Thanks bro 🫂

In this heat? It’s not going well

Not necessarily? Idk man, language evolves, the word “nerd” doesn’t have the same meaning/connotations as it did 40 years ago, nor the same as it will have 40 years from now. Either way, my brain is fried from work so I’m just gonna sit this one out. Feel free to use my comment as a Strawman if you must

Yeah but that doesn’t fit the pun nearly as well

You do realize that drones (or any aircraft for that matter) don’t need to physically take off from Red Square in order to have originated from Russia, right? Hell, there’s a non-zero chance that they ordered it from Amazon and had it shipped to some warehouse only a mile or two from the airport and attached explosives to it from there

Bro I use double dashes all the time–often to make little asides like I’m doing right now–and have been using them for years. It was just something I picked up by reading actual books. Now AI comes around and I’ll occasionally be falsely accused as one just because of that one small aspect of my writing style. Feels bad man

Just because it’s a well-written answer doesn’t automatically mean it’s AI. There’s a couple syntax errors/typos in there that lead me to believe that at the very least it wasn’t JUST a straight up copy/paste from ChatGPT

Didn’t realize using grammar and sentence structure made me an AI… Maybe the real Skynet was the friends we made along the way? Idk, either way, fuck you

Who cares?

Well, you should for starters, since you’re the one making a post about it. There are a LOT of different things those two images could represent, even IF we take them at full face-value as presented.

NK was bombed to Hell and back during the Korean War and many areas being bombarded into the ground tend to undergo blackout procedures to make it harder to hit important targets or civilian populations. Perhaps they’ve simply relaxed those procedures recently (even though, in most of their rhetoric, the war continues on) since it’s been a few decades since the last carpet bombing run was attempted.

Maybe, as you suggest, there has been a massive increase in urbanization within the last ~10 years and everything that showed as pitch darkness before was sparsely populated or living in abject squalor and couldn’t afford/weren’t given access to the electricity needed to keep them on all night. But maybe now they do and everyone is happy all the time and it’s not even like they live in a repressive state where elections technically happen, but there’s only ever really one option

Or maybe, as another user pointed out, the required buildings have already been sitting there for some time and only recently been instructed to have the lights on 24/7 to give the illusion of progress because someone got a little embarrassed when the first image made the news and everyone made fun of NK for appearing to be one of the poorest nations on Earth.

And what about the very likely event that parts of the images are indeed altered in some way? Maybe it’s something minor like just rotating them to line up properly, sure whatever. What if NK HAS improved some infrastructure but visible areas of SK and China have developed twice as much within the same time frame? Whatever work NK has accomplished would look pitiful in comparison if that were the case.

And why stop there? What if there’s actually LESS overnight light than there was however many years ago. What if that original image wasn’t photoshopped per say, but just happened to be taken on a night where the whole country experienced sweeping blackouts (minus Pyongyang because nothing bad can ever happen there)? Or the updated version was taken on the night of some big cultural festival and the entire country was celebrating together in those specks of light?

My point is there are, like I said, A LOT of different possibilities that one can draw from just showing a set of “Before/After pics” and YOU as the person presenting them should have at least some answer for the curious beyond “Who cares?” Not only does that make you look bad but it lowers the importance of whatever it is you’re talking about and subsequently lowers the audience’s willingness to engage, to care. Am I expecting you to provide down-to-the-millisecond records of when each was taken, the diameter of the camera lense, or some convoluted third unreasonable request? No, of course not. But I would expect you to be at least a little knowledgeable actually no, just CURIOUS enough to go and look for some info if asked. Even if it’s just a 30 second Google search, that’s still better than essentially telling the audience to go fuck ourselves

Fabulous

I have a few questions regarding what it will look like to “do things” in the game. It seems likely that for stuff like Training it will be as simple as telling the browser ‘I want to train my Strength’ and then a timer pops up and when it’s done you go up a level. That’s all fine and good, but what about more complex activities like performing a heist or something? Will that also be timer-based? Will it be possible to lower the amount of time spent if my character meets a certain skill check? What if I’m like level 20, trying to do a level 15 job, and I bring along three level 2s to help, will that increase the likelihood of failure (and presumably prison time), just make the timer longer, or would the level 2s simply not be able to assist since they are well below level 15? Will the various operations have different specialized roles (point man, safe cracker, get away driver, etc) or will we all just be lumped together? Lastly, you said PvP combat will be stat-driven, so would that be EXCLUSIVELY number based a la Yugioh (my 2450 ATK point monster beats your 2200 ATK point monster, dealing you 250 points of DMG) or will there be any elements of RNG thrown in as well?

Sorry, that was a lot, but take that as a good sign! The game sounds mighty interesting and I’m anxious to see how it all plays out!

Like everyone else has said, Control is a fantastic game all around, but I have yet to see anyone else in this thread mention the absolute banger of a soundtrack it has

Don’t forget the soundtrack!

What part of Wagner’s views specifically are you referring to? (The music I mean, not the racism since that’s just a whole big, sticky, knotted mess to try to unpack.) But yeah, are you referring to Gesamtkunstwerk?

I’m not the original guy you asked and I’m not presenting any genuine evidence, but it isn’t so much that the games are causing groomers to appear because they lack community guidelines or terms of service or are outwardly open to letting anyone play. No, it’s more so that these games are insanely popular among children and the pedos are chasing after the kids wherever they happen to coalesce. It could be Minecraft or Roblox, it could even be something like TF2 or Quake or even Microsoft Flight Simulator. The game itself doesn’t matter, what matters is that they’re on the prowl for kids and will follow them wherever they go and try to talk to them however they can

Does it really count as a warning when the danger is already happening? Sorta feels like yelling “Hey watch out, you’re about to be stabbed” after the victim is already lying on the ground in a pool of their own blood

If they can’t ever go home, they’ll have no choice but to keep working! Just think of the profits… ONLY think of the profits

Dude, that job pays THREE TIMES as well as the equally-dead one I currently have (even more if you include benefits). Just accept the good fortune bestowed upon you, get paid to do practically nothing, and find a new hobby to invest all your new free time into. Like, how is this even a question?

Edit: I redid the math and turns out you’re making 3x what I do, not the 2x that I originally said

An all-time classic