The most complex object in the universe … according to the brain.

Judging by the stock price decline that didn’t start last week, but rather has been ongoing for monthsyears, you’re spot on. This is exactly what the market was expecting.

DEI has at least some roots in holding a positive connotation, a lot of companies that value an image/brand of diversity will have a DEI department/team. It’s not just an acronym they made up, though it’s definitely been co-opted by reactionaries as a way to describe someone they feel only got the job/promotion/attention because of a compulsion to raise up minority voices (a “DEI” hire is their way of saying the person wasn’t qualified for the job, but got it because they were black/a woman".

My initial take on the rant was to simply ignore it, but now I’m wondering if there’s maybe something to the idea that specifically in the shooter genre, the market is different enough that I don’t really know the space. Like BG3 was about as DEI a game as you could get, and no one’s arguing that game’s success. But I do know a couple conservatives that were specifically kind of turned off by games like cyberpunk and BG3. Apparently they couldn’t handle tasteful sidedick. Maybe for a shooter to be successful it’s got to coddle what the gun enthusiast crowd is demanding? I don’t know. Despite their popularity, I just don’t play that many shooters.

In many states, if you have a gun anywhere in possession while committing a drug crime, even selling weed, it adds years of mandatory sentence onto the charges, often way more than the drug crime itself. I would be extremely weary of anyone mentioning anything about a gun and drugs together in a communication the cops can pin on you … because while they may be the nicest dealer you ever met, they are not the smartest.

(side note, I might have fudged the data a little and just made up that I checked with anyone else)

It’s ok, I checked myself by asking the person in my life most likely to agree with me. We’ve agreed the association with red vs blue politics in the US is your responsibility for making an analogy that could be easily construed that way, not ours for fitting what you said into the context of current cultural norms. Therefore in conclusion: everyone thinks you messed up with that analogy.

It’s fair to continue to consider them in competition with other store fronts. Don’t be fooled into thinking it will always be a great way to get cheap games, though. That brand, is EXACTLY what IGN paid for when they bought them: for the faith they built up in people like yourself, that they are and will always continue to be a trusted company. And part of the amortization of that purchase, is converting that belief into money, by enshittifying it. By taking advantage that they can make less valuable offers, raise prices, and fail to keep up with competitors innovations, on the backs of people remembering the good experiences they had with the company based on its original ownership.

Correct - this was always going to be the case the moment IGN bought humble bundle. Any delay in getting to this point was a conscious decision about how fast to boil the frog - but IGN didn’t buy Humble Bundle because they believed in the mission of helping charities and indie game developers, they bought it because they believed they could make more money than they spent on it.

Maybe not in some countries. It’s certainly a way that term gets used in the US. See also, reduction in force (RIF), downsize, reorg, shifting priorities, etc. The way labor laws are written, companies are encouraged to do this, because it circumvents protections against firing someone on leave, pregnant, or in a minority. When an individual is let go, there’s risk of litigation or claims that it’s because of some protected status: and correct or not, we’re a very litigious country with a lot of lawyers looking for a payday. So more and more, companies have normalized layoffs even when they’re doing very well, because its a way to “clean out” the company of less productive employees with much less risk of getting sued: and they can always rehire or shift exceptional employees they want to keep.

I always assumed there was some tradition to cutting your hair short before going to war, because long hair would present numerous liabilities - more maintenance, potential visibility issues, potential to foil cover/disguise, and potential vulnerability in hand to hand combat. And there is a lot of military tradition to a short haircut, though I’m not sure how much is based on the above reasoning. But I’m not a historian so maybe this is just a bad interpretation of Mulan or a random teacher passing on low quality education.

Yep - we get it. But some of us don’t enjoy the effects that microtransactions have on the game experience, and would prefer not to play those kinds of games. A filter whereby we could just hide those games, and browse ones that we would enjoy, that are more targeted for us, would both save us time and increase the likelihood of us finding a game we want to buy, improving the shopping experience and putting more money into game developers’ and Steam’s pockets. Similar to how the google play store offers a “premium/paid apps” section, because while much of the market prefers free to play and doesn’t mind ads or microtransactions, they know some of us loath it and would rather pay up front for an experience that doesn’t go there, and they make more money when they help shoppers shop.

This has been a universal problem with any MMO game that tries to have some kind of a resource grind/time sink. Even if you can manage to stop players from botting it, you can’t stop players from third world countries selling their time to players in first world countries. The game economy quickly becomes a reflection of real world capitalism that most of its players were trying to escape.

It feels like there’s a lot of potential here. One of the most loved colony sims, Dwarf Fortress, thrives on this concept of emergent behavior: yes, the descriptions of the individual characters, their motivations and backstories does have a sort of hollow, procedural generation to them. But the stories they enable, the wacky quirks like an engraver going nuts putting up murals to cheese on everyone’s walls, the fact that when you get an unlikely hero or battle outcome it isn’t the author’s giving them destiny but a true random fluke, the unexpected disaster of opening an unseen water or lava flow or awakening some ancient evil - that can create a wonderful sandbox where players encounter and create their own stories.

There’s a balance in story telling, especially interactive story telling, between romanticism and realism. Between what we want to happen, and what actually happens. And sometimes, oftentimes, it’s the things we didn’t want to happen that make a story more compelling and memorable.

Hit a military target. No one got super outraged when terrorists blew up the Cole. But when they took out 3k civilians on 9-11, or about 1.5k civilians on 10-7, they made a lot of normally anti-war people very angry and willing to look away while their military made horrible mass casualties as a response.

So, the problem is if you kill a few angry people, they all have at least 2 friends/family members, and therefore you create twice as many angry people as you destroy. The only way killing angry people actually reduces the number of angry people is in fact genocide. But if you’re willing to commit genocide, you have to stop and ask yourself if maybe, you’re the angry person.

I had a good laugh when I noticed this tag on steam yesterday.

I think the reality is, “boomer” as a term is here to stay and a moving target: as gen x ages into 40+, they’ll become boomers. One day when gen Z becomes old, they’ll be called boomers. At least here, there’s a fun double meaning to the term. For me, I came into the Doom franchise at Doom 2, at an age where what I played was still very much influenced by my parents and friends’ parents. So yes, Gen X were the primary player base, but it’s not unfair to say the boomers often paid for the game and maybe sat down to a round or two of it. And given that, it might have been one of the last games they were able to sit down and enjoy. I don’t know if anyone else experienced something similar, but my dad in the last 20 years of his life or so really locked in on the 1997 MTG: Shandalar game, and despite several computer upgrades along the way was never interested in any of the newer MTG digital offerings, preferring the cards and UI and experience he was familiar with. And while similar with Doom that game was played by many Gen X and Millenials, I think those demographics mostly continued to follow the franchise through newer releases: but maybe not the boomers.

This last week - factorio, working on city blocks, it’s a little daunting, but hoping the blueprints will serve me in upcoming modded runs that need more scaling.

Vampire survivors, caught a sale, fun as hell if a bit of a patient gamers moment. If you just emerged from under a rock, it’s a minimalistic horde survival roguelite with lots of metaprogression through unlocks, reminds me of an oldie called Crimsonland.

Latest pickup was book of hours: a game made by the guys that did Cultist Simulator, with a similar cards mechanic but a little less stress with everything trying to kill you. Was a little confusing at first but I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Little bit of Orb of Creation: the 0.6 patch is in beta and overhauls the whole game. Combat currently disabled but research, artifacts, and augments in general were made way more interesting. This is an incremental game (big numbers, very casual difficulty, goal tends to be to unlock more stuff and bigger numbers).

And an EA account. And agreement to a 3rd party EULA with EA. For a single player game. That’s some real “we’re gonna sell you microtransactions later” energy out of a 60 dollar release.

There’s anti-union busting laws that are supposed to disallow a company from blatantly targeting unionized employees. But they’re worthless if not used to take the company to court. Starbucks has been up to the same thing: when a store unionizes they mysteriously select it to close.

Ah, seconding ark. I wanted a couple weeks after my friends jumped aboard the hype train, which lasted only a short couple weeks. A few years later and it’s free on EGS, a friend of mine owns a steam copy, and we cannot for our lives manage to connect a private game server between the two platforms. Basically first and one of the very few games I’ve ever refunded on steam, and not even worth playing for free from EGS.