Uh

And being an indie dev isn't easy because no one has the time anymore. Everyone is drowning in student loans and low wages. Capitalism is sucking the joy out of them and overworking them and ai art is taking away opportunities to be something unique

Games are $70 fucking dollars now. I can't afford that like. I just can't. Most of us are struggling with finances as is.

You get an indie game with love put into it and it gets received insanely well and it's. Just. Not enough.

Its burnout waiting to happen. No fucking body who goes through the trials and hardship that is game dev wants to be laid off after finishing a game there fully put their chest into. Soon why even bother? It's just another dead end for most and the student loans from learning through school is insane and no one has the time or drive to learn through their own means because we're working two jobs to pay for necessities.

I cannot overemphasize how crazy that is. If you're an indie game launching on Steam (meaning you're operating on a lower budget than most games) one of your first goals is to hit 20,000 wishlists before you launch, since that's the magic number that makes the Steam algo start showing your game to people who don't know you exist. You need months of hard work and good luck to make it, and even then you're still praying that the 20k wishlists actually convert to sales (I've worked on projects that hit 20k wishlists, but with a really low conversion rate so the games still 'failed')

An AA game with a hefty budget would need way more than that to make back its money spent. They would have to compete with AAA games hogging all the attention (and the audience's budget), while not having that scrappy indie culture behind them. If they don't sell enough to make their money back + enough for a new game, that studio is toast.

Hi-Fi Rush's team really went for a hotdrop stunt that would instantly kill 90% of other studios outright, somehow pulled it off spectacularly with a completely new IP that couldn't even fall back on brand recognition, and Microsoft STILL closed them down. They had a miracle team and just fired them all.

As summer approaches, the trapped bodies are going to be a major source of illnesses and epidemics are expected to spread. Already, there are 20,000 cases of hepatitis in Gaza.

It's not the first time that has happened

"Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian was arrested at her home in occupied East Jerusalem last Thursday, April 18, on charges of “serious incitement against the State of Israel” and held in a Jerusalem police station. According to her family, while in detention there she was shackled and subjected to severe interrogation under torture for hours, incarcerated in a freezing, urine and cockroach-infested cell, prevented from sleeping, yelled at and intimidated, and denied essential medication. Anyone who followed the torture debates around Guantanamo, Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, or Abu Ghraib in Iraq will recall precisely what the function of such methods of sensory deprivation is: to reduce the prisoner to a psychological state of terror such that they will confess to whatever their interrogator wishes them to admit.

As Shalhoub-Kevorkian has herself documented, such violence is the norm in Israeli jails. Fortunately, an Israeli court declared on Friday that her arrest was unlawful and that the police had failed to find “substantial evidence to support the severity of the accusations or to indicate [her] involvement in further offenses.” Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian was released, but her ordeal is far from over. The terms of her release stipulated that in addition to paying a bond, she would have to “attend” a further interrogation. That interrogation will take place tomorrow Thursday, April 25, behind closed doors and without legal representation.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s arrest and violent interrogation marks an escalation in a sequence of harassment, intimidation, and attempts at censorship that has been ongoing for years, but which intensified after “Operation al-Aqsa Flood” shook Israel’s sense of security on October 7. Her own institution, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she is among the most eminent professors, holding the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and in the School of Social Work and Public Welfare, has been profoundly complicit in the campaign of intimidation that has seriously endangered her life, as a Palestinian resident of occupied East Jerusalem who lives among fanatical and violent settlers. In October, the administration of HUJ wrote to her requesting that she step down from her post at the University as a result of her signing a statement, previously published in Mondoweiss, by childhood researchers and students calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Not only did they pressure her to resign, but they also took the extraordinary step of making public an employment-related letter that would normally have remained confidential as a personnel matter.

If you dare come at me about banning straws, I will throw you into the sun cannon. I’m disabled, I’m crippled, I need disposable plastic straws, and all those pricey ridiculous alternatives aren’t working as well. Plastic straws were invented for the disabled.

Way to shit all over a vital access need because you think straws are worse than corporate greed.

We all care about the turtles, the seals, the oceans, obviously. Notice how the easiest thing to yell about was something that would barely affect anything but appealed heavily to emotional discourse.

The disabled community is huge, and it can be joined by anyone. Most of those As Seen On TV products were invented for us. Society still mocks us and ignores us, and often outright harms us in multiple ways.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/