• 3 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 5th, 2025

help-circle






  • I know this is dodging your point, but WotC has already divested themselves of MODO and a third party now runs it. I know what you mean, a central server going down destroys access to the game you pay for. And indeed we see that happening with plenty of live service games, to the point that its starting to weigh down the entire industry, or at least that sector of it.

    But I ask, is it really that different? Various NFT projects have come and gone, and most of the NFTs people have paid for have succumbed to link rot already my guy. The average life span for a live service game is like, what? 2 years? And even the successful ones, what? Like 7? I haven’t played God’s Unchained, but I can’t imagine being a blockchain game will make any difference, especially because the games that do survive and are remembered have the following factors:

    Can easily be modded/ hacked Can be easily emulated Were cherished and beloved

    Deus Ex can be downloaded for free. Pokemon red and Sim Tower and Oregon Trail can be run in a browser. Breakout can be run in a search engine. As far as the comparison to MODO, those cards were fungible. When you completed a whole set, you could contact WotC to take them out of your account, and they would send you a copy of the whole set in paper. It’s why MTGOexchange was called that; before bitcoin, you could trade magic cards for drugs.



  • This is something historians struggle with, because “Collapse” has happened before, the most famous of which might be the Bronze Age Collapse, or the fall of the western Roman Empire in 473. Needless to say, those didn’t result in human extinction, or even the extinction of human habitation in those locations (so Greece was inhabited before the Bronze age collapse, but that predates Classical Greece, which we think of as it’s golden age, and one for humanity).

    Specifically, it was (natural) climate change or political turmoil (those usually go hand in hand) making long established trade routes and subsistence patterns untenable, and with it, destroying the power of the people who controlled that trade. There was a reduction in trade, as the elites had the money to import, and the disposition to distinguish themselves from the lower classes. There was certainly some population reduction, because food was not moving as much, and populations were reduced to what the locality could support. I want to note that at this point, we see migrations (although we do see violence). I want to thank Patrick Wyman’s podcast for teaching me this answer.

    So I think, in this case, I think its likely we see this. The current power structure will probably not survive, although pockets of it may hold on in places, and maybe even survive into the next iteration (so think about the Catholic Church, an ancient roman institution survives to this day). Instead, I expect to see local polities spring up, holding on to or rejecting various aspects of the old world. A process of balkanization implies the rest of the world looks on in horror, but I expect to see some process of it happening everywhere. Immediately, these fragments will resemble the world we recognize, but in the centuries that follow, the world will become unrecognizable to us.

    I think its also important to note that like, the destruction of the social order, which would suck for a lot of reasons (like the development of technology like vaccines), doesn’t necessarily mean a “dark age.” Some knowledge was lost (like Roman concrete in the fall of Rome) but I dont think the fall of the modern world precludes the loss of electricity, or motor vehicles, or even something like the telephone.










  • Its also shown in later movies that various other predators will hurt weak creatures if it serves their purposes. The original predator (dubbed “The Jungle Hunter” by the fandom, I guess) seems to have been one of the more “moral” individual Yujata.

    Which I think it is pretty fucking interesting