Due to the recent announcement of Proton moving to a non-profit structure (although not becoming fully non-profit) I’ve decided to take another look at them and really, Proton Unlimited is an enticing offer. However, the fact of everything from mail, to accounts, to storage being in one place is somewhat disconcerting. Also I...
I can’t speak to their Password Management as I use Bitwarden for that
But I am slowly but surely migrating myself away from gmail to (my own email at my own domain routed to) Proton. The webmail is very much comparable to gmail and, if you communicate with like minded people, it has decent support for signing and even encrypting email both to other proton mail users as well as to complete randos with just a password that you can send later. My only real complaint is that (… for some really good reasons) there is no easy to use exchange server and I need to run their mail bridge to use a desktop client like Thunderbird to send and maanage and (one day) back up emails.
VPN? I switched over to this around the same time I decided I wanted to “take control” of my email and it works pretty well. Very easy to get some openvpn credentials that I can plug into whatever setup I want. And no extra fee for port forwarding unlike SOME providers. That said, my main complaint is that the port is semi-randomized which doesn’t play the nicest with my totally legit linux iso torrenting setup… But a quick docker ps and docker logs and then updating the config is pretty trivial and I only have to do it maybe once a week?
The big elephant in the room is that, as you rightfully understand, you are still putting a LOT of trust. But that is actually why I like Proton. Because other companies pretend they are going to knife fight the CIA and the US Government on your behalf all while actively not acknowledging anything until we get a post mortem. Proton are VERY open about just how far they are willing to go to protect you (not very) and what YOU can do to mean that Proton can’t provide much useful information once the appropriate paperwork and legal actions have been filed.
I wouldn’t trust a paid account with anything more sensitive than what really innovative stuff a friend did with a bun in the dumpster behind the Wendy’s the other night. But, hypothetically, if I needed to send an anonymous email? Third party VPN/Tor, clean hardware, and a free Protonmail account works great and I do trust Proton to give the absolute bare minimum in that case.
And just for a bit of context. My “grand plan” is to migrate the vast majority of my correspondence and accounts to email addresses tied to one or more of my own domains. Currently I plan to use Protonmail for the mail server because I don’t want that smoke. But the point is that I control the email address so I can get my Heat on and walk away in 30 seconds (actually more like a few hours but…).
Which is why the other aspect of that is that I want to back up the emails I actually want to save (rather than just EVERYTHING like those of us with older gmail accounts do) via a local client that I then archive to an encrypted volume on my NAS and (REDACTED) after that.
Friendly reminder that bump stock bans and anything related to fire rate is, at best, performative and more often outright malicious compliance/legislature.
The two most common types of ammunition used in mass shootings are 9mm pistol rounds and 5.56 nato/.223 rifle rounds. Neither of which overpenetrate soft tissue to any meaningful degree*. Once you are at the semi-automatic fire rate it is just wasting ammo as you pump a dozen rounds into one kid desperately trying to protect their Bluey doll from the hell that is the second amendment.
This is a big chunk of why the only people in the military who are even “allowed” to fire in full auto are machine gunners. Anyone else is either in an incredibly specific situation or just wasting ammo. And its why so many militaries throughout the decades have outright disabled automatic fire on their infantry rifles.
If we ACTUALLY care about half measures to protect people from mass shootings? Magazine capacity is the way to go. Because the lives saved by murderers needing to reload their emotional support assault rifles will be a lot higher than those saved by making it take a bit longer to dump a magazine into one innocent child.
And, obviously, the real answer is actual gun control and firearm bans. Bare minimum is treating semiautomatics with the same restrictions as automatic weapons. If you want to hunt or target shoot you can use a revolver or bolt action.
*: The 5.56 is a particularly evil round due to its tendency to tumble/yaw upon entering the human body. So you get tiny entrance wounds and massive exit wounds.
Gun nuts are some of the most obnoxiously entitled people on the planet. In large part because they define themselves by how much money they have given gun companies and feel like they have a constitutional amendment specifically for them. Any time something is taken away from them they cry harder than a toddler who was told they can’t have chicken nuggets for dinner.
As for bump stocks specifically? A lot of the smaller gun companies were pushing for similar “loophole” devices and, thus, have been focusing a lot of sponsor money on gun youtubers to talk about how they aren’t covered by the assault weapon ban because it is very specifically about “multiple rounds from a single pull of the trigger”. So now they are “technically correct” on top of it.
“Brandon obviously used soros’s deep state to fake his results. And it doesn’t matter if someone is on drugs because that is our God given right and everyone should have enough ketamine and coke in their body to kill a dozen horses”
Took a bit to figure out what it was even claiming to do
When enabled your phone constantly sends e2e encrypted your location to the server where you can than access it from a webbrowser.
God no. Just take a hatchet to my battery and be done with it.
Also: Until a month or two ago, sure. But google finally got their shit together-ish and set up a tracking network the same as apple and samsung. And that is what you are sacrificing your privacy for. Yes, you give Big Tech tracking information… that they already have. In exchange you can actually have peace of mind of knowing your luggage is in the same airport or even where you parked. And you can’t really self-host a crowd-sourced network.
I guess. But it is really going to depend on where you live and just how frequently it does dial home.
My personal use for these networks is luggage tags. But a friend lost her phone on a hike a few years back and the find my phone stuff was more or less useless due to poor reception and ever dwindling battery.
The real benefit is the low energy bluetooth magic and OTHER devices to do the phoning home. Because maybe I have shit reception but someone hiking a hundred feet away has good reception and updates the ping.
If people truly change their lives and focus on it, you can do a lot. But it does not take much, at all, to become compromised to one degree or another and people vastly underestimate the amount of redundancy. Or even the impact of a sibling or partner or even friend.
Instead, the common case is people will tweak one small aspect and think that does anything other than inconvenience them. Or, worse, they’ll watch a youtube and decide to put EVERYTHING through their vpn which… defeats the purpose because they are still one easily collated set of profiles/cookies that can trivially reveal that “Fred Smith in Afghanistan” is really “Fred Smith in North Carolina”
Which is why my approach is that there is data I very much want to protect and data I know I can’t. So I focus on understanding the former while doing what I can with the latter.
And something like this? There are probably specific niche use cases for this. But it is a product/service that fundamentally requires aggregated data. And, depending on the implementation, it is going to fuck with your battery hard.
I mean… bluetooth is literally broadcasting your position (sort of/it depends on the implementation). It is not at all a stretch that you should turn that off if you care about privacy. Same with not scanning for what wifi networks are available or even pinging GPS satellites (because that leaves a log). Hell… cell tower logs are a treat for cops/TLAs for a reason.
Aside from that? Good for you. If you actually follow through on that I can respect it. My point is more that this particular solution seems like the worst of all worlds.
Either you are demolishing your battery with regular phone homes to a server you hopefully control or you are relying on a push via SMS and the hope that you lose your phone somewhere you havea reception. And you still only have YOUR phone and YOUR network to track it which has significant drawbacks if you travel.
Not sure if google is particularly different but the way this works for the other services is basically low energy bluetooth scanning coupled with the phones providing their location*. So basically all the devices on that scanning/spy network periodically ping/listen for nearby devices/trackers. When it finds one, it sends a quick message to the servers with that phone’s location and the ID of the tracker. Get enough of those pings and you can triangulate the position of the tracker pretty precisely.
Which… is why this fundamentally does not work with “hacker” solutions that allegedly emphasize privacy. Because you just don’t have enough devices listening. This was painfully obvious with tile back in the day and is still an issue with Samsung in some countries.
*: Via a combination of gps, cell tower, and wifi network scanning. The less obvious part of that being wifi networks which is the majority of how interior positioning works.
You act like republicans think pedophelia is a sin
Again. EVERYTHING republicans accuse others of doing is projection. They lack any degree of empathy or shame so if there is something they do then Others are doing it but bad.
I mean… I don’t really disagree in this specific context.
I assume Fortnite has kernel level/rootkit anti-cheat. And Epic make massive amounts of cash from all the goku skins people buy. Unless they have the resources to test at least the major distros and keep aware of possible hacks/bypasses on that side it is just begging for exploits. And it is big enough that the moment one is identified EVERYBODY is grabbing an ubuntu live CD to get some goku dollars.
I still think it is shit that they don’t directly support Linux with the EGS (especially since they distribute Unreal Engine and marketplace stuff via that). But for their “more revenue than the GDP of a small nation” live game? I get it.
A buddy who works on one of the popular live games made the comparison to pokemon cards. Everyone thinks it is a great idea to show them off at school. Until the kid trips, they get scattered on the floor, and it is a god damned feeding frenzy of every single kid losing their minds to scramble and fight over that dog eared pikachu card.
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
The problem is that basically EVERYONE has an overwatch game this year. We had, what, three different Overwatches during the Keighleys proper? Fucking Valve have a god damned Overwatch game.
And… Overwatch 2 failed horribly. So did the Gundam Overwatch.
A proper CRPG will take years. And, as Owlcat et al have pointed out, it is a lot harder to sell people on a CRPG that is not “fully voiced” which drastically increases costs. But also? Baldurs Gate 3 largely benefited from early access but MS can’t rely on that with how much of a cluster everything has been. Unless POE3 is “as good as Baldurs Gate” in early access? it is a “failure”. So there isn’t going to be a “hey, let’s see if this is still cool in four years” project.
My hope is that POE getting that patch a few days ago is a good sign. But my money is on Avowed underperforming (because, like Outer Worlds, “Waa, it isn’t Skyrim!!!”) and Obsidian becoming a support studio for Bethesda.
It still significantly increases development costs over the CRPGs of olde. Especially because BG3 felt like the first game that had:
GOOD voice acting
Significant “choice” and branching narratives
Plenty of content that players will “never” see.
Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were. We have known that ever since Bioware started doing it.
And yeah. Outer Worlds was basically the same scale as Fallout 3. But people want a giant empty open world. Never managed to finish it (the two times I played I lost interest around the time I got to the capital-ish planet) but had a great time.
Unless china can peacefully occupy Taiwan, that won’t be the result.
The result will be that TSMC et al will blow up the fabs. At which point basically the entire world is screwed and china is not any better off relative to where they started.
Almost 99.999999999% guaranteed that there are a LOT of stipulations regarding what she is eligible for in the event of a divorce. And I doubt she has the willpower to become public enemy number one for rejecting the orange shitstain.
Nah, she, like many of us, is hoping he dies and she can just get his cash that way.
The indie/pseudo-indie space still has a lot of great games. And the reception to those are vital for convincing the few remaining funding sources to “take a risk” on their next game.
But that is also not what the keighleys are. They are basically E3 in that it is about the big publishers and platform owners doing big announcements and a select few smaller studios being allowed to pad things out and get cut if Kojima decides he wants another jerk off session.
But I assume there will be a Steam demo event of some form during this (it feels like we have one of those every week now). There are also actual indie groups that do showcases around the same time. And THOSE are a spectacular time where it is clear people love the games they are working on. Also it is usually a great contrast to “all dudes, all the time” on the keighleys and actually having developers on the indie showcases.
Hexbear is a no brainer to block but ml was very much “fine” with a high tolerance for tankie idiots. But it feels like the hexbears figure out they are all blocked and are now just moving to ml en masse.
Sucks because there are actually some good users on there. But I just can’t with the swarm of righteous stupidity.
Because the vast majority are just as stupid as the libertarians. They don’t actually know what socialism or even communism is. They just know they were told that capitalism is bad (and… it mostly is) and that if they support this revolution they’ll get everything they want.
Its why so many are hellbent on accelerationism. They think that they’ll become warlords during the civil war and get exactly what they want.
libertarians are basically chickenshit republicans who don’t want to acknowledge how they get their dream world that… is pretty damned similar to the republican dream world. The problem is that trump is just an unlikable and obnoxious piece of shit. And libertarians are incredibly fragile and need to have their ego stroked endlessly because they are “enlightened” and “above the petty two party system”. And trump almost immediately started talking about how he was one of the best libertarians and blah blah blah.
Removing the trump factor, it would be like if Biden (or, honestly, even Sanders) were to go talk in front of a tankie rally. On paper, they want many of the same things and have many of the same policies. But they would be one poorly phrased message away from failing a purity test and being booed out of the venue.
I AM kind of glad trump reached out to the libertarians. Because it gets people like you to rush out of the woodwork to defend your particular brand of wannabe fascists.
Did you seriously just turn trump talking about deporting us citizens because they are saying something he doesn’t like into “but here is why the democrats suck”?
I think there is very much an argument for working to get Democrats we actually WANT to vote for down ballot so that we actually have someone “good” in 4 years.
Having the other candidate openly talk about violating the rights of a significant part of the country is not that moment. And the fact that you want to turn this into an attack on the Democrats makes me REALLY suspicious of what your actual motives are.
Obama was HEAVILY criticized for his, quite frankly excessive, use of drones in assassinations.
And Clinton had a LONG history of controversies even before he ran for office.
Regardless, Biden is the incumbent. Replacing him is the Democrats saying that they have no faith in the president.
Again, there is a lot of reason to discuss how to salvage the Democratic Party. But not really one where the opposition is talking about illegally deporting protesters.
Keep this up and people will assume you are just a dumbass tankie who is regurgitating Russian and CCP talking points.
The same reason most of NATO have been very hesitant and the like:
Supporting a defensive war is one thing. Supporting an offensive war, against a nuclear power that threatens to nuke people on days ending in ‘y’, is another. And while it is incredibly unlikely that putin would actually attack anyone (since they can’t even handle a Ukraine with one arm tied behind its back), it will still lead to political turmoil as people insist the world is about to end.
But now? This is a REAL good way to distract people from the other, much less defensive, war that we are financing.
That is the same kind of mess that made the no fly zone so untenable.
But to the eyes of a public who are not sure if they are more afraid of World War 3 or Iraq War 3? Having that line of “We are only helping Ukraine to defend themselves, not to escalate this war” “works”.
And if it sounds like we don’t actually care about the Ukrainian people and just view them as a tool to keep Russia busy?
But this also really highlights an incredibly unexplored “setting” for Souls games (or even games as a whole): Battlefields.
To my knowledge, only Nioh 1 (and to a much lesser extent 2) ever really approached that. The feeling of being one unstoppable murder beast of a guy sprinting from cover to cover as what feels like hordes of mooks with rifles unloading on you. Diving into a trench to try and limit the directions you can be attacked from. And storming into an officer’s camp to assassinate them.
Instead, we always get there after the war (which will likely be the case here since the story stuff is almost always set “in the past” for ER) or we’ll be off on our own and just hear a few rumbles in the distance.
Giant Lord or whatever TLG’s old name was has some vibes of it where explosions happen until the boss fight starts. But it is still very much on the outskirts of a battle with just a fancy skybox.
King under the Mountain always rubbed me wrong. They hit right at the tail end of “wow. kickstarter is awesome” and right before people realized how many DF-like colony sims there actually were. And then their kickstarter survey, for a key with no add-ons, required an insane amount of personal information. I think they claimed it was for VAT but saw a few “ask a lawyer” threads that pointed out that was nonsense and could have been done with a checkbox.
And the super duper secret publisher right around the time interest was spiking because of DF-GUI was more than a bit sketchy
I dunno. I know that it is hell out there for indie devs (not so much in 2021/2022 but…) but all that combined with the game never feeling like more than a “unity school project” REALLY raises a massive number of red flags. Probably just a single kid in over their head and trying to act like a “real” studio but… yeah.
Still, good to see it was released as open source and here is hoping the fanbase that glommed onto this can carry it forward.
Not sure if they had a third party manage it for them (there has been a LONG history of super vague “secret” dealings) but it was for their kickstarter rewards through backerkit or whatever. So the same survey you get asking how many extra books you want to buy or whatever.
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drives for ISO/IMG/VHD(x)/WIM/EFI files. With Ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the disk images to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can have multiple images on the disk and Ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them....
I see no meaningful information coming out of this and mostly think it is going to depend on the moderator and if they do their job and/or try to be “unbiased”. And trump will likely pull out for no apparent reason.
That said: I still think it is a good idea. One of the “debates” last time REALLY “hurt” trump’s strongman schtick. I forget which one it as, but trump started another Hunter Biden attack. And Joe seemingly thought he was referring to Beau and tore into the orange shitstain. **And trump backed down. **
It was bassically exactly what Democrats should be doing across the board. Show “decorum” because that is what “moderates” like. But the moment a line is crossed? You smack them down and make them acknowledge they ain’t shit.
This is what (modern) voice acting has always been.
Actually read a few interviews with professional VAs or watch their streams if they do that. Two VAs actually interacting with each other and reacting is almost unheard of outside of very specific productions (and mostly are done as a stunt for some BTS footage). They read a dozen different takes of every line and go through like five different scripts worth of dialogue. And then they do “efforts” that are just general grunts and emoting that are used for the moment to moment gameplay and to pad out a scene that had heavy rewrites. It is why so many professional VAs can stream “their” games… because they genuinely have no idea what is going to happen.
Paying to train a limited use model off of a specific VA (or even a group of VAs) is the “logical” extension of that. And, arguably, it is a “good” one (with some MASSIVE caveats). Everyone lost their god damned mind over that FPS that came out last year where the announcer was (allegedly?) a model trained off of a VA. But it also meant that you could have stuff you would never have had otherwise. Nolan North isn’t going to get a paycheck to sit in a booth all day commenting on random matches. But a model that can read out a team’s name and string together different reactions? That is actually really cool and WAY better than the traditional sports game approach of “The Champion! just went through… A Table!”*
Like almost everything AI? The key is to focus on creators’ rights and control what can and can’t be used as training data. Because the genie is out of the bottle and ain’t going back in. But if we can protect the rights of what goes into training data? Then people are still paid for their effort/creation.
Do I think this was done “ethically”? I don’t know. But with everything Paradox has done in the past few years? I assume “not in the slightest”. But the concept is sound and one that we need to standardize sooner than later.
Of course, we also need UBI so that people’s lives aren’t tied to their jobs but that is a bigger mess.
*: Also, if you don’t think those aren’t already stitched and blended together with most of the same tech then I have a bridge to sell you
I’ll also add on that there are very good reasons to pay for models based on VAs. Brendan Fraser infamously permanently-ish hurt his vocal cords because of the performance that were expected of him in his prime. Same with a lot of VAs (I think David Hayter is one?) who basically need to smoke a pack a day when they are “in character” to get the right gravely voice. And while Stephanie Beatriz played it smart and made sure her “Rosa” voice was something she could maintain, a lot of actors and actresses basically can’t be the character they are famous for because it is killing them.
And pulling a solution out of my ass that is surely missing important aspects of the industry?
if I just want Nolan North or Felicia Day to voice a character then I buy the use of their model from their agency and am charged based on how much dialogue they have in a given game. If I want to use them as a character going forward (so what ANet tried with Felicia before they realized she was too expensive and decided to give Zojja permanent brain damage so she wouldn’t ever have dialogue again)? I can pay by line at a much cheaper rate.
But if I want Nolan North to do a voice that isn’t just Drake? Then I am paying him to train a new model and it gets a lot more expensive. And I can pay more to “own” that training data with the same caveats regarding future use. The main idea being that I want to make sure my Nolan North performance doesn’t end up in a competitor’s game next week.
I am not aware of any games having a problem with too many cores*. But most of those (from memory) seem like peak Pentium era games. For the sake of this explanation I will only focus on Intel because AMD was kind of a dumpster fire for the pertinent parts of this.
Up until probably the late 00s/early 10s, the basic idea was that a computer processor should be really really fast and powerful. Intel’s Pentium line was basically the peak of this for consumers. One core with little to no threading but holy crap was it fast and had a lot of nice architectural features to make it faster. But once we hit the 4 Ghz clock speed range, the technology required to go considerably faster started to get really messy (and started having to care about fundamental laws of physics…). And it was around this time that we started to see the rise of the “Core” line of processors. The idea being that rather than have one really powerful processor you would have 2 or 4 or 8 “kind of powerful” processors. Think “i4” as it were. And now we are at the point where we have a bunch of really powerful processors and life is great.
But the problem is that games (and most software outside of HPC) were very much written for those single powerful cores. So if Dawn of War ran past on a chonky 4 Ghz Pentium, it didn’t have the logic to split that load across two or three cores of a 3 Ghz i4. So you were effectively taking a game meant to run on one powerful CPU core and putting it on one weaker CPU core that also may have lower bandwidth to memory or be missing instructions that helped speed things up.
To put it in video game (so really gun) terms: it is the difference between playing with a high powered DMR and going to a machine gun, but still treating it like it is semiauto.
But the nice thing is that compatibility layers (whether it is settings in Windows or funkiness with wine/proton) can increasingly use common tricks to make a few threads of your latest AMD chip behave like a pretty chonky Pentium processor.
*: Speculation as I am not aware of any games that did this but I have seen a lot of code that did it. A fundamental concept in parallel/multithreaded programming is the “parallel for”. Let’s say you have ten screws to tighten on your ikea furniture. The serial version of that is that you tighten each one, in order. The parallel version is that you have a second allen key and tell your buddy to do the five on that side while you do the five on this side. But a lot of junior programmers won’t constrain that parallel for. So there might be ten screws to tighten… and they have a crew of thirty people fighting over who gets to hold the allen key and who tightens what. So it ends up being a lot slower than if you just did it yourself.
I know we need to shit on China every chance we get but…
That is perfectly normal and it is clear that the team that let this article through has never been out to Yosemite or any crowded wall. I prefer to stick to the less crowded routes (and am not huge on big walling) but I’ve definitely run into a few multipitches where my partner and I kind of just hang out at the anchor waiting for the people ahead of us to get far enough that we can go again. And when they are taking ages to progress on a 5.9… we tend to wait until they are almost at the next set of anchors before even starting. I think our record was two hours because we were pretty certain we would have to rescue the idiots in front of us… and we did. Was basically wait until their leader was panicking and then jug up to get them sorted and then have them rappel back down with us because we didn’t feel like having to walk around their splatted corpses when we got down.
Also, based on the picture, this is a via ferrata route and they were part of a tourism group. For those not familiar, those routes aren’t “real” rock climbing as they involve staying constantly clipped in to fixed metal cables with a personal anchor and often involve using outright ladders. They (allegedly?) go back to World War 1 and 2 when troops would need to traverse mountains to get to the enemy. They are REALLY fun and I encourage them to people doing the tourism thing but you also almost inevitably get stuck behind someone because you probably don’t have the skills to clip past them to keep moving.
But this isn’t someone who is in direct on a single cam or even someone clipped in at an anchor. It is basically the equivalent of leaning against a railing on the side of the road.
But also? That kind of makes a huge difference. Story time (so obviously anecdotal and grain of salt and…)!
Way back when there was this series called Mass Effect. All us PC gamers were pissed off that Bioware were traitors who had abandoned us and never wanted to play that xbox shit. Until there was a port of the game to PC and we all needed it in our veins.
Mass Effect PC was one of the first (?) games with activation model securom as a DRM model. And the Scene Group who cracked it first did a piss poor job and the game would crash once you finished the tutorial and got to the starmap. But, because it was the era of multiple Scene Groups vying for power, nobody wanted to be “second” to crack a game.
So the various message boards were full of people complaining and eventually a good many of us pirates just drove down to Best Buy and bought the game because we needed it NOW!!!
I want to say it was properly cracked within a week? But that was still, likely, very significant sales. Largely for the same reason that publishers/devs pay for day one influencer streams and the like. That is the peak of marketing and when you get all the impulse buys who didn’t pre-order.
That is pretty normal. Operation Flashpoint cranked up bot accuracy to full aimbot levels if it detected the DRM check was bypassed. Serious Sam 3 added an unkillable scorpion enemy. One of the Ghostbusters made ghosts unkillable. And so forth
That said: My understanding is more that the way the DRM check was bypassed meant the secondary check (whenever a starmap was loaded) errored out because the function was missing.
Israel and Hamas both never cared about the Palestinians. Hamas leadership continue to kick back and relax by the pool in Other Country.
But there are likely still troops on the ground. As well as people who were radicalized by seeing their entire family get wiped out in a bombing because a pesky journalist was walking by.
And… that is the real problem. Because we (The West) have seen what happens when you just nope out of a conflict in this region. you get islamic state powers taking over that are totally not directly allied with iran. And that causes massive issues for everyone down the line.
Because Hamas are not the heroic freedom fighters that internet people have decided they must be.
They are a terrorist organization who basically gained de facto political and military control of the Palestinian people (with just a bit of help from the Israeli government…). In large part because the PLO were (allegedly) starting to get too much traction and it is a lot easier to fight against bloodthirsty savages.
So yes, they do have some boots on the ground to organize the radicalized victims of both sides and point them at Israel/the IDF. But the actual leadership are kicking back and relaxing while making big political statements about the kind of ceasefire they would accept. Just like any other politicians.
Organizations like the United States where Dubyah (of all people) was directing a war against The Enemies of America on the other side of the planet? Or putin and his generals and their attempted genocide in Ukraine?
This is bog standard. Do you think bin laden was personally visiting every single al qaeda fighter on the regular? Do you think isis/isil leadership are doing the same? No. They basically have the equivalent of NCOs and junior officers leading terror cells that do the actual work while they live in luxury.
I doubt it is even thoughts over how powerful Halo is as an IP. I would be shocked if MS corporate hadn’t realized that any 343 Halo is going to get shit on because “this isn’t Bungie”. And people hate 343 enough that firing them and pushing the leads out won’t raise any red flags.
But yeah. Look at how much damage control MS did when they were releasing fucking Pentiment on switch (look, I love that game with all my heart but you know things are fucked when people remember it exists). There is zero chance 343 “closes” until the next full generation… probably that gen’s refresh SKU consoles. Because it would instantly be interpreted as “xbox is dead”.
But gutting Bethesda? We already see people in this very thread talking about how it is good because they didn’t like a game one of the studios did.
I love Larian and am ride or die with Swen et al. Have been ever since Divine Divinity was “we have Diablo at home” but ended up being a shockingly good (for its time) hybrid ARPG/CRPG.
But Larian are very much not the example of “how to do business”. Like Digital Extremes, they are a “legacy” studio that is INCREDIBLY lucky to have survived. Larian themselves had to deal with really shitty publisher deals (Beyond Divinity and I think also Divinity 2?) and games so bad it almost killed the studio (even Mortismal himself will acknowledge that Divinity 2 was a trash fire before the DLC… and was still a mess after). It was mostly “lucking out” and embracing Kickstarter before everyone hated it that saved them. And… Dragon Commander still got close.
And you know what has REALLY made them stable? That’s right. A deal with a major company to work on one of the most famous IPs in gaming (tabletop and video) history.
Larian are smart to try to maintain their size and not overly grow. But, like countless game devs have said and gotten shouted down for, they are far from “typical” and got REALLY lucky. Hell, Swen himself has mentioned the same in between the blurbs that outlets love to reference.
And this is WHY the smaller studios are on the chopping block and not core Bethesda.
Because smaller games that are incredibly solid don’t matter. What matters are AAA tentpoles. And Tango’s A/AA games were “lukewarm” at best. They had an AMAZING B/A game but fuck 'em. Same with Arkane Austin
And… probably same with Obsidian this fall (?) when their Elder Pillars game comes out and people decide it isn’t Skyrim so it is bad. Ignore that Pentiment was amazing or their long legacy as one of the best studios in CRPGs. People will just talk doom and gloom because it isn’t The Last Of Us.
Which will lead to MS continuing to try to be Sony rather than take advantage of the studios they actually have. And people will continue to talk about how they can’t compete with Sony because they don’t have a Horizon Zero Dawn.
I’ve been saying it ever since MS started buying every studio they could. They have an AMAZING roster and can basically dominate the market by “flooding” it with high production value “indie” games. But… people want their AAA tentpoles.
Is the Proton (Mail, VPN, Password Manager) ecosystem any good?
Due to the recent announcement of Proton moving to a non-profit structure (although not becoming fully non-profit) I’ve decided to take another look at them and really, Proton Unlimited is an enticing offer. However, the fact of everything from mail, to accounts, to storage being in one place is somewhat disconcerting. Also I...
Supreme Court strikes down Trump-era ban on bump stocks, gun accessories used in 2017 massacre (apnews.com)
'I'll lose the debate on purpose': Trump tries to lower expectations for Biden showdown (www.rawstory.com)
Open Source FindMyDevice Solution - selfhostable! (gitlab.com)
Find your Device with an SMS or online with the help of FMDServer. This applications goal is to track your device when it’s lost and should be a…
The newly unsealed Jeffrey Epstein documents have Donald Trump's name all over them. He had been secretly disguised as 'Doe 174.' (www.businessinsider.com)
Epic won’t update Fortnite to run on the Steam Deck. Tim Sweeney says Linux is ‘a terrifically hard audience to serve’ (2022) (www.theverge.com)
Xbox Games Showcase Deep Dive | Avowed (www.youtube.com)
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
Biden warns China's economy is on the brink (www.axios.com)
Stormy Daniels Has Marriage Advice for Melania Trump: Dump His Ass (www.vanityfair.com)
Don't expect big reveals at Summer Games Fest, says Geoff Keighley (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Sounds like there aren’t going to be any groundbreaking reveals this summer games fest.
rulegularly check their modlog to remind myself how burnt and sickly the grass is on the other side of the fence (lemmy.cafe)
https://lemmy.cafe/pictrs/image/97660db9-06bb-4a4b-a71a-531125b5486f.webp
Trump’s Outreach to the Libertarians Was an Absolute Train Wreck (www.thenation.com)
Trump told donors he will crush pro-Palestinian protests, deport demonstrators | Speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, he said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror. (wapo.st)
The US is thinking about letting Ukraine use its weapons to strike Russia, even if it enrages Putin: report (www.businessinsider.com)
US officials are considering letting Ukraine strike Russia with US weapons, The New York Times reports....
ELDEN RING Shadow of the Erdtree | Story Trailer (www.youtube.com)
King under the Mountain (Mountaincore) went open source as developer shuts (www.gamingonlinux.com)
Multi-boot utility Ventoy updated to 1.0.98 - Fixes for Arch Linux, KAOS, RHEL9 (github.com)
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drives for ISO/IMG/VHD(x)/WIM/EFI files. With Ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the disk images to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can have multiple images on the disk and Ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them....
Biden says he’s accepted an invitation from CNN to debate Trump on June 27 (www.cnn.com)
Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves' (www.pcgamer.com)
Microsoft’s Xbox Is Planning More Cuts After Studio Closings (www.bloomberg.com)
Valve launches Proton 9.0 with improved game compatibility and more - KitGuru (www.kitguru.net)
Chinese climbers stuck on cliff for more than an hour due to overcrowding (www.cnn.com)
Denuvo Outage Makes Hit Single-Player Game Unplayable [Persona 5] (gamerant.com)
Revealed: UK military has flown 200 spy missions over Gaza in support of Israel (www.declassifieduk.org)
UK military has flown 200 spy missions over Gaza in support of Israel...
Microsoft Closes Redfall Developer Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush Developer Tango Gameworks, and More in Devastating Cuts at Bethesda (www.ign.com)
Affected devs:...