My work computer is on W11. Notifications got much worse, and moved to a harder-to-reach shortcut. There’s a persistent bug with maximization, in which many forms of apps will suddenly take over the region normally reserved for the taskbar (no, I’m not referring to full screen modes) that so far as I can tell can only be fixed by logging out.

The UI is worse, making settings pages even more confusing. Windows Explorer has dived deep into iconography, while still not being clear about what those icons mean. The new context menus are missing options, so they need an extra one to go back to W10’s options.

This is of course setting aside their blatant lies about “It’s not spyware we promise we promise”, among so many other hundreds of problems. I’m doomed to stay on W10 for now to finish a project, but afterwards, I’ll be finding a distro I prefer.

Why do they keep trying to fuzz the terminology?

Zionists and Jews are not the same thing. They have very little in common.

Maybe just to highlight some positivity, Trump’s niece Mary runs a very positivity-driven channel alerting the world to the dangers of her uncle. Nice way of showing we don’t still believe in “Sins of the father”.

The bullet engraving does sound weird, but I have heard of traditions where people engrave names onto dry grains of rice.

I never played Remake, but when a YouTuber recently did a comparison video between some of their major scenes, I ended up respecting the original so much more.

A great one was when the plate falls. The original made directorial choices that emphasized the brutality of it all so much better, especially by choosing to cut the music. It just seems like Remake’s director was adding so many things simply because he could, making short and direct scenes so much worse by excess creation.

Of note, another JRPG from that general time period, Trails in the Sky, is being remade soon, and that one seemed quite a bit more faithful to me. Still taking liberties to change dialog, but only where it makes sense - they also greatly retooled the battle system with full respect for classic turntaking style.

That’s not always true when members of the team feel really motivated and inspired by a concept.

I’ve been in that zone a few times before. “Well, I’ve been working for a few hours. I guess I should take a break and play a game. …Or, I could just keep at it…?”

Of course, with such large teams now, you’re unlikely to see that happen to many of them. They’ll be working late, but usually zombies.

Playing an indie mystery game called Dragon Detective. I’m on case 4 so far, it’s definitely held my attention with the story. It manages to do a good job with its worldbuilding.

My only response to “Antifa” is to continually ask “Anti-…fa-what?”

I’ve still been using it lately to animate a video. It’s nice that so many tools have been refined in that time.

This makes me realize the last time I interacted with Digimon was the age-old TV show that began with an Isekai.

I’m curious how the series has changed. Apparently some of the newer stories lean a bit darker?

When listening to the dev commentary of Valve games, they talk about how much work goes into level design planning even just for the sake of optimization, like clearly delineating barriers between major regions (doorways) so the engine can unload objects from other areas.

I get the impression the “First step easy” setup from UE5 may have made it so that more people can give us unoptimized messes, but still only a few rare devs understand proper optimization at all levels of development.

When I run a social media site, it will be a rule to use uncensored terms, and any use of asterisks or alt-words like “unalive” will result in a warning or suspension.

I remember that talking point about walkable cities being “digital prisons” and never understood the gymnastic logic people go for with those.

Do they think that only being able to leave via a registered electronics-laden metal box on roads built by the government is “independence”? Do they realize in some countries even assassins will use public transit to evade attention?

I mean, you changed the topic onto the subject of pricing, which is the main thing driving sentiment that Microsoft is anti-consumer. There are other smaller gaming subscriptions out there, and I don’t call many of them anti-consumer.

I guess it occurs to me that the shooter was lucky to target so accurately.

Emotionally driven rogue shooters often aren’t going to have steady aim. We’ve even seen from many similar incidents, it can happen that multiple unrelated people to the object of their hate can get hurt. It’s often how gang violence spreads - the gangs only care about their opponents, but stray bullets still hit innocent people, dragging the mess forward.

If they’d hit anyone else, which is purely a matter of luck and lack of discovery, not shooting skill, I imagine this wouldn’t be so clear cut an issue. For that reason, I’d rather we not generate imitators, especially not in crowded events like these.

It sounds plausible Sony and Microsoft don’t have very fair algorithms to decide what a dev earns for their subscription. That’s an internal element, and we don’t get to see that calculation.

Imagine a guy hears about Game Pass, and sees he can play Spiritfarer on it. “Spiritfarer!? That awesome emotional experience that everyone says they cried at? I’m definitely playing that!” 5-ish hours later, they’ve finished the game, and thoroughly enjoyed it, but the subscription is still going.

At this point, the subscriber decides they may as well play State of Decay 2 mindlessly the rest of the month, often without much interest, but trusts another excellent singleplayer indie darling will arrive next month.

I’d bet the algorithm may pay the SOD2 devs far more in that case because numbers show that’s what “kept them engaged”, not to mention live service games like SOD2 have DLC to entice people into.

Theres absolutely a danger in that thinking, since most people bought a PS5 after seeing Sony’s incredible singleplayer games, and I believe that’s primarily what gets people into Game Pass too.

So this is basically an observation about raising prices. But I think there’s a misconception on social media that you have to be reading the news and on your soapbox to alert people to those things.

Pricing has always very readily affected people’s spending behavior. Not just people that follow gaming news, but people browsing GameStop for whatever’s new. We’ve even seen that - stats are showing people spent much less on games this year. Some people are even spending less through the option of going for a subscription rather than buying 8 games through the year. The publisher plan is certainly to tune up that cost with time, but personally, I don’t think that plan has a high chance of success.

And there’s a very worrying reality on the publisher side that gamers have many alternatives, especially as quality falls in these AAA products. You can imagine someone starved for a Soulslike might’ve spent $70 on generic copycat “Folly of the Dodgeroll 7”, if not for seeing Hollow Knight Silksong for $20 one shelf over.

So basically, I never hated the subscription model itself as a “weapon of capitalism”; just the constant attempts to shrinkflate as has been happening to most else.

I have different reasons I hate MS and Game Pass specifically, but I was never convinced by this argument.

It works on the argument of “We would like to stop offering direct purchase models, and require consumers to play by subscription.” But no one has done that. No one has really come close to doing that.

People argue the price will steadily go up; and that’s one of the reasons I don’t play Game Pass anymore. I knew that I wouldn’t maintain access to the games on there, which is why I bought the ones I wanted to keep playing - not very many.

That might not quite be true. You can’t have 1000 people make Hollow Knight overnight. It’s like the old adage of 9 mothers making a baby in one month.

The closest thing would be to split the studio internally into 10 small teams, and have them each make a game over a long period of time; maybe that’s what you were implying.

If nothing else, to sustain themselves. The more they profit off one game, the longer they can develop their next project without worrying.

Say one of them has an idea for an awesome 3D Soulslike, but they’d have to triple their team size to make it in a reasonable time frame. They could afford that with more money.