I was born and raised in the PNW and first saw the LaRouchies at the UW, with a large display of Obama with a Hitler mustache… though I did not spit at them lol.

Other posters have already come up with Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche…

No American Presidential candidate before Trump has been so widely popular whilst also having a cult following of people who basically believe in an entirely different reality whilst also being so brash and brazen about it.

There have been demagogues before, with cultish followings, but they’ve not been anywhere near as popular as Trump.

To attempt to add a few:

Technically, Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, attempted to run for President back when Mormons were basically what we would now call a domestic terrorist group, and when most non Mormons viewed them as a dangerous cult.

He was assassinated by a mob, who stormed the jail he was in whilst awaiting trial for treason and other charges, before the election took place.

Also, you might be able to consider the fairly brief existence of the Anti-Masonic party at least somewhat akin to the living in a totally different reality attribute of MAGA people.

Basically, following the inciting incident of the Morgan Affair, where a William Morgan was apparently planning to publish a book outlining the evils of a Freemason conspiracy to control government and business in the US, but he was jailed, a bit of a circus trial ensued, and then he disappeared.

The Anti Masonic party was the US’s first third-party and basically it was built off of what we’d now call conspiracy theories stemming from the Morgan Affair, and called for Masons to renounce their fraternity or to be uprooted from positions of prominence.

Much like the modern MAGA movement, it was full of highly religious conspiracy theorists, but it didn’t really coalesce into also being a cult of personality around any of their more prominent members the way such reverence exists for Trump.

I used to know sooo many people that would justify this, a cryptoscam, shilling literally any outright fraud or vastly overpriced bs on their social media.

‘They’re just getting their bag, you’re hating cuz you broke!’

This is the cyberpunk dystopia.

Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

As far as actual tech competency goes?

Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.

Yep, this happens constantly.

Also, a motorcycle and a moped are apparently the same thing.

Everyone knows that captcha is just google crowd sourcing part of its image recognition software, right?

Well shucks, I could have used another 2¢.

Not sure about his rejected screenplays but uh well he has definitely written a book or two with comically offensive depictions of black americans, and well now he got his dream come true in the most insane way possible and produces movies that are astoundingly tasteless like Lady Ballers.

In terms of containerized solutions for apps/programs?

Better than the alternatives.

In general?

I feel like they’re exes for Linux, and would greatly prefer to not have multiple different installations of the same or slightly different versions of dependencies wasting space.

He was one of the few OG guntubers to actually have a hard rule of not mixing political or cultural opinions, views or charged rhetoric or lingo in with his discussion of firearms.

In addition to that, he had far more practical experience than many other guntubers, had far, far more practical advice regarding firearms than most guntubers, and had an exceptionally direct and effective communication style, with plain language and simple yet accurate demonstrations.

Most (not all, but most) other popular guntubers are highly political, brash, and edgy, highly commercialized themselves and basically turned into gigantic spectacular overproduced shills for whoever is sponsoring them, and participate in creating and maintaining a culture of continuous conspicuous consumption for firearms, akin to FOMO… or they just had no clue what they are talking about.

Basically, Paul came across as a disciplined range master with a subdued yet wry wit, amidst a sea of overly cocksure, foolhardy guntubers with more money and ego than sense, who he’d likely ban from said range.

Before we can commence with therapy relating to your suspected anxiety, adhd and trauma relating to people consistently extracting large amounts of time and money from you whilst making complicated, conditional, arbitrarily changing promises (involving the complicated, conditional, arbitrarily changing views of multiple third parties you do not personally know) to repay you in some way, which they never do…

… please allow me to trigger all of your suspected conditions as thoroughly as possible in the name of ethical transparency and consent before we can proceed.

Don’t worry this will only take 15 minutes to explain adequately if you’re in a good headspace.

…

Subject appears irrationally angry and violent for no discernible reason, suspicion of psychosis.

Shockingly similar to Ben Shapiro, who seems to have wanted to be a concert violinist and later screenwriter, but had his screenplays rejected and found more luck telling the world that basically all Arabs and Muslims are savages and deserve to be collateral damaged.

At this point I wonder if Rush Limbaugh secretly wanted to be a painter but was rejected from art school.

Yes, whether or not you are immersed in still, motionless water, being showered by a … shower, or rainfall, or hose, being swept along by a river or undertow, or covered in snow…

The primary thing that triggers a human response to sweat is just your internal body temperature.

It doesn’t matter how or what is transmitting heat to you, so long as your body is generally above a certain temperature threshold, you will sweat. Go below a certain general threshold and you will begin to shiver.

Exactly what those temperature thresholds are vary from person to person, based on your genetics, the climate you are used to living in, what kind of fitness level you have, whether or not you are currently sick and fighting off an infection… etc.

Generally speaking, I am seeing that humans begin to sweat when their immediate surroundings are 32C or about 90F, but again, different kinds of people used to different environments will have somewhat different thresholds.

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1966.21.3.967

So, perhaps thats a rough approximation of how hot the water of shower or bathtub would have to be for a roughly average person to begin sweating while bathing.

Because we are imperfect animals with imperfect survival mechanisms, and sometimes water is actually hot enough to heat your body above what it considers to be its threshold for thermostatic equillibrium.

Problem: Body Temp Too Hot.

Solution: Emit Salt Water Tears from basically all of your skin so that the heat can transfer into Salty Tears and then evaporate. Works very well in low humidity situations.

But also problem: Humidity and temperature in ambient environment is so high that evaporation either does not work at all or is ineffective at dissipating internal body temp to the outside environment.

Same Solution: Keep sweating even though it doesn’t work, enjoy heat exhaustion/stroke.

This is the whole problem of a ‘wet bulb’ temperature causing mass heat exhaustion, stroke or death: If the humidity and temperature are high enough, long enough, its literally impossible for a human body to naturally cool down.

Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.

Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.

Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.

Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.

I disagree.

Amazon still owns and operates New World.

All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.

They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.

The servers will be shut down in a few days.

There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.

Why would you promote a product that does not exist?

Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.

I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).

It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.

It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.

I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.

Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.

Yeah it hit that point a few days ago.

If I had to guess, they started the process of pulling the plug when sales/players didn’t pick up on Labor Day, a holiday that normally sees increased player numbers.

I do not think this will go F2P at some point in the near future.

If you spend 8 years and 200 million + dollars on something that you expect to … you know, at the very least, recoup that cost… and it doesn’t even make a fraction of a percent of that?

At that point, someone with some modicum of business sense is likely to realize they’ve been chasing the sunk cost fallacy for almost a decade and that throwing even more time and money at this to develop it even more probably is completely insane, as its already shown that nobody wants this product.

I think its more likely this will be totally scrapped barring a few assets and code snippets that might be cannibalized into other projects.

This whole thing is an utter disaster from a branding perspective, if the core gameplay systems later emerge in some other game, its going to have nothing to do with the whole grand expanded universe they’ve envisioned and promoted as being a huge draw to this game.

As for the devs, sure I feel bad for them in theory, but it doesn’t help that you’ve got at least one that calls everyone criticising the game a ‘talentless freak’ and then having a twitter meltdown in response to a person saying basically: wow I’m sorry this game didn’t do so well on launch, it looks like a lot of time and effort was put into it.

https://boundingintocomics.com/2024/08/23/concord-dev-writes-off-critics-why-would-i-care-about-a-bunch-of-talentless-freaks-hating-on-it/

The whole ‘feel bad for the devs, they did a good job, it was management that fucked everything’ is seriously undercut when you basically express that opinion to a dev and they act like a 14 year old responding to people that don’t like their Deviant Art OC.

The estimates I’ve seen from people going off of PS achievements for the game put total PS sales at about 15,000 compared to about 10,000 on Steam.

So that would equate to roughly an all time PSN concurrent player count high of 1,000.

The Day Before was playable from release on Dec 7th until the servers were shutdown on Jan 22nd.

47 playable days.

All time steam peak player count: 38,104.

Total Development Time: Approximately 3 Years, likely closer to 4.

…

Concord was playable on release on August 23rd, and will shut down on September 6th.

15 playable days.

All time steam peak total player count (after release): 697.

Total Development Time: Approximately 8 Years.

…

Fucking amazing. At least they’re refunding it.