Anomander

I normally hate turning to Youtube when there’s a text resource available, but I’ve definitely found there are some situations where explaining a trick or a location in text is massively harder than just watching someone do it in a video.

my family can euthanize me even if I object?

No.

There’s no law that allows killing of the unwilling; even a living will addressing assisted suicide or euthanization due to incapability assumes that you would still consent at the later date, but lack either physical or intellectual ability to communicate that. If you can clearly communicate that you’ve changed your mind, they have to respect that, even if that changed mind has reduced capability due to dementia.

Your best hope would be to go with assisted suicide while you still have enough faculties to make the decision and execute on your portions of the act.

Also, on the subject of this song being “breakout/viral” - how hard is it to manipulate streaming numbers?

It’s seemed like the numbers there are 'semi-'manipulated in the way that Kpop can be - hugely inflated by deliberate rewatching and multi-platform streaming, but by individuals who genuinely want the song to do well, rather than bots or purchased fake stats.

It’s really seemed like ‘the right’ sees Oliver Anthony as “their guy” and rallied behind him and his song in order to push it up the charts as an imagined way of ‘owning the libs’ - and I think OA’s industry backing worked hard to seed that narrative among those circles in order to elicit that sort of boosterism from them.

Yeah, I had to un-quit Whatsapp when my siblings-in-law moved to Argentina - because Whatsapp is the main communication platform for a lot of Argentina and that’s where all the various family chats moved to once the in-laws no longer had local phone numbers or reliable SMS service.

Yeah there’s two ‘main’ kinds of people who want a platform where users are able to post hate speech and reach “everyone” with it.

• People who want to be hateful and want access to the targets of their hate. They want to upset people, they want to ‘own the libs’ or be able to toss slurs at minorities, and those things are unrewarding for them if they don’t get to see how upset they’ve made their targets.

• People who want to recruit people to being hateful. They want to convince normal people to share their prejudices and their biases, they want “debates” or would like to share “statistics” and are seeking a soapbox that can reach people who might find their views convincing.

This is a huge part of why defederation works, why platforms like Voat or Gab rarely thrive for very long. Being hateful in an echo chamber towards people who are outside the room is rarely fun for those folks, and very often results in in-fighting and fragmenting of the movement. Moderates and ‘normies’ are driven off because now they’re a target rather than a participant or spectator.

Shocking news: people are people everywhere, not just on ‘rival’ platforms.

It’s definitely a spiritual successor to EV, but it deviates in just enough ways that it’s not quite living up to it’s predecessor. It’s very fun and it definitely scratches the nostalgia, but it doesn’t fill in as a full-blown successor.

• It’s heavily fleet-focused, rather than being more of a solo-pilot experience. I found several missions that were functionally impossible without fleet support, but were relatively trivial with a reasonable backing fleet, and the end-game is assembling not just one ship with the best gear in the galaxy - but a fleet of them. EV series’ relationship with escorts was not as significant - they were very rarely the deciding factor in missions or battles, and you weren’t able to change their outfits from default, so the total power available was far lower.

• Because there’s more of a focus on fleets, ships ability to be upgraded has much wider balance implications than just pilot experience - so despite there being far more and far more interesting breadth of outfits available for customizing a ship, it feels like ships are far less customizable in total - ships sell with far less ‘free’ space and lower total outfit space, while sectioned space like weapons or engine capacity adds further constraints. Ships in EV had enough ‘spare’ space that the gap in power between your ship and a default version was much more meaningful, so that you could be asked to take on several at-level ships for a mission and that wasn’t a prohibitive task.

• It’s definitely open-source. In absolutely the best and worst ways - there’s a lot of really diverse ideas and a lot more creativity among the various factions you meet than EV offered. There’s way more story and depth to most factions than EV really offered, and it seems clear the intent is to build that level or deeper for all of the major factions over time. At the same time, they’re all sectioned off and have varying narrative tone or content development, and there’s not really a ton of interaction - so it does wind up feeling a little patchwork as you explore. The various pieces don’t connect to each other well, so you really do get a vibe where the faction over here is Steve’s pet project, while over there is Laura’s faction, and these two factions were done by the OG dev, while the new guy made this faction over here but it’s really new so there’s not really anything there, and…

• Holy fucking beam weapons, batman. EV always was very hesitant about using beam weapons, and a lot of plugin content followed suit - as beam weapons tend to be incredibly hard to balance while also being very difficult to do well on an audio/visual front. Endless Sky uses a ton of beams in almost every faction. Whatever noise they make is guaranteed to get annoying after it’s your primary weapon for a while, and often drowns out other cues, while the clutter of drawing N permanent glowing lines at all points you’re holding the trigger gets really busy really fast. If the damage is even slightly too high, the ability to deliver it continuously and with near-perfect accuracy makes them busted, while if the damage is a little too low they’re wasted dev effort. With turreted beams or on AI pilots, beams become a guaranteed source of damage. You can’t out-pilot weapons that just draw a hitscan line to your ship, where out-piloting the ‘projectile’ weapons was one of the major feelings of player skill expression in the original EV series.

It’s good. It’s definitely good. It’s amazing at the low low cost of “free”. It’s still in-progress so a lot of the content is still incoming and a whole bunch of tone and meshing issues are quite likely to get fixed. Just, some of the gaps between the games that inspired it and the game it wants to be happen to exist in the same spaces that fans of the originals vibed with hardest.

Whole lot of people here have cut off other people, but no one’s yet shared a story about what got them cut off. This one’s mine.

I was unceremoniously removed from The List by a group of folks I was close with for years, after clashing with a couple of new additions to the group for a few months. We collectively ran a bit of a sketchy party scene and had been hosting stuff out of the weird end of town for a year or two when it all blew up - we weren’t quite on the scale of underground warehouse raves, but we were like the training-wheels version. We’d get a lead on a place that was slated to be vacant for a month or a commercial building gone dark, arrange a couple bands and an escape plan, and pull a couple hundred bucks each in entry charge and dodgy beer.

They were great friends in addition to being sort-of in business together, and we had some absolutely great times.

Except one couple who’d been with us from the start and were OG team members met a new crowd of people. They wanted to bring their friends, we said sure, and … shit started going downhill. The couple weren’t bad. Their friends weren’t bad. Their friends’ friends were awful. I didn’t like the new crowd’s vibe, I didn’t like who they were bringing in, what they were up to, and I didn’t get along with the initial connections in the slightest. I thought they were assholes, they thought I was an asshole, and in hindsight we were both correct.

As much as each new member of our little scene was more money at the end of an event, I didn’t want them there. I spent a lot of time and everyone’s patience arguing why I felt these specific new people needed to be shown a door and firmly told to be on the other side of it, and I definitely went out of my way to cut them out of anything I had control over. My friends were frustrated, I was frustrated, and everyone was on edge - I was convinced these people were going absolutely ruin what we’d built, my friends were frustrated I wouldn’t drop the grudge and didn’t see the problem I was focused on.

In my defense, the new people were bringing in their crowd, and their crowd was bad news. It was like they were the scene where all the people other parties didn’t want wound up congregating. There was the sketchy “why are you here?” old dudes, there were the people who did too much of many drugs even for our standards, there was the massive collection of edgy at-risk middleschoolers, there were the aggro bros and the dealers with Connections … to me, inviting those people in the door was a massive heat score and absolutely ruining the vibe for the kind of people we wanted to attract. That said, in my friends’ defense - we had agreed we’d make decisions as a team, and I was outvoted but unwilling to let it go; and we didn’t have a problem with drugs or kids or even weird old dudes in general - half of us started in that community young and most absolutely dabbled in chemicals. We all were those kids a few years prior. My concerns read as hypocritical or gatekeep-y, rather than genuine, because I’d never been concerned about that shit prior.

The last straw? I paid a guy I knew from the other side of town to drive his dad’s charger slowly past our venue a couple times, for several different events, so that people thought we might be about to get raided. Because the people I didn’t care for were pretty dodgy, they fucked off at the faintest hint of trouble.

The other people in our crew found out, and I was excised from that group.

In hindsight, we were both right. I was petty and sabotaged the group to get my way - and those new people did absolutely ruin shit for that scene within a couple years. I’ve connected individually with a few members of that group over the many years since, but am very formally persona non grata at shit they do as a group - I don’t think any of the people I still talk to even admit to the rest that they see me sometimes.

I don’t want this to read like I was booted for taking some moral highground. I absolutely wasn’t. I took the low road and went behind my friends’ backs to undermine what we were doing, all because I wanted a specific group of people gone from our scene. As much as an adult’s perspective would make it easy to spin this as if I had moral objections to bringing hard drugs and hard druggies and middleschoolers into the same place for underground parties - I wasn’t concerned about those things, morally. Having middleschoolers get wasted at parties wasn’t a problem to me, or even having creepy dudes trying to pick them up, or people shooting hard shit in the living room … I just didn’t like how there was more of “them” than “us” and our events were slowly becoming that scene, instead of just having a little bit of it off in one corner.

Honestly, I take the opposite view - to me that’s one of the best changes they’ve made in ages and I’m glad it propagated to old.reddit as well as showing up in new reddit; it’s been an occasional frustration to hit ‘hide’ by mistake on something I wanted to see, then need to navigate to the far corners of the profile just to un-hide it again was always extra-silly. Next up maybe they can turn off auto-hide when reporting a post.