That’s a lot of assumptions to make an argument.

Ok, so Zelensky has banned opposition parties, arrested political opponents. And furthermore he cancelled elections that were supposed to happen next month. Will you be condemning Ukrainian conscription then, since the government will neither be democratic or legally elected?

So the 15000 civilian deaths caused by Ukraine bombing its own provinces before Russia intervened, the constant efforts by Russia to resolve the issue diplomatically, the naked refusal of the West to even engage with Russia, the West openly backing a fascist coup in Ukraine, and then arming it with the explicit dictate of provoking Russia, the West pressuring Ukraine to not accept the generous settlement offered by Russia in May after the war started, all that doesn’t count?

It’s not like Russia has never done any of those things individually.

[citation needed]

Same for us, but apparently we are even at the lower end in our region

Whatever the big submarine is called. I played like 2-3 years ago

I called mine Triton, the prawn suit Scylla, and my submarine Poseidon

Not “Lit”, Mir!

The dead babies fabrication should tell you when it’ll stop.

Israel felt the need to invent a story about 40 dead, beheaded, mutilated and burned babies, and then propagate it to everyone in the world. Why? To pre-emptively elicit sympathy over the genocide they are about to embark on. They are preparing to unleash 300 000 non-professional soldiers (reservists) upon Gaza, who have been filled for a week now with tales of Hamas “attrocities” and ideas about Palestinians being animals.

What will follow will make the Warsaw Ghetto cleansing, following the order to deport the Jews to the death camps, look like a kindergarten field trip.

You dont want to lose any of it in case of violence, otherwise it’s evidence that places you at the scene, and you dont want creep cops to “confiscate” anything for the same reason.

You don’t want to be seen with bulging pockets (or even worse carrying any sort of backpack/fannypack, etc) because that makes you a target for cops. Even worse, they can plant things in bags or wallets.

At the bare minimum, carrying no ID when chaos erupts, means cops might let you go to avoid the work, hunt down other easier-to-arrest protestors or gives you the option to give a fake name, then make a run for it.

Source: experience with Greek protests.

Dont take any personal belongings with you either. No keys, phone, wallet, id card.

Since you mentioned Twitter videos.

There’s, for example, a genuine video of Palestinian fighters looting dead Israeli soldiers and then kicking their faces. Then there’s fake videos, like the one with Israeli toddlers in chicken cages, being made fun of by Palestinians. That video is fake, as the sound of Palestinians is dubbed over (I have no idea where the images came from).

Don’t forget that Israel was the first to perfect online propaganda.

Nobody hands out independence. If you don’t fight for it, you won’t gain it. Even if the sentiment is genuine (Palestinians will end up suffering at the end), one has to realise that there’s no “enduring” ethnic cleansing. Palestinians have to act at every chance they are given, or they’ll cease existing as a people.

Inshallah

50 dollars were console games. On PC you’d often find the same game at 30 dollars (disk) or 20 dollars (steam) on release. The difference was due to console makers taking a standard fee cut from every sale.

The first AAA games back then to be released at 40 and 50 dollars on PC were COD MW1 and BF3, which set the trend for all other games since then. This was pure profit for the publishers, since there was no cut for console makers on PC. And before you say it, no, the Steam cut back then wasn’t even comparable (much less since it was a % cut and not a standard fee). In fact Steam hiked their cut because of the price hike triggered by EA and Activision, which is what then made EA pull their games off Steam and create Origin.

The budget is also a marketing ploy. The average person hears about a game costing hundreds of millions to make and they think “well then, it MUST be good”. It’s more or a pissing contest among publishers. Most of that budget does indeed go to marketing and executive wages/bonuses.

And from the publisher’s perspectives, that’s really a good investment of the budget, because it doesn’t just drive up sales. It also cultivates customer loyalty and fanboyism (e.g. “we are spending all that money because we believe in the game, and we want to give our loyal fans the best experience possible” is a very common line in pre-release interviews).

For example, there’s a false equivalency among gamers, propagated by this kind of propaganda: “I have to pay the high prices and engage in microtransactions/DLC, because that supports the game developers and their high budgets”. In reality, the people who actually make the game see very little of that money. Their wages, in most instances, are shit and do not reflect the hours they put in. However, gamers rarely want to understand that, and instead extend the publisher pissing contest among themselves (“the game I’m playing now spent more money than the game you are playing, therefore it’s the superior product”).

Spencer’s analysis is just an overview of the current symptom.

This is the real disease:

because it sees a new platform it can scale to feed the financial growth demanded by investors.

Investors/shareholders demand infinite growth, but there’s finite space to grow (millions of games, few customers). This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices. Capitalism has eaten gaming.

But we’ve been observing this trend in AAA and AA publishers/developers mostly. Indie gaming is alive and well and evolving towards being better and better. Why? Because indie developers are not usually beholden to investors.

Once you hear a gaming company you used to like has gone public, say your condolences and then run away.

You can’t because the engine is bad, and they need a lot of loading screens to connect the small-sized playable areas. Other Bethesda titles pull the same trick, but you don’t realize it, because there’s no loading screen. Instead it’s doors that handle that (which is quick because rooms are small) and pre-loading of neighbouring grids when you are outdoors (which is why sometimes you’ll see creatures popping out of thin air, or walking out from behind walls/trees/rocks to hide the popping.

Bethesda always advertises their “new engine”, but really it’s exactly the same engine they’ve been using since Morrowind, with minor logic improvements and updates to the graphical assets. It’s to the point where a lot of bugs have ancestry trees.

Scratch, etc.

Fascists be downvoting