Kind of off topic, but this just activated one of my trap card rants,

The problem is not that we’re a litigious society, the problem is we make litigation artificially costly and time consuming by restricting the number of lawyers and judges we create and only trying to address the bottleneck that creates by making courts harder to access (e.g. increasing filing fees, giving defendants more ability to force things into arbitration kangaroo courts, etc.).

Especially in light of how our courts have been just making up bullshit to let cops/soldiers/Republicans do whatever the fuck they since circa 1968/2001/2025, you can’t tell me that people need as many years of education to practice law as we require in this country.

Also, private bar associations are fucking weird, feudal era anti-democratic bullshit that ought to get replaced with proper public licensing agencies that are accountable to democratic systems and accessible to the public

/end rant

en masse

That sounds wonderful to me, I just want that mass of righteous people to write down all of their ideas so future generations can continue their work even after the fervor has died down. I call those ideas laws and regulations and the ongoing spirit of that mass of righteous people a government, but I’m not too attached to semantics.

Until they monopolize their industry, which is something they’re always going to be trying to do by their very nature as for profits and which has already essentially happened here

A government can be influenced if it is transparent and democratic, which can be ensured if they’ve got good bylaws that are being scrupulously enforced. Like, if you have decisionmakers a) accountable to free and fair elections (whether they’re elected directly or appointed by elected people) holding b) regular and public meetings where c) outside organizations can raise disputes and get them decided under d) neutral procedures that are published in advance and that every party has equal opportunity to understand and take advantage of, and e) if those decisions and the reasoning behind them are also published and cited as precedent to be reinforced or overturned in subsequent decisions, then I really think the rest takes care of itself.

And I think we had a lot of this figured out when we got done fighting totalitarian regimes in the 1940s and turned around and passed the Administrative Procedure Act, but conservatives keep adding loopholes and trying to drag all of us back to feudalism and monarchies.

I think it is possible to have a government that functions in this way on a long term basis. I don’t think the same can be said of for profit companies.

Yeah, payment processing is among the many many many industries that ought to be nationalized so they can be administered in a transparent and democratic manner (see also, healthcare education housing electricity internet etc.)

There’s just too much opportunity to use it to manipulate markets and oppress minority viewpoints for it to remain in private hands imo

An American security contractor and a Chinese embassy employee are at a bar. The American says, “I gotta say, your propaganda is impressive. You sure know how to keep your people in line.”

“Oh, you’re too gracious,” the embassy worker says. “And besides, it’s nothing compared to American propaganda.”

The contractor chokes on his drink and gives his friend a bewildered look.

“What are you talking about? There’s no propaganda in America.”

They’re very good at identifying talented developers /s

Yeah, and the fact that people basically can’t talk about this game without mentioning it got boycotted because one of the people who makes money from it is a massive piece of transphobic shit is a small step forward all on its own

Eh, people don’t buy for the gameplay mechanics most of the time, they buy for what they see in the trailers and read in the descriptions. Being the only videogame available for this IP, having the WB marketing juggernaut behind it, releasing at a time of the year without much competition, coming out on every single platform - it would have been weird if this game wasn’t the best selling one in 2023.

Man has consistently been putting out five minutes of good to pretty good content once a week for over fifteen years, it was an incredible run tbh

Well, props to Yahtz for not being a scab and quitting when Nick got fired, good solidarity there

It would be amazing if his team could somehow join the Outside Xbox, then I could get all of my British accented videogame snark in one place

An initial solution looked to have been found from an old Fallout 4 VR thread on Steam, where the same problem could be fixed by using a console command to change the player’s sex.

In Starfield, the same command works, but all you need to do to fix the bug is enter the character customisation screen. Using console commands, this can be done by entering ‘showlooksmenu player 2’. If you’re playing Starfield on console, you can visit an Enhance Clinic for 500 credits to get into the character customisation. You don’t actually have to change your appearance, as players have reported that simply entering and exiting customer customisation makes weapons work as intended once again.

This was already true, but is even more so now - Bethesda should make console commands available on Xbox immediately. Besides the fact that there was no reason to restrict them to PC players in the first place, they’re almost certain to be necessary for all sorts of weird troubleshooting that’s likely to come up in any game this big.