ignore years of evidence that Biden’s admin can function

They’re doing a real bang-up job, both at home and abroad.

One often fuels the other

Eh. Speculative fiction is different from magical realist revanchism in a lot of critical ways.

But they both routinely serve as metaphors for the modern era.

Mandelorean is a western

It nakedly and obviously cribs from Seven Samurai, The Good The Bad And the Ugly, and Wolf and Cub.

Misogynists hated Leia back in the 70s, too.

But it’s still actually fun to watch, with his pacing, and good characters.

I disagree with all of this.

Eight was half of a good movie. Seven was a series of vinettes of varying quality that ended in disappointment.

I was genuinely shocked to see how good an actor Hayden Christensen was when he wasn’t in a Star Wars movie.

Quit while you’re ahead

Quoting Carl Sagon to explain why gravity would kick in before Coyote looked down

This is also an idea behind the Dark Forest Hypothesis

I think that’s less about warp-speed weapons and more about natural resource constraints and the unpredictable nature of technological advancement causing advanced civilizations to preemptively obliterate one another.

But yes, the only practical defense against superluminal weaponry would be to avoid getting spotted.

If their engines aren’t constrained by speed of light, why would their weapons be?

at such long ranges you could move your ship and avoid a directed energy weapon

But how would you know an energy weapon had fired? Wouldn’t you be constrained by the speed of light, regardless?

galactic north

This isn’t entirely unreasonable to determine, since the galaxy is a big disk and you could map that as a 2D plane. For the most part, ships are traveling across the plane between planets, in the same way that a ship flying from Earth to the Moon or Earth to Mars would be flying through a plane perpendicular to the two bodies. Not a lot to visit above or below the plane, and the shortest distance would be between two points, so…

Down is towards the target.

Starfield could have been a way better game if all they did was fuck it up like 45% less.

Compared to the KOTOR series, it was lifeless. Compared to Mass Effect, it was very boring. Frustrating for a game with such strong precedents to land so weakly. But they put so much energy into quantity of content that they forgot to invest in quality.

They could have alternatively just delivered on their promises of making the game easy to mod and let the community handle the rest but they fucked that up too.

The goal was to create a game that procedurally generated itself, not one where individual hobbyists expanded it manually.

I swear gamers have the memory of a gnat

It’s more a “sucker born every minute” thing.

Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Killzone, Sackboy, inFamous, God of War, The Last of Us, and if you want to go older, SOCOM, Syphon Filter, Spyro, Sly Cooper, I could go on.

They’ve all got their own boutique developers and were simply published by Sony at one point or another (not even exclusively). Insomniac Games seems to be the real owner of the IP for a bunch of them. Hell, most of these are just knock offs of other franchises. Sackboy is a very obvious Mario/Sonic analog that simply never got popular in the same way.

If every consumer went along with that set of ideals, every studio, firm and corporation would be free to jerk us around willy nilly

There are definitely some publishers more open to modding than others. Early on, you could accuse Nintendo of being a sleeping giant who failed to give modders warning or opportunity to compromise. But now modders are just trying to hug a very large hedgehog with it’s spikes out.

Sony, another massive Japanese company operating in the same industry as Nintendo, doesn’t lash out this aggressively at their own community

What IP does Sony hang its hat on? I’m hard pressed to name a uniquely Sony-esque title or franchise. They partner with Square Enix on the reg, but Square is also horrifyingly litigious.

Nintendo doesn’t have to act out like this.

No. There are proven effective ways to monetizing the modding community and exploit them for their free labor. And that’s not part of the Nintendo business strategy, possibly because their creative directors’ egos can’t handle it or possibly because some bean counter thinks it’ll hurt profits long term or maybe possibly even because Nintendo has a better-than-average work culture and the staff doesn’t like the idea of being undercut at their jobs by hobbyists.

Idk. But I also just don’t get the desire to bang your heads against this wall over and over again, on the modder side of the equation. There are other franchises and platforms to mod on. At this point, it feels more like a battle of wills than a rational strategy on either end.

Some of it is pure hubris. But some of it is American IP law, which will punish you if you don’t zealously prosecute people in defense of your patents. Its sort of like laws on squatting. If someone is openly and notoriously using your IP and you don’t try to sue them for a long enough time, they can claim the property as functionally abandoned.

For Nintendo, which hasn’t had a particularly good new idea in 20 years, the idea of losing Mario or Link or Pikachu to a legal loophole like this would be devastating.

Competition between insurance providers won’t help us here since

the insurance firms are a cartel anyway and the price variance is more a consequence of your region and your vehicle than your carrier.