I have not played in a while, but the last time I did play, Squad is essentially a milsim-lite, and it has an actually decent community.

Though I may be biased, as I was an early tester for Project Reality, way back in the day.

To make a long story very short, basically, a good chunk of the original PR dev team founded Offworld Studios, and basicslly just remade the same concept of a game, in Unreal 4, and more recently they apparently switched over to UE5.

I can at least guarantee that an average Squad playing experience is not going to be as suicidal ideation inducing as an average CoD playing experience.

I recently watched a youtube video that explains, and I am oversimplifying here, but essentially…

They managed to reinvent a new kind of Russian Bias, by way of primarily two things.

1. They apparently do not actually model the amount of time it takes, with an autoloader, to actually switch over to a different ammo carrousel, so switching ammo types and just reloading in general is far too quick

2. The physics model for shell penetration/internal damage is basically broken in specific situations + several high end Russian vehicles are incorrectly internally modelled, so this results in many high end Russian vehicles being far, far more resiliant than they actually should be.

At this point, I only keep up with warthunder at all for the shenanigans.

It is truly masterful how they’ve designed the points and gold and combat systems to essentially constantly gaslight you into playing and/ot spending more, despite the actual gameplay basicslly being a bunch of rabid racists doing the opposite of anything resembling teamwork.

I can’t say I am aware of a comparable aerial combat game, but, if you’re interested in tanks, I have heard good things about Gunner Heat PC! (GHPC).

I mean, with the amount of dark patterns, micro transactions… that we now have words for those concepts…

A lot of games literally are designed, at the fundamental gameplay level, to wave a theoretical victory/payoff in your face, and give you ladders to climb, that make you feel like you are achieving something…

But it ultimately still ends up being inconsistent operant conditioning, which fundamentally is the same pattern that is at play in behavioral addictions like gambling.

So yeah, a whole lot more things either basically are, or literally are addictive, in the same ways that things that are broadly recognized by society addictive are.

Good on you for being aware of yourself!

Yeah I guess that is actually what is happening… combined with… 99% of pictures people see these days are taken with phones or webcams, with different methods of doing color balancing, and different standards for lighting and color grading.

Whereas it used to be, in the before days, in the last century… you’d probably most often see a person pictured in either a school photo, a mugshot, a portrait done for some other occasion, or basically a polaroid, which would be recognizabley differently exposed/styled (basically) from the rest.

Huh.

To me it looks like an actually very well colorbalanced photo… maybe something to do with image formats, different kinds of viewing devices, some kind of HDR process working oddly?

EDIT:

Also, the background, the backdrop, its … the actual pattern of the material is that its lighter and more colorful in the center, and then does a kind of noisy circular taper to black, toward the edges.

Thats not an exposure or contrast error, its an intentional choice, meant to emphasis the center of the image, but also allow the well lit people on the edges to be clearly discernable, in detail.

Its a fairly common practice in more traditional portrait photography.

wdym?

Astronauts are following the same photo format as they’ve always done, and the penguin is wearing a tuxedo.

Gotta have a healthy relationship with a hobby.

Its one thing for it to be an important part of your life and you as a person… its another thing when it becomes your entire life, when you start throwing away other things, opportunities, relationships, finances, etc, to keep being intensely dedicated to it.

I was just gonna say “LoL players tend to be fucking awful people”, but, seeing that there are many recovered addicts in this thread…

…unironically challenges my assumptions and gives me hope that people in general can change.

Now we just need to make Warthunder not work on linux…

The funnier part is the idea that you could just… report a well established and ingrained element of a society… to that society’s ‘police’… and thinking that they would do anything other than laugh at you.

It is really funny to me that, in general, medical professionals in the US still think people do or should broadly respect them.

… Why?

Nobody cares that you’re just following orders, that’s not a very good excuse.

Nobody cares that you have a boatload of debt you need to pay off… most people do these days.

None of that gives ya’ll societal permission to engage in possibly the most elaborate gaslighting fraud system that humanity has ever produced.

Ya’ll are supposed to have ethics, ‘first, do no harm’, yet you violate this routinely as a matter of course, “professionally”.

With few exceptions, you’re all hypocritical liars with God complexes.

You should know, better than most, that your intentions do not matter at all, outcomes do.

They are legitimate military targets, they are acting as comms relay servers for military strikes/operations against Iran, and are very likely also being used to do threat analysis / kill chain assignment tasks.

This is what you get for becoming part of the military industrial complex, tech bros.

TIL Doctors cannot write legibly nor manage a basic queueing process.

Are you talking about platform exclusive content?

I didn’t play very many old school fighting games.

As best I can tell, Vega was a boss in SF2, but a playable character in later iterations of the series.

If your complaint is that… games in popular IP /series will do fairly regular releases with not really too much substantially different between each one…

This is a thing that went on 20 years ago, and still goes on today.

Mario Kart 8… 9? 10?

Are we at Call at Duty 24 now, I think?

Hey, are you intetested in Madden… 31?

Pokemon versions… latest silly pair of opposing concepts?

Yeah this is dumb and stupid, but its not a thing that is different between nowadays, and ye olden days.

How in the fuck has no one yet said:

No Microtransactions.

No Gacha Games (literally 50% of current year gaming).

No Games As A Subscription Service.

No Games With Perpetual DLC (that are each as expensive as other entire games).

Oh I’m not trying to say that the book/movie is trying to say everyone will go through a kind of violent psychosis upon gaining enough self awareness… just that its a potential.

Kinda like stochastic terrorism… stochastic psychopathic terroristic burnout?

Exactly.

The… the norms here are bullshit, both from the PoV of ‘I am a consumer’, and also from the basic professional etiquette of ‘this is a business meeting/exchange’.

Fuck, like… I got a statement from my insurance the other day, saying they didn’t cover 1 of the two sets of glasses I got.

Called em.

Do I owe you money?

No, your optometry provider might bill you later though.

Ah ok, cool, thanks!

… and its been 6 months and the optometrists have yet to send me a bill.

Not my problem! Bank Health Cabal Error In Your Favor!

It is a… comical approximation of:

どういたしまして

Dō-i-ta-shi-ma-shi-te

Roughly:

Dough Ee Tah She Ma She Tay

… but all said rapidly, together.

It means “You’re welcome”, but is maybe slightly more formal than it is casual.

The joke is that it is maybe what a native English speaker would hear, when a native Japanese speaker says “You’re welcome” in Japanese.

… It does not hardly make any sense in text alone, it makes a lot more sense if its actually spoken aloud.

The reverse of this kind of thing… is how a bunch of English terms /phrases have been oddly/poorly translated or transliterated into ‘Engrish’.

Most Japanese people I have met have a very good sense of humor about this kind of thing, they think its funny that, without a lot of practice speaking English, they suck at speaking English, and vice versa, native English speakers with no practice speaking Japanese, suck at speaking Japanese.

Like, uh, ‘Engrish’ itself as a term… is a thing, because in Japanese, they do not have such a distinct difference between ‘L’ and ‘R’.

They use a sound that is roughly in the middle, in between L and R, they usually never learn or use the two as distinct sounds, if they grow up speaking only Japanese.

(Though this could be changing somewhat due to modern internet culture / communications?)

So… they often struggle to learn these two distinct phonemes, sort of how a native English speaker would struggle to learn maybe some of the phonemes in other languages, that either are not present or are very rarely used in English.

You tend to learn phonemes, the building blocks of words, distinct mouth sounds… you learn them best when you are young, its much more difficult to get your brain and mouth to learn new phonemes when you are older.

Oh, your bureacracy is complicated?

Cool, I don’t care.

Tell how much this is gonna cost before I obtain the service.

Can’t even come close to doing that?

Fraud, as far as I’m concerned.

Ah that works!

Yes a… reverse weeaboo, hahah!

I mean the guy I met had different facial hair, was maybe 10 to 20 ish years older than this person, but … maybe?

Maybe there are more ‘Ameriboos’ than we realize.

EDIT:

I should probably clarify that the guy I met in the bar, and the guy I met on the hill were totally different people.

Don’t know much about hill-sama, but bar-kun was… well lets just say most of our conversation was about karate, he claimed he was a fifth dan black belt… i am a first dan black belt, a novice in comparison… and he demonstrated his credentials rather convincingly.

He also said was exiled/former yakuza. Had a busted knuckle, told me that he’d fucked something up, and that his boss, instead of taking the finger, hit him with the blunt side of the… presumably a wakizashi… and then basically exiled him from Japan.

My nickname for him was ‘yokai’, which he found very amusing.

Seattle is wild place if you just walk around everywhere.

Oh my god, ‘Eat a duck I must’, I’m using mouthwash atm and that almost made me do a spit take, that’s amazing lol!

Unfortunately I cannot see the image, ita not loading/displaying right for me, and I’ve also not heard of Rawhide Kobayashi.