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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Brother, these games are thirteen to thirty years old and therefore not in any way relevant to the discussion.

    For our sanity we must let TES go. Since Skyrim, Bethesda has only developed Simplified Skyrim In The Wasteland, Buggy Skyrim in the Multiplayer Wasteland, and Very Boring Skyrim in Empty Space. And about a bajillion outright Skyrim re-releases.

    Their current leadership is incapable of acknowledging the failures of Starfield, from uninspired game design to extremely outdated engine that holds back the very fundamental vision of the game. Since Bethesda’s leadership hasn’t changed or acknowledged their wrongs, we have every reason to believe that TES6 will make the same mistakes. They do not have the means of their ambition anymore.



  • Well “Going private” doesn’t mean anything. It can mean PE. It can mean “traditional” personal/family ownership (e.g. Musk with Twitter). It can also mean moving to a co-op model (theoretically I don’t think anything stops a bankrupt publicly-traded company being bought by its workers). “Private” doesn’t sit anywhere on the political spectrum; even Marxists can generally agree that co-operatives are in principle better than publicly-traded companies.

    Unfortunately PE firms are usually the ones who win the bid when a company “goes private” because the PE business model is driven by speculation and leveraged buyouts, and (at least in the US) supported by advantageous tax rates. Even from a purely capitalist perspective it’s an objective failure that harms the macro-economy. It’s not even capitalism anymore; it’s oligarchic.





  • Unrelated to the article itself but I initially clicked on mobile and was presented with this clearly GDPR-violating prompt:

    Tracking consent prompt with only an "Accept all" button

    Where’s the button to reject tracking? It doesn’t exist.

    For reference this is the correct prompt on admiral’s own website:

    Tracking consent prompt with a "Reject all" button next to "Accept all"

    First time I see GDPR violation this brazen. While writing this comment I finally figured out how to reject consent (clicking on “Purposes” and manually deselecting each purpose).

    I double checked with remote debugging, the button is not just hidden in CSS; it’s missing entirely:

    HTML source showing no reject all button

    For some reason I don’t get a consent prompt at all from my desktop even on a brand new firefox profile – perhaps because of my user-agent?

    Anyways I felt motivated today so I’ve sent an email to their Data Protection Officer and set a reminder for next month in case they ghost me.


  • It’s the eternal debate: Should you, as a parent let your kid “win” when playing games, or should you play fairly and crush them until they either give up or get skilled enough to actually beat you?

    There are pros and cons to either solution and ultimately it depends on what the individual wants; the immediate satisfaction of a balanced experience, or the assurance that every win or loss was earned fair and square.

    I don’t play these types of games anymore, but as a teenager I played a lot of Battlefield and I went from noob who would get absolutely crushed every game, to good enough at some game modes that my presence in a 32 player lobby would be sufficient to tip the whole game in my favor and my team winrate was well over 50 %. That is a meaningful, long-term reward that does not quite compare to the modern approach where no matter how many hours you sink in honing your skill, you’ll still only win about 50 % of the time. Yeah sure you have a fancier badge or whatever, but it doesn’t feel like improvement.

    Of course Activision makes a compelling argument that SBBM is overall better for the health of the playerbase. I do feel like we lost something though, and that it is another area in life where algorithms decide what our experience is going to be and smooth out any meaningful challenge.



  • It just occurred to me a reason TF3 can’t happen in a satisfying way.

    You couldn’t make TF3 with a different cast of “heroes”, right? It would just be unsettling and disrespectful. TF’s DNA is their lovable characters.

    Not a single TF playable character is a woman. That was on-par for the 2000s, but definitely not acceptable in the 2020s when your competitors are OW and Valorant which both have a diverse cast with (AFAIK) gender parity. Keeping the cast but adding 9 women and 2 enbies would feel extremely performative and like the new PCs are inferior “tack-on” characters.

    TF3 would either be problematic or desacralized. IMO making new IP is the right call.




  • Skyrim’s true power is that it’s excellent for single-player roleplay. The game is very immersive, the universe feels extremely vast, and the gameplay allows for extremely varied play styles.

    The end result is that the game is very replayable if your thing is building a consistent and unique (head)cannon for your character. If you don’t focus the main quest, you can put in hundreds of hours across multiple characters before things get stale. Even the quests that you follow multiple times, you might approach from very different angles.





  • The title of the post is literally “I love my Gitea”.

    The content of them meme does conflate “git” with its various frontends (like gitea), but it’s an incredibly common misnomer so who cares?

    The person I responded to then went on a weird rant about how “git by itself is distributed” which is completely irrelevant to the point since OP’s Gitea provides a whole lot more.


  • You’re completely missing the point. Even Gitea (much simpler than GitHub, nevermind GitLab) is much more than a git backend. It’s viewable in a browser, renders markdown, has integrated CI functionality, and so on.

    Even for my meager self-host use-case, being able to view markdown docs in the browser is useful from time to time, even on my phone.

    As for the things I use (a self-hosted) GitLab instance at work for… that doesn’t even scratch the surface.



  • They’re not selling a product, they’re selling promises. The “product” is only worth something because it is supposed to materialize into in-game assets in the most ambitious, technologically advanced video game ever made.

    Future will tell if those are empty promises. I personally believe that they are, and if the publisher knows for a fact that they are building vaporware, then it’s called a scam (though it’s essentially unprovable until the publisher “finishes” their game or goes out of business).

    I know that salespeople aren’t usually big on ethics, but I believe that what RSI is doing is both unethical and (probably) illegal. They’ve gotten half a billion from their lies though so what the fuck do I know.