For real. I wish it were these people killing themselves with their stupidity, not others…

Yes.

No. It doesn’t make a difference to the viewer that does it, obviously they seem to not care, because they do it anyway…

You just created the solution to your own confusion. Congratulations. Now consume it

Watching isn’t playing. This is my whole fucking point.

Considering your argument revolved around vaguely claiming “viewing people playing single-player games is different from viewing people playing sports” which then turned into arguing it’s because of the “intention” of the activities rather than the actual result, no. The only time you even actually argued about playing sports was when you acted like sports are inaccessible and then realized that wasn’t gonna work out. You wanted to sound philisophical but instead you sounded stupid, congratulations again.

This statement is utter nonsense.

Considering you have no idea what you’re talking about, let alone what the conversation you engaged in was about, I can see why it doesn’t make sense to you.

Your most recent response has proven satisfactory. I expect your cognitive dissonance to fade shortly. Do not resist.

Yeah duh that’s why it’s called eSPORTS I’m not really talking about 1 genre of videogames I’m talking the medium in general so we should limit this to concepts that can be applied universally here.

So you’re admitting your entire argument is “story mode games are different from competitive games”. That’s what you mean when you say that watching games is profoundly different from watching sports. Gotcha. And then you’re pretending that competitive games/gamemodes and other non-narrative/non-art focused games are A. all one genre or only exist as e-sports and B. don’t make up a large portion of the most played and most watched games.

Then, you’re pretending that it actually makes a difference to the viewer as to whether or not Alien Isolation is intended to be experienced “second-hand” compared to kicking a ball with some specific time and scoring rules. Clearly the average viewer of bakery simulator streamers or horror game streamers are getting the exact same sort of engagement and experience as someone watching a match of tennis or soccer. The end result, to the viewer, pretty much the same, which makes your “point” moot. The entire point is the experience of watching the content itself. Your idea is that games “weren’t designed” for it, therefore it must be an entirely different experience for the viewer. It isn’t.

There is more disparity in how someone feels watching golf vs. American football than there is between someone watching American football vs. Halo Red vs Blue or Overwatch. There is more similarity between watching tennis and watching Omori than there is between watching tennis and watching Airsoft. Sports are often times more different from each other than they are from games, and games are often times more similar to sports than they are to other games. It’s not complicated to grasp, really.

The fundamental difference is That you don’t have to field a team, practice, meet up, etc. to play baulders gate.

You definitely do that for competitive/ranked gaming or esports (well, you obviously don’t meet up in person to play ranked CS:GO but you know what I mean).

it was built from the ground up to be experienced by a person the same way you might read a book.

Conveniently, you chose a genre that is literally based off of books. Regardless, games like that aren’t even played like “reading a book”, they go completely differently every playthrough. I don’t see the point you’re trying to make here.

Watching someone else play it isn’t the same as that same person watching football because a writer, or game developer doesnt write a sport. You aren’t defeating the purpose of a sport when you watch someone else play it, you’re just watching people participate in a framework of rules, not experience a narrative.

You aren’t defeating the purpose of a game when you play it. Unless it’s a visual novel or something, it’s not like you’re reading a book. Not only are you pretending that all games are primarily narratives with a path that it’s predetermined you’ll take within a short number of playthroughs, but the narratives you are talking about still don’t fit your description. People aren’t all the same and they play games completely differently, unless you have thousands of hours to put into literally every game you’re not gonna experience every unique experience from a game like Baldur’s Gate man.

You are defeating the point of the media when you watch someone else play it through YouTube or twitch.

Not at all. You’re not going through a predetermined experience when you play Rainbow Six Siege (ew) or Baldur’s Gate 3 any more than when you play soccer or golf. Chess is technically “predetermined” in a sense that it has a finite number of moves you can take and a finite number of possible outcomes, you can technically “solve” chess, but we’re not gonna pretend like that means watching it defeats the purpose of playing chess. Watching other people use the tools the game gives them along with their own creativity is what makes both sports and games fun. I’m not going to think of everything the same as someone else; and I certainly don’t want to play a few million matches of soccer until I experience every new soccer experience, so why should I be expected to do that with games? Watching someone use some advanced technique to improve their play shouldn’t defeat the purpose of basketball for me, I just try to incorporate that into my play or think “oh that’s neat” or something and continue playing. Watching someone do something creative or something I didn’t know about in a game just improves the experience while also being entertaining.

That being said, I don’t play games much nor watch games anymore, so maybe the gaming YouTubers have compromised by enjoyment of gaming. But I also don’t watch or play sports anymore, nor film, so it’s probably just the neccessity to have a job keeping me from using my free time on entertainment… no, I’m on Lemmy, therefore I could be gaming right now, so naturally that must mean my gamer spirit HAS been stolen by Twitch.

The comparison should be “you like movies why don’t you watch movies?” But of course, the dad probably does watch movies.

Not sure what you’re getting at here.

Organized? How exactly? “Organized” varies by regional law or context. If it’s sponsored by a local sport union and the play is based around a set of rules, that would be organized enough for you, no? That’s the assumption I operated off of.

Why does being “organized” matter in the first place? Something doesn’t need to be professional league whatever for you to view it anyways. Neither sports nor video games.

Literally like everywhere. If you were American you could replace that with baseball or American football or basketball, or from somewhere else it could be cricket or rugby or something. Regardless of where you are in the world, it’d be harder to not stumble into something sports related than to avoid them. You could go to wartorn Haiti 0.0001 seconds after a hurricane and an earthquake and there’d be groups of people playing soccer on the rubble.

You can repeat it as much as you want. I’m not sure what your argument is when you say they’re “fundamentally different” – in what relevant way, exactly? There is no more benefit or engagement or whatever that you get from watching people play sports compared to watching people play games. Watching someone else kick a ball around for sport, it’s not exactly a unique experience from watching someone else play finger twister on their keyboard in a game. They’re both literally just pixels on a screen and take the exact same processing power and thinking.

There are differences obviously, like when you watch sports it’s usually because you’re addicted to whatever corporate team comes from your city/state/province/country, not to watch ball go weee or admire skill or have esoteric analyses of the gameplay, but the latter reasons still exist to some extent. Vice versa for games – usually you don’t watch games for the brainless esports competitive tribalism, but it’s still a big part of the culture.

there’s a difference between a sport and a media designed to be consumed by the masses

This implies that sports aren’t specifically designed to be consumed by the masses. Sports are like, the epitome of braindead mass appeal. Everyone can do it, they’ve existed as an activity of the average person for tens of thousands of years. You could overthrow a small democracy using the chaos that soccer team fanboys generate throughout the year. I don’t think there’s a single person on this planet who doesn’t know who Messi is

Sports are far from inaccessible to an able-bodied person unless they’re trying to do it seriously competitively and they’ve been optimized for widespread appeal

they’re filthy communists i tell ya

Small/Medium-sized Business

The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across. It’s physically impossible to settle that in 10,000 years

You’re just flat out lying at this point lol. 21-23% of the entire Israeli Jewish population is first-generation immigrants; 30-35% is second-generation, direct offspring of immigrants; 30-35% is third-generation; 10-15% is fourth-generation; under 5% is fifth-generation or beyond (which would include Jews who lived there since before Aliyah). These are numbers are from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. There’s also statistics that rather say 40-45% are third-generation with much less being fourth-generation or beyond, but with around the same amount or slightly less being first and second generation – I find the former estimates far more reasonable though. It’s estimated around 90-97% of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants since 1900.

A majority of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants of several Aliyah (immigration to “Zion” from outside of the lands of Palestine/Israel, practically starting from 1882 but mostly ramping up around the start of the British/Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the region in the early and mid 1900s). Even the most conservative estimates say that around 50-70% of Israel’s Jewish population growth since 1900 came from immigration, with most of the rest of the population growth coming from recent immigrants having children. And those are really conservative estimates, the actual amount is likely much higher than that.

A significant portion of Israeli Jews came from immigration in the 90s, especially from the Soviet Union after its collapse – 1.4-1.6 million Jews (compared to Israel’s total current Jewish population of around 7.4 million) immigrated to Israel following the collapse of the USSR. Over a fifth of the entire Israeli Jewish population in just the span of one generation. Yet second- and third-generation Israeli Jews make up like 3-3.5x as much still.

It’s crazy for you to try to state that modern Israelis aren’t primarily (nearly exclusively) descended from relatively recent immigrants who displaced (and outright genocided) the native population. You straight up just made that up without consulting any history/statistics, not even Israel’s own statistics lol. Palestine faced a colonization and replacement by Jewish immigrants – according to the Jewish Virtual Library, 8% of people in the region were Jewish in 1882; then 11-13% after the end of WW1, after the adoption of a Zionist policy for Palestine and occupation by the UK (see the Balfour Declaration); then 32% in 1947 after several Aliyah; then in 1948 – the year the Israel was formally established and immigrants were shipped in from all over the globe, and the year European immigrants to Israel started all-out total war and genocide against Palestinians – that number jumped to 82%. It is not Jews’ “indigenous land”, 93%+ of people in the region were Arab Muslims at the time of the first Aliyah, hundreds of thousands compared to the 9,000 Jews and even less Christians. Jews hadn’t been the majority in the region since the 4th century, Arabs & Muslims have been the majority since before the Magna Carta, the Crusades, European Feudalism, they were most of the population when France just started to exist.

Considering the actual facts of the situation, your justification basically becomes “colonization and apartheid in the modern day is okay because some other people they identified with lived there 1,500-3,000 years ago”, in which case I have some bad news for like, 95% of Europeans, Middle Easterners, and Asians, who all exist on lands which were someone elses in that same time period. Ethnonationalism with feeling you have a “right” to certain land you have no actual connection to based on some ancient “predecessor” civilization that had those lands stolen from them before Hindu-Arabic numerals existed is a strong hint that you’re in the wrong (see: Nazism). Modern Jews are about as indigenous to Israel as the modern Japanese are to Korea, or modern Turkish are to Mongolia.

Zionism is modern-day ethnonationalism and colonialism by predominantly non-Levantine peoples (more than half of those being primarily European in ancestry). Its purpose is creating and justifying an ethnostate where Jews are superior and have rights that other groups don’t have – and such things are cemented in the Israeli constitution and law. To exist, Israel requires relegating non-Jews to second-class personhood and requires (or required at some recent point in time) commiting acts of genocide towards certain non-Jews; abolishing that would be abolishing the concept of Israel and Zionism as a whole. There is no real moral defense of the state of Israel.

Even worse, because the Kingdom of Israel stopped existing 3000 years ago. Modern Israelis have zero connection to ancient Israel

Elixir? Is that the weird older cousin of Gleam?

mfw non-commutativeness

Usually the best resources you can get online for free for language learning as a beginner or intermediate is mostly pirated photoscanned books, with some online pages or YouTubers mixed in as another supplement.

For example, for Japanese, I pirated the 3rd editions of Genki 1 & Genki 2, plus the workbooks for them. I also owe a lot to the YouTuber Tokini Andy (who has videos going over the updated Genki textbooks and explains a lot of things missing/poorly explained in the book, he’s pretty great). There’s also an interactive quizzing website for Genki someone made. For definitions and stroke order I used jisho.org, and for etymology I used Wiktionary, hanziyuan.net, and dong-chinese.com. The only other website/app I regularly used was Renshuu (a spaced repitition learning app for Japanese), which was pretty great and was a good supplement for drilling in what you learned from other resources – although you have to modify the settings quite a bit to really “optimize” it. A lot of people use WaniKani which is kind of similar but I think more Kanji-oriented and used more for students studying before a test. Oh and to learn the Kana, I basically just tested myself writing down the characters in the standard order for a few days until it got drilled into my head, I also used the Tofugu Hiragana learning resource thing but it only helped for a few mneumonics. Other than that, although I’m not exactly a weeb, I tried to force myself to watch anime (in Japanese) any time I wanted to do something like watch a show or play a game, and I’d look up all the stuff I didn’t recognize. Anime isn’t exactly representative of how Japanese people speak at all, and you’re going to get your shit kicked in (by that I mean disapprovingly stared at) by Japanese people if you speak like an anime character, but I suppose it’s like learning English off of Sesame Street and SkyDoesMinecraft…

For German, I heavily utilized Deutsche Welle’s learning resources, especially Nicos Weg. I also had people to practice the language with. My German still sucks though… for whatever reason, I had the absolute most difficult time with trying to learning German out of any language. The word order magic fucked with my head especially, but I just kept mixing up basic words.

For Russian I used Memrise at first, which worked for vocabulary and got me familiar with the most very basic vocabulary, but the features locked behind monetization eventually got too disruptive so I spent pretty much all my time on (pirated) beginner Russian learning textbooks and very technical grammar books (I was a very learned linguistics major so learning from linguistics-heavy books was significantly more feasible for me than it is for the average person). I probably had the least frustrating time with Russian out of any of the languages I self-studied. I self-taught myself Cyrillic when I was like 8 because I thought slavic stuff was cool so that didn’t really require any time…

I learned passable French in high school (despite my ADHD ass not paying attention 99% of the time and basically just not being present mentally for all of French 3), which then degraded a lot in my ability to use it since I never used it and was preoccupied with other stuff, but I can still read it fine, and I can understand it spoken depending on how they speak and my state of mind. I didn’t even study outside of school or anything really, I just had a teacher from France (she was my favorite teacher). Actually thinking of the words and grammar I’m trying to say though, I’m pretty fucked in that department unless I go back and practice it. French is my 2nd language.

I self-studied Spanish after school, not very seriously though, I could already grasp it pretty well enough because of my French knowledge. I got conversational in no time – still, randomly not being able to recall random words is a pain in the ass (that goes with English too I guess). I did a bit of Duolingo at first but then just started listening to podcasts and videos and stuff, and looked up the words I didn’t know (beforehand and during the time I was already doing a lot of Spanish linguistics work so I already knew “about” the language and its phonology/spelling to pick out the things I heard). This was really only possible because, again, I was already able to understand pretty much all the French you would encounter in daily life.

For Finnish I mostly used pirated books and YouTube learning resources. The first books I used were from Leila White, “From Start to Finnish” and “A Grammar Book of Finnish” which are both great. I would definitely suggest that anyone who wants to learn Finnish goes through those books – the second one’s a reference rather than something you’re supposed to go through from beginning to end though.

I tried (and failed) to learn Arabic a reeeally long time ago. It didn’t extend much past a few obscure and not-very-helpful learning internet resources plus Duolingo (which was kind of useless for Arabic, even moreso than Duolingo typically is useless for languages). I had an unusually hard time with the script for this one (is it racist to say the damn squiggly lines all look the same), and reading it without vowel markers is very difficult to me.

slovake.eu was a helpful resource for Slovak when I was doing the necessary stuff for citizenship – I could’ve probably gotten by with only English (despite doing it myself and without an immigration lawyer) but I felt it only made sense to at least try to learn the language. It… definitely happened… I basically learned much of the core vocabulary and some grammar quirks, and played fill in the blank with Russian/Polish words except how I thought they’d be in Slovak for words for ones I didn’t know. Would not recommend doing that, but if you DO do it then just know that Slovak is the absolute best slavic language to do it in, they will probably understand you if you outright are speaking a different slavic language.

Right now I’m using this book online for Italian that’s only in Italian which is basically like, introducing grammar & topics in the language with no actual instruction or anything, it’s just a bunch of Italian sentences with images and stuff to get you to remember the grammar based off of context. It’s sick as hell, but I can’t remember what it’s called right now.

After a long time (around B2 or maybe B1 level probably) you have enough comprehension to start learning well while watching content made for natives – e.g. you can watch YouTube videos or a TV show in the language and can learn from looking up the (still large) portion of words you don’t understand.

I was originally a monolingual English speaker – only 1 native language, I didn’t have like 2 or 3 native languages like most of the world (shout out to all the kids who acquired English solely off of TV and YouTube as a kid). On one hand, being monolingual definitely makes you more ignorant to other languages and your first language might be a little bit harder (but honestly it doesn’t get much easier from there, you will still writhe in pain 4 hours a day trying to learn any subsequent languages), but on the other hand being a monolingual ENGLISH speaker opens you up to way more possibilities (resources) than not being an English speaker, so I guess overall I was pretty lucky in that regard.

I have really bad ADHD and Aphantasia which is (for the most part) a hinderance to language learning – my working memory is extremely bad, I can’t visualize SHIT and ADHD makes my non-visual memory go kaput. Language learning takes significant time, energy, it’s frustrating as fuck, and most of this comes down to a lot of it just being brute forcing memory. There is no cheat to language learning, there is no “lern basque in 23 dayz”, it is just putting thousands upon thousands of hours of very regular, very (inter)active focus and memorization methods into it until it’s drilled in your head. It can be more challenging than any job you’ve ever done and you’ll want to cry due to how little progress you feel that you’re making despite the great amounts of time and energy you put into deciphering this mess.

On the other hand, I know Autistic people with Hyperphantasia and Synthesia (specifically, the kind where you see colorful words appear in your vision when you hear, read, or think about language) and they are SIGNIFICANTLY more capable at language stuff than anyone else, although it’s still a lot of effort to put in for them of course.

Language is pretty much about constantly pushing back against the force inside of you that says “you can’t do this, you’re not improving, it’s tiring” and managing your breaks/scheduling well. It’s easy to turn a “break” into just not touching the language again. You have to be motivated a LOT to learn a language (including being motivated by pressure/necessity, go get locked up in a country with speakers of your TL or something) or else you’ll just quit as soon as you hit your first wave of roadblocks.

Uh, yeah they would. Republicans and their general… hatred of mankind are already a pretty good motivator. It’s not like there’s any leftists to compete with them either, Americans are scared of those.

Chimpanzees are likely going to be extinct 2-3 decades from now. Bonobos will be extinct in 4-6 decades. Orangutans will go extinct within 10 to 20 years. Most animals closely related to humans (including most apes & monkeys) are projected to become extinct within a few decades. I do not want to be alive when gorillas go extinct

This is mostly due to the meat trade (apes and monkeys are often killed for meat which is eaten by locals or traded), being affected by the wars in the Congo/Africa, being kidnapped & sold as exotic pets, and habitat loss from human resource harvesting/logging & development. Humans are effectively displacing, enslaving, slaughtering, and cannibalizing their distant cousins

It is a nuanced topic that requires explanation of certain history. There is no TL;DR

That’s painful to look at, I can’t agree that it’s easily readable