In my head, the USSA was still in its transitionary stage.

I never put my finger on exactly why, but Duskers always gave me future-70s, Soviet sci-fi vibes. Plus you can also play it on basically anything.

Idk I really really like my shiny graphics. I think “AAA” games will get made, they’ll just take a year or so longer in development as crunch will be a thing if the past.

I’m sure there will still be big-budget, high graphics games, but honestly, does (home console) gaming tech even need to improve much more? It feels like we’ve almost reached photorealism in the current gen. Like, I thought Red Dead 2 looked amazing, and that was on the PS4 6 years ago. Many game environments can pass for real-life photos. I feel like if character models were made more realistic, then we would hit a ceiling on how much more graphics can improve.

I don’t know shit about game development, I’m sure there’s plenty more advancements to be made in stuff like physics engines but graphically it seems like we can’t, or at least don’t need to, improve. The jump from last gen to this one seems like it has the most diminishing returns of any gaming generation

Caves of Qud

Dear god, can we please have more games utilizing a solarized color palette? Thanks.

I do all my Hexbear posting via tablet and stylus, while walking the corridors of my office building, Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk style in order to add a sense of drama and kinetic energy to my posts.

Hickel touches on this. it really depends how much of the American economy is on bullshit like advertising, cops, and cars

Net-appropriated labour comprises approximately half of the total labour that provisions goods and services for Northern consumption. […] To maintain current consumption, Northern populations would need to substantially increase their working hours (while also committing substantially more domestic land, materials and energy to production), which would be socially and politically difficult to achieve. It is plausible that people would prefer instead to forego some kinds of production (for instance, production of goods for elite consumption) or shift to forms of provisioning that require less labour (e.g. public transit instead of private cars).

IMO it’d be fine, the whole point of a planned economy is you can finally choose efficient modes of production. there’s so much stupid shit to cut out (e.g. mass incarceration, private healthcare, most finance) and you don’t need a reserve army of labor anymore.

On the other hand, large sectors of the US population are engaged in useless labor which could be eliminated free up a lot of labor power (office pmc types, ai, insurance industry etc) and similarly with types of labor which just service the elite (country club employees, many landscapers etc)

In my headcanon when I wrote this the USA collapsed in 89 instead of the USSR, so by the 2020s we’ve had thirty years of socialist development without the threat of capitalist encirclement forcing us to maintain a massive military. The Soviet and Chinese governments similarly have been able to disarm as fewer global conflicts have gone hot each decade, refocusing economic goals towards completing green projects and improving living conditions.

Also the USSA doesn’t reach the same borders as the current USA, it’s just the largest of a series of successor states including indigenous states in the southwest/hawaii/alaska.