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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • What I am really unsure about is if there’s even a market for Halo anymore.

    I’d like to think that a plot-heavy, dialogue-heavy game has a place in the modern era, at least after God of War and Ragnarök, but I don’t know if that’s what the kids want, and I really don’t think the industry wants it because it’s expensive and the ROI is low compared to PvP extraction shooters, which are cheaper to make an easier to monetize.

    I want to play a story through, and I want to care about the story and the characters and the dialogue. I cut my FPS teeth playing Marathon (Bungie’s predecessaor to Halo) and never got into the shallow-plotted shooters that id Software was pushing at the time, but I think the market has largely passed me by.

    This focus on the engine and the focus on company structure does not give me hope.



  • I can’t catch quite the drift what x86/x64 chips are good for anymore, other than gaming, nostalgia and spec boasting.

    Probably two things:

    • Cost- and power-no-object performance, which isn’t necessarily a positive as it encourages bad behaviour.
    • The platform is much more open, courtesy of some quirks of how IBM spec’ed BIOS back before the dawn of time. Yes, you can get ARM and RISC-V licenses (openPOWER is kind of a non-entity these days) and design your own SBC, but every single ARM and RISC-V machine boots differently, while x86 and amd64 have a standard boot process.

    All those fancy “CoPilot ready” Qualcomm machines? They’re following the same path as ARM-based smartphones have, where every single machine is bespoke and you’re looking for specific boot images on whatever the equivalent of xda-developers is, or (and this is more likely) just scrapping them when they’re used up, which will probably happen a lot faster, given Qualcomm’s history with support.

    I’d love to see a replacement for x86/amd64 that isn’t a power suck, but has an open interface to BIOS.



  • It is, though. Studies in disinformation have proven this. This is why right-wing bullshitters are so eager to engage in debate: just getting the chance to show up and be refuted in a legitmate setting, like a major newspaper, gives them an audience for the ideas and credibility, that their position is one worthy of refute.

    This is how we got the alt-right in 2015: by taking neo-Nazis seriously.

    This is what the media doesn’t understand, and why fact-checkers are getting–correctly–rolled on social media. Every time you bring up one of these lies, even to fact check it–especially to fact-check it–you give it credibility.

    This is why the Harris/Walz campaign’s tactic of ridicule is working so well. Instead of saying “No, you’re wrong about XXX because YYYY and ZZZZ”, they’re saying “What is wrong with you? You’re weird.” The latter doesn’t give the lie any oxygen.








  • There’s a few things going on, here

    • A lot of leaders are using layoffs as a flex on workers that got raises post-2020. There’s a lot of “they need to know their place” language in boardrooms, and not just in this industry.
    • I’m assuming this gets them out of paying company-performance-based bonuses, as well as PTO and leave for people who were looking forward to a post-crunch break.
    • AI. Executives, especially in creative fields, are salivating over the kinds of headcount reductions AI can provide.
    • There are some relatively forward-thinking leaders who are looking at the economic landscape and figuring they need to conserve cash. Not say that’s the case here, but it’s a reason that some companies that aren’t run by utter assholes are citing.

    As someone who’s been a Bungie fan since Pathways into Darkness (yeah, I’m that old) this makes me sad in a way that only the sale to Microsoft had managed.







  • I realized I composed that entirely incorrectly; here’s what I should have said:

    I hope they use full-motion video for characters, rather than rendered CGI models. This didn’t look great in Myst, and it was really nice when an enterprising modder added FMV back to Myst. I get why (FMV doesn’t always work with VR) but I hope they give us the option on day one with Riven.