I by no means have a raging hate-boner for Epic or anything, but they’ve definitely done enough to irritate me to the point where I haven’t even bothered with the store for the free games.

It started off poorly with the store launching in such a bad state that it would’ve failed the HTML class I took in high school (it didn’t even have a cart. How can you launch a shopping site without even having the ability for people to buy more than one item at a time? I learned how to program that in 2007!) and it went downhill from there with stuff like the exclusivity deals and that sale they did where they marked 30% off on games that hadn’t even released yet, without even telling the developers or asking permission. Then they’ve rushed to embrace pretty muchthing I’ve praised Valve for refusing to deal with, from NFT games to AI that may or may not be violating copyright laws with the stuff making up the learning databases.

Plenty to criticise, but I’m getting tired of watching them try to shove their foot back into their mouth.

I think the real issue is with schooling before college, and this article seems to be looking at college as the same sort of environment as the previous 12 years of school, which it isn’t. So much of everything through high school has become about putting pressure on teachers to hit good grades and graduating student percentages that actually teaching kids how to learn and how to collaborate with others has become a tertiary goal to simply having them regurgitate information on the tests to hit those 2 metrics.

I have taught myself a number of things on a wide range of subjects (from art to 3d printing to car maintenance and more. City planning and architecture are my current subjects of interest) and I’ve always said when people ask about learning all this stuff that I love to learn new things, despite the school system trying to beat it out of me. I dropped out of college despite loving my teachers and the college itself both because I didn’t like my major (the school was more like a trade school, we chose our majors before we even got to the college) and because I had never learned how to learn in the previous 12 years of school. I learned how to hold information just long enough to spit it out on the test and then forget it for the next set for the next test. Actually learning how to find information and internalize it through experience came after I left school.

It’s also easier for the ruling class to simply ignore protesters, and it doesn’t get your message seen by the general population. This is why the civil rights movement included marches that ground entire sections of cities to a halt and why MLK supported groups like the Black Panthers. Disruption and inconvenience are necessary to enacting change. Even with mass public support, nothing really happened for civil rights until MLK was killed and billions of dollars worth of property was torched. A week later, the civil rights laws were created, approved, and enacted.

Very true, but it’s precisely that wealth disparity that concerns me. I’ve seen the current US wealth disparity described as being on par with the disparity in France just before the French Revolution happened, where the cost of a loaf of bread had soared to more than the average worker made in a day. I worry that the more than half a century of anti-union propaganda and “get what I need and screw everybody else” attitude has beaten down the general public enough that there simply won’t be enough of a unified effort to enact meaningful change. I worry about how bad things will have to get before it’s too much. How many families will never recover.

But these are also very different times compared to the 1920s in that we’ve been riding on the coattails of the post WW2 economic boom for almost 70 years, and as that continues to slow down we might see some actual pushback. We already have, with every generation being more progressive than the last.

But I still can’t help but worry.

The US economy literally depends on 3-4% of the workforce being so desperate for work that they’ll take any job, regardless of how awful the pay is. They said this during the recent labor shortage, citing how this is used to keep wages down and how it’s a “bad thing” that almost 100% of the workforce was employed because it meant people could pick and choose rather than just take the first offer they get, thus causing wages to increase.

Poverty and homelessness are a feature, not a bug.

I’ve seen Christmas stuff for sale before Halloween stuff in stores before.

Hell cannot exist after death because we are already living in it.

I stopped finding this as funny when I learned that some of the “leaks” have been stuff like a person quoting a Wikipedia entry on a WW2 tank, or a recent one where somebody quoted an internationally available manual for a jet.

Still hilarious though that it’s such an issue that “Do you play War Thunder” is a question asked by the US military in job interviews.

How does that work? Unless there’s been some drastic improvements very recently, or billionaires are included, US wages have been losing purchasing power for decades.

When I last checked a few years ago, when accounting for inflation, average US wages had dropped about 5% compared to the 70s while the price of goods had increased by anywhere from 50-100% in most cases, with some things increasing by 200% or more. College, in particular, is up like 1,100% or something from the beginning of the 70s. Another absurd example is a taco at Taco Bell, which has doubled in price since the 90s, when accounting for inflation. The cost of rent has doubled since the 70s and has gotten even worse in recent years. The rule used to be not to spend more than 30% of your wages on rent. Now it’s don’t spend more than 60%. It used to be feasible to buy a house on the wages of 1 person. Now, it’s barely viable to afford a house on the wages of 2 people.

Wealth inequality is the worst it’s been in US history. According to the IRS, more than half of Americans made less than $20k last year - I think 51% made less than $15k. At a previous job where I made roughly $25k a year, I was making more than the bottom 60% of Americans. Raises haven’t kept up with CoL increases for years now. The average American works 50 hours a week between 2 jobs and switches jobs every 2 years because it’s the best way to make sure you’re paid what your skills are actually worth.

I can’t imagine where the data you saw came from, but that has the same vibes as when they said that people were going to take their COVID checks and use them to buy cars.

Or for buying too much stuff. Or really, whatever problem is currently happening. It’s the Millenials fault somehow, we’ll just figure out how later.

It’s worth noting that though those are the “recommended” settings, my 2060 runs high settings without any issues, and runs high settings on every other game I’ve played, including other AAA releases from this year. It’s my fault for not making it clear that those are NVIDIA’s recommended settings and not what I actually have it running at. But Starfield is the first game I’ve ever seen that has simply not been able to run on a standard HDD at all. Even Baldur’s Gate 3, which requires an SSD as well, runs competently on an HDD, just with slower load times on models/textures.

I totally understand that tech becomes outdated, especially with the jump from one console generation to the next. And especially that the recent generations of NVIDIA cards have been nowhere near as long-lasting as the 900 and 1000 series were. But Starfield is an outlier even by those standards. It has never put any real pressure on my CPU or GPU, it’s all been entirely on the speed of the harddrive.

Running it on an HDD was such a bizarre experience. The game would freeze for about 5 seconds every minute or so, and on initiating any dialogue with NPCs it would stutter for just a moment. NPC dialogue would also be out of sync with their animations, which is to be expected with the stutter. The weirdest part was how the music would stop playing suddenly and the game would go completely silent for about 10 seconds while it was still running smoothly, before all the sounds that had happened in that timespan played out suddenly, like they had been queueing up while the game figured out whether or not it wanted to play them. For this one particular game to have these kinds of issues - especially considering how partitioned the game world is by loading screens - says that the issue lies in the optimization of Starfield and not the specs of my PC. Especially since they all stopped when I migrated the game to an SSD I have plugged into an external SATA dock hooked up over USB C.

The fact that it literally can’t run on a normal HDD is baffling to me. The game is so poorly optimized that not only does it require an SSD just to run both the graphics and audio smoothly and in sync, but the recommended settings for my 2060 are everything as low as it can possibly go. I got roughly a decade out of my 970 before it truly started to show its age, but my 2 generations old card is barely good enough to run this game?

And don’t even get me started on how I keep feeling like I’m playing Fallout 4 because so much of the music uses the same underlying score of the music from the reveal trailer. The number of times I’ve heard those rising notes from the leaving the Vault scene in Fallout 4 in my 3 hours in Starfield…

A loaf of bread.

Bread often has stuff baked into it, so what’s the difference between a loaf of bread with cheese or nuts baked into it vs. a loaf with chicken, cheese, and marina sauce baked into it.

Hell yeah, love Mike! Super chill dude who deserves every penny imo.

As somebody who almost went into the game industry and didn’t because of the low wages, horrible working conditions, and just generally poor quality of life, I think I know more about how devs get paid than some rando on the internet.

And I haven’t pirated a game since the Bay went down like 10 years ago. I just hate people who get so holier-than-thou because a handful of dollars from their purchase will go towards paying the devs’ salaries on the studio’s next game while ignoring how much of it will go to stock options for the shareholders and buying the CEO another Ferrari. You wanna pirate games or not, I don’t care. Just don’t give me this “my money is going to the devs” crap. Because it isn’t. That’s just the excuse you use for your pearl clutching.

I will happily buy more expensive games that are shorter and with worse graphics than modern AAA games, so long as the devs are getting paid well and aren’t crunched. Because my money isn’t going to the devs, but it certainly tells the company what I do or don’t care about.

Yup, it’s the same old song of fascists and cultists.

“Are you lonely, sad, angry, or just generally dissatisfied with your life? Have you tried blaming your problems on a minority with less power in society than yourself? Act now, and I’ll throw in a second minority, free!*”

*Just pay shipping and handling.

Which dev did you write your check to?

I haven’t played it, but that seems to be the general consensus I’ve seen.

You forgot the part where they also want women to carry dead babies inside them until they rot and kill the women.

Plenty of the “classified” documents aren’t actually classified. Oftentimes it’s a case like this, but I remember one person posted a link to the Wikipedia page for a WW2 tank to show how the in-game stats were nerfed compared to the actual vehicle, and they said they couldn’t use data from classified documents.

I think both drag performers and Broadway actors have the perfect skill set for reading books to kids. It’s like the difference between reading the lyrics to a song and hearing a musician sing it, regardless of whether they’re a country singer or an opera singer or a movie music composer. An actor, whether Broadway or not, would know exactly when to pause to create dramatic tension, be able to give characters their own unique voices or personalities, etc. And the fantastical, exaggerated costumes of drag I imagine just make it all the more exciting for the kids.

As for how drag performers reading books to kids started, I have no idea, but somebody else said it started from people volunteering to read books to kids at local libraries, and the LGBT community got into helping out in that way, which led to drag performers doing it. And that makes sense to me. The LGBT community seems to be heavily made up of people who want to support their communities. Probably because they’ve often had to band together and create their own.