Clickbait cringe video or no: this is my honest take also. Only reason I don't own a steamdeck right now is I'm still convinced there's going to be a Steamdeck 2 sooner rather than later. My PS4 basically just sat for the past year and a half gathering Dust while I've been shifting back and forth between my PC's depending on whether or not I want to play on my TV or my desk after work is done. Only reason I ever booted the ps4 up in the past two years was to play god of war ragnarok and that just hit PC also along with the valhalla DLC i've been wanting to try.

Steam Deck has all the benefits of portability that the switch has combined with even more ways to play on your TV since you can use either a dock or the cloud saves features to swap back and forth almost seamlessly. Also: 3 cheers for piracy and emulation if you want nintendo content also.

Consoles are dead to me. I'm PC exclusive for the foreseeable future.

You know I realize in the grand scheme of things this is kind of a weird/sad thing to fixate on but I can't get it out of my head that in like 20-30 years hollywood is gonna do some "based on a true story" film about this operation that plays out like an Ocean's style heist movie or something.

I get the impression it was very different in the early 20th century, but I honestly think that fascists in the early 21st century on the whole probably don't even realize they're fascists and will reject being called one purely on reflex. You see this particularly well in a lot of terminally online nerd spaces where people will state and argue for cis white male patriarchal supremacist positions without a moments hesitation but will react with complete incredulity if you call them on it. Some of them are being self aware crypto-fasch sure...but a lot of them just deny it because they have just enough awareness and self preservation that they recognize that makes them a bad person and doing any work to be better is much harder than just pretending.

All this is to say: the people who voted in favor of fascism are the ones already excited to slap a swastika on. A huge number of the people who voted "Don't Know" are probably down to fuck with fascism...they would just rather call it liberalism.

I don't want to do the math on how much I've donated but I can tell you now its been more than $27.

Yeah I think so. I went looking for it on twitter proper and I can't find it, but I did find him responding to people saying he deleted a post because their replies convinced him it was a bad take and he didn't want to leave it up. Shockingly rare instance where someone actually has their mind changed online.

It looks like he deleted it and did a bit of a mea culpa and realized he was talking nonsense....for what its worth.

100% this. Its absolutely no different than when they were telling people to vote for Biden because he was "clearly the candidate more qualified to end the violence" even as they approved more weapons and shut down any dissent. The premise that the democrats represent a position that is in anyway distinguishable from the republicans on the issue of Gaza is especially hilarious to me because it is practically democratic voters regurgitating and accepting republican talking points even as the democratic party itself denies it.

.....The more I look at this the more it makes sense if you swap Trump and Kamala for Kyle and Krystal.

Yup...he does. I listen to kyle in my youtube feed every once in a while cause I actually think he's one of the less insufferable libs overall but the fucking hair...how has nobody had an intervention with him yet?

I get that g*mers are awful and it's not for everybody..but comrades...nothing quite tickles the dopamine receptors in my brain the way seeing two top level street fighter players go at it does. Fighting games are beautiful things.

Esports are sports.

Eh..I disagree. If anything I feel like it just adds to the scrappiness/underdog status of the rebels. Every man and woman in the rebel alliance ( a few exceptions not withstanding) is a person who was convinced to join the cause. How can they compete with such a dominating totalizing force that can just grow more ground troops in a tank?

...where there's a will and the force is on your side...there's a way!

Edit: also if you want to get technical at that point it isnt just clone troops but I put that aside cause obviously that's extended universe nitty gritty that's secondary canon anyway.

Honest to god that movie really made me reevaluate a lot of my opinions and criticisms of star wars world building up to that point. It's not exactly a hot take that star wars is kinda fudgy on physics and that "the empire" and "the rebels" were kind of vaguely defined in the OT to sort of let you fill in the gaps and project what you wanted but I never really questioned the basic physical possibility of how these groups could physically exist in their world based on the information we had.

How the fuck did Palpatine build the death star destroyer fleet??? Where did he find people to man it??? Even if AOTC for all you may criticize didn't just go "lol clone machine go wrrrrrrr!!! Armies appear and go boom boom!"

Honestly in your position I would say just skip the gym altogether and focus on doing 20-30 minute or calisthenics/cardio using some household items and a pullup bar at home. Pullups, dips, squats, etc.

I get your time is limited but it's pretty much always gonna be better to get a little bit of exercise every day then a huge amount once every 7 days.

I don't want to give this guy undo credit but I think it's worth pointing out that the one election he got "wrong" was apparently the election of 2000. He predicted Gore would win.

.....yeah.

Yeah...only thing that makes me feel like this is still semi-hyperbolic is...didn't Afghanistan and the last quarter of a century plus already kinda show that to be the case? Ukraine itself already kinda seems like the result of that sense that the west is insurmountably powerful being squashed.

raytracing to avoid carefully designed baked lightmaps

There's some truth to your post but I gotta push back a bit on this one. Raytracing isn't so much a way to avoid having to generate lightmaps or cut costs so much as it is just an objectively superior option to lightmaps in terms of quality. In fact I would argue that Raytracing is maybe the singular reason games didn't quite look good enough 5 years ago. Polycounts aside Raytracing is basically the number one thing that's separated graphics in engine from prerendered cinematics that always seem to have that extra oomf. Lightmaps are largely generated by the computer anyway and even with raytracing both require an artist's labor to light the scene. The only downside and why you'd ever opt for lightmaps over raytracing is performance cause rendering real time reflections at 120fps in 4k is expensive.

Never forget: we lost tenacious d for this.

Bad take. They didn't fix anything about the Mario movie and the ugly sonic glow up is still genuinely one of the most insane course corrections in movie history. Genuinely people don't grasp how insane that whole saga was and the idea that it was bad intentionally is nonsense.

I worked in game development for like a decade before I finally got burnt out and this is basically why. Overwhelming amount of the work you do is just going to be shovelware and in all the years doing it I can think of basically 3 projects that I was genuinely happy to be involved with and working on.

If you want a silver lining: concord's failure kinda doesn't matter to most of the people who worked on it personally or professionally. 99% of videogame work is gig/contract so most of them probably were going to be laid off one way or another after the launch and having art assets from a AAA game like concord still looks great on your demo reel irrespective of what the actual sales numbers were.

LMAO: Sephiroth is a product OF Shinra. He's basically Frankenstein's monster.

The resemblance is absolutely canny.

I don't disagree and like I said in my post: we do indeed suck. I just want to push back slightly because looking at the numbers I think reality bears out more that Americans are deeply confused and propagandized. Its fair to say that a lot of people have arrived at the right conclusion for all the wrong reasons and I'm all down with throwing out a "death to amerikkka" as we feel it...but I also think the more important takeaway to have in this situation is that the feelings of the American public are essentially immaterial here. The empire doesn't care.

I don't want to give us too much credit cause we definitely do suck but: I do think its worth remembering that polls show a significant majority of Americans support a permanent ceasefire. This is just another example of democracy being a dog and pony show while the empire carries on doing whatever the hell it wants.

If it wasn't so horrific I'd almost laugh at the way they are going on with these hypotheticals. It is dead. This is his legacy. Its over. Its DONE. Even if we did a complete bipolar about face tomorrow...in what plausible timeline going forward is a two state solution tenable? I feel like people writing these articles still aren't grappling with the sheer scale of what has already happened.

I can never remember the source of the quote but I once read something to the effect of: "It is a testament to the insidiousness of capitalism that it has convinced a majority of Americans that the American system of chattel slavery was historically a simple series of race relations that had absolutely nothing to do with the production of cotton and sugar."

These things often are not mutually exclusive concepts in practice.

quite possibly the best piece of star wars media ever created.

That's an incredibly bold claim! ...also it's an incredibly accurate claim! Lol.

For real though: one criticism of star wars that has always been legitimate is that it falls into the trap of making fascism look really cool and failson cop from Andor is just such a fucking wonderful and brilliant in universe takedown and middle finger to people with a stormtrooper fantasy.

Andor has actually been a double edged sword for me. Its so fucking good that it basically shattered my ability to delude myself into believing that 99% of star wars content wasn't completely disposable drivel. I remember sitting in silence at the end of the last episode just wondering how I was ever supposed to give a crap about all this babyshit ever again. I haven't even bothered to finish the latest season of the Mandalorian let alone the acolyte.

I like the way he ties it back to how the media is covering Gaza. The image of Tankman and his role as a propaganda symbol is genuinely fascinating to me.

Somehow... without ever showing it or even stating it as a direct lie: they actually created a mandela effect which has multiple generations of people convinced to this day that he was viciously turned into hamburger without a second thought despite having video showing the exact opposite. Of course if you call this out there will be apologists who say "lol, we never said he was run over" and indeed that's technically true...but clearly the idea he was is so heavily implied in so much discourse around it. Its enough to send you down a dangerous rabbit hole wondering how much of what you just assume is true everyday is all manufactured. Keeps me up at night.

Yeah, I know. I'm not convinced he'll ever finish it either. I think he basically knows the broad strokes of where he wants things to wind up though and he had discussions with the show runners about it. Like the specifics are subject to change but I 100% also think it was always his intent for Jon to basically abdicate and go north of the wall because depending on your perspective it's kind of the happiest ending he actually could have gotten.

The best description I've heard that really absolutely nails it: "Its an absolute 5 star 2 star banger of a movie."

Kinda in the same vein as Commando with Schwarzenegger. Insanely unbelievably stupid movie and so goddamn better for it.

I don't have as much faith that two white trust fund failsons had that intention all along,

Oh certainly not. I don't give them any credit for that. That's all GRRM. I actually think a lot of the problems in the final season are the result of the fact that he already mostly knows how all the character arcs are going to conclude but he still hasn't quite figured out how to get them there yet. The show runners, even under the best of circumstances, may not have been up to the task of filling in the gaps but it didn't help that they basically tried to speed run all of it.

I mean them being giggly sex pests all along definitely tracks and I agree that the writing in the final season was a dumpster fire, but I don't buy this was any sort of change of plan out of spite. Botched execution notwithstanding: having the white savior messiah figure be unmasked as the ultimate true big bad fucking owns on paper and I absolutely think that was always the intended route.

What the fuck?!?? Like you could say this in like the times of season 6 or before but the entire point of her arc is that she is meant to be the ultimate final villain of the show!!!

This is like making an Anakin Skywalker reference about him being the chosen one or the hero of the Republic and ignoring the pesky space fascist part, LMAO!!!

Balenciaga

You know I remember when Covid first dropped we kind of wondered if "mask culture" would take hold here and people would start just wearing masks more often even when the pandemic ended. Even at that time I wouldn't have been cynical enough to think they'd actually be passing laws making wearing medical masks a crime. We are a deeply stupid country and we deserve complete annihilation.

The studies we've done on violent media seem to fall along the same lines as other studies. The short and simplified version is: media is really bad at influencing behavior but its really good at influencing viewpoints and perspectives. In this sense: violent media doesn't make you more prone to do violence...but it can change how you perceive violence. That fact is especially problematic and complicated when you consider things like Call of Duty which ultimately serve to glorify and revere military violence. I have mixed feelings on it myself and I'd personally argue to let it be...but I definitely think there's a leftist case to make against violent media when you see it through that lens.

The developer who sounds like they were traumatized from having to stomach horrific imagery seems less to me like an issue with violent media and more like worker exploitation TBH. Plenty of people create horror movies out of passion and love. The issue is this person clearly was uncomfortable with the work but essentially had no alternative if they wanted to maintain employment.

One of the greatest videogame characters ever conceived of. Every year I find myself more enamored and stunned that she and kotor ii were allowed to happen.

Even Lawrence O'Donnell has openly stated in at least one interview years after the fact that Ralph Nader was always a useful scapegoat to explain away the Democratic Parties own failures and ineptitude during Bush V. Gore and the 2000 election. Trying to find the clip but to paraphrase him: its rather sad and hilarious how the DNC spent months and months insisting and asserting that he wasn't a real candidate or a serious person they even needed to engage with or breath life into...until suddenly they needed someone who they could conveniently pin the whole thing on to avoid ever having to do any sort of self critique or analysis.