I really shouldn’t like it, since games in which you die repeatedly generally just irritate me, but something about it keeps me coming back. And dying.

Skyrim is the most obvious one - it just seems more appropriate in the winter.

Ditto The Long Dark, though it’s notably not festive.

When it’s really cold, and especially at night, I sometimes get an urge to play Little Inferno - it’s sort of like one of those old fireplace videos, except with added surrealism and silliness.

I sincerely have no idea.

The narrative that a leftist couldn’t win is repeated so predictably and so often and by so many people that the whole idea has become sort of detached from reality, and there’s no telling what would happen if it was actually a possibility.

And particularly since the one thing I’d pretty much guarantee is that the concerted efforts on the part of the ruling class to prevent a leftist from running would be as nothing compared to what they’d do and say in order to prevent one from winning.

Because people are miserable and desperate and they want to blame someone or something, and bigotry is simple and superficially satisfying.

And because some number of those who actually are to blame for their misery and desperation have self-servingly encouraged them.

Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?

This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.

It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.

I actually started early with gamepads, dating all the way back to the Gravis and the original Logitech Wingman, but it might be relevant that I still primarily use a mouse and keyboard, and especially for anything that requires precise aiming.

I use a gamepad for emulated console games, since they’re designed for a pad, and for things that require free and flowing movement, so respond well to a stick or a d-pad - racing games primarily, and many platformers and similar action games. But for things that combine separate movement and aiming - first person shooters and RPGs and the like - I just think a mouse and keyboard is better than dual sticks ever could be.

He doesn’t need to do it this time - he has a veritable army of fascists, a brazenly corrupt and compromised supreme court and a squad of billionaire plutocrats to do it all on his behalf, and not coincidentally they have a detailed blueprint in Project 2025 that tells them exactly what to do, step by step, to transform the US into a christofascist/plutocratic autocracy.

All Trump has to do this time around is just carry on being Trump, while all those other people do all the dirty work.

To “win?” No - not really.

But I don’t think that matters much.

Honestly, I think that Trump and the overt fascists and plutocrats who are backing him fully intend to get him into office or destroy the country trying - that if he doesn’t win legitimately, he’ll “win” through fraud, or through the machinations of the brazenly corrupt and compromised supreme court, or through violent revolution.

His backers - the Heritage Foundation and the rest of the fascists and Musk and Thiel and the rest of the plutocrats and so on - don’t just want to try to get him into office - they want to destroy American liberty and democracy. It’s not even so much about him specifically - he’s just the right combination of charismatic and shallow that they see him as their opportunity to impose the autocracy they want. And I don’t think they’re going to let anything stand in their way. So whether or not he actually wins the election isn’t even really relevant, other than to the degree that that will determine what other strategies they might have to, and will, implement.

Right, nor did I expect a rating based an on individual article - sorry if that’s the way I made it sound.

It’s simply that the rating of high credibility accompanying an article that was so obviously little more than a barrage of loaded language cast the problem into such sharp relief that I went from being unimpressed by MBFC to actively not wanting to see it.

All I see here is someone whose ego relies on a steady diet of derision hurled in the general direction of strangers on the internet.

I haven’t seen any evidence that it does that, and quite the contrary, evidence that it does not - examples from publications ranging from Israel Times to New York Times to Slate in which it accompanied an article with clearly loaded language with an assessment of high credibility.

It’s possible that it’s improved of late - I don’t know, since I blocked it weeks ago, after a particularly egregious example of that accompanied a technically factually accurate but brazenly biased Israel Times article.

If you’re not going to answer then I’ll just default to the obvious: you think you’re special and that everyone else is an idiot/sheeple/etc.

Right - you’ll just assume that I see it as some sort of competition that I’m winning.

So are you saying that you wouldn’t be able to recognize my second example as a biased statement without the MBFC bot’s guidance?

Or did you just entirely miss the point?

I didn’t say it was a competition or anything remotely like that. Please show me where I did if you believe otherwise.

Okay

So you have a very high opinion of your own discretion but assume everyone else is trash or what?

Where would you put yourself as a percentile?

Right there. Obviously. In fact, that’s the exact point of a percentile - it’s a ranking system, which is to say, a competition.

So are you going to answer or not?

No.

No - actually I do the bulk of it based on presentation.

“Facts” fall into two categories - ones that can be independently verified, which are generally reported accurately regardless of bias, and ones that cannot be independently verified, which should be treated as mere possibilities, the likelihood of which can generally be at least better judged by the rest of the article. In neither case are the nominal facts particularly relevant.

Rather, if for instance the article has an incendiary title, a buried lede and a lot of emotive language, that clearly implies bias, regardless of the nominal facts.

That still doesn’t mean or even imply that it’s factually incorrect, and to the contrary, the odds are that it’s technically not - most journalists at least possess the basic skill of framing things such that they’re not technically untrue. If nothing else, they can always fall back on the tried and true, “According to informed sources…” phrasing. That phrase can then be followed by literally anything, and in order to be true, all it requires is that somebody who might colorably be called an “informed source” said it.

The assertion itself doesn’t have to be true, because they’re not reporting that it’s true. They’re just reporting that someone said that it’s true.

So again, nominal facts aren’t really the issue. Bias is better recognized by technique, and that’s something that any attentive reader can learn to recognize.

The main problem that I see with MBFC, aside from the simple fact that it’s a third party rather than ones own judgment (which is not infallible, but should still certainly be exercised, in both senses of the term) is that it appears to only measure factuality, which is just a tiny part of bias.

In spite of all of the noise about “fake news,” very little news is actually fake. The vast majority of bias resides not in the nominal facts of a story, but in which stories are run and how they’re reported - how those nominal facts are presented.

As an example, admittedly exaggerated for effect, compare:

Tom walked his dog Rex.

with

Rex the mangy cur was only barely restrained by Tom’s limp hold on his thin leash.

Both relay the same basic facts, and it’s likely that by MBFC’s standards, both would be rated the same for that reason alone. But it’s plain to see that the two are not even vaguely similar.

Again, exaggerated for effect.

The only competition here is between relying on ones own judgment vs. relying on a third party.

No it doesn’t. That assumption just fits the strawman living inside your head.

Of course I’m not “immune” - nobody and nothing is perfect.

But I pay attention and weigh and analyze and review and question, which beats the shit out of slavishly believing whatever I read.

The alternative is to use your own brain.

The fact that people are so often so ignorant and/or ideologically blinkered that they can’t see plain bias when it’s staring them in the face is the problem, and relying on a bot to tell you what to believe does not in any way, shape or form help to solve that problem. If anything, it makes it even worse.