Try it, I guess? Their servers aren't in the US. At worst they could take it off the app store, but fucking Fortnite taught kids how to sideload lmao.
Valve only strongly supports Linux because Gabe has like a personal vendetta against Microsoft. Not complaining. I think it's great that Steam has broken the Windows lockdown on gaming. It's just funny.
I recently had to digitize dozens of photos from family scrapbooks, many of which had annoying novelty pattern borders cut out of the edges. Sure, I could have just cropped the photos more to hide the stupid zigzagged missing portions. But I had the beta version of Photoshop installed with the generative fill function, so I tried it. Half the time it was garbage, but the other half it filled in a bit of grass or sky convincingly enough that you couldn't tell the photo was damaged. +1 acceptable use case for generative AI, I guess.
Fuck me, I didn't even think about that as a possibility.
These fires have left me kind of anxious, not over the possibility of losing my belongings or even the home that my partner and I have managed to buy together. I'm terrified of losing our future. It's so clear now how fragile it all is. One disaster could ruin any hope we have of keeping a home and saving money for retirement one day. And this is happening right now to thousands of people. Historically LA fires have mostly impacted wealthy neighborhoods, but this is something else. I know someone whose home burned down that they just bought a few months ago. They are completely fucked.
Edit: In case there's some confusion, I'm not talking about rich suburbs burning down. Yes, of course the mcmansions in the hills are going first. Those idiots insist on living in some of the most flammable regions on the planet and can afford to rebuild over and over. I'm not going to try to justify whether I deserve my home, but it's a single bedroom condo "worth" under half the median price in LA that I share with my partner. If it burns down, we'll be priced out of a home permanently while paying off a mortgage for a pile of ash for the next 20 years.
I don't know about 10x, but I've started deleting my comments before finishing them more often than I used to. This mostly comes from me questioning halfway through typing it out if my perspective contributes anything new or if it's worth the time I would need to fully cover what I want to say. If either answer is no, I'll delete.
??? Have you been living under a rock or something? That aged like milk over a year ago. Its just stinky cheese now.
Apparently I have? I pretty much stopped paying attention to this story since it seemed as thoroughly poked into as it was gonna get unless some upcoming lawsuits would change anything.
And it's been a while since I watched it, but I remember a bunch of the interviewed ZA/UM staff agreeing that Kurvitz and the other two were fucking things up a bit and needed to go. That doesn't mean I side with the fucking shareholders and new leadership. It just means it's not as simple as the investors screwing over all the workers.
But if you don't mind, I'd appreciate your perspective. I finally finished DE only this past summer, so I also missed this news unfolding in real time. I probably have some blind spots on the story.
I like the People Make Games investigation, but understandably no one's got time for that shit. It's like 2 hours long.
TL;DW: It's complicated, but I don't think it's right to say the workers got stiffed. A lot of people worked on the game, not just the three who were forced out (though those three were considered the core design team). At this point, though, what's left of ZA/UM is probably an empty office and half a dozen scrapped projects on hard drives. There's nothing left to support even if you side with the company. I say pirate it.
Edit: The good news is there are like 4 recently announced projects from multiple former Elysium devs that promise to carry on the spirit of the game.
There wouldn't be much left.
I switched from torrents to Usenet years ago and never regretted it once. Makes everything much easier and simpler.
The parts of LA that burn down every year are typically wealthy suburbs. They'll never urbanize those neighborhoods. This current wave of fires is hitting a little further in than usual, though not enough to reboot the city meaningfully.
I definitely see how we got here. Even the people I know who most love reading will just buy unreasonable numbers of books well beyond their capability to get through them meaningfully. Like their goal in life isn't to be fulfilled through literature, it's owning a large enough home someday to house their personal library.
That Pikmin boss is real!
Social media company faking charities for no one's benefit is a level of dystopia I could never have made up. Conditions are that bad right now they need to pump pretend feelgood posts in people's feeds to keep their aging userbase satisfied? Or they just stopped asking "why" years ago.
Protagonists siding with royalty by default is a big reason why I haven't enjoyed much fantasy media lately. I could see myself playing the hell out of Metaphor Resomethingorother, but I'm so put off by the royal quest of the central storyline that I'll probably end up skipping it.
Can we get a 2-hour video essay on this? You're on to something big.
I finished The Beginner's Guide literally like 20 minutes ago. It's a 90 minute "experience" more than a game, by the developer of The Stanley Parable. Seems that a lot of people get something profound or personal out of it. Can't say I did, but I'm in the minority here. Could be just what you're looking for.
I appreciate the thorough write up and feel bad now that I'm probably not gonna play these lol. It sounds a lot like the kind of art that I categorize broadly as thing I admire and respect from a distance and value those that love it, but will never, ever experience personally for one reason or another. Is there a better way to describe that?
I'm the kind of person who bounces hard off discomfort in my comfort spaces, and games are one of those comfort spaces. Not that everything I play needs to be easy or perfect, but if a game asks more from me than I'm willing to dedicate casually, I'll probably end up turning it off. It's very fun to see others get excited about their complex things, though, so thank you for sharing.
Hell yeah.