I just got a new GPU, and they gave me a coupon for the game for free. My system should be able to run it great, but I’m not even sure how good it actually even is. All the reviews I see all look like paid reviews or early access folk, or people that claim to love it to justify their overpriced rigs.

I loved 1 and 2, and then the series went downhill for me. Now I guess I have 4 but might wait a while to play it because I know a ton of patches are coming. Besides, there are a ton of other great games on my backlog that I’d much rather play with my limited free time.

Is this a trend now? Who inscribes bullets? This seems a little too, “We need to really spell out the motive to people so they know exactly what to think about this.”.

I’m kinda curious now how you even go about inscribing a bullet. I feel like a hand tool would just not really produce a legible result, and I’ve never really even heard of a machine for it. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but really rare to see and kinda weird that the last two high profile shootings had inscribed bullets to really drive home the point.

So, back to cartridges. Honestly I’d be totally fine with that- but the issue isn’t quite with my end. Some game is made, and is sold for $70. A disc costs under a dollar to produce. A cart is significantly more, and digital is just paying upkeep on a server. Digital has the highest profit margin, and carts the lowest. Discs are great for physical distribution.

That said, I would totally love collector editions in the form of a figurine with storage media built in.

There’s no rule saying whales CAN’T play basketball.

It’s weird watching 4k re releases of CG animated movies from the early 2000s. Some of them they re-rendered at 4k and you can see that major characters are high res, but all the background assets are not. Same with some early special effects in 4k. You can really see the rotoscoping and how some effects were done

Destiny. Played the heck out of 1, and 2 is just… Annoying. I still play, but I actively disuade people from picking it up.

It went from a mechanically fun game with garbage storytelling but amazing lore, to mechanically complex and hyper specialzed, still mostly garbage storytelling, and lore that is trying to constantly one up itself or nonexistent. The seasonal model was a mistake and it’s grindy for the sake of money. It really took a terrible turn down sitcom alley of having the seasonal content need stakes, but also not really change anything drastic. So it just feels like tasks for the sake of tasks… Which it is. A neverending treadmill where grinding has only very short lived rewards.

Not always. School shootings happen and suddenly crickets on gun control. “Think of the children” only applies to moral outrage, not tangible physical threat prevention. Also applies to school lunches and any other actual tangible thing to ACTUALLY benefit general child welfare.

I feel like there are a surprisingly large percentage of the population that just take most things at face value. It takes something painfully overt for someone to notice, and it’s usually only spotted on something trivial, like fifty thousand five star raving reviews for a beer coozie on amazon.

Astroturfing is real, and if you don’t think that a government would do it… Wow you have a lot of history to catch up on.

Weekend at Donald and Bernie’s?

But if we force schools to change their curriculum to align with MY version of reality, that makes it true! Right?

Or it’s just a really really long con for a ton of content creators to make content about “the shocking truth they won’t teach you in school!!!”. Because I guess that’s the only way to get idiots to actually understand something is by packaging it in some hidden conspiracy wrapper.

I worked at BlockBuster back when Netflix came out. It was legit a great contender, and an awesome service. BB had their own mail service, but it was just seen as a copycat. Also the franchise had a LOT of bad blood, and sometimes rightfully so. Depended on local management how much leeway you could have. The most lax stores that were lenient did the best.

The reason it worked was because physical media is protected by the first sale doctrine. So if you could buy a disc, it could be under one roof as rentable inventory.

Streaming and licenses is what fragmented everything and greed gave the appropriate incentive.

It also somewhat killed direct competition. When everything was physical on a shelf in front of you, all for the same price, you had direct comparison and competition. You could have any show or movie from any studio all side by side. That $2-5 could get you anything, across the board.

I saw this all coming from miles away. I don’t blame anyone, every step sounded like a great deal. I see a lot of the same things with Gamepass. It’s a great deal, and I don’t blame anyone for using it… But I don’t see it as being a long term net positive for the industry.

I really hate the term ‘freedom’ now. It’s thrown around so much and it means basically nothing anymore. “Join this! Now with 20% more freedom!”. Freedom to/from what? It’s never stated, it’s just a vibe.

Oh you want to talk directly to a person? You need to subscribe to 911+. For only $4.99 a month, you get the following perks…

Well, yeah- but what if they could sell the problem AND the solution?

Do I want my face in ads? No. Not at all.

Would I want this same tech used to character swap myself into movies, or just swap actors in whatever? …okay yeah that might be kinda fun novelty.

I’ve tried one that works surprisingly well. Each sentence had great pacing, cadence, and correct enunciation- even had tone right when someone was shouting or angry or sad.

I wouldn’t really recommend it, though. While I couldn’t pick any single thing out that was wrong, overall it just didn’t quite flow. It’s like watching someone try to act that is technically doing everything right, but it just isn’t good. It basically didn’t understand the greater context of the story and was saying lines.

It was uncanny valley, but exclusively with voice.

In person socialization? Is that like VR chat?

I think it’s a legal issue, honestly. When printers first came out there was a fear that people would just print money and other illegal things, so printer firmware had to print out security identifiers on everything in yellow ink so it can be traceable. That’s also why yellow ink always goes out first, and why it complains about yellow ink when trying to only print black and white.

If that’s law, then it could be illegal to use firmware that does not have these features, and anyone making fimware that ‘just prints’ may be held liable.

Thus is all just an educated guess though, but seems plausible.

This is a fantastic opportunity to allow parents to explain financial insolvency to their autistic child grieving the loss of their robot companion.

Yes, it absolutely will. That’s why I fragrance the pandas. Just a little here and there so that some Howard will need to sort through it. The lime really comes through clearly.