MudMan

Is this about the US, is the US alright?

I was in a bookstore yesterday. I did have a chuckle at this self-help book called something along the lines of “How to Politely Tell People to Fuck Off”, which proudly stated to be written by a social therapist or some other Pokemon evolution of a psychologist.

Otherwise it was novels from mainstay authors, young adult stuff whose quality was undecypherable from their “my cousin knows Photoshop” covers and a bunch of pseudo-academic highly specific texts from local self-published authors.

I was disheartened to see that the native minority language section keeps shrinking, especially among children’s stuff. And while I was looking at that I also noticed the manga section is bigger than the graphic novel section and that is bigger than US comics, which were now nonexistent. More neutral about that one.

Water, in particular, feels like it tastes very weird through a straw. Maybe because it’s so neutral, but the mouthfeel of it changes so much with the vessel and straws just make it seem like someone is powerwashing your mouth to prep you for surgery or something.

It’s not the worst, and I bet the people in this thread reporting that they need straws for mobility or other medical reasons don’t think about it that much, but I think I’d default to flavored drinks if I had to use a straw by default.

Being unfair to large corpos, especially ones doing relatively unimportant things, like entertainment media, is suck a light expression of this pattern.

But it’s everywhere. It’s the fundamental mechanics of social media and it’s rippled out into relegitimizing a whole bunch of very bad things, up to and including the rise of fascism. We’re all just broken inside in a very particular way that enables that sort of mob behavior and the alienation and exposure from social media means we’re always in this weird mob mode for these things, even when we’re being super articulate and relaxed and casual.

It’s terrifying and we aren’t honest enough about it. Forget Ubisoft, they don’t matter. All social media was a mistake for much, much bigger reasons, but it’s weird to see it materialize around something so trrivial

Sure, but then you’re in the accessibility scenario. It’s still a utility thing.

That’s just soup at that point. And to be fair, a boba straw is in the spork continuum anyway.

I don’t… like them. Does anybody actively like them? Quick poll, does anybody here pop a can of coke or a glass of water and deliberately go find a straw to put in there?

As far as I can tell straws exist either to drink something too thick to reliably pour out of a glass rim, like a smoothie or a milkshake, or to cirvumvent some limitation, be it accessibility or having to extract liquid from a sealed vessel.

By the same token, who here just brings a large, wobbly paper glass up to their face in a dark movie theatre and tries to repeatedly sip it?

Man, the snark in that piece feels like a weird retro thing and I realize it’s because I haven’t perused traitional games media news coverage in a long time. I don’t know how I feel about that.

Anyway, this just seems good of Ubi in general, even if I’m way too platform agnostic to care about something being on Steam or not. I’ll say that I had to go check to notice I own all Watch Dogs games on Steam already, so the more vitriol I see towards these guys for their outlet choices specifically the less aware I am of how long they were supposedly an Epic exclusive.

Like, what games are not on Steam? How long was this happening for? Was it just Avatar and Star Wars or something?

Oh, by all means, give that a try, see how it goes. I’d say “and then report back”, but… you know, that wouldn’t be much use.

I had to go look up if this was a tongue-in-cheek obscure reference to Frank Miller. It’s not, apparently.

Pretty sure that one was consensual.

For a change.

For the record, that doesn’t seem to be what Wilson said, if he said anything human-readable at all, which I’d argue he did not.

I don’t have much of an interest on it either way, but I can defer you to Jason Schreier’s take on it, which seems pretty well informed.

No, play it later.

In the spring, when it is scheduled to come out on GOG and you get to keep it forever.

You’re all welcome.

Yeah, I guess that’s how mini PCs got popular in the first place. Just cram a laptop in a box, get most of the performance and less of the hassle. At a premium, of course, so I imagine on the manufacturing side it’s quite the win/win.

Still, a 10x multiplier in power consumption at idle and over 5x under load is pretty wild.

A fun one to put in perspective how hideously power hungry modern desktop PCs are is that I have an old (ish) laptop running as a local Plex server that also has a LLM loaded in there and a few other docker bits and pieces and it just sits happily humming at 10W idle (which is as much as my TV draws when it’s turned off).

I’ve looked into building a small form factor PC to replace it at some point but all the spare parts I have lying around would draw as much idle as when that tiny thing is going full tilt and I just can’t justify it for something that just stays on waiting for me to feel like rewatching The Matrix or whatever.

Yeah, man, getting into Home Assistant and messing with energy monitoring did more than thousands of chastising TV segments to get me to fully shut down my computers.

Who gives a crap about gaming use power consumption, give me idle benchmarks, you cowards. Do you even know how kWh work?

I think most of the games that would be in this position aren’t willing or able to do that. It’s not like there’s a ton of income on stale half-released games with no active development, but people should be aware that’s what they’re looking at anyway.

Oh, that was very much needed, for sure.

I’m not American, friend. Anybody who could have voted for not-Trump and didn’t is a collaborationist with an opposing force in my book, and I have zero need to adjust that assessment.

I’ll let you know if anything changes my mind when people are digging bunkers in Greenland or I’m holidaying in the Gazan Riviera or whatever. In the meantime, this is real life now and the collaborationists can check if they’re cool with the outcomes of their collaboration in real time.

You absolutely get to say you made it. Plus modify it, reproduce it, use it as the basis of other art and anything else you want. Any exception to that is some negotiated contractual clause that sets how crediting is meant to go or some policy to disclose it.

Movies have a long tradition of strict crediting rules (in the US, anyway). In comics there’s few people involved, so it tends to be easy. In games you can absolutely have a ton of art applied throughout (or concept art used as the basis for something) with no direct attribution beyond telling people yourself.

Hey, if AI hate gets people to realize how little recourse the actual person doing creative work as a contractor has to claim it at least this nonsense will have a positive effect.

As opposed to… you know, the perfectly legal genocide, or…?

Hey, apropos of nothing, where are the “can’t bring myself to vote for Biden/Harris” crew? I shouldn’t even ask, should I? I don’t even want to know what mental gymnastics are happening at this point, let alone in the next however many years.