People are emotionally driven. Admitting something scary is more emotionally taxing than pretending it’s fake.

I guarantee 99% of people would want a house on 2 acres thats a 30 minute drive to town than an apartment.

This is an insane take.

Many people like density.

With an apartment you have no yard, probably no garage, cant make any changes to it, and you hear all your neighbors, and smell them if they smoke, and you dont own shit.

Many apartments have yards.

If you own that apartment, you can make changes to it. Maybe not some drastic changes, but I imagine the real limited there is money rather than architectural.

Many apartments are sound proof. I almost never hear my neighbors.

I don’t know if my neighbors smoked. I’ve never smelled anything.

Apartments actually benefit the wealthy class, which is why I find it funny lemmings love them so much.

You seem to be confusing renting with apartments

I’m a Republican

In 2025? Why on earth? No Republican policy is good. Their policies don’t align with their marketing.

I really don’t think that’s a productive use of “gatekeeping”.

Do you apply this to other mediums? There are books and movies that are difficult to follow, but no one demands that authors and publishers release a simpler edition. Video games seem to be an exception.

Accessibility like “let me remap the controls” or “give me subtitles” is a whole different beast from “let me be invulnerable”. Treating those as the same is strange to me.

I’m not particularly against difficulty options. I didn’t have the patience to finish Nine Sols without turning the difficulty down. I wouldnt have felt “gate kept” if I just had to put the game down without finishing it.

Sorry, there seems to be a misunderstanding. I was asking what you mean by artificial difficulty.

Sometimes people use that phrase and they might mean anything from “you can’t quick save” to “if you don’t take a healer you can’t heal”

Can you share?

I’m not sure there’s an agreed upon definition of “artificial difficulty”. The whole game is artificial so I’m not sure what “natural difficulty” would be.

I’ll keep saying it: I already have a job. I want to play a game to unwind.

This is not a universal response. Some people like difficult games for many reasons. Overcoming a challenge can give me a taste of triumph absent from my day job.

Implementing a wide gamut of difficulty settings is also an accessibility feature, and allows people with certain physical or mental challenges the opportunity to enjoy your game firsthand. Why would you want to deny your audience this opportunity?

Sure, maybe, but the devil is in the details.

I suppose it’s not the game maker’s responsibility to stop people from ruining their own experiences. I’m pretty confident that some people would just easy-mode through dark souls and have a vastly diminished experience. “I don’t see the big deal. It’s just an action game”, they might say, because easy mode gave unlimited healing and no monster respawn. The difficulty (which is vastly overstated) is part of what makes it work. People remember Blight Town and Sen’s Fortress because of the ordeal. I can’t remember a single dungeon from Skyrim.

Furthermore, meta game options found in menus is not the only way to do difficulty options. Elden Ring, for example, is very generous with spirit summons.

“I have many friends and family members on the other side who I love and remain close to, even though we don’t agree on politics at all. I don’t think the murderer who shot Charlie Kirk represents anyone. This was a sick person who believed violence was a solution, and it isn’t, ever.”

I don’t know how you could stay close with maga people now. That sounds extremely difficult.

Not a fan of “sick” used in this context. I don’t think there was any evidence that the alleged shooter suffered mental illness. Writing off disagreeable actions as sickness maligns people with actual illness.

Also, “ever” is a pretty broad claim. I don’t think violence is typically the best solution, and arguably there were more tools left in the box to stop Kirk, but ultimately every right has to be backed by “or I’ll stop you” or it’s at risk. If masked men come to abduct you, violence is likely an appropriate response. Shooting a giant talking head, arguably not justified even if he’s fanning the flames of hate and stochastic terrorism.

But overall it wasn’t a boot licking capitulation, so that’s nice. I didn’t watch it live since I rarely watch TV.

Don’t pretend he wouldn’t have gleefully participated in that. He was an ardent trump supporter, and thus an ardent supporter of concentration camps.

and a few of the worst offenders (Google is one that I know does this) add a random string of characters on the element that serve as a unique identifier that periodically changes and so requires me to readd them to my UBO blocklist.

Does ubo accept css selectors? Css has syntax for “match element that starts with, ends with, or contains, this string”

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Attribute_selectors

All those people who refused to take COVID seriously have a lot of blood on their hands.

You seem to be unfamiliar with hyperbole, or maybe just didn’t recognize it here.

Also they kind of enshittified Google photos by walking back the unlimited storage promise. Probably not the best project to point to for “Google doesn’t suck” arguments.

Google kind of sucks.

What was their last big success? Google maps? Pretty much everything they do lately is some combination of shitty or prematurely killed.

A chunk of those aren’t mobile-first games. Dead cells is like an award winning game on PC and console. They’re good games. Maybe the metric should be “is this on other platforms , too?” Somehow the shitty models of mobile games haven’t fully developed on other platforms.