I gotta say, going into the new years, I quite respect your dedication to this.

I’d be fine with that, if that had been criticism the games had ever received. But… this just seems like their own personal hangip?

Well I suppose that answers that. They got picked up by Microsoft/Xbox Games, IP rights included, which is pretty kickass to hear. Hopefully Microsoft continues to be just middling evil towards their studios and obsidian can actually do what they’re good at. Seems like they’ve had enough dev time on this / grounded that they might actually be allowed to, you know, make good content…

Not sure if the IP is still owned by WB, but if so it’ll never happen. Warner Bros are awful about not fucking over the users.

They use a radical new networking technique called “Lying, but with graphs”

You’ve a winning argument, to be sure! Not sure where I quantified how much I think hollywood influences culture but okay.

FWIW, obviously popular media both is influential and responds to culture. “Hollywood” really shouldn’t be treated as a singular entity if we’re trying for a semblance of legitimacy. This is really quickly going to fall into a discussion of the role of the audience and how that’s changed in the digital era (vs. when Aristotle first brought it up…), and neither of us care enough to suffer through thay. Suffice to say it’s not cut and dry, and beyond that I dont know any better than you do what specific impact they have (and neither do they).

This is a real Im14AndThisIsDeep meme. More people have access to platforms where they can share their creative works than at any other point in human history, if you aren’t seeing it then you’re not really trying to find it. That point would be fair, too; its hard to find original content (even more so with the rise of AI-driven SEO). It’s not the trend in hollywood, but hollywood doesn’t define culture NEARLY as much as they’d like to think they do…)

… That’s what I did.

Nnno, I meant “I do not need windows so you can just axe it no problem”. You expressed your reluctance to give up the ability to use windows applications, which is an issue that can be trivially resolved on a device like a surface where you can easily implement dual booting. It’s… you know, really easy to keep that functionality.

But I guess if you really want to be a jerk about misunderstanding me, go ahead? There’s nothing really stopping you, just do yourself a favor and look at the topic you’re being a jerk about. Incredibly niche applications for consumer hardware. Seriously, you’re better than this.

Neat, you’ve never heard of dual booting! I don’t do it much because the tools that are relevant to my life are all natively on linux, but: On devices like your PC or surface (and technically some android devices, but it’s pretty janky right now) you can have multiple operating systems installed. If you’re doing network management, a device that can boot into both windows and linux is a real boon, for example because there’s plenty of low-level tools that haven’t been ported over to windows / are much easier to use from a dedicated CLI vs. something like powershell (or god forbid, WSL…). Surfaces are great for that, because their small form factor and one hand interface (touch input) mean you can get into some truly stupid places and have your tools right there with you. It’s like a netbook, but not as woefully underpowered.

Surface tablets are niche but SO much more useful than the app-restricted alternatives from samsung or apple. Nuke windows and stick your fav distro with a tablet frontend on there and it becomes an incredibly versatile little machine.

Short answer: It’s an early access MMO in the style of minecraft or roblox.

(The article links to some leaks and has as much detail as there is, quite recommend if you’re interested)

I’m familiar with the specific attacks you mentioned

(I made “false landings” up.)

No, it’s not unique to the US. But we’re by far the most dependent on technology out of any country and knowing this we talk a big game and do nothing to back said game up. The frequency with which [any agency you care to name] fails information security audits is pretty much just one long interrupted string of failures, and having worked with many western non-US governmental groups, the difference in security culture is pretty shameful.

Yeah… this is an example of what I’m talking about. It’s the romanticized version of the wild west online right now, and whenever you talk about the need for increased security, you’re subjected to a propaganda lecture (edit for clarity:) lecture about propaganda and the political implications of fucking twitter or something. Everyone is so primed to respond along the party line to the idea of troll farms that the conversation about how they’re used outside of influencing our elections never even occurs to people. Most don’t even realize it’s an issue that could be discussed.

So lets be clear here, while you’re absolutely correct about what you’re saying, that’s not related to what I was saying.

The near constant spear phishing, network intrusion, ransomware, impersonation, false landings, etc. attacks that every government, medical, social and technical system in the country is being constantly subjected to is the issue I am qualified to speak about. It’s an area where the US isn’t even attempting to fight back, and as beautiful as headline-darling things like stuxnet were, the developers that worked on it haven’t figured out how to mitigate ex: the rampant identity theft throttling the country. My favorite new one has been the theft of identity and thence blackmail of recently paroled prisoners, since a bad actor can easily get them returned to prison by just, say, using their credit card at a walmart out-of-state, or applying for public benefits in a different city. This happens all the time and nobody, at all, is talking about it. It’s so common I was brought in to write a set of tools that auto-generate the letter informing out-of-state LEO agencies that the person was the victim of identity theft and should not be found in violation of their parole terms, since that was so common it was all their entire staff were spending their time doing.

That’s just the one example that has occured to me, if you want more I can go on for very literal hours (just ask my students (who are no doubt quite stick of the topic…)). There’s no systems, or even the political or social will to investigate developing systems, that could even begin to address the most basic issues in this realm. That is the problem I was screaming helplessly into the void about.

We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though. Like at this point it’s embarrassing, we don’t even have the semblance of security education or standards for digital hardening. it’s just fucking awful, and we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms and hackers because of it. massive data breaches are a weekly occurrence.

Its just… we’ve got the NSA, sure, and they are good at what they do. But what they do is not what we need. Right now, you can scatter some USB drives outside any gvmt office here and some poor dumb HR rep or whatever will invariably plug it in to their work desktop, and they’ll totally fail to understand why it was bad for them to do that.

God I hope so.

I could care less about league of legends is an understatement

Couldn’t. Couldn’t care less about league.

But the burning fires of my grammatical pet peeve aside its a damned reasonable choice to not care about it. My worry is how other esports companies will react to this. It’s still such a tenuous sport even with the crazy viewer numbers the League world championships bring in, and if the biggest name in esports is about to start jettisoning actual production staff from the biggest title in the room… Idk, I can see other companies overreacting.

Explains why the cinematics have been so lacklustre recently…

IDK, seems rude to compare her to this absolute fuckwit. Yoko gets a bad rap because Beatles fans were racist jealous and accused her of some insane shit. Everyone knows some of her music, but she was an insanely influential performance and installation artist even before getting with John, and that’s not to mention her peace advocacy. Admittedly though her music, while influential artistically and based on traditional tonal performance styles, really really sucks.

Meanwhile though, Pitchford is exactly as annoying to listen to but has -zero- redeeming qualities. Seriously, fuck this guy.

For anyone else curious, “Discord kitten” is apparently a (mostly sarcastic) slang term for “suger baby”. I was really hoping for actual kittens, but alas.

Big if true. Going to need some real convincing benchmarks to believe this one, though. From a read, seems like they’re implementing ASIC on processor dies, which is not at all a new concept.

See its not that the poop jokes are bad its that there’s only one damn joke and they keep recycling it. Like the poop jokes were rarely funny in the games (I’m secure enough to admit that I laughed at more than a few…) but at least there was a variety. This is the same damn one as in trailer #1. What kind of person can’t write two “claptrap shitting bullets” jokes???

The Bad:

No Marcus narration. How are they so out of touch with the source material to miss THAT one? And there’s like… five guns. And while I like all the actors, what the hell are they doing playing those characters? Claptrap already had a voice, and it sure wasn’t jack black. Poop jokes. They’d be fine if they were, you know, funny. But they weren’t. How do you fuck up a poop joke?? The absolute lack of a coherent timeline that follows the canon. How is Tiny Tina the most subdued performance in the whole trailer? WHERE THE HELL ARE LILITH’S TATTOOS? Why are the cars so… lame? Why is the part where the narration says “Weirdest and most dangerous world” playing over a shot of random boulders? Why is Roland being played by a comedian? Where the hell is Zer0? Mordecai? HANDSOME JACK? Chris Sabat isn’t listed on the cast so we’re not getting Mr. Torgue. There’s no vending machines. This fight is so rough it looks like I choreographed it. NO HAMMERLOCK.

The Good:

Florian Munteanu (Krieg) doesn’t have a shirt on.

The Bad Again:

This movie isn’t 1hr30min of Florian Munteanu not wearing a shirt and hitting things. Preferably in slow motion, and glistening. Maybe throw in some cute Pandorian animals, too. How cute must a baby skag be? I don’t know, but I want to find out the answer.

I mean come on you could do ANYTHING with this, a feature length movie just of Granny Flexington’s Story Corner would be lauded as one of the best troll moves in history. Sure, I’d go and throw a brick through Gearbox’s windows for that, but I’d make sure nobody was behind said window first. … Probably.

Both this clip and the first clip emphasize the same poop joke. And that’s a problem. Somehow they’ve managed to make poop jokes in Borderlands a problem.

And keep in mind this is the scene the producers and people involved thought was good enough to debut online. This is what they are selling the movie on. This is their big “Take a look at this and get excited!” clip. If that’s the case, well, I fear for the rest of the movie.

Sums it up pretty well. I’m just astounded by how awful this is going to be. This looks bad enough I’m not even going to hate watch it, just… just no.

The writing in 3 was… not great (the DLCs were amazing) but man the gameplay is unparalleled. If they could just do a villain that rivals jack again, maybe this could be something decent.

… unrelated, anyone wanna buy a bridge?

Finally, a hunting season even the vegans can join in on! I cannot wait to have a row of taxidermy amazon drones above the mantle in my man cave…

Saved you a click: new E-Ink display with a 60-120hz refresh rate

Man, you weren’t kidding. Their strongest argument was that valve can run steam for essentially free, which is just fucking ridiculous. Valve defined content service in the 21st century, they paved the way for streaming and netflix. How anyone that is arguing in good faith can think reliably serving data thats 10x-100x larger than a Netflix stream is ‘basically free’ is unbelievable.

Also, it is not “pulling out all the stops” to drag out an international business court case if that case took eighteen months. I’ve seen international filings where you havent even gotten a hearing date after 18 months, what in the hell is the author smoking…

ITT: a lot of people worried that one of the few examples of corporate-provided services that isn’t a flaming pile of anti-consumer profit-before-everything garbage is going to be punished for not being that via political ratfucking.