It’ll prevent indie artists from having their work plagiarized over and over without payment from indie “devs” who honestly shouldn’t have the right to exist as “developers” if they can’t afford to actually hire artists and such.

It’d be one thing if they made an agreement to get assets from artists for cheap or for free as a favor, but just plain putting them all out of business permanently by letting a machine steal their work forever is another thing entirely.

Wait until the population declines further and the CCP tightens its grip even more over Hong Kong. I doubt this’ll last. It’s just how authoritarian communist regimes work. Look at Putin and co. for examples.

Only thing shocking about this is that it took this long. Any drone capable of carrying a weapon was going to get one. I mean, look at Ukraine right now. Consumer drones with soda bottle improvised explosives and cardboard drones. I can see a future where most warfare is drone vs drone, to see who can hit the other’s supply lines / storage first.

The way Russia’s turtling with illegal mines, drones are basically one of the only ways to attack without taking massive losses while also moving slowly and being sitting ducks for artillery.

Sad, because I was a fan of them and bought all their games from Saint’s Row 1 all the way to Gat out of Hell (although not in chronological order) and got Agents of Mayhem for free somewhere, but think they’ve made some bad moves lately.

I think it all started going downhill from Agents of Mayhem, and them screwing up with the reboot of Saint’s Row was probably the nail in the coffin. I wish they’d just made Saint’s Row 5 instead, with wacky time travel shenanigans and a more polished set of superpowers.

At the point where they decided to “reboot” to something old school and grittier (TOO old school, imo) they really didn’t get what their fanbase wanted, and what new players who’d only heard of and experienced Saint’s Row 4 would get excited about.

They could’ve probably taken Saint’s Row up to 6 entries if they’d just iterated on the formula from 4 and possibly Gat out of Hell (I wouldn’t know, I got distracted and didn’t play it after I bought it, ironically). Similar to how United Front Games (the developer of Sleeping Dogs) could’ve probably stayed in business if they’d just made Sleeping Dogs 2 instead of that horrible “free to play” multiplayer asset flip of some of the least interesting elements of Sleeping Dogs 1.

We basically are. The only good news is that young conservatives believe in and want to do something about climate change, so when the current crop of oil-funded deniers die off, we have some hope to limit the damage. That said, I’m seriously considering moving up north away north as far away from the equator as possible, and to an area with fresh water and farmland.

Then buying a gun. Never thought I’d need one after I left the Army, but as things get worse, I suspect that more violence will result due to scarcity and more likely: stress related to perceived scarcity that doesn’t exist. It’s always the fear that’s more dangerous than the reality. We can probably get by with easy to grow, nutrient-dense foods that are boring to eat, like beans. It’s the stress of not being able to eat “tasty” food that’ll probably get people to snap. Gunfights over steak, etc.

Not surprising, but disappointing. The premise was interesting (first person magic shooter) but the execution was tepid. The presentation / atmosphere, the generic graphics, the dopey dialogue, the lack of an interesting story. A lot of the success of games like Halo is how the world sucks you in with its atmosphere and storyline, I think developers really underestimate how much that matters in a single player game. Cinematogrophy is important, the feel of an experience is more than the simple gameplay of moving a character around and pushing buttons.

To be honest, hating the sequels makes it less likely that you’re a prick. They weren’t that good at launch, and now that the “new movie smell” has worn off, now people have the time and perspective to see that they aren’t actually that good.

If they were any other sci-fi movies that didn’t have the “Star Wars” name in front of them, they probably would’ve bombed.

Honestly, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness was a bad movie (I’m glad I didn’t see it in theatres) but the worst part of it was how they betrayed the storyline of Wandavision, and the character growth and arc of Wanda herself.

I agree, but he’s unfortunately better than the alternative. I would have hoped that a guy whose nickname was “Amtrack Joe” would’ve done better. I’m guessing he was worried about the midterms or the 2024 election, given that everything that makes peoples’ lives harder somehow gets unfairly blamed on him.

It just goes to show that Democrats are just a more sane conservative party with more tolerant social policies, they’re not actually all that pro worker. The Europeans are right about this.

I doubt the title of this article very much. Ukraine is getting F-16’s and probably JAS-39 Gripens very soon. Offensives and counteroffensives have to be slow and methodical by nature against entrenched forces, otherwise you’ll take massive losses for very little gains.

Ukraine is on its way to gaining air superiority, and more vehicles and air defense is coming into their forces every month, and the longer this conflict lasts, the more likely it is that they’ll gain more advantages over Russia as the sanctions keep draining them.

The lack of air superiority is hampering what Ukraine can do, and once that issue’s settled, I think we’ll start seeing more steady progress. Plus in the wide world, Japans and South Korea are settling their differences over WW2 and will probably keep cooperating, and part of that will be to send more stuff to Ukraine in order to help win there so they don’t have to fight WW3 with China over Taiwan.

It’s not just the West that supports Ukraine, it’s also the Democratic parts of Asia.

Same. I stay away from #Explore and just keep to my feed of people I actually follow. And I make sure to unfollow those who are too stressful to hear from constantly.

I agree with almost all the of all politics all the time people who constantly post negative things, but it’s too tiring to read them, especially since knowing about it does me no good and I can’t do anything about it anyway. I already vote and donate as much as I can, and I live in a Blue state so anything outside of my area’s just not possible for me to influence.

I’ve found it’s better just to ignore it and focus on positive things that make my life better.

This is also why I stopped going to Mastodon. In addition to negative ragebait politics being almost the only thing that’s trending (and I have too much of that in my life already) there’s no real nuance or tolerance for anything outside the echo chamber.

You DO get called a racist nazi transphobe for stepping outside the box or trying to support people, ideas or places that might not be 100% perfect or pass the strictest ideological purity test. I thought Liberal Twitter was pretty exclusionary and echo-chamber-y, but Mastodon’s a lot worse.

Kind of, but more “slightly amusing” than funny.

Agree. Even recently, I would have up to 5-6 cans worth myself (have since cut down a lot), but alongside the financial cost, there’s also the acid eating away at your stomach lining and the excess caffeine to worry about alongside the Aspartame.

Frankly, given the stomach issues and acid reflux that too much soda can give you, I would imagine that people (even sodaholics) would have to stop much sooner than 20 due to all the other issues involved with sodas before the problems with Aspartame would even come into the picture.

Not to say that I’m not leery of Aspartame, but diet Soda has other major issues beside it.

This crap has sent me back to physical stores. If they have it in stock, I don’t have to wait for it to ship, I just drive there and pick it up. Same with returns too, and exchanges. Same day.

Plus, I can trust that the company itself has probably looked at and tested the products, and has a real product and not a fake. I doubt I’m the only one going back to brick and mortar as well.

Makes me think of the Privateer / Elite style X spaceship games, but that’s probably because of my personal bias towards games like that.

Everyone else would probably think Porn or the X-games first.

Not so sure about that, I feel like average people are waking up to technological bullshit like this more and more every year. Yeah there’ll still be an overly high amount of idiots, but I’ve learned that even older people can change and question things like this.

You can only get so many “We’re giving you 2 free years of identity theft protection because we got hacked and your personal information got stolen.” from big companies like your cell phone company, credit check company, etc. before you’re like “Hey, anything I put online can get stolen by criminals…”

Even if you’re a tech-unsavvy type. At some point the light bulbs turns on and you put 2 and 2 together.

Shit like this is why monopolies and oliglopolies don’t work. I hope people complain AND jump ship in big enough droves for this to change. Self-hosting and the old fashioned “buy your own music permanently” option are good too.

I don’t use streaming services, I just buy MP3’s (or AAC’s on iTunes or whatever they’re using nowadays, it’s been a while) and keep them locally and on the cloud. Never liked most Streaming Services’ recommendations anyway.

Given how modern AAA games are and Bethesda’s recent track history, it’s not negative to be skeptical, it’s smart.

Especially since despite Microsoft watching over them and helping them to have the most “bug free launch in history” it’s still probably going to be a hot mess for weeks to a month after launch. I want to be pleasantly surprised, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Plus, the recent release of Baldur’s Gate 3 with no microtransactions or season passes, etc. has gotten peoples’ standards up, and given that Microsoft paid a lot of money to buy Bethesda, we’re aware that they’re going to have to make that money back somehow, and will probably give into the temptation to do some really player unfriendly things to do it.

Bethesda’s been going all in on surprisingly expensive microtransactions for really tiny amounts of content, like in Fallout 4 and 76, and it wouldn’t be shocking for them to continue in that direction. People aren’t being mindlessly negative, they’re looking at current and past trends and making an educated guess about the future.

I’ll probably transition my AMD 8350 build over to Linux when Win10 stops being supported. As opposed to my mom’s FX-8370 build, which I’ll probably just have to replace with a new Windows 11 system, as there’s no way I’m expecting her (an elderly woman) to learn anything other than Windows. Especially since she’s reliant on Windows-only apps.

The actual hardware she’s using will probably be converted to a Linux Desktop, but I’ll have to migrate her data to a new mini Windows 11 PC or something.