I think also one thing to remember is that phonics and word sounds are not reading either due to the fact that English is a Frankenstein language where any letter or combination of letters often has a myriad of ways of being pronounced. You cannot learn to read without a healthy dose of memorization and contextual cluing. Letters are, at best, just another clue as to what the word could be.

I have a son that’s learning to read right now so I’ve got some first hand experience on this. This article is making a lot out of the contextual clues part of the method but consistently downplays or ignores that phonics is still part of what the kids are taught. It’s a bit of a fallback, sure, but my son isn’t being taught to skip words when he can’t figure it out.

He’s bringing home the kinds of books mentioned in the article. The sentence structure is pretty repetitive and when he comes across a word he doesn’t know he tries to look at the picture to figure out what it is. Sometimes that works and he says the right word. Other times, like there’s a picture of a bear and the word is “cub” (but I don’t think my son knew what a bear cub was), he still falls back on “cuh uh buh” to figure it out.

So he still knows the relationship between letters and sounds. He just has some other tools in his belt as well. I can’t say I find that especially concerning.

Brother, if you can’t even get a sizable chunk of people to join you now you sure as fuck aren’t coming out of an armed revolution on top. There’s no shortcut to going where you want to go. You gotta put in the work to convince people.

It’s like the dumbest version of the trolley problem where the tracks are reversed. You could do nothing and people will die. Or you could pull the lever (convince a bunch of people not to vote for Harris) and a lot more people will die but, hey, at least you can say you did something.

Sure but the fully fleshed out diplomatic victory in Civ V was only added by DLC, it’s not that crazy that the equivalent was a DLC in VI. Beyond that, things like religion, archaeology, and espionage were all DLC features in V but were base game in VI. It was a clear step forward on the whole.

6 definitely had religion at launch. IGN actually declared “This game will go down in history as the most fully-featured launch version in the 25-year series.”

Huh? League is bigger than dota 2. By like a lot. Because League has much more mass appeal than dota. And that was their point, it has a dedicated but niche fanbase.

Hard disagree. There’s plenty of games that are little more than dressed up choose your own adventure stories. Plenty that are meant for chill and relaxing gameplay. Plenty that do little more than guide you through horror scenes. And so on.

And even beyond that, most people don’t even play a game long enough to have any real “skill development over time.” I read from the Civ7 director recently that if you’ve ever finished a game of Civ you’re literally in a minority of the player base. And that tracks with what I’ve heard about other games as well.

Most players of any given game never finish it. Most of those quit at the first sign of frustration and most are on the easiest game difficulties. This would indicate to me that the majority’s conception of “fun” has little to no relation to skill development in the game. They’re there for the moment to moment experiences. Rubber band mechanics are there to evoke those fun experiences more often in the majority of the player base.

I think you’re overstating the importance of games as a platform for skill development as opposed to a platform for, you know, having fun. The fact is that the vast majority of players play any game on one of its lowest difficulty settings.

Rubber banding is made for the core of the game’s audience and challenge-seekers are just not large enough to be that core. Some of those rubber banding mechanics can and are disabled at higher difficulty settings. Others are needed at higher difficulty because the AI can’t compete and the investment in dev time to improve the AI just isn’t worth it because, again, very few people actually play the game at those difficulties.

Sad part is that voters trust him more on the economy than the Democrats.

Bud, you’re literally parroting Trump’s faux-naive explanation on what his words meant. But ok.

Feel free to address anything in my post with substance. Tell me that it’s a lie that Trump said he’d be a dictator “for just a day.” Or that he actually didn’t try in multiple illegal ways to overturn the election. Or that he didn’t spend hours doing nothing while his colleagues begged him to stop the assault on the Capitol.

If I’m repeating lies, go on. Show me.

Why do you believe Trump when he keeps lying to you? The eagerness to trust the explanation given to you by a literal convicted felon fraudster is astounding.

Probably because he has literally claimed he will be a dictator (for one day only, wink wink). And probably because he actually attempted, in a number of illegal ways, to not count the last election so he could remain in power. You know, like a dictator.

Look, if this was literally anybody else I’d be willing to use a more charitable interpretation. Call it a gaffe at least. But Trump should have burned every last ounce of benefit of the doubt that anybody has for him the moment he abandoned his colleagues in the Capitol so he could see what the violent mob would do.

We spent the entire 2020 election going “Oh Trump doesn’t really mean it like that.” Until he did exactly what he fucking said he would do. Why are we doing this again?

The time since the release of that song is longer than 1985 was from it (2004).

I never said story games are shallow. But if the games you like are ones where you can feel like you’ve experienced all the game and the story has to offer in a single playthrough then they are, by definition, shallow. Even a great movie is worth watching multiple times of its story has any appreciable depth. Video games, even more so since there should be more to the story to experience.

Sounds like what you enjoy are shallow, linear story games. To each their own, of course. Glad you’re happy with what PS5 offers you in that regard. But the industry has a lot more to offer than that.

You can be thinking about shareholders despite not having them if your goal is to sell to them. I take it that they mean they don’t really have any interest in catering to the demands of even potential shareholders.