This. Democracy isn’t broken, FPTP is. Although, as the other comment says, this shows it still being functional in that party alignment substitutes for ranked choice by making it so that candidates the third party can tolerate get endorsed by a retiring third candidate. Less “broken”, more “convoluted and ambiguous requiring custom to take over for the design flaws”.
For one, EU immigration policy has already hardened significantly and is now being directly catered to Meloni’s far right government. You’ll notice the far right hasn’t stopped bleating about it.
And the reason for that is that immigration simply cannot be curved effectively without literally solving inequality worldwide. That’s why it’s such a convenient scapegoat. Xenophobia doesn’t need to make sense, and since desperate migrants being smuggled by human traffickers are unresponsive to posturing you can just bang that drum indefinitely.
So we can either explain this effectively to people (and also help improve the inequality bit) or we can resign ourselves to a fascist government elected by racist useful idiots.
I feel like the real lesson is being missed here:
Do not mess with Mbappé.
I mean, the lit-up signs are for visibility. In some countries pharmacies are assigned strict working hours by the government, so it’s useful to see at a glance if a pharmacy is currently open without having to walk right up to the door (and night shifts may require ringing a bell in some of them, so that’s also helpful to convey that they are in fact open).
The fancy animations are just because when signs went from neon-lit to LEDs it turned out not all pharmacists have good design sensibilities. At least as far as I can tell.
Hey, I do get that bidets aren’t culturally well established everywhere, and even in bidet areas they don’t often come with detailed instructions, so usage habits are kinda random.
But that’s why I went to the shower bit instead. I would hope cleaning your nethers when you shower is a universal habit, or at least as much of one as washing your hands after a trip to the toilet.
But hey, maybe permanently sweaty, poopy undercarriages are just… you know, “an American thing”? I don’t know.
Water on your bum is water on your bum. If the caveat is that magical built-in bidets don’t need a scrub (as much), why is your reply to my post and not the “muslim thing” guy? Wouldn’t it apply equally to both?
Is it?
Are we in one of these social media posts where we rediscover that a bunch of people have not been washing their bums in the shower for their entire lives and we have to carry on living with that knowledge?
Honestly, if you do the job right the towel is the right implement, in that you’re just patting dry any stray droplets left over.
For insecure bidet-ers, a preemptive TP run to verify you’re ready for a towel is a bit of insurance, I suppose.
Just… have one for each person in the household. It’s one thing to be secure in your technique, quite another to hold everybody’s destiny in your grasp.
Hah. I almost wrote that I also think the two Ultima Undergrounds are better than Deus Ex despite being much older and having an objectively very clumsy interface. Then I thought that’d get us in the weeds and pull us too far back, so I took it out.
Look, yeah, Deus Ex rolled in elements from CRPGs and had good production values for the time. But all those things were nothing new for an RPG, they were just new for a shooter. Baldur’s Gate and Fallout were a few years old. The entire Ultima franchise had been messing around with procedural, simulated worlds for almost a decade at that point, which in the 90s was a technological eon.
And yeah, System Shock had created a template for a shooter RPG, they just applied it to a lone survivor dungeon crawly horror thing, rather than try to marry it to the narrative elements of NPC-focused CRPGs, which is admittedly a lot more complicated. And Deus Ex was fully voiced and had… well, a semblance of cutscenes. In context it’s hilariously naive compared to what Japanese devs were doing in Metal Gear or Final Fantasy, but it was a lot for western PC game standards.
But it wasn’t… great to play? I don’t know what to tell you. Thief and Hitman both had nailed the clockwork living stage thing, and at the time I was more than happy to give up the Matrix-at-home narrative and the DnD-style questing for that. The pitch was compelling, but it didn’t necessarily make for a great playable experience against its peers.
I didn’t hate it or anything. I spent quite a bit of time messing with it. That corny main theme still pops up in my head with no effort on demand. I spent more time using it as a benchmark than Unreal, which I also thought wasn’t a great game.
Also, while I’m here pissing people off, can we all agree that “immersive sim” is a terrible name for a genre? What exactly is “simulated”? Why is it immersive? Immerisve as opposed to what? At the time we tended to lump them in with stealth games, so the name is just an attempt to reverse engineer a genre name by using loose words that weren’t already taken, and I hate it. See also: character action game. Which action games do NOT have characters?
Man, I am a grumpy old fart today.
Thanks for the link! International press is still running the 33% estimate they probably got from the French morning papers or have taken down the results, so my references hadn’t updated the number.
For the record, the image is not new, there was a lot of international coverage regarding Le Pen’s presidential chances in 2022. But presidentials are presidentials, only one person gets to win. Legislatives raise a lot of questions about parliamentary dynamics, alliances and the potential for the second round to generate another bout of Macron shooting himself in the foot followed by him shooting everybody else in the foot for good measure. That, and there is more paranoia about the tilt right across the EU and internationally about the US.
No, please, free me from this. Because in my head I’m super annoyed at how well this seems to work and I need rescuing from an expert.
The closest thing we had was the System Shock duology, since both predate Deus Ex. Deus Ex was basically accessible System Shock. Having dialogue trees and NPCs without losing the open-ended nature of System Shock’s more dungeon crawl-y approach was the real selling point. Well, that and the trenchcoats and shades. The Matrix was such a big deal.
But even then, each of those elements were already present in different mixes in several late 90s games. Deus Ex by some counts was one of the early culminations of the genre blending “everything game” we were all chasing during the 90s. The other was probably GTA 3. I think both of those are fine and they are certainly important games, but I never enjoyed playing them as much as less zeitgeist-y games that were around at the same time. I did spend a lot of time getting Deus Ex to look as pretty as possible, but I certainly didn’t finish it and, like a lot of people, I mostly ran around Liberty Island a bunch.
I played more Thief 2 that year, honestly. I played WAY more Hitman than Deus Ex that year. I certainly thought System Shock 2 was better. Deus Ex is a big, ambitious, important game, for sure, but I never felt it quite stuck the landing when playing it, even at the time.
I’m not of the opinion that more simulation and more “realism” are always better, but I would absolutely take a System Shock 2 remake, especially after the System Shock one (1 one?) turned out great.
FWIW, I’m seeing projections based on the counts that still have them at 34, but I guess we’ll see.
I agree that a resurrection of the cordon sanitaire is probably a positive and I agree that Macron was extremely clumsy, like much of the EU’s centre and demochristian right, in sliding towards far right positions they just can’t defend any better than the actual fascists. But still, from an international perspective France is now firmly in the club of Central European countries with a major fascist problem in a way it wasn’t yesterday, even if the outcome was already understood to be going this way.
I’ve genuinely never felt the need, but I also don’t post for clout or proactively, I’m more of a reply guy in that I prefer the version of social media where I talk with people rather than at people and I do not give a crap about followers, upvotes or starting popular threads. Believe it or not that tends to do a lot to minimize the use cases for blocking, in that people rarely take the time to chase me around or specifically target me, even when things get heated.
But hey, if somebody is bothering you block away. I don’t have a moral stance on it.
Kind of overrated? I mean, it was cool to see a bit more of a palatable cinematic presentation in real time to go along with the late 90s PC jank, and that theme did kick ass, but it’s less groundbreaking in context than I think people give it credit for. And it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as System Shock 2, in my book.
I get that immersion tends to normalization…
… but man, 34% is still a LOT. Especially when it’s 2x the previous result and the largest bloc.
It’ll be good if they are prevented from having easy access to legislative action, but it’s still an underpants-threatening result in my book.
Well, it’s two different things, one is the background record, which is less “freaking out” and more “not for me on PC”.
The other is blending the background recording with metadata on a timeline, which starts getting Recall-y in terms of logging a video recording of what you were doing where there is also a data record of what you were doing. I do think that part starts stepping over to kinda creepy.
It’s more useful here than as a OS feature, though, because yeah, I can see it saving one the trouble of recording different matches separately or having to scrub back and forth to find certain things.
Yeah, I get that, but that’s also true of Steam Link and Steam’s general streaming solution (which I presume is what this is using) and it’s trivial to get a different window to show up or even to get to the desktop from the in-game streaming, particularly if you have a non-Steam app in your library.
So yeah, it’s gonna be on demand recordings from me… assuming the quality holds up (Nvidia’s kinda sucks). Otherwise that’s what OBS is for.
The US didn’t “subvert it”, they’re just running a pre-alpha version that never worked and was built for entirely different hardware.
Because ultimately all representative democracy is game design. Democracy isn’t majority rule, it’s majority rule tempered by a lot of pre-existing agreements and ongoing compromises.
Very representative systems have a lot of advantadges, but they also have different issues. Coalitions can be hard to sustain, manifestos and programs aren’t expected to see implementation. People argue, and they do have a point, that an overly fragmented legislative doesn’t represent popular will, since the policy implemented by coalitions necessarily will be mismatched to every option people voted for. It’s also true that in extreme cases you end up with systems where people run as an audition to get a job in the ruling coalition, rather than to push an agenda.
So yeah, ultimately all electoral systems are constantly being gamed by both politicians and voters. That’s just how politics work. But within that we can fine tune all these systems for optimal outcomes, and I do think that a legislative that genuinely needs to trade and deal and compromise is going to be more functional and less prone to extremism than direct majoritarian rule, where there are no checks beyond the other powers. I think even a system like the French would be a big improvement for both the US and UK systems, but it’s probably only applicable in the UK, where there is already a multiparty system. The US is so entrenched that at this point you probably need a full reinvention of their entire constitution. The thing was always a first draft at best anyway.