… When I originally played the game, and still to this day, I consider it the worst ending.

Simply because it causes the most suffering and death.

Illuminati ending is … essentially status quo, nothing really changes, beyond your personal story.

Helios ending… well, terrifying, but frankly, I trust JC.

Play through DX IW and you’ll see he… makes very persuasive arguments.

Uh, anyway, canonically, they blended all three endings together, to set up DX IW.

I’d say the JC/Helios ending is… fairly clearly the most optimistic ending of IW.

Also, fun little uh, spoiler, I guess… one of the endings of DX IW features a panning/dollying shot from the vantage point of an orbital space station.

Its looking at the Eastern US and Western Atlantic.

… Florida isn’t present. It’s almost entirely underwater, by ~2080.

Ah.

That… would explain why I have been confused by / screaming at the internet today.

… wonderful.

Rolling internet brownouts untill the Tracer Tong ending it is then.

I remember Enron being prosecuted, we did at one point at least kind of pretend to give a shit.

But uh… yeah…

ActiBlizzcroSoft

You’l probably get banned or at least have your comment deleted from .world if you say stuff like that, and jordanlund is still the ubermod.

I would say I am fairly sure its some kind of afinancial crime to uh, short a company you have a material position in…

But we live in ‘interesting times’, so… who knows!

… Maybe he had an ‘interesting chat’ recently, with Michael Burry.

That would be ‘funny’.

Yep.

I read this and actually said aloud “Oh Dear God.”

I mean, I’m a poor, I don’t have… a pension, investments, I’ll be lucky if my net worth ever exceeds the FDIC guaranteed $250k…

But uh yeah, yeah, if you have any uh, exposure to the stock market… uh, good luck!

Have fun realizing you were actually just barely less poor than me, this whole time.

I mean, a whole lot of them really do seem to want to go back to Roman/Greek norms, so uh…

Does this toga make my (UwU) look fat?

As an econometrician / data wonk, I’m pretty sure we are past ‘plausible’, more like well into ‘you could do a legitimate scientific paper on this and essentially prove it, and now we’re arguing over error bounds and precise methodology’.

… Have you not encountered a Republican before?

… They could try saying the alphabet, that’s at least a place to start.

Ok, I found one of my longer comments on ‘being an ex corpo from MSFT’.

I think the original post topic was basically about how the Windows kernel is now such a mess that MSFT can’t actually understand it.

I guess I should clarify that I did sign an NDA, and back then, contemporaneous, when I was still trying to work at MSFT, I obviously gave a shit abiut it.

Now, now its like a decade later, I don’t like, still have a copy of it, and I also don’t fucking care.

I worked in the tech industry, now I despise almost all of it with a burning passion, left it entirely some years back.

The NSA has something like the 5th or 6th largest data center in existance, its been around for about a decade, in Utah.

They just capture everything, they have wiretaps on all the trunk lines that feed into undersea cables going international, they work with every major ISP, basically every major city in the US has a building where there are a bunch of floors for major ISPs/TelComms, and a bunch of floors for DHS, FBI, NSA, (Not the) CIA, etc, where those trunk lines come in.

For over a decade now, the problem is that they have so much data that they don’t know what to do with it, how to search through efficiently.

Or, well, that was their problem.

Enter Palantir, whose intial early whole thing as a company was developing ways to prioritizes and rapidly search through astounding amounts of data.

… You aren’t paranoid enough.

If it makes you feel better, when Elon and his idiot DOGE crew did their thing earlier this year, they probably compromised, amongst many other Federal databases… SIPRNet, the superuberduper classified comm system the military uses for the most sensitive realtime digital comms.

Yeah they just fucking got a log in and then opened a shitty remote portal so they could get into it from wherever, as opposed to, you know, a secure site.

Chinese and Russian IPs were nearly instantly seen trying to barge their way in, and frankly, I think they managed to.

Yep, that last part is … basically the most important concept of running a large organization, if you’re a corpo/evil bureaucrat.

The obfuscation is the point.

The ‘I thought I was in compliance’ is the point.

The ‘this is too complex to assign blame simply’…

That is the fucking point, of designing and running a system that works in that way.

… How do you know they’re a her?

Because we are very cheap and superficial.

Cheap in the sense of ‘unwilling to spend more money on things where quality really matters.’

I… I’m not even joking, that’s why, its true in both a pithy and literal sense, if you look into the economics / industry standards of why this happens.

So, sooo many houses that got built in like the last five years, that every idiot bought thinking home prices would go up forever?

They’re rush jobs, hack jobs, absolutely literally full of holes and problems, start falling apart… well it used to be ‘the moment you walk in’, but now nobody is even walking in to them, and some are literally falling apart, even collapsing, before they are bought.

Absolutely hilarious that a decade or so ago, every American I knew was laughing at Chinese ‘Tofu Dregs’.

Building inspectors, realtors, gov agencies who are supoosed to be regulating this, the whole system, its massively, wildly corrupt and broken, you can find a few honest building inspectors on tiktok or youtube who just document how poorly built so many of these new homes are, when they’re called in to double check some other corrupt building inspector’s work.

Its a massive problem, yet another entire element of the US society / economy where massive corruption and fraud is so normalized that I won’t be surprised if some other USAsian shows up here to tell me how its fine, its not that bad.

I did actually block that person, so I can’t reply to comments stemming from their comments without doing it more manually, not on my phone as I normally do, but uh, muchas gracias amigo, no hay mal que por bien no venga, y, sobre aviso no hay engaño.

( Lo siento para mi español torpe, hace mucho que no lo hablo. =P )

I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised, I’ve worked at both functional and dysfunctional large corporations, either themselves tech corps or in the tech wing/department of other large orgs.

The PS3 is yes, a great example of making a versatile product that can appeal to many uh, kinds of markets, market demos.

What I am saying is that Valve is probably the most strategically competent tech company in existence, at least in the US, and that they would not willingly allow themselves to be tricked, at the level of long term, big boy corporate strategy.

They are the people who tend to set traps, not walk into them.

You’re talking to an ex-Corpo, lol.

Nonetheless, yes, the PS3 is a great example of what you can do with a product, but I’m trying to analyze the uh, 12D chess or whatever, the actual strategic conditions of the situation that would dictate whether or not it actually makes sense for Valve to do something similar with the Steam Machine.

Right now, no, it does not.

Valves whole thing is basically effectively stealing PC and Xbox gaming away from Microsoft.

It would be silly of them to allow their own tactics to be used against them in an unforced error.

Oh I’m not, but I appreciate your concern.

See, as a person with CPTSD from the level and extent to which I have been traumatized by narcissists…

I know how they operate, and I’ve basically just played this one, fed into their compulsive need to make everything about themselves, to always see themselves as a victim.

I’ve here taken this uh, organic, emergent, unexpected turn of events, to turn this into an example that further showcases how narcissism actually works.

Why do this?

Unironically, to raise awareness.

So, so many people who are abused by narcissists are of course also gaslit by them, and don’t realize that the way a narcissist acts, the things they tell you are normal…

… they’re not normal.

Here, here’s the song I use as my ‘Ode to Narcissists.’

Listen to lyrics. (Skip to about 2 min if you’re not a fan of the non radio cut, the extended version)

New Order - Blue Monday