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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The Egyptians have Ramses

    Uh? Ramesses was human - all 11 of them were. Egypt has the likes of Ra, Osiris, Anubis and so on, who I don’t think are particularly tyranical in their stories.

    For China, the actual mythology stuff is a lot of creation myth, but they do have a few stories about a divine emperor crushing an army of demons, and it turns out a lot of that is actually about conquering less developed, more nomadic cultures to unify China (Japan pretty much did the same, creation myth then crushing foreign demons that are actually literally foreigners not under their rule). And then there’s the whole mandate of Heaven that they used to justify dynasties rising and falling, mixing up history into myth, that began when a government that started well ended up being seen as tyranical after a few centuries (the Shang, ending with Zhou and Daji).

    Older, more primordial mythologies just start at world creation myth, and then talk about humans figuring out how to settle the land, and how the universe works. Mesopotamian cultures mostly focus on defeating the forces of nature, which does involve standing up to violent gods or monsters, but that comes from trying to build up a civilization that can survive disasters, and is actually not tied to tyranical human rulers. Any civilization needs to start with things like water control, that’s why everyone from China to Greece also have that. Sumerians specifically have cities that go to war with each other because “the chief god of their city told them to”, which is obviously manipulation to secure resources, but isn’t particularly tyranical against their own people. And then the Bronze Age Collapse happens, after which the myth of Ishbi and Erra shows a war god who gets petty and kills everyone because people didn’t pay attention to him. So again, the stories of tyranical gods come from people trying to survive and explain destruction events, from nature or from outside forces. When the Assyrians go around killing everyone, Sennacherib destroys Babylon out of anger and frustration - he tries to write a story about the god of Babylon ordering him to do that, and another story of his own god putting the same god of Babylon on trial for some crime, but that doesn’t stick and Sennacherib gets murdered.

    At some point it’s not easy to distinguish mythology and simply literature. For China specifically, Journey to the West and Investiture of the Gods talk a lot about the bureaucracy and hierarchy of the Heavens, the oppression of gods and demons - but they’re 16th century novels, are they really mythology? Those stories clearly became popular because people felt oppressed by tyrants, so the myths about tyranical gods can of course be a reaction to the people experiencing tyranical rule. Sun Wukong’s story famously starts because the various systems of the Heavens can’t contain him (and mankind), only Buddha can - but then that’s still a 16 c. novel that showed up long after the creation of Buddhist “mythology”, its spiritual structure and divine figures.

    So there’s multiple reasons for stories to pop up about gods becoming tyrants, either because the people get upset at actual tyrant kings, or because one country tries to justify the destruction of another country. But there’s a distinction to be made about stories written as piece of literature and when they become actual civilization building myths that is a fundamental part of its culture. The older a civilization develops and gets centralized, the more opportunities you get for anyone to write more stories that become myth a few hundred years later. If that civilization has ups and downs, the stories about gods are more likely to reflect that. (I think Egypt got out of that because it actually collapsed 3 times, and kept starting over with new gods doing the same things, none of the unified kingdoms lasted more that 500 years)











  • Uruanna@lemmy.worldtoGaming@lemmy.worldSame as It Always Was
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    1 month ago

    and I don’t even use them on my PS5 because I prefer 60+ FPS to graphical fidelity I can’t even see the difference in.

    So the idea of the PS5 Pro is basically to play with the same graphic quality as graphic mode, but with the performance of performance mode.

    If you’re saying you don’t even need graphic mode on your PS5, then obviously you don’t need a PS5 Pro. But there are people who want both 4K and 60 FPS. They’re not that many, but they’re vocal, and that’s what the PS5 Pro is trying to sell.

    “I don’t even have a bike, so what’s the point of all those bike helmet sales?”


  • I can’t believe we haven’t learned anything since “it’s about ethics in games journalism”. “It’s about monetization in AAA games” now, apparently.

    I totally agree that there has been a hate campaign about DEI right-wing complains, but there’s two subjects that came to head at the same time here because it was on the same big title:

    Star Wars Outlaw and AC Shadows had the same business model, Star Wars showed that it failed, and Ubisoft got spooked and said they’d have another look at the monetization model for AC. People did get pissed at both games when their business models with passes and editions everywhere were revealed.

    It’s just that AC also had at the same time the matter of racist and misogynist hate because of the protagonists. I don’t think this happened on Star Wars, and the fact that it failed too shows that it isn’t the only complain people are having against Ubisoft.

    Apparently the monetization guy is stepping on the minority hate campaign subject, he’s the one conflating the two problems here just because his job title. We shouldn’t forget that Ubisoft did pull an infuriating and deplorable stunt with that monetization model.


  • I’m not reading the article but why does the title still need to phrase it like the devs are the ones who need more time, suggesting they haven’t finished making the game a month and a half ahead of release? We already know that investors got spooked by Star Wars exploding because of its sales model with special editions driving up the prices for some bullshit, and we know AC was supposed to do the same but now won’t. They literally just said “actually we’re going back to simultaneous Steam release and we’re dropping the special editions and we’re rethinking the season’s pass from scratch and so-and-so will now be free instead of paid DLC” like a couple weeks ago. I can see that they did that following devs advice, but it wasn’t that the devs needed time, ever since the advent of DLC there have been multiple games from big companies where we’ve heard that the dev team fought against garbage DLC and sales practice but were told to fuck off and do what they were told and then the game exploded. The sales department is the one that needs more time to rethink the worth of cutting this down and selling the pieces, and then have the devs adjust all that.




  • Sales expectations here don’t mean “we think this game is so good it will move x million units,” that thinking doesn’t exist anymore. It starts from the money they put in it, and they deduce “we’ll need to sell x million copies to get the money back with the profit we want.” There have been a few interviews specifically about these two games saying that.

    It’s the same old idea that AAA products (movies, games, same excuse) cost more to make than they bring money back - although we never know exactly how much of that is actually “investors expect an x% return by week y” where x is just too high and y too short and they never want to think longer term, and we never know how far an investment actually goes. Especially in the case of the Remake trilogy where keeping the same engine and world is supposed to drastically reduce the cost of the last game compared to if they had started a new game from scratch with the same content - except part 3 is unlikely to sell more than part 2 given that it’s a sequel.

    At any rate, we all know it’s true that development time and costs keep going up exponentially, and no one likes it (and yet everyone wants 4k 60fps somehow).



  • Does the article say the headline is wrong? Or does it say conspiracy theorists listen to facts because it relies on a handful of willing participants who changed their mind when seeing facts and reports? Because that’s not the crux of the crazy conspiracy theorists.

    Try again when the chatbot talked to the likes of Graham Hancock or the hardcore MAGA death cult. Facts don’t matter.

    Rand pointed out that many conspiracy theorists actually want to talk about their beliefs. “The problem is that other people don’t want to talk to them about it,”

    Just look at this guy who straight up pretends that no one tried to talk to them before.

    It does talk about gish gallop at the very end, and claims that the chatbot can keep presenting arguments - but doesn’t actually say that it has worked.


  • Uruanna@lemmy.worldtoA Comm for Historymemes@lemmy.worldLet the man enjoy his boats
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    2 months ago

    Yeah, that’s what we call a disorder now. As in, some “autistic” or “obsessive” traits can be fairly common at very low levels, but we start calling them disorders when they severely impact your life. Like being physically unable to stop washing your hands 200 times in a row to the point of making yourself bleed, that’s a disorder - but being unable to step on black tiles or odd steps on stairs is not severely impacting your life. Same reasoning for things like gambling or porn, it’s an addiction only when it starts ruining you, your work, or your family life.

    Not sure how damaging that could get for a train or ship lover, you could probably find workarounds for the “forgetting to eat” thing. Like packing a snack. Depends if the person is holding out for weeks on ends while they have other obligations to other people.

    I don’t know that the mania phrasing is that significant for a serious armchair diagnosis like that. As long as someone constantly stops to watch a ship passing by like they’re under a spell, they could call it a mania, inspired by some god or another ; making lists for no reason could be enough for people to call you bonkers (even in the last couple centuries, you could still send people to an asylum for the dumbest assumptions). We’re certainly missing details, but that could go either way, it’s not enough to suspect something big beyond “people used to think basic mental health was the voices of gods.”

    Yes, he’s happy when they return, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy a majority of the time during these periods.

    He’s making lists. He happy.