We live in the digital attention economy.

We literally pay … attention.

Everything is a contest to get you to pay your attention toward watching, looking at, reading, whatever particular thing.

Outrage is the best way to get you to pay attention.

But when you’ve spent your attention on being outraged… your brain tricks you.

You’ve had the experience of being outraged… you felt it, you feel like you understand the thing, experienced the thing… contemplated the thing… even like you acted in some way about the thing.

But 99.9% chance… you did nothing other than absorb information and have emotions about it. Maybe you also posted a reaction comment or video of some kind… but you didn’t do anything tangible about it, something that might alleviate the conditions that led to this outrageous thing being a thing, or its likelihood of recurring.

You didn’t actually do anything about it… but you feel like you did.

This is why people get nutty about fandoms, have parasocial relationships with e-personalities, get legitimately fatigued from so much bad news.

There has to be a balance, you have to retain actual self control and self awareness. Otherwise, you’re a zombie that thinks you’re morally superior to other zombies, and you’ll sleepwalk toward what the algorithm wants you to…

When you could have, at some point, turned off the screen and… meditated, read a book, gone for a hike or jog, planted a garden, maintained your car… even gasp had a face to face interaction with a random person.

They want us atomized, exhausted, existentially despairing.

Such people won’t be capable of doing anything about anything.

If you want to stay Christian about it:

God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference.

… Not actually in the Bible. A Lutheran pastor came up with it in the 1930s.

Though I personally disagree with the less often quoted second part of it, which echoes your quoted verses of Jesus saying to more or less be right with God and focus on that… seems to imply that all suffering is unavoidable, and of course that you’ll be better off in Heaven… which I do not think is the case.

But, I can at least say that I think the first part is pretty close to spot on.

The entire company is somewhere between 300-500 people.

It literally fits into a few floors of a tower in Bellevue.

Meanwhile… Microsoft essentially bought the land area of a mid sized US city, and turned it into a sprawling corporate complex.

… and that is just their main campus.

Microsoft literally runs a private shuttlebus system in the Seattle-Bellevue-Issaquah area, to get people into and out of their campuses.

They then also have local private taxi services to get people from one building in a larger campus, to another.

There’s your scale difference.

Microsoft is essentially a semi-sovereign entity, occupies substantial territoty, got their own police too.

… Valve has something like 5-10 concurrent floors in a single building that is basically on top of a shopping mall.

Hyper-Capitalism? Nooo.

//RETRO//-Captialism? … significantly better by comparison.

Terrifying, but true.

‘Stakeholder Capitalism’ turned out to be approximately the same degree of bullshit as ‘Abundance Agenda’ is now.

They might be getting mad because Jesus is not saying the same thing I am.

He is saying do not worry about tomorrow because you can worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.

He is saying material reality is not the most important thing, your relationship with God is.

I am saying do not worry about things where the worry itself prevents you from actually acting to make tomorrow better… or where there genuienly is nothing useful you can do, when you have no realistic choice.

…and I would want you to fundamentally base your appraisal of your own situation in the material and practical reality, and in you trying to be as honest with yourself, about yourself, as you can be.

At this point, the shitpost comm is going to be able to just actually focus on literal shit related stories.

reality is enshitttifying aughguhah!

Grand Theft Auto 6.

No, its not about car theft.

Its about Auto-matically recurring payments, Auto-matic agreement to updated TOS that strip your rights and property, Auto-matic dynamic pricing.

Remember when the GTA series was a cutting critique of US society, caricaturing it?

The joke is inverted now: You’re the joke, if you’re stupid enough to pay to be robbed.

The commission/valve cut is tiered.

First $10m of revenue: 30% cut

Between $10m and $50m: 25% cut.

Over $50m: 20% cut.

Then you have all of the incredible things Valve offers to a game dev, beyond simply existing where most pc gamers are…

…here, use our achievement system, here, you can make in game items tradable, here, you can use our servers for multiplayer peer discovery and linking friends to friends easily, here, you have a whole storefront, news blog, and discussion board… oh you made your game for Windows? No sweat, you don’t need to port it to Linux, we got you there. Oh you wanna do DLC? We got a whole system for that. Oh we forgot to mention cloud saves, we’ll do that for you. And! If you want people to mod your game… we’ll host all their mods, and make it so users can just upload them and download them and such.

You know how many games I’ve seen start on itch.io, incubate, develop, then do an initial launch on Steam?

Way, waaay better plan than just jumping straight into Steam Early Access. You put a firewall between the people on Itch who know they are beta testers, and people on Steam who expect working product, and thus avoid the reputational damage of going through all or most of development on Steam.

Anyway… I’d call all that stuff pro-indie-game-developer.

I certainly agree that gambling, p2w loot drops are bullshit, and the Steam item market being able to convert into actual money is… not good, and should be changed.

(I will note though that a game dev can decide if their game’s items will be directly tradable, or marketable for basically SteamBucks, or both. You can just only allow them to be directly traded.)

But the rest of it? Yeah, a whole lotta games that start with little money can have a lot easier time developing and remaining financially solvent, with all the infrastructure that Valve/Steam provides… maybe the analogy would be they effectively help you up a few of the first rungs of the proverbial ladder.

Its also worth noting that Valve is not a publically traded company. They do not have stock. They do not have a board of investors or shareholders demanding line must go up.

They do things the old fashioned way, they build up a giant warchest of money, money they actually have, with no loan payment due, no strings attached… and then then deploy that money to do things like invent their own VR tech, fund Proton development, build the Steam Machine and Steam Deck, etc.

Every other company in the space that does anything like this is beholden to capitalist investors and the demi-gods of banking and finance in a way that Valve isn’t.

Its why Unity enshittified and then imploded, and why Godot hasn’t.

When you need to make line go up for somebody, when you very directly owe people money… shit comes out the end of the pipe. When you don’t… as long as you manage your own affairs well, you more or less are in charge of what comes out of the pipe.

Yeah… Terrestrial 5G towers with a fiber backbone for some proportion of them… are… stupendously more cost effective at getting a decent level of internet to a lot of people.

Also doesn’t cause Kessler Syndrome, which is, you know, good.

Now, such a system will still suffer in more abberant atmospheric conditons, but to a far lesser extent.

Literally the only actual ‘use case’ I can think of where StarLink ‘makes sense’ as a better solution is … you are a boat that is actually moving most of the time.

If you’re a house boat… terrestrial 5G probably exists near your mooring.

Either that or you truly, truly live far away from civilization.

… but we already had satellite internet that did those things.

I mean, yes, but specifying a more specific cause of the delusional thinking is useful.

Sorry I’m pretending to be a normal person, who is just like, trying to say and a remember a word.

I understand, sometimes there are very natural reasons for concern, valid reasons, reasons that a clowny screed will likely not affect.

But the world seems awash in hopelessness and worry these days.

Succumbing totally to that… will make things worse. Ideally, all of that energy could be spent either actually trying to do something that is in some way useful… or at least not be expended on stressing yourself into an early grave.

I’m not really trying to demand people be a certain way, I’m just trying to echo the fatalism, but reorient it in a way that it might … give people permission, so to speak, to try to exist in, think from a less taxing perspective.

One must imagine Sisyphus laughing hysterically, at least sometimes, for no immediately apparent reason.

… oomwoo?

Sorry, I need to look this up on Squeam.

Hey, on Mreesh, somebody said its a scam!

… But then LikkiiLiikkii says its legit.

Hrm, I wonder what Gronk thinks…

Call me!

… on the line, call me call me any time, call me!

?

Water is a resistive surface, you can land on it.

Generally, this will… not exactly go swimmingly, and most aircraft will sink soon afterward, if they don’t tear themselves apart in the landing process… but in some situations, it is possible.

There are also a fair number of aircraft that are intentionally designed to be able to take off and land from water.

You have perhaps heard of a seaplane?

You people should really smile more.

… this all is immensely funny, watching an entire species ecocide itself, and most of the rest of the planet, ultimately because we are too … cowardly, lazy, neurotic, greedy, take your pick, to do what would need to be done to stop it.

But that’s the joke!

The human condition.

That is the joke.

… why are we so serious?

What is all that worry and concern gonna accomplish?

Do you have an actual thing you could do, to make things better in some way, for yourself, for others?

If no: There’s nothing you can do, worrying is pointless.

If yes: Just do that then.

Don’t be deluded that you’re guaranteed, or even likely to be sucessful. That is arrogance. But there is value in trying to do the right thing, even when it seems hopeless.

Don’t worry about what is unavoidable… it will always get you, eventually. The anticipation only makes it worse, and, paradoxically… makes it more inevitable, by wasting your energy that could be spent on doing instead be spent on worrying.

Hey, at least the warning panel is still there, and you can see it.

It can, in fact, always be worse.

force chokes you, but only a little bit

Popularity is about personal marketing.

Competency is not.

How many scientists have you heard of who made groundbreaking discoveries in the last year?

vs…

How many extremely rich idiots do you hear about, and from, on an essentially constant basis?

I have altered the context of the joke, pray I do not alter it further.