Good on them! Hell yeah.

Considering the amount of gambling, exploitative practices, dark patterns, etc that exists in modern live-service games - saying that comes across as rather disingenuous.

It is good to hear this particular live-service game is bucking some of the recent trends, but I think it is safe to say these types of games, in general, have done damage to the industry and the wallets and minds of players. Enjoy yourselves, but be cautious and don’t let your guard down because these companies will screw you if they think they can. We have seen it so many times.

Nah, fuck them. They thought they could get away with this predatory debt-trap system that was marketed at children and they are clearly salty that they got caught. Not to mention the whole idea of not even owning your own PC or the data within which would set a bad precedent for everyone everywhere.

There are so many competitors in the industry NZXT operates in; it would be very easy to avoid ever buying their stuff again. And I intend to do just that. Get bankrupted, you pieces of shit.

And they are using paid influencers to promote said debt trap to those that don’t know any better, particularly children.

Probably the most insidious part of this to me. Seeing those clips of “influencers” pushing the idea of convincing your parents to get you a rental PC. Disgusting.

Elite: Dangerous, Tiny Glade, BG3

Thankfully there is a very simple, no-effort solution to this: Don’t play their trash.

I already don’t play their excruciatingly mediocre games and this just reinforces my avoidance is justified.

Also good gods they’ve been milking this tired franchise for almost 2 decades now.

I have a 14 pro and thus still use Lightning, but I’ve had iffy USB-C connectors and plugs on various other devices. Potentially an upopular opinion, but I don’t like USB-C much and find it doesn’t have a very positive feeling connection. I’ve also had a couple USB-C plugs fail already.

Prostagma?

Same. I’m still pissed that 2020 was left in the state it is in with tons of its own bugs and missing features that were promised. I remember talking to a friend and saying that MSFS2020 was a cool flight sim but still had the vibe of an early-access game at times… and then they drop an announcement for 2024.

Turns out that a massive Earth-scale game that requires streaming of gigabytes worth of data every play session for each user and has next to no local storage is a really awful idea.

X-plane 12 is looking better and better.

People will, in a single breath, tell people to exercise their right to vote in democracy and also that voting for the person/party that best represents them is wrong if it’s not a Big Party.

It was barely even alive for it to die in the first place 👀

Average users do not even remotely care about federated software and/or decentralisation. That is techno-babble to them and their eyes will glaze over if you try to market that to them.

That being said: Mastodon does a shit job at explaining how it works, how to use it, and what its advantages are. The Joinmastodon landing page just assumes you already know how a fair bit about instances work and what federated software is and does a very poor job explaining it. And even then, most users won’t care either way. They just want to click a Join button and be done.

Agreed. TES just hasn’t had good world design and lore since Morrowind. If I remember correctly, he also wrote much of the books in the TES universe which are still used in Skyrim.

ESO might be an exception. I don’t think it has the best writing but it does have much more interesting lore and world design than Oblivion and Skyrim.

Agreed. Modding doesn’t “fix” Skyrim either. It adds surface-level content and tweaks but the fundamental bones of the game are still there and they are heavily flawed. One of the few exceptions I can think of are things like Skywind but that’s only because it removes Skyrim’s story entirely, overhauls many of its mechanics, and uses the world/lore/story of one of Bethesda’s better games.

And in the case of Starfield - it’s entirely beyond salvaging with mods. Mods will not be able to fix the biggest problems with that game because they are literally the very way the game was made. To fix them would require basically remaking the entire game from scratch.

They can take as long as they want. After Starfield, I have zero confidence that TES6 will be any good. Bethesda has some serious issues they need to sort out with their production pipelines and methodology and they need to rethink how they approach story-driven open world experiences.

Every time I see a Starfield video and see the camera turbozoom in on a character as they deliver a forced, robotic line with terrifying facial animations - I get teleported right back to 2006. It is very obvious this studio does not know what they are doing and has learned little from their previous releases and from other contemporary games.

There are certainly some people that willingly choose not to vote, but there are also a lot of people that can’t. Either because of inability to get to a polling station, employer that won’t give them time off (or threatens punishment), or they live in a state that is actively attacking their voting rights and/or making it extremely difficult to vote.

It’s important to remember that one of the parties in the US two-party system is effectively a fascist party and they hold power in many states. It is often not as simple as “just go vote”.

If it is going to be a primary computer or a work computer then I would get the Pro. The extra horsepower and cooling just simply make it more capable.

The Air is still a very good laptop and it is surprising what it can do, but if this is going to be a work tool for you then you should get the best that you can afford. An Air might be good 90% of the time but that 10% where it overheats will suck heaps.

The features customers actually want vs what the shareholders tell them they want.

As a cyclist that drives, this was an interesting, although unsurprising read.

The expectation drivers place on other drivers is that they must be going as fast as physically possible at all times regardless of road rules. This creates an environment where motorists are literally breaking the law constantly. Other drivers will literally harass or even put your life in jeopardy if you drive the speed limit. Going 10-20kph over the limit is expected. Rolling through stop signs is expected. Cutting off buses is expected. Drivers do not tolerate anything that will even remotely slow them down for the tiniest fraction of a moment.

and yet if a cyclist rolls through a stop sign at an empty intersection then drivers will deeply criticise them to a level they never would if that same person was behind a wheel instead of handlebars. Other drivers are certainly disrespectful to each other but the hatred drivers have for cyclists is, quite frankly, goddamn disturbing and terrifying. Drivers will regularly drive in ways endanger the lives of cyclists even if the cyclist is following the rules to the letter. There are so many helmet-cam videos of drivers intentionally intimidating cyclists or even taking faux swipes at them - and these are just the ones that were recorded. It happens constantly.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the cyclist-drivers were significantly faster at detecting the appearance of fellow cyclists.

Cyclists that drive tend to have a unspoken understanding and respect for each other because we know the bullshit that we have to put up with. We also have a better understanding of the roads from the additional perspective and know what areas are dangerous, where to watch for cyclists, what laws cyclists need to follow, etc.