Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: TheSHEEEPI always love offensive games like that for the sweet butthurt they cause in all the hypocrites and do-gooders [External Link].

I've noticed that it's currently considered much more of a social faux pas to be a do-gooder than a do-badder.

So did I.
A good development, for once.
I'd much rather have more people that are unfriendly and appear dickish, but are honest, than those who "mean well" but only cause more harm.

Most people who are unfriendly and appear dickish aren't actually honest, though. You're claiming a correlation that doesn't exist. Look at the whole US establishment: A bunch of dickish bastards who do enormous harm and spout arrogant violent crap all the time, and who are also collectively as lying and dishonest as the day is long. Apparent niceness has long been displaced as the main form of dishonesty. Rather, the most common approach nowadays is offensiveness purporting to "call a spade a spade" or whatever as a smokescreen for self-serving nonsense.

Also, most people don't just appear dickish. Rather, people who appear dickish very often do actual bad things. Your position is actually kind of naive--when I say "do-badder" you assume that of course there can't be any such thing as an actual bad person who does anything bad, so I must be talking about people who just say shit. No, I'm saying literally, in our society doing actual harm may carry some social stigma (unless you do a LOT of harm, like crash the economy with derivatives trading, then you're a pillar of the community), but it's considered much worse to be some kind of idealist who wants to do good things. We fear the idea that doing good might be possible, I think.

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Quoting: GuestTo be honest, the internet is full of people complaining 24/7 about people getting offended, it's so boring...

You have to understand, they get very offended by people being offended. People being offended is a trigger for them. We have to make allowances . . .

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPI always love offensive games like that for the sweet butthurt they cause in all the hypocrites and do-gooders [External Link].

I've noticed that it's currently considered much more of a social faux pas to be a do-gooder than a do-badder.

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I've been looking for something that I can play for a few minutes in between doing other things. Thing is, most of my games aren't really suited to that--like Stellaris, for instance: Once you're in, it's for a good long time. This looks like just the sort of pause-to-relax-for-a-minute thingie I'm looking for.

So, um, does Dean Martin ever show up?

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Huh. So let's see . . . if Google ever gets Android stuff working on Chromebooks, that would give you Steam games via link on Chromebooks as a side effect.

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Quoting: Mountain ManWish it was more than just a shooter. With visuals like that, there should be opportunities to explore and enjoy the scenery.

I suppose for beautiful space settings with time to enjoy the scenery we've got Helium Rain.

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Quoting: wvstolzingSorry about the wildly off-topic post, though. Slightly more on topic: 'cyber cafe's were huge in Turkey in the early 00s; I had Starcraft-addicted cousins who practically lived in those places. They're all but extinct nowadays though.

Your cousins are all but extinct? Condolences, my dear chap!

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Quoting: elmapulthings will never end at this rate, its a "cat-and-mouse game"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_and_mouse [External Link]
just like wine will never be perfect for the same reason.

Welll . . . Wine will never be perfect for current Windows. But over time the proportion of software that was written for Windows-before-the-present gradually increases, and current Windows seems to be getting worse at backwards compatibility, probably deliberately for certain tactical reasons which I think may be mistaken.
So in theory Wine could become approximately perfect for pre-current Windows, and that becomes a more and more important role.

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So, since everyone here seems to agree (and that's also what I've heard) that cyber-cafes are very big in Asia, would that mean the recent surge in Asian Steam usage has been overstated?

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWhat about 'em? In case you hadn't noticed, we have powerful warrior classes now. And yet I'm not trying to claim capitalism isn't a real thing.

Neither am I. And I'm not claiming that feudalism was basically capitalism. All I'm saying is that capitalism is more or less an adaptation and evolution of what was before. As you said, we define capitalism by its differences to other paradigms. This definition serves a purpose, but isn't very objective or scientific. Of course it's by evolution and adaptation that all economic and political systems form.

I'm not quite sure what that means. Before capitalism nearly all people didn't do wage labour. Under capitalism, most people do. It would be wrong to say absolutely everything is different, but it would also be wrong to claim that structures of how people work and live didn't change in pretty fundamental ways. When water freezes, there's continuity--it's still water--but you can make some pretty broad statements about what's different.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyIn the old days merchants existed and made money, but they didn't rule, and if aristocrats got fed up with them they took their stuff. What constituted dog and what constituted tail was different, and what was considered the important social virtue was different. Compound interest was often illegal. And who dominates song and legend is far from beside the point. Vikings had song and legend about great warriors, we have news shows dominated by talk of the stock exchange and media that talks incessantly about lifestyles of the rich and famous--many of them famous solely for being rich.

And why do you think people didn't gossip about the lavish lifestyles of rich merchants and traders back then? Again, you might point out that their surviving legends are violent, but so is most modern entertainment.

I have no proof they didn't, no. But you can't really build an argument on "I can't prove otherwise". There are a lot of ridiculous things I can't prove to be false.
I mean, I'm sure people talked about rich merchants some. Just, not as much as they talked about rich clergy, or powerful warlords. Medieval merchants simply were not ancient counterparts to modern capitalists; they had a much tinier slice of the economic action. Commerce was much smaller compared to the economy as a whole, and merchants engaged in commerce didn't control production. Medieval merchants were kind of like just the modern shipping and trucking and freight rail businesses--IF those businesses were about a tenth their actual size. Well, no, because they did own the cargos, but like, say you had people who bought Hondas from Japan, shipped them to North America and sold them to dealerships at a markup--except hardly anyone ever bought foreign cars. It would be a noticeable group that made some money, sure, but it wouldn't be central.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe vikings were actually a little odd in that their merchants, raiders, conquerors, and even peasants, were pretty much all the same people. But a lot of what they traded was precisely things they had stolen while viking--and people, actually; the viking slave trade was huge for a while. But these multi-role people, if you look at their own accounts, cared the most about the raiding and conquest and fighting--that was what made a man respected and followed. The merchant stuff was fine, but it wasn't as important, it wasn't what society was about.

What do you base all this on? Sure, vikings traded on all kinds of valuables and commodities, even slaves, just like their foreign peers. But they were also world class craftsmen. And their merchants, jewelers, blacksmiths and whatnot were just that, not raiders who also dabbled in a bit of trade.

You have a point. The vikings were excellent craftsmen and had plenty of their own stuff to trade. I exaggerated there. As to all the same people--all I was getting at was that the vikings unusually didn't really have a separate warrior vs. peasant class or warrior vs. merchant class. Kings had dedicated warbands and such, but in general they had a lot of reasonably independent farmers, fishermen and whatnot, who were armed and could fight, and who sometimes went viking, sometimes went trading, and sometimes went to do whichever looked like the best bet when they got wherever they got to. I wouldn't be surprised if increasing social stratification was part of what ended the "viking age".

Quoting: tuubiIn any case, trying to reduce any society to a single value or ideal is counterproductive. That forces you to ignore the human factor. Life might have been simpler, but not to such an extreme degree.

I respect you, but really, have you been reading what I'm writing or some funhouse mirror version of it? I feel this is a serious misrepresentation of my thesis and my extensive "human factor" qualifications of it. It's quite annoying.
Yes, yes, the world is messy, whatever. That does not mean there are no patterns to be observed. Human society is dominated by human ideas, human ideologies. And human ideas tend to be simple at the core. There are all kinds of reasons why any given dominant ideology doesn't control the whole show, why complexity comes in will we or nill we, but that doesn't mean those dominant ideas are not dominant or that they themselves are not fundamentally simple.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI really think we tend to overestimate that aspect because it's what we care about and it reassures us to think people back then were just like us, that what we care about is inevitably what everyone has to care about.

I'll ignore the slightly patronizing tone, but you're right, I do assume our basic needs are the same as those of people a thousand years ago. I actually think it's the other way around: We tend to romanticize and mythologize people we have no direct experience of. Even famous historians and archaeologists have commonly fallen into this seductive trap. We have this strange need to make history seem exciting when most of it is decidedly not.

But maybe we're getting slightly off topic here? :P

I really don't quite see which bit of what I've been saying constitutes romanticized yearning for excitement. If anything I've been quite negative and brutal about the ethos both of the medieval and dark ages past and the 18th c. to modern era. I have been drawing a picture of two different elites running things for their own benefit largely to the detriment of everyone else--just in very different ways, with different basic organizing concepts and productive systems.
Our fundamental needs are to some extent beside the point. Our fundamental needs are the same as those of stone age hunter-gatherers, but one cannot claim that stone age hunter-gatherers were motivated by anything we could productively call profit; they were (and the few remaining ones are) as human as anyone else, but clearly had no merchant class at all or anything like one. So why would our fundamental needs somehow make it necessary that such a class be terribly important in medieval times? (Incidentally I'm not claiming a linear progression or anything--profits and mercantile endeavours and even investment were very important in the late Roman empire, but they kind of stopped being when it fell)

Ah, well, yeah. Very very off topic.

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