ringwraithfish

For me, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 modding was the golden age of FPS gaming. The life of a single game purchase was extended well beyond any expectations because of the creativity of the modders.

Unfortunately, mods like Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, and many others are getting developed and released as “Full games” now, to the detriment of the gamer and the industry.

Now we’re in the age of relatively easy to use game engines, where anyone can develop and release a game, but there are so many games flooding the market that you look at and think “Why would you release this?”. In the past, I truly believe these types of games would have been relegated to the modding scene and filtered properly through the communities to gain popularity naturally and organically rather than getting huge marketing budgets pushing us to buy the next big thing or FOMO.

Relevant dunkey

Relevant dunkey

Having students bike the final mile sounds a lot like Theranos saying they could do all these amazing blood tests on their new, futuristic machine, only to find out that they’re still doing most of them the way all labs did them

Agreed with what you’re saying about blizzard, but I don’t regret buying D4. I enjoyed the story and playing through the classes. The thing that’s missing is the replayability. The seasons don’t do it for me and the gear is too incremental - there’s never the “holy shit it finally dropped” moment.

That’s how I do YT. The good creators usually have a consistent release schedule. The really top tier ones may only release every few months, but by only browsing subs I’m sure to catch them.

That’s the core of the trial though, right? That through these deals and other things Google does to stay dominant, they stifle the market for competition. Ie Edge, Chrome, and every other Chromium-based browser pushes Google to the end users and FF pushes some unfamiliar search platform, then there’s an uphill, arguably unfair, battle for it to gain enough market share to be sustainable.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series is a good one. Unlike most authors in this genre who tend to be overly descriptive and feel the need to develop the lore of every squirrel in the kingdom, Le Guin writes really tight, well thought stories, where every word is important to the story.

I’m seeing a lot of judgement on pretending Santa exists vs being 100% truthful with your kids. I don’t think either way is a bad way, but don’t judge others if they choose to pretend Santa is real.

With that being said, I do agree that if you are going to go with the Santa story, when the kid asks if they are real you should be truthful.

I just went through this with my 9 year old. She just came up one day and asked me if Santa was real and I told her no. There were a lot of follow up questions and it made her realize the tooth fairy, Easter Bunny, etc were the same situation. She asked me why we pretended Santa was real and I explained for us it was nice to see the magic that they felt from a stranger being kind just for kindness sake.

For me personally, I think it’s a good lesson for kids to begin logically questioning their world and what they’ve been told.

Twitter's definition of state-affiliated:

How state-affiliated media accounts are defined

State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution. Accounts belonging to state-affiliated media entities, their editors-in-chief, and/or their prominent staff may be labeled. We will also add labels to posts that share links to state-affiliated media websites.

Conspiracy theories aside, AFAIK there's no evidence that any level of the US government exercises control over NPR.

How is it state affiliated?

My rule of thumb is if it’s spammed all over YouTube, then It’s going to be shit in some way. Temu, TikTok, Raid Shadow Legends, Better Help, that stupid cereal brand that was advertised for a while, etc.

They have such sights to show!

Ackshually!

Yes, I understand that's the current structure. I'm saying there needs to be a new structure where CEOs can't make greedy decisions with impunity. Clearly the idea that the board is supposed to prevent that doesn't work because this story is all too common.

Pisses me off that CEOs never get fired for their bullshit and get to "retire" or "resign" like they didn't just make the most boneheaded decision that severely hurt the company.

There really needs to be some organizational structure where the CEOs have the power to make the decisions they make, but the employees have the power to punish and fire them when they do shit like this. No golden parachutes for them!

I wonder if they're repackaged due to not meeting certain quality control thresholds, but still technically useable

Post your specs and driver versions

I'm usually the same way with open world games like The Witcher, GTA, RDR, etc, but BG3 puts the story enough on the rails to keep me focused while still letting me make critical choices and enough freedom to explore so it feels amazing when I find little secrets or Easter eggs.

My buddy has played through it twice with 40 hour runs each.

I'm still on my first playthrough at about 70 hours and close to wrapping up act 3.

Some games need huge QoL updates. I'd like to see a balance of backwards compatibility along with the ability to toggle QoL settings. Give the player a choice to play OG or with modern QoL mechanics