GlitterInfection

Keep pants on! Got it!

I think it was a one or two day thing, but it was glorious!

It's the set of background conditions and events leading up to the current story, but that's not important right now.

Those well-meaning-but-terrible-in-practice consumer protection laws are probably a good indicator of why the EU isn't a hub of technological innovation.

They're at least a symptom of the same underlying outlook on the industry.

While Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 might look like sudden jackpot successes

This article is funny. It's like the feel-good inverse of a rage-bait article. It's stating what we all want to be true and cherry-picking two games that only sort of provide evidence towards it, and only if you squint really hard.

Both games are sequels backed by huge publishers with tons of cash.

BG3 is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise title; a franchise which recently received a massively successful film, a huge boost in popularity during a pandemic, and a boost in cultural relevance in Strange Things.

Helldivers 2 fits the claim a bit better, but it is still a sequel to a well received, well selling title. The extraction shooter genre is also exceedingly popular right now, and the fact that it has Games as a Service bullshit built in says that publishers weren't as hands-off as the article implies.

So the more realistic take-away from this is that good games with huge budgets for development AND marketing in reasonably popular genres can make a ton of money.

Which isn't saying much. And it certainly doesn't look like a sudden jackpot.

I don't know the answer but they pointed this out further in the press release:

However, it’s also important for us that Mastodon is one of the few, if not the only social media platform that operates out of the EU, and we would like to keep it that way.

I'd assume that this is for a reason, too. If it were advantageous to run your company out of the EU people would probably do so sometimes.

This is absolutely right. It's reductive of me to say that recycling is bad for the environment; intentionally reductive.

People generally have a very hard time absorbing the fact that plastic recycling is a scam, so it's hard to start nuanced to actually get the point across.

But you definitely nailed it. I would argue that if it was reduce, reuse, revolt, the environment would be in a much better place.

Sort of. It's less a guard down thing as a fraudulent hoax thing.

Recycling was actively brought forward as a solution by the oil companies to push the blame of plastic use onto consumers.

So while recycling rare metals is always valuable, plastic is definitely not. Almost all plastic gets buried in landfills, and the only way to make this not happen is to not make products with plastics.

By creating and marketing plastic recycling as a solution that the consumers must take onto themselves, it allowed them to rake in profits by moving everything to cheap plastic alternatives.

We are now literally made of microplastics as a result.

I'm fond of saying that recycling is almost exclusively bad for the planet. It's true and people don't like hearing it.

This is the type of whataboutism I can get behind!

I can almost guarantee that more people care about the free next gen update of Fallout 4 than will ever play the Fallout London mod.

I'm legitimately excited for the Fallout London Mod, so this isn't meant to minimize it, but modding, even in Bethesda games, is a much smaller niche than people on here seem to think.

Bethesda is legitimately doing something good for the game, for free, and they announced it two years in advance.

The only upsetting part of this is that they recently announced a launch date and it is coincidentally close to when Fallout London was planning to release.

If that one coincidence wasn't happening, then nobody would be complaining about this pretty cool free update.

At least not until after it releases.