ConstableJelly

I know this feeling all too well, glad you did right by yourself. And remember, even if you’re doctor says, “there’s nothing we can do, just rest and let your body recover itself,” it was still worth doing to be safe.

"You can’t rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn’t be your default belief. I don’t think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from id games.“Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy? Could they have created more things for fans to buy? Could they have cost-effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games? Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones? Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper? I really don’t know.”

I’m no expert, but ya doy. Microsoft’s play to pursue low-cost, high-return recurring revenue by shoving their extraordinarily talented single-player studios (Rocksteady, Arkane) at OBVIOUSLY terrible live service titles is bad enough on its own but is also a telling reflection of the executive mindset (this goes for Sony too). Profit is king, data is infallible, and development talent is best directed at our behest and is easily expendable when needed.

Let game devs do what they want. Some games will fail, but jesus, not at the scale and volume that they’re failing at right now.

Understood, and I concede the benefit of being able to choose and fix on a PC, it’s definitely better. But it’s almost more of a difference in perception. For someone unfamiliar with PC builds, it’s not a matter of not having a choice but not having to choose or having to fix anything. It’s the promise that it will work on its own (notwithstanding the reality of hardware failures in general).

I’m leaning this way for the first time in decades. I’ve had every Playstation console from the beginning, plus Xbox and Nintendo systems here and there. As the indie game market has evolved in the past 5-10 years, I’ve found my playing preferences transition away from big, detailed, AA/A, as I’m sure many others have as well. I bought a Steam OS Legion Go last year and have been enchanted by the flexibility of PC gaming, even as it’s limited for me to what can be played on a handheld.

I strongly disagree with any notion that consoles have had no value comparable to PCs for years. I think PC gamers vastly underestimate the value of being able to one-click purchase a console, pull it out of the box, plug it in, and play. I’ve explored gaming PC purchases since I bought the Legion, and there is a comparably steep commitment required to research CPUs, GPUs, storage, cooling, and RAM, and how their combination will affect performance and longevity. You can buy pre-built, but you’re looking at roughly $1k for a lower mid-level machine, plus peripherals and maintenance. Perhaps this is part of the fun for some people, but it’s definitely a barrier for many.

On the other hand, the distance between PCs and consoles continues to widen, where the newly released PS5 was only barely a good value for its power compared to PCs when it released and quickly fell behind again. Similarly, I’ve enjoyed being able to experiment with games I wouldn’t otherwise have played via the Playstation Plus catalog, but no subscription media service has ever maintained or increased its value over time, and Sony has already raised prices while the quality of its offerings continues to wane. And of course the abandonment of physical media means that we are further locked into an already tight ecosystem.

Ultimately, one of the big reasons I’m finally considering a PC purchase in place of the next console generation is that I’ve been playing with a home media server the past couple years and recently migrated to Linux Mint. My confidence level with feeling capable of managing a PC effectively has grown enough that the aforementioned barrier feels less intimidating. Hopefully the Steam Machine will close the gap for some console players feeling similarly, but the inability to upgrade the GPU feels too big a deal when I could just make the slightly longer leap to an actual PC.

RPS is one of two video game sites I subscribe to, the other being Jank, which is a direct, independent spinoff of RPS. They have a consistent house style that values the fun and creativity of good prose (even if they sometimes fail to reach that standard). I imagine some people would find their style hamfisted, but it feels authentic to me in a way that almost every other publication doesn’t. They don’t have that homogenizing tone to their voice that’s reaching for the superficial cultural moment and SEO optimization that outlets like IGN have.

I’ve gotten the opposite impression, especially with all those recent AI advocates getting booed and laughed at by students during university commencement speeches. It feels like the usual ‘powerful elites with huge platforms’ - including legacy and independent media - versus almost everyone else.

Beginning the trailer with an earnest, unironic pronouns joke is absolutely the worst possible way to advertise that your antiquated, creatively bankrupt spoof series is returning for the right reasons. That joke would have been worth a groan at best 10 years ago on the Babylon Bee.

Then “I’m a Republican now so I’m supposed the be racist.”

Then “There are no safe spaces.”

And the tagline “Every line will be crossed.”

If this movie is somehow successful, whoever’s remaining at the Daily Wire will be kicking themselves that they couldn’t afford to fund it themselves.

And that’s on top of the pitifully tired gags like calling the “Wednesday” reference character “Tuesday” or the dildos.

Grossly inconsiderate of Mamdani to be governing so efficiently and effectively to date for all the conservatives and liberal democrats who now have to work that much harder to continue their efforts discrediting democratic socialism as an unrealistic framework for politics in the U.S.

Trump, already a prominent New York real estate figure, saw his national profile rise significantly during his time on the show, popularizing the catchphrase “You’re fired!” NBC cut ties with him in 2015, citing “derogatory statements” about immigrants. He was elected president the following year.

Thank you for that depressingly amusing framing, The Hill.

I don’t do multiplayer games, so Elden Ring I think is at the top for me at around 200 hours. Although, if you looked on Playstation it would probably be one of the Spider-Man games because my kids use my account to just play them as a sandbox.

I like the Dualsense a lot at its best, but I go through roughly a controller per year probably. One of them something with the rumble loosened. Not noticeable in some games, but when I was playing Returnal it sounded like a jackhammer. Another the sticks got…sticky in a way that was really distracting. Stick drift on another, and my current one the right arrow stopped working. I had to re-map it to the left stick click to play Infinite Wealth, and other games like Elden Ring just won’t work with it.

“If you don’t figure out how to be excited to live here, you’re just going to be left behind.”

We got terribly swarmed in a very remote area in Michigan’s upper peninsula while walking in the woods. My partner and I grabbed pine branches and started waving them around us while we ran back, but my dog kept thinking I was playing as I tried to wave them around her and would run off from me. Within 20 minutes of getting back, she was covered in massive lumps all over her body, her lips and ears were grossly swollen, and she started breathing really, really shallowly.

There were no open or emergency vets anywhere nearby, so we tried to give her some benadryl and water as best we could. Luckily, she was well-recovered by morning. But the danger posed by swarms of mosquitos became abundantly clear to me.

“Actual malice” is the high legal standard that public figures must meet to prevail in a defamation case.

I was curious what side enjoys the benefit here given, y’know… the First Amendment, and it seems like this is definitely a performative move on the government’s side.

Adam Steinbaugh, a First Amendment lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, shared a different assessment on Monday.

“Patel said proving actual malice is a ‘lay up’ (no), but the allegations in this complaint don’t even hit the backboard,” Steinbaugh wrote on X. “It will, however, accomplish the primary goal: making media outlets weighing a story think about the cost for attorneys to get a meritless lawsuit tossed.”

I’m not sure this holds up logically. WaPo and NYT did gangbusters during Trump’s first term, before their ownership structure and content guidelines pivoted hard toward institutional supplication.

There is value to the credibility that comes from standing up to actual authoritarianism, if you’re not captive to the billionaire mindset. I have to imagine that the cost/benefit for publicity like this is pretty attractive to these publications’ accounting departments.

Sounded like Keith David to me.

In the context of the article, this sounds merely like evidence for the appeals case aiming to overturn the order to block information sharing between the two agencies. So…at best they don’t get to continue breaking the law? Which seems appropriate - we can’t just shoot everyone in the back who breaks a privacy law 42,695 separate times. It’s not like they’re teenagers stealing snacks from Walmart.

The ongoing case over IRS and DHS data sharing is now set to be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. DHS is actively appealing Kollar-Kotelly’s November order blocking the IRS from sharing data with DHS, which was signed last year by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The then-acting commissioner of the IRS resigned after the deal was signed.

The linked article is from California’s office of the attorney general related to an existing lawsuit. As a non-Californian, I am supremely disappointed that this is happening just at the state level, but credit should still go where its due. And if their legal action sets a precedent that makes it easier for other states (or dare I hope, at the federal level if and when we get strong antitrust regulators like we had under Biden), then all the better.

Search results on Amazon are fully pay-to-play anyway. You don’t get anywhere near the top of the list without paying for the privilege. No big deal for slop producers who sell in volume, but basically useless for small businesses or private sellers.

I’m also playing this for the first time after owning it for a while. Took me a while to really get into it - it’s the first high-production, AAA action game that I’ve played in a while, and it felt strangely linear and repetitive. The puzzles are so clearly tailored to your specific abilities they feel kind of silly against the otherwise immersive world. The rewards and upgrades are kind of trivial on normal difficulty; I’m still mostly spamming normal and sidekick attacks for every battle.

Eventually though I settled into the rhythm and I noticed that stuff less. The acting and scene choreography are outstanding - it feels like theater in a way that’s unique to my experience with games. And I’m enjoying it more for what it is. It’s just overall not landing as satisfyingly as the first one did, and I think that’s because indie games have done increasingly cool things since the 2018 game came out and I’ve been playing them more, and my tastes have just changed a lot.

“I have a chip on my shoulder,” she said, describing her drive to prove she can win over private equity in Silicon Valley based on merit, not inheritance or legacy …[T]he young founder hasn’t taken money from her parents for Phia. Instead, she’s insisted on raising outside capital even as some investors remain fixated on her personal life instead of her business venture.

I appreciate the sentiment, but it would be delusional to think her ability to “win over private equity” was divorced at all from her father’s legacy and last name. And actually, I’m not sure I appreciate the sentiment. In 2026, merit is way down the list, like scrawled sideways in the margins, of things that matter to private equity.