Heh, it’s funny that you accuse people of gatekeeping when the only person doing gatekeeping here is you: “games are supposed to be fun”. No, games are supposed to be whatever the fuck their creators want them to be, and then you get to pick and choose which ones (out of the millions and millions of videogames being created, enough for several lifetimes) you want to spend your valuable time on. You trying to dictate how creators should create their creations is very rich. Get in the fucking ring and create something, then you’ll get to dictate to yourself as much as you want on how your game should be created.

You do know that when you start insulting your opponent you’ve both lost the argument and shown your ass, right?

Hopefully one day you’ll realize that you are the problem, that it is you carrying water for the right-wing party that together with the far-right-wing party have turned the good ole USA into a right-loving hellhole, slowly but surely over the last 50 years or so. Always unable to understand why a growing number of people are done with your political farce, just foaming at the mouth as your shill cries of blue-compliance and lesser-evil voting fail to do anything.

I’ll contend the biggest play Meta ever did was buying Whatsapp. They saw the app had reached critical mass and was an actual necessity, unlike their facebook crap which only appeals to a certain subset of people.

And now we’re all stuck with it and Meta’s enshitification and progressive privacy violations.

I would contend that you haven’t really grasped the sheer scale of the universe if you think space travel or colonization is even remotely possible. Sure we went to the moon once but it took pretty much all of our might coupled with gobs and gobs of money. We will surely be back at some point, and I think it’s inevitable that some humans will at some point travel to mars, or one of the moons of Saturn/Jupiter (on what will assuredly be one-way trips), but that’s it. Forget about even attempting to reach our closest neighboring star; our current understanding of physics ensures that we would never be able to make that trip. Same reason we’re not hounded by alien tourists all day every day even though the universe is teeming with life, those other instances of life are equally locked to the respective places where they spawned, which brings us to the next point:

Life. Yes, earth-based life is very resilient, on earth. Consider the massive, incomprehensible planetary forces fighting it out for billions of years until some semblance of a stable -but incomprehensibly unique- balance was reached, where life was finally allowed the necessary time to thrive, flourish and diversify around that very particular balance. Take life out of the environment in which it developed and it fizzles out very quickly. 99% of the effort in any kind of human space exploration would be on trying to replicate earth’s environment to a ridiculous degree of precision and then hope/pray that nothing ever breaks on any of the systems/machinery/technology you use to replicate earth, because then you’d be SOL and fizzle out quickly.

Here on earth we’ve got gargantuan industries (just to name a few think about electronics, plastics/petroleum, metals), built piece by piece over hundreds of years in all material sciences, mutually interacting and interdependent, with massive and incredibly specialized supply chains that rely on readily available amounts of very specific resources that you can get on earth. You can get a plastic ring seal, any size of nut&bolt, and a microcontroller here on earth for $1. No amount of money will get you any of these out there in space. We only manage this for the ISS because it is pretty much tethered (at a distance of only 400km) to a huge-ass planet that can source and produce anything it could ever need, put it on a rocket (costs a lot of money but can be done on demand) and have it get there in a matter of hours, and even then it’s very specialized, technical and perpetual effort to maintain it.

I can see us maybe pulling that off for something built on the moon (our backyard, really) but for Mars, our closest neighbor? No chance if you want to have actual humans involved, only machines and very slowly over hundreds of years, if at all.

This is just a lame and cringe version of the same meme several posts above. Won’t get any traction

This is just a lame and cringe version of the same meme several posts above. Won’t get any traction

I appreciate your level-headedness, and I definitely get where you’re coming from, but I need to point out the big gaping blindspot in your argument: the crackdowns and the facism are already here, and they’ve pretty much demonstrated they don’t particularly care for or wait for justification.

Do you see why arguing “you’re giving them ammo and justification” rings very hollow at this particular point in time?

Who the hell would measure their package in inches outside the good ole USA?

It’s bewildering to me how this continues to be an issue only in the US, the rest of the world figured out this problem around 2010, and I’m not kidding. It’s like you guys are still arguing about Beta vs VHS in 2023

I wouldn’t be able to make things work without a password manager. Except in my case I can’t bring myself to trust an online third-party with my password data, so I’ve just being using an offline personal password manager called pwsafe for close to 2 decades, it’s worked out perfect for me.