abraxas

I hear what you’re saying, but to be fair, younger players don’t start out with those reflexes either. It’s probably harder for older players, but I’m not convinced it’s that much more of a challenge that it’s not worth trying

It's not about the reflexes, though. It's that they have opted to take actions that make the game unenjoyable for a significant number of gamers despite it having no positive benefit for ANY gamer.

And much of my Letsplay complaints weren't about Elden Ring. I mod that. I don't have the tools to mod Bloodborne, a game I otherwise would like more than Elden Ring because of its storyline.

I think it’d be a bit more difficult than you are assuming however since it is also a multiplayer game. I guess they could limit the difficulty options to offline players only.

For online play, you can just match people who are using the same difficulty, and perhaps disable PVP entirely for Easy difficulty. For everything but PVP, it's not that big a deal. Seamless Co-Op Mod works with the Easy Mode mod. If modders can make a coherent experience, I'm sure From could. If they wanted to. Which they don't.

I found it. It's in Nexusmods instead of in the game.

It is a great apple to apple comparison.

This is the "nuh uh" answer. You never quantified anything. it's sorta a "fuck you, I know you showed my argument was a fallacy, but I'm better than you so I'm doubling down". I spend too much time in places where that shit gets laughed at. I'm going back to those places. Enjoy your shit game.

They made a piece of art. You chose to buy it knowing what it was. Git gud

No. I chose to buy Bloodborne because people convinced me that wasn't the case. Git blocked.

You have so many options to make it easier.

Like the third-party Easy Mode mod.

You bought a game that you knew would be full of “difficult” bosses

I bought a game that I knew had a working Easy Mode mod. I would not have bought it if it hadn't. Because the designers are assholes, but assholes who can write a decent story.

And now you sit and complain about there not being an official “difficulty slider”.

Yes, I do. And you sit and complain about another human being having an opinion despite the fact you could just NOT complain about other human beings having an opinion. Funny how people "sit and" do things.

Do you also go to a vegan restaurant and complain they’re not inclusive because you can’t order meat?

No, but that's not an apple-to-apple comparison, making that a False Analogy fallacy. For two reasons. First, whether I agree with it or not, veganism is an ethical position and they're refusing to serve any meat on the menu because they think it's morally wrong to. Do you think Fromsoft thinks they're "going to hell" if they put in a difficulty slider? Second, vegan restaurants are ABOUT veganism. There's no reason to choose to eat at a vegan restaurant unless you or someone in your party is looking to have a meal without meat in it for some reason. There's plenty of reasons to play Fromsoft games but at lower difficulty. Most people don't like Bloodborne or Elden Ring "because it's difficult/unforgiving". They like it because of the story. Anyone who would opt out of playing those games because someone else could play them on easier has serious issues.

Learning to play the guitar or code also doesn’t have a difficulty slider, but people of all abled-ness manage it anyways.

Games are about entertainment. They're not a career. Nobody is paying me to play a Fromsoft game. More importantly, nobody is gatekeeping the entertainment, immersion, and story of music or coding behind me being able to "Git Gud".

And let's look at music and coding. Since I can speak a bit to both. For music, OF COURSE there are difficulty sliders. When I took recorder back in school, they had 2 different versions of many songs. When I first learned Christmas music on piano, I learned special "simplified" tracks for the songs. I never "Got Gud" at music, but I still got to the end of the book.

And coding. Coding is the opposite of a Fromsoft game. You're surrounded by mountains of tools that try to make it easier. When I bring in a junior developer, I'm not giving them some unforgiving code challenge to power through. Maybe they'll never be good enough to design a specialized cache or optimize queries. So I give them the things they CAN do, and hold their hand so they always succeed. Junior devs don't ever fail, not because they "git gud" but because I set them up to succeed by this little difficulty slider called "how hard is this ticket to do and how much help do they need from me?"

I'd say it's simpler than that. Russia keeps funding regions it wants destabilized so something bad is always happening at a time good for Russia.

No tinfoil hat, but total Scumbag Putin.

Already seen it. I don't love Biden, but he's done "okayish" at most things. Every time the economy comes up, people start missing Trump despite the fact he was the one that destroyed it

Does this guy really need the national fame with MAGA that comes with making it on NBC? I don't get it. We've already had 400 convictions. This is a random kid that pled guilty to civil disorder and got 2 months in prison.

If anything, an article should question how someone whose allocution contradicts the evidence got 2 months despite the prosecutor pushing for a year.

I think girls who get long eyelashes do it because they like how they look.

And thank god if they do because I would hate a woman who only cares about what other people think of her looks.

Yeah, that's someone who has so much money he doesn't understand it.

If a $4 latte a day is a significant financial burden for you, you will never own a home. If you can own a home, that $4 latte will have no effect on that.

And the avacado toast? The health effects alone are likely to pay for itself in the medium-term.

It's days like this that remind me I'm not a typical gamer.

When Sims 4 came out, I put Sims 3 away thinking it was time for something bigger and better even though I'd had wishlisted DLC unpurchased. When Sims 4 clearly had basic content locked behind future DLC, I quit and didn't go back to anything because playing the old version when the new version is out "didn't make sense". Went from being a Sims player to not a Sims player, not in protest but because their business model "failed to monetize" me. Obviously, if I were the base case, EA would have backpedaled.

Reminds me of the "mini-outrigger and story collection" thing with fantasy literature. I've gone from being a diehard fan to no longer even reading simply because I didn't have the bandwidth and research hours to take it all in (Dresden and Iron Druid, lookin at you).

I beat Starfield the first time before the bad reviews started overwhelming. And I still don't get it (except perhaps as hype). Bethesda games are far from perfect (people seem to forget the negativity around Skyrim being compared to Oblivion), but they scratch a particular itch that millions of gamers have and crave.

What terrifies me is that this whole "Hey look, we're getting 2006 again" attitude is exactly what's going to kill off the Bethesda "genre" the same way SquareEnix gutted the AAA Turn-Based RPG. Sure, it means we might get a black horse game out of left field (Persona 5, talking about you) but it's a shame to see so much hate on the style of game that Bethesda is.

And we need to make no mistake. While some complaints have been valid, the biggest ones that started this snowball have been things like "I shoot guns around guards and nobody comments" or "I murder an entire town and then pay a small bounty and everyone's fine with me again".

I get the "huge procedural universe is soooo boring" complaint; I don't agree with it because I loved Daggerfall and because Starfield has more hand-made content than Skyrim, but I can respect it. But that alone doesn't justify all this "worst game ever" BS. It makes Starfield sound like it's worse than initial-release NMS was (and I can say from experience, it's not).

And for me, I just crossed hour 180 with Starfield, and have not been bored once. I don't expect it to be everyone's favorite game, but it's certainly mine for 2023.

For people like me who go down for a half hour and feel like a train wreck for 8 hours when they get stabbed a little, I'll take a 1.5min one.

If you told me I needed to run on a treadmill for an hour while the ultrasound worked, I'd STILL take it over getting stabbed a little.

Actually, I think they don't want linux gamers, with their higher technical savvy. Some game dev companies love how 90% of their bug reports come from 10% of their users (and even brag about it). Other companies would rather just not get those 90% of bug reports.

Five years is literally the worst sentence you can get for the crime he pled guilty to. From how it's worded, the most recommended penalty for that crime appears to be a $5000 fine and maybe a little jail time.

They "threw the book at him" by all definitions of the word.

If I had to guess, probably for the same reason you can't sue for not being able to pick what apps you install on your toaster.

Google probably opened themselves up to this monopoly shit by trying not to be as much of a monopoly as Apple is trying to be.

I've heard a lot of lawyers say that the law punishes virtually every good behavior because that behavior can be construed in a way that you can be sued for, and that it favors being a dick more than anything. In this case, that might be what happened?

I mean, not that Google is a saint at all.

it’s important to know that Teresa Halbach’s vehicle was found on the property, along with charred pieces of her bones in a burn pit.

Police corruption is the problem. Her vehicle being on the edge of his fairly large property is a lot less damning if it weren't for Steven's blood being reported in the vehicle. There were witnesses who claim to have seen it moved there, even if Zellner cannot seem to decide who moved it.

And you say "her bones", but there's two problems with that. The bones have been confirmed to be human female, but they couldn't confirm or deny they were Halbach's. And there's a compelling reason to believe they were not burned in the burn barrel they were found.

There seem to be two real possibilities in his case. EITHER it's a fairly ridiculous frame-up job or he's guilty. That should be easy because of the question "why would anyone go to THOSE lengths to frame Steven Avery?" It's not easy because the open animosity and bad-faith of thep olice in this case is compelling.

I think he likely did it, but I genuinely think the case is so tainted, he should not have been convicted.

I don’t really get people saying fuck Nintendo. It’s their IP, and Yuzu team was pretty blatant it’s made for piracy

Because a significant percent of people have always seen IP as theft and IP lawsuits as shakedowns. Real Talk - IP was codified to solve one problem (it wasn't casual piracy, it was inventors being ripped off by evil businesses), and it made that problem worse. We should've just thrown it out from there and tried something else, but then the evil businesses convinced the soccer moms that their little Billy listening to Metallica on Napster was everything wrong with this country.

It’s not what you do when you try to stay under the radar

And people walked down the street smoking pot in my state before it was legalized. We still said "FUCK the war on drugs" when they got harassed by cops.

, I think he did it.

At this point, we're way past that line of the narcissist's prayer

Didn't he back Trump just a month or two ago on the same? Can he make up his mind? I mean, thanks for denouncing him now after almost 80 total criminal charges in 3 jurisdictions, but what gives?

Happens for blood draws as well, even small quantities. Happens if someone pokes me with a lidocaine. It's a vasovagal reaction where my body "overreacts to certain triggers". My blood pressure and heartrate plummet (to scary low levels. I've freaked out nurses on a couple of occasions). It causes me to feint in a comically dramatic way because the bloodflow to my brain gets too low. To be even more fun, I sometimes exhibit false "seizure" symptoms when I'm down, tightening up all my muscles at once and stopping breathing. During my first COVID vaccine, my breathing stopped for almost a minute, which is why 2 doctors were overseeing me when I came to. My wife explaining the situation is the only reason I didn't end up in an ambulance. You shoulda seen the nurse, she looked as pale as I did!

In theory, this could kill me, and there are confirmed ultra-rare cases of people dying from vasovagal syncope. In practice, I'm far more likely to die of a car accident on the way home (with my wife driving me because I'm in no state to drive after that). So long as a competent medical professional is watching me, I'm basically completely safe. But absolutely miserable.

Honestly, it makes me feel like I'm some kind of drama queen. But it's entirely made up of unconscious responses in my body.

And the weird thing is that it's not thinking about needles. It's my body's reaction to the feeling of a needle entering it. That sad little "prick" feeling that is maybe a 1 out of 10 on the pain scale? I have no idea if it's "trickable" because I have absolutely no problem digging out a splinter with a knife. I keep wanting to find out if getting a tattoo would trigger that reaction or not. I just want to get a tattoo anyway lol.

Exactly. It should be anonymized in the media. "400 traitors, terrorists, and bigots have faced justice for their 1/6 actions, with more convictions coming in every day" <--that is the headline we should have. Few names, few faces, just facts.

Why is it always progressives who have to hold their nose and “vote blue no matter who”? Centrist Democrats have been driving the car for decades

Because we're a minority and the options are the party that now gives us significant representation for our demographic (103 members of the House, and 1 (sadface) senator) or the party that thinks anyone left of "moderate-right" should be thrown out of a helecopter over the ocean.

The US is designed to change slowly, and even fixing that is designed to take time.

What you keep asking us to do isn’t compromise, it’s to stay in an abusive relationship where you get to make all the rules and we deal with it in silence

No. What we're asking you to do is pick the loveless relationship where your party buys you supermarket flowers once a year over Jeffery Dahmer. The Dems don't abuse us. We just don't have the votes and constitutents to do something worthwhile. You do realize that if a moderate compromises too progressive, they get replaced with a Republican, right?

So why don't we fight in-party for more representation and educate voters that we're not the boogey man, instead of threatening to murder the whole country to get our way like the bloody Repubs do?

Came here to say this. I have a friend that's a meat and dairy company, and she (yup, 1 person for-profit farm) doesn't lobby for or against shit.

That gets us under 100% already.

It's an extreme-case prisoner's dilemma. For shoppers to prevent a Walmart/Amazon monopoly, people would have to both give up convenience AND affordability in hope that everyone else had the same radical values. There were PLENTY of boycotters for both, but they just weren't anywhere near enough.

At some point, when you're starving and Sam Walton comes by and offers you food your family can afford, you pull the trigger. And I don't fault someone who does that.

Good news. You can still beat the game if the "thread of prophecy is severed", but it is fairly challenging and generally requires stumble-luck or at LEAST knowledge of how to normally beat the game. It helps to know the identity of another character you have to kill in cold blood to get "almost back on track". And then the location that serves no real purpose except to get back on track from that situation.

It's polarizing, a lot like many Bethesda games. My unpopular take is that I've been having an absolute blast with it and am on my third playthrough. It's the only game I've played for months and the only one I find myself wanting to play.

For me, what I love is that it's Skyrim in Space in so many ways. It's what I hoped/wanted for gameplay when I bought Outer Worlds. And Outer Worlds really disappointed me there.

Is it balanced? Hell, no. Personal and ship weapons are as much of a mess as I always felt weapons in Fallout 4's were. I have this badass heavy weapon that I have to fire on full auto for 30 seconds to kill a random enemy... Or I fire one shot from this other weapon. RPGs love to make automatic weapons do shit damage to keep them feeling balanced, and ultimately they often end up being a waste.

Ditto with the build system. The ship builder makes you dream of a badass build experience, but does admittedly fall short. But nobody else gives me that feeling the way Starfield does, so I find myself letting Good be enough for me when Perfect isn't available.

Again, I'm sure plenty of people are bored and hate it, but I consistently feel like Bethesda gave me exactly the game they promised me. And as much as I want more, it's still my favorite and most played game of 2023 by now.

Several reasons.

• Paying customers are footing the bill for that anti-theft
• The guy is making over $500k off someone else's product with a couple days' work. I'm no Tankie, but you don't have to be a high schooler or a pothead to have a problem with capitalism's more toxic extremes. People have been conditioned to forget this, but piracy is a counter-leverage to prevent product pricing from going out of control. Just look at the average prices of Switch games vs PC games. The harder it is to pirate a product, the further the price of that product is from a value consensus.
• These types of anti-thefts tend to false-fire for the paying customers (who footed the bill). This is especially true because he builds his mods against a closed-source product that behaves in ways he cannot always predict. Published modding interfaces are never perfect.

There are some serious downsides. In this case, this should get progressive alarms going off.

But before we get to the bulk, I'm going to repeat my last line's question first. Why invent new ways to fuck the poor in the name of gun control when we have solutions that work?

1. It encourages transitioning gun ownership percentage to wealthy white people and less gun ownership to less-wealthy and non-white people (who, on average, make less money). This is the big one
2. People don't like to admit it, but gun ownership DOES have a deterrent effect in high crime areas. Home invaders regularly mention avoiding houses of armed people when interrogated. I don't want ANYONE robbed on my street, but I definitely don't want my family victimized. My road has a dramatically lower home invader rate (based on value of property) than surrounding areas. Why? Outspoken gun owners due to the hunting culture (we have too many deer)... Do we really want to pretend to justify all the upsides of gun ownership to going to rich white people?
3. Over 90% of gun crimes are committed with illegal weapons, a majority of which go back to legitimate owners and were stolen/given illegally. That means the liability insurance chain is already broken (or the rates go up, further alienating poor folks)

Simply tracing, background checks, and better regulation all-round would be more effective than a regressive tax on gun ownership. And those things are well-established and well-tested in society. Regulations WORK. So why invent new ways to fuck the poor in the name of gun control when we have solutions that work?

EDIT:

And some other thoughts that kinda go both ways at once. It looks like $300k is the quoted amount by most 2A firearm insurance companies. Almost like they lobbied for the bill. It makes me wonder if they would also lobby for weakening other regulations because "well gun owners are insured".

And part 2 as a flipside. It looks like the costs might not be terribly high. I'm seeing quotes as low as $30/mo. It's hard because they are all EXTREMELY shadey companies and (like other insurance companies) they like to hide their rates from potential buyers. As well as their fine print since the rates are so low from them avoiding paying out. By their fine print, it looks like they don't pay out if your action might have been criminal. So the insurance doesn't actually pay the victims of anything except accidental discharge.

But then, do we want to empower another questionably corrupt industry by mandating gun owners be their customers?

Yeah, people seem all over the place about whether a copied mechanic is "ripping off" or just a genre.

These pokemon-likes have no more in common with Pokemon than Street Fighter with Virtua Fighter, Tekken, MK, KI, Fatal Fury, Guilty Gear, DBZ, or even Super Smash Bros... and about 2 dozen other games

First off, this isn't testing. We know exactly what we need Horseshoe Crab blood for, and it's incredibly important.

Second, it's probably not torture. The worst-case-scenario level of discomfort from bleeding them is fairly low, like a human giving blood. And that (incorrectly) presupposes them having as advanced pain-sensing as humans. The actual death rate is the bigger issue, but we are talking about saving lives and the medical community is trying really hard to change the status quo on this. Covered below.

Third, what you're seeing in that picture saves thousands of lives per year. How much human suffering, how many human deaths, are you willing to accept to achieve those goals? What if one of those humans that has to suffer or die was your kid? There's no plant-based alternative to this process at this time.

Let me clarify this. Using horseshoe crabs for this purpose is VERY EXPENSIVE. It's only done because we don't have an alternative yet, and the process is necessary for modern medicine. There is plenty of research going into either making this process less expensive (which probably involves a lower death rate for crabs) or finding an entirely different process to achieve the same goals. But none has been found (well, except that they used to use rabbits for this. I don't know the details)

I can understand the desire to spare... um...shellfish some..uh.. pain I guess. But NOT at the expense of human life and suffering. That's just silly.

I've got a mug from a town I used to live in. It's a rooster with the name "Shitty Larry" written across it. He was a local celeb. A rooster so badly behaved he had to be rehomed, and the people who adopted him created a whole lifestyle around dealing with his "antics".

As I was leaving, Fucking Frank was also coming into the spotlight.

They're assholes. But they taste good.

I dunno if that origin story will be a good thing or a bad thing. Either it empowers decades of theorycrafting, or it blows them out of the water entirely.

But then, Pyramidhead really seemed like he had to be an aspect of James, and the movie really made it all weird. PH is the only male enemy in the entire game, and is the most awkwardly sexual monster a gamer could have imagined when SH2 came out (the first time he shows up, we see him...uh..assault and murder a mannequin. Also the ONLY clearly sexual moment in the entire game despite a possible romance existing)... Otherwise it's a game where virtually every enemy you face is gendered female.

With limited spoilers, James's seeming sexual frustration is rumored to be one of the concealed storypoints in SH2... which completes an amazingly complex, mature, and terrifying story

There was a HOLE here. It's gone now. -Silent Hill 2, mysterious 100% optional message at Neely's Bar

Yes, there was a literal hole at that location as well. And some people suggest it's about alcoholism.

There's another message that shows up in Neely's Bar, signed by James, telling him to kill himself but that he'll go to a different place than Mary when he does.

If you take those things that the game doesn't give away for free, and add the actual story beats that I am opting NOT to spoil, then the sexual tension becomes a clear possible explanation.

...which is why the sign also says it's as much caffeine as coffee.

I would say the 14th Amendment is pretty unambiguous on abortion, just as the Commerce Clause is 100% unambiguous on the unconstitutionality of these travel laws. The problem is that it's not specific, which is the opening used by this adversarial SCOTUS.

Even if you had 100 pages listing specifics for a Constitutional Amendment, you'd STILL miss obvious ones. The protection from Cruel and Unusual punishment, for example. It should be more unambiguous by including a list of 100 things the authors considered cruel, 100 things the authors considered unusual, and then a stipulation that they meant "if any of those 200 items is true". And even then, those Constitutional authors didn't write "Keelhauling" in the list, so that must be fine!

But summarizing... You can't have a large over-arcing right that stands the test of time and dishonest lawmakers without it being general and requiring some interpretation. If only we could solve for dishonest SCOTUS justices.

I think the "novel way" in this case is the idea that games can look at your data from other games to adjust difficulty. So if you do well in God of War, the AI difficulty in the new Devil May Cry could get harder. Ditto the other way around.

I would say it's a newish idea. I don't see it as particularly innovative, though. We just don't do it NOW because it's stupid.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I get more value out of YT Premium than any other streaming service.

My local chain does that bullshit upsell standard.

They'll even show you your CLEAN air filter in hope you're a sucker enough to say yes.

And they don't get in trouble if they just say "wow, look at this cabin air filter. Would you like us to replace it while we're working on your car?"

The problem with Presidency. More people approve of his decision than disapprove. Either choice would have fucked him next November.

Lucky for him, Encumbants get a huge leg-up on the reelection bid and need to basically be guilty of treason not to win.