I’ve been playing it and enjoying it. It could be better. Most games could. I had kind of low expectations, honestly. I’m glad it’s a single player game with no live-service and no season-pass. I’ll probably play it a second time. Runs kind of like crap, so I might play it again in the distant future where I have better hardware.

I imagine a lot of internet duds are mad about how there’s a queer subplot, but they can go fuck themselves. Unfortunately, this creates a problem where if some random guy is bashing it I have to try to suss out if they’re really just mad about queer stuff. It’s hard to tell. And because we’re all just emotional idiots, some people might be mad about the queer stuff and not realize it, and the words that come out of their mouth will be “boring characters”.

But also a lot of their games have problems. Mass Effect 3’s ending is so bad it has its own wikipedia page.

They can be killed in their homes, too.

I had a shower thought the other day that if more CEOs were shot dead, there’d probably be less Return to Office.

People are sometimes like “oh but violence is bad!” but ignore all the casual harms inflicted on people by capitalism and friends.

I’m an outlier in that I buy music on Bandcamp. Renting music feels like a bad deal to me, but for some people it might work out.

I think I repeat listen to albums a lot more than I repeat watch stuff.

Still, I’d consider a service that was like “pay $10 for this movie and it’s yours, drm free, forever”. A quick search shows WandaVision on DVD is like $50, and you’d have to like rip and self host yourself to stream it.

I think the subscription model is often user hostile, but it’s very lucrative

People just want all their shit in one place for a reasonable fee.

One problem with this is that monopolies are bad.

I’m not sure what the ideal solution is. It’s not “12 different services each charging $12/month” though.

I don’t think regular capitalism can really solve this.

Guild Wars2 is very good.

It downscales your level if you go back to older areas, so you can play with lower level friends. (Though it’s still pretty generous, and the high level friends will be more effective). So if your friends aren’t playing much, you can still coop with them when they do play.

There’s a lot of content. Most of the maps have stuff just happening. There’s also instanced content for 5, 10, or … I think private convergences can go up to 20?

There’s not really a gear grind. When you hit max level (which is pretty easy) good-enough gear is very easy to get. A smidge better than that is a little expensive but still very feasible. The fanciest gear is numerically the same, but let’s you reskin and swap stats for free, which is nice.

I’ve been on Linux Mint for the past several months and I think I’ve needed the terminal twice?

Once I couldn’t find a GUI option to adjust the brightness/gamma, but searching found me the terminal command so I just used that.

More recently I needed newer Nvidia drivers than were available by default, so I had to add a new PPA thing. We’ll find out later today if I’m going to regret that.

I… I played a lot of guild wars 2. It’s a good game!

But about 40 games total. I don’t want to be a mono-gamer so that’s nice.

This is a good answer.

At my job, there was a desire to do a big rewrite of the system. It was a disaster. We spent like 8 months on this project where we delivered no value to customers. Then there was essentially a mutiny from the engineering team and we killed it.

We’ve since built on top of the original system and had, in the words of product leadership, “the most productive quarter in the history of the company”.

Now, why was it a disaster? The biggest reason was that people, especially people in leadership positions, did not understand the existing system very well. They would then make decisions based on falsehoods and mythology.

I don’t think I’ve ever desired to have speech as an interface for a device.

Yeah, I could yell at it “Open the browser and go to uhh the order of the stick comic index page” and maybe it would get it right. Or I could just… click on the browser, type oot and pick it from the drop down. Faster, no error, no expensive processing.

I don’t drive (cars are a bad form of transit and I’m lucky enough to not need one) and I’m not hands-full in the kitchen often.

Would rather they invest in, like, housing, food security, climate crisis, any number of other more useful things. I know you could say that about anything- like all the money being spent on movies seems frivolous next to that stuff- but AI is especially dubious.

Our society’s priorities are all wrong, and I don’t think it’s going to get better without a lot of suffering. Maybe not even then.

All of these stories I feel the same way: moving to another centralized privately owned platform is stupid.

as an almost maximally privileged person (cis straight etc), i want my whining fellows to shut the fuck up. Just stop. Stop taking up all the god damn space. Just be quiet. It’s okay not to be included in every scene all the time.

Your point about not assuming people are straight by default is valid. But I mostly just want some cis-het folks to stop embarrassing me by being fucking insufferable.

A dark souls kind of slow paced combat game, but built for co-op. Except I don’t have any friends who are on the same skill level and schedule.

More broadly, I really want more games that you can play co-op in where the players are vastly different skill levels, but it’s still fun. I don’t know how to solve this.

I can imagine like a game where one person is playing dark souls and the other is playing candy crush, and they interact somehow. Like making matches in one give estus in the other, and killing bosses gives stuff.

Basically I want to play games with my frienda that don’t play the same games, somehow.