CIWS-30

It’ll prevent indie artists from having their work plagiarized over and over without payment from indie “devs” who honestly shouldn’t have the right to exist as “developers” if they can’t afford to actually hire artists and such.

It’d be one thing if they made an agreement to get assets from artists for cheap or for free as a favor, but just plain putting them all out of business permanently by letting a machine steal their work forever is another thing entirely.

Wait until the population declines further and the CCP tightens its grip even more over Hong Kong. I doubt this’ll last. It’s just how authoritarian communist regimes work. Look at Putin and co. for examples.

Sad, because I was a fan of them and bought all their games from Saint’s Row 1 all the way to Gat out of Hell (although not in chronological order) and got Agents of Mayhem for free somewhere, but think they’ve made some bad moves lately.

I think it all started going downhill from Agents of Mayhem, and them screwing up with the reboot of Saint’s Row was probably the nail in the coffin. I wish they’d just made Saint’s Row 5 instead, with wacky time travel shenanigans and a more polished set of superpowers.

At the point where they decided to “reboot” to something old school and grittier (TOO old school, imo) they really didn’t get what their fanbase wanted, and what new players who’d only heard of and experienced Saint’s Row 4 would get excited about.

They could’ve probably taken Saint’s Row up to 6 entries if they’d just iterated on the formula from 4 and possibly Gat out of Hell (I wouldn’t know, I got distracted and didn’t play it after I bought it, ironically). Similar to how United Front Games (the developer of Sleeping Dogs) could’ve probably stayed in business if they’d just made Sleeping Dogs 2 instead of that horrible “free to play” multiplayer asset flip of some of the least interesting elements of Sleeping Dogs 1.

Not surprising, but disappointing. The premise was interesting (first person magic shooter) but the execution was tepid. The presentation / atmosphere, the generic graphics, the dopey dialogue, the lack of an interesting story. A lot of the success of games like Halo is how the world sucks you in with its atmosphere and storyline, I think developers really underestimate how much that matters in a single player game. Cinematogrophy is important, the feel of an experience is more than the simple gameplay of moving a character around and pushing buttons.

Same. I stay away from #Explore and just keep to my feed of people I actually follow. And I make sure to unfollow those who are too stressful to hear from constantly.

I agree with almost all the of all politics all the time people who constantly post negative things, but it’s too tiring to read them, especially since knowing about it does me no good and I can’t do anything about it anyway. I already vote and donate as much as I can, and I live in a Blue state so anything outside of my area’s just not possible for me to influence.

I’ve found it’s better just to ignore it and focus on positive things that make my life better.

This is also why I stopped going to Mastodon. In addition to negative ragebait politics being almost the only thing that’s trending (and I have too much of that in my life already) there’s no real nuance or tolerance for anything outside the echo chamber.

You DO get called a racist nazi transphobe for stepping outside the box or trying to support people, ideas or places that might not be 100% perfect or pass the strictest ideological purity test. I thought Liberal Twitter was pretty exclusionary and echo-chamber-y, but Mastodon’s a lot worse.

Given how modern AAA games are and Bethesda’s recent track history, it’s not negative to be skeptical, it’s smart.

Especially since despite Microsoft watching over them and helping them to have the most “bug free launch in history” it’s still probably going to be a hot mess for weeks to a month after launch. I want to be pleasantly surprised, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Plus, the recent release of Baldur’s Gate 3 with no microtransactions or season passes, etc. has gotten peoples’ standards up, and given that Microsoft paid a lot of money to buy Bethesda, we’re aware that they’re going to have to make that money back somehow, and will probably give into the temptation to do some really player unfriendly things to do it.

Bethesda’s been going all in on surprisingly expensive microtransactions for really tiny amounts of content, like in Fallout 4 and 76, and it wouldn’t be shocking for them to continue in that direction. People aren’t being mindlessly negative, they’re looking at current and past trends and making an educated guess about the future.

I’ll probably transition my AMD 8350 build over to Linux when Win10 stops being supported. As opposed to my mom’s FX-8370 build, which I’ll probably just have to replace with a new Windows 11 system, as there’s no way I’m expecting her (an elderly woman) to learn anything other than Windows. Especially since she’s reliant on Windows-only apps.

The actual hardware she’s using will probably be converted to a Linux Desktop, but I’ll have to migrate her data to a new mini Windows 11 PC or something.

This is the reason why they’ve made sure only their brainwashed nutjob militias have all the guns. And also why the police are a bunch of classist racists too, along with much of the military (which primarily recruits from the south).

I don’t want to put my conspiracy hat on, but it also might be why “liberal” politicians try to get states with tons of activists to have the strictest gun laws. I’m not a second amendment wingnut, but if the corpos and their fascist storm troopers every decided to start a shooting war with the civilian population, I have no illusions about who’d probably win, given that the average civilian is just a coward who’ll back off and comply when even slightly threatened with violence.

Everyone else has answered your other questions, but let me just say that I’ve used KDE Neon (while distro hopping) it’s both beautiful and functional. The latest KDE developments are really solid and intuitive, and based on their development updates I’ve seen on Mastodon and elsewhere, it seems like they’re really starting to understand their userbase.

I.E. they understand that most people want to double click icons to launch them even though almost the entire development team prefers single click. They’re not doing the tunnel-vision dev thing where they force what they love on users even though the vast majority of the userbase prefers the opposite.

Edit: It looks and feels gorgeous, and even similar alternatives like Kubuntu kind of feel a little worse to me. Then again, I’m a serious Cinnamon / KDE fan, so other peoples’ mileage may vary.

“Are you kidding me? Just LOOK at these nerds!”

/no self awareness
/selfown

Ironically, for old stuff at least, Piracy is the only way it’s reliably preserved. Even if you do want to buy it new to support the creators, oft-times you can’t. It’s because I can’t buy it that I turn to piracy. Not just for old games, but sometimes old comics and manga too. Occasionally Anime that’s no longer licensed or available.

Plus, it’s only going to get worse now, with Streaming services and online platforms delisting anything even that might not make a profit because they don’t want to pay residuals. I’m not big on pirating new releases, but that’s because I think we should support artists. I also think we should call for the creators to be paid more of the profit share vs. the money people at the top who seem to do nothing but fire people and shoot down good ideas to try to make everything the same carbon copy live service.

I also don’t have to pirate new stuff, because it’ll old stuff on sale at half price (or less) soon enough, and with all the bugs fixed and the features added the way it should have been at launch. My backlog is so huge that I won’t have time to go through it anyway before I die. So there’s another reason I don’t care much about new games. If I’m still interested in them a year or more later when they’re on sale and fixed up, I’ll buy it then.

As for stuff like Anime and Manga. Anime subscriptions are surprisingly cheap, and so are monthly manga subs if you know where to look. Viz’s Shounen Jump ($3) Vizmanga ($2), Azuki.co ($5), Mangamo (also $5 last I checked)… so long as you only subscribe to one at a time and rotate, you’ll probably never run out, and it’s a lot cheaper than buying it one volume at a time $10 each or whatever.

Probably best to get the second cheapest size just in case. Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. If I ever got a Steam Deck, that’s what I would buy. Games just keep getting bigger after all.

Recettear is something I recommend too, as it’s really unknown for how good it is. You play as an item shop owner (who’s a young girl) that has to make a profit from making and selling items, and there’s a dungeon crawling elmenet too.

Aren’t “Boomer Shooters” actually Millenial Shooters? That’s who played them when they came out.

Honestly, one of the reasons to get a physical copy is to save time on the download. Not everyone has blazing fast or reliable internet where they live. Just having to download a patch as opposed to the entire 80+ GB game can be a big deal to some. I know it was like that for me back when the only thing available in a past residence was DSL. No cable or Fiber, just DSL.

As someone who is good at memorization (although not as much post COVID) but has been historically poor at critical thinking, I agree. People kept telling me I was “smart” and that there was no way I could fail X or should fail X, but life experience and slow but steady analysis showed me that no, everyone (including my parents and teachers) were wrong. I was dumb as bricks, I’m just good at memorizing things.

I’m aware that my critical thinking skills aren’t great. I’m also aware that I had no business going to college (and failing of course) studying what I did (computer science) and that it’s actually very good and liberating to admit how fallible you are, and how bad you are at things, because it gives you the freedom and insight to know what you can do instead of what you can’t.

I’ve lived long enough to see stupid people succeed at what “smart” people fail at, just because they’re honest enough and humble enough to admit when they can’t do something, and also when they’re wrong. I saw that doing something right imperfectly (but effectively) is more useful than doing something wrong with perfect execution. It’s the difference between going forward at a walk, and going backwards with a rocket thruster.

I’m disappointed, but not surprised. This is how they are, especially during times of stress, like war. Culture could probably get better if not for their leadership, but I doubt we’ll see it improve until Putin and the people backing him get purged.

When I got tired of some BS changes Google was making with Chrome (and concerned about the Chromium near-monopoly) I switched to Firefox. It had just revamped itself out of the Australis debacle, and had some very good extensions available on the front page of its store, so I switched and never looked back.

Honestly, for what I wanted and needed out of a browser, it was just better than Chrome, and it still is. Highly underrated browser, and I wish more people would give it a shot. I also wish that Mozilla would give people the option to change its default icon with their new, more sleek orange and purple swirl without the fox and world.

The default Firefox icon honestly isn’t very stylish (especially when compared to the Chrome icon and the new Edge icon) and I think a lot of people may just avoid it due to not liking the way the icon looks. Dead serious here, marketing / image is everything for a lot of tech products.

Honestly, I’m shocked by this. I would have thought that they’d at least be not-stupid enough to have something like that.