This is kind of an object lesson in how (understandably, I'd argue!) paranoid people are about any little policy or feature change.

I do in fact spend a lot of time disabling unwanted, auto-enabled features and opting out of stuff I definitely never intentionally opted into.

(But it is *also* too funny not to do).

(I saw first preview in NYC, so maybe they added a line to that effect since then. But honestly probably not!)

And look, love me some Stephen Schwartz, lifelong Schwartz-head here, but he's not the guy for the material either.

The best melody in the show is this little motif for the phrase "American royalty," and *nobody* ever says "Wasn't the point of America supposed to be that we don't have royalty?"

It seems like a perfect match until you think about it for like a second.

Looks like the article is updated and everyone is confused. www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

He'd say he was possessed by an eldritch horror at the time, and that'd probably be true, but that wouldn't really make it better.

Ooh, this is brand new to me! Picked it up! Thanks!

"Voters' frustrations with the status quo are not the same as a desire for socialism," so always leave the door open for barbarism, too.

Yeah, I think at its best (like most criticism at its best) it does the Jonathan Gold thing: "The only question is why." Why put those blocks there?

At its worst it disappears into abstractions from first principles and prides itself on being disconnected from games as they're actually experienced.

But that's a *textural* difference, and this notion of gameplay-as-a-discrete-thing-fully-seprabale-from-aesthetics tends to work weirdly hard to ignore texture. In order to be mystified by the difference here, we have to pretend that, by default, we experience games purely and entirely as rulesets.

The parsimonious reading is that they mean the two things are *functionally* identical: that there's nothing you can *do* with the one as a player that you can't do with the other.

That's still somewhat incorrect, of course: You can move Mario differently while you've already failed for a start.

That does seem pretty open-and-shut.

But with one woman and eight malfunctioning Roombas.