yeah I definitely get why it happens -- if you invested 100's of millions into a AAA game, and most gamers will drop the controller if they have to fire too many neurons, you'd better hold their hand

"base game is easy, with optional challenges for skill-focused players" is how you get NPCs who bark incessantly to use your new Fire Thing to melt the frozen door or some shit 6 seconds after you see the frozen door

it's a spectrum though. Celeste did it right: opt-in Assist *and* challenges

while we're joking about "what's your most anti-woke opinion," mine is that "hard game with opt-in assists" is the way to make your game accessible, not "default easy with optional challenges"

also, folks gotta accept they gotta get good at games a bit more often, but that's me yelling at a cloud

Universal childcare
Paid parental leave
Universal healthcare
High-speed rail
Energy independence by 2035, no fossil fuels
Give that Joe Camel guy 3 more Labubus, jail if he leaves the house with fewer than 5

I'm actually pretty moderate

Ban smartphone sports gambling
Ban crypto, like, all of it
Ban vapes
Legalize everything else, but regulate and tax the hard shit
Decrim sex work
CFPB is as big as the FBI
I said abolition, but save jail for bosses who interfere with union organization or operation

Student loan forgiveness
Corporate death penalty. "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one" (bye bye OpenAI)
If you're a billionaire, we tax you until you aren't anymore
Pack the court, reverse Citizens United, Dobbs, VRA revocation, and ~10 other things

Stack Overflow served more traffic than your company and, until sometime in the last 2 years (long after it stopped being run by technologists), ran on ~10 physical computers

pre-FB WhatsApp did Dockerless bare-metal deploys

This goes out the window if you raise VC — this kind of money doesn't matter to you anyways + you try to get a lot of users, damn the costs

but colocation is a one-time fixed cost, and those cloud bills can add up

I know it feels cool and magical to open a dashboard and get computer, and the physical world is scary

but you can buy a *lot* better specs if you build it yourself, such that your small company probably won't need autoscaling/hundreds of instances, even if you use inefficient tech

Republican voters and the press seem to care about the Epstein stuff more than the hundreds of baldly illegal, sometimes literally murderous offenses of this administration, and it's nice to feel hope

but also remember the Establishment has short memory, and can bury pretty much anything