One of the most surprising thing in old timey movies is that streets were truly mixed-use spaces, people walked there, rode horses, sold things from carts, etc. I guess that was possible because horses and horse-drawn carts were slower than cars, plus horses would generally try to avoid crashing into something, even without orders from their rider or driver.

I always thought that a “street” and a “road” were synonyms, until I heard the term “stroad” from Not Just Bikes. It turns out that in modern planning, a street is meant as a paved path intended to provide local access to homes, shops, and other things. A road is supposed to be a way to get from A to B. A “stroad” is a derogatory term to refer to a street that has been combined with a road, so you get high speed traffic that wants to travel through an area next to homes and businesses.

Stroads are the worst of both worlds because you end up with people who just want to get through an area dealing with kids playing, cars turning onto and off the path, other drivers slowing down to spot an address, etc. It also sucks for the locals because the way onto their driveway or school has to deal with large volumes of high-speed traffic.

IMO we’re not going back to horses and carts. High speed movement of people is here to stay. But, we really need to use modes of transport that separate people who are passing through on their way somewhere from people who are exercising, playing sports, shopping, hanging out outside their homes, etc.

The best way to do that is public transit, especially light rail and subways which pack a lot of people into a really efficient people-mover. Subways additionally move the people-mover underground to an area where there’s nobody who isn’t trying to travel. Light rails are easier to build, but they have to share the above-ground with people doing other things. But, at least when they’re on rails the only shared space is the rail, and the pedestrians know that as long as they’re not standing on rails they don’t have to worry about the light rail vehicles.

For North America, giving up cars might be too difficult, at least in the short term. But, it seems like in newly built neighbourhoods, the least they should do is make it so every second “street” is pedestrian / bicycle only. Or, maybe allow local vehicles but with an incredibly low speed limit, less than 10 km/h and a rule that they must yield to pedestrians at all times. That way someone can still pull into their driveway but they’ll only drive half a block on the local street to get there.

whoosh

I wouldn’t say the democrats have refined their messaging. The leftist democrats who are saying these things are still a minority while the majority of the democratic party want to be seen as centrists who aren’t hostile to big business.

But at least it has gone from 1 prominent person saying these things (Sanders) to now enough that you can no longer count them on just one hand.

The money, power and majority of the democratic party is still against them. But, it really seems like voters are behind them.

Perhaps the good thing is that so many democratic politicians lack a spine. It means that if it’s clear that the democratic socialist message has momentum, they’ll happily pivot to the new shiny thing and adopt it as if it’s where they were all along.

Ever since agriculture allowed some of the population to not be farmers, there has been inequality.

Overall, it’s probably a good trade-off. I’m not ultra rich, but I’m not a subsistence farmer either. So, some inequality is probably the price we pay for technology.

The current world is better off than most of history. Since the Odyssey is in theatres now, look at that. Odysseus is a king in a palace-centric economy where the riches flow to the kings who then redistribute it to everyone else. In the middle ages peasants were tied to the land from birth. They weren’t slaves, exactly. But, it was pretty similar.

Capitalism was supposed to be more efficient and fair. Instead of the bosses being born as bosses and the workers born as workers, in theory a boss who made terrible decisions could lose his capital and become a worker. A worker who had an idea and could find investment could become a boss. In the 1800s that was revolutionary, until that point classes were classes for life. But, of course, for it to work there needed to be laws and those laws needed to be enforced.

The US was revolutionary at the start because it was going to be a country without a king. They carefully designed the system so the president wasn’t a monarch. However, there were some problems. First, these were 20 year olds in the 1700s. They didn’t know game theory. They were idealists who thought that congressional representatives would be honest and honourable. They didn’t think a party would collude with a corrupt president. Second, these were aristocrats. Sure, they didn’t like kings, but they thought that only land-owning white males should have a say.

So, really, it’s no surprise that a few hundred years later the people who would have been the land-owning aristocrats 1000 years ago are once again in control.

It remains to be seen if the people can once again restore a sane level of inequality, or if this American experiment has run its course and something new will emerge.

You ate at the onion.

Yes, then (as expected) the companies passed on the cost to their customers.

If there were a competitive marketplace, retailers would be offering refunds to their customers or putting on huge deals so that annoyed customers didn’t switch to a rival retailer.

But, when Amazon has some massive chunk of the market, what happens if they piss off a customer? What are they going to do, go to the mall? The mall closed a long time ago.

Blondies? Pound cakes? Cheesecakes? Honestly, none of those appeal to me. They all seem like such bland treats.

Vanilla is a good flavour enhancer. I love it as an addition to something like a chocolate mousse or an egg nog. But, on its own it’s as exciting as white rice, or spaghetti without sauce.

The disease caused the decease.

To Apple’s… phone?

Oof. The first few seasons were good, but it was pretty weak long before it hit season 8, let alone its final season 11.

The library is still there. The books are still free. There’s no charge for admission.

Admittedly, the card catalogue is now covered in slop, so it’s a bit harder to find things. But, everything’s still there.

If it takes multiple billions of dollars to create a product that is useful for a niche group of pen and paper RPG players, that product is probably not going to succeed.

But, also, if Facebook didn’t have such an unassailable monopoly on social networking, small, focused social networks that targeted a niche group of people might have a chance of surviving.

And Google built a search engine. Everything else they’ve tried to build has failed, other than maybe Gmail which was just a Yahoo Mail / Hotmail clone. Everything else that has been successful has been an acquisition: Maps (Keyhole), YouTube, Android, Google Photos (Picasa), Doubleclick…

We really need robust antitrust. How many of these acquisitions would be thriving companies in their own right, competing with the big tech giants if the tech giants hadn’t been able to absorb them.

Google+ is an example of what happens when companies have to compete instead of acquiring other companies. Google poured billions into it and it flopped completely.

According to the same poll, 25% of the respondents had never heard of the Democratic Socialists of America, and 21% had no opinion of them.

Also, 10% of respondents who leaned democratic that the Democratic Party needed to be completely reformed, 47% said it needed major changes, and 39% said it needed minor changes.

Also, this is a major “throw the bums out” moment:

One question was: “Imagine that after the November 2026 elections, most of the current members of Congress are replaced with new members. Do you think that would:”

51% said it would change congress for the better, only 9% said it would change congress for the worse.

Also, even if only 1/3 consider themselves democratic socialists, 73% would be either enthusiastic or OK with nominating someone who described themselves as a democratic socialist, and only 27% would be uneasy or upset by that.

I actually can’t find in that poll where people identify as democratic socialists. But, everything else suggests now is an ideal time to run a DSA candidate.

I don’t think I care enough about Taylor Swift or her songs to care about reviews of them, even if the reviews are funny or whatever.

I don’t like that kind of game, and have barely played any of the Elden or Souls games.

But, in addition to the gameplay, for some reason the graphics really are off-putting to me. Even though they look really good, there’s just something off about them. Maybe it’s a kind of uncanny valley thing. I even find the fonts they use to be just slightly wrong. Like, the weight and spacing of the characters is subtly off.

You just reminded me that I was in the middle of playing Odyssey and I just… drifted away from it again. That has happened a bunch of times.

I like sailing around in that game. It’s fun to discover new things. But, yeah, you can’t play it as an assassin, you have to play it as a warrior, and the warrior mechanics are frustrating to me. If I remember correctly there are 3 different skill trees in the game, one that’s stealth-related, one that’s bow-and-arrow related, and one that’s combat-related. But, you can’t really play the game as just a stealth-assassin. You can’t play the game as a ranged bow-and-arrow user. The skill trees reflect this because in the bow-and-arrow one there are all kinds of abilities related to using a bow-and-arrow while you’re in melee combat, and in the stealth tree it’s the same.

I still love climbing to the top of a high thing, unlocking an area, then jumping off. A lot of the little side quests are fun. Sailing around on a boat is fun – and sometimes the boat-to-boat combat is fun too. But, too often it becomes “fight these 50 dudes in melee”. And yeah, they telegraph their attacks, and give you plenty of time to dodge and counter. But, when it’s 50 dudes, sometimes the attacks line up in a way where you can’t deal with all of them, and so they whittle your health down, even if you’re doing the right thing 95% of the time.

Ooh, I just remembered another fun part of it, though it can sometimes also be tedious. There are the missions where you need to clear out an enemy base. You don’t have to use stealth to do that, but you can. And, it can be a really fun problem-solving challenge where you figure out which dude gets isolated at which time, and you stealth-kill him and hide the body before the nearby patrol sees. One by one you can eliminate everyone in the base, until there’s just one guy walking around in a base, all alone, every one of his buddies is dead. Clearing out a base like that can be really satisfying, although sometimes it takes too long. I just wish more of the game allowed you to solve it with stealth.

It was also the first time it happened, so people were more put off by it.

Anybody who plays now knows that their gear is only going to be useful for the current expansion and that they’ll have to start from scratch again if they play the next one.

As someone who joined late in Vanilla, I think the fact that tier 3 armour became meaningless a few days into Burning Crusade was a great move, and necessary for the game.

In Vanilla, if you were late joining, you could never catch up unless someone was really nice and basically carried you for a few weeks. I spent months hearing tales about all the fun that my friends were having, but I couldn’t join them because farming the gear to catch up to them was essentially impossible on my own, and would have taken them a lot of time to level me up.

The game needed a reset so that people who hadn’t been playing for over a year could catch up. When BC came out, the Tier 3 stuff helped people for the first 2-3 levels, but by the time everyone hit 70, all the gear was reset and everyone was on the same footing again.

That was really healthy for guilds and for the game. If you already had a bunch of people who you liked playing with, you could start on the harder dungeons and then the raids immediately. Everybody started out in crap gear that kept those initial things challenging, and then everyone slowly got better gear. If you had just joined the game, you could catch up to those groups, and either join them, or form your own new group and you weren’t behind.

What killed WoW for me was all the borrowed power stuff, where you got new abilities and learned a new way to play, which they’d then just reset with the next expansion. There was also ridiculous button creep, where in the early days (ignoring downranked spells) you’d have maybe two dozen abilities, half of which could be used in combat, and a third of those were rare and situational. By the time I quit, you might need two full bars worth of abilities in combat, your typical “rotation” would use 8 or more, and so-on. On some characters, I had so many buttons that even with maxed out button bars, there were some that had to remain in the spellbook.

The story also got stupider. In the beginning, your character wasn’t the centre of the story. You could earn personal achievements, or group achievements, but it was clear that it was a game being played by millions of people, half of whom had also done those same achievements. In later expansions, they tried to pretend that you were the unique person. You weren’t an archdruid, you were the archdruid… and so were the other 100 people on your screen. Or you were the maw-walker, but so were the other 1000 people in the maw. And, of course, the lore got more and more incoherent as they kept trying to find corners of the lore that they hadn’t yet exploited.

The other major issue with WoW is that both time and the advance of technology, but also Blizzard’s choices, killed the social aspect of the game. In the beginning, there weren’t good resources to learn how to play, what kinds of equipment were out there, that sort of thing. That meant that one of the best ways to find that out was chatting with other players. That was great. Even if other players were sometimes obnoxious, the fact that you had to chat with them meant that the game felt alive. The only way to join a group for something was to send messages to other people in the game. And, since servers were isolated, people got reputations. If someone was nice to other people, they’d be known for that. If someone was a jerk, or tried to cheat other people, they’d get known for that too.

These days, people use communications not tied to the game at all. There are amazing resources to learn about the game and optimize how you play outside the game, which means there’s no need to chat with people in-game. They added a group finder and raid finder so you could join a group for something without ever talking to anyone, which also killed socialization. They merged servers and made cross-realm events so that there was always someone to play with you… but now everyone was effectively anonymous to everyone they played with, so being nice wasn’t something that gave you a good reputation, and being a jerk carried no long-term penalties.

Combine all the technological changes with all the lore / storytelling changes and you get a very good, very polished single-player online game, where other people happen to be there sometimes. These days you can be doing a 25-man raid and feel lonely because you’re not actually interacting with any of the other players in any meaningful way.

I really wish another MMO would come out that would add back all the social things that Blizzard broke. But, even if someone did everything right, I don’t think you could ever capture the magic of that early Vanilla / BC experience because the world has changed.

Yeah, hearts of Iron is a game that I played a lot for a short time, but have no interest in playing again.

If the DLC was truly separate it would be one thing. But, with each DLC they modify the base game a bit… but not completely. To get the complete modification you need the DLC. That leaves all kinds of stubs in the base game that don’t make any sense without the DLC. Like, you can create a special weapons research centre where (sans DLC) you can research 1 item, and that 1 item isn’t even useful or interesting. Or, you can choose to research a vehicle chassis that… can never be used because all the vehicles that use that chassis are in the DLC.

It even seems to me like the basic “war” part of the game is broken simply because certain DLC exists. Like, at certain parts in the game, it is essentially 100% impossible to break through an enemy’s entrenched position, so you simply reach a stalemate where neither side can advance.

What I think happened is that they added mechanics to some DLC package that make it possible to entrench more than in the base game and also to break through that entrenchment. But, then they basically added the entrenchment to the base game and the way to break it was only in the DLC. I don’t think this was necessarily done in a malicious way. It’s just that with dozens of DLC packages, it probably becomes impossible to properly test things (and they care more about the users who buy their DLC).