Xcalibur

exactly what @ChopBlock223 said. Don't get me wrong, WP isn't that bad, but it's mediocre and biased, with people gaming the system all the time; overall it lacks excellence and reliability. They're also not forthcoming about their financial situation. And as I said, there are archives/mirrors of its content, so the whole thing can easily be rebooted under different management, which I think would be the best way to resolve its issues.

It was an interesting time period, because more people were online with better connections than in the 90s, but it wasn't as conglomerated as it is now. As Chopblock was saying, Wikia/fandom is a great example of the downside of this, where organic communities get shat on by slumlords who only care about spamming ads. What makes matters worse is that those slumlords are the Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs the mediocre and pretentious Wikipedia, which means they already have a source of income, on top of rich donors, but that doesn't stop them from panhandling. Sidenote, please do not donate a cent to Wikipedia/WMF, it's trash for this and many other reasons. I wish I could deplatform it, then it could be rebuilt from an archive/mirror. Anyway... /b/ was never good, but 4chan really was a major nexus of internet culture, and imageboards had a certain insane creativity you couldn't get anywhere else. Underneath all the shitposting, there were gems. But still, it's funny to me how people act like browsing the *chans was the greatest thing they ever experienced. The rise of big tech censorship, the culture war, and moral crusading has definitely made the internet less chill than it used to be. Social media tends to have an amplifying effect, and also tends to bring out the worst aspects of people and culture. I found my way here via doom wiki. I've said it before, but much props to the people here for declaring their independence from Wikia. I started out writing content on the wiki, but migrated as soon as I learned of the fork. With some difficulty, I've been able to revert most of my Hexen walkthrough content on the Wikia, replacing it with much more basic walkthrough from strategywiki. My wikia content covered the last two hubs, and it's now on the fork; I also rewrote the first three hubs exclusively on the fork, so that's something.

true, but force of numbers tends to even this out. Highly controversial topics tend to be split down the middle, while quality content from either side tends to be mostly likes, with partisan dislikes still being a minority. It's trash that pisses off everyone that gets buried in dislikes. lol yea, I was thinking this topic seemed a bit dated.

As usual, corporations/powerful entities demand special protections, and the people aren't allowed to express themselves, which goes against the whole point of the internet being an interactive medium.

Wouldn't call these excruciating, since I tend not to take on tedious bullshit challenges. But my highest gaming accomplishments: Getting 1CC on Battletoads, NES, US version, no warps. Getting KO & 1st round TKO on Mike Tyson in Punch-Out!! 1CC Turtles in Time (SNES) hard mode. 1CC original Castlevania on NES. No cheating or savestates for any of these. In case you're not familiar, 1CC means One Credit Clear, meaning you're allowed to lose lives, but you beat the game without using a continue.

I'm not a progressive myself. In fact, a few years ago I pissed off the regulars here by debating about political issues in my typically stubborn manner. That said, people naturally have different values and inclinations, and both Left & Right, innovation & tradition, have something to offer. As for you OP, the real issue is not stuff you hear out there, but the dark place you're in right now. You can't fix the world, but you can fix yourself.

Super Breakout, Atari 2600. classic stuff

I listened to them in my younger days, alongside Loveline with Dr. Drew & Adam Corolla. it was good stuff while it lasted, but I drifted away from that years ago.

Of course those ideas have been used other times, and I'm not denying Star Wars' borrowings -- from those films, and from Dune. But it's about how you do it. Star Wars took existing works and blended it into something new and distinctive, with its own character. TLJ just ripped stuff off and pasted it in, doing the absolute minimum to rework it. There's a subtle but profound distinction between hackjob ripoffs, vs liberal borrowing to make something new. Going on a tangent, my favorite music genre, hiphop, has always sampled existing records. Some argue that sampling is plagiarism and unoriginal, but I say it's not, because they rework the samples into something very different from what the original artists intended. If no one was allowed to take existing concepts and run with them, it would choke off creative development. On the other hand, when you borrow from existing works, you have to do so with proportionality and creativity, instead of just regurgitating. Fair Use doctrine regarding copyright is a great example of what I mean by this.

I'm aware of its roots, but there's a difference between plagiarism vs influence/inspiration. As the saying goes, originality is the art of concealing your sources. You're allowed to borrow from things, as long as you rework it and make it distinctly your own. The Original Trilogy did that, Disney most certainly did not. TLJ in particular just ripped entire sequences: they turned Hoth to salt and moved it to the end, Cloud City became casino planet (complete with betrayal), Dagobah became the island (complete with dark side cave), and they took the throne room from RotJ while making it far less dramatic and effective. The space chase with fuel running out was from Battlestar Galactica, and the scene of shooting at a hologram was from Escape from LA. There was no effort to turn old into new, it's just a cut & pasted hackjob. Also, porgs were a nauseating merchandise insert.

Came in to say this. I don't think I've ever seen a film that insulted my intelligence quite like TLJ. It didn't even have the saving grace of being so-bad-it's-good. It's cheesy, clunky, incoherent, inconsistent, poorly paced, poorly plotted, etc. In particular, it veered wildly between being a serious drama vs a parody, and the camera work was lazier than a porno. It had blatant merchandising shoved in, to say nothing of the heavy-handed, preachy far-left politics (although I won't say anything more on that, since that's a red button around here). It also assassinated characters, broke the logic of the fictional universe, and had zero grasp of military strategy. Worst of all, TLJ is about 90% plagiarized -- much of it is ripped from Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, along with an episode of Battlestar Galactica, the ending scene in Escape from LA, and filler scenes from a sci-fi movie from 2009 (forget its name). Plagiarism is the nemesis of creativity; it's lazy, dishonest, and shows no integrity. It actually took me awhile to process how truly awful it is. I don't think any film has made me say "uhh, okayyy..." more times than TLJ. The only positive thing I can say about it is that it has fancy special effects, that's it.

There's a common myth that everyone thought the world was flat centuries ago, and we only found out that it's round in the modern era. For the most part, this is false. There were in fact some ancient cultures that believed in a flat Earth, but round Earth was figured out in Ancient Greece and India, and the knowledge proliferated from there (it's not a coincidence that those were two of the most philosophically oriented civilizations). Europe at the time of Columbus 500+ years ago largely understood that the Earth was round, in fact there's a globe that dates back to the 1400's that leaves out the Americas because they weren't discovered by Europe yet. Columbus' whole idea was to circumnavigate the globe in order to find an alternate route to the spices of Indonesia & East Asia (and bumped into a new continent along the way), which would only be viable if they knew the Earth is round. Centuries later, with far better knowledge, a combination of contrarians, fundamentalists, conspiracy theorists, memers etc believe the Earth is flat, even though there are basic proofs that it's not: you can't see the Himalayan Mountains from far away, the sky flips upside-down when you cross the equator, and the constellations are different.

There is truth to what you're saying. East Asia had woodblock printing long before the West, but it was Europe that invented movable type, a key breakthrough. Why is that? Because movable type is far easier to create with an alphabet than with thousands of characters. So yes, structural differences can be significant, but what I said still applies.

This is accurate. Other scripts wouldn't be difficult to input with proper accommodation. For example, you could have a keyboard with radicals or hangul components, and the software would combine them into characters automatically as you typed them. Of course, that keyboard would have to be designed differently, ie you'd have to have multiple components per key, and the ability to easily shift between them to cover the whole system. Radicals for Chinese characters would be especially challenging, but as long as the most common radicals were easily accessible, it would be fine (you could have more complicated input for the rare ones). For a kana keyboard, you could have different shift keys for dakuten/handakuten as well as a shift lock for switching between hiragana & katakana. We get so used to our way of doing things, that we forget that there are other ways and means.

I'd recommend asking in princed dot org.

I can confirm, hangul is arguably the best-designed writing system in the world. It consists of elements/particles grouped together, each element representing a phoneme, so that each block is a syllable; in this way, it combines the advantages of an alphabet and a syllabary. Not only that, but the vowels & consonants are easily distinguished, and the design of the particles is similar to how the tongue is placed when pronouncing it. It really is superior, but it's only used in Korea, so if you're not into that language/culture it's not relevant. Chinese characters are built on a different principle than most writing systems. Instead of capturing the sounds of language, it captures ideas. This has certain benefits -- if you know the characters, you can read a text without knowing the language (historically, this helped unify China, which then as now is a huge region with different peoples and languages). It condenses meaning down into less symbols, and as someone else said, they have great aesthetic qualities. The main downside is that they're much more difficult to learn, it's alot to download into your head. But even that issue is alleviated somewhat by the system of radicals/components. All characters are formed from the same set of components, and these intuitively tell you the meaning and how it's pronounced. Chinese relies on these symbols entirely, while Japanese (which I've studied) combines them with a native syllabary; strangely enough, modern Japanese is written similarly to Bronze Age languages, with logograms for words and a syllabary for grammar. Our own latin script is pretty good, although not necessarily the best. It's ultimately derived from the Greek alphabet (as is Cyrillic), which came from the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs (which are logographic). So there's an entire chain of evolution reaching back to ancient times. Chinese characters have their own ancient origins as symbols etched onto oracle bones, which were used for divination. Gradually they developed from pictograms (which directly resembled real things) to more abstract forms; this can also be seen in the development of cuneiform, a script which despite its merits went extinct in antiquity. Inventions of writing were relatively rare, the breakthrough only happened a handful of times. While there are many writing systems, most of them can be traced back to a small number of originators. One exception may be rongorongo, a unique writing system from East Polynesia, discovered on Easter Island. As you've guessed, I've delved into this topic a fair amount, and this gave me an excuse to expound on it. I could say more, but that's plenty enough for now.

I think one of the more interesting things about games is how they immerse you in situations unlike your real life, and let you explore moral choices and consequences. As a male human in particular, I find games satiate certain base drives and instincts I have that are ill-suited for the real world. Honestly, killing stuff in an FPS is fun, and so is conquering the world in a grand strategy title. Obviously, going on a killing spree is bad news (and the kind of bad news we've had too much of in recent years). And of course, waging aggressive wars and slaughtering people just for glory, wealth, and political/cultural mastery is orders of magnitude worse in a moral sense. Yet you can do these things in games without being a monster irl. I don't think there's anything wrong with indulging in such impulses, whether through games or other media. The key thing is to distinguish between entertainment and reality, and not take it to excess. Besides, I'm opposed to censorship in general, since it's fundamentally dishonest and puts shackles on creative expression. Naturally this means that some rather disturbing & upsetting things get published, but that's the way of things. Everyone has different limits, theoretically anything can be offensive to someone out there, so the only limit should be flat-out illegal content IMO. As for aggression in general, it causes quite a lot of trouble, but ultimately it's there to help us survive, as individuals, groups and as a species, just like our other innate attributes.

for those into this, I recommend the SCP series (Secure, Contain, Protect). it's crowd-sourced horror writing, with the gimmick that the stories are supposed to be documents from an agency (NGO or similar) tasked with keeping monsters, demons, and other nightmarish entities hidden and locked away. there's some legit good quality stuff there.

not bad. in this case it's just classification, but labels like "boomer", "zoomer" etc do in fact refer to a larger conflict between generations. that stupid "ok boomer" meme that used to be around is a prime example of this. I think partly it's because of accelerated social/technological change. it also has to do with issues like the middle east wars, the 2008 crash, etc in which younger generations had to pay for the mistakes of the older folks.

this is true. but it's also yet another example of inter-generational tension.

Ideally, you're supposed to take on the challenge the way the devs intended, using only the tools and methods they made available to you. In practice, it's not a big deal if you use savestates sparingly, especially to avoid repetitive, tedious play (eg doing the same easy thing over and over to get to the hard part). I think there's a big difference between judicious use of savestates vs savescumming, ie using them to brute-force your way through instead of playing properly. It's a matter of context and of degree. but even if you're playing by the rules so to speak, there can still be ambiguities. A great example of that is the final boss of Zelda II, Dark Link. First, you can trick the AI by standing in the corner (because they had to reduce AI to make the game fit on a cartridge). While seemingly legal, it feels like cheating because you're exploiting a weakness in the game that wasn't really intended (developer intent being an important concept). Secondly, you can use magic to give yourself extra health. while this is usually fair, in the case of Dark Link, you and him have the same HP, and the fight is intended to be mano a mano, a fight to the death between two evenly matched warriors. It only seems fair to keep the same HP, and not use magic to give yourself an advantage over your opponent, at least in that specific situation. Subverting the intended challenge, even if allowed to by the game, feels like you didn't "really win", at least to me. (and yes, I've beaten Dark Link fair and square, it's one hell of a fight).

Biggie & Big L are my two favorites. classic hip-hop was always my favorite genre, although I can't get into the new stuff for the most part.

as others have said, they are poisonous garbage. sure, they might help you get through long hours, but the costs are not worth it. you'd be better off with coffee, or even chewing on coca leaves if you could somehow get them.

sci-fi & fantasy are closely related, they're both forms of storytelling with extraordinary elements. the essential difference is that one uses magic while the other uses advanced technology.

it has to do with friction and tensions between different generations. also what NoXion said.