I really want to take this same approach but so many websites and apps that I use for shopping for things like groceries now just cease working unless I either manually force cycle through them, or just temporarily disable them. I really hate it.

Any time I run in to one of the genuine fascist types in Helldivers, I literally will merc them until they kick me or they run out of lives. I will drop all my samples, and blast them when they are literally in the ship waiting for extraction. Fascism is only fun when it’s by Paul Verhoeven (i.e. Starship Troopers), or in a game where it’s satire. If you genuinely believe in it, I don’t miss out on anything by ruining their fun and dropping from a mission, since I’m already maxed out at Lvl 150.

It’s a Chris Columbus film - who is one of the GOATs for family movies with heart (Home Alone, The first Harry Potter film, etc.) and I love it, too.

Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.

I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”

…use things like a specific kind of grain, noise, distortion, aberration, etc. to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.

The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.

I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette.

Why? It’s literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you’re simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren’t quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more “real.”

Hey now… Don’t forget camera bob, “lens dirt,” chromatic aberration, and vignette!

AKA - the video game graphics equivalent of “beer goggles.”

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Thermian. One of the all-time greatest gags we lose in the streaming era.

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More like B-4 from the end of Nemesis

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When a company is using AI in place of a person, it’s not a sign of that they are “futuristic” or “forward-thinking…” It’s a sign they are cheap, chase fads, and make short-sighted decisions that are not designed to improve their relationship with their customer.

Anyone using some headless white-label monthly subscription version of ChatGPT in an attempt to save a nickel on their bottom line - even if it means making everything worse for the company, product, employees, and customers in every way possible - is probably someone you don’t want to do ANY kind of business with - whether you’re a contractor, customer, or client.

The democratization of technology is a double-edged sword.

For every improvement in UX and lowering of a once impassible barrier of entry, we seem to inevitably gain a massive number of “eXpErTs” who can suddenly stand upon the now much lower skill floor.

Shortly thereafter seems to be a destruction of the general reliability of whatever field these “eXpErTs” flood - usually a field which used to be inherently cryptic and had complex prerequisites just to begin operation within, let alone master.

Like… it makes me almost miss when “using a computer” meant you had to understand how to browse a directory in DOS…

Because at least then you literally couldn’t begin to operate in the field unless you could wrap your head around understanding the basics of syntax.

Now you can just have an entire legion of dullards misspell or misspeak 30% of a malformed question to some random free LLM that still has trouble telling you “how many Rs are in the word strawberry,” and have it confidently fart back out a wrong answer that they will then copy-paste into a paper or article which will then be added to the pile of growing misinformation currently stuffing a frighteningly expanding part of our collective knowledge base.

Except FOSS. Because if you can fork it, it cannot be enshittified… every time they attempt to, another fork can be made.