Going through the postal service might have been safer than other forms of travel because there would have been more explicit exchanges of custody. Like put a kid on a passenger train and they could just get off and get lost before getting on a connecting train and who knows what happened to them? They arrived on train A but never got on train B.

Whereas with mail, the kid becomes the operator’s responsibility. If the kid is handed over to the operator to ride train A but then is nowhere to be found at the destination, then that operator is the prime suspect. Or the operator hands the kid off to the next operator in the journey and the kid is now their responsibility.

And even if you have a babysitter, passenger stations are going to be a lot more crowded than cargo stations, so keeping track of a kid will be a lot easier, plus the driver is the babysitter for the postal service, so they won’t miss their train or take the wrong one by accident (unless they are routed incorrectly lol).

In the past, making money and making great games had a lot of overlap.

But then the big studios realized how much some people are willing to spend on either the latest version of the same thing, to not have to wait for a timer, to skip a grind (especially one tuned specifically to make people want to skip it), to gain an advantage over other players, plus a bunch of psychological tricks and are so often chasing that money, which probably kills a lot of the passion for their staff that actually knows how to make good games until they either leave or start phoning it in.

But indie studios, while they can also be run by people just chasing the money, can also be run by people more interested in the creating a great game aspect than the money aspect.

You can see the same thing across the entire economy. The main difference is that regulatory capture and the amount of resources required to make a video game aren’t set up to prevent new players from entering the market and since games are digital they scale much easier than physical objects. Like some people have de-enshitified their cars or even made their own from scratch or an older one, but it’s not like they can just sell those de-enshitified cars to anyone, they’d need to ramp up production quite a bit to get the same reach viral indie games can get.

I finally checked out itch.io recently to look into steam alternatives and was disappointed to see that a lot of games there have “graduated” to steam and stop updating the itch.io version in favour of their steam version.

Though I’ve noticed that some non-porn games are adding “nudity” and “sexual content” to their user tags when the game has none to attract people looking for good porn games, but then it turns out to just be a good game without porn.

I noticed when looking through some of my unplayed games’ tags and saw “dating sim” plus the ones above in a bunch of SAO games, which are unfortunately not very good games from the ones I’ve tried so far, which is kinda ironic given that a great game is central to the story.

Yeah, IMO they should either be priced cheaply because anyone who buys is essentially testing the game. Then it’s an ok gamble IMO, cheap game that might never get better and could be full of bugs.

Or they should be priced higher to attract people who specifically want to support the idea and avoid review boms from people who expect a full game even though it says “early access”. But this model then puts a requirement for communication and transparency with those who did support it, as well as a commitment to release what they did produce as open source if they end up abandoning the project.

Though I think there should be some buyer beware involved. Read reviews before you buy, especially negative ones, and look for trends (to avoid being overly influenced by one reviewer’s bias). It’s impossible to predict which will continue being developed and which will fail (and out of those that fail, which ones intended it from the start and which ones were trying to make a great game in good faith but it just didn’t work out), so buy early access games for what they currently are rather than what you hope they’ll be. Even if they do get finished, that final product might not be what you’re hoping for.

Other than banning the account after it happens, I can’t really see any way to punish the bad faith actors without catching people with low resources just trying to make a game despite the system being stacked against them.

Is sound air being disturbed or a brain interpreting vibrations in the air?

Hello, this is Tim Adobe. Don’t worry, we are working hard to make sure we remain the best. There’s currently a team trying to figure out wtf a “gnu” is while another team figures out the maximum price increase our customer base will accept to give us a good budget to work with (previous profits were used on boats for executive team and some pizzas from the cheapest place my executive assistant could find with free delivery). Is Mr GIMP interested in selling?

Boomer solution to having a child out of wedlock: lies and shame.

Millennial solution to having a child out of wedlock: who gives a shit and why was that even a thing?

Isn’t a lot of the industry produced “honey” actually honey flavoured corn syrup anyways?

Would probably be more interesting with a pantheon instead of a monotheon, so sure! But I call mischief and chaos for my domains.

Ok fine! Since no one has yet stepped up for it, I’ll also do lust, but only because you all twisted my arm about it!

If I ever get a chance to be a god of a reality, I’d make real crazy shit happen in the vicinity of people tripping on acid, but only when they are the only ones looking. And then, whoever doubted the most gets to see it sober exactly 2 weeks later.

I’m not sure whether I’d say your first paragraph overestimates or underestimates people but I disagree with that premise. The fact that there exists people who willingly take their own life is a counter example, and I’d say that it would be a slow suicide (as in the work they do isn’t going to immediately cause them harm) makes it even easier, even if they see the eventual harm as inevitable.

Personally, I think the idea of AGI is dangled to build credibility for future attacks to be blamed on a rogue AI system. After which, the ones who really control the AI will come in and “fight” it and be treated like heroes, with repeats happening coincidentally when people start getting tired of shit again and need to be reminded about how the rulers saved them.

Edit: forgot to close my bracket.

After noticing that I had a harder time enjoying being around water because of concern about my phone getting wet, I’ve just been getting water resistant phones. Haven’t really tested how resistant they are but it’s nice not caring about that anymore.

Edit: fixed a word

The hamster also wants to be the one to press the red button.

But why male models?

It was an observation I’ve made from reading/seeing other examples. Not surprising that others have noticed it.

Is that a parody fan fic that points out Rowling doing that with any character with more intellect than a rock or dehydrated slug?

Yeah, some responses think you don’t understand scientific notation. At least it’s kinda funny, they misunderstood what you were saying so much they thought you misunderstood what the comic was saying when you were actually pointing out that the comic appears to be underestimating the size of the problem space it’s pretending to pretend to enumerate (aka it can be very difficult to write for a character that is intended to be smarter than the author, even when the author is really smart like this one is).

Yeah, it’s like she wanted to avoid the Tolkien fantasy cliches but somehow ended up making it even more cliche and lame.

Looks like the current votes in this thread don’t really appreciate just how fast total permutations of large sets grow. It’s one of the few things that can dwarf that number for the total number of atoms in the observable universe.

But we’re talking permutations of sound combinations that can be of arbitrary length. Going by that alternating consonant/vowel pattern above (which simplifies it because you can have consecutive consonant or vowel sounds in words and phrases), the numbers of pairs would be 120,000. That’s less more than 100,000, so for each pair in a phrase, you add at least 5 0s to the total possibilities. 2000 / 5 is 400. Unless I screwed something up, that means the maximum length of a query is 400 consonant/vowel pairs before you have to introduce gaps (which goes against the random noises that got responses). Halve that because it can start with either a consonant or vowel sound.

A rough estimate of the number of sounds in the above paragraph is something like 225, and I simplified my count by ignoring consecutive consonant sounds (which it is full of).

Like yeah, 10 to the 2000 is a huge number but when you’re dealing with permutations, you use up numbers very fast. A more popular counter example is the stat about the total number of permutations for a deck of cards, where they say if you shuffle it well, you probably have a unique sequence of cards that has never been seen before. Iirc, that number is within a the ballpark of the order of magnitude of that total atoms in observable universe estimation. And that’s just with 52 possibilities and no repetition (calculated by factorial, whereas sound combination possibilities grows even faster and isn’t limited to 52 options).

Edit: corrected that bit where I rounded the 120,000 to 100,000 to simplify the math by looking for a minimal value rather than the actual value.