He's also an illegal immigrant who stayed on an expired visa.

My assumption is the latter, which is awesome.

Most rich people are, especially if they grew up wealthy. They never had to face any consequences or handle real responsibility, and it shows.

I mean, how is it any different than referencing movies, music, TV shows, stand-up comedy, or any other piece of pop culture?

Would referencing a movie somebody hasn't seen before make you terminally in-theater or something? Though, having said that, I am now going to take every opportunity I can to work the phrase "terminally in-theater" into my daily life anytime somebody mentions a Marvel movie or something.

There's a big flaw in your logic.

The biggest portion of people buying this stuff aren't "gamers" in the way that it's often used around these circles. It's the millions of people who buy coins for their Bejeweled clone of choice and have never owned a console in their life. And there's so many new kids entering gaming all the time who have never known a better world. I remember a Twitch streamer talking about how heartbreaking it was when AC6 came out and gave you the full color wheel plus multiple channels to customize your mech, and their chat was full of kids shocked that you didn't have to buy skins or color packs. That's how it used to be. You'd unlock skins by playing the game, not buying them in the store, but that hasn't been the case in decades now.

And the often touted story of the whale with more money than sense is a myth. Do they exist? Sure. But the vast majority of money coming from mtx from gamers is from people who are psychologically vulnerable to addiction/gambling and people with a poor ability to comprehend finances like kids. These companies have hired psychologists to tell them how to best extract money from your wallet by probing your brain in just the right way. From lootboxes to battle passes and seasonal content to daily quests and washing money through funny money currencies, it's all been designed to prey upon people with addiction issues, ADHD, training young kids into gambling addicts, etc. It's the Lotto tickets and pumping extra oxygen into the air of casinos and making sure there's no natural light in there so you don't realize how long you've been playing slots of the gaming world. Look at WoW, with its daily quests. They train players using Skinner Box techniques to continue logging into the game and paying the monthly subscription long after they've stopped enjoying it because it's become a habit and they are afraid of falling behind.

Voting with your wallet isn't going to fix it. You'll never get your average Facebook mom to care enough not to buy Farmville tokens or whatever, and these companies will never stop abusing psychology on their own. Only industry regulation will stop this.

Because that's the group most likely to commit misogyny in the workplace? Especially in male dominated fields.

My first thought was this shirt so I was very confused:

I have one of those 76 "canvas" (vinyl) bags sitting around somewhere. Anytime somebody I know gets excited about a new Bethesda game, I just send them a picture of it and tell them that I've got a great bag to sell them.

I think it comes from the other direction. Like, the trans and femboy communities are small, but a high portion of them are in tech jobs and FOSS. So this is a stereotype about trans women and femboys all being into Arch, rather than all Arch users being trans women or femboys.

Still overused, but I can see why since the 3 most active communities I see on Lemmy are Linux users, trans people, and Trekkies.

People with poor fiscal responsibility skills, such as children, people with ADHD, and people with mental health issues like depression.

They literally hire psychologists to make this stuff as enticing as possible by pushing the right buttons in your brain.

This is brilliant for them. They basically take the elevator pitches from the concept phase of design and toss them at players to see what sticks. Don't even have to get to the point of a vertical slice to playtest, just a conceptual animation of gameplay.