Yeah again this is exactly why I'm always surprised when people can't tell, there's this oily look to almost all genAI imagery that always creeps me right the fuck out Like it is physically gross to look at, and I've generally got a pretty high tolerance for that kind of thing

Yeeeaaahhh I absolutely am done giving any slack to the "oh but poor wee valve is at the mercy of the paypros" dipshits. The paypros deserve the pressure, **but so does Valve**, because their Review Commissars need to get reined the fuck in by actual human beings with actual thought processes.

Anyway Cyrene does take an age to spin up, the struggle is real, but that thing where she puts Phainon into perma-angry mode is just hilarious Just whispering in his ear "that guy said you're just some dork named kevin, you ain't gonna take that, sure you ain't go kick his ass"

...and this is why Carney’s quest to win over Albertan truck guys is cooked from the start Ain't happening, sorry

I've been grouching about Star Rail for ages and rightly so, but credit where it's due, the QOL improvements have been genuinely impressive They've clearly sunk a lot of work into making it pretty clean to skill up and level up a character, taking away the friction that feels left over from Genshin

This site is NEVER beating the "thinks it's 2015" allegations, but no more so than the game designers that think "I can't believe y'all think games should have friction" is still a defensible take We saw the world you made and it's Atreus never shutting up and it sucked, the debate is long over

What a great headline

Carney is absolutely going to rip the Libs apart in his desperate and pathetic attempts to win the votes of Albertan truck guys Next up is probably getting rid of childhood vaccinations, why the fuck not it's not like Mark Carney cares if your children live as long as the Production Units endure

Star Rail has never come across as more desperate for money than right now, when they've paired a double banner of seven(!) characters (three per banner with one patch-long character" with the biggest drought of free events I've ever seen

So that new Wuthering Waves character is pretty much just Cyberpunk Marin, huh ...I mean no complaints I just love how these companies unapologetically wear their influences on their sleeves

Goddamn Iraq War didn't have as much consent manufacturing as this genAI slop does

Next week the House E&C Committee is looking to run something of a shock and awe campaign, debating at least 19 bills that they say are related to "protecting kids online." Most of which are actually about censorship and control. Don't buy the framing. It's always the same damn thing.

Love that it's still exploring

Every time I see some Bidenist dead-ender saying "there's no affordability problem" it's always either a lanyard guy or a full university professor The latter really confuse me because, buddy, you won a lottery tougher than the fucking Powerball, you have no idea how regular people live

Incredibly funny considering the Yakuza 0 thing

The Dune movies were really prescient in renaming it a "Crusade", as it turns out Anyway, honestly wondering we're going to see a full Papal THOU SHALT NOT edict on this stuff pretty soon. By all accounts it seems to be how he got the job.

Thinking about the flying car timeline we'd be in if Ken Williams had gone absolutely hogwild bringing over Falcom games and, eventually, VNs

What's weird is that the ENTIRE IDEA behind how Steam was supposed to approach games on their platform was "if it's legal and not an obvious scam, it's not our business regarding the content" And that just slid and slid and slid and like fucking **everything** with tech corps you never hear why

I had no idea this happened. Fuck.

"Figure out how to handle the brutal crash without sparking another fucking Tea Party with your corpo bailouts" kinda sums up how to plan for AI That and maybe channelling some of that Butlerian energy, because connections to artists are a key Dem advantage and they hate that shit

Saw an exchange on here that just reminded me that "if you're posting screenshots of some other dude's deleted Bsky posts you are wayyyyy too Big Mad" Like they deleted the posts, what the fuck else are you looking for, exactly? Ritualized Seppuku? Anyway fine candidates for the Nuclear Block

These odd little stories In those old issues of HM were so damn cool Nothing really like it now

Two gaming things: -Finished "Nobody Wants to Die", and it had that indie thing where they were sitting on a few really cool gameplay systems but decided "nah we're gonna do this other thing", and the other thing was a half-baked knockoff of Altered Carbon Looked great, though, give it that

One explanation for economic populism in the US is the recurring cycle of bubbles and bailouts that happens without any democratic input

One thing that's always bugged me is that Babylon 5 could absolutely do well if someone just redid the Amiga video toaster CGI stuff Most of the rest of it is practical effects that hold up fine and Lord knows the writing and acting would too I suspect it's a rights thing, though

This is funny, as one thing that people often miss in Westminster systems is that caucus meetings can be utterly fucking brutal, and the prime minister is usually there to catch all that shit If you tried this in Canada you'd get roasted, if you tried it in the UK they'd likely just toss your ass

If you want to REALLY stare into the Void, try using bing It barely even gives you normal results anymore, just a big wall of confidently wrong copilot slop

Well, they'll still have to pay plumbers and such. But all of this is partially to channel people into those fields, and crash the cost of labor there. Why do you think they're always telling you "go into the trades?" They don't care about your job prospects. They just want cheaper trades.

I'll be real, if geopolitics really is wrecking mihoyo's whole product line, it will absolutely be the funniest thing imaginable I've already read speculation that they made the next big Zenless char more overpowered because of this stuff & now leaks say they're redoing the whole next HSR patch

...I wish Destiny 2 was still good Sweet Business my beloved

Prototype version of Animorphs was kinda rough

Discovering a weird contradiction: I'm weirdly reluctant to actually finish games, but also I REALLY enjoy rolling credits on a game when I actually do it Like I've finished two this week, finished two others last week, feelsgoodman.png It's not even really a challenge thing, VNs work fine

We always avoided any Pie Disputes by simply having multiple kinds of pie You want pumpkin, okay, you want apple also okay, you want rhubarb that's a bit more of a challenge but we'll see

I was JUST thinking about this damn movie After finishing Somnium Files and thinking "oh fuck this is one of those visual novels where you need a speadsheet to keep track of everything going on across all the paths" I was immediately reminded of Primer The most complicated movie ever made for $10

Everyone knows the rules, everyone gets straight to it. Lovely stuff

Dull to keep harping on it, but voters generally want boring welfare state Social Liberalism, as it's what was successful for nearly a century But rich people want cutthroat neoliberalism, better yield, so the thing we want isn't even presented as an option IMO the chaos gushes from that gap

It is intensely funny that people here were saying "oh but content creators should go back to X they'll get more engagement" It's literally just millions of accounts being run by grifters, the view count on your X posts is meaningless and it's not like they'll ever commission you for anything

Finished AI: Somnium Files. Much better than I was expecting, though I feel like a few of the actual Somnium trips felt like they were there just to fill space and time. Also impressed by how the path structure shook out? Some unexpected swerves that made sense in hindsight. Glad I played it.

Again: if the entire executive class wasn't trying to burn the world down to replace all white collar workers with these things, they'd be fascinating. We invented AIs that slack off work, fake progress, and then fake contrition when they're caught. NOBODY predicted SlackerBots, but here we are.

Cannot overstate: the Steam Machine is less powerful than a base PS5. If it costs more than one, it's fucked. Absolutely zero percent of potential buyers give a shit that it's a "real PC", they will hear that it's less capable than a PS5 and that'll be that. And, no, "free online play" won't help.

Not exactly crashing out, but I wish I could grab some of these fucks by the lapel, get in close, and scream "EVERYBODY IS BROKE YOU UTTER AND COMPETE MORONS" "IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW MUCH THE PARTS COST OR WHAT YOU THINK IT'S WORTH, THE ONLY REASON THE STEAM HARDWARE CHARTS ARE LIKE THAT IS MONEY"

Why am I seeing a game journalist caping for Roblox by saying "oh but they're face-scanning children now so it's okay" Motherfucker that shit isn't even acceptable for adults And why the fuck would you trust ROBLOX of all orgs to avoid the inevitable data breaches, they demonstrably don't care

This is awful, and Diaz has QTP'd that they have insider info that @crunchyroll.com execs consider the current backlash against their enshittification of subtitles too small to matter. They've bent to backlash before tho with trying to lower video quality. This is an important one, anime fans.

Ohhh boy So yeah called this one. Also immediately grabbed the sequel because it's very conveniently on sale right now. Not actually done with Somnium yet, but I'm likely to lurch straight into the next as soon as I am.

Incredibly funny that that one exec was insisting "gen z loves the slop", then the most slopperiffic shooter ever gets demolished ARC Raiders is clearly an "in spite of" and they just did voice synth from what I can tell. Slop any harder...

Please god can you people just make the mobile browser not be a resource-demolishing sack of shit Even the fucking search bar doesn't work right, I don't want to see the home screen every single time I click on that bar

...stunlocked when I realize that, for all that people gave William Gibson shit over his tech knowledge, he ABSOLUTELY CALLED IT with Count Zero One of the reasons the big LLMs creep me out is because they're pretty much just GIbson's "Loas", and are treated in much the same way

One of the interesting things about this interview is Ichikawa flatly saying "We haven’t used any AI in developing this game." They KNOW that it's a shitstorm waiting to happen, and I still honestly think that most devs don't want to deal with the hassle. So continue hassling! Hassling is good.

It kinda shows how that weird culty mindset has really wrecked Microsoft, as now they can't just slide this stuff in quietly. They have to make a big noise about it, or else Satya might inquire as to whether they've got enough of a Growth Mindset, and so they keep eating this kind of shit in public