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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • Waaay better than the porn bans and online age verification schemes, honestly.

    I question why this is just for “children who show mysoginistic behavior”, though. Sex ed should be universal, and this should be a major part of sex ed.

    I assume the fear here is parents complaining about their kids being talked about porn, which may end up being a larger underlying issue than the porn itself. I guess you just have to trust that education professionals handle the opportunity well and this doesn’t become a stern talking to for problem kids, which is likely to do as much as stern talking tos have done historically.


  • I don’t particularly love the floaty, sloppy “just put some damage in this 180 degree arc” basis of the combat system much. I am also not at all on board with most of the early teenage edgelord narrative stuff in there. Maybe I was a bit too old by the time these came out.

    The Harryhausen references are neat and some of the boss fights are cool set pieces that did set some of the groundwork for later AAA action games, but I would much rather spend time in the more expressive, free-flowing Devil May Cry side of things if I’m going for snappy, precise combat… or all the way into Musou slop, I suppose, although I’m not much into that, either.




  • That last panel hit me like a truck because… yeah, that’s what people think happens when they do their little personal choice things to pretend they matter.

    They really buy like a paper book once and go “ah, yes, Bezos is fuming right now” while he makes another billion.

    We have lost all sense of how to influence society and all ability to gauge scale. For all the folksy traditionalism in this (which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?) the Internet has created this entirely disproportionate sense of our footprint on the world and this strip is as much a result of the hyperconnected dystopia as everything it’s complaining about.

    In my experience this is extra bad for Americans who, frankly, didn’t need that much of a push to go from their individualist, self-centered perception of society to this vision of sitting on a couch listening to a walkman as activism.




  • I wanted to like it, couldn’t really get into it.

    I see what it’s going for, it’s just… not my thing. It never clikced with me moment to moment and the self-congratulatory aren’t-we-smart information discovery stuff just doesn’t work for me in most cases (this applies to Fez and The Witness, too).

    I’m not mad that people do like it, though. There’s nothing in there I find… objectionable, or poorly designed. I just didn’t get into it and that’s alright.


  • I am surpringly annoyed about Americans somehow finding a way to make this about themselves.

    In reality I’m much more worried about the likely counterreformist pushback that is likely about to happen. We’re about to find out if a remarkably powerful organization’s leader was able to seed enough support to secure a politically aligned successor, and if the answer is “no” a bunch of organizations are about to get even more ruthlessly conservative at a time when a new strain of fascism is seeking moral support. The Catholic Church has been here before. It didn’t go well.




  • Oh, you guys are thinking small.

    Peter Executive (a vassal of Andy CEO). Mary Anesthesiologist. Alice S. Theorist. William Credit Authorizer. James M. Researcher.

    The worst part is that, fun as this is, I’m having flashbacks of every time I’ve said something along the lines of “Matt from HR” and realizing that’s how that has always worked.


  • Hm. I wonder who is “unhappy”, exactly. The industry is super reliant on Steam data across the board, I can’t imagine Ubi’s own people would love to lose the ability to track competitors, even if they also buy estimates from other sources.

    I can see how they’d be annoyed that their more console-focused games and games that have a chunk of players on non-Steam platforms, like Outlaws look worse when the only info people see is from Steam. I don’t know that the answer is to get Valve to close API access as a matter of policy. I personally would love to get similar info from Sony or Epic, which I bet would make Ubi look at least a bit better right now.

    Of course, from Valve’s perspective there is no downside here. Right now I bet they have a rep telling Ubi “hey, you want to look good for investors? Prioritize Steam sales to look better on public data”, which is exactly the kind of mildly abusive crowdsourcing techbro stuff Valve loves to do.