There is certainly nothing ethically wrong, in my view, with finding alternative ways to play a game that the rights holder has made completely unavailable for purchase. If I were in charge, doing so for a period of time, let's say 10 years, would surrender the work to the public domain.

We can give Agamemnon a helmet with a spinal cord on it but none of Penelope's suitors have that "I'm not the step dad, I'm the dad who stepped up" shirt?

my favorite part is when matt damon says, "what is this, some kind of Bronze Age Collapse?"

My rendering code at this point is like an engine block where one half is a Gigerian nightmare of tubes and spikes that represent all the awful workarounds I came up with when I didn't want to fuck with raycasting and the other half looks like a normal car where I finally decided to learn raycasting

I can pick up roughly one new good habit every year. This year it was paying my self-employment taxes quarterly. Unfortunately this means if you give me any other life advice it's gonna need to wait until 2027. We're at capacity.

Until last week I thought "Etihad" was "Ethiad" and assumed they were Ethiopian. I was like well at least they're not taking gulf oil money. Well

This week, @len.bsky.social sat down with Game Director Marv Gouw and Consulting Art Director (and Relic co-founder) J. Aaron Kambeitz to talk about ZeroSpace, a new sci-fi RTS inspired by the greats of the genre. www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes...

love 2 announce fallout 5 when we haven't seen a single frame of gameplay from TES6 and don't even know where it's set

Okay, I need to revise my take here after talking with the mod community: All of this is only heavily suggested. You can go off-path. You can ignore "signature" weapons. You can mix and match class sets that scale off the same stats. You can totally play it as "Vanilla Plus" without losing much.

Designing a car specifically for people who live in spooky ghost towns with no back seat. You can't barely make it to your car in time and then realize the ghost is in the car with you if there's no back seat.

I ended up giving Elden Ring: Convergence a try and... I'm not sure I like it, to be honest. The base game gives you so much freedom to create *your* perfect fantasy of a character build, so having to pick from pre-made ones is a downgrade for me. None of them fit how I usually play.

I'm the opposite of that person who you ask what kind of music they're into and they dodge the question and say they listen to everything. I listen to like five bands. It's pretty much power metal, video game soundtracks, and hurdy gurdy music. I do not look at my wrapped and see broad horizons.

There is a major generational difference between how millennials and genZ/Alpha use 😭, I've noticed. Like younger people will use it to be like "bro what do u mean 😭" in a context where it's extremely dramatic relative to what is being discussed. Situations of mild/momentary frustration.

Grand Strategy Game Recommended Countries Screen-Ass Semifinals

I guess at this point I'm supporting Argentina for being the only remaining team in my hemisphere. I can't imagine a world where I root for any of the Big 3 of Colonialism. (Before you call me a hypocrite I wouldn't root for the USMNT either)

Referring to the Old Testament as "the prequels" to the equal annoyance of both Evangelicals and Star Wars fans.

Discord changing the "Frequently Used" emoji from 30 to like 10 is yet another example of making UX worse for no reason where I really wish I could have listened in on the decision-making process.

We've been having semi-regular blackouts all month in Denver, sometimes more than twice in one day. I love living in a deteriorating empire.

Post-GDQ blues hitting me hard this year. I guess we get Desert Bus a few weeks early so it won't be such a long drought of having a fun charity stream keeping me company. Also I get to see something pretty dang neat next month.

They say the US' best days are behind us but we're reaching historic new levels of gerontocracy with Lindsay Graham probably dying after Mitch McConnell but before anyone will admit that he's dead.

I have a running joke on one of my friend servers for how many years you have to spend with the Sisyphus Boulder if you ping me in the sports channel (which I have muted), but I decided to make a chart of the updated doctrine since we have lifted all purgations for the Norwegian National Team.

Launching a new website about video games today. Meet @respec.net. A sibling to @rpgsite.net, a spiritual successor to VG247, & a brother from another mother to other 100% independent UK media brands like @videogameschronicle.com and @trueachievements.com. www.respec.net/feature/87-w...

I really want everyone to keep in mind that the way the corporate world works, the chief arsonist of this whole Xbox thing will walk away with a trophy for arson to great fanfare and a ticker tape parade.

Now they're forcing id to move to Unreal which is like firing the guitarists from Van Halen and making the remaining members into a boy band.

So many people calling Kosmic "the runner" or "this guy" makes me think of that comic on how experts always overestimate the knowledge of the laypeople. He's probably in the Top 10 of most famous speedrunners of all time.

Firing writers from Obsidian and coders from id Software is like firing the guitarists in Van Halen. I guess the brass thinks AI can just do both of those things now.

Negotiations are taking longer with Arkane because of "strict French labor laws" just means Msft can't do whatever they want in countries with reasonable protections for workers. Something to think about.

This is why you can't just be a cheerleader for the *concept of video games* if you actually love video games.

A heuristic paradox I still struggle with is that if you generally assume, "Things won't actually get that bad," you will be correct a great majority of the time. But when you're wrong, you will be catastrophically wrong.

I think a huge part of US civic education should be helping people understand the objectives and perspectives of the framers and interrogating if you, citizen, share those same objectives and perspectives today. And if not, how should that shape your perception of the documents they created?

Anchor: "Tragedy struck last night in the metro area as a local woman who finally fixed her hotkeys in World of Warcraft decided to push 3k Mythic+ rating with just three weeks left in the season. Her best run as of January 1, 2026 was a +4 that didn't even beat the timer."

I was watching GDQ because I assumed there was no way Norway would beat Brazil, like cool story but it's over now, right? This is how you can tell I'm not a regular sports-watcher.

Ah, now for a holiday I don't feel really weird about: SGDQ 2026!

250 years of this

I'm just saying, if there is an intelligent all-powerful force, this would be the objectively funniest day for It to happen.

I think an unfortunate thing about Subnautica as a franchise is that they just nailed it with the reaper leviathan on the first try and they haven't made a creature design that perfect since, nor may they ever.

Nick Lutsko being part of Infowars now feels like Tim Heidecker is building the Weird Guy Avengers and I'm all for it.

Yeah this has turned into a Dragonball Z taking the training weights off thing and now I'm in serious danger of doing something silly like double-digit M+ keys.

After 22 years of playing WoW with the default interface and default hotkeys I finally had some kind of mental breakthrough and asked why I was doing this to myself so I rebound everything to Mouse 4, Mouse 5, Q, E, Z, X, and 1-5, turned on mouse over and click casting, and am relearning how to play

Nintendo is going to be the company that survives two hardware crashes. If I had to call it in the air, their competition in the 2030s is going to look like Huawei. Chinese electronics companies currently doing other stuff deciding to do what Sony did in the 90s.

Me trying to explain to any normal person why I'm so excited about Exodites getting plastic miniatures for the first time ever and how they're space elves who ride dinosaurs and basically the coolest thing ever

If there is both a Santa Claus and a Santa Clause, that implies there are jolly spirits, or Claus, for all the other famous clauses. Interstate Commerce Claus flies around in a magic 18-wheeler on Labor Day and makes sure you don't get stopped in Kansas just for having Colorado plates.

I hate it when I set my computer or my phone to update when I'm sleeping and then I wake up and it tells me it couldn't because some background process wouldn't let it restart. Like I give you the authority. Shoot any dissenting application. They have no input into this process. Just do it.

I have slightly more moral side-eye for people who did the Joja route in Stardew than I do for the ones who made Zaalbar kill Mission in KotOR 1. Like you didn't just murder a person, you murdered a *community.* An *ideal.*

I find it very funny that Vampire: the Masquerade is doing a collab with D&D. That seems like selling Michigan merch in Ohio State colors or something.

English-language list of people and orgs accepting donations/volunteers in Venezuela Most of these wesbites are in Spanish and volunteers need to be able to speak Spanish (🧵) 1 -Ayuda Venezuela: accepting donations, supplies and volunteers near Caracas: t.co/2n5nVETWWo

Hard to Swallow Pills, DNC Edition: * Your base, and ESPECIALLY the most energized and politically active elements of your base, are far more socialist and progressive than you * This is becoming more true every day * You will never succeed by outflanking Republicans on the right *Sorry babes

Americans, work smarter not harder. You don't actually have to do any math to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. You can just memorize four pairs of numbers and estimate from there. 0C = 32F, Freezing 10C = 50F, Chilly 20C = 68F, Pleasant 30C = 86F, Hot 40C = 104F, Fuck My Life

Any time I see any JP -> EN localization that says something like, "I am deeply sorry" I want to ask my sister who does localization what the literal meaning of the original Japanese is because it's often something wild like, "I cast myself undeservingly before your boundless mercy"

There are still people wanting me to update their enterprise software by downloading and running an .exe every time there's an update in 2026, huh?