I am pretty sure Hard Drive dot net is a satirical tech blog.
Okay, hear me out… I have no place for this anymore because conspiracy theories are overrun by super crazy people… but that’s not my point right now…
So, my conspiracy theory is that some government entity established satirical websites as a means to spread misinformation or to desensitize the population…
It’s really strange that like pre 2008 (i dont have excat dates here), there were basically none of these kinds of sites, and then they started popping up everywhere…
It’s one of those things that I believe got us to this point…
But I’m probably crazy and wrong who knows
The Onion started publishing in 1988, and was online by 1996.
Landover Baptist has been on the net since 1998. I stumbled on it as kid, back when the family computer was for playing Neopets.
There’s been an increase in satire websites for sure, largely driven by the popularity of the Onion, and it does cause problems. There are conservative outlets which 100% put out complete and utter bullshit under the guise of “satire,” knowing that their audience has the gullibility of a five year old, and that’ll end up on garbage Facebook pages as unironic.
It’s not “conspiracy” but more - the Onion is very popular, popular things get knock offs, and opportunists saw a way to inject lies or laziness into the public discourse, while claiming they’re “satire.” (Similar to how CinemaSins on YouTube uses the term, “we were wrong about a basic thing in the movie? psych! the jokes on you for taking it seriously!)
I really miss that brief time that the Babylon Bee was good.
Speaking as someone who got literally any humanities education:
The whole ‘predictive programming’ thing only works on absolute inhumanly stupid dumbfucks who unironically join the ‘homelander’ fan club. People need to be made that stupid, and doing it while teaching them how to read and fo arithmetic was a hell of an achievement.
I can assure you with absolute certainty that satire has been an established tradition for a very long time before 2008
I have zero interest in them remastering the older games. I 100% do not want an unreal engine Morrowind remaster. I want Morrowind to be a buggy exploitable mess where I can buff my intelligence and speed into 5 digit numbers.
to be fair what has happened to oblivion is that the game still runs entirely on the old creation engine, but the renderer and all the graphics assets have been swapped for unreal engine. you get old bugs as well as new bugs.
I don’t mind the remasters, because I’m too young to have actually played any of the remastered games when they were released. So, I played Oblivion Remastered, and that’s the only way I would’ve ever know about it. I thought that Skyrim was just a legendary standalone game that people loved (I’ve still never played it). I can see it as a waste of time for the studio and a ridiculous cashgrab as well, especially for the people that played the originals.
I don’t mind remasters if they are that - remasters. Faithful graphical updates to the originals (e.g. Halo 2 Anniversary). But a lot of the time they are janky remakes instead by outsourced development for as cheap as possible. They usually end up as insults to the originals.
The problem I have with remasters is how they fundamentally change the art direction so often.
They’re good supplements to their original, but I don’t think they’re fit replacements.
Agreed.
Probs because they are usually outsourced for cheap with little direction from the main studio, “as long as its good enough”. And/or the main studio has completely changed since the original and they just dont have the same respect for it.
