We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

To me that seems like a bold claim considering “the divine right of kings” has not been successfully resisted nor was it escaped from. Monarchies still exist on every continent, people of royalty still get more rights and better treatment than others, once-royal families still possess loads of wealth, still rule countries in high political positions, still own many companies and other wealth generating assets. Humans have gained unfair advantages due to their lineage for thousands if not tens of thousands of years and I highly doubt that this will change massively in the next thousand years.

Regardless, it still sounds like a really nice speech though.

How about ducks?

Maybe it’s a sort of strapon biting fetish.

I don’t really know much about this topic even after reading the article. It does bother me however that there’s so many channels/server on Telegram full of spammers that seem to offer drugs and prostitution. It’s almost like those were the only things that exist in this world. Which is such a huge waste of a chat program.

Also who the hell listens to any of the nonsense influencers/politicians write in their heavily biased channels, seriously, I can’t find a sane reason to join those, yet strangely that seems to be the only reason the masses use this tool. It’s all just confusing.

One might argue the image is 3 * 1/4 + 2 * 1/8.

The 4th panel is two half-sized panels! Does that count? 👀

From this limited view pedestrians seem to have a pretty nice place there. Crosswalks are highlighted strongly and there’s no traffic lights to slow down pedestrians so they have the priority and the necessary attention. Sidwalks seem wide enough as well.

Yes the road is wider than the bike path, but they each have one lane per direction and there don’t appear to be any sharp turns. The bike lane should perhaps be a little wider, but if there’s only a low number of cyclers it seems equal-ish.

I feel like the little “hill” where the bike lanes and crosswalk intersect should start earlier, that way bikes could come to a halt at the top of the hill and wouldn’t have to accelerate through it, instead they could use it as a sort of break to build up potential energy for a little speed boost later on. Either way the hill seems like a decent idea considering bike drivers occasionally try to drive past pedestrians without a clear path, overestimating their agility - especially at high speeds.

While one could argue for a similar hill on the road, I’d consider that an unnecessary nuisance for the bus driver and passengers. Being shaken around while getting up for a stop is not a nice experience. A hill would also scratch the underside of a low-floor bus.

Ideally bus and tram stops should probably be placed just before a crossing, not after. That way the bus doesn’t block view of pedestrians for cars coming from the opposite direction. The bus driver will usually have to stop for the station either way, so might as well combine the stop for the station with the stop for the crosswalk.

That said I’d argue it’s more of a pedestrians > cars > bicycles or maybe even a pedestrians > cars/bycycles system. Not quite as bad as your suggestion, but still not ideal.

edits: Added a comment about bus stop location. Added comment on low-floor bus.

What do you mean when you say they’re paywalled?

Very true, but only the fact that the game had such an incredible and easy to use map editor was the reason this was possible.

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I’m aware of that and also see the problem, but argue that that’s partially because most people just aren’t used to this. People’s actions depend a lot on what they consider the norm. Take waiters or other service people as an example - in some cultures it’s usual to tip them, in others it’s unusual or even frowned upon.

You would have to at least have a base minimum purchase price and then accept tips on top.

That’s also fine. If the initial price were lower than other comparable games then I assume that more people could be convinced to tip. Or even just if a company is very open about their work / income and dedicated to communicating to their players. I think there’s already some companies like that, though perhaps not necessarily the big ones.

That’s where work contracts can help. Any form of tipping and how it is split would have to be handled by a contract anyway.

He’s not talking about donations though, he’s talking about paying full price THEN tipping.

I’m aware of that. The “Pay what you want.” concept mentioned in my first paragraph was its own idea/suggestion/thought, since it kinda fits the topic. It’s a different thing.

It’s a blatant excuse to pay developers less while placing financial guilt on the people paying for the product. It’s the same way tipping at a restaurant works.

Not really, really good video games take months or even years to complete, so your developers will want to be paid for that time before they become profitable. At restaurants the initial investment isn’t quite as high, as far as wages are concerned. I’d argue that you get tipped before even getting your first monthly paycheck. That can not be the case for video game tips.

I assume software developers and other people in the IT sector are also in higher demand than waiters, so they don’t have it quite as bad as waiters. That’s why I think they’re not comparable.

That said, I do believe that a company that is open about the tips it receives could be interesting for developers. If I saw that tips were actually split evenly among all the employees and their work hours then I think it’d be worth considering applying there. Though I guess for fairness those tips should even be paid out if employees quit or get kicked out so you’d have to track how much each person contributed to each product and that could be a bit of a bureaucratic hassle.

I think the concept of “Pay what you want.” is a very friendly approach to this. It already exists on platforms like itch.io and some free to play games financed through donations, like Dwarf Fortress, also became extremely popular. Humble Bundles are also pretty famous for this. And of course kickstarters do something a bit similar to this.

Personally I’d love to see donation buttons/infos especially for all the free music and games that exist out there. But I want to make sure my donations reach the people who actually worked on it, so I dislike products like paypal or patreon where a portion of the money goes to men in the middle and their managers/owners, etc. A bank account number or something along those lines where I can transfer money a bit more directly would be nice, but some creators only provide paypal buttons, so I won’t donate.

I never played the game but watched some trailers and gameplay videos. I’m 99% certain that Helldivers 2 is following the Starship Troopers formula and purely making fun of patrionism, propaganda, war, the military, military personnel, “freedom”, heroism, politics and military advertisements and turning that into a game. There’s just so many obvious signs, it seems impossible to miss. In other words, it is a political game. Or maybe I just really don’t get either of the two.

Seems to be mostly about horror stuff. I guess a bit of a focus on more random negative events / disasters? My assumption it’s mind/madness related, so perhaps some of it is only in a pawns imagination/hallucination.

Judging by the few existing screenshots I guess that’d also allow for some random natural disasters like earth movement / quakes (big hole in the ground) and makes me think of other stuff like flooding, tornados, etc. But there’s probably already a ton of natural disaster mods.

Also glasses, latex gloves, calculators, earrings and whatever that horseshoe-shaped device below the calculator and next to the potions is. 🤔

Oh right yeah that’s definitely a book when zooming in. Okay no bags then.

Is that a slime covered tentacle monster… in a backpack? Yay backpacks! And handbags too.

Yay! It makes my-current-self happy that your-past-self said nice things about my-past-selves comment. Go, my-past-self!

With that silly comment of mine out of the way, there’s one thing I want to add which is that I think we should maybe show a bit of leniency towards our past selves. Keep in mind that our past selves had less experience than us. They didn’t have all the experiences that shaped us. For better or for worse. When we say “I didn’t know.” maybe to make things more interesting we could instead say “My past self didn’t know.” at least once, just for the fun of it.

Physically speaking, what our past selves did have though was a lot more potential than us. They had the potential to become our current self and at least in theory they also had the potential to become different versions of our current self. Some of them we might consider better, others worse. These versions would all have a different experience than our current self. Maybe even a slightly different thought going through ones head can be an experience with a big impact on the future.

I guess some people do say that they need to makes ones past self, or even another persons past self proud. One thing that I thought was funny was hearing another person saying “That will be future me’s problem.”. So in a way we really do take snapshots and project things onto them.