leftzero

The question is how long that mindset will survive once Gaben leaves. Or dies.

We need to upload him into a GabenOS of sorts. To preserve the Valve mindset, and also for science.

Some neurotoxin and mass murder would be a small price to pay.

It's easier to understand when you look at English history and realize that English is essentially three different languages (old Saxon, Norse, and Norman) badly put together (a great example of this being meats having different names than the animals they come from, since the people farming said animals spoke Saxon, but the people eating them spoke Norman), with plenty of Latin, Greek, French, and other languages sprinkled on top, all written with a limited alphabet that's incapable of properly reflecting the pronunciation of those languages' words.

It doesn't help, though ,that at some point the English alphabet got simplified with things like ō becoming things like oo, without taking into account that things like oo were already being used to represent different sounds, or that at one point over a period of a few decades in the middle ages for some reason all English speakers seemed to decide to randomly switch around the pronunciation of all their vowels without changing how they wrote them (!?), or that, while all languages borrow words from others, unlike most others English for some reason doesn't bother to adapt their orthography or grammar (a French or Catalan speaker will have no problem understanding why façade is written like that and pronounced fassade instead of fackade, for instance, but I'm sure most English speakers won't be so lucky, especially if they write it facade... and then you've got things like fiancé, or the plural of radius being radii, and so on)... and you end up with the oos in book, blood, door, and boot all being pronounced differently... and, for some reason (probably the borrowing one), the one in brooch being pronounced a particular fifth different way... 🤷‍♂️

Yankee, or Yank.

The set of all integers is not larger than the set of all odd integers.

The set of all real numbers, on the other hand, is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality_of_the_continuum

Activision Blizzard was already about as anti-consumer as possible, so in this particular case at worst nothing will change, at best Microsoft might actually clean house and there might be some improvements for the consumers...

Grammatical gender ≠ biological gender ≠ gender identity. 🤷‍♂️

No, succulents.

Yeah, it's called clinical depression, it's entirely normal, happens to everyone. 🤷‍♂️

I got glasses. That definitely changed the way I saw things. Everything suddenly became more focused.

The point is that, other than Gabe, Valve doesn't have any shareholders to put before their customers. A publicly traded company, on the other hand, effectively has no choice but to cause as much harm as possible to their customers and to society in general in order to maximize short term shareholder profits, leading to runaway enshittification.

And horse armour.

And all their attempts at turning modding into a walled garden they could control and profit from.

I was a Relay user. Now I use Connect for Lemmy. 🤷‍♂️

Seems like a reasonable demand.

Horoscopes. Fortune cookies. Political speeches.

We do like humour. So called "memes" (that is, image macros, memes are an entirely different thing, of which image macros are merely a particularly malignant subset)... OK, I'll grant you, maybe they're not entirely the opposite of humour, maybe they're just what's left when you remove all the humour and just leave a dry mummified shell of what might have once been a very poor attempt at a bad joke... but still, if they're poorly made (as is the case 99% of the time), they're noise, they're spam, and if they have any value whatsoever it's entirely negative... and if they're "well" made... then they're just plain old political propaganda (but without the artistic value that good propaganda posters had), so noise, spam, and definitely of negative value to society.

I don't suck as much at programming as I suck at everything else.

That seems like an excellent idea, we should all make everything possible to make sure such AI overlords are built.

Please don't hurt me, or an eventual future indistinguishable facsimile of myself..?

In the US, sure.

Outside, a Yankee is a Yankee, even if they're cosplaying a ghost while standing in front of a burning cross and waving a confederate flag. We don't care enough to ask in which state they had the misfortune of being born. 🤷‍♂️

Shut up, Todd.

Your game might have been a 6/10 ten or fifteen years ago, but today it's just outdated in every single aspect.

Not only that, but its characters and quests feel generic and uninspired even when compared to older Bethesda games, and the little background stories that made them great (I still remember that guy falling from the sky just out of Seyda Neen all these years later) are not only entirely absent, but their absence is highlighted by the sheer generic blandness and emptiness of the planets and the cookie cutter repetition of the locations you find randomly scattered on them (often without any consideration for the planet's nature or environment; I've lost count of the amount of times I've facepalmed after finding an outdoors lounging area with sandwiches and whatnot in planets with no breathable atmosphere; and the time Gopher found life in a cookie cutter cave in Earth's moon without the game acknowledging anything about it just made me feel all kinds of vicarious embarrassment for your game).

And to top that off there's the bugs (I posted my negative review out of frustration after the last time the game crashed before I could save after spending way too long modifying my ship with that extremely poorly designed ship editor interface — though even that isn't as bad as outposts; I entirely gave up on those after the first attempt), and Bethesda's apparent absolute lack of interest in fixing them...

Which gets me to the main reason people are shitting on your game, your company, and you personally now, Todd: the sheer Elon Musk levels of lunacy you and your company have displayed in response to the first wave of negative reviews by telling the reviewers their opinions were wrong, and the fact that said lunacy apparently takes precedence over fixing the damn bugs.

This is no longer about a mediocre poorly written and lazily designed game running like shit on a decades old engine that should've been ditched after Morrowind, this is about Bethesda jumping the shark and losing any respect its customers might have once had for a company that used to produce great games. We gave you another chance after the horse armour debacle. We stood by you when your games became formulaic generic fantasy with Oblivion and Skyrim, because the stories were still good. We gave you many chances, because we remembered the good old times and we naively hoped they could come back. And then you showed your true colours (admittedly for the nth time, but hope is hard to break) and outright told us our genuine concerns were, against all evidence (in the year of games like Baldur's Gate 3!) wrong.

Fuck you, Todd. You ruined it. And it's quite possible Bethesda will never recover.

If you've got windows 10 try updating to 22h2 (no, really; a consequence of Bethesda being acquired by Microsoft, I suspect), and update your GPU drivers.

That got it running on my 980ti, so it should also work with the 1070.

non-fire- removed ant

I don't know which instance is doing this shit (world or ml, I assume), but it's absolutely removed. 😤

Majestic.

(Though probably not as much if you could smell it.)

Exactly, Steam got where it is because it managed to be more convenient than piracy (as Gaben himself said, piracy is a service problem), as did Netflix before the fragmentation (and rampant enshittification) of the streaming market made piracy once more the most convenient (and better quality) option.

Epic store exclusives don't promote Epic, they promote piracy, as that is the second most convenient option after Steam (it's worth mentioning that Steam also acts as unobtrusive DRM; infect your game with malware like Denuvo and suddenly piracy again becomes the more convenient — even the only reasonable — option, as cracked games perform better and are more stable than malware DRM infected ones; Steam provides a good enough and, more importantly, harmless option for both consumers and developers, something no alternative, including piracy, has managed to achieve).

And, of course, the instant Gaben retires and Valve goes public and begins to enshittify itself we won't be going to Epic or GOG (unless they manage to replicate what Steam has achieved), we'll be back to sailing the high seas.

Top left one is just stretching. I've seen cats look exactly like that when stretching, same face and all, no stylisation required, other than what's already naturally built-in due to them being cats.

Top right one is somewhat stylised, but mostly is just high on catnip.

The other two... yeah, those ain't very good.

I thought the world didn't entirely suck. Ignorant little idiot, I was.

I'm replying to this from Jerboa (the Android Lemmy app), while logged in as my lemmy.ml account.

Federation; it's great (when it works). 😁

Only issue is I can't set up my kbin.social account on Jerboa, but eh, it's still in development, so I'll probably be able to at some point down the line (or someone'll make a more general Fediverse app). 🤷‍♂️

A printer being stupid (and Xerox's refusal to give him the source code so he could fix it) was precisely what led Stallman to start the open source software movement.

Luckily, Activision Blizzard already stopped investing in quality and started shafting customers quite a while back, so worst case scenario (in this particular case, your criticism is still valid for most others) nothing changes, best case scenario Microsoft actually cleans house and the market becomes slightly less anti-consumer with one of the worst offenders gone...

You just haven't turned the current high enough.

By any civilized standard democrat politicians are far right extremists (a few token exceptions are closer to right or even center-right on some points, but they have little effect on the whole). Republicans are outright deranged lunatics, mixed with a worryingly increasing percentage of fascists.

The old man the boats.

"...And that's what your holy men discuss, is it?" [asked Granny Weatherwax.]

"Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin, for example." [answered Mightily Oats.]

"And what do they think? Against it, are they?"

"It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray."

"Nope."

"Pardon?"

"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

"It's a lot more complicated than that--"

"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."

"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"

"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."

—from Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett.

Yeah, but British is a thing, and everyone knows about it (the British made damn well sure, back when they were the main global bully)... American, on the other hand, doesn't work, because it refers to the whole damn continent, not just the USA... so if we want to refer to the citizens of the US Yankee / Yank is about the only option we have; not the best, maybe, but probably the least worst.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

I'd be fine with the world being run by a Commodore 64 running ELIZA. It'd still be orders of magnitude less harmful than the parasites we've got now.

Then we'd go back to sailing the high seas, until a better alternative shows up; as Gabe said, piracy is a service problem.

Sounds more like an enlightened centrist to me, but same difference really.

If a maniac wanted to shoot someone ten times, and the victim wated not to be shot, the enlightened centrist would smugly proclaim that the maniac shooting the victim five times would be a just middle ground that'd be fair to both parties, and that the victim would be unreasonable, intolerant, and antidemocratic for not agreeing to it.

Same result, orders of magnitude more hypocrisy and idiocy, and of course you can't criticise them, since by enabling the maniacs they're just debating and trying to find a compromise, and disagreeing with them is being hostile and going against the very principles of democracy itself.

Malignant asshats, the whole lot of them, wouldn't recognize the paradox of tolerance if you violently hit them in the head with it.

Good, ban boomers too, then.

Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, and Malcolm McDowell (among others) in Wing Commander III Heart of the Tiger (1994), for instance..?

Not that I'm aware. Probably Baader-Meinhof.

To wit, coincidences are more noticeable than non-coincidences, and once you've noticed one it'll be much easier to notice others you might have missed.

I myself once spent about a week seeing Curta hand-held mechanical calculators everywhere. Books, magazines, blog posts, youtube... I wasn't complaining, of course, the Curta is an amazing piece of engineering, but still, it was a bit weird.