the chains of satnav: when it sends you on a detour that you know is slower than your way

The first d2 dlc - curse of Osiris - was bad so I played a lot less, then with the dreaming city they started it so other players advanced the story in my world. So now I’m no longer the cool #1 Guardian who saved the world: that is canonically the first fireteam to finish the 24h world first raid race. Not a terrible crime but it breaks one’s immersion when it feels like Zavala and Ikora are coming to me because Gladd and Sweatsicle aren’t available.

Then they vaulted all the content, kept digging deeper into the bad jokes unfunny humor, and added FOMO seasonal content that although nothing gets sunset/vaulted any more - if you can’t play for a few weeks you miss out on major characters dying or whole arcs being finished without you.

I know this is much memed on - I have 97 kids and can only play 4 seconds a month… - but honestly, it sucks. I can still play side quests in skyrim… ff12… fallout 1… balders gate 2… from decades ago - but not AAA game Destiny 2? Bullshit man.

off the top of my head:

Pressing buttons simultaneously in the reactor

Squat competition in the gym in Wall Street Market

Escaping Midgar on motorcycles

Hunting chocobos

The Fort Condor battles

Submarine battle

Mr Dolphin and CPR

Temple of the Ancients

Snowboarding

Meg and Mog in the Gold Saucer

edit: also marching in junon parade and the slap battle with Scarlett

Welcome to Eversmile. Set in the realm of joy. The people of Eversmile are plagued only by aching facial muscles. And not anthrax as we had hoped. Eversmile is a disgusting land of good humor and polite frivolity.

not that i play wow but shredders too

to me this is the wrong way of looking at it, it’s like saying “imagine a world where plutocrats just didn’t do pollution, imagine a world where plantation owners didn’t use slave labor, imagine a world where industrialists didn’t employ children”

it was always going to happen, just society has to force capitalists not to be cunts. Only way, always was, always will be, still is.

because all the best musicians are dead you see

Thing that cured me of my destiny 2 fomo was to get the transmog system to make my character look like a year 1 day 1 player (the broken armor you get when Ghaul takes your light) and then that’s my “look” I’m the guy who looks like they’ve never change their armor. Then I picked one ship and one emblem I liked (Xûr’s rock ship, and Strange Coin emblem) and that’s it. no more MTX.

I wonder if there’s any side benefits that if Nintendo destroy a mentally ill man’s life, they experience a PR backlash.

I always wondered if I’d like to write for video games (I write sketch, character, musical comedy) but honestly there’s probably very little fun in it, as you’re writing 95% one-sided conversations that are variations on “go to place, bring hack item”

So basically the bit in Succession when Mattsson tells Tom he wants to fuck his wife and is looking for “a pain sponge”

my wife got a few hundred bucks from a feminine hygiene product, unless you count that as “cents on the dollar” meaning a percentage of the final amount - in which case, that’s the case in every settlement.

not to mention like fucking Nestlé, Montsano, Blackrock, Northrop Grunman

yeah. 5 mins. Thats all you play. Definitely not 3 or 4 hours just disappear the moment you load it up.

a year to work a full time job I meant.

edit: I looked it up, average - 50th percentile - is actually $79k per annum. Still not crazy money for a full time job.

pay me a marketing fee

Average pay is like 50-60k [per year] for a[n average of a] 40 hour week [job], less if you’re like social media coordinator or something. It’s not like it’s crazy money.

And why hate on people that are usually artists, writers, creatives etc spending half their life using their talents in a bland corporate way to make money to pay the bills so they can spend 10% of their life actually creating art?

Plus, everyone’s job is easy when you reduce it to simplistic terms

I can be a back end developer: just organize the data and show it on my screen. Don’t show me a login page, don’t ask for my preferences, don’t give me help articles, just organize the data

I can be a firefighter: just put out the fire, don’t ride around in a big truck, don’t slide down a pole just put out the fire.

Destiny 2 still struggles with this. Some enemy attacks 1 shot because at high frame rates they hit the player multiple times as the projectile passes through the player character’s model

Actor here. Doing intimacy scenes is surprisingly difficult, arguably more so than combat, because usually people train and get certified in sword and dagger, rapier, firearms etc to get cast

When working a job, putting your mouth on another person’s mouth is a very unusual act, and you want your actors - regardless of gender - to feel safe, comfortable, professional and not exploited - not to mention you might spend 2x 14 hours days on this sequence from multiple angles getting it the same every time

I think the secrets in Hearthstone are all server-side and took a while to unlock, but for that you have to be Always Online, which some people hate

that’s the other issue. I can’t have a raid group - I don’t have a set gaming time or day or even length of time to play, or even set location in my house, and Destiny is a very needy game in terms of you needing to clock in regularly or else you miss narrative-shaking story events you can never experience again.

All it takes is not being able to play for a couple of months and you’re pretty much out for good.

the issue with raiding for me is needing to find 5 other people, at the same time, who aren’t toxic, who won’t kick you, and needing to maintain the grind year-round to have the meta load out, some of which are items you can only get if you’ve already done the activity you’re trying to do, and have an entire uninterrupted 6 hour session to do so.

There’s only so much “you can’t play this because…” before it turns into “I won’t play this because…”

I played Balders Gate 1 like this.

different guy here. It seemed to be fairly useful for software engineers to solve quick issues where the answer isn’t immediately obvious - but it’s terrible at most other jobs.

And part of why it’s bad is because you have to type into a text box what you want and read it back (unless you build you own custom API integration- which goes without saying is also a terrible way to access a product for 99% of people)

Another part of why it’s bad is because you’re sharing proprietary information with a stranger that is definitely cataloging and profiling it

Very few people interact with language in a way that is bidirectionally friendly with AI, and AI just isnt very good at writing. It’s very good at creating strings of words that make sense and fit a theme, but most of what makes “very good” writing isn’t just basic competency of the language.

yes but on the other hand people will think you (shudder) like Cybertrucks

they bought back Titan recently with a seasonal expansion with lots of underwater stuff and a story with the giant serpant that lives in the methane sea.

But when the season ended I think they took it away again.

I’m convinced there’s no plan at the top of the CEO food chain.

I would not be surprised to find out that someone with no business experience, could probably run these things better than these guys do.

not everybody = nobody

id wager the average user could not read the terms they’ve agreed to in a human lifespan

after a while you get to the point where you have to play on gold stake because winning every run gets boring.

I wanna ding his little hat like a hotel reception bell

2nd

I’ve said this in other comments- Fallout succeeds because it’s about relationships between people who know each other vs people meeting but finding out they have something in common on a path to somewhat positive interactions which is the basis of all good drama.

Compared to every scene being naked drama with only conflict, exposition via confrontation, transactional relationships centered around a quid pro quo, or “love at first sight” being a romantic motivation.

It’s amazing to me that “lesbians? owning a shop? impossible!” is a thought that people have. There are lesbians on my street, at my job, and at my Sunday evening class.

I myself am bisexual. It’s just like… we exist man. And if a bomb went off in my city, I am far enough away to survive the blast. So now you’ve got a bisexual guy in the nuclear winter. OoOo so woke.

Zero hour contracts pay NI contributions and tax through their paycheques but can’t claim deductions as they are still employees and are as such still subject to employee rights - with the exception that their working hours can be as low as 0 or as high as the maximum allowed by law provided they are given sufficient legally-mandated breaks

Self employed persons do not get these protections and pay tax at EoY

I’ve never heard the phrase “zero hour contracts” outside of the uk?

my clarification that it’s different from uber is important because in the UK zero hour contracts are still subject to different tax processes and employment law than being self employed.

yes that doesn’t change my statement giving context to another side of life in Britain that people may not be familiar with if they don’t live there.

it predates Uber. Most teenagers are on 0 hour contracts so they can only work weekends and/or evenings around school/college/uni

have to do Rasputin dance to log in to MS Teams

A pint of beer can be $10/hour with tip

some games would be unplayable without hand-patching the code that you’d find in a magazine.

It’s not even just girls in bikinis.

They put a camera underneath a clear chair, or kneel over it, zoomed in on their butt crack and gooch, with a tiny bikini barely obscuring the naughty bits. Perhaps another one focused entirely on their feet, and the third camera, from the front, adjusted in such as way as to clip off the bottom of their clothing at the edge of their bust so they appear topless, and then lick an ear-shaped microphone while a vibrating pad makes them jiggle.

It is as close to porn as you can get. Which, also, they have links in their bio to their “list of social media” - the top one of which is usually actual porn of them…

I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it is unsuitable for children and most people would consider it a form of porn or erotica, especially as it’s a forward bastion for their actual literal porn.