My ex wife and I used to take a chess board everywhere, play in cafes, parks, restaurants, pubs. It was something to do when we had run out of stuff to say to each other. It was a conversation starter, people would come up and have a sticky, or ask us who’s winning. Some people would occasionally ask if they can play. It was nice. Until Queens Gambit was all the rage. Then people seemed to assume we were just following that trend, and there was a noticeable increase in people saying “Queens Gambit eh?” And we stopped taking the board out so much.
Dune before the movie came out
The Lynch one, right?
I stayed up to date on ai and machine learning, including language models. I remember hearing that one learned math from language and wondering where things will go. I watched ai safety videos before they felt relevant. Then I heard Openai, which had a good rep at the time, is releasing their new model online, called ChatGPT. Having played with DungeonAI and NovelAI before I was gonna fiddle with this as well.
Then headlines broke, it became a phenomenon. Even then I figured this would be this week’s Thing before getting bored, as was common with these ai.
Down the line I remembered hearing ChatGPT on a gas station ad for some travel app. That was when I realized this is permanent. People who aren’t even online are likely hearing about this. Suddenly my niche hobby and hopeful dreams of the future became an actual enshittified crisis.
I don’t think I need to explain how everyone using language models now is just god awful for everyone. And the attention hasn’t gotten us closer to answering long standing questions of ethics, economic change, what is intelligence or consciousness. We’ve just got a bunch of the lowest common denominator shouting their answers now.
Goddamnit yes. It’s why I’m very pro-gatekeeping. Because people who are new to a hobby because it got popular tend to ruin every-fucking-thing.
For example: flight simulator. That used to be an exclusively nerd domain up until the FS2020 version, which was released on Xbox. The result: a massive influx of new garbage payware and a decline in quality of established brands. While also making the sim worse in order to chase broader appeal. It’s gotten a bit better after covid went away and the normies dropped the hobby, thankfully.
Also: film photography. The popularity of instagram and YouTube ‘influencers’ got a lot of people into our hobby the past decade. It’s lead to increased gear prices, film being more difficult to get and the forums flooding with the dumbest possible questions, since these newcomers are allergic as fuck to reading manuals or watching any tutorial longer than thirty seconds. It’s also lead camera manufacturers to chase this new demographic by making their cameras shittier and more ‘instagram-friendly’. Here’s looking at you, Fujifilm and your shitty X-half.
Take it from someone who’s been around a bit: if you like a thing, keep newcomers away from it. Gatekeep it like the Berlin Fucking Wall, lest they completely fuck up your hobby.
I’m in the same boat with a few others here when it comes to some games like Halo and Fallout. But I feel like I’m on the brink with 2 new ones:
- Doom: I played the original when I was a kid and got bullied for it (or probably being a general nerd). 2016 and Eternal were really popular and the franchise took off; but Dark Ages feels off. I played Dark Ages for a bit, put it down, and haven’t picked it up since. I think Doom is going down the shitter, especially what they did to Mick Gordon.
- Mother Mother (a band): My SO and I love their music for how unique and interesting it is; and we went to one of their first concerts at a small venue when they came into town ~10 years ago ish? Must have been <500 people. Generally no one else liked their music we shared it with, so we kept it to ourselves. Now? We went to another one a few months ago and it was at a HUGE stadium; absolutely packed. I think one of their songs went viral on TikTok - My Daddy’s got a gun. We’re proud of what they’ve accomplished, but really hope they don’t lose their identity in trying to become even more popular.
TIL Mother Mother is popular now. Loved O My Heart back in the day
This was from the concert. Pretty packed
I was a nerdy teen in the 90/00s. There’s plenty I could be gatekeeping but the thing is… I’m not special. Nobody is. All this shit is meaningless. You don’t own any of it. Sorry it just all comes off so territorial and greedy in a way. Grosses me out.
I am an avid collector and drinker of Chinese teas, particularly oolongs and puerh. I had been drinking them for years when suddenly the absolute asshole Dr. Oz went on TV claiming that puerh tea was some magical cure for anything and everything that you might have.
Normally, I get excited for new people to share tea with, but this fad caused prices to rise across the board and caused the market to get flooded with awful quality tea. These people were drinking some of the worst quality (fishy, shou/cooked puerh) teas and were more obsessed with how to mask the flavors with milk and sugar than actually slowing down and enjoying the tea.
The fad faded and people went back to putting matcha in their morning milkshakes. Even so, I still run into people that reflexively associate incredible tea with Dr. Oz and the disgusting teas he foisted upon his audience. Sad.
Not to that extent, but crypto. I think its an amazing and really interesting technology. But now it’s tainted by scammers and when people hear the term, they get defensive because they are ready for you to scam them
Ive learned a bit off a on about crypto, but never got “into it”. When I first started learning it looked like a really interesting concept with a lot of potential uses.
I can’t remember the details at this point, but when looking at bitcoin I remember seeing so many problems. There was the transaction price, speed, and complexity. There was the insanity of all the wasted energy to “mine” bitcoin. Most importantly, it didn’t make sense to me as a currency. Currency needs to be stable, easy to exchange, and easy to use to buy things. Bitcoin always seemed like a really cool prototype that needed a successor or major revisions.
Then the masses (and braindead hype bros and “visionary” corporate types) jumped on it and turned it into the shit show it is today. When people would get excited about it (“price is going up! Gotta buy now!”), it was clear they either didn’t really know what it was or were trying to hype it to get more money pumped into it. When friends or family brought it up, I’d point out that it didn’t really have any use except as speculation. I’d tell them they if they wanted to gamble, go for it, but they should realize that it doesn’t have intrinsic value (just like all the other currencies) and, as it stands, it’s a really shitty currency. Know that people aren’t buying it because it works well. People are buying it because the price is going up.
People have made a lot of money (or theoretical money if they’re still holding), but it still doesn’t seem like it actually gets used for anything but speculation. The $2+ trillion USD market cap for bitcoin makes my head spin. I’ve always thought that bitcoin was a dead end and would eventually be dethroned by something more viable, but here we still are.
I haven’t looked at cryptocurrencies in a while. Any notable progress in the last 5 or so years toward it being more than a money making gamble?
Bitcoin hasn’t made much progress. There are some layers on top of it that let you send instantly and cheaply, but they are at best impractical (for lightning, of you want to be able to receive money you have to create a channel with a “server” node and them spend bitcoin which buy you liquidity to receive money. Utterly worthless)
The two I have my sights right now are monero and ltc. Both of those let you send pretty fast and with less than a cent fee
There is a tech that is called proof of stake that means that mining is waaaay more energy efficient but none of those are implementing it. I’ve heard it has drawbacks but I’m not sure I understand them
Also momero is mined in a way that buying GPUs or ASIC (mining specialized hardware) is not worth it. You get better results on a CPU, making mining more accessible for everyone
Both of those have confidential transactions so no one know who sends who how much money nor how much money each part has. Which is pretty cool
Feels bad man
It’s equally as bad when you discover you like something that has been around for a while and has lots of fans and you don’t get accepted or realise you don’t want to be part of the fans because of how shitty, toxic, dumb etc. they are. A relevant example for this is Assassin’s creed for me. I never like any of the games until AC: Origins, even though I gave most of them a fair shake. AC: Origins is a 10/10 for me, I put in over 600h hours into that game, 100%'ed it and all its expansions/dlc. AC: Odyssey is good too, but I never got as into it, so a 8/10. Valhalla never looked good in any way so never even tried it. Started playing Shadows about a week ago and really enjoying it so far, not as good as Origins but mostly better than Odyssey. But damn do people not like when I mention this, like I’m not allowed to like it because I didn’t like the earlier games. I have no issue with people liking them and not the ones I do, never said anything else. Music is a lot like this too. “Oh, you like their newer stuff? Fucking idiot, only the early stuff is good, I now see down on you as a person and hate every opinion you have”.
When games have a perceived quality shift people will attack the newer fans because they see them as the reason why the company is allowed to “get away” with producing the worse thing. I don’t know how you can avoid that and still have a community that holds the thing they love to a standard. Some communities just like to fight about which games better, Im not really sure what else there is to even talk about with assassins creed (i’ve only played 2 of the games so idk).
There’s way too much gatekeeping in gaming. People don’t seem to understand that everyone has different tastes, and it’s all subjective. There is no objectively good game. For me it’s Half Life 2, I don’t like shooters, tried it but couldn’t get into it. But to many it’s one of the greatest games ever.
There are objectively good games. There are not objectively fun games.
Half-Life 2 is objectively good, and if you say it’s a bad game you’re simply wrong. However if you say it’s a game you do not enjoy and isn’t fun for you, that’s not wrong.
A game can be both good and not enjoyable to you.
Conversely, a game can also be objectively bad and yet fun for some people.
Tabletop RPG. It used to be a niche of the internet in the early days, with people posting here and there their scenarios, campaign, ideas etc. It was hard to find and so pleasurable when you found something.
Nowadays it’s trusted by … Wizard if the coast ? Online only platforms and what have you.
I loved #scenariotheque, but now it’s almost a ghost website (pardon the french).
I know if sounds like old man yell at clouds, but damn do I miss the early days.
I feel with you but I think it also brought some benefits. Finding time to meet up with my friends has become harder and harder with everyone growing up, studying, getting jobs.
The influx of people during covid catapulted the virtual tabletop solutions ahead and now we regularly play again using foundry vtt since everyone can just sit at home.
But yeah, online everyone just talks about DnD or Critical Roll it feels like and unless you’re on reddit there’s very few communities left.
Star Wars
This happened to all the ols school Star Wars fans. Disney created the “idiot fans”
Old school Star Wars fans harassed the actor who played jar jar to the point that he considered suicide…
All of the more recent Star Wars slop has made me realize that the original films aren’t really that good either.
Bite your tongue. Like a lot of things from the past, they need to be viewed in context
I mean they are objectively poor in a lot of ways, but you’re spot on. At the time they were fricking mind blowing. Space opera/space cowboys on the big screen! Before that we had what? 2001 and star trek?
Yeah any decent sci-fi before Star Wars was heady with little action. Logans Run, Silent Running. Also in my mind I saw sequels in general change from shameless cash grab to better attempts
I keep getting people telling me they won’t watch Andor because of the other slop and it makes me sad
thats me rn
Do watch Andor. It’s not just good Star Wars, it’s ‘good TV’ in general. And I say that as someone who hates modern Star Wars with a passion. Andor’s excellent.
Yup. Was a huge fan of the EU books and lore. Wanted to give Disney a chance, so I saw the first few movies. It was like seeing your ex at the club but she’d gone through massive amounts of plastic surgery and they’d removed all the unique features that attracted you originally. Haven’t watched anything Star Wars since the second movie in the new trilogy, literally 0 desire to see the conclusion or any new Star wars content.
Yea, Disney swore off all of the EU books stating they had no place in Star Wars. Then they started stealing portions of the EU books and basically making bad fanatic versions of them.
I thought the force awakens was pretty decent. I mean it’s literally just a new hope redux.
It wasn’t a bad movie, the characters were just incredibly forgettable. Rogue One was a good standalone movie, but it was kinda bittersweet because they stole part of Kyle Katarn’s backstory and he was always one of my favorite characters.
Reddit
Soon it will be Lemmy
Plz no…
Already happened
While not to the same degree as a lot of folks, Fallout got into it some time around New Vegas because it was featured on game fly. Anyways delved headfirst into it and fell in love with the classic games. The post Fallout 4 boom gives me a headache sometimes I just want to talk with old bastards and my fellow autists about Fallout without some profligate butting in cause they watch the TV show.
I was lucky enough to have played fallout 3 before new Vegas. So the series for me went from “that was fun, interesting setting” to “Wow this is genuinely amazing and feels like a living world that I’m inhabiting and interacting with.”
And then fallout 4 came out, and I was hoping that Bethesda would have learned something from New Vegas. But that was foolish, modern Bethesda doesn’t write stories, they don’t understand characters, they are a software company manufacturing a product, not a studio crafting playable stories. What narrative and story do exist, are the minimal needed to serve the gameplay loops. They make toy boxes, not experiences. Some people like that, but that’s not what I play these kinds of games for.
Going back and playing fallout 1 and 2 solidified this for me further, if Bethesda was going to learn from what made new Vegas great, they would have done so from 1 and 2 and implemented it in 3.
I haven’t even bothered to try fallout 76. I know what it is, it’s a looter shooter live service game meant to Skinner box you in to spending as much time as possible grinding up numbers and finding the best stats on rare drops. It’s not what I’m in to. I’ve accepted that.
As much as I love the fallout setting and the potential for story and world, there will never be another fallout game, just Bethesda products wearing the aesthetic. There are plenty of other great games out there that have story and gameplay working synergistically to create an experience.
Well if you want to scratch that CRPG story itch may I suggest Arcanum, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Tainted Grail, Wasteland 2 and 3, and basically all of Owlcat games except maybe Pathfinder kingmaker.
played a lot of those.
I remember VtMB particularly fondly.
Now if only VtMB2 would get out of its development hell so we could know if it’s shit or not.
Russerfrushenrushen kids and their first person fallout games. All my homes know best fallout is third person isometric turn based.
Technically that includes Brotherhood of Steel, careful there that game is still actively worse than anything Bethesda has made.
Eh, I remember enjoying it, though never played it again so 🤷 possibly nostalgia. It was just not an open world or rpg.
Oh wait, I was thinking of fallout tactics. BOS was like wasteland skinned diablo right? That is, not turn based so not in my original grumpy old man comment.
Sounds like Rick and morty
Nazi ideology, OP OP. There was a nice little thing we had once, until you cunts took it up like a hoard of malignant nihilist pussies 😒Now we can’t even bring up the Third Reich’s many incredible qualities in conversation without someone rolling their eyes! n-chan numpties ruin every fandom.
/ss
I hate that 4chan losers have somehow become the face of nihilism.
Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, but at least it’s an ethos
lmao about the /ss
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