Victor Gruen is widely considered the inventory of the modern shopping mall. He was an Austrian Jew who immigrated to the US when the Nazi’s annexed Austria.

I can’t find much specific on his political views, but I’ve seen him described by historians as “far-left” and “socialist”.

Shopping was originally a small part of his vision. He wanted to make an indoor, air-conditioned version of European pedestrian areas. Residences, schools, libraries, hospitals, parks, etc. He hated how the mall he envisioned became the shopping mall. He was influenced by Disney Land - trying to make a planned neighborhood that optimized the human experience. In turn, Disney took a lot of influence from him to make EPCOT.

So I don’t know that he was a Marxist, but he denounced the capitalist hellscape that his malls eventually became.

The Murdoch empire transcends borders

Just looking through my HLTB at things I’ve done recently:

The Ace Attorney series Sucker for Love Coffee Talk Haven (good for co-op)

If you want a bit more gameplay, but still chill:

Paradise Killer Braid Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

More gameplay focused:

Control Portal Wargroove Cat Quest Knack (I know it’s a meme, but the games are actually pretty fun)

I fell into both.

Bought Skyrim on PS3 a few months after it came out. Had an absolute blast and it immediately became a favorite for my wife and me. The load times were terrible and there were bugs, but the bugs were usually just funny visual glitches. The DLC came out and was fantastic - I still wish they released more.

Eventually built a new gaming PC. My wife really wanted to try the earlier ES games so we bought the physical PC pack with all of them in it. The load times were way better with an SSD. The graphics and frame rate were way better. At that point patches had fixed a lot of the bugs.

I tried some mods and found that most of them aren’t even worth the time it takes to browse for. 80% are just adding softcore porn that ruins the aesthetic. Another % are shit posts like replacing dragons with a model of Thomas the Tank Engine or replacing bears with Shrek- funny for maybe 30 seconds but not worth actually playing. 5% are other weapons that are just overpowered. The I’d guess about 4% are decent UI and graphics mods, some of which have since been rendered obsolete by newer editions. Probably <1% is actually good new content that I’d want to play, but even most of that isn’t as good as the base game.

It’s a similar situation with tabletop homebrew. Everyone and their mother thinks they have some great ideas, but in practice they usually aren’t as fun as the main product. It’s hard to compete with a corporation spending millions of dollars to pay people to work things out.

Add in how annoying it is to mod and how, even without any updates, it tends to break things. Skyrim has a reputation for being a broken and buggy game, but in my experience on multiple platforms (I eventually got the Switch and PS4 versions too lol) it’s really pretty solid. Back in the day when it was common to see posts complaining about how buggy the game was, 90% of the time you could dig into it and find that the OP was using a crap ton of mods.

I would strongly disagree that modding was a major selling point considering that it released for consoles without mods for the same price.

I mean… You can just go read the patch notes to find the things they’ve fixed and improved. Going from playing the original Skyrim to the Anniversary edition is similar to what a lot of other companies would try to call a re-make.

And with the horse armor- Todd Howard has since claimed in interviews that was priced that way due to pressure from Microsoft. It was the early days of experimenting with online digital content distribution. It was the time when most phones still didn’t have touch screens, but had some level of Internet connectivity. People were paying $1-$5 for low-quality 30 second music clips to use as ringtones, or UI skins. I don’t think this has been corroborated by anyone else, but it certainly makes sense.

What game has released for 100 pounds? In the States I can’t remember anything over $70, unless you’re looking for special collector’s editions. Which is more than just a game and not really a fair comparison.

And also games absolutely used to be more expensive. On the N64, Killer Instinct and Turok both released at $80 in the US nearly 20 years ago. That’s about $155 today. Virtua Racing was $100 in 1994- that’s $210 dollars today.

Gaming’s very roots are micro transactions: arcades. They were designed to suck quarters out of children’s pockets. Then with home consoles it was the rental market: games like the Lion King and Battle Toads are famous for being reasonable experiences for the first couple of levels, then adding a ridiculous difficulty increase to prevent people from beating it in a single weekend and trying to get them to rent the game for longer.

What we call DLC today used to be called an expansion, and was seen as a consumer-friendly cost savings mechanism. The studio got to save money by re-using a lot of development from the base game, and that savings was passed along to the consumers who already purchased the base game. No one complained about the Roller Coaster Tycoon expansions.

That doesn’t excuse micro transactions, but to say that wasn’t happening 20 years ago is just plain wrong. Plus this post is specifically talking about Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout 4. Skyrim definitively does not have micro transactions, and Fallout 4 I would argue does not, though I’ll admit some of the smaller and cheaper DLC’s are blurring the line.

And that’s if you buy everything at full price on launch day. People who wait a month or two can often get a decent 10-20% off these days. If you wait a year or two you can get DLC’s included for the same price. Right now Fallout 4 with all of the DLC is on sale for $10 on steam. Skyrim has different versions that have gone on sale for $5 at points, and is routinely under $20. So at this point I consider the launch prices to be adding in a heavy premium for impatience.

A company fares to continue providing support and free updates at the same time other companies are shutting down servers and pulling games out of people’s libraries, yet haters still find ways to complain.

He was one of the key figures in the corporatization of NASCAR.

I think there’s some debate among fans as to how much of that was him as opposed to him just driving and leaving the business to other people and being okay with his face and signature getting plastered everywhere.

These memes go hard though so I don’t care that much

You clearly don’t have even a basic education in economics. There’s enough data across a variety of jurisdictions and history at this point to establish the effectiveness of the minimum wage.youre choosing to ignore that and simp for managers and capital owners.

Fair enough, I was just rolling with what you brought.

Does CNN work better? Or CBS?

I think I would agree with you on a lot: faithless electors should be legislated out of existence and the electoral college sucks. Where I disagree is that I don’t think this is significant enough to discourage voting. Faithless Electors are more of a trivia question than anything meaningful to American politics.

Out of the tens of thousands of electors in history, there’s been just over a hundred faithless electors.

And, to quote from your link:

They have never swung an election

How many faithless electoral have ever happened in history?

“Abandon the two party systen” isn’t a solution.

Supporting a 3rd party would be a solution. A terrible solution that has historically proven to only hurt the cause you are trying to support. But bad solutions are at least still solutions.

Changing the election system is another solution. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is one of the many issues I consider when weighing who I vote for. But the reality is that law has not passed and may never pass, so we are stuck with the electoral college and first-past-the-post voting system in the US for the 2024 election.

Then there’s coups. If you’re advocating for political violence I suggest you visit a nation experiencing it. There’s a reason so much of the country was terrified watching the news on January 6th 2021.

Then there’s leaving the country, which is basically just an option for the wealthy or otherwise lucky exceptions. Not really fixing the system as much as abandoning it.

Typographical errors aside, are you proposing any actual solutions or just trying to discourage people from voting?

I do both. Jellyfin is way better if you put in the work of having a good folder structure and file names for metadata to scrape.

VLC is good for weird file types or non-video media. If you want to have a stash of reaction gifs in a playlist, I don’t know if JellyFin has any way to do that. Or if you want the tablet to display a random slideshow of pictures, like a diy digital picture frame. Also it’s easier to use if you don’t have good file names and metadata scraping.

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/475110

https://youtu.be/kT0HJkr1jj4?si=_gOsunaQoUZ0bg0W

TL;DW: your understanding is a simplification. It an assumption that allows educators to move past complex nuances when teaching about broader topics as part of a general education. Chromosomes and gene expression are a chaotic mess in reality.

Biological sex is also a spectrum

Don’t even talk to me unless your cat beds have weight-sensitice heating pads