Polish Perspective comments:
Just a nerdy sidenote. I’ve been accepted into the Geforce Now beta; Nvidia’s game streaming service. Streaming services are going to move into the video game space after conquering both music (Spotify) and TV (Netflix). So I was curious about how the experience would be.
The basic premise is that most gamers don’t need to own expensive hardware. Unless you play twitch-shooters at a serious level – where every extra ms of latency is hyperimportant – , your needs can be covered easily. Hardcore gamers are very vocal, so their numbers tend to be exaggerated. Most gamers’ needs could be covered. Right now the invitation-only beta is free. You still have to own your games. These are still early days so the exact business model is still being figured out.
Google released their Project Streaming a few days ago, which is their first foray into the same space. Taketwo’s CEO stated in a conference some weeks ago that he sees a large industry-wide adoption 1-3 years down the line. The chess pieces are being put into place.
For me, I have a super basic celeron-powered laptop which I bought for ~$300 since it covers my basic browsing needs and it does so well enough. I have no home PC right now so this solution is right in my backyard.
So how is it? Surprisingly good. You need at least 50 mbit/s in order to get [email protected] home. I can stream Witcher 3 at great quality settings on my laptop at 60 fps. The service supports cloud save, too. Installation for the most popular games takes just 10 secs. For the less popular ones you have to re-install them at every time, which is a bit of a PITA if the game is big. Anything over 20 GB tends be annoying in my experience. But the upside is that you don’t store anything locally. I have just 8 GB free on my SDD as I write this, so that is a big bonus for me.
You can be very portable too. You only need the app and a decent internet connection to access your library. You could play these games on vacation, in a library, at a friend’s house. Unlike bulky and fat gaming laptops, my laptop weights just 1.2 kg so portability is definitely key. I usually have a small wireless mouse with me regardless.
I’ve tried some online shooters (primarily NS2, a small game which I own) and the experience was totally decent. I tried the more popular CS:GO and I had zero latency/lag issues. The only downside there was 60 fps, but that is limited by my screen. Nvidia has a way to stream at 120 fps but your screen needs to support it. Right now that is a downside given that the only laptops which have such support tend to be gaming laptops, and they are often very expensive in the first place (nullifying the need of the service). However, you can still use this on a basic home PC with just an integrated GPU and a cheap CPU with a simple 144 Hz monitor which you can get for under $200 these days. It’s also very possible that we could get cheaper laptops with 120-144 Hz monitors down the line.
As stated above, the hardcore gamers will never be satisfied with this, but for most casual gamers out there and even moderately serious ones, I see no reason why this wouldn’t be attractive. Pricing is null right now, but most discussion have ranged in the $10-20 range. If we assume the upper bound and include access to games in the price down the line (just like Netflix), then it would be very attractive for vast swaths of gamers. Especially those like me, who only game occasionally and who don’t have the time to be super serious. Another benefit is that hacking will be much harder to do, especially in online games, where it can be a real plague on PC in certain titles.
There are still a lot of kinks to iron out. Internet is hardly 50 mbit/s or above in most places (though 5G buildout will certainly help that as data capacity increases). In some countries, data caps can get in the way, though not in Poland and many European countries. Exactly how the distribution of games will be structured is to be established. All the business models are still early-stage. This is why it’s still a beta and why Google is just now dipping their toes. But this is coming. The experience was definitely good enough for most gamers and it is an economical solution, too. I can just buy the latest Metro game when its out on Steam and then stream it for free – as of now – on my crappy laptop at good quality settings on 60 fps instead of splurging on expensive hardware. Even at at temporary cost of $10 or $20 per month, it would be a good deal. You don’t have to lock yourself in for years. What’s not to like?
While I don’t particularly follow gaming news, I am still quite amazed to have missed this.
Anyhow, this was certainly very useful information.
I was planning to build a new machine once I get a good financial cushion again (I’ll be giving away the rig I built in 2013 to a relative soon). But bearing this in mind, what’s the point? Laptop + docking station + peripherals has been a solid decision for work for several years now, and with video game streaming, the vast majority of people will no longer need a gaming PC either.
(I have always been opposed to gaming laptops. They are far worse for video games than dedicated rigs, more expensive, you can’t upgrade them, and their bulk makes them subpar for work and mobility too).
Couple more comments:
1. What about mod support? I find some games (e.g. any Bethesda blockbuster) basically unplayable without being souped up by a ton of mods.
GeForce Now only seems to have support for mods on the Steam market, not self-installed mods.
I don’t imagine it’s possible in principle to even get a lot of leeway here, because:
- You are talking about granting people access to masses of computing power, which some will exploit to power other applications, such as Bitcoin mining. This is no longer an issue, since all serious mining is now done on dedicated ASIC hardware, but still, I am sure there’s no shortage of other commercial ventures that bright, enterprising people will be able to find and exploit if given the option of loading extraneous programs.
-
So ironically, while game streaming would make video gaming much more accessible – hopefully even killing off some of the parasitic overgrowth that is mobile gaming – the massive influx of normies it would produce after it becomes popularized like Netflix and the deathblow it will deal to what remains of modding culture will further despoil video gaming beyond even its current woeful state.
At least that’s my take on this. Perhaps it’s not the best take. I did only learn of this recently. What do you think?
I’m thinking if there’s a typo. Video ring would make sense. Maybe there’s One Video Ring to bind them all, or something. But what’s a video rig?
I am somewhat doubtful it will catch on so quickly, and I certainly hope it never does.
I rarely have time for games these days with university and work but nonetheless maintain a proper $2000 desktop PC. When I do play games I like to own them and be able to fuck with them modding-wise.
In general I despise DRM and streaming services, perhaps its an Irish cultural matter (another story entirely) but I like to own things. Renting, streaming, Amazon, paying for access etc can fuck off.
That makes one even more dependent on such streaming services, so one never really owns a game like in the old days when there still were physical media…lame.
Anyway, while I’m guilty of having spent much time on games myself, I have my doubts whether gaming should be viewed positively, the right should devote some thought to the question if a gamer genocide might become necessary.
A computer with hardware sufficient for playing the latest games (as opposed to merely writing texts, browsing in the net or playing stuff from 20 years ago).
Before we find a solution to the Gamer Question, we need to decide what we should call the coming Final Solution to the Gamer Question. Please vote!
A) Gamercaust
B) Gamerdomor
C) Gamercide
D) Gamergeddon
D) Democratic Gamerpuchea
E) Gamerpalooza
We also need to decide how to dispose of the gamer bodies:
A) scavengers
B) crematoria
C) burning in the open
D) burying in mass graves
E) other, please write
And the method of killing them:
A) gas chambers
B) mass shootings
C) machetes
D) deadly gifs (like the ones used against Kurt Eichenwald)
E) giving them unlimited access to video games, but no food
F) other, please write
I think it’s a widespread sentiment, at least among people old enough to remember the time before Steam.
Gog is still good in that regard, because one can actually download all the installation files, but who knows how long it will stay that way; and of course they don’t have many of the newest blockbusters (which are probably not worth it anyway though).
You need to include some reference to Korea…Koreans are the worst gamers after all, those assholes ruined Starcraft with their 5000 clicks-per-minute “e-sports” crap.
Does North Korea have a policy on gamers? Or any plans what to do with them once they’ve conquered the south? Maybe someone could ask the North Korean embassy.
Indeed the last ‘blockbuster’ game I actually enjoyed was Witcher 3 and the only one I plan on buying going forward is Cyberpunk 2077. Quality has dropped immensely since circa 2010 with some exceptions of course.
I very much sympathize with that.
But, considering that a proper gaming rig does indeed cost $$$ and I have almost no time to game seriously anyway – nor do I have other reqs that require powerful machines, such as hardcore image rendering, video editing, video game design, etc. – it’s just the rational decision for me.
Obviously I would never stoop to signing up for Netflix and the like.
Yeah of course if you’re short on cash and don’t have the need, why the hell would you bother with a serious rig. On the other hand, they do have excellent longevity though, my last one was from 2011 before I upgraded this January.
However, one thing I do find, is that having a new, top quality PC actually makes you more productive. I run a small magazine and write science fiction in my spare time so I do a hell of a lot of writing, and having a beautiful new machine actually makes me want to use it more.
So there are hidden values to shelling out $$$
All these technologies that run your software remotely have a major downside, it means you are at the utter mercy of whoever is running your cloud, gaming streaming, etc. As their recent actions have shown, Silicon Valley is hard left and undertaking massive deplatforming and censorship. Someone like Karlin could easily fit the profile of a person they would want to shut out, so being keen on these cheap technical services is a bit like the natives selling away their land for some cheap beads.
In light of your post about Russia’s underperformance in game development, have you been apprised that your co-ethnics have released an RPG that has been sitting on top of the Steam charts for the last week? Not selling millions, but quite well nonetheless. The grognards at RPG Codex appear rather smitten.
But what can change the nature of a man?
Planescape Torment was an interesting experience, but tbh I agree with the people who think it was better as a story than as a game; its gameplay was quite clunky, especially the combat (which they probably should have cut out completely or at least made optional). Still one of the best games ever though.
There have been all those games inspired by the classic Infinity engine titles in recent years, like Pillars of eternity, Tyranny, Tides of Numenora etc. I can’t play them (my laptop is ancient, also don’t know if I would want to get sucked into such timesinks again), but one reads a lot of negative views about them, that they’re mostly inferior to the older titles. Apart from the graphics games seem to have regressed in quality.
Our German friends sometimes forget that ‘Final Solution’ has a really negative connotation in the English-speaking world, but in German you have a First Solution, Second Solution usw. until you arrive at a Final Solution.
I built a flight simulator on a small XPC box in 2006, which ran like a champ on WinXP and was SoA in 2006, but I made the mistake of upgrading it to Win7 to run newer versions and it choked the system to death, so I rolled everything back. Now that I’ve lived through all that, I can’t quite recall really why I wanted to upgrade a simple flight simulator.
Wondering if the Russians here want the Kebab Russian Muslim guy to win tomorrow or the Potato(?) Irish Catholic(?) guy?
Peace.
Is this a sports thing?
Well, no, the new Obsidian games haven’t been that great, but I think the argument must be made that for all of its flaws, Planescape: Torment was incredible specifically because it was presented in an interactive style. I don’t think that I would have been as charmed with Fall-From-Grace or truly felt the same grim final march in the ending as a movie or a story. That’s what the best games can do – as much or even more than the best novels – to truly make you identify and transport you into an universe.
That’s beautiful, and in itself that artistic merit justifies it. Witcher also did that, I feel. But I think I will put in a few more throwaways to justify them, even though now as a father and a consultant, I don’t have that much free time:
Mythology. We lived in such an immensely pozzed time complete with almost everything we consume being made implicitly or explicitly to promote a leftist agenda. Video games(and anime for that matter) don’t exactly oppose that trend explicitly but they often manage to at least be orthogonal and provide a less pozzed version of what things could be. And that’s important, as silly as it is, to at least have a vision of things that isn’t completely infected. Its not, I think, a mere accident that gaming is so heavily associated with right-wing groups. Even something as prosaic as Tactics Ogre, for example has classes divided by sex and change can happen only within a sex’s possibilities. To actually even acknowledge gender differences is increasingly forbidden these days.
Complexity/logic. Games are heavily meritocratic and operate by complex rules that often encourage us to study in detail, piece it apart in our heads and apply them to our advantage. At its most beautiful, it can actually be a form of engineering, much like computer science itself is:
Promoting this form of thinking allows for the kind of precise, complex awareness that actually helps people communicate. I feel that as a German, you surely must appreciate precision.
Mannerbund Games are heavily sexed and you especially see this as skills demanded rise, so that eventually after you get beyond a few ranks in League, its pretty much 99% men. Again, obvious why its so affiliated with right-wing movements, but it remains one of the few things that women don’t invade until it becomes status affirming(and then of course, they will barge in despite not really knowing anything). In a time when its basically not allowed to have male-only spaces, it allows for one and in its attitude, somewhat maintains the cohesion of old mannerbunds like hunting clubs and smoking lounges.
Now you can final solution me.
Nurmagomedov vs McGregor.
Peace.
Sure, but I’ve seen people make the argument that it might have worked better as a point and click adventure, without the clunky combat, and that might be true. I agree with you however that gameplay is important, many new games seem to suffer from the fact that they’re aiming at some grand cinematic experience, to the detriment of gameplay mechanics which are almost an afterthought.
I can’t comment too much on recent games though…pretty much only new games I buy is the occasional adventure…and those I’ve played are sometimes pretty “pozzed” as well, with even the occasional reference to transgenderism. There’s no escape…
Apart from that only post-2010 game I’ve played is Age of decadence, which is pretty good. For some reason it seems to be quite popular in Russia.
I really should consider making a site just to rate games on how pozzed they are. A good rule of thumb I’ve found is to selectively pick games originating from Japan; much, much less poz there. Otherwise, rely on our faithful Gospodin Karlin to endure stupidity so that you won’t.
And yeah, I don’t really play the “cinematic” games myself.
Those adventures I mentioned were all American, reflecting the mental world of US liberals.
The transgender thing comes up in Technobabylon (2015) which is set in the later 21st century…there’s a female character, and it’s just casually mentioned “I used to be a man”, as if that was nothing remarkable…
There are also some references in that game to a civil war in the US…because evangelical fundamentalists have taken over Texas, lol.
And it’s actually not even a totally bad game, some aspects of its vision for the future are quite interesting. All the more irritating when you’re suddenly confronted with those “pozzed” elements.
The good news is that since the games will be server-based, and with restrictions as to what can be installed (this is a given Karlin, so no BC mining), possibly with a dedicated list of games (like you have with Netflix) there will be no cheaters. Unless the game is cross-platform, which I think should not be the case.
I’m still angered by the use of the singular pronoun “they.” Trust me, I can sympathize with the irritation. Heh, I actually worked with a “based” Swedish guy once on the making of a mod(trying to be vague here, actually can sorta identify me since it got pretty popular), and went through the writing actively gutting every time he used “they” and replaced it with the appropriate gender pronoun.
And you get to agree to a code of conduct for good behavior in order to play 🙂
Oh, I do also have a recommendation:King of Dragon Pass. Quite old but still beautiful, very elegant with a thoroughly premodern viewpoint and often hilarious. Since you play Saxon-ish tribes that count their wealth in cattle, at one point you can actually earn gold coins for mercenary and all your weaponthanes get frustrated with the “yellow metal” and demand cattle the way that the gods intended.
It would split the gaming industry. I don’t see it as a bad thing more variety can’t hurt. People mentioned mods. There are also games like turn based games where you walk away from the game for extended period of time sometimes. It’s expensive to run all that processing power and bandwidth. If they can achieve economy of scale then perhaps. If youtube still runs in the red then what hope can video game streaming will have?
Steam already lets you stream from your good PC to your laptop for free too.
Nah, you just grew up.
The “Irish” guy is an outspoken “gay rights” supporter, so of course the Kebab Muslim.
The short-lived Reaxxion magazine, a Roosh project managed by Matt Forney, sort of did that.
But there wasn’t any popular demand for it, unfortunately.
Swedish ultra-liberals actually thought about the pronoun issue for a little bit and came up with ‘hen’ for gender-neutral.
Since he/she is ‘han/hon’, ‘hen’ doesn’t actually sound that discordant or out of place, which frustratingly might make it easier for people to accept.
I can tell you that “Endlösung” is triggering in Germany.
People will jump out of windows, call the Nazi police, shut down the University, riot in Parliament etc. at the slightest mention.
From a novel of 1995:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distress_(novel)
You can rent servers with GPUs, or TPUs for that matter, today. Even FPGAs, it seems. Kind of pointless to rent out bitcoin ASICs I guess given the depreciation.
https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/
https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/gpus
https://cloud.google.com/tpu/
Gamercaust / Industrially sealing their cellar tombs / Deadly GIFs.
There is a sequel out now, by the way. Check your iOS appstore.
Oh for the love of…you’ve got to be kidding me!!!
Peace.
Torment has pretty interesting combat, compared to let’s say most jrpgs and western clones
About visual style, while it might be dismissed as nostalgia, sprites are dear to heart to many gamers.
Offtopic, but it would interesting to discuss in the future, about Mormons and Mormon economics?
I think I once read that Mormons are very prominent in the US national security complex and are strongly in favour of things like torture programmes against America’s enemies, because they are in a sense the ultimate US nationalists (being mostly Anglo-Saxon in descent and adhering to a religion created in the US).
It would be interesting to know how much truth there is to that.
You haven’t lost much. inXile tried to replicate Planescape in Tides of Numenera setting and in my opinion completely failed.
Planescape Torment remains the king.
There are 16 million Mormons, so they are enough to create their own separate country or nationality.
But Utah already functions partly like this for them.
I remember watching Romney (in 2012), very intelligently saying to Obama, how states within America need to have more independence and autonomy – and that Utah as success story of this.
He was even making deeper points about economics and political economy, during this argument.
But yet the far stupider people like Obama and Trump – achieved greater popularity with the American population.
Here if “people get the politicians they deserve” – I would not be surprised if the Mormon community were not more intelligent on average, than other Americans.
That seems quite likely, given that they’re mostly of British descent and probably not affected by any dysgenic trends due to their lifestyle.
Mitt Romney seems pretty horrible to me though, Republicans like him are a big part of the problem.
He was also quite anti-Russian even back in 2012.
It’s a shame in a way that Mormonism cucked and gave up its potential to be an Anglo-American ethno-religion
R-Money is highly intelligent (the Romney family has been prominent in American politics and business for many years), but being an earnest Mormon who years for respectability he’s still a total loser.
A good example was that during the Great Financial Crisis, the survival of the American automotive industry was in doubt. Barack Obama to his credit saved the American automotive industry, though not without some funny business. The genius Mitt Romney offered his sage advice and penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.
Now, he and many other Republicans sincerely believe in economic liberalism. They might even be dumb enough to agree with GHW Bush’s chief economic adviser Michael Boskin who infamously stated:
But this is a wildly unpopular political position. It is especially unpopular in the Midwest. This op-ed was penned in 2008, when Romney still had Presidential ambitions. Romney of all people should know better since he was born and raised in Michigan (heart of the American automotive industry) where his father had been Chief Executive of the American Motors Corporation and later Governor.
So why pen such an incredibly tone-deaf, stupid op-ed at all? Even if you really believe that, keep it to yourself. German_reader likes to criticize my extreme positions and language as being unpalatable to ordinary voters. I agree with German_reader. Perhaps Mitt Romney should’ve hired German_reader to advise him.
Mitt Romney likewise engaged in other idiotic stunts during the 2012 campaign. For instance he lambasted the “49%” of American workers who are too poor to pay the federal income tax (but pay many other taxes), suggesting they’re losers who will never vote Republican. Ron Unz has pointed out that if his minimum wage proposal were adopted then the 49% would be more like the 30%.
Unsurprisingly he went onto lose the election.
Four years later Donald Trump exploded onto the political scene and exposed traditional Republicans like R-Money for the fools they are.
Incidentally, here is a humorous anti-Romney video from 2012:
Of course now this seems obsolete since President Trump is worth about fifty times more than Mitt Romney is:
Romney very successful in business, while Trump has only lost money.
Trump’s assets and total business is valued around $200 million today, but this is more than half less than he inherited from his father.
Trump would be richer than he is, if he had just hired a normal investment management to manage his inheritance.
Obviously, this would create identity crisis for his celebrity identity, as he views himself as a celebrity businessman. But if you read a few minutes in the topic, you will discover he had only been losing money consistently.
His only business success was in being a kind of Kardashian before the 2000s. But Kardashian family, made more money.
Trump was not even very popular on Twitter in the past.
See how few retweets:
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/297042413078319105?lang=en
Because he has a higher understanding than the average cattle.
Of course, there no advantage to American economy, from transferring taxpayer money to a failed industry. Government transfer of citizen’s income, to shit, unsuccessful industry.
He seems a very rigid and moralistic character.Would he even drink beer?
His view of Russia is something from 1950s.
But his political understanding and knowledge is high for a politician, and his viewpoints are aimed at higher intelligence people, than the other politicians in America.
Obama and Trump are speaking in an emotional and intellectually disorganized way – like they are communicating with animals.
So I respect Romney, that he seems to reflect a more intelligent and civilized audience, and without demagogy.
Stop calling ordinary people cattle, it sounds really creepy, like you’re some kind of elitist vampire.
Anyway, my understanding is that Romney came across like a plutocrat who despised even many of his own voters, also totally unreliable on the immigration issue (iirc he favored amnesty for illegal aliens both before and after his presidential run, only toning it down somewhat in 2012 for transparently tactical reasons)…no surprise there wasn’t much enthusiasm for him.
Trump’s populism is mostly fake, but Romney couldn’t even bother to pretend he cared much about the interests of anybody but various lobbyists.
Why are you criticising his religion? That seems rather intolerant to me
Finnish doesn’t have any grammatical gender (which is mainly an Indo-European thing) so there’s naturally only one pronoun. Back in the 19th century when we were ruled by a bunch of Germanic aristocrats they decided that this indicates lack of civilization and there was a big push to introduce gendered pronouns into Finnish, completely identical to what’s now going on in Sweden except in reverse…
A lot of linguistic reforms pushed with the school system starting in the 19th century did manage to modify the language but the gendered pronouns didn’t catch on. They did manage to screw up pronoun use in many other ways like importing the idea of using plurals as “formal” pronouns from German and you still see Finns forcing themselves to follow that totally artificial made up grammatical rule that was never used before we were all brainwashed by schools.
R-Money was successful in business, but so was Donald Trump. There’s a cottage industry in attempting to make Donald Trump out to be much less successful than he is. The two most common tropes are:
• That his business empire has underperformed the S&P 500 since he got started–counting his father’s wealth as his
• That he’s worth a lot less than he says he is
The first trope is based on the false idea that he inherited his father’s money in the 70s, which he didn’t–he got a loan from his father and political connections. He didn’t inherit money from his father until Fred Trump died.
Even if the claim were true, that would mean he took a successful large real estate corporation and did about as well as America’s 500 largest corporations. Not bad.
Trump’s business career is also particularly interesting because its arc. He started out with big successes, then the successes went to his head in a way that was emblematic of the 1980s. He very nearly lost everything as a result, but managed to recover and shifted to a new lower-risk business model which exploited the Trump brand rather than going into highly leverage real estate.
The second trope may well be true, but $200 million is not. The Trump Organization’s long-term lease on 40 Wall Street alone is worth $500 million. Trump Tower is worth something similar. His financial declaration in 2015 listed $350 million in cash and marketable securities alone, and over 500 private corporations.
His financial declaration also had some highly amusing details, such as the fact that he apparently draws a $180,000 annual pension from the Screen Actors’ Guild.
Meanwhile Bernie Sanders’ financial declaration showed that he has $25,000 in high interest credit card debt. No wonder he favors socialism. 🙂
This I take particular issue with. In 1949 Toyota was close to bankruptcy. There was a debate between the Bank of Japan and MITI about whether or not to bail out Toyota. The Bank of Japan was opposed. MITI was in favor, and as part of its argument said, “No country ever got anywhere without making cars.”
At the time Japan’s largest export was…silk. The rest is history.
New GM has gone on to make $70 billion in profits since its IPO. Fiat Chrysler has done very well as well (ironically, by abandoning the gay little faggot cars Obama tried to force them to make).
A lot of small-l economic liberalism is correct, but there is a role for the state to play in making sure the national economy moves up the technological frontier (or staying there in the case of advanced economies).
South Korea is a nice recent case study. POSCO was formed by the state and the World Bank refused to finance it. Today it is one of the world’s largest and most advanced steelmakers (and was wisely privatized once it no longer needed the state). Samsung was forced to enter the semiconductor business by the government.
In fairness to Mitt Romney his op-ed was nuanced and did not actually call for the elimination of the American auto industry. However ordinary cattle don’t understand exactly what Chapter 11 Bankruptcy reorganization is. So it was very stupid for a politician to publish, and one of the reasons why he lost in 2012.
To give you an example–I know that teachers are parasitic losers who picked child abuse as a career. But the public has Stockholm Syndrome about this and actually likes teachers and even incorrectly believes they’re underpaid. Thus I would not publish an op-ed under my real name titled Teachers are Trash.
R-Money stated he would brand China a “currency manipulator” on Day One in office. Since he lost the election, who knows if that was true. But I really doubt he intended to follow through.
Back in 2008, both Obama and Hillary claimed they would renegotiate NAFTA. They were asked at a Democratic debate on what they would do if Canada or Mexico refused. They both ducked the question, and the moderator didn’t press the issue. In eight years in office, Obama did nothing to renegotiate NAFTA. Instead he signed a disastrous trade agreement with South Korea and cooked up the TPP and TTIP.
Trump has successfully renegotiated NAFTA (now the USMCA) and KORUS, and he pulled America out of the TPP almost immediately. He has now launched a full fledged trade war with China, and the goal is to outright wrench supply chains out of China.
Now his populism is disappointing on other fronts (healthcare, foreign policy, etc.), but he was and is serious on trade.
The fashionable rules are always changing.
Why, alt-right moral whoring not remunerative enough?
Perhaps more bend-overs are called for.
Well perhaps connotation is harsher in English. I was translating into rednecks earlier – and people (perhaps you) were saying I was misusing the word rednecks.
So, according to urban dictionary – our cattle are your rednecks. But really the meaning is more like, cattle
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bydlo
Sadly agree button doesn’t work.
Yes – we need to get this more commonly used English 🙂
From that definition of the term “Bydlo”:
Maybe some of the Americans here can explain, but I don’t think that’s really the same as “rednecks” (which to me, at least, isn’t an entirely negative term, but also evokes images of independent-minded, hard-working rural people with guns who are treated unfairly by ignorant elites).
“Bydlo” seems to be more of a term for urban rabble, if I understand correctly.
My uncle in Ukraine referred to all people not of noble descent as bydlo.
Bydlo is a term beloved of by russian liberal elites with all the associated connotations. Not a good word to use from optics perspective, if nothing else. Though who am I to talk of optics lol.
Maybe stereotypical image of cattle are poor, unpolished, etc. But there can even be rich people who are, basically, cattle. The image for me – of a collective people, lack of critical intelligence, and psychologicaly behaviour similar to animals. Mentally, working as a herd.
So probably a combination of “rednecks” and “cattle”.
Trump and Obama were better for attracting them, on average, than Romney (guy was attracting more intelligent demographics).
Between Paul Ryan, and Trump – American cattle are “neighing for Trump”.
Redneck is a pejorative term when employed by urban liberals, Jews, etc.
Rednecks themselves however use the term to describe themselves. It signifies proletarian rural culture, vocations, hobbies, etc. One can see people with bumper stickers, t-shirts, etc. which proudly proclaim slogans such as REDNECK FOR LIFE.
Many country-western hits include lyrics which proudly identify the singer as a redneck.
The Australian term “bogan” is somewhat similar.
“Hick” on the other hand is entirely pejorative.
Still, not a good idea to call people cattle imo. Some of them might eventually take it personally and punch you in the face.
And anyway, I disagree with your basic point…it’s the supposed elites like Romney who have fucked up and continue to fuck up throughout the West with their misguided policies, based on absurd ideology and their selfish class interests. Trump is an extremely flawed person and kind of a false prophet imo, but there are deeper reasons than mere stupidity why people voted for him.
Obviously, proletarian and lower middle class people tend to be less intelligent and refined.
But you will find no shortage of herd like behavior in the intelligent demographics, who may possibly be even more conformist owing to paying steeper social and professional prices for heterodox thinking.
Steve Sailer has been writing about the “Invade the world, invite the world” ideology for many years now. The consequences of this ideology have been catastrophic. Yet many intelligent people continue to subscribe to this failed ideology and consider “populism” to be some sort of mental disease (or the nefarious creation of the Dark Lord of the Kremlin).
You can see this with more benign, but still foolish, policy memes as well. UBI is currently fashionable. Finland experimented with this, and unsurprisingly it led to laziness. Fancy policy pieces blamed the Finnish government for simply not believing enough in the program.
See this ridiculous piece for instance: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opinion/universal-basic-income-finland.html
Now there are all sorts of silly things that proles believe. They will for instance coordinate (over Facebook) one-day boycotts of gas stations when they think gasoline is too expensive. But they’re generally fairly sound on basic questions of human nature and common sense. Intelligence can be very useful, but it can lead to endless rationalizations of foolishness as well.
Fear of people punching you, is not a motive for avoiding the truth.
If I was American I would vote for Trump in 2016 (well, not actually vote, as voting statistically useless).
However, afterwards must have some smell of the cattle on you, as his election campaign was essentially devolving to animal training.
By the way, this is not necessarily “elitist”.
The herd Obama has created in 2008, included “elite” people like Scarlett Johansson.
This is a problem of Marxism, to assume class interests radically divergent.
Ideology of Paul Ryan or Romney, is generally following careful concept of enlightened self-interest, and opposed to policy like redistribution of resources from normal taxpayers to corporations (as happened in Obama “stimulus package”, which Romney had intelligently criticized).
And even working class segment of Trump supporters, can understand these concepts, when they support his reduction of corporation tax. There’s no advantage for working class American people, to have American corporations incorporate in Ireland, where a tax environment is more competitive.
Policy which results in corporations that had left America, repatriating economic activity in America.
While Obama “stimulus package”, resulted in simple taxpayer subsidy to corporations.
If people like Romney and Paul Ryan, simply following “selfishly class interests”, then they would have supported the “stimulus package”, which had resulted in unprecedented increases in average salary of executives the year later.
So between:
The Islamist who helped campaign to ban Russian singers from Dagestan because of their “un-Islamic” videos and praised the murderer of Yury Budanov
… you choose Based Dagestani Man because of muh gay marriage.
Your Orthodox “nationalists” are no different from the Catholicucks.
Why can’t it be between:
The guy with mauling ground game
You know… what most people are actually looking forward to see in this fight.
Because we all know gay support and Islam are both not cool.
Kebab vs McNugget
Potato is already used for Germans and Scandinavians by resident Kebab.
Actually, Potato Germans has another, less derogatory, meaning as well.
https://da.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartoffeltyskere
I think it lacks noblesse oblige.
No surprise coming from me, but I’m quite comfortable with such language provided it’s casual rather than vicious. I don’t use the term “cattle” (except in response to Dmitri) but I do use “proles” in a similar manner.
We can’t read Dmitri’s mind so only he can let us know whether or not he has noblesse oblige.
Stimulus in the wake of a recession, and in particular a deep “balance sheet” recession in response to a major financial crisis, is simply good economics. When private spending collapses, the government should step in (provided it is creditworthy). If anything the stimulus should’ve been larger, but at least it was larger than the hapless response in the Eurozone.
Of course there is the political problem of what exactly the stimulus goes to, but that’s a problem with any budget.
Republicans talk a tough game on the government budget, but in practice pursue quite expansionary fiscal policies when in office. This was true of Reagan, W, and now Trump. We now have apparently permanent trillion dollar budget deficits (almost 5% of GDP).
Fortunately the government is not a household and these deficits aren’t nearly as dangerous as people think.
Argghhh matey!
Mormons are not in the military in high numbers, but are a very large share of the FBI, CIA, NSA, diplomatic service, and federal prosecutors. They dominate the GOP in Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho despite being a 15-20% population share.
Ok well the Irish Whiskey then tapped out to the Russian Kebab in a choke…serves him right for trash talking the guy for like 2 months and saying how he would easily knock him out. Apparently all the commentators are saying Kebab completely dominated the fight and Whiskey was basically trying to keep standing the whole time.
Peace.
“Bydlo” translates as “goyim”, except even more offensive. Only the worst, stereotypically disgusting Jews use the word.
Oy vey, how antisemitic!
Exactly so.
I’m not a “nationalist”, you can take your Western ideological degeneracies and stuff them where you keep gay marriage.
Why choose the degenerate leftist? Because he’s “russophile” and “white”? He can go fuck himself, leftism is legitimately a worse cancer than Islam.
Congrats, your ape “won” today.
You should get Horizon Zero Dawn when it arrives on PC in Q4. I play very infrequently now, that is the only recent game which compares favourably to Witcher 3.
It’s a very ugly word in Russian that shouldn’t be used lightly. A more accurate translation for ‘Redneck’ would be ‘Gopnik’, but that has it’s own cultural connotations.
Is it just me, or am I the only person here of ex-Soviet background who doesn’t despise regular Russian culture? Well I guess there’s gerard2, but that’s not exactly great company.
Don’t forget guys like Utu (otherwise one of the better commenters) with their ‘my enemy’s enemy’ logic decrying ‘Islamophobia’ as a Jewish plot. Yet somehow German_Reader, otherwise most moderate person on this board, is the only person who ‘gets it’ regarding snakes in the grass like Talha.
I consider Russian rednecks to be vatniks. They are basically equivalent in meaning.
Gopniks are basically lumpenproles, so that would be “white trash” in the US and “chavs” in England.
Bydlo – cattle, biomass, etc. Negative in any national context, unless skilfully interwoven with humor; also a means of signalling liberalism.
Good, lefists BTFO.
(Muslims, despite their talk of beheadings this and infidel that, are cowards at heart. They will bend and submit when faced with the stern rule of law. Leftists, in contrast, are human cancer, burn it with fire.)
Chechens and Dagestanis are renowned in Russia for their strict adherence to rule of law. /s
No contrary stereotypes about that whatsoever as any Russian would confirm.
I believe closest American equivalent of “vatnik” – is “le American bear”.
Meme reference to government-programmed subgroup of cattle.
Rednecks is complicated though, because it seems to have too many positive connotations well?
So when we’re say “all Americans are rednecks”, they might misinterpret this as a compliment.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/14/redneck-pride-west-virginia-protests-strikes
Lol how the events of last night, were so surprising…
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/oct/07/khabib-conor-mcgregor-fight-crowd-brawl-report
There isn’t a single “government” in the US, though. We’re very split along partisan lines, almost on a religious level.
Lots of people use vatnik with a positive connotation, including myself.
Doesn’t seem like it, unfortunately.
Dmitry never referred to his obligations to the “cattle,” unlike Thorfinnsson who has several times talked about the need to guide the proles to better lives.
IMO cattle is worse than even the old word “chattel.” Slaves have humanity, livestock have none.
Interesting, I didn’t know about Mormons in Nevada, Arizona and Idaho. Thanks!
I still don’t get why you would say that, to me “redneck” primarily refers to a very specific subset of the American population, that is poor Southern whites, often of Scots-Irish background, the sort of people whose families have been in America for centuries, but often feel marginalized in modern America.
I guess the term has been extended to other groups of American whites as well, especially those in rural areas. But the US seems to be full of deranged, urban liberals, and those aren’t “rednecks” by any definition.
Anyway, interesting that Russian commenters seem to mostly view this “bydlo” term as rather nasty.
In words, but in actions – putting “more” tag on Gerards comments.
People in such states sometime convert to Mormonism for business reasons.
Of the “open” or “proud” ones. But you can see redneck attitudes almost heavily permeated, including with the liberals (as much as the other side) who will be mindlessly intolerant to any viewpoint foreign
I had a “anonymous” Facebook account for writing some anonymous political comments on stories, in 2017, before I discovered this forum. I write some ordinary comments with my views (which are kind of moderate usually and not very strongly supporting any government views), and some Americans who disagree with my view, call me “Russian troll”. In March or April, Facebook has deleted the account (I was sometimes criticizing on the CNN page).
Lol perhaps in the 1930s. It’s exceptionally common, especially for use in internet commentary. Maybe a politician should avoid it, but it’s perfect for describing the average politician.
I’m not saying you don’t have a right to add “more” tags to Gerard’s comments, which are often insulting everyone. Just that he is the purest English translated vatnik.
Unfortunately Russia is not a country of strict law enforcement, yet. Too much implicit trust for Muslims to function properly; they must be treated like delinquent kids.
I don’t think that has anything to do with the stereotypical “redneck” attitude (which imo is more along the lines of “We know you think we’re dumb trash, but we don’t care, and if you openly insult us to our face, we can still beat you up”).
It’s of course true that the US is highly polarized, and parts of it are downright paranoid…that “Russia stole our elections” nonsense is just bizarre. But tbh my impression is lefties are intolerant fanatics everywhere, not just in the US.
Well, ultimate US nationalists except.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/13/the-missionary-position/
https://www.pri.org/stories/2012-10-22/latino-mormons-lds-churchs-fastest-growing-group
Gerard2 talks like a lumpenprole (gopnik), not a vatnik. Big difference.
Lol, but it would be funny if he’s has a PhD in French philosophy in real life. I mean, he is a connoisseur of classical music and has a very wide knowledge of English vocabulary.
Although this isn’t the stereotypical redneck, this is a pretty incredible song. The entire notion of “being dumb” is so silly given the general attitude of survival and struggle:
https://youtu.be/yqDVObM1kxc
I quite a few “dumb redneck” jokes by told to me by rednecks I knew myself. What most of us consider as intelligence just isn’t that important to them.
Was there much unnecessary poz in Mankind Divided? Haven’t gotten it yet.
There was a whiff of it with the Augmented Lives Matter stuff but it wasn’t featured prominently. The main socjus focus was on the “apartheid” system of separating augs from normies that was instituted from 2027, which involves a whole medley of responses from forcing them to travel separately on public transport to packing them off to ghettos. I didn’t find all this too credible so immersion suffered, but tastes will differ.
The main problem with DX:MD is just that it’s not a very good game. It ends in what should have been the halfway point. It was handicapped by bottom-tier money-grubbing techniques which cratered its ratings, such as including microtransactions (made on the last-minute demand of the publisher Square Enix). Eidos Montreal was also pressure to release the game early, meaning they had to cut a lot of planned content; it’s unclear that Marchenko was even meant to be the final villain (see below). Instead money was invested into ridiculous peripheral things like the Breach mini-game which hardly anybody even plays AFAIK.
It’s a well-polished game functionally, though I do have my pet peeves (many of which also apply to DX:HR as well, and which I can describe later). But there’s too little content for an AAA title game, and fighting a huge, brutish Ukrainian terrorist as the final boss… is a bit anti-climatic (Marchenko should have been the Dragon to the main villain).
It’s a bit of a puzzle why they went in this lame anti-terrorism direction, a major climbdown after the conspiracy-fests that dominated earlier titles. After all, California is due to be destroyed soon. The civil war needs to break out. The Reed plotline needs to be resolved. So many opportunities, but only the latter was even marginally touched upon. And given the inevitable commercial failure of DX:MD, largely a result of inane publisher decisions, none of this may ever be resolved.
Thank you. It sounds like it had all of the problems of HR, but now to the Nth degree. A pity for a promising universe.
Too bad. I was hoping it would be an improvement over HR. But I think the most recent game I played was EU4.
But I think vidya peaked long ago, considering all the best titles are all now ~20 years old..
[partially relevant post from one of Sailer’s threads]
“What I see everyday is that all of the men getting close to retirement … the people being hired to replace them are probably 75% POC.”
I think the original poster’s observations bode very poorly for the United States’ ability to compete abroad in the future or even domestically in the age of globalism. As Anatoly Karlin has noted, Silicon Valley only does well because they have a monopoly (and I’d argue they also have an advantage in marketing due to their native English abilities/not having to hire translators). When faced with actual competition, they struggle. See Tesla as an example; also, Apple – Samsung is the real innovator in the mobile phone market now. American multi-cultural companies currently have an advantage due to them being so large and having a monopoly, but they are extremely inefficient due to their “diverse” hiring practices and they inspire almost none of their employees to go out of the way to innovate for them; employees are nothing more than cogs in a wheel. When Han China bursts onto the scene in the West, watch out.
An interesting topic that likely won’t be covered around here (wrong demographic*) is the competition multicultural American video game companies are facing from traditional, ethnically homogeneous countries like Japan and China. Microsoft’s game console, the Xbox One, is getting dominated this console generation by the Japanese companies Sony and Nintendo. Reason: Microsoft can’t make politically incorrect content, so they are having to rely on low-brow content like sports games, race car games, and first person shooters that won’t “offend” anyone.
*Anatoly Karlin might like this topic, though. I’d be interested to see him write about it.
Meanwhile, Japanese companies put anti-pc tropes into their games all the time – like attractive female characters, strong male characters, and traditional stories like rescuing princesses – in order to appeal to the male demographic. True, many of their first party studios are in the West, but they are controlled by an East Asian culture. Compare that situation to Microsoft, in particular their sexy female mascot, Cortana. She was covered up and purposely uglified in their latest Halo game in order to appease SJWs; formerly, she appeared as a nearly naked hologram with a voluptuous figure and beautiful face. Result: Sony and Nintendo have destroyed them. Microsoft can’t compete at all, so there are rumors circulating that they are getting out of the games console market and trying to rebrand as a streaming service.
And Microsoft isn’t the only Western company to get dominated by anti-pc East Asia or conservative Eastern Europe. Short list:
Electronic Arts (Mass Effect) = took a successful role playing game and purposely made the female characters unattractive; this was done because the game allows players to romance other characters in game, and since “male objectification” is a big thing with SJWs and we can’t have young men looking at hot girls according to female “journalists”, they were removed. Not surprisingly, the game sales crashed.
Electronic Arts (Battlefield 5) = inserted female characters – including a disabled female with blue face paint and a prosthetic arm – into the front lines of WW2 Britain’s armies in Western Europe, despite the utter implausibility of the situation. They also showed the female character doing “ninja” moves and beating up/killing large male characters with a cricket bat. EA’s executive vice president Patrick Soderlund responded to criticism by claiming that detractors (his company’s customers) are ignorant and possibly sexist. Not surprisingly, the game’s pre-order sales have plummeted, and he quit his job before sales figures were released.
Microsoft/343 Industries (Halo) = took the sexy, nearly naked, Cortana character and made her purposely unattractive, both in terms of figure and face. Halo 5 sales were so low they were covered up by Microsoft; true, that aspect of the game by itself did not cause them to lose sales, but it was definitely part of a culture that contributed.
Microsoft’s 343 Industries, like many American companies these days, are filled with affirmative action hires, particularly females. As such, they can no longer make games with attractive females without risk that someone will run to HR or the Soros-funded games “press” like Polygon, IGN, or Kotaku. Their Asian and Polish competition have no such limitations and have crushed Microsoft’s first party production studios as a result.
EA/Bioware = in the Lord of the Rings-esque “Dragon Age” franchise, which also allows players to romance other characters, they inserted a transgendered character whose identity as a male was purposely hidden until just before the player could chose to have sex with them. When this fact is revealed to the player, it is too late to back down…and if the player does, the game is programed to make all the in-game characters hate you for turning down the option of having sex with a “female” character pretending to be male. Not surprisingly, the game was met with derision and sales crashed.
And that’s only a very short list. Compare that to their competition which has dominated:
CD Project Red (Polish company) = produced a “Witcher 3” game, which I believe Steve has covered, with an all-European cast and gorgeous player characters, including sexy females. The game was denounced on many SJWs forums but became a monster hit anyway (it’s almost like politically correct SJWs are a small percentage of the population despite controlling the megaphone). This game effectively destroyed EA/Bioware’s politically-correct Dragon Age franchise. Over the pond, Netflix is busy replacing one of the main Polish characters with a black woman. Fans will loooovvveee that.
Nintendo (Japanese) = traditional content appealing to traditional values (i.e. Mario and Link rescue a princess) have won millions of loyal customers, despite Nintendo’s technically inferior Switch console. They’ve sold millions of units and will likely far surpass Microsoft’s Xbox One in sales this year, despite the Xbox One being out for greater than double the length of time and being much more graphically capable.
Sony (Japanese) = dominated Microsoft in ways that can hardly be described here; their list of first party exclusives is simply breathtaking, both in terms of their quality and in terms of their variety. They are regularly attacked by American SJWs for including content from Japanese companies that feature attractive women, but they largely ignore that and have crushed multicultural Microsoft as a result. Under this same category, I’d file many other Japanese game companies, but if I did it here, you’d never finish the post – for the two or three people who made it this far.
And on the horizon is China’s Tencent, a game company of monster proportions only held back by the shortsightedness of the Chinese government. Once they get into the Western market with their anti-pc content, they may very well dominate, too.
And that boy is going to get “smashed” for not abiding by discipline by his father.
“I think that for Khabib, the most severe sanctions would be my regard. I am going to regard this severely,” Abdulmanap told Ren TV. “I warned him. For me, the most important thing is discipline. You can do whatever you want in the octagon, but beyond its barrier—this is the border separating civilians, there are children, women, bystanders.”
…
“I know my father’s gonna smash me when I go home,” Khabib said.
https://www.si.com/mma/2018/10/08/khabib-nurmagomedov-father-abdulmanap-brawl-ufc-229
I love that family – that dude is afraid of no man in the ring, but he is afraid of the censure of his father. That’s the way it ought to be.
Also, Putin called him to congratulate…
Peace.
Heh, if you want to consider it, the quality was already being dropped hard by proto-SJWs even before they explicitly showed themselves. Both Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2 had lost writers for internal purges for being offensive, and the quality of the work suffered: you didn’t need to see obvious SJW stuff to be annoyed at repeating dungeons or the lack of closed plotlines in ME3.
The argument has always been that by making the work more “inclusive”, they would increase the audience – a rather ridiculous thing given the Pareto Principle. Its always better just to focus on the fringe that you’re aiming at, something which ironically Japan does better too. There is a niche for shota and gay audiences in Japan, but its just clearly labeled and made for that audience, and there is no moral obsession with signaling that its “good.” Its just a fetish like anything else.
What’s sad and funny is that this isn’t the first time that the American game industry had self-destructed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
In many ways to similar issues, where poor quality rapidly carved down on the audience perhaps most infamously captured in the unplayable “game” of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial where Atari ultimately tried to hide how badly they were doing by…burying unsold copies of the game in the desert. Epic.
Poor quality does seem like its going to do in triple A games once again, and narratively its most obvious in the inclusion of SJW elements. For awhile open-source and indie projects have avoided it, but with the ever increasing reach now with “code of conducts”, it doesn’t seem like even they will survive.
In some ways, the Eye of Soros/SJW really does feel like Tolkien’s Sauron. Unable to create, but perfectly gleeful to twist and destroy every franchise it touches. Its impossible to imagine a FromSoft in the US these days, much less a Metal Gear Solid. There’s so little value in skill or artistry, and game making really does seem to depend hugely on talented lead designers.
It’s not whether sportsman wins or loses which is important, or shows their character – it is how sportsman behaves after both victory and defeat.
In this case, he shows the character of an uncontrolled clown, or even a poorly trained dog. White man allows him to compete in their sport, and he fails to understand the basic concept of sportsmanship or discipline which the sport is supposed to be teaching, but instead shits on the American carpet. Actually at least the father is acting ashamed of his son.
Tesla is producing (apparently) very good and innovative products, which already has a lot of fans who wait years to buy them.
Problem of Tesla is in its financing and there was some kind of mismanagement of manufacturing. It’s a new startup though.
“What’s sad and funny is that this isn’t the first time that the American game industry had self-destructed.”
Check out the American comic book industry for an example of a self-inflicted decline. It’s on the verge of extinction due to SJWs; true, digital media played a role but these nuts took a swan dive off the George Washington in epic fashion. 10/10. They replaced nearly all their white male superheroes with feminists, stereotypical gay men, overweight lesbians, unattractive females, and various minorities – including replacing Iron Man’s Tony Stark with a 15 year old black girl supergenius who is written like a psychopath. Not surprisingly, their sales have crashed as their male audience has fled. Check out a YouTuber by the name of Diversity and Comics. He’s gone on a wild ride detailing the insane antics of Marvel Comics. He has a pretty good saying: “we are in a post-profit industry.” In other words, these companies get infected with these political extremists and then shift to not wanting profit from the “wrong” people, even if their company loses money and goes out of business; another failing of multiculturalism – no one has any loyalty to anything, including companies and institutions.
https://i.imgur.com/OvSAxii.png
Only someone who hasn’t kept up with what happened ahead of the match would claim McGregor behaved like a sportsman. His team made it way too personal by literally throwing a dolly through his team’s bus window, insulting his family, people and religion, not to mention trying to kick him at the weigh-in. Twinkie probably knows what I’m talking about.
Which is why Al Iaquinta, Khabib’s last opponent, said Conor and his trainer got what was coming to them.
That being said; he should have 100% restrained himself and not jumped the fence – he realized that and apologized and will (deservedly) get penalized by the association as well as (deservedly) smashed by his dad.
Yup, fathers need to take responsibility for teaching their sons right.
Peace.
Is this a real villain in a real comic, or just some alt-right trolling?
It’s literally an SJW’s depiction of what xer believes is “Nazi thought” voiced by Red Skull, the enemy of Captain America.