JDPoZ
@JDPoZ@lemmy.world
- Comment on prudish mom 2 days ago:
I am convinced that violet8 is the single most horny poster on Lemmy now… which is fine… because I am entertained by your posts.
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 2 days ago:
I bet they’re in their early-20s and either are done with college or didn’t attend so they’ll respond with “HA. Wrong!”
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 2 days ago:
Oh gosh. Great 6 paragraph essay countering made up points I wasn’t making.
Sorry to make you read so much?
Here…
Let me make a 4-paragraph response to that criticism specifically (since apparently when I do the internet thing of separating out some sentences to give certain thoughts some visual breathing room, that’s means it’s a big scary paragraph I guess.)
🤣 Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think (based on the other responses you got besides mine), your point seemed to be “don’t like it? Stop buying that thing b/c you don’t need it” rather than being something perhaps more prescriptive from a policy-proposal standpoint where you might accurately assign the blame to the giant monopolistic company who has a stranglehold on the space of digital marketplaces like “yeah we probably should break up Amazon” or maybe even just more helpful in a direct way like “here’s a link to a place you could buy that thing that I know about” instead.
Choosing Amazon for a dr recommended medicine is definitely the same as choosing it for your coffee flavoring.
The point I was making in response is that what the product IS matters NOT. The point was that a SINGLE COMPANY might be the only feasible place your average consumer could purchase said product - whether frivolous luxury sprinkles, or a niche but paramount healthcare need… is bad.
My point is unless you are under duress, you are responsible for your actions.
Disagreed due to poor framing. One of the reason we broke up monopolies in the past (but don’t anymore thanks to capital basically fully capturing any semblance of a working democratically elected government), was to eliminate the ability of singular entities - through the knowledge that they owned the ONLY way to get something - to exploit or price gouge on goods that consumers either want, but especially NEED.
Obviously my stupid caramel sauce is not a great example of a NEED, so you can disregard it, but my point wasn’t about stupid caramel sauce or other frivolous bullshit… it was about the fact that THERE ARE SOME THINGS NOW THAT YOU CAN ONLY REALISTICALLY FIND ON AMAZON and if THEY ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO HAVE IT, THEY CAN FUCK YOU OVER HOWEVER THEY WANT.
“Don’t buy stuff” is a stupid fucking argument (regardless if it’s your banana slicer or your fat ass’s XXXXL diapers that your mom can’t buy anywhere else) - in the same way someone says “just sell your house if global sea rise causes it to flood there…” like how Ben Shapiro likes to do.
Assigning “personal responsibility” as a response to a SYSTEMIC problem is a stupid one.
Why are Americans fat?
Me : “Because we have more shitty foods literally lab-designed to maximize addiction, filled with additives that were made illegal in other countries, because we allow companies like Coca Cola and Pepsi to advertise to children and set up soft-drink machines in school common areas and cafeterias now have fast-food outlets in them, there is almost no public transit or walkable cities anywhere in the US nor safe biking lanes or even consistent side-walks - meaning a car is the only choice for many places Americans live - which means less traversal by foot, zero free time to cook healthy meals nor the larger incomes needed to afford things like fresh groceries, nor even access in some cases to nearby healthy food suppliers such as grocery stores vs gas-stations filled with lukewarm hot dogs and 5-hour energy drinks? All of which statistically can be linked to people in the US on average having a much higher-than-other-countries-with-similar-GDP average weight, increased rate of diabetes, and other tangential health problems.”
You : “No, stupid… it’s b/c Americans are big fat lazy cunts who love choco-bars and are unique to the world and like being fat.”
Ooops sorry - that’s like 30 paragraphs. Just forget reading it since that’s probably too hard. Probably because you hate reading… not because of any other factor. You just need to take personal responsibility.
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 3 days ago:
Ah yes - the “personal responsibility” argument… 🙄
Whatever product it is isn’t really the point.
There are certain things that people either need or want and if Amazon is the only place to get them and your solution is, “well, just sacrifice” is fine if it’s a luxury good like stupid caramel sauce, but what if it’s something like vacuum cleaner bags for the vacuum you use are only sold now via Amazon?
What if it’s a specific chewable version of a vitamin your kid’s doctor suggested for your child who has a specific deficiency and can’t swallow pills and the only maker of the kids chewable of it sells on Amazon?
Should I just “take responsibility” and not give them the med?
…or maybe we should just be okay with criticizing the fucking trillion dollar company that gets to have a monopoly, and maybe think of other suggestions to give other than a “Ben-Shapiro tier” canned response. 😑
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 3 days ago:
My biggest problem is that very specific niche products and have no direct sale options from the supplier / manufacturer tend to only be available on Amazon.
Like there’s a specific caramel sauce I like to put in my coffee that is made from real caramel and not “caramel flavored corn-syrup” and the company that makes it is great and based out of the US, but they have no direct-sale option on their website nor any place that says “where to buy.”
The only place I’ve found it to be reliably sold from is Amazon, because I’m not a small coffee business. As far as I can tell, unless I order massive quantities via some sort of scheduled contract ordering agreement, I don’t think I can order direct from the manufacturer.
I hate Amazon and would rather not give them money, but they have effectively created a de-facto monopoly for certain products… whether they are the actual only major supplier that has both a web storefront and that will ship around the US… or they are the only web storefront that yielded search results for specific products when consumers are combing the web marketplace for them.
Until the US govt or other entities with regulatory teeth willing to prosecute them for monopolistic practices and maybe even break them up some day, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect even the most savvy consumers to fully remove themselves from purchasing at least some number of very specific goods form Amazon.
- Comment on Xbox chief Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft 1 week ago:
Exactly.
People forget that the Xbox game division is only a subset of Microsoft so Phil always had to answer to the bigger suits.
Phil actually made games. Phil came from a pretty cool era and I’ve seen him interviewed over the years by people who you only go talk to if you liked games.
As far as US game company execs go, Phil wasn’t the worst.
Also as far as I know, unlike the head of a certain studio who ruined WoW and CoD and more, he wasn’t mentioned recently on a certain set of files that were made public recently.
I know it’s not exactly a high bar, but Phil actually seemed like someone who cared about gaming in general, but he probably also didn’t get to be in charge by pushing back and sticking his neck out to save everybody else whenever it came to making the Xbox division as profitable as the suits above him demanded.
Whoever is next will be likely switching from a shovel to an excavator to dig the Xbox brand’s grave.
- Comment on Did anyone really think the Final Fantasy 7 remake was better than the original PS1 version? 1 week ago:
The original FFVII was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment.
FFVII came at a point when Nintendo’s most beloved 3rd party partners had felt wronged by Nintendo’s semi-monopoly / greed - in that Nintendo had continued to charge a massive premium on cartridge production for anyone who wanted to sell a cart to run on their systems (think Apple pre-USB-C where everyone who wanted to make “Lightning Port” accessories basically had to pay Apple a premium every time they built any iPhone / iPad accessory), and this had only worsened with the N64 due to the increase in hardware costs (some SNES games like Chrono Trigger were already $80-$85 in the mid-1990s which was VERY expensive for the time). So 3rd party partners were willing to pivot to take a risk with SONY who was relatively unproven in video games (and who also had a very big chip on their shoulders thanks to Nintendo backing out of a hardware deal with SONY at the last second so they literally set up shop to poach 3rd party partners to bring exclusively to their new PlayStation project).
FFVII also came out at a point when there was excitement and a rush to produce new “3D” (polygonal mesh-driven assets) visuals as opposed to “2D” (traditional sprite sheet-driven assets) visuals, and the amount SquareSoft (before they merged with the Dragon Quest “Enix” guys) was willing to spend to invest in making these kinds of assets for a video game - at least at the scale they were attempting - was unheard of at the time.
Hironobu Sakaguchi had been at the helm of the Final Fantasy JRPG series for more than a decade, and had just lost his mother. FFVI was already a masterpiece in storytelling (which is the main thing that JRPGs brought to the table in gaming), but he had decided to try and tell a story that resonated with the same sort of feelings he had in losing his mother.
All that combined :
- the first new big SquareSoft JRPG for the “32-bit” era
- launching on MULTIPLE CDs (also a somewhat new and novel concept) instead of a cartridge
- the first to do some 3D graphics instead of 2D sprites for visuals (though backgrounds were still pre-rendered sprites)
- the first to incorporate SOME real orchestration as opposed to pure MIDI-style instrumentation
- Sakaguchi’s loss inspiring him to add that aspect to the story - which lead to one of gaming’s most impactful moments of all time at that time in an era when “storytelling” still had not evolved much… we had yet to get cinematic games like Metal Gear Solid yet - which kind of was the first truly movie-like experience with full voice performances and advance emotive animation from character bodies, and camera actions designed to mimic cinema.
So any remake would NEVER live up to the original, because even the original cannot live up to itself anymore - because the original’s story relied on how voices played in your head, rather than some actor maybe not being up to snuff, the graphics not aging very well b/c of how early-on it was in the creation of polygonal assets and animations, and how there wasn’t really anything of equivalent cinematic awe in gaming that had been released yet to compete with the story-telling of JRPGs like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger, and Earthbound (Mother 2).
I think taking on the challenge of remaking it is interesting, but I always would rather an effort be made to make something new, rather than rehash anything - even things that I grew up loving… because nostalgia is always chasing a ghost… and ghosts never live up to your hopes and expectations.
All that being said, the thing I had the biggest issue with was the “style” of the characters in the remake. They are inherently very stylized in the original, and there seems to have been zero effort to maintain any of that “style” from the original, because it seems the modern interpretation was to toss out any possible “style” interpretation for more “realism” in the character designs… think “Disney live action remake” adaptions of characters vs their original animated character styles.
Here’s what I mean… I wanted Barret to look like THIS : Image
…instead of this :
- Comment on When you're cooking and it does its thing. 2 months ago:
Garlic, butter, thyme, rosemary, bay leaves, onions, shallots, and basil.
Any of these in almost any dish make whatever you’re cooking smell amazing.
- Comment on Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) 2 months ago:
Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.
I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”
…use it to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.
The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.
- Comment on Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) 2 months ago:
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette. Why? It’s literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you’re simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren’t quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more “real.”
- Comment on Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) 2 months ago:
Hey now… Don’t forget camera bob, “lens dirt,” chromatic aberration, and vignette!
AKA - the video game graphics equivalent of “beer goggles.”
- Comment on Are there video media (e.g TV shows, Movies, anime, video games, youtube videos, etc...) with a majority of the dialogue in an fictional language? 4 months ago:
Thermian. One of the all time greatest gags we lose in the streaming era.
- Comment on NO! I don't want to download your app and set up an account. Leave me alone 6 months ago:
I don’t care what format someone uses as long as software I use supports it. I’d rather save as much bandwidth and support as many features as possible. Animated GIFs and JPEGs are literally ancient formats from the 90s at this point that are terribly optimized and so limited in their feature support. I want 120fps HDR animated images that can be bigger than 640x480 without playback being choppy and the file size being over 200MB.
- Comment on Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket 7 months ago:
Maybe I should start like a service where we get someone like a dedicated “agent” who has their assets hidden to buy tickets for you for a small fee… and then transfer them… like an agency… for travel…
WAIT a second 😱!
- Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 8 months ago:
It’s an expensive carbon spewing parrot.
- Comment on Palworld confirms ‘disappointing’ game changes forced by Pokémon lawsuit 9 months ago:
Th same way Digimon, Monster Hunter monsters, and every other unique IP looks nothing like Pokemon. Make completely original designs that don’t look like fan art or knock offs of another artist’s specific trademark style.
- Comment on Palworld confirms ‘disappointing’ game changes forced by Pokémon lawsuit 9 months ago:
I’m a little torn on this.
On the one hand, let’s be real - clearly PalWorld takes more than a little “inspiration” on a bunch of different Pokemon IP. The illustrations, modeling, and just visual style overall matches in many ways almost perfectly for many of the creatures. They are like off-brand versions of Pokemon with the exact same eyes, mouth types, etc. in many cases as if they were illustrated by Ken Sugimori himselfImage.
Additionally, the game involves using handheld ball devices thrown at wild world-roaming creatures you capture after cutting down their health by some amount to increase the catch percentage and different “grade” balls have increased chance for capture.
There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.
But on the OTHER hand, the leveling up, breeding, base-building, the various ability tech-trees, item crafting, and just overall engine complexity is VASTLY superior to what appears to now be an almost EMBARRASSINGLY behind set of game design mechanics in the actual Pokemon games… it’s sort of a Saints Row vs GTA IV situation here where they were an obvious copy off, but improved in enough ways that ended up being a fun game in itself.
Copying off exact art asset styles is one thing you shouldn’t do… but taking Nintendo’s gameplay ideas and expanding upon them vastly and being told to remove said mechanics as if they stole code is asinine and sets a bad precedent.
Every time there’s been a popular game, there are a thousand copies off them that twist and evolve those mechanics until something else comes along.
Nintendo came along with platformers after Pitfall on Atari. Sonic copied 2D platforming basics from Mario like running to the right and jumping on enemies but changed so much. Final Fantasy copied off Dragon Quest, which itself was a digital idea based off of Dungeons & Dragons. Doom to games like GoldenEye to Halo to Call of Duty to PUBG to Fortnite to APEX Legends…
This feels like taking advantage of grey area in the realm of visual IP similarity to shut down someone making their gameplay design mechanics look antiquated by comparison.
Really embarrassing for Nintendo to be doing this, when clearly what Nintendo should be doing is doing like what Fortnite did when APEX came along and added location / enemy / weapon call outs and just STEALING the mechanics they weren’t clever enough to think of on their own and implement better versions in their own games… but clearly they’d just rather have a monopoly and continue lackluster work.
- Comment on The Simple Act of Buying a Graphics Card Is the Defining Misery of PC Gaming in 2025 11 months ago:
I just kept an eye on Micro Center’s refurbished cards for a few weeks and was able to snag a 3090Ti late last year with a 3-yr warranty for the same price I paid for a 980Ti in 2015.
- Comment on It was rigged? 1 year ago:
Excellent summary, but I think folks were sad because a bunch of us had tuned in hoping to see :
- Comment on A Netflix exclusive 1 year ago:
That first punch that landed on Paul’s face made him stop dancing around like an idiot… but yeah after 2 rounds it became just a war of attrition, where Tyson’s knees (which apparently were in a brace outside of the fight itself) just couldn’t hold up and let him close the gap and deliver any of his admittedly still-fierce punches.
- Comment on Entire Mac Lineup Now Finally Starts With at Least 16GB RAM, Ending 8GB Era 1 year ago:
I know it’s in vogue to shit on Apple…
Apple does have a lot of vertical integration which allows first party stuff to function well and they work closely with a lot of their premium 3rd party software partners, but you try running an actual RAM hungry process like a local LLM model, for example, and all but the highest end latest edition MacBook Pro WILL shit the bed.
- Comment on What websites still feel like the old internet? 1 year ago:
How is it that 2 days after this posted no one has said “Craigslist.”
- Comment on Steven Spielberg is ‘a big PC Gamer’ — loves shooters, and insists on keyboard and mouse 1 year ago:
There used to be stories (not sure how true) of him going to events like E3, Tokyo Game Show, Gamescom, and other developer-centric game conventions.
He also was a key figure / contributor in some old school PC adventure games like Indiana Jones from waaaaay back in the day.
