Reading it back over, I did get that fact backwards. Students at UK owned universities that are in China, as opposed to UK students in Chinese universities, so, you’re right.

Though the core of what I am saying here remains. They’re not the same thing, and both remain fucked.

It’s pretty clear given China’s massive successes in elevating people out of poverty, solving homelessness

If you call herding the homeless population into camps and abusing them for their labour, “elevating” them, and “solving homelessness,” I have a bridge to sell you.

I can’t wait to see the exemption for “part time workers” and suddenly everyone making less than a triple digit salary has exactly 32 hours a week, or whatever is legally permissible to pass as “part time work” in your country.

You’ve provided a fantastic common-sense solution designed off the simple premise that no one needs 12x of a living wage, and I can’t agree enough, but I know the capitalists would fuck it up at every stage possible, while simultaneously arguing that they’re justified in doing so because the method of economy that they worships has given them moral purchase to look down on the poors.

The ceo makes $96.5 million a year.

This should be severely punishable by the law. It causes more societal harm than many crimes with serious penalties.

I’ll be the first to say aloud that a forced pledge to the nation and flag in a school is a fucked up concept, but the whataboutism’s in this thread are insane. Equating natural born children in a state funded school singing the national anthem to foreign university students, paying their own way, being gathered in a sports arena to attend a pro-nation pledge of alliegence, complete with military personnel and armed guards, is not an honest comparison.

Both are questionable. The latter is clearly far worse. And more importantly, the former being bad doesn’t shield the latter from criticism. China can go fuck itself at LEAST as hard as American-brand nationalism.

Edit: Struck out my mistaken initial misread of OP. Point remains.

A thread about the BBC, Netflix and the Israel government. Goes into a feverish tirade about American genocide.

How’s that whole “destabilizing the west” op going? They paying you well over there? Or is this like a “they have my family” situation?

While you are absolutely right, that doesn’t make it engaging to listen to. Perhaps ludonarrative harmony can go too far.

Fantastic response tbh.

It’s a good game, and very unique in what it does, but it’s not the objectively best written masterpiece it gets praise for.

My friend who thinks it is also thinks the same o Shakespeare, which I think explains a lot. I tend to be impressed with works that say more with fewer words rather than say little with very many. If the author could pull his head out of his own ass and get to his points, I think it would be a better game, but I suspect Disco Elysium fans would argue that that would ruin the best part of the game, so I just accept I’m not the target audience.

Bless.

Fairly confident I wound up with some malware from a “GOG” download from one of the sites in the megathread. I’ve already formatted and the files are long gone but I’ll tuck this link away for the future.

Hey, I also had immediately reacted to the graph and headline without reading, and came back to do the edit afterwards. I’m right here with you, fam. It was just an interesting topic point for me, so I dug in a little more.

I don’t think this is about enthusiasts buying less games, though. We’re not talking about the average number of purchases the consumer makes. This is more evidence that there are a lot more casual players out there, who will make their 0-2 large game purchases a year and play their games over a long time. The college guy who literally only buys a couple sports games that they play online with a friend. The burnt out parent that can only make time for their 2 open world adventure games all year. I know a few people in my life who own a Switch, Mario Kart and Animal Crossing, and that will be literally the only two games they load all year. And this is to say nothing of people who strictly play F2P tirles, which apparently are 33% of players.

“US game players purchase 1-2 games a year on average” is not the same thing as “the bottom 60% of purchasers only purchase 1-2 games a year.” This is evidence that, one, the medium is reaching a much more widespread market and, two, the casual market is often more engaged with F2P titles.

I think if we looked at enthusiasts and hobbiests, there would still be a decline in purchases. I don’t think this is evidence that games have become too expensive for most.

In Canada, we are contracted to be in the building for ~6 hours of work a day, but for employment insurance purposes, it is considered an 8 hour day. The expectation is that every 6 hour in-building day has about 2 hours of work at home. Obviously, this is largely untrue: there are weeks where I work exactly 30 hours, and weeks where I work 60 hours dealing with every assignment, test and paper all coming in at the same time. But, in the surface, it is legally recorded to be a 40 hour work week even though those are not the hours I am required to work.

No idea how, exactly, this relates to Japan’s situation, but I thought it could be interesting for context.

Edit: Okay, I actually read the article, and it does talk about this.

The results showed that Japanese teachers were largely preoccupied with out-of-classroom activities.

They spent 17.8 hours a week on teaching, which is shorter than the international average of 22.7 hours.

However, lesson preparation in Japan took 8.2 hours a week (international average 7.4 hours); extracurricular activities, such as supervising clubs, consumed 5.6 hours (international average 1.7 hours); and administrative tasks, such as paperwork, took 5.2 hours (international average 3 hours).

Where a Japanese teacher spends 17.8 hours a week on teaching, I spend ~22 hours (trying my best to omit in-school prep time, which is not uniform week-to-week).

For further comparison, I definitely spend far fewer hours on lesson preparation, as we tend to share a lot of our lesson plans across teachers, probably spend close to the international average on administrative tasks, and spend like… maaybe 1.2 hours pre week on extracirriculuars. And those extracurricular hours are also pure optional: I can simply just say no and not do it.

I think is is fascinating how much time Japanese teachers spendon extracurriculars and administrative tasks, in particular. I find myself cursing the inefficiencies that lead to a lot of that administration time, as I often feel we could save a lot of time in that space. I wonder if Japanese teachers have similiar issues.

But, the Democrats are the ones responsible for genocide in Ukraine! /s

Metal Hellsinger was one of the more inspired experiences I’ve played in the past several years. Really sad to see a studio making genuinely quality games have to shutter.

Seconded for Dark Cloud 2 specifically. Game is incredibly good.

As a combat/character building driven player, you need to hit character level 2-4 for core abilities/synergies to start coming online before combt gets interesting, imo. If you’re a story driven player and you’re not already into it 2-3 hours in, you won’t get into it at all.

Ah yes, gloss past the fact that they were nationalists before they were socialists, even if you take their name at face value.

Fucking Polievere. Every time I think he can’t get any more unlikable.

You know, fundamentally, I don’t hate Gamepass as a concept. “Netflix, but for videogames” is an idea I can get behind, as it widens the audience for something I love by lowering the bar of entry. There are plenty of people out there that benefit from being able to play a few games here and there without needing to commit hundreds of hours to $100 purchases.

But Netflix has overstepped with price hikes and ads, and I’ve cancelled my service with them. That Microsoft thinks it can charge some ~$40CAD a month is pure hubris. I hope they learn quickly that, at that price point, the enthusiast market will happily cancel and just buy their games outright, and the casual market will decide it’s an expense they don’t need.

Because if they’re shuttered, the company/people that make the company have the opportunity to go somewhere else and do something better. I’ve disliked everything they’ve produced since they were purchased by EA, so I’ve come to think the publisher holds them back.

The last Bioware game I genuinely enjoyed was Dragon Age: Origins, which was the last thing (mostly) developed before the EA buy-up. I’m sure it’s scary for the employees, but I suspect this is good for Bioware in the long term.