This is probably the best most level-headed and respectful take I’ve seen regarding cultural appropriation. Thank you!

Real talk, this screenshot is probably for an application intended for hiding communications with another partner from your spouse. When I worked in support for a phone manufacturer I encountered it once while educating a customer about excessive app permissions. I pointed out “for example this calculator app has permission to make and receive calls. A calculator app should never have permissions like that” and he sheepishly explained what the app was and that in this case it actually should. Points for honesty I guess?

My understanding was that KSP2 was originally going to be just a slightly cleaned up re-release of KSP1. A remaster if you will. Buy up some existing mods, bundle them in, clean up the UI a bit and enjoy the fruits of this new definitive edition of the game. But the team was able to convince Take2 to try to replace the game engine as part of that remaster and truly make it worth while (hence the 4 year delay from the original release date)

If you want a stupid fun “kill infinite number of baddies working for an insane BBEG” style game, Just Cause is a blast. 2 and 3 were both fantastic (3 smartly gave you infinite explosives) and the amount of silly chaos you can cause (and are rewarded for causing too!) is brilliant.

For an example, in JC2 there’s a mission where you have to destroy a rocket which is launching using a fighter jet and blow up the rocket before it reaches orbit. The ongoing challenge was simply that I’d shoot it until I got too close, not start maneuvering for a second pass until it was too late and instead crash into the rocket dying in a fiery explosion, followed by the rebel leader telling me over the radio that I’d failed and to try again. Then one of the time, I shot the rocket until I got too close, started maneuvering too late, exploded as the plane crashed into the rocket and the rebel leader started saying something over the radio, except it was a congratulatory statement, and I realized I’d instinctively ejected from the plane at impact, and was now falling down to the ground with only my parachute and lots of enemy aircraft trying to kill me. So I grappled to a helicopter, persuaded the crew to let me in (aka beat them up and threw them out) then got shot to hell by another helicopter, which I conveniently would grapple to, persuade its crew to let me in, and keep repeating the process until I finally was close enough to the ground to grapple down to the ground and steal a fast car to evade the enemy army.

JC3 one-ups this by instead of having you blow up a rocket (an ICBM in this case) but instead catch up to and ride the ICBM so you can redirect it to save a major city.

They were decent to the Anno series, but honestly that’s probably just because they didn’t see the value in messing with the formula that Anno solidified around the time of the acquisition and it reliably boosts their numbers with strategy gamers who otherwise might not be customers of Ubisoft’s at all

I mean, if actually meeting your end at the hands of a customer your company fucked over becomes a perceived risk to the job, C-suites might think twice about anti-human profit-seeking decisions for their companies

A couple of years ago I started looking at the sugar contents listed on labels. Ho-ly crap. How does a pint of strawberry milk contain over 100% DV of sugar? Why does my PB&J consume 2/3 of my daily sugar budget? Its honestly sickening once you start keeping track of these things and I’m not even doing more than just trying to reduce my sugar intake and loosely monitor how much I take in

Also im pretty sure that most fat people are fat from drinking shitty sugar filled crap instead of water. Also the zero sugar artificially sweetened shit fucks with ur insulin making u fatter. Just drink water.

There’s a multitude of (often chronic) health conditions that create sticky weight gain, or weight that simply does not go away through diet and exercise. Add in the challenge for women and minorities of healthcare discrimination and you’ve got a recipe for overweight people who simply aren’t able to lose the weight no matter what they try, and doctors blaming the weight before testing for endocrine disorders (oh and of course financial challenges in accessing healthcare in the first place)

That’s relying on them having the political will to do more than half-ass it. Let’s be real, everyone loyal to trump is loyal for one (or more) of three reasons:

1. They directly profit from the loyalty
2. They believe it will help them realize their career ambitions
3. They believe they can use him to ultimately achieve their own private ideological ambitions

These are the same reasons people joined the first Trump administration and literally none of them are attempting to join his second administration meaning they were not able to realize any of their goals through Trump (or they were shown exactly how far they could go before they found the line they could not cross)

Simply put, it’s not an environment conducive to actually realizing policy goals in any incredibly complex interconnected web. The last trump administration tried to block China from international logistics and instead made logistics more robust (and helped the Mexican economy by accidentally encouraging significant investment in manufacturing and logistics there) and got completely deadlocked by infighting when they attempted to realize their wet dream of “repealing and replacing” Obamacare/The Affordable Care Act. I’ll be extremely impressed if a trump Administration manages to actually achieve a meaningful disruption of the Internet, especially with how the rest of the world largely refuses to support his policy goals

Heck a tiny regional bank I worked at with less than 2 dozen locations was constantly flinging data between its Primary and DR datacenters, and they were too small for any dedicated fiber so that was just over standard ISPs (with some locations technically on residential plans because the ISPs didn’t offer any better options than that in the small towns the bank supported)

IT is a weirdly hard field to break into these days, and climbing the ladder can be difficult as employers generally don’t want to take a risk on someone who hasn’t worked in helpdesk/sysadmin/security/etc. before. Once you get your first role with the job title you want it’s 20 times easier to get your second one.

The job market also sucks right now. 1-3 years ago it was amazing and I landed interviews I should not have landed simply because places couldn’t get candidates, but now I’ve been laid off and spent 3 months and about 40 applications and ultimately took the first offer I got (it was also the second place to call me to interview)

I think you’re misunderstanding what people are saying. The author of the article is clearly trying to say that major video game studios should stop focusing on high fidelity games, making unrealistic statements about market demands (let’s be real, that’s not how people select what games to purchase. The art style is certainly a factor, I’ve not played games with art styles that don’t jive with me and I’ve certainly had gaming experiences elevated by brilliant artwork, but regardless of art direction, of the gameplay isn’t for me I’m not going to play it) and honestly it feels like the author was told to write an article to support the title rather than reporting on actual industry trends or providing real criticism ongoing industry trends. The entire argument the author is trying to make falls over when you consider any market segment other than the AAA developers

I think the worst part is the author even points to freaking Minecraft and Roblox, both were indie titles when they first launched, and also compared triple-A titles to a live service game and Epic’s tech-demo-turned-Roblox-clone.

Honestly it reads more like they set out to write an article supporting a given narrative and carefully tuned their evidence to fit that narrative.

How about some studios that aren’t hurting and don’t fit that narrative? SCS software which makes Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator hasn’t released a new game since ATS’s launch in 2016 because their business model is to keep selling DLC to the same customers, and invest that money in continuing to refine the existing games. Urban Games has openly stated they exist solely to build the best modern Transport Tycoon game they can, releasing a new iteration every few years with significant game engine improvements each time. N3V Games was literally bought out by a community member of one of it’s earlier titles when it was facing bankruptcy and simply exists to refine the Trainz railroad simulator game. Or there’s the famous example of Bay12Games which released Dwarf Fortress (an entirely text mode game) as freeware and with the “agreement” that they’d continue development as long as donations continued rolling in

The answer isn’t a move to live service games as the author suggests, nor is it to stop developing high fidelity games but simply to make good games. Gaming is one of those rare “if you build it they will come” markets where there’s a practically infinite number of niches to fill and even making a new game in an existing niche can be extremely successful whether that be due to technical differences, design differences or just differences in gameplay. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and Banished all have very similar basic gameplay elements but all can exist without eating eachother’s market share because they’re all incredibly different games. Banished focuses more on city building, RimWorld focuses on story and your colonists ultimately escaping the godforsaken planet they’ve crashed on, and Dwarf Fortress is about building the best dwarf civilization you can before something ultimately causes it’s collapse (because losing is fun!)

Having read the article I don’t see how the comment your replied to is out of context. It’s very in context, especially given the article literally points to highly successful indie games as examples of low fidelity games that are incredibly popular

When I worked for a phone manufacturer I learned that their market research found that features like a headphone jack and SD card slot were pretty exclusively needed at the budget end of the market while the higher end generally didn’t care about the lack of these features. I don’t know that I fully agree with this, but to some degree it kinda makes sense

Dammit. That’s too funny and I want someone to share this with but nobody i know is the right mix of wierd to get it

The offline installers literally are the files to install the game.

It’s as close as we can get in this day to having the disc and installing from disc long after the publisher was bought out and absorbed so many times nobody truly knows exactly who owns the rights to the game anymore. As long as your disc (in this case, offline installer) was stored safely and is still readable you can install it on a compatible computer (and that’s often the harder part is finding a compatible computer!)

YouTube even allows A/B testing for thumbnails now so creators can know with far more certainty what style of thumbnail generates more clicks. I’ve even observed the A/B testing occuring as I’ve scrolled past a new video mentally marking it to watch later then later seen the same video with a different thumbnail

My wife uses it and I’ve never seen it find a discount code. I assume it’s because we don’t buy enough online since money’s been pretty tight

changed it from the side of union men to the side of flamboyant, sensitive baristas.

Lol based