I’d love to see Monolith games come natively to other platforms, but they’ve absolutely flourished under Nintendo so far. They’ve been given a lot of creative freedom with their own games, and also have had a lot of success as a support studio on the Legend of Zelda games, Splatoon games, and a lot of the other major games.

They also have a reputation for being one of the better japanese developers to work for, with overtime not normally being allowed. They also seem to give their employees easy development deadlines, with games like Xenoblade 3 releasing several months early (because they finished it early), and Xenoblade 1 remake having extra content, because they finished it early and used the remaining development time to work on other parts of the game.

Cursing frequently seems like a sign of immaturity honestly.

Edit: to be clear, swearing in moderation is fine. But the only people I’ve known to swear excessively were always young, immature, or less than bright. I largely associate heavy swearing with kids and teenagers who swear excessively because they think it will make them see older.

It’s an absolutely massive game, and has been in development for 17 years. They also were pretty upfront with the fact that there would be a price increase at launch. I’ll also mention it’s one of the rarer games where the devs opted out of any Steam DRM, so you can copy the game files and run them on any machine without needing Steam installed. I keep the game on a thumbdrive for playing on my work PC when I have downtime.

All in all I think the price is well deserved, and I hope they do really well.

I had one time a couple weeks ago where I was scheduling jobs on Monday, we were supposed to be rained out Tuesday, light/scattered showers Wednesday, and heavy rain Thursday.

Actual results was no rain Tuesday, absolute downpour on Wednesday, and sunny Thursday and Friday.

Yeah, I’ve long thought that weather forecasts are a perfect use case for AI. AI is great with complicated systems that are hard to model accurately but have lots of available data.

Current weather forecasts kinda suck. I try to schedule jobs around when it’s going to rain, and have to frequently reschedule because rain forecasts aren’t very accurate. I really hope we can see improvements.

They want access, they just don’t want china to have access. Of course, when you add a backdoor it’s best to assume everyone will use it sooner or later.

30% as industry standard

That’s the same as app stores/etc, and is still a common cut to take. I’m not convinced the cuts that Epic is taking are actually sustainable for offering downloads/updates/etc for a game indefinitely, but it’s hard to tell since the Epic store is already bleeding money.

I’ll also mention that Audible (which has a monopoly in the audiobook space) reportably takes a 60-75% cut of audiobooks sold on their platform (they take only 60% if you agree to sell exclusively on audible, but they take the full 75% if you want to sell the book somewhere else as well). Monopolies abusing their position is really common, but I haven’t seen anything similar from Steam that makes me think they’re abusing their position. I suspect PC gaming would be in a far worse state if another company controlled the popular storefront.

Being a small game dev has a lot of uncertainty and risk. I wouldn’t blame any small dev for taking a guaranteed paycheck from Epic. Larger studios with safe prospects should be blamed though imo. Gearbox with Borderlands 3 for example.

Except they’re trying to strongarm people into using it by using huge amounts of money to buy exclusivity rights.

People don’t want monopolies because companies can abuse their position to hurt consumers. But steam provides a very user friendly experience with lots of benefits and features like mod hosting, remote play together, etc. Epic provides a store that people hate using, and people only put up with because epic abused fortnite’s success to buy exclusivity deals*. Despite being the much smaller storefront, Epic already feels like the abusive monopoly in the PC gaming space.

*Many people also play on Epic because of free games, which is a valid and pro-consumer way to attract users. I’m 100% cool with this strategy, although giving away merchandise at a loss is also a common monopoly strategy.

There was a request to halt sales until the specific mechanics were removed, with the mechanics being throwing pokeball like items and riding monsters.

That lawsuit might take years, and the requested damages from Nintendo are only $66,000. Palworld isn’t going to be shut down anytime soon, even if they lose the case.

Great game, it and the original Pixel Dungeon were my most played phone games for years.

Another high quality mobile experience I can’t recommend enough is Slice & Dice. Gameplay is quite different from Pixel Dungeon, but it’s basically replaced all other phone games for me. Been playing it almost continuously now for the past 3 years.

Some people prefer CRTs for gaming, there’s much less input lag, and differences in the way images are displayed means that you can often run games at lower resolutions than pixel based displays without as much of a decrease in image quality. Here’s a DF video talking about some of the advantages.

Also CRTs can be pushed to insanely high frame rates, although this can be limited by how much you reduce the resolution. For example, one guy got his to run at 700hz refresh rate (by dropping resolution to 120p).

“A man chooses! A slave obeys.” - Andrew Ryan, BioShock

In general a lot of Andrew Ryan quotes are captivating, but that one transcends thanks to both the events happening, and the realization of the plot reveal.

I started working this job after Obama had already been in office one term, so I was mainly comparing the final 4 years. I’m really glad I was still in college for the first term when the economy was really rough.

Covid did have an undeniable effect on the economy at the start of Biden’s term, and I don’t consider that his fault or anything. It does feel like we generally haven’t really recovered from it though, gas prices finally came back down but everything else is crazy expensive still. For example, I do electrical work, and a 250’ roll of 12/2 wire went from $35 in 2019 to $140 today.

Probably unpopular answer, but it’s not some clear cut “this political party has better policies for everyone”. Republican policies usually are better for people living in rural areas, and Democratic policies are usually better for people in cities. I’m sure people will debate this, but this is the reason why people typically vote depending on where they live. At the very least, they believe that their party has better policies for them and their way of life.

My personal (anecdotal evidence) is that I work for a small business in a rural area, and our main customers are other small business owners (usually self employed or under 5 employees). Over the last 3 presidents, the Obama years were rough for our company, we had explosive growth during the Trump years, and then we’ve had stagnant growth over the past 4 years. Our largest competitor went out of business this past year, which sent us a lot of new customers, but we’ve also had a lot of our customers go out of business as well, so we’ve been pretty stagnant. Being stagnant isn’t terrible, we don’t have shareholders or anything, but the cost of living has increased and company profit/wages haven’t which is a problem. That said I know we’re doing pretty well compared to a lot of people here.

Another (once again anecdotal) example is that I have a friend who paints murals full time, for the past 30ish years. He told me that he does well with either Republicans or Democrats in office, but that his customers change. During republican presidents, his customer base is usually local businesses wanting to decorate their stores. During democratic presidents, his customer base is usually towns, state buildings, schools, etc.

But anyways, I’d be very interested to hear from some people living in cities if there’s a visible uptick in income/etc when we have a democratic president, or in general what your personal observations are on how which president affects your local businesses/income/prices/etc.

A bank I used for a mortgage has mandatory text message 2fa if they think you’re on a new device (won’t allow google auth/etc). And web browsers like firefox/brave block enough cookies/etc that it requires the “new device” authentication everytime I log in.

Problem is, for a couple months there was some delay with their text messages. It would take 10-20 minutes to send your 2fa code, and the code would expire after 5 min, meaning that by the time you got the code it was always expired and unusable.

Made it completely impossible to log in to pay my mortgage payments. Led to some really frustrating talks on the phone about how I didn’t want to pay with a credit card over the phone, I wanted them to fix their damn system so I could log in and pay via bank transfer like usual.

Many new PCs (generally the cheaper priced ones) come in S mode now, where you can only install Microsoft store apps. You can turn this off to allow regular PC programs too, but they require you to set up the Microsoft store before you can disable it.

If you’re trying to set up a new PC without a Microsoft account (which is getting increasingly hard), you can’t disable S mode. There was a workaround that involved booting into recovery mode and running some commands/registry edits, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft has blocked that too by now.

This is also the biggest reason Valve supports Linux and ChromeOS. Microsoft really wants full control over what software people can use on Windows, and Valve is worried about getting pushed off the platform.

Yes I’ve seen it before. Once Microsoft even updated their virus definitions to auto-delete the chrome installer when downloaded. Thankfully they reversed that one pretty quickly, but I had to completely disable all Windows virus protection to install chrome for a relative.

Yeah, I’ve gotten sucked into HSR as well (first f2p gacha game that’s ever hooked me), and I can’t imagine having time for another game like it. The daily content isn’t really any trouble to do, but having to do that for multiple games would get old fast. And the monthly content drops can be really substantial and take a long time to experience all the content.