Lvxferre
The catarrhine yerba mate enjoyer who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
Кўис кредис ессе, Беллум?
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You wanted me to explicitly address your point; I did, and now you’re losing your marbles over the fact that I did??? Also, look up what “straw man” means, as you’re clearly ignorant on that.
🤡
My sides went into orbit. Congratulations for shooting your own foot.
What were you saying back then again? Something about “Tankie user defends obvious Nazi dog whistles.”? Well, guess what - you just used a Nazi dog whistle.
You’re really, really craving for attention, aren’t you?
…usually I don’t bother with this idiotic “I dun unrurstand lol lmao XD haha” conveying “I expect you to waste your time explaining obvious shit over and over while I pretend to not understand what you say”. But since I’m in a really good mood, just this once I’ll bite. I don’t think that you’re able to follow either, but other users will and I think that this is a good example of the problem with witch hunters.
“But gassing vermin!!11 Infestation! lol” - then find some elements prompting the player to conflate the vermin with Jewish people, or any other victim of the Holocaust. Things like this:
- Is the player’s avatar dressed in a way reminiscent of the Schutzstaffel? No. Compare this with this.
- Are the rooms recognisably similar to gas chambers used in the Holocaust? No. (inb4 “bUt BoTh ArE CrEePy LoL” is grasping at straws)
- Does the vermin in question resemble a caricature Jewish person? No; it’s Mickey Bloody Mouse dammit. And from other screenshots you have a moth and some tumour thing too.
- Posters painting fascist slogans, symbols, or discourses in a positive light? So far I saw none.
- et cetera.
Do it. Find those elements. Or elements that are similar in spirit. The burden of the proof is in the one claiming the connection, in this case you.
Without those elements, gassing vermin is simply gassing vermin, and the one creating the association between vermin and Jewish people is you, not the devs.
“88 gives it context” - nope. You need to link them. If they were showing that 88 with fireworks right after you got rid of a rat, then perhaps it would give you the context to interpret that rat as a Jewish person.
Also worth repeating that this association is undesirable for the developers, as shown by the fact that they changed the name of the game to “Infestation: Origins”. But hey, this contradicts your assumption, and it prevents you from rolling in certainty like a pig would roll in filth, so it gets “conveniently” (dishonestly) ignored, right?
The above is already enough to address your idiotic point. But I’ll go further, because I’m predicting that you’re going to grasp at straws.
“But the Discord…” - they already paused discussions there until they get better moderation; that shows that they do not condone whatever was happening there. (They probably got some nazi with the same sort of reading comprehension as you [zero] assuming that he was in good company.)
“But all those pieces of evidence in Twitter! So many things, it must be a sure sign!” The “evidence” being shared there is ridiculous:
counting the space “Infestation 88” is 14 keystrokes.
This is numerology tier idiocy.
[associating TG·44 SST with STG 44, one of the assault rifles used by the Nazi in the war]
Yeah, sure - pick anything written, shuffle it enough, omit some characters, be very accepting on what you’re matching it with, and you’ll get whatever you want out of it.
And, rewatching the trailer, the found footage section is October 13, 1988 // Meaning the date would end in 13/88, which is SUSPICIOUSLY close, especially if you would be playing AFTER this point.
Not only “13 is close to 14, this must be a sign of an enemy Stand!” is already a silly stretch on its own, but the date being displayed in the picture doesn’t even follow that idiotic M/D/Y order. It’s displayed in Y/M/D (1988 Oct, 13). Good motherfucking luck associating 88/10/13 with 14/88.
“1-4 players, in 88, taking on an “outbreak of vermin in various locations”.”
This was as a reply to a screenshot showing In the year 1988, what was thought to be an outbreak of vermin in varioues locations morphed into something far more sinister. Infestation 88 is an episodic, 1-4 player co- [cut off]
…do I really need to highlight how fucking stupid this is? 1-4 players is fairly common in games, and the text in the screeshot does no effort to align that “1-4” in a way that you’d read “1-4 88”. The one doing it is actually Fagundes himself.
Theyve [SIC] been creating horror games since 2010. But at the bottom, copyright 2024. // 14 year difference.
More numerology tier crap.
Yup. There is a REASON to use THIS public domain character, and it ain’t a good one.
As a reply to “Let’s also not forget Disney himself was an anti-Semite.”
If the devs are supposed to be anti-Semite, then why the hell would they represent the brainfart of an anti-Semite as the enemy???
I heavily recommend this game for people who like VNs or branching narratives. It’s a bit light on horror, but extremely enjoyable.
And as the article says, play it first-hand, without seeing any sort of let’s play or whatever. The first run is amazing.
I’m not saying anything further because it would be spoilers, and those are a big no for this game.
I got your examples, but tone down your nationalistic bubbling - fascism is a global issue, and yet you’re framing it specifically into USA politics, as if other users were necessarily expected to be American.
In part because they are generally too chicken shit to say anything.
It’s because they’re generally too chicken shit that they avoid dogwhistles, and actually say it - using a dogwhistle actually increases their odds to be detected and called out.
Here’s a real example of that, from Reddit’s r/againsthatesubreddits.
TW: transphobia
This thread links a lot of transphobic replies to a r/trueunpopularopinion thread called “Pronouns should not be enforced as they are now.”
When you look at what the users say, on a discursive level, you find “wonderful”[/sarcasm] things like this:
The user is clearly associating trans people and changing one’s social identity with mental illness, that’s transphobic per excellence. And yet the nearest of a dogwhistle that you could claim is that he used the word “schizophrenic”.
Should we take “schizophrenic” as a dogwhistle? Well, then let’s put Mayo Clinic as potential spiritual successor to Mein Kampf. [/sarcasm]
And if someone says “Mayo Clinic doesn’t have the context to read it as a dogwhistle” - if you’re already going to use the context to dictate meaning, might as well ditch the concept of dogwhistle, and look for what they say.
And while there are “false positives”, those are almost all immediately resolved with “yo dog. Uhm… I get you are in your mid 30s but you may want to stop putting your birth year in posts” and a “… holy fuck. Fucking nazis”.
From my experience, that is far from true. Those people finding false positives will usually insist that the other is a Nazi, to the point of irrationality. Often doing things like I criticised Josh Fagundes (check the Twitter link in the OP) doing, and trying to justify their false positive as a true positive by grasping at straws.
It’s like witch hunting - once you get labelled a witch, it doesn’t really matter if you’re a witch or not, you’re going to be treated as one.
As for “false negatives”: Okay? Some fascists will be undetected with or without acknowledging their “super secret code” of dog whistling.
“Some”? No. More like “a lot of fascists”. Because you’re looking for a super secret code while they’re saying things in the open.
Also, note that trying to decrease the amount of false negatives will increase the amount of false positives, and vice versa. So those issues are interconnected.
EDIT: about your example:
“yo dog. Uhm… I get you are in your mid 30s but you may want to stop putting your birth year in posts” and a “… holy fuck. Fucking nazis”.
That is not how it usually happens. It’s usually like this:
- [Alice] you put a 88 in your posts, so I you’re probably a Nazi. Fuck off Nazi.
- [Bob] No, that’s my birth year. …holy fuck, fucking nazis. I’m removing the “88”.
- [Alice] Trying to hide yourself, Bob the Nazi? I’m not stupid! (implied: “I can’t be wrong!”)
- [Charlie] Alice said that Bob is a Nazi who uses 88 dogwhistles. He’s probably a Nazi.
- [Dan] Alice and Charlie said that Bob is a Nazi. Both. He’s a Nazi for sure. (implied: ad populum fallacy)
You see a low-key version of that in this very thread, with Josh being a low-key version of Alice.
Well sure, but people use dog whistles so it’s important to recognize them.
Fascists don’t need to use dogwhistles to call each other. And they often don’t use them, specially not the best known dogwhistles - because it’s like saying “I’m a fascist lololol please kick my arse!”.
As such, when you look for dogwhistles, you’re bound to get
- lots of false positives - someone being mislabelled a fascist because they used the same symbol to convey something else;
- lots of false negatives - fascists slipping past your radar, because they didn’t use the dogwhistles that you trained yourself to identify
It’s simply not a good way to find and get rid of them. Unlike looking at what they’re saying “in the big picture”; that’s always reliable because they need to convey their shitty discourses if they want to spread them.
Context can be important but sometimes it’s subtle
Context is always important. And as a general rule (not failproof): if you’re actively looking for the context and it’s still too subtle for you, then odds are that it’s too subtle for the fascists to get it too.
(Note: I’m talking about “fascists” here but it also applies to other shitty groups of people.)
Not the point. “Infestation” + 88 + gassing vermin is absolutely not comparable to the mental gymnastics you just vomited out as an example.
You didn’t read the Twitter thread that I’ve linked, right? Do it. It’s actually way worse mental gymnastics than my shitty example. (“1-4 players = Nazi dogwhistle” tier.)
Even if the developer was truly this oblivious, it would still not change the issue of it, and the Nazis that posted on their Discord for so long were clearly proof of that as well.
Give this a check. The developers are changing the name of the game, and addressing the Discord server by pausing discussions there until they get better moderation.
EDIT: by the way you’re already doing less worse than he did. At least you’re trying to connect discursive elements, like “gassing vermin”, instead of doing conspiracy shit tier things like “they’re active from 2010 to 2024! That must be a sign of an enemy Stand 14 words!”. And the fact that you called me a “tankie” shows that you at least checked my profile to see if I was potentially a Nazi, seriously, props for that.
Relevant reply from the developer. I’ll transcribe it here.
@everyone // Our game “Infestation 88” is set in the 1980s, with the year 1988 chosen simply due to its symmetrical design in the game’s artwork/logo. Unfortunately, we were unaware of any additional meaning the number ‘88’ has. However, after learning about this, we’re changing the game’s name to “Infestation: Origins” We apologize for our ignorance on the and appreciate that this was brought to our attention so we could address it ASAP!
With respect to our Discord server, we also apologize for the current lack of moderation in place, and will be working on remedying this ASAP. As per the rules, any hateful speech or content in any regard will result in a ban. We also plan to update our FAQ soon when we have a chance to address common questions that pop up. We greatly appreciate your patience and support!
@here Due to the overwhelming number of posts and rule-breaking content, we’re temporarily pausing discussion until we have better moderation in place. We hope to have things back online soon! Thank you again for your patience.
Okay… I think that it’s worth to look further at the Twitter comment chain from Josh Fagundes, mentioned in the text.
I’ll use the exact same [lack of] reasoning that the author used to “prove” that he’s a Nazi. (I don’t think that he’s a Nazi, mind you; I’m doing this to show how bloody stupid his witch hunting is):
- Josh ‘Anoriand’ has 14 characters, including the quotation marks. Coincidence? Perhaps not!
- Look, I’m not saying it’s IMPOSSIBLE that this game wasn’t made with ill intent is exactly 14 words. And it’s immediately followed by “but 88”. Coincidence? Perhaps not!
“Conclusion”: I’m going to play it safe and treat Josh Fagundes as a nazi!
…yes, it is that tier of stupid. And if the developers are actually Nazi trying to push a Nazi discourse into the players, Josh is not “denouncing” them. He’s actually helping them to push said Nazi discourse, since now they can say “ah, that’s just someone being silly. Pay no mind, look at the ridiculous shit that he’s using to “prove” that our game is Nazi.”
Here’s a better approach.
What’s “88” in the title conveying to the player, within the context of the game? Through all the screenshots being shared, I’ve seen it being consistently used to refer to 1988, and nothing else. Is there any other element contextualising it to be interpreted as “heil Hitler” instead of the year?
In my opinion the better option is to ditch the concept of dogwhistle. We [people in general] should look at what a symbol (including words, gestures, etc.) conveys within a certain context, we shouldn’t be picking individual symbols and assuming the discourse (what is being said) based on them.
For example, the 88 in the title of the game should be associated with the rest of the game. Because depending on the rest of the game it might convey only “1988”, or it might convey “heil Hitler”.
What makes this matter messier is that you got two parties to blame here - developers and publishers: Colossal Order and Paradox
Hallikainen (co_martsu)'s apology would have sounded sincere if she, among other things, showed that CO did its best, and that Paradox is to blame for the issues; she’d be feeding Paradox to the wolves/userbase, but there are ways to do that without losing face. She didn’t - and in the process she’s issuing that corporate apology to protect the butts of both companies at the same time.
It’s all bullshit for gullible people.
Yup, full agree on that. But the gullible people keep pre-ordering their bloody games, and here’s the result.
You do realize it was very likely not CO’s decision to release the game in this state, right?
Contrariwise to your “I assoome that you’re ignorant, so let me enlighten you”, I’m aware of that, as shown in the very excerpt of my comment that you’re quoting. And my point still stands.
The company likely responsible for the decision to ship the game (Paradox Interactive) was the exact same company responsible for its QA. It knew that the game was a buggy mess and it still decided to ship the game like this. CO relies on Paradox even to breathe; it shows that CO is not to be trusted, regardless of being their fault or not, given how it depends on a cancerous company.
Even then Colossal Order is still at fault, alongside Paradox. Think on why. [Hint: “teeth controversy”]
Game companies have absolutely died by going against the publisher and going bankrupt from withheld funding, e.g. Free Radical Design and Lucasarts.
That only further reinforces my point, it does not contradict it. And it makes me wonder if you actually got it on first place.
Like have you ever […]
This is almost a textbook example of genetic fallacy=brainfart. As such, I won’t bother with it.
DISCLAIMER: before anyone vomits further assumptions or idiocy like “ur sayin dat cuz…”, I am not among the people who bought the game. It doesn’t even run in my system (for further reasons than the ones why it doesn’t run on you all’s). As such I have no direct emotional or monetary involvement on this matter, OK?
For context, look at the negative reviews in Steam. Cities Skylines 2 developers promised the sky and a bit more for their game; suckers pre-ordered the game like there was no tomorrow, because CS1 was a good game; and the devs (Colossal Order) released some rushed mess, full of bugs, with performance issues, missing features that players expected from CS1 + dev promising “CS2 will be berrurr, chrust us”, and shallow gameplay.
The comment being linked is corporate “we are sorry for your inconvenience” babble trying (and failing) to address player outrage.
Relevant detail: Colossal Order has strong ties with Paradox Interactive, a company known for its awful DLC policies and buggy DLC releases (cough Europa Universalis IV: Golden Century cough cough). And guess who does quality assessment for Colossal Order? Paradox.
Note to self: put CO in the same “don’t buy” blacklist as EA and Paradox.
Dr. Stone taught me that Suika = watermelon.
…from the link that @[email protected] provided, it seems to be “2048 meets Tetris with circles”. On each turn, you drop a small fruit of a random size; fruits of the same size merge into a larger fruit, and your job is to get the biggest fruit before the box fills up.
People who hate sbmm hate it because they have to play with player of their skill level
I don’t rule out that a lot of players simply want to stomp bad players, but that is not the only reason why people hate SBMM. The article mentions other two - long wait times and lack of variability. I believe that chess-like odds solve both.
And, sure, it wouldn’t solve the “WAAAH I WANNA DESTROY NOOBZ!11 LOL LMAO” “issue”, but… is it even fixable?
Chess solved this problem a long side ago, with odds - a stronger player may remove pawn(s) or piece(s) from their side of the board, to give the weaker player a winning chance (and to give themself a challenge). And it’s completely transparent (well, you do see the initial board state, right?).
With some good design, plenty multiplayer games could implement the same idea - giving the more skilled player a bigger cooldown, less HP, or perhaps even restricting a few combos deemed too powerful.
I don’t know (…or care, really) about USA so I’ll speak on more general grounds.
There’s a lot of stuff in social media that makes it a great soapbox for social manipulation:
- low cost, wide reaching: it’s easy to be heard
- decontextualisation: it gives more room for assumers¹ to do their shit, and make an incorrect context out of nowhere.
- virality: it’s easy to start a witch hunt. Cue to the pitchfork emporium / Twitter MC of the day.
- upvote/like-based systems: people don’t upvote your content (increasing its visibility) because you’re right, they do it because you say it confidently.
- on the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog: concern trolling made easy.
Now look at what @[email protected] said: “Dunno man, seems like it might be the fascists.”. IMO that user is being spot on, those five things make social media specially easy to manipulate for fascists². And they’re mostly the ones creating this dichotomisation of society³, because that’s how they’re able to congregate the nutjobs into a political discourse. Suddenly the village idiot doesn’t simply say “they’re hiding aliens from us” (stupid, but morally OK), the discourse becomes “the Jews are hiding aliens from us” (stupid and Antisemitic).
- By “assumers” I mean individuals who are quick to draw conclusions based on little to no reasoning, evidence, or thought. This plague exists since the dawn of time, it’s just that decontextualisation gives them more room to assume shit out of nowhere.
- Fascists often babble about “virtue signalling”, without realising that themselves are prone to signal adherence to their stupid beliefs. They don’t want to be in the receiving end of their own witch hunts.
- By “society” I mean at the very least Western Europe plus the Americas; probably more. It is not exclusive to USA.
Given that it’s pointing straight to “no”, should I interpret “AI” as “additional irony”?
…seriously, model-based generation is in its infancy. Currently it outputs mostly trash; you need to spend quite a bit of time to sort something useful out of it. If anyone here actually believes that it’s smart, I have a bridge to sell you.
Not even parrots - the birds are actually smart.
I’m not a lawyer but I can see a good way for lawyers to use ChatGPT: tell it to list laws that are potentially related to the case, then manually check those laws to see if they apply. This would work nicely in countries with Roman law; and perhaps in countries with tribal law too (the article is from USA), as long as the model is fed with older cases for precedent.
And… really, that’s the best use for those bots IMO - asking it to sort, filter and search information from messy and large systems. Letting it write things for you, like those two lawyers did, is worse than laziness: it stinks stupidity.
It’s also immoral. The lawyer is a human being, thus someone who can be held responsible for one’s actions; ChatGPT is not and, as such, it should not be in charge of decisions that affect human lives.
For the people discussing here: remember that the morality of an act depends on the act itself, the context where it happens, and the moral premises. It does not depend on how you phrase or label the act.
With that in mind: since I define arseholery as “actions or behaviour that cause more harm to someone else than they benefit the agent”, and there’s practically no harm being caused by OP’s actions, I do not think that OP is being an arsehole.
The idea has some merit but it’s harder to implement than it looks like. Model-based image generation is heavily biased towards typical values, so you’d need a lot of poison to do it. And that poison would need to be consistent - it doesn’t work if you tell the model now that cats are dogs and then that ferrets are dogs, you need to pick one.
I’m rather entertained by the amount of fallacies and assumptions ITT though. I get that you guys are excited with model-based image gen; frankly, I’m the same when it comes to text gen. But those two things won’t help, learn the difference between “X is true” and “I want X to be true”.
Europa Universalis IV
That’s a game that I went from avid player to not remembering that it exists. Power creep, poor design decisions, gross disregard to regions based on where Paradox gets money from, ditching believability for the sake of railroading, obnoxious DLC and sales policies… frankly nowadays I place Paradox in the same bag as EA and Game Freak + The Pokémon Company as “they don’t deserve my money”, because of how poorly they handled EU4.
I am not surprised.
Meaning is negotiated by the speaker and hearer, or in this case between whoever is sharing vs. seeing the image. This happens based on the context and and conversational implicatures. For example, if there’s some element in the picture, you take it as related to the message being conveyed.
And that’s the problem: AI tools don’t think. They don’t understand what is being made, why it’s being made, who is making it, and for what reasons.
And more importantly, the AI tools don’t understand the message being conveyed.
Uncontrollable AI is the next moderation nightmare
The issue is not the uncontrollable AI. The issue are lazy and greedy companies expecting moderation to work without human intervention. It doesn’t, for the reason I mentioned above. And that issue precedes image generators. Here’s an example of that:
#║##║## Happy date, hanging around at the McD's
▓ ▓
/o)/o\
If I posted it in a hypothetical forum with state-of-art automatic moderation, no human mods, and that had a rule like “you can’t mock fascists here”, I’d be clearly violating the rules of that forum (as it mocks Mussolini) and getting away with it because no bot will get what I’m conveying through that - bur plenty humans would. Did I use Stable Diffusion for that? Fuck no, it’s just ASCII art.
AI is a tool for humans to use. It’s a damn good tool. But only a fool would leave decisions like moderation up to AI. Including the legitimacy of its own output.
[Nomura] And I’m not really sure what the intent behind that is.
You can’t be sure of the “intent” (whatever this esoteric word means) behind anything except your own actions and words. As such, it’s useless to ponder about it.
[Nomura] It just always felt a bit off to me, and a bit weird. I never really understood it – or why it’s needed
JRPG and WRPG are effectively two RPG subgenres. They could as well be called “storyline-driven RPG” and “mechanics-given RPG”, but given the relative prominence of Japanese designers behind JRPG, they ended being labelled based on being made in Japan vs. Europe+Canada+USA.
And just as any words referring to media genres, you aren’t supposed to take those as well-defined groups. It’s perfectly possible to get a bunch of Japanese game designers make a WRPG, or a bunch of Western/Canadian/American ones making a JRPG. In fact you’ll often see mechanics from one subgenre in the other. (Good examples of that would be Pokémon Red/Blue on one side and Undertale on another.)
[article writer] it’s always good to keep in these kinds of perspectives, and consider whether we need to drop it or not.
The association isn’t even remotely othering, given that it highlights the relative prominence of Japanese games in the RPG market.
[Nomura] Certainly, when we started doing interviews for the games that I started making, no one used that term – they just called them RPGs
And I bet that plenty people simply called it a “game”. Context. Use it, Nomura.
But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.
I think that the concept of tragedy of the commons is being misused here. When feeding data into those models, there’s no common resource being used, as the data doesn’t cease to exist once you feed it to your L"L"M. Instead what’s happening is that they’re further breaking what was already broken - the legal concepts of IP and copyright.
Where the concept could apply is the usage of the output of those models, with the common resource being the overall quality, reliability, and usefulness of the internet, for the sake of petty benefits (such as advertisement/spamming/marketing). However this degradation predates the large “language” models (and the internet itself), and it isn’t a result of the technology itself.
If I understood the FFF correctly, that is not what they’re doing; they aren’t working with a half dozen straight sections, each fitting a single “square” (in this case a 2x2), and leaving curves up to the player. Instead they’re adding a new curve (the half-S) to be used with the other pieces.
For reference here’s how it works in Transport Tycoon / OpenTTD:
If implementing something similar in Factorio (note: the colours mean nothing, they’re just to distinguish the pieces of rail):
The later can be smoothed out to look a bit more like curves, but the basic units are all straight and diagonal rails.
If they’re going to rework how rails work, wouldn’t it be better to get a bit closer to Transport Tycoon in this aspect? I think that it’s close to perfect: simple but deep. It’s relatively effortless to get a train route done, and you basically only have diagonal and straight rails, but it’s damn hard to make your route efficient.
I wish that I could read Chinese, to check if Recreate Games’ claim of mistranslation holds some ground. It feels fishy though - usually developers are quite cautious with ambiguity; and when a business says that the customers are “confused”, more often than not the customers are quite lucid and complaining about spot on stuff, it’s just that this goes against the business’ best interests.
Yup. In other words they didn’t want to pump out a sequel. Even then that’s what plenty people expected from CC, since it’s “part of the Chrono series”, and then got disappointed and an otherwise great game got this “but what about CT…” stigma. (I remember the outrage back then. And the kids distorting it into a SNES vs. PS fight.)
I played CC.
Sure, the story is connected - Kid being raised by Lucca, the Time Devourer being Lavos, Guile being strongly hinted to be Magus, all that thing. But the loads of characters make you look at the big picture, instead of focusing on their individual personalities; the theme (dimensional travel vs. time travel) is different; and the battle system is nothing alike. Those things are actually improvements, but at least for me, they make it that CC doesn’t scratch the same itch as CT.
And there’s always that lingering melancholy in Chrono Cross that is at the same time beautiful and completely unlike the “happy” Chrono Trigger.
That’s why I say that it’s a great game, but an awful sequel. It doesn’t have the elements that make you say “THAT is Chrono Trigger 2!”, but it’s fun and in certain aspects better than CT.
None of those reach the same level as Chrono Trigger in my opinion, but they’re still great:
- Lufia II - Rise of the Sinistrals (SNES). Note: Lufia is best played out of order, since the start of Lufia I spoils the end of Lufia II.
- Tales of Phantasia (SNES). Preferably through the DeJap translation, IMO better than the official.
- Pokémon Fire Red or Leaf Green (GBA). Pokémon as a series decayed a fair bit, but Gen III was amazing.
It’s the Sex update! They actually released it! The mad devs!