4x games tend to be functionally infinitely repayable, since a single game often takes an eternity and there are usually many factions to play.

I particularly like sword of the stars 1 & 2. Honestly don’t remember which I preferred but I know I got an insane amount of time sunk into both of them.

Farscape is a very soft sci-fi, but it has a mostly consistent world that mostly follows its internal logic. It has muppet aliens and the supernatural along side more traditional TV space tropes, but the narrative makes sense as presented, and it doesn’t do much to hurt your suspension of disbelief.

Doctor Who is the opposite of consistent. It makes shit up as it goes along and isn’t even consistent in the kind of bullshit it’s throwing at you. It can be tropey nonsense, comedy overriding reality, fairy tale reasoning that breaks down when you try to think about it to much, or whatever other idiocy it feels like being today. Instead of building a world that you can understand, it basically just says “don’t worry about it, assume we already did the boring set up stuff, and just run with the fact that plastic can be alive and chasing after people because that’s what we’re doing this week.”

There are also some Republicans that will state they don’t like the ruling but are also too afraid of the loss of their seat to actually do anything for the country the swore to protect.

Any Republican that supports impeaching a right wing Supreme Court justice (let alone 6 of them) is going to be committing career suicide. It would be handing vacancies to the Democrats to fill, and potentially locking in a left leaning court for decades.

Now, obviously they should be able to put the good of the country and the rule of law above things like partisan politics and their prospects for re-election. But we’ve already had several rounds of purges on the right that have wiped out anyone with principles or conscience since those things get in the way of being blindly loyal to Trump.

France on Sunday took a step closer to delivering what was once seen as an unthinkable nightmare: a far-right government taking power in Paris for the first time.

Well… the first time in a while. And just as the last time was exiting living memory.

I’d vote for ToS era Pike over Trump. I’d vote for a candidate who only communicates via ouija board over Trump. I’d vote to not have a president for 4 years before I’d vote for Trump.

It’s crazy that Trump can get convicted of fraud, be found liable for sexual assault, promise to abuse presidential power to get revenge against those who cross him, actively undermine both national and global security, promise to round up millions and put them into camps, attempt to overthrow the election and refuse to not try it again, and so on, and his side is still so loyal they’ll wear solidarity diapers for him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_theseus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus

I like wireless, I just fucking loathe earbuds. Unfortunately, they have completely replaced the wrap around on-ear headphones that were the best for wearing while running errands or exercising.

I don’t want something big and bulky while I’m walking around, but I also don’t like having shit jammed into my ears. And critically, those on ear headphones are just the right size to have a convenient button layout so I can easily pause or go back a few seconds in my audiobook whenever I need to.

But Apple decreed that wireless earbuds were the future and the market for everything else fucking died.

He’s firing from both ends.

Because they could sell them as new games.

Fallout is hot right now thanks to the show, and from a business perspective its kind of crazy that they didn’t plan to have something available to capitalize on that interest. A Fallout 1 & 2 remake or remaster would have been an easier option than a whole new game. And it’s the kind of thing you can outsource to another studio, so it doesn’t have to disrupt their current plans.

If I were some soulless executive at Microsoft, I’d have been getting this put together the second I saw that the show was a huge hit. I’d be trying greenlight remasters of basically all the games, plus a new non-numbered game in the series that could have limited scope but keep the same basic flavor, and maybe a new game in a different genre altogether. Things that could be handled by other developers and pushed out over a reasonable time frame so we could at least have something to announce before season 2, while letting Bethesda keep Fallout 5 for whenever they finally get around to it.

Steam isn’t a monopoly, I can get my games elsewhere (epic, gog, humble store, origin etc). But Steam is dominating the market because it does it better. It offers value and features that others don’t, and it generally hasn’t abused its dominant market position to squeeze the consumer or crush their competitors. The closest thing to enshittification we’ve seen from Steam was them allowing third party DRM and launchers, which isn’t something they wanted, it’s them backing down from a stand-off.

I want competition, but there’s good competition and bad competition. Good competition is what we see from Steam and gog, where they stand out by being good at what they do and giving customers what they want.

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

I think it’s easy to look at all the bullshit EA and Ubisoft and the like pull now, and imagine that same pattern from streaming playing out in gaming.

Unless Ubisoft has stopped requiring that I log into an ubisoft account for every game, I will have to pass.

Don’t forget the psychic ones. Any world with abundant telepathy and mind control is pretty much guaranteed to be a dystopia.

I believe there was originally a line of dialogue about there being resistance when they pushed through objects, which was supposed to explain why they don’t just fall. That line was cut, but IIRC it is still referenced indirectly when Geordi’s hand gets zapped and he says that there was more resistance to pushing through stuff afterwards.

That wouldn’t explain why there is enough resistance in the floor to stand and walk, but not enough resistance in walls to prevent them from easily passing through. Presumably their mass and the pull of gravity are unchanged, so the resistance would have to be enough to counteract their weight. And even if they did weigh less, they still propel themselves forward through walls by pushing off the floor, so either the floor needs to be more solid, or they should be nearly weightless and move by paddling their feet through the floor until they build up momentum enough to smash through a wall. Also, if they are applying pressure to objects they pass through, shouldn’t people they touch feel it?

Personally, I’d probably explain the floors specifically being impassable by blaming it on the way the artificial gravity is generated.

I don’t have a good explanation for how they can breathe, how they see without interacting with light, how they can hear clearly when matter isn’t really touching them and therefore can’t conduct sound, etc.

This is one of the big things that killed Amazon for me. They used to have a great search and filter function that was designed to make it as easy as possible to find what you were looking for. Now it’s designed to find things that are related to your search and ignore your filters when sellers pay them to promote their product. Combined with the fake reviews and the ocean of low quality trash that fills 95% of their inventory, it’s now actually easier to drive to a store and search shelves manually than it is to sit and click.

And don’t get me started on AI generated “reviews” that are just reworded marketing material with affiliate links. It used to be that google could get you some relatively reliable sources, but most of those have long since replaced real reviews with this bullshit. At this point, I just assume every review is a lie unless I see a video of a human testing the product while taking about it.

I honestly think that anyone who is making money by misleading consumers with product reviews that aren’t actually based on some interaction with the product should be in prison for fraud.

Lifting a kilt is not exactly difficult.

“Kilts, because they don’t make three legged pants.”

For real though, I gave up pants years ago and I will never go back. I highly recommend giving it a try.

I love all three and have no idea how I got here.