CIWS-30

Wait until the population declines further and the CCP tightens its grip even more over Hong Kong. I doubt this’ll last. It’s just how authoritarian communist regimes work. Look at Putin and co. for examples.

Only thing shocking about this is that it took this long. Any drone capable of carrying a weapon was going to get one. I mean, look at Ukraine right now. Consumer drones with soda bottle improvised explosives and cardboard drones. I can see a future where most warfare is drone vs drone, to see who can hit the other’s supply lines / storage first.

The way Russia’s turtling with illegal mines, drones are basically one of the only ways to attack without taking massive losses while also moving slowly and being sitting ducks for artillery.

Sad, because I was a fan of them and bought all their games from Saint’s Row 1 all the way to Gat out of Hell (although not in chronological order) and got Agents of Mayhem for free somewhere, but think they’ve made some bad moves lately.

I think it all started going downhill from Agents of Mayhem, and them screwing up with the reboot of Saint’s Row was probably the nail in the coffin. I wish they’d just made Saint’s Row 5 instead, with wacky time travel shenanigans and a more polished set of superpowers.

At the point where they decided to “reboot” to something old school and grittier (TOO old school, imo) they really didn’t get what their fanbase wanted, and what new players who’d only heard of and experienced Saint’s Row 4 would get excited about.

They could’ve probably taken Saint’s Row up to 6 entries if they’d just iterated on the formula from 4 and possibly Gat out of Hell (I wouldn’t know, I got distracted and didn’t play it after I bought it, ironically). Similar to how United Front Games (the developer of Sleeping Dogs) could’ve probably stayed in business if they’d just made Sleeping Dogs 2 instead of that horrible “free to play” multiplayer asset flip of some of the least interesting elements of Sleeping Dogs 1.

If you’ve seen the big eyes on the thumbnails for the “Pitch Meeting” videos on Youtube, which kind of look similar to Anime Eyes: yes, they do look horrifying.

Not surprising, but disappointing. The premise was interesting (first person magic shooter) but the execution was tepid. The presentation / atmosphere, the generic graphics, the dopey dialogue, the lack of an interesting story. A lot of the success of games like Halo is how the world sucks you in with its atmosphere and storyline, I think developers really underestimate how much that matters in a single player game. Cinematogrophy is important, the feel of an experience is more than the simple gameplay of moving a character around and pushing buttons.

Well, this death’ll cause chaos that’s not good for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Hopefully it’ll mess things up long enough for Ukraine to gain more of an advantage.

Same. I stay away from #Explore and just keep to my feed of people I actually follow. And I make sure to unfollow those who are too stressful to hear from constantly.

I agree with almost all the of all politics all the time people who constantly post negative things, but it’s too tiring to read them, especially since knowing about it does me no good and I can’t do anything about it anyway. I already vote and donate as much as I can, and I live in a Blue state so anything outside of my area’s just not possible for me to influence.

I’ve found it’s better just to ignore it and focus on positive things that make my life better.

This is also why I stopped going to Mastodon. In addition to negative ragebait politics being almost the only thing that’s trending (and I have too much of that in my life already) there’s no real nuance or tolerance for anything outside the echo chamber.

You DO get called a racist nazi transphobe for stepping outside the box or trying to support people, ideas or places that might not be 100% perfect or pass the strictest ideological purity test. I thought Liberal Twitter was pretty exclusionary and echo-chamber-y, but Mastodon’s a lot worse.

Kind of, but more “slightly amusing” than funny.

This crap has sent me back to physical stores. If they have it in stock, I don’t have to wait for it to ship, I just drive there and pick it up. Same with returns too, and exchanges. Same day.

Plus, I can trust that the company itself has probably looked at and tested the products, and has a real product and not a fake. I doubt I’m the only one going back to brick and mortar as well.

Too true. What’s bonkers is that rules on this vary state by state. You move across state lines, and sometimes it feels like you’re in an entirely different country. I used to favor “States’ Rights” and flexible, empowered local governments who could respond to nearby challenges more surgically than a larger, more lumbering government bureaucracy further away.

Looking back, I see that now that I was naive, and that what I had was an ideal, and wasn’t the reality. Republicans always seem to turn “States’ Rights” and “Local Authority” into a way to flout sensible Federal laws and do horrible shit like this instead of what they claim to be doing.

Makes me think of the Privateer / Elite style X spaceship games, but that’s probably because of my personal bias towards games like that.

Everyone else would probably think Porn or the X-games first.

Given how modern AAA games are and Bethesda’s recent track history, it’s not negative to be skeptical, it’s smart.

Especially since despite Microsoft watching over them and helping them to have the most “bug free launch in history” it’s still probably going to be a hot mess for weeks to a month after launch. I want to be pleasantly surprised, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Plus, the recent release of Baldur’s Gate 3 with no microtransactions or season passes, etc. has gotten peoples’ standards up, and given that Microsoft paid a lot of money to buy Bethesda, we’re aware that they’re going to have to make that money back somehow, and will probably give into the temptation to do some really player unfriendly things to do it.

Bethesda’s been going all in on surprisingly expensive microtransactions for really tiny amounts of content, like in Fallout 4 and 76, and it wouldn’t be shocking for them to continue in that direction. People aren’t being mindlessly negative, they’re looking at current and past trends and making an educated guess about the future.

This is the reason why they’ve made sure only their brainwashed nutjob militias have all the guns. And also why the police are a bunch of classist racists too, along with much of the military (which primarily recruits from the south).

I don’t want to put my conspiracy hat on, but it also might be why “liberal” politicians try to get states with tons of activists to have the strictest gun laws. I’m not a second amendment wingnut, but if the corpos and their fascist storm troopers every decided to start a shooting war with the civilian population, I have no illusions about who’d probably win, given that the average civilian is just a coward who’ll back off and comply when even slightly threatened with violence.

Ouch. Harsh, but true. And this is coming from someone who likes the XM8 and the G36 before it.

It’s true. Kevin Feige (of the Marvel movies) once said something like, “People love chocolate ice cream, but if that’s all you offer them every day, they’ll start to hate it.” and for a time, it seemed like he and Disney / Marvel understood that, which lead to such a wide range of movie genres for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the breakout successes… but now I feel like they’ve forgotten that, and now we get the formulaic “Marvel Movie” template shoveled out, and now they’re slowly starting to fail.

And for good reason. People need variety, and it’s because entertainment producers don’t understand this need that so many major studios are flailing. Hence the recent purge at Pixar for example, and why Ubisoft is struggling lately, etc. It’s not just game publishers that have this issue, it’s movies, tv, and comics too. Like the recent “Death” of Ms. Marvel which is eerily similar to all the extremely temporary crap that happened to Peter Parker’s Spiderman in the past, like the “death” of his aunt, or his “marriage” to Mary Jane.

Yeah, like Amerikanski’s say: “That shit is lit, it is straight FIRE!”

“Are you kidding me? Just LOOK at these nerds!”

/no self awareness
/selfown

Johnny Bravo hasn’t aged well for this and other reasons. The character himself was funny in the way he acted like a dorkier, blonder version of Elvis though. I remember thinking it was funny in the past, but then again, I was a child.

Ah, the Windows approach. The few times I worked with PC Repair shops, backing up everything and reinstalling the OS was the go to for most “repairs”. Especially since it was faster and cheaper than just researching all the issues and repairing them the “right” way. Although to be fair, if the OS is borked enough, backup + reinstall IS the right way.