The new items stuff in particular seems like QoL considerations for “we just added a hundred items to the game for players coming back to it after months away.”
I was genuinely excited for Obama. I strongly supported him during the primary, was thrilled he won, and was very hopeful when he was elected.
Quickly disappointed not long after, but at least when he was first being elected it was definitely a “I really like this candidate and am hopeful they’ll live up to their promises.”
It’s literally the easiest fucking litmus test in the world.
“How many things does this person say will come true that actually come true? How many don’t?”
I just ran into this the other day with someone talking about Alex Jones talking about an attack on the world trade centers in 2000.
A number of others also presented similar ideas before it happened, but more importantly - if you need to go back 20 goddamn years for an example of foresight for someone who makes wild predictions for hours every single day, that person isn’t a prophet.
The stupidity of a lot of people is disappointing to the point of being demoralizing.
He said “Oh I will know. He is in my heart so I can never be fooled.”
Ugh, I hate this one. Especially with the people that believe in demonic forces.
Like, ok - so everyone that disagrees with you has been misled by demons or the devil, but you’re right because you feel it, but that feeling can’t be the same forces you attribute to other people’s differing feelings, because you have the magic protection provided by your feelings being right. And they don’t have the magic protection but they think they do because the evil forces can trick people into thinking they are protected. But not you, because you feel it’s actually the good guys in your heart.
I’ve always thought Superman would be such an interesting game to do right.
A game where you are invincible and OP, but other people aren’t.
Where the weight of impossible decisions pulls you down into the depths of despair.
I think the tech is finally getting to a point where it’d be possible to fill a virtual city with people powered by AI that makes you really care about the individuals in the world. To form relationships and friendships that matter to you. For there to be dynamic characters that put a smile on your face when you see them in your world.
And then to watch many of them die as a result of your failures, as despite being an invincible god among men you can’t beat the impossible.
I really think the gameplay in a Superman game done right can be one of the darkest and most brutal games ever done, with dramatic tension just not typically seen in video games. The juxtaposition of having God mode turned on the entire game but it not mattering to your goals and motivations because it isn’t on for the NPCs would be unlike anything I’ve seen to date.
You may have noticed a distinct lack of return2ozma. This is due to their admitting, in a public comment, that their engagement here is in bad faith:...
Around one in six voters say that a guilty verdict in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial will make them less likely to vote for him, according to a new poll.
With the advances in AI this is no longer as reliable an option, and will quickly become less so.
But absolutely letting someone know where you are going and as many identifying details about who you are meeting is wise. As is having them check in on you by a certain time after.
The level of detail in Helldivers 2 is insane for the type of game and company size.
Deformable terrain and buildings, enemy animations when you shoot off different limbs and they keep moving towards you, your cape burns off more and more as you use your jetpack, etc.
Call of Duty has 3,000 devs working on their titles.
Arrowhead has around 100 employees total.
I very much believe this game took that long with a team that size, and it shows and is a large part of why it’s been so successful.
If you saw Jordan Klepper’s Russia special, John Bolton straight up says he thinks Trump will pretty much end democracy.
And then mentions that he’s going to write in a candidate when he votes.
I don’t get it man. I’m not going to be happy voting for Biden, but I’d vote in Caligula’s horse if it meant avoiding fascism overtaking democracy in the US.
I support religion as long as it gives people a sense of community, hope, and strength.
I used to feel this way. Then 2020 happened and I realized just how damaging any degree of magical thinking and faith based reasoning was for a society.
I no longer think there’s an innocuous amount of irrationality. Just varying degrees of social harm that come with any of it.
I mean, you probably are in a simulation, if that makes you feel any better.
But it may well be a simulation of the history leading up to a society capable of simulating the past.
And as anyone who has ever sat through a history class knows, you tend not to be forced to study the chill parts of history where everything is awesome.
He’s trying to say that the people coming into the country are dangerous criminals, but he’s done the talking points so often by now that neither he nor his audience need the connective tissue between the ideas.
“Oh, now he’s doing the Hannibal Lecter bit? Yeah, screw illegals or whatever.”
They have their own coded language at this point where as Trump slips more and more into dementia they still understand what their adoptive hate spewing neo-Nazi grandpa dictator is talking about.
It’s outstanding, but even right now at its best it still isn’t perfect.
I’m very, very much looking forward to what they can eventually do using UE5 as the base in an era with generative AI to fill out the edges.
When the polish (pun intended) is there, the game is beyond everything else. But when you end up just a bit past the edges of where it holds your hand, it quickly loses the veneer, which is the key difference vs something like a Rockstar open world (but also very different budgets and aims).
There’s a handful of studios I think will adapt especially well to the future of game development, and CDPR is one of them.
Because it is going to be possible to have CP 2077 main scenario style interactions across an entire open world within the next decade. And who better to curate that experience than the people delivering it in a diagonal slice?
It’s critical for the USA that he win this next election - Trump is an existential threat to Democracy in the US.
It’s critical for the world that Trump not win.
Trump is immediately going to stop any support for Ukraine and hand that to Putin on a silver platter, is going to weaken NATO and the UN as much as he possibly can, and is going to flip the US from the virtual ‘allies’ to ‘axis’ before the end of his first next four years. Which will go on as long as he is alive, as once he gets power he’s not giving it up.
He isn’t even playing coy with his praise for megalomaniacal current dictators, especially Putin.
With Trump in charge of the US, you can expect him and Putin together actively working to spread Christian fascism to Europe using subversion and eventually force where needed.
It’s not just the US that’s on the line in November.
I mean, I absolutely will be ashamed when I vote for Biden in November.
Ashamed that the best this supposed bastion of democracy could offer up for me to choose between are:
The oldest person ever in the running for the job who makes everyone hold their breath he doesn’t do something addled each time he’s in front of a podium.
A guy in several criminal cases at the same time who tried to overthrow the government and is simultaneously beloved by conservative Christians trying to ban books on sex while having had sex with a pornstar who he said reminded him of his daughter.
A guy denouncing modern science who admitted that he had a worm that ate part of his brain and died.
There’s a lot to unpack there, and pretty much all of it makes me feel shame, irrespective of my ethnic background.
Europeans — especially Germans — are increasingly keen on curbing immigration and are less focused on climate change, according to a study by a Danish-based think tank....
In general I love the idea of the US moving more and more towards only supplying defensive munitions to countries (such as the long list of really fucked up countries we deal arms to that would surprise most people).
We could always take special action to supply offensive arms in response to justified conflicts such as in Ukraine, but let’s not let authoritarians build up a stockpile of offensive capabilities from US sweat during times of peace. That’s a recipe for less peace.
But by all means we should let allies buy as much defensive capabilities as they desire.
Being an ally to the US should be more associated with the benefits of protection from bullies than capacity to bully.
(And most important IMO is that we don’t allow selling tech officially or privately by US corporations to enable authoritarians to abuse their own citizens. Something we very much do and I really wish we didn’t.)
Can’t believe this shit-hole country was an actual threat ever.
We have representatives of the US political party leading for President right now echoing Kremlin propaganda on the floor of Congress and their candidate is cheered on and welcomed for saying he’ll be a dictator who will undermine Western diplomatic relationships opposing Russia and would even encourage Putin to invade those countries, all while state level party representatives are literally saying that ‘democracy’ is a bad word that they oppose.
How the fuck is Russia not an “actual threat?”
There’s more to modern warfare than nukes, missiles, and tanks. And by the end of November Putin stands a very good chance of having won the kind of megalomaniacal victory that Stalin or Hitler couldn’t have possibly dreamed of.
Article is very interesting and talks about the mix of goals in regards to the protests, and how speech negatively and positively helps accomplish those goals.
It’s clear to me reading this that if people really want to further humanitarian concerns over the Palestinian civilians they should avoid the literal tribalism around the topic and the false dichotomy of ‘sides.’
It would be a lot harder to criticize a protest branded as a “pro-civilian” protest that simultaneously called out the human rights abuses on the Palestinian people and the Israeli hostages.
That asked the university to divest from any investments funding either Hamas or Likud as long as either were carrying out war crimes against civilians. Yes, in one of those two cases it’s a moot request, but by requesting both it furthers the comparison and similarities between the two and their extremist methods.
It would also give no cover to extremist voices calling for the destruction or harm of civilians on the “other side” of the conflict (as sampled in the article). It’s no safe space for pro-Palestinian voices calling for the killing of Israeli citizens nor for pro-Israel voices calling for (or turning a blind eye to) the bombing of the Palestinian civilians. True antisemites or Islamophobes would have no safe harbor there.
It takes the conversation from being about two opposing political sides to the ‘sides’ of “protect civilians” or “kill civilians” which is a position that’s incredibly hard to justify being on the other side of no matter one’s political beliefs.
And as has been discussed in various literature about the importance of reconciliation, it creates the space for victims of violence against civilians and secondary trauma in this conflict to feel their trauma can be heard without facing minimization to justify the trauma of the other political side - something that’s been happening far too much on both of the current sides of this discussion.
Disavowing violence against civilians should not be a political statement, and it being packaged as such is clearly a huge factor in how that message is being subverted and suppressed. Even the way Finkelstein straight up gave a messaging shift that would have improved the success of the core message he’s been supporting for years before this and then immediately had someone lead a chant of the very message he pointed out as undermining the narrative was ridiculous. Polarizing messaging might find solace in either a “pro-Palestinian” or “pro-Israel” protest, but wouldn’t be a good fit for a “pro-civilian” protest.
It would also be nearly impossible to brand a counter-protest to. What the hell do you call yourself if you are protesting against “pro-civilians”? The “pro-authoritarian” protest?
As long as the call for humanitarianism is wrapped up and divided into political sides and literal ethnic tribalism I have a feeling that the call is going to continue to get ignored and suppressed while local tribalistic tensions and conflict becomes more and more center stage instead. It might be smart to rebrand the messaging where the focus on humanitarianism is center stage and the only ‘tribe’ being championed is ‘human.’
Yes, this is a privacy thing, we strip the EXIF data. As long as you’re not also adding location to your Tweet (which is optional) then there’s no location data associated with the Tweet or the media.
People replying to a Twitter thread with photos are automatically having the location data stripped.
God, I can’t wait for LLMs to automate calling out well intentioned total BS in every single comment on social media eventually. It’s increasing at a worrying pace.
Popular rapper Toomaj Salehi wrote songs in support of the protest movement in Iran following the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in 2022. He has been in jail for over a year....
so they have no reason not to reward him and keep him in power.
They have dozens of reasons to want him out.
The Dems would be foolish to intervene and prevent the GOP continuing to bludgeon themselves. If the right end to avoid the shit show caused by their own party, they should vote in a Dem speaker, even if a minority party representation.
The worst was the week where they added accuracy to the arc weapons so after a long mission, usually right at extraction, the people using arc weapons would have accuracy go over an overflow and crash the game for everyone.
I just didn’t play at all until that was patched after a while.
People got so fucking angry being told they couldn’t bring arc weapons because it would literally crash the fucking game. No dude, I’m not telling you how to play, I’m telling you what’s going to ruin the entire run for everyone involved, including yourself.
Global concern rises over bird flu as experts warn of potential human pandemic (www.irishstar.com)
Elden Ring: Shadows of the Erdtree will come with a day 1 patch with various improvements
This info comes from the Elden Ring twitter account...
The Christian right is coming for divorce next (www.vox.com)
A Majority of Voters Backing Biden Are Mostly Motivated by Stopping Trump — Poll (truthout.org)
MAGA 'Prophets': God Thinks Trump's Conviction Was Rigged (www.rollingstone.com)
We’ve just had a year in which every month was a record-setter (arstechnica.com)
Hypothetical Game Ideas
What game would you create if you had the skills and experience of a veteran game dev? I.e. John Carmack...
A quick note on the return2ozma ban:
You may have noticed a distinct lack of return2ozma. This is due to their admitting, in a public comment, that their engagement here is in bad faith:...
'Dox the Jurors': Trump fans on a mission to make those who convicted him 'miserable' (www.rawstory.com)
One in 10 Republicans less likely to vote for Trump after guilty verdict, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds (www.reuters.com)
This is the first poll taken after the conviction, and has us at 41% Biden/39% Trump...
Donald Trump Should Drop Out (washingtonmonthly.com)
One in six voters say Trump verdict could change their minds ahead of tight election, poll finds (www.msn.com)
Around one in six voters say that a guilty verdict in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial will make them less likely to vote for him, according to a new poll.
Gamers aged 55+ account for almost a third of gamers now, and that share is on the rise. (www.midiaresearch.com)
Gay men in France are facing wave of attacks after being lured into hook-ups (www.lgbtqnation.com)
Libertarian convention devolves into fighting, obscenities on eve of Trump’s visit (www.politico.com)
Arrowhead initially planned to make Helldivers 2 in 3 years—instead it took 7 years, 11 months, and 26 days (www.pcgamer.com)
Two Republican senators criticize Trump's 'reich' post — but most plead ignorance (www.politico.com)
A Hidden Variable in the Presidential Race: Fears of ‘Trump Forever’ | Undecided voters are concerned that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, he’ll never leave. (www.bloomberg.com)
It’s almost like Trump tried a coup to avoid leaving office the last time around.
Trump's social media account shares a campaign video with a headline about a 'unified Reich' (apnews.com)
"That is madness": Pope Francis condemns Texas migrant crackdown, rejects "conservative" Catholicism (www.salon.com)
Tacos. (lemmy.world)
"Don't Be Weak and Gay," a Missouri GOP Candidate Tells Voters in a New Campaign Ad (www.them.us)
Later, losers (lemmy.world)
Are We Really Going to Let Trump Come Back to Fail Again? (www.nytimes.com)
For many millions of Americans, time seemed to move differently under President Donald Trump....
Lindsey Graham Reveals Outrageous Position on Election Results (newrepublic.com)
Top Republicans are putting conditions on accepting the outcome of the election in November....
The Patriarchy (lemmy.world)
Trump praises fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter during rally speech (www.theguardian.com)
Ex-president calls Hopkins’ cannibalistic Lecter ‘late, great’ while condemning ‘people who are being released into our country’...
Cyberpunk 2077 director thanks fans as the game hits a 95% positive review rating on Steam (www.eurogamer.net)
Even Biden’s Lawyers Are Urging the White House to Change Course on Gaza (theintercept.com)
Trump: Jews should be ‘ashamed’ if they vote for Biden (www.politico.com)
Germans fear migration more than climate change, study finds (www.dw.com)
Europeans — especially Germans — are increasingly keen on curbing immigration and are less focused on climate change, according to a study by a Danish-based think tank....
Biden says US won't supply weapons for Israel to attack Rafah, in warning to ally (apnews.com)
Boy Scouts of America changing name to more inclusive Scouting America after years of woes (apnews.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/20749204...
Leaked audio reveals Donald Trump discussing his VP picks (www.independent.co.uk)
The Kremlin announces nuclear weapons drills on Putin's orders (www.euronews.com)
The move comes after an acrimonious exchange with senior Western officials, labelled by Moscow as ‘provocative threats’....
How pervasive is antisemitism on US campuses? A look at the language of the protests (www.theguardian.com)
Article is very interesting and talks about the mix of goals in regards to the protests, and how speech negatively and positively helps accomplish those goals.
deleted_by_author
The Taliban are working to woo tourists to Afghanistan (abcnews.go.com)
Iran: Rapper Toomaj Salehi sentenced to death, says lawyer (www.dw.com)
Popular rapper Toomaj Salehi wrote songs in support of the protest movement in Iran following the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in 2022. He has been in jail for over a year....
MTG says Johnson needs to "do the right thing" and resign, or be ousted (www.axios.com)
Helldivers 2 CEO Says Arrowhead Must Fix the Game and Add to It at the Same Time ‘To Stay Relevant’ (www.ign.com)
Showing appreciation for hard work. (lemmy.world)