Actual OP here: Christmas is “put on a performance” fake. It’s also many pagan holidays mashed together by the Christians and co-opted when arguably the date of their messiah’s birth was in another time of year. It’s also getting longer and longer so companies can sell more and more crap that just ends up as waste.

Is Festivus made up? Sure. But it’s genuine in it’s disdain for what Christmas has become and is a sincere protest. In the words of Frank Costanza: “As I was raining blows down on him, I realized there had to be a better way”

Do you miss the part where it’s an open rebuttal of the over commercialization of Christmas? Instead of wasting a bunch of time putting up decorations bought simply to fill some billionaires pockets, I’ll put up a steel pole.

Also you’re missing the Airing of Grievances as well. Thats integral. The family fight is gonna happen regardless, so might as well get some therapy out of it and bury the axes while you’re at it. The Feats of Strength will get rid of whatever animosity is left too.

Oh, I’m sorry, did you grow up in a normal, functional family?

Winter? Nah. Love it for many of the reasons already being stated.

But the fake as fuck holiday season that comes with it? Done with it. I’m celebrating Festivus unironically this year. Done with the rest of that shit.

Thank you for your comment. I thought of Hyperbole when I was writing mine. I have the same feeling about how they handled their struggles in a much healthier and constructive way. I’ve sent people their post on depression before to help explain my own feelings. I’m glad to know it resonated with others as well.

Campbell left a really bad taste in my mouth. It’s one of the few times I’ve been successfully able to completely sever the art and artist. I love the work, but kinda deplore Campbell. I don’t really want to give them any credit because they don’t even want it themselves.

I’m really torn on this one. They were a great comic that reached a lot of people and then the creator went on all these rants about not really being depressed and it was all a show(and I swear they then retracted that but Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have that part listed). Then they burned their books and swore off creating and wanted everything removed. But then the book burning was even staged…

For someone who claimed it was all an act, it sure seemed like coming clean was a mental breakdown in itself to me. Like they had imposter syndrome, but then the irony was yeah, you are as dysfunctional as you “pretended” to be and just demonstrated it to everyone. There was no imposter.

That’s all to say I wish they’d kept creating and hadn’t left like that. Hadn’t basically said “this all sucks and shouldn’t exist”. But oddly, it is fitting. I’ll give them that. Viewed as a whole, it’s almost poetic.

ETA: I found a summary of the drama that included a mention of them retracting their claim of being depressed. I swear it was blog post called something like “I lied about lying about having depression”, a follow up to “I lied about having depression”. In the second post they claimed coming out as not depressed was in itself fake and I believe part of some art piece/experiment. The OP of the linked post adds a few details I’d missed. I don’t disagree with their posit that it was all an art project and Campbell isn’t a real person. I’ve certainly considered something similar in the past.

https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/a4t8s0/pictures_for_sad_children_a_summary_and_thoughts/

ETA2: Found an even better writeup with some more current details. There’s this gem tho:

Two days later, Veil posted again: “I’VE BEEN PRETENDING TO BE PRETENDING TO HAVE DEPRESSION FOR PROFIT AND I’M SORRY.” A day later: “IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PRETEND TO DO OR SAY ANYTHING AND MY COMICS HAVE NEVER BEEN ABOUT DEPRESSION.”

https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/pictures-for-sad-children-webcomic-simone-veil-interview

Gondor, stop burninating the countryside!

Ok fine, I’ll give you a cookie too…

Their existence doesn’t negate the people who enjoyed Minecraft. You basically said “the people who bought a hyper realistic sim expected hyper realism”. Yes, a tautology is a tautology.

Again, plenty of people find non hyper realistic graphics satisfying. An entire Indie catalogue proves this. Games like Lethal Company or Among Us or Terraria or Stardew Valley are huge hits with pixel graphics or graphics from 1995.

Your argument is boiling down to “well someone will complain, so might as well not even try”. It’s very cynical and defeatist. Acting like hype against Arma means no one else enjoyed anything. You take too much from other people’s opinions. Enjoy what you enjoy. Stop basing your opinions on what others on the Internet say.

Just doing my civic duty

I gave 'em a cookie. Now they’re happy :D

I disagree and counter with Minecraft. Art styles don’t need to be hyper realistic to accomplish immersion.

I think your point stands well. You’re playing an older game despite less fancy graphics because the gameplay itself is engaging. 2010 counts as “old” in my book. Anything previous generation and beyond definitely isn’t “modern”.

It feels like old cartoons(Tom & Jerry/Looney Toons era) where they drew the background as a muted static cell and only freshly animated things that moved. Objects in games are either entirely real, or just a painting on a texture. We’re still at “if I can touch it, it’s probably important. Otherwise ignore it”.

I still blame the advent of graphics. Look at final fantasy: up until 10, everything was simple graphics for the most part and storytelling was key. Then graphics began to explode and everything became about the visuals. One of the more modern Final Fantasy, 13, was basically a 30 hour tutorial in the beginning. Just stuck on rails getting cutscenes after cutscene. The same thing happened with other games around that time(roughly when the ps2 launched). Now everything is raytracing this, lighting that, dynamic shadows this.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s all very cool. But it feels like the AAA focus went towards graphics and it’s taken the Indie scene (and Nintendo, love them or hate them), to keep pumping out creative and "just fun to play’ games.

ETA: To be clear, I’m referring to the ratio of games. I know AAA masterpieces still exist. But games like Crysis used to be the exception, not the norm. Bleeding edge, test your hardware games used to be more rare and now almost every new AAA game is a hard drive, ram hogging behemoth for the sake of its graphics.

Except the original study wasn’t properly vetted for decades and it really set us back because we blindly followed the wrong path. Science institutions failed this time around. In this case, the money was more of a tragic loss.

I disagree with you, but the fact that all your comments are in the negative while constructively contributing to the conversation is very telling. I don’t think you’re right per se, but holy hell you’re not wrong.

The downvotes on this person’s comments are a perfect example of toxic downvotes.

I tried to buy the model from an artist recently for personal use(friend wanted some Mickey ears of a specific style). Person told me no and quoted me $130 with a 3 week wait time for a physical product that was something I could print in about an hour myself. For a Disney product they were already infringing on themselves.

Went elsewhere and found someone selling the model for $7. Figured that was fair for the effort to transform it into a model file.

Turned out I was wrong - only took me 20 minutes to print.

Some of these artists are ridiculous…

Funko pops were also very popular. Everdrives are overpriced junk.

That’s a lot of fancy words to say “so you can emulate your games”. Which is our point: if you can’t play your OG games and are gonna be emulating those anyways, no one gives a shit if it has an OG chip anymore. We’re gonna have to emulate anyways, any might as well do it with better shaders, graphics, control, etc than on this custom built, one use only, emulator.

Exactly. The ONLY point of these consoles is to play physical copies of games you still own. Otherwise just buy a mini PC and USB controllers that match the originals and call it a day. Going halfway like this makes it useless to both niches.

But it’s not the original thing. It’s missing a core feature. So it is emulation.