Sordid

Given that every accusation is an admission, this indicates he realizes how deep the shit he's in is. Good. Let him stew.

Hyping up old features as if they're groundbreaking is a proud Bethesda tradition. I still remember laughing at their pre-release hype around the Radiant quest randomizer in Skyrim, which is virtually identical to the quest randomizer that Daggerfall had been built around fifteen years prior.

Dang, this is a disappointing read. This might be an unpopular take, but I have been steadily losing respect for FromSoft over the years due to them essentially following the same path as Bethesda - they used to make varied games until one of them randomly became very successful, and from that point on they've just been remaking that one game over and over with slightly different coats of paint. I was hoping they'd break out of that pattern with AC6 and do something original for a change, although I was also keenly aware there was a risk that, being the sixth game in the series, it would be just another AC. The fact that it's apparently just another Souls is somehow even worse.

The article doesn't really seem to make any moral argument (probably because it's unfinished - maybe don't post it until it is?). Yeah, Discord is financially unsustainable, but that's just because it's still in phase one of the enshittification cycle. At this stage, venture capitalists are basically subsidizing the service for everyone. Maybe I'm just myopic, but I don't really see anything morally wrong with enjoying a service paid for by a greedy billionaire. And once the enshittification ramps up, well, there are always alternatives.

I'd say remembering the message she intended to send is far more important than remembering what exactly she did to the picture.

Now he’s driving their investment into to the ground so the banks will end up writing off most of the debt rather than asking for repayment. So far, it seems to be working.

Maybe I'm financially illiterate, but I don't understand how that works. Like... if I take out a loan to buy a house and then deliberately burn down the house, that doesn't get me off the hook. If anything, I'll probably end up going to prison to boot. Why exactly would the banks just write off Musk's debt instead of going after him and his other assets in court?

It looks cool, but frankly I'm far more interested in how it's going to be monetized. I bought into PoE early access back in the day but stopped playing after a few years because I got fed up with how its game design is compromised in order to accommodate its business model. Specialized stash tabs for currency, maps, cards, etc. are basically a mandatory purchase, since inventory management is hell without them. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but IMO deliberately introducing game design problems, such as tedious inventory management, so that you can sell the solutions is a scummy practice. The same goes for drop rates, which are frustratingly low in order to force you to trade instead of finding your gear yourself, since in order to trade effectively, you need to buy a few premium tabs. Even though I actually made all these purchases to overcome these artificial hindrances, being squeezed like that left such a bad taste in my mouth that I just couldn't enjoy the game anymore. If they keep this up in PoE2, I'm going to steer well clear.

What should the media have done? Ignore it?

Yeah, why not? They were perfectly fine with ignoring hundreds of migrants drowning after their boat sank near Greece last week. The only reason I found out about that is because I saw a meme bashing the media for ignoring it.

It's unfortunate that the headline and much of the article is needlessly sensationalized. The article makes it seems as if our previous understanding had been completely wrong and was now completely overturned, and that's simply not the case. The new finding is that aggression can be the result of self-control, but it's pretty clear from the words of the researcher and the abstract of the paper that aggression resulting from a lack of self-control also exists ("We often fail to inhibit our worst, most aggressive impulses. But that is only one side of the story." and "balanced perspective, which allows aggression to arise from successful and unsuccessful self-control").

Research indicates that the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a center of self-control, shows increased activity during aggression, further debunking the association between poor self-control and aggression.

That doesn't debunk shit. It's obvious why the prefrontal cortex would be active in the case of premeditated aggression, but this finding makes perfect sense even in cases of spontaneous, uncontrolled aggression. In that case, the prefrontal cortex is trying to exert self-control, it's just failing at it. But that activity would still show up.

Very interesting findings, but the reporting is pretty poor.

This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I'm more baffled why game devs continue to implement inventory limitations at all. I have yet to see a game that wouldn't be significantly improved by just giving the player infinite inventory space.

Hasn't Russia been using these munitions and worse all along? Screw them, let them reap what they sow.

Experience. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, uh, you can't get fooled again!

Oh yes, here we go! They are finally starting to turn on each other. The sooner Russia balkanizes, the better for everyone around them. Just wall them in and let the rats eat each other alive.

I'm skeptical. Trillian still exists, but hardly anyone uses it. It can't connect to a bunch of services because their operators decided to disable third-party access, and I remember that even back in the day it was constantly playing catch-up with network updates that broke compatibility. "One chat app to rule them all" is a neat idea, but I don't see it working in practice.

Yeah, but you have to weigh that against the harm that kicking the Russian out quickly will prevent. It's like chemotherapy. It fucks you up too, but less than it fucks up the thing that's killing you.

Severance: Blade of Darkness. This game from the Spanish dev Rebel Act Studios is absolutely insane.

First of all, in gameplay terms, it's basically Dark Souls ten years before Dark Souls. All the basic elements are there - very difficult lock-on based combat with heavy emphasis on distance, timing attacks/blocks/dodges, and stamina management, several equipment slots for your left and right hand that you cycle through individually (and the same for consumables), non-linear level design with shortcuts to earlier areas, weapons that you might hang onto for their moveset even though they're not statistically the best... To be fair, there are some differences. The game is divided up into discrete levels rather than having an interconnected world, there's no magic, RPG elements are pared down to the absolute minimum, and the controls are atrocious even by the standards of the day. But looking back on it, I find it extremely hard to believe that From Soft didn't take some inspiration from this little-known title.

Secondly, there's the technical aspect of the game. Remember Doom 3? Remember those pre-release videos in which id Soft bragged about their new engine having 100% dynamic lighting with every single polygon casting an accurate real-time shadow? Yeah, guess what, Blade of Darkness had the exact same lighting system three years earlier. Ridiculous!

Daggerfall. Ah yes, the infamously undercooked open-world RPG from Bethesda. In some ways it was actually the last of its kind; nobody really makes old-school dungeon crawlers like this anymore. But it was also one of the first games that pioneered a procedurally generated world deliberately made too large for a single human to explore. With a world containing 320,000 square kilometers of wilderness and almost fifteen thousand locations of various types, it would take a lifetime to see everything. It's quite literally not built for human consumption, since you can never fully consume it. The best you can do is sample it. This achievement went thoroughly unappreciated at the time due to technical limitations making the vast world invisible and therefore pointless. The very faithful Daggerfall Unity remake can be modded with a draw distance of some 150 kilometers, however, and the sheer size of Daggerfall's world thereby revealed is extremely impressive to see. Despite its primitive graphics, it feels far more real than the compressed geography of Skyrim and Fallout. Ridiculously huge worlds that the player can never hope to fully explore would go on to be used in games such as Minecraft and No Man's Sky.

Turbo Esprit. I mean, just watch this video. Yes, that is a third-person open-world city driving game with realistic traffic and pedestrians, i.e. an early predecessor of GTA. It came out in 1986 and runs on a ZX Spectrum, a machine with 48 KB of memory.

Driller. The first game on the Freescape engine, a first-person shooter (of sorts) featuring fully 3D environments and enemies. In 1987. Running on the same machine as the previous game.

Jurassic Park Trespasser: the YouTube channel ResearchIndicates and one of the most informative Let’s Play videos of all time best explains this game.

Oh god yes, that's one of my favorite games and let's play series of all time. Hey, remember how Half-Life 2's physics engine blew everyone's minds with those seesaw puzzles where you had to weigh down one end with bricks or other items so that you could walk up the other? Yeah, guess what, Trespasser had that before Half-Life 1 even came out.

Furthermore, once you ate your burger, if you want more, you have to buy another because it’s a consumables.

The same goes for single-player offline games, though. There's only so much entertainment you can get out of one before you've seen everything, get bored, and look for another one.

you pay once but can play anytime while patched and updates require prolonged work after you purchase

If a studio fails to budget for that and make sure those costs are included in the price of the game, it frankly deserves to go bust.

Again, and for the last time, not kicking the Russians out of Ukraine as quickly as possible will hurt the civilians more. There are no good options, the US and Ukraine are choosing the lesser evil. If you disagree with that and think that there is a good way of kicking the Russians out quickly without hurting civilians, please, share.

Yup. It's incredibly convenient, I have no idea why people stopped using it. I follow a bunch of youtube channels, webcomics, podcasts, blogs, and apps in development. If there's some way other than RSS to have all those updates show up on a single page, I don't know it.

I find it absolutely sickening and disgusting.

So do I, but you know what? The damage the Russians are doing every day is worse; in case you haven't heard, they've been busy these last few months turning eastern Ukraine into one giant minefield. So the lesser of two evils it is.

Kenshi is a post-apocalyptic sandbox open-world RPG / base-building game with a bunch of lore but absolutely no plot for you to follow.

It was great while it lasted, but I stopped using Trillian simply because people stopped using the networks it supported. I used it for ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger. The latter three don't even exist anymore, and ICQ is a shadow of its former self owned by some Russians now. Some people migrated over to Skype, some I just lost contact with altogether. Thinking back to those carefree days fills me with a strange sense of melancholy. It all seems to have gone wrong somewhere along the way, and not just in terms of IM apps.

I would rather vote for an actual leftist that loses and causes the dems to lose too than vote for a dem and barley win.

A vote for a leftist with no chance to win is a vote for the conservatives. It sucks, but such is the nature of the two-party system.

the options are not in fact committing borderline war crimes or accepting russian rule

I can't help noticing that your claim of other options existing was not followed by even a single example.

at least grow a spine and say it with your whole chest instead of shoving off the responsibility on said russians

It is their responsibility. The fighting happens because Russia invaded, and it would cease immediately if it withdrew its troops back within its own borders. Every single casualty is 100% the fault of Russia. Calling me spineless is not very nice and more importantly not a very good way of arguing against my logic.

Can someone more knowledgeable about American politics please explain to me why the Republicans are allowed to do this and/or why the Democrats aren't doing the same? This seems like such a blatant abuse of the system, I'm baffled that it keeps happening.

Do people not use it anymore? I still do. I follow a boatload of different youtube channels, webcomics, blogs, etc. If there's some other way besides RSS to have all of those updates show up on a single page, I don't know it.

I don't find many reasons to be proud of my country, but the fact that we were the first to give tanks to Ukraine absolutely is one.

Eh, Bethesda flip-flop on that kind of stuff all the time. IIRC in Arena, the Imperial City was just in generic temperate woodland, then it was retconned in some in-game books to a jungle, then retconned again in Oblivion back to generic woodland. Same thing with the armor of imperial soldiers. Generic fantasy plate in early games, Roman in Morrowind, generic fantasy plate in Oblivion again, Roman again in Skyrim... They just can't make up their minds.

I will say this, though: It's okay to retcon old lore, but only in order to make it more unique and interesting. Retconning stuff to make it more generic and bland is a high crime.

I mean... there's not holding your hand and then there's the game not bothering to inform you that you're softlocked because you failed to notice and pick up a one-pixel item four hours ago in an area you can no longer return to. I remember those old point-and-click adventure games very well, and I have very little desire to go back to those days.

defied the societal norms of his time by embracing his homosexuality openly

More like embraced the monarchical norms of "rules for thee but not for me".

Fingers crossed!

Frontier: Elite 2 had it in 1993. There really is no excuse at this point.

If that's what it takes to kick the Russians out of the country, then it has to be done; failing to kick them out would result in far more harm. The fault is still with the Russians, since if they weren't there, there would be no fighting and no casualties at all.

I'm not sure that's what he's going for. He just looks unhappy to me, which seems very plausible. If he had half a brain, he'd do a Bill Gates and put on a careless smile in his mugshot.

Basically all of NetHack, but if I had to pick one thing, it would be the fact that the devs foresee things that don't even exist in the game. For example, if you polymorph yourself into a monster that can eat metal and then eat a trident, you get a humorous message referencing Trident bubble gum. A similar message exists for when you eat a piece of flint (referencing the Flintstones, naturally), despite the fact that there are no monsters in the game that can eat rocks. In other words, that message can never be seen in the vanilla version of the game, but the devs prepared it anyway just in case you mod such a monster in.

It blows my mind that this kind of plan to undermine vital functions of the government, needed now more than ever, is not considered terrorism and/or treason and punished accordingly. We're facing an existential threat as a species, and their grand plan is to exacerbate it?

I think the idea is that this is the opposite of new, that trailer screams "screw all this weird new stuff, we're going back to the roots". As for whether that's interesting... eh, maybe? I'm not convinced a horror film can work when you already know what the monster looks like and how it works. Aliens is a fantastic sequel precisely because its makers recognized that the alien wouldn't be scary a second time, so they changed genres and made it an action flick instead. The next logical step would clearly be a slapstick comedy. This doesn't look like that, but who knows, maybe the trailer is deceptive. ;-)

Generations of having a chance to blow up children. vs maybe a short term push of the front, maybe.

The thing you're forgetting is that the Russians are busy laying as many landmines as they can get their hands on all over eastern Ukraine. Using cluster munitions to drive the Russians out will result in less UXO than letting them continue doing that.

With conventional weapons UA is already kicking ass.

I guess we must be following different news outlets, then. All I'm hearing is that the Ukrainian counter-offensive is going a lot slower than planned. And if you can be sure of one thing in a war, it's that things are always worse than the belligerents are willing to admit.

if the dems never win the Republicans won’t have anyone else to blame anymore

I think you severely underestimate their ability to find scapegoats.

It’s not our war. It’s not our fight. It has nothing to do with us.

That's where you're wrong. America has a global empire, and Russia is one of the other powers trying to undermine and dismantle it. If America wants to keep its empire and the many benefits it brings, it has no choice but to defend it. Be thankful you're only having to spend money while someone else is spending lives.