Especially when the poster does not disclose that it’s AI.

The perpetual Youtube rabbit hole occasionally lands on one of these for me when I leave it unsupervised, and usually you can tell from the “cover” art. But only if you’re not looking at it. Because if you just leave it going in the background eventually you start to realize, “Wow, this guy really tripped over the fine line between a groove and rut.” Then you click on it and look: Curses! Foiled again.

And golly gee, I’m sure glad Youtube took away the option to oughtright block channels. I’m sure that’s a total coincidence.

W/e. I’m a have-it-on-my-hard-drive kind of bird. Yt-dlp is your friend. Just use it to nab whatever it is you actually want and let your own media player decide how to shuffle and present it. This works great for big name commercial music as well, whereupon the record labels are inevitably dumb enough to post songs and albums in their entirety right there you Youtube. Who even needs piracy sites at that rate? Yoink!

Those white power redneck types are all protestants and most of them have a vehement anti-Catholic streak. A black pope would just confirm to them whatever-the-hell conspiracy shit they already believe about the Catholic church, so it’d more or less just be spitting on a forest fire anyways.

Not that the Vatican shouldn’t do it anyway, though.

We can only hope.

I don’t know what it says about me that I instantly recognize that Salad Fingers poster.

I get where you’re coming from, but in certain fields I don’t think that’s going to fly too far.

The guy selling me a sofa, I really don’t care if he has a bachelor’s degree or not. My doctor? Yeah, I kind of think he needs to have legitimately completed medical school.

That, and the bloom has certainly been off the rose with most big name Nintendo properties over the last couple of cycles. Tears of the Kingdom was just a retread of Breath of the Wild but without the benefit of the formula being fresh and arguably worse in quite a few respects. Pokémon has been an archaic frustrating insult to the player’s time and intelligence since the 3DS era, arguably before. Echoes of Wisdom should have been a $15 eShop title. Super Mario Wonder managed to simultaneously be underwhelming, rather grating, possess zero replay value, and pales in comparison to Odyssey. Etc, etc.

It seems Nintendo is getting paranoid and conservative. Creativity is dead over there, and mostly the only moves they’re making are safe and samey cash-grabs, which is a strategy that I don’t think has much long term potential. This is really the first time ever I have no interest in a new Nintendo console nor any of its games, and Nintendo’s continued fan- and customer-hostile behavior that’s really ramped up over the last several years also pitches in to make this an easy no sell for me.

They did disclose it, though. I got popups every time I logged in for weeks warning of the imminent additional cut Apple was going to take from donators/creators, which explicitly spelled out that payments made via other platforms would not be affected by this cut.

Maybe they were prevented from doing so in the iOS app, but they sure did it everywhere else.

This is exactly it. It feels like about 99% of the crap these companies are pushing has no reason to be an app. Patreon is already primarily a web page. I guarantee you everything anyone cares about in the app you can do on the mobile version of the web page. Without being locked to the App Store/Google Play, and on (practically) any device. Isn’t that what these companies should want in the first place? Totally device and platform agnostic, ready for the maximum amount of suckers potential paying customers to be able to access it?

I sort of get it, but also “Half Life game ends with G Man time-freeze BS and a random abrupt cliffhanger that will not be resolved for years, if ever” isn’t exactly an unexpected outcome for anyone who’s interested in Half Life.

You may as well just watch a Youtube LP of Alyx anyway, since I imagine the majority of players do not have the equipment to play it themselves.

If the cliffhanger at the end of HL:2 Episode 2 annoyed you, the one at the end of Half Life: Alyx will annoy you even more because it not only returns to that moment but the G Man uses reality warping shenanigans to overwrite what happens in it, and replaces it with a different cliffhanger.

Son of a bitch and his unforeseen consequences, indeed.

On the bright side, this also circumvents the need for the original events of Half Life 3 to happen, since Valve has consistently said they were not willing to make it as it was originally drafted (especially now since Marc Laidlaw leaked/released the entire plot online). So now I guess they’re free to do something new with the story direction… Whatever that might be.

No trial date has been set in either case, but his defense team have said they want the federal case to take precedent because it involves the death penalty.

Precedence. I know I’m kicking a dead horse long past its expiry date, but obviously my efforts here rambling about stupid knives or whatever the hell is wasted. I should be a the copy editor for a major news publication instead. I couldn’t possibly do a worse job!

Just for one example, it’s well known that they sell their hardware at a steep loss just to try to entice people to get locked in to their ecosystem. Meta’s plan is to get VR devices into people’s homes and then figure out how to spy on them to make money off of it afterwards, and in the bargain use the piles and piles of cash they make from Facebook to squeeze out any competitors and become the defacto monopoly in the VR market.

For this blatantly obvious reason I always recommend that nobody buy a Meta/Facebook VR device, ever, for any reason, no matter how “cheap” it is.

Let Zuck Zuck continue to lose money on it until he either goes broke or gives up. This is a rare case where deliberately not buying a product from the dominant player in the market can literally help the entire scene as a whole.

And I also have a VR headset and VirtualBoyGo if I really feel like giving myself an authentic headache.

I strongly suspect they fuck up every case as badly. It’s just that the vast majority of them aren’t so high profile, so nobody’s looking at them under a microscope and we don’t hear about it. Injustice is rampant all throughout the prosecutorial system, the odds are deliberately stacked in the state/government’s favor and against the accused, and the notion that anyone gets a fair trial in this day and age is laughably naive.

The prosecution absolutely will cheat in any way they think they can get away with because they are secure in the knowledge that they will always get away with it. Nobody will bring the hammer down on them, and even if so they’ll then be forced to do what? Prosecute themselves? No one is watching the watchmen in any functional capacity. The state controls the phone systems, the prisons they’re in, the wardens keeping the inmates in, the cops who catch them, all the way down the clerks who write the paperwork. Even if someone somewhere in the chain fucks up, they’re all chums who see each other every day and they’re all on the same side. Private citizens can exert no meaningful oversight over the system whatsoever. The only thing that matters to the prosecution is that they convict, convict, convict regardless of the guilt or innocence of the accused. Ruining lives strengthening the government’s position is the point, always. Everything else is just window dressing and lip service.

People also lost their shit over the PSP Go being digital distro only in a physical handheld console, and lost their shit so hard that Sony of all people walked it back with the Vita and built cartridges back into the spec. (And it became retroactively excusable once it was discovered how easily the PSP/Go could be hacked, and suddenly the Go was the desirable model for emulation and, er, backups. But that’s neither here nor there. Under its intended use, within its original lifespan, it was a stupid idea.)

If you ask me the entire point of a game console is to be a dedicated platform that you stick games in and it always works. If I wanted to fuck around with downloadable only content, games that are only keycodes, patches, day 1 DLC, always-online DRM, and the inevitable day the servers all go dark I’d just game on PC. Which, come to think of it, in these modern times is exactly what I do anyway. I have game systems dating all the way back to the Atari VCS which I can to this very day if I feel like it slap a cartridge or disk in and they play. To me, there is immense value in that. Without that, there’s really no need for the “real hardware experience” for me. I can just emulate if any title comes out that I truly give enough of a shit about that I must play it. Anything else is just selling you a rental, but at full price. I find that immensely distasteful.

So I have zero interest in the Switch 2, and thus it will be the first Nintendo console in history I don’t own, or aim to own (I do not have a Virtual Boy, much to my shame and embarrassment.) I imagine I’m not the only one. Nintendo’s been trying very hard to lose the plot, which for a company as profitable and famous as they are takes a real concerted effort. Congratulations to them, then, if that’s the goal – What we are witnessing here is very possibly the beginning of the end for big N.

Obligatory Linus video for a similar, but not identical, monitor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVUxxn53mBE

This Dasung model is mentioned at the bottom of the article. TL;DW: These things have the exact list of drawbacks you think they do including miserable contrast, color accuracy so bad it’s fallen off the bottom of the chart, a low refresh rate, and quite a bit of ghosting. So it’s awful, but surprisingly not as awful as you’d think if your primary experience is an e-reader form the first couple of generations. Linus being Linus he does attempt to game on it and gets… a result… but this is a display technology with niche applications and still best suited to displaying mostly static content.

You know, I made the exact same comment and made the exact same prediction yesterday, while watching their dumbass “first 100 days” press breifing. I would normally say that great minds think alike, however the damn book was not supposed to be an instruction manual.

I have investigated. My conclusion is: Your low approval rating is because you are a toad.

My consultancy rate is very reasonable at three million dollars per second. You owe me nine million dollars. Sign here, please.

You can already theoretically do this with the doors on a Jeep, but it hasn’t exactly turned into an epidemic.

Low towing capacity and an outrageously miserable bed size. Less than five feet? The powertrain of this should have been put in a station wagon, not a “truck.”