I mean, practically speaking, he probably won't be playing his next show given that his touring band and all his other openers quit in protest. So unless it's going to be four hours of Ed and an acoustic guitar...
It's also the biggest country in the world by population, by far. That's not really indicative of anything. China is also decarbonizing at an absolutely incredible rate, whereas the US are basically doing everything they can to increase their emissions.
Astonished to see no mention of FEERSUM ENDJINN by Iain M Banks. It's one of his few standalone SF novels and its... Weird. Oh boy is it weird. Multiple parallel interweaving narratives that connect up in truly bizarre ways, a story that takes place across different planes of existence/reality, and parts of narrated entirely in phonetic block capitals like the title. And that's before even getting into how mind-bending the setting is. It's weird, it's brilliant, it's easily the strangest book from an already strange writer. Absolutely recommended, though it's not unlikely you'll get to the end and think "What the fuck did I just read?"
My House is brilliant, but I wouldn't call it an adaptation exactly. I think you can make the same argument for Backrooms (especially the movie). Both draw heavily from HoL, but only in very limited ways. House of Leaves can only inspire, it can never be recreated.
What did they prevent exactly? The tour is still happening, just without Macklemore. So I don't know what you think you mean when you say "prevented the tour."
What happened was the venue owner presented a set of terms, and Ed Sheeran, worth around $300 - $400 million, decided those terms were acceptable. Which means that when offered a choice between "Make slightly less money" and "Defend genocide", Ed decided he was OK with genocide.
And by the way, Macklemore was offered those same terms. There is zero chance they went straight to kicking him off the tour. First thing they did, guaranteed, was tell him that he could either get kicked or cut the Free Palestine stuff. And clearly he told them to get fucked, because he has actual fucking integrity, something that is apparently too much to expect from your precious little sad boy pop star.
Nah, fuck that. What you're calling corny is just sincerity. Leave that irony poisoned "caring about things is cringe" bullshit to the right wing chuds.
Even the goofy thrifting song is based as fuck. It's a rejection of fast fashion and manufactured style in favour of joyous self-expression on a working class budget.
I didn't say free to play would have saved it. It was destined for failure either way. I said that it failed as hard as it did because they decided to charge for it.
My point is not that free to play would have saved it. I was pretty clear about that. But the scale of Concord's failure is absolutely staggering even when compared to other high profile failures. Highguard peaked at 97,000 concurrent players on Steam. Concord's peak? 697. That is literally more than two orders of magnitude less.
So yes, even though Highguard ultimately failed, there's an argument to be made that with some continued investment it might have found a core player base and built that into some kind of ongoing source of revenue. Would it have made back its development costs? Probably not, but there's a chance. But Concord's failure is in a whole different league. It didn't just fail, it smashed into a brick wall at 200mph. And that was only possible because of the sheer arrogance of slapping a price tag on it.
Out of all these points, the key one is that it was $40 in a genre where the median price for entry is $0. That really deserves to be front and centre above everything else.
Everything you've said is completely accurate, and describes why Concorde failed, but the key to why it failed as hard as it did is the decision to slap a price tag on it.
To get away with being a $40 game in a free-to-play genre, they would have to have something so compellingly unique that it could not only stand out in the crowd, but stand head and shoulders above it.
Concorde was still destined to fail even without that decision, because, as you said, there was nothing unique about it. Forgettable, boring characters battling for unclear stakes in generic arenas with generic powers. No differentiation at all. But released as a free to play game it might at least have gone maybe a year before it collapsed.
But the sheer arrogance of taking this boring, also-ran, generic hero shooter clone and deciding that it was so special that it deserved a $40 price tag... That's what turned Concorde into the greatest failure in the history of video games.
Trump is genuinely this stupid, and he's also very insecure, which means he surrounds himself with people just as stupid as he is. Even when those people don't agree with him, they keep it to themselves because Trump's cult leader status allows him to completely destroy the standing of critics within his party with just a few words.
The result is monarchy; a leader deeply unfit for the role surrounded by sycophants who will nod in agreement to everything he says.
It's a pleasant fantasy to think that there's a plan. It would be nice if this was all by design. If America wasn't being lead by some of the most stupid and incompetent people to have ever lived. Because what does that say about Americans, when their leadership are this pathetic?
But this is real and it's happening. Trump is actually this moronic, and the people around him are stupid enough and craven enough to enable him. Those who aren't, like half of the top generals at the Pentagon, get pushed out. The weak willed and the idiotic remain.
Inflation is not ontologically evil. The problem is that we have this Bizarro world version of inflation where everything keeps getting more expensive, unless it's an hour of our labor.
In a world where wages rise in line with costs, inflation actually benefits workers, because generally speaking our debt to savings ratio is much higher. Inflation reduces the comparative size of your debts. If you buy a house for $500,000 today, and then over the next ten years your income doubles, in effect the price of your house has halved. Ditto cars, student loans, medical debt, etc.
The problem is not the inflation itself, but the suppression of wages. That's what's actually killing us.
NB: This does not imply that inflation is ontologically good either. Just that, under the right conditions, it can be beneficial.
I have no disagreement with anything that you've said here, and it honestly reads to me that you have actually come around to agreeing with what I'm saying.
My point is not, and never ever will be, that there is nothing to be concerned about. Trump is a fascist, and he is doing everything he can to turn the US into a dictatorship.
I push back on the oft repeated assertion that (heavily paraphrasing the many different versions of this that I've seen) "Trump can do whatever he wants because of his magic crime powers" because it's defeatist thinking. If you assume that everything and anything is completely within his power and ignore the actual realities at play then you're just conceding ground that is still in contention. It's not actually helpful or useful. You can't fight a war if you're always in retreat. You have to know where the battle lines actually are. That doesn't mean that those lines aren't under attack. But recognizing where those lines are means you can actually fight to defend them.
I mean, practically speaking, he probably won't be playing his next show given that his touring band and all his other openers quit in protest. So unless it's going to be four hours of Ed and an acoustic guitar...
Huh, as of 2023 apparently. Thank you for the correction.
It's also the biggest country in the world by population, by far. That's not really indicative of anything. China is also decarbonizing at an absolutely incredible rate, whereas the US are basically doing everything they can to increase their emissions.
Astonished to see no mention of FEERSUM ENDJINN by Iain M Banks. It's one of his few standalone SF novels and its... Weird. Oh boy is it weird. Multiple parallel interweaving narratives that connect up in truly bizarre ways, a story that takes place across different planes of existence/reality, and parts of narrated entirely in phonetic block capitals like the title. And that's before even getting into how mind-bending the setting is. It's weird, it's brilliant, it's easily the strangest book from an already strange writer. Absolutely recommended, though it's not unlikely you'll get to the end and think "What the fuck did I just read?"
Halfway through reading HoL, I posted to my groupchat "This book is a war crime."
12/10, cannot recommend it enough.
My House is brilliant, but I wouldn't call it an adaptation exactly. I think you can make the same argument for Backrooms (especially the movie). Both draw heavily from HoL, but only in very limited ways. House of Leaves can only inspire, it can never be recreated.
What did they prevent exactly? The tour is still happening, just without Macklemore. So I don't know what you think you mean when you say "prevented the tour."
What happened was the venue owner presented a set of terms, and Ed Sheeran, worth around $300 - $400 million, decided those terms were acceptable. Which means that when offered a choice between "Make slightly less money" and "Defend genocide", Ed decided he was OK with genocide.
And by the way, Macklemore was offered those same terms. There is zero chance they went straight to kicking him off the tour. First thing they did, guaranteed, was tell him that he could either get kicked or cut the Free Palestine stuff. And clearly he told them to get fucked, because he has actual fucking integrity, something that is apparently too much to expect from your precious little sad boy pop star.
This is the only possible answer.
Nah, fuck that. What you're calling corny is just sincerity. Leave that irony poisoned "caring about things is cringe" bullshit to the right wing chuds.
Even the goofy thrifting song is based as fuck. It's a rejection of fast fashion and manufactured style in favour of joyous self-expression on a working class budget.
They're out of money and this is their cover story.
From a business point of view, sure. But that was never my point.
I didn't say free to play would have saved it. It was destined for failure either way. I said that it failed as hard as it did because they decided to charge for it.
My point is not that free to play would have saved it. I was pretty clear about that. But the scale of Concord's failure is absolutely staggering even when compared to other high profile failures. Highguard peaked at 97,000 concurrent players on Steam. Concord's peak? 697. That is literally more than two orders of magnitude less.
So yes, even though Highguard ultimately failed, there's an argument to be made that with some continued investment it might have found a core player base and built that into some kind of ongoing source of revenue. Would it have made back its development costs? Probably not, but there's a chance. But Concord's failure is in a whole different league. It didn't just fail, it smashed into a brick wall at 200mph. And that was only possible because of the sheer arrogance of slapping a price tag on it.
Out of all these points, the key one is that it was $40 in a genre where the median price for entry is $0. That really deserves to be front and centre above everything else.
Everything you've said is completely accurate, and describes why Concorde failed, but the key to why it failed as hard as it did is the decision to slap a price tag on it.
To get away with being a $40 game in a free-to-play genre, they would have to have something so compellingly unique that it could not only stand out in the crowd, but stand head and shoulders above it.
Concorde was still destined to fail even without that decision, because, as you said, there was nothing unique about it. Forgettable, boring characters battling for unclear stakes in generic arenas with generic powers. No differentiation at all. But released as a free to play game it might at least have gone maybe a year before it collapsed.
But the sheer arrogance of taking this boring, also-ran, generic hero shooter clone and deciding that it was so special that it deserved a $40 price tag... That's what turned Concorde into the greatest failure in the history of video games.
You're giving them too much credit.
Trump is genuinely this stupid, and he's also very insecure, which means he surrounds himself with people just as stupid as he is. Even when those people don't agree with him, they keep it to themselves because Trump's cult leader status allows him to completely destroy the standing of critics within his party with just a few words.
The result is monarchy; a leader deeply unfit for the role surrounded by sycophants who will nod in agreement to everything he says.
It's a pleasant fantasy to think that there's a plan. It would be nice if this was all by design. If America wasn't being lead by some of the most stupid and incompetent people to have ever lived. Because what does that say about Americans, when their leadership are this pathetic?
But this is real and it's happening. Trump is actually this moronic, and the people around him are stupid enough and craven enough to enable him. Those who aren't, like half of the top generals at the Pentagon, get pushed out. The weak willed and the idiotic remain.
Well... Not exactly.
Inflation is not ontologically evil. The problem is that we have this Bizarro world version of inflation where everything keeps getting more expensive, unless it's an hour of our labor.
In a world where wages rise in line with costs, inflation actually benefits workers, because generally speaking our debt to savings ratio is much higher. Inflation reduces the comparative size of your debts. If you buy a house for $500,000 today, and then over the next ten years your income doubles, in effect the price of your house has halved. Ditto cars, student loans, medical debt, etc.
The problem is not the inflation itself, but the suppression of wages. That's what's actually killing us.
NB: This does not imply that inflation is ontologically good either. Just that, under the right conditions, it can be beneficial.
I have no disagreement with anything that you've said here, and it honestly reads to me that you have actually come around to agreeing with what I'm saying.
My point is not, and never ever will be, that there is nothing to be concerned about. Trump is a fascist, and he is doing everything he can to turn the US into a dictatorship.
I push back on the oft repeated assertion that (heavily paraphrasing the many different versions of this that I've seen) "Trump can do whatever he wants because of his magic crime powers" because it's defeatist thinking. If you assume that everything and anything is completely within his power and ignore the actual realities at play then you're just conceding ground that is still in contention. It's not actually helpful or useful. You can't fight a war if you're always in retreat. You have to know where the battle lines actually are. That doesn't mean that those lines aren't under attack. But recognizing where those lines are means you can actually fight to defend them.
Love the Enzoni. Probably one of my favorite lesser known cocktails.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?