He should take a photograph of it, then he could copyright that.

I’ve worked for companies that would leave it up to chance without a second thought. I’ve known people that worked there and Amazon doesn’t seem like it cares about its employees. Does it make sense? No, but there’s alot about corporate America that’s pretty dumb.

The PS5 in general has just felt like a nebulous console. I don’t know if it’s just me not being as connected to console gaming anymore or what, but there’s no PS5 games that are “must play” or anything that I’ve seen/read/heard hype about that has made me really interested. Partly there was the Covid years where it was apparently facing shortages and during that I just switched my mind off to the idea that I’d ever buy one. It’s been out for years now though, but nothing about it makes me care to move on from our PS4 that’s still chugging along.

That was probably the intent. It works as a soft layoff. Do something wildly unpopular, knowing that a bunch of employees will quit. The ones left will pick up the slack, because obviously if they had anywhere else to go they would’ve left with the first group.

Was it parasitic? I used it for playing music off of Youtube and it would let me put the screen to sleep and keep playing the music? Did it get enshittifed or is it just that it provided a way around Youtube Premium? I haven’t actually used it in ages, though it still seems to work, it opened up at least.

Normal people usually just say “years”.

That somebody like Trump has a chance in hell of winning the election again is kind of proof enough that this country is already lost.

I still like my eyes. Blue with a hint of yellow/brown around the center (hazel). It’s almost like an eclipse. It’s the part of my body that gets the second-most amount of compliments.

Seems like he was just exercising his right to bear arms, is Trump against the Second Amendment now?

I’m not suggesting it, the post title is suggesting it. They mention the $2.90 fare, as if to show what a pitifully low amount of money they were killed over, which suggests that had it been over a more reasonable sum of money, maybe the shooting would’ve been more understandable. Maybe had it been in the process of stealing a $100 million Van Gogh it would’ve been different.

I know the amount in this situation is ridiculously low… but is there an acceptable amount where shooting would have been justified? How much money should it take for a cop to be able to open fire on a suspect? $50? $100? $1000? 10,000? 1,000,000? What’s the cut-off?

“It’s just horrible – so surprising to see it here. But we have to get over it. We have to move forward.”

-Trump in response to a school shooting in Iowa, the day after the shooting, back in January 2024.

Trump needs to get over being shot at, that’s the America that him and the GOP have created. If he doesn’t like it… maybe consider some sort of way to control access to guns so that unhinged individuals can’t get them… something like… I don’t know, gun control?

I started playing one of the Gacha games a few months back now, Watcher of Realms, I think the only reason I started was because it showed jiggling boobies in a trailer. The name is goofy and the story is almost non-existant, the gameplay isn’t terribly deep, but has some nuances to it, it’s like a tower defense RPG game. It’s kind of dumb as a game because it records your playthroughs of scenarios that you can then use later on to “Auto-fight” for you as you frequently have to grind for different shit. So you basically set the game on auto-pilot and stop playing the game. I’ve been playing for something like 6 months now, but I’ve been committed from the start to never pay a single dime for it and I’ve stuck with that the entire time. Granted, I’ve put way too much time into the game and, if time is money, I’ve wasted a bunch that way, but I’ve never actually paid for anything in currency. Cheap skate 4 life. I honestly don’t know why I keep playing, knowing what the game is setup for, but I still log in day after day.

I can definitely see how it encourages players to spend money, there’s so many mini-currencies within the game that obfuscate what you need to do to earn this or that hero or get whatever thing you’re trying for, but ultimately the incentive is to buy shit to get further along. In this game though, the rates are so goddamn ridiculous that you’d have to be an impatient jackass to pay the rates they want for simple things that don’t even give any guarantees of better performance in the game. On the one hand, I thing games like this are evil for trying to take advantage of people, but on the other, if you’re that stupid and that rich that you have money to burn on a game like this… maybe throwing your money away on digital stuff isn’t the worse thing you could be wasting your money on (like real world drugs or donating to Trump or something stupid like that). But yes, for kids who haven’t mentally developed yet, there probably should be some sort of protections for them, since they’ll pay for dumb shit at the drop of a hat.

I don’t know, I can breathe out using my butt, but I’m so straight nothing goes in my butt, not even air.

This was a really interesting video on how modern wargaming is used by the military and its links to the recreational scene, I just got done watching it yesterday. I think Quinns, in typical fashion, seems to try to moralize a bit much, especially with his pointed questions, but then does a good job of coming back around to show the other point of view, though I think the overall view he had seemed negative. He tried to present both sides at least.

He did recognize the need for militaries in general, but then seemed to equate any use of wargaming as resulting in deaths, which was automatically bad. I think some of the wargame professionals made pretty good cases for why it was justified and how “wargaming” is a bit of a misnomer, it’s more a way of contingency planning and working through possible scenarios you might encounter, so wargaming just helps prepare for different scenarios by showing the range of actions that players/actors might take in a given situation. They’re mapping out probabilities using human psychology, along with boardgame and videogame mechanics.

I think the ending portion where he called on gamers to “do something” about making wargaming ethical was kind of whatever. As if the gaming community was any sort of unified bloc that could even do anything about it. Something like that would probably require like a wargamer’s guild or union that added some sort of restraints on the kinds of projects they would work on (only scenarios that minimize casualties) or something like that, but that sort of defeats the purpose of trying to map out probabilities, since you’d purposely censor certain probabilities from your line of thinking. I think wargamers will just continue to do whatever they’re doing.

I could see something like that being done with music, I’ve never heard of it being done, but I could see it happen. Songs are usually just quick enough that I could see people listen to a song that evolves over time as the musician tries to get it “just right”. Usually though, people form a preliminary opinion about which tracks they like on an album and if it’s not good the first time, they’re not as likely to re-listen to a track (even if it got updated every few weeks/months). There’s a documentary on The Rolling Stones on how they came up with Sympathy for the Devil that shows how that song develops in the studio over time and it’s really interesting to watch it unfold, knowing what it will eventually turn into, but I can’t imagine doing that for a song that may or may not actually go anywhere.

With movies though, they probably have one shot to get it right, after that, most people aren’t going to sit through another showing of a movie to see what changes they make to it (changes they may not even notice). Games are so goddamn complex though that I can’t imagine any game getting released and not having to get patched at some point in its life-cycle. Plus, alot of games are meant to be played over and over again over the course of days/weeks/months, so it wouldn’t be a big ask to have people download an update for a game, especially if they’re fixing a bunch of shit that is annoying players.

And I’m sure whoever put it there faced way more harsher penalties than a certain someone who willfully hid highly classified documents in his bathroom for months and lied about it to investigators.

Do you mean “radio”? Because I’m pretty sure that’s already a thing.

Ok, so they produced at least one, we know that for sure.

I grew up playing FPS shooters like Doom, Quake, Tribes, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, etc, but I had avoided Fortnite for awhile because it just seemed like a kid’s game, whatever. Then my oldest son started getting into it and we’d play matches together, and suddenly I felt out of my element. The addition of building mechanics adds in a whole other element that you don’t really have to think about in other games. Granted, it’s not realistic being able to build shit that quickly, but whatever, it’s a game. And seeing some of the skill involved with these people running/gunning/building elaborate forts and the sort of battles that play out between two people gets insane sometimes.

Another interesting aspect of it is all the cross-marketing that goes on, you’ve got almost every major franchise represented in some way, shape, or form. It reminds me of Ready Player One. It sounds dumb, but Fortnite is probably the closest thing to a Metaverse that we currently have. I mean, hell, Emperor Palpatine somehow returned in between the movies in Fortnite (a dark day for Star Wars fandom).