It’s only insane if you have them all running at once.

If you don’t like something, that’s fine. They made the product they want, they’re free to do that, and you’re free to not like it.

Just know that art has always driven social discussion, and it’s always been met with heavy social opposition, just usually in the form of outright censorship. So historically artists had to be subtle in order to be critical without being censored. In order to see more edgy stuff you had to go to small, barely funded art house shows.

But then the internet happened, and suddenly artists weren’t beholden to a small number of elite entertainment corporations. Art containing more openly progressive ideas can now be shared directly with the masses, the masses are now preferring progressive ideals more than ever before, and naturally corporations making entertainment products now have a financial incentive to cater to that demographic (often called “virtue signaling”). Today you see a mix of corporate pandering and actual art, even within the development teams of a mainstream product like Dragon Age or Disney. Some messaging feels honest, others feel ham fisted because it’s pride month.

But the censorship of the pre-internet days existed for a reason. A lot of people feel uncomfortable seeing things that challenge their status quo. People tend to seek comfort, and they just want their entertainment to leave them be. But now that corporate censors are less of a barrier, and now that progressive ideals are proliferating, the people themselves are backlashing. They say things like, “it’s way too much woke agenda, I’m tired of it. I want to watch a show without having the story be about woke issues.” I think that’s also normal.

I think the backlash is two fold: On the one hand, real art challenges the viewer, which can be exhausting when you just want to be entertained before you get a few hours of sleep and go back to work in the morning. But on the other hand, you do have what offen feels like a disengenuous layer of progressive pandering coming from corporations that you never saw before. And no one likes being pandered to, let alone not being pandered to.

I think this corporate pandering towards progressive ideals is new, the terms we use to describe everything are definitely new, but the tendency for art to expose people to progressive ideals and the tendency for the masses to be conservative and resist change are as old as humanity. And I view the two as a social evolutionary yin and yang, keeping each other in check.

“Sorry, we can’t work on your machine unless your story goes viral. Just policy, you understand.”

Whole article? It’s 10 sentences.

Haven’t tried it myself but Tiny Glade just came out and looks like something that might fit that vibe.

Or Dorfromantik

I would agree with you if we’re talking about something like the ability to search a car, where the cop is not allowed to without the owner’s permission (assuming no probable cause or warrant). In that case the cop usually figures out a loophole to manufacture probable cause or manipulate the owner into agreeing to a search. And then there’s nothing a lawyer or judge can do later, because it’s the cop’s word vs yours.

But if we’re talking about a law that actually says the cop cannot take your phone no matter what, and they do, then any public defender would be able to point it out and the judge would certainly have to enforce it. I can’t think of a way the cop would abuse their power because, in this case they don’t have it.

I could be convinced based on the actual wording of the law, though.

It’s much more worrying how often face unlock works with a simple photo.

Bought a Pinecil a few weeks ago. No problems.

Goodwill asside, their games just aren’t even fun. They’re all the same game loop:

• walk around listening to an unskippable dialogue
• climb to the top of something to clear out part of the map and place a bunch of markers on it
• go to the various markers to collect pointless garbage
• fight some trash mobs with a very generous parry-based combat system
• complete the next main questline
• get a weapon upgrade you’ll immediately forget about
• repeat

Ooo I just found out element added support for drop-in/drop-out voice and video rooms. That’s the real killer feature they’ve been lacking I think. Will have to try it out.

Yeah, I saw that element is using jitsi under the hood for its screensharing. If that makes for a seamless user experience, that’s great. It’s been like 10 years since I last tried Jitsi, but it was not smooth.

TBH both disc and slack have their downsides, disc more so, so I’m fine if they just take the best of all worlds.

But yeah, screensharing is the deciding factor for me. As much as all my friends hate discord, we use screensharing all the time (it’s just a bit jankier getting it working on Linux).

This one is clearly made to look like slack, which is great I need to try this out. Just wish someone would make one that looks like disc. And then matrix needs screensharing support.

Does it work now? I tried it around a year ago and couldn’t get voice to work at all. It even had a message saying they were in the process of rewriting their voice streaming backend, and the legacy path may just be broken.

Discord compatible bots run on whatever server you run them on, they’re not owned or run by Discord.

It says the client is compatible with both space-bar and discord.com, so yeah, if you use it with discord, expect all the downsides of discord.

Idk, I know I’m in the minority, but the stuff I don’t experience in a game is just as important as the stuff I do experience.

As someone who played WoW as a kid, the world always felt bigger and more memorable because there was stuff I wasn’t geared/skilled/determined/lucky/whatever enough to see. Then during WotLK they made a concerted effort to ensure everyone could see all the content. Suddenly the world felt small. Less like a world and more like a series of checkboxes that you tick off and say “done, onto the next game”.

I really appreciate when the creators say “not everyone will see everything, and that’s ok, that’s how we intended it”. Elden Ring is really good about this. I’m about to finish my first playthrough, I know ive missed a lot of stuff, but that’s OK, my playthrough was uniquely mine.

The vast majority of the game is optional so that you can get to the final boss and see an ending. I remember getting the normal ending and thinking “really? That fight was trivial”. Turns out the minimal play-through is tuned for a low skill level. The “true” ending is another story though.

I have to assume they’re trying it out, but we may never see x86 to ARM emulation run at playable framerates while maintaining the power efficiency for many of the 3D workloads the steamdeck can currently run (not to mention dx12->vk translation). For simpler games, sure, but probably not cp2077.

Maybe it’s technically physically possible, but I don’t think we’re close to doing it. I think it would be easier for them to fund ARM+VK ports of new/popular titles, or see a battery density breakthrough.

lol, you got me, i definitely hadn’t thought of that.

Yeah, the only question is whether human brains are also just that.