bigsocrates

I don't know if I would call it "fun" but I spend a lot of time exercising. Sometimes an arguably disordered amount of time. Is it fun? Sometimes it is, sometimes it's an obligation, sometimes it verges on torture. Sometimes it starts in one category and moves to the other as I go (and not always in the direction you'd expect.)

Otherwise I like spending time with friends either in person or on the phone, and I go see live music and go to museums, though less since the pandemic (and not at all during the worst of it.)

I'd like to get back to doing some volunteering, though that's not always "fun." More satisfying.

@chamurai: I see your pun! I SEE IT!

#GuessTheGame #619

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#InsightfulGuesser

https://GuessThe.Game/p/619

You haven't really explained here WHAT you don't like about it. Do you find the story boring? The characters annoying? Is it just that the combat is tedious to you?

Or do you not know, it's just not compelling.

I think if the answer is that you just don't enjoy the combat (which is what I would assume based on restarting 3 times rather than pushing through to see what comes after) you have your answer and since you already know 5e isn't for you it's not likely to get better. Are you able to put up with bad gameplay in an RPG if the story grips you? If that's the case you might want to push on a bit but otherwise you already know why you don't like the game.

@chamurai: Is that why it's green when you get the right answer?

@sombre: To be fair it did release in the US as Final Fantasy 3 so that's kind of fair.

@chamurai: I sure didn't!

But I think that is an artifact of the stats being flawed. Game #617 is much less well known than 618 so I'd think people familiar with it might have a better chance of actually having played it, while a lot of people could guess 618 without ever having played it, but maybe not on the first clue.

Also 617 is much newer so it might be fresher it people's minds so if they were going to get it they might get it immediately, while 618 could be confused with a number of other games, especially if you haven't played it since release.

In summation, guessing the game is a land of contrasts.

Is the first shot intentionally blurred? Also I feel like including a character makes it a bit too easy, it's kind of odd when they choose to do an extreme close up of one element or whatever and when they decide to give you something that gives you a legit chance.

#GuessTheGame #618

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#InsightfulGuesser

https://GuessThe.Game/p/618

@skuski: Nobody here has really said that capitalism per se is the problem, but we do not have a "free market" system (regulations and subsidies distort it seriously) and the "free market" isn't perfect anyway.

When people criticize capitalism they are criticizing capitalism as currently being practiced in the West and some other areas (like Japan) and often specifically the United States. Private Equity looting companies and using leveraged buyouts to extract value while piling on debt and paying themselves has nothing to do with product demand and the simplified idea that if journalism were valuable people would buy it. Likewise a lot of the harm done to journalism from the Web comes from various companies skirting copyright law or using monopoly or outright fraud (Facebook) to control the ad market.

The American economic system is a lot more complicated than "pure" capitalism or supply and demand.

@zombiepie: It's important to note that a lot of why capitalism can't support good journalism relates to how private equity operates, and strip mining of companies that are in many cases moderately profitable. This is going on right now with the Baltimore Sun, which was financially sustainable but has been purchased by a company with bad intentions and is going to be turned into a shadow of its former self if not destroyed entirely. That has happened to a lot of newspapers throughout the country, which were doing okay despite the Internet but got purchased, weighed down with debt, and collapsed. This isn't exclusive to papers, of course, the same thing has happened to chains like Sears and Toys 'R' Us, but newspapers are particularly vulnerable because even if the business is okay it's not great.

@ben_h: The problem with this limited scaled back model is that it can't do the expensive reporting that the big media companies used to. It used to be that there were a lot of publications out there doing investigative work and with foreign correspondents. That's fallen off a lot. This is especially important at the local level, where the New York Times isn't going to pay for someone to go do a 3 month report on illegal chemical dumping in some river in Ohio. And we're getting a much narrower look at what's going on overseas from our media (though there social media can help some because there's more direct access to sources who live there.)

Remap and Second Wind may be able to replace Waypoint and The Escapist but there's no similar employee owned company that can replace SI.

@chamurai: Technically, guessing that you weren't going to guess correctly counts as a wrong guess, so deduct another point.

#GuessTheGame #616

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#InsightfulGuesser

https://GuessThe.Game/p/616

Sports Illustrated has laid off almost all of, or maybe all of, its staff.

This is just the latest example of publications that a lot of us grew up with (and that even our parents might have grown up with) either collapsing completely or becoming a shadow of their former selves. Many of the major magazines are dead. Newspapers outside of the top nationals are either dead or dying. TV is on its way out as a medium, and while streaming has replaced some of it (just as the web has replaced some of what magazines and newspapers used to deliver) it's not ever going to provide the level of breadth and depth that the old industry did.

Sports Illustrated was already pretty hollowed out, but this still makes me sad. Not just because of nostalgia but because...someone has to do the actual reporting and someone has to pay for it. Maybe for Sports Illustrated it doesn't really matter because it's just sports (though the magazine did break some important sports-related stories of greater consequence) but for newspapers and more general topic magazines it's essential. Social media influencers and commentators mostly just repackage the news that the legacy media sources gather. Almost nobody makes a living being an investigative reporter on social media or streaming (you can argue that someone like Coffezilla would qualify, but he's much more limited in what he can/does cover than traditional investigative reporters) and nobody does the "boring" reporting of local politics and court activities on those platforms, at least professionally.

This stuff is essential to society and it's dying.

I raise this on Giantbomb.com because, of course, we've seen similar events in the video game industry. Almost all of the magazines are dead, and a lot of the websites are dead or seem to be dying. Video game news reporting was never at the level of even Sports Illustrated, but we've seen this year how important old school reporting is to keep people informed about what's actually going on in the industry with labor issues, layoffs, and the like. To their credit sites like Kotaku and some reporters who have moved from those sites to general interest publications have reported on a lot of these issues, but generally not in a deep investigative reporter way, more just reaching out to (or being reached out to by) a few sources.

It's very depressing for me to watch the media slowly erode and be replaced by something much shallower, more insulated, more commercially focused, and less capable of doing the important things that media is supposed to do. In video games and sports it may not be all that important, but it's happening everywhere and that portends very bad things.