I think you misunderstand: the core of the argument is our lack of respect for you.

I played a lot of Tread Marks, an arena tank combat game with fully destructible terrain. The capture the flag mode was super intense, and there was a decent online and modding scene for awhile. The highlight are the levels, which are incredibly varied and creative outdoor environments, some of them extremely psychedelic. It's open source now and has bots, so there's nothing stopping you from trying it out.

Hell yeah, Liero was intense. I had it on a floppy disk, and we would play it on the library computers at school during lunch recess.

Thank you for the effortpost

Starting with the US: a very significant amount of the labor was unaccounted completely in the official statistics. In a family of 4, if the father worked the fields registered as an agricultor while his wife and children "helped" him, this was accounted only as one worker, where de-facto there were four workers.

This vibes with something I could never quite put words to, even in the modern day: if agricultural work is really so rare, why is it that SO many people I know worked on the farm when they were growing up? I'm sure there's some selection bias from living in a large midwest city. But those cities are filled with young people who grew up on a farm and spent their afternoons and weekends doing chores (e.g., actual farm work), and then got out of that lifestyle as soon as they could.

First and foremost, a huge factor is climate. The climate in the grain-growing steppes of the former USSR is much more unreliable, with shorter growing seasons, colder weather, and a larger variability in rainfall compared to the temperate grain-growing regions of the USA.

The USA has so much EZ-mode arable land, it always seems unfair to compare it's output to... anywhere else, really.

It is simply incomprehensible to people like me from the capitalist west to imagine a rural life rich in arts, healthcare, education, culture, sports and entertainment. Practically every town with above a few thousand inhabitants had a "Дом культуры" (dom kultury, culture house) vibrant with poetry clubs, art classes, theater companies... Children also could enjoy an immense amount of positive activities by belonging to the communist youths of the pioneers and the komsomol, so they weren't isolated in their homes as American children are (even in cities)

I'll have to read more about this, it seems like a good model for how to make rural life enriching. I think a lot of the reactionary attitudes we get from rural areas mainly come from how hollowed-out the society has become.

Name a more iconic duo than "metal bands" and "selling out"

What do you want to bet that Ritchie Torres personally had a bad experience with losing access to some digital game. If we have someone illegally occupy and auction off his home, then maybe we can shift his position on Palestine as well!

The Twitter discourse among AI tech bros has gotten positively millenarian. They would have you believe that all work will be done by AI powered robots in nine months.

The lack of games was a blessing in disguise. Many of us left it powered off so long that the firmware is out-of-date enough to get hacked.

Modern GW art is severely lacking in Weird Dudes in the background.

I'd say it's the old phyrexia stuff from the early 00s (EDIT: omg, it's actually older than I thought, it's from the late 90s). They actually did pull together a unified style, while keeping the character and soul intact. There are definitely a few good pieces of art in modern times, but in the 90s and 00s I was excited to see the art when I opened a booster pack.

The hand-drawn art of 90's MTG was so evocative and full of soul. I think it's not simply the change towards digital art that ruined it, but also WotC's imposition of corporate style guides that ironed out all the lumps of character that the art had before. It affected the tabletop gaming industry broadly as it become more financially lucrative, you see the same phenomenon from Games Workshop and D&D stuff: the art came to reflect the character of the Business.