Avoiding Gell-Mann amnesia! Unfortunately, to even get to this question you have to be expert enough in one area to see through the BS… Not a luxury everyone is afforded.

I can’t help comparing it (unfavourably) to baldurs gate 1. The story just didn’t hook me the same way.

I haven’t played a lot of souls, but elden ring death (both of non-boss enemies and protagonist) is super toothless. What made it more relevant in previous games?

Omg yes. It was not just a corridor. It was a send up of every game corridor game that I had played to that point. Taking a design limitation and making it a compelling plot twist was exactly what made bioshock awesome. One of my top 5 gaming moments of all time.

For me grind is when the gameplay loop is motivated by reward not exploration and plays out the same every time.

Good gameplay can come from a feeling of freshness because there are lots of possibilities, because rng or because player options (say, slay the spire), or from lots of genuinely novel content (say, elden ring).

It doesn’t feel like a balancing act at all. I just want more of the latter and less of the former, but maybe some people really do play for repetition?

Couldn’t find a good primary source to dig into it. But from Ipsos:

“I believe the preference for physical discs amongst next gen gamers reflects the potential value they derive from the pre-owned market,” commented Ipsos director Ian Bramley to MCV, “which is holding up the preference for physical - this is unlike the music and film markets.”

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/64-percent-prefer-physical-media-to-digital-distribution

I’m sure there’s a lot of generational and market segment differences. I never really understood “collecting” games. But I guess people do that in digital too with their huge steam sale backlogs!

I’m sure not many people care about physical vs digital per se. It’s the arbitrary locks by servers, digital storefront, DRM etc. So that when you pay your money you have no idea what you are getting and what your rights are. Physical game media was a simpler time from that perspective (play in perpetuity, don’t redistribute, cool cool that seems like a fair trade) and resulted in better pricing and experience for consumers.

I’d accept “move on” if the argument was just “muh pretty box” (god knows there are plenty of ways to buy pretty boxes of vidya IP) but consumer rights are surely worth fighting for, or we get needlessly bled for ever more dollars.

Even better than that. You take the medicine and it reduces everyone else’s risk of getting sick, even the ones that refuse to take the medicine. It’s the closest thing we have IRL to literal magic.

As an immunocompromised person, thank you to everyone who gets vaccinated against communicable disease, you make my world a little less heinous to navigate.

Pretty weak analogy. Wikipedia was technologically trivial and did a really good job of avoiding vested interests. Also the hype is orders of magnitude different, noone ever claimed Wikipedia was going to lead to superhuman intelligences or to replacement of swathes of human creative/service workers.

Actually since you mention it, my hot take is that Wikipedia might have been a more significant step forward in AI than openAI/latest generation LLMs. The creation of that corpus is hugely valuable in training and benchmarking models of natural language. Also it actually disrupted an industry (conventional encyclopedias) in a way that I’m struggling to think of anything that LLMs has replaced in the same way thus far.

Agreed, de facto, budget cuts have been and would be racist.

Fiscal conservatism actually does mean something though. Like you could imagine a left leaning fiscally conservative government that maintained a balanced budget by raising taxes on corps and the wealthy. That would be basically fine (though I think on balance not as good as running a modest deficit to fund nice policy). If you just go, yeah no those words are henceforth no-bueno, aren’t you just buying into their doublespeak?

Trumps “platform” was by any measure or definition less fiscally conservative than kamala. Pretty sure the reps left fiscal conservatism in the wasteland with Romney.

The new bullshit dogma for the right wing is “growth”. But I don’t think the Trump parade really even tried to explain that was the goal, or really any coherent economic policy.

Edit: the article seems to make the same point. That previously at least outwardly normal people have gone off the deep end.

Only has a fraction of the strategy and deck building of the actual TCG. Just seems like the usual mobile garbage to me (stamina mechanics, a million currency types, pay to win), shame.

Yup. Betfair in the UK didn’t close or settle their 2020 market for months, even though the terms of the market were about who was declared winner on election night, and were long since met with 100% certainty. That was some very easy money.

Absolutely. The othering is a symptom of this tribal politics-as-team-sport too. “They are bad because they are tanky/neolib/whatever”. Leads to lazy argument. Sure there are people who are dogmatic and rude, who you’ll probably end up blocking, but if we all gave each other a bit of grace the quality of discourse would surely improve.

“it’s in the public interest” so all these articles will be freely available to the public. Right?.. Riiight?!

Use of “coronate” can only be a nerd trap. Not today Satan!

I really enjoyed them too, which I guess I could have made clearer. I felt like my enjoyment was heightened by my knowledge and nostalgia for the books, but interesting yto hear another positive perspective without that aspect. I suppose what I’m trying to say is not that they aren’t or can’t be good, but that they aren’t and can’t be a faithful and complete adaptation.

The world building aspect is why I tend to think TV series are generally the better screen medium for scifi than feature film, having more space to explore the causes and consequences of a fantasy premise. But yeah, I love a spectacle. The setting and soundscape of the new movies are top. Like I can’t rember feelings like that in the cinema since Lord of the rings.

It’s impossible to adapt, see all previous adaptations. I think you’ve pretty accurately summed up the shortcomings of the medium for that story. Watch the movie to marvel at the setting brought to life with a nice soundscape, ideally see it on a big screen. If you read the book you’ll have some attachment to the characters and universe anyway so pacing and skipped detail shouldn’t be too much of a problem for you. Just don’t expect it to be perfect. IMO the second part is a bit stronger, maybe because the scope is tighter.

Thought process of a child, that scans at least

You think fear of immigrants and fear of fascism are comparably illegitimate? Oof