
It all started with the LAION “pretty images” dataset (I don’t remember exactly what it was called). This style was pervasive in that dataset, and to be fair to the curators, it did look good at the time. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the art style. It’s just that it’s now become so overused, and always with slop, so we associate the style with slop.

The way it seems to work in Canada is that the government decides on a set of topics they want to fund that are fairly high level, and as long as your work falls in one of those categories, the grant gets approved. So the government doesn’t choose the specific drug to study. They choose which medical condition we want to try to treat, then they let the PIs tell them what they want to do and how it relates to those priorities.

I’ve been picking them up religiously after I found out I missed Frostpunk. The only ones I’ve played were the big names like Control, Death Standing, and the old Fallout games. For everything else, the client doesn’t give you enough information to decide if it’s worth your time or not. I keep having to go back and forth between Epic and Steam to read reviews and the “similar to other games you’ve played” thing. It’s not worth the effort.

You don’t pay people because it’s the only motivator. You pay people because you need money to survive in this world. If we don’t, then the only people who can afford to spend time making mods are those who are already have their basic needs taken care of through other means.
I would like to see a world where anyone with the passion for modding can make mods.

Ah, I see. Though I would call this manipulative, not dishonest.
entities that seems honest are the most secretly dishonest
It’s the converse. By definition, dishonest entities (that are good at what they do) will appear honest.
Definitions aside, let’s go back to my original argument. To rephrase it a bit: A transparently manipulative entity is better than a deceptive and manipulative entity. So why protest the added transparency and not the manipulation?

I feel like if anything has the right to be ridiculously expensive, it’s art.
What’s the downside?

I have no interest in this game, so I wouldn’t know how it actually affects gameplay. But do you not agree that this is shitty business practice? You have a game. Sell the game. If you want microtransactions, then produce extra art or something and sell that. You can even make the case that separating out parts of the game into various DLCs on launch is acceptable. You’re at least charging for something of value that you created.
Implementing anti-cheat costs resources and makes the end result strictly worse. Now you want people to pay you to undo that? That’s creating negative value. We want the economy to run on people creating positive value.

I think a more apt comparison is if you’re renting out a place where every light switch is three-way with one switch near the light it controls and another in a closet with all the other light switches. You can control the ones in the closet for free, but the ones in a reasonable location are pay-per-use. The problem isn’t that the features aren’t available for free. It’s that they poured resources into deliberately making things worse, then they charge you to undo that. Literally creating negative value.

I remember playing the first game and getting stuck on the tutorial because I was mashing the left click button trying to swing my sword only to have Geralt hip thrust at the enemies.
But once you figure out how to swing the sword, the game’s actually pretty fun. One thing I particularly liked is that there’s an investigative storyline where you actually have to go and investigate and figure out the answer with the clues provided, and you can fail. I went into it thinking it would be like most modern games where you only get obviously correct or incorrect dialog options and angered everyone in the process.
It wasn’t “many employees close to Altman”. It was the entire company, including the people who initiated the process of getting him kicked out. The whole thing made absolutely no sense.