It got bought out by the company that owns KnowYourMeme, ebaumsworld, and the “I can has cheezeburger?” website in 2019. That’s pretty much all you need to know.
Old internet to me is straight up pointlesswasteoftime.com, which eventually got absorbed by Cracked like a cheap suppository after David Wong (aka mediocre comedy writer Jason Pargin) sold out. That was in 2007. And now Cracked is functionally a content graveyard.
I always knew him as the guy that copied reddit and tvtropes forum posts and put them into youtube videos while providing no credit to the original people that came up with them.
This is true of any work of fiction. People in works of fiction - at least works of sci-fi or fantasy adventure - are typically more risk taking because that’s interesting to a reader/audience and the author knows this.
The sad thing is that a Cyberpunk dystopia is nominally interesting. Violent, terrible, and impoverished, yes, but also fastpaced and exciting. Our world is dull, programmatic, largely predictable, and extremely boring unless you have disposable income. We all have cellphones, yes, but that doesn’t make it cyberpunk.
Valve has been compared to Lord of the Flies because of its corporate structure by multiple people who worked for them. The company has an internal ranking system that determines compensation. It’s also one of the least diverse workplaces in its industry, being overwhelmingly white and male.
So, while I’m glad that Gabe was nice to one of his direct reports, the reality is that the president of the company being nice to one specific person doesn’t make the company good or ethically ran.
Intelligent design is a broad, vague, and intensely mutable concept. It isn’t helped by the fact that there’s multiple kinds, with the pseudoscientific kind touted by the religious right in America and the more generic, very fucking old “teleological argument” which is also intelligent design at its core. To give a specific example of intelligent design philosophy that isn’t directly tied to a belief in a deity as an active participant, you can look at the deists, who believed that the universe’s fundamental laws were engineered by a kind of “clock maker” deity who left the universe running under its own principles but doesn’t have a direct, guiding hand in individual events. This is still a form of “intelligent design” and closely corresponds to simulation theory. At this point, you are redefining terms to suite your argument. Also, you can’t really say the world is or is not intelligently designed, as you have no evidence for either. The only truly “logical” position to hold for any of this is straight agnosticism.
This argument conflates belief with religious practice. The core similarity of both beliefs is that the universe is intelligently designed. And you can believe in the idea of a God without participating in any kind of formal religious practice. That “most” religious belief is wrapped up in a particular religious tradition is ancillary.