JDPoZ

Places with low taxes usually are shitholes that no one wants to live in... and if a place has high taxes but are a run by an authoritarian who does nothing but keep it for themselves, they are also usually a shithole... but one they can "buy" good graces from and so they'll usually hang there some if they also can have a home somewhere else in case they lose favor with that authoritarian... so it's pretty much always a bluff it seems.

This is also why it's hilarious when idiots say "RICH PEOPLE WILL LEAVE IF YOU TAX THEM!"

Lol, they get away with everything here. That kind of "freedom" they get away with in the US is priceless.

...And so the tired meme continues to be relevant :

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Agreed on the "shifting focus" part for vignetting specifically - but everything else... outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular "aesthetic" I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.

I agree that highly stylized games like "Bodycam..."

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...use things like a specific kind of grain, noise, distortion, aberration, etc. to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.

The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you're emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.

I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette.

Why? It's literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you're simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren't quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more "real."

Hey now... Don't forget camera bob, "lens dirt," chromatic aberration, and vignette!

AKA - the video game graphics equivalent of "beer goggles."