I mean, only a misdemeanor offense, and the caller ID thing only cost them $6 million. Sounds to me like this is definitely within budget for a bunch of candidates.

It’s not exactly the same, but Slay the Spire scratched some of the same itch for me. It’s got the same meta-structure as FTL, but the fights use a deck-builder format. It’s really well done.

One Step From Eden seemed like it should be even better for me, since it borrows the positional strategy stuff from the Mega Man Battle Network games, but I couldn’t get into it. Mostly I remember it being just way too fast. I really wanted to like it, but basically didn’t.

And yeah, as someone else mentioned, Advance Wars is good, too. The thing that Into the Breach did that Advance Wars didn’t, for me, was that Advance Wars basically depended on the AI being a bit crap so that you could overcome an initial disadvantage and work up to victory. Into the Breach gets around that by making the enemy wholly predictable instead, which is arguably more fun. The only other game I know of that worked that way was an Android game called Auro, but I don’t think that’s playable anymore and I believe the dev has abandoned it. It’s a shame, as it was really well made.

Other than that… you could try learning Go (aka igo, baduk, or weiqi). It’s a board game with very simple rules, but very deep strategy that emerges from those rules. The main disadvantage is that it’s multiplayer only, but there are puzzles, problems, and AIs you can use to turn it into a solo time killer.

I don’t even get how they have the authority to do this. Measure 110 was enacted as an amendment to the Oregon constitution, so it seems like it would require another amendment to rescind that and recriminalize possession.

https://xkcd.com/605

And for those thinking that maybe time could have turned the THCA into delta-9 THC, that’s true, it could have; but time would also turn that delta-9 THC into CBN. So the delta-9 levels would be unlikely to have increased much over the baseline regardless of how old the weed was.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/greatestgen/images/1/14/Drunk_shimoda_%28full_song%29.ogg

They’re actually kind of doing that in the E. Jean Carroll case. His “appeal bond” has to be 110% of the judgment award, so he has to put up 91.6 million instead of the 83.3 million she was awarded. My understanding is that the extra is to cover the interest that might accrue during the appeals process in the event that she still wins.

Edit: e.g. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/trump-asks-to-delay-his-bond-in-excessive-carroll-verdict/ar-BB1iNqcq

Bud Clark for the win.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/Expose_Yourself_to_Art.jpeg

In addition to “format shifting,” which is a well-recognized use case, and game preservation, which is a huge and under-recognized public interest in emulator development, emulators are also used for the development of homebrew software. E.g., there’s a port of Moonlight for the Switch, which lets you play Steam games streamed from a PC using your Switch, letting it serve many of the purposes of a Steam Deck. That’s huge! It would be way less practical to develop this kind of software if you could only test on real hardware. Testing on real hardware is also essential, of course, but testing on an emulator is vastly faster for rapid iteration.

Or it won’t happen when you’re watching, because then they’re thinking about what they’re doing and they don’t make the same unconscious mistake they did that brought up the error message. Then they get mad that “it never happens when you’re around. Why do you have to see the problem anyway? I described it to you.”

My favorite is “and there was some kind of error message.” There was? What did it say? Did it occur to you that an error message might help someone trying to diagnose your error?

They did them first. I still keep seeing ads for “free” turbotax, though, so I’m not sure what effect it’s having.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/ftc-issues-opinion-finding-turbotax-maker-intuit-inc-engaged-deceptive-practices

A recent (satire) headline from The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/alabama-middle-schooler-jailed-after-taking-basketball-1851186115

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Yeah, I agree about the textures, but I think you’re overestimating the existing LLMs. I think folks are already starting to recognize the style of the current LLMs and finding it off-putting. I think that’s only going to increase as people try to apply them in even more places.

I kind of disagree about AI, I guess.

I do think it’s a valuable tool, but honestly there’s not a ton that it does that you couldn’t already do with an asset store. And there’s a fair amount of risk associated with using AI in the near term. Folks already have a lot of qualms about the ethics of how those AIs were trained. And the first games that come out that rely heavily on AI are likely to be really janky–there are devs who will have tried to entirely replace a role on the team with AI, and the quality will suffer as a result. So I think in the near term there’s going to be a pretty severe backlash against AI-generated stuff in games. Folks will say it all feels generic and low-effort; it’ll be the new “asset flip.”

Long-term, I think it will have a place in the workflow for sure, the same way that store-bought assets do; you’ll just need to adapt them to fit in with the feeling you’re going for in your game, and hand-revise some things. But near-term, I think there will be a lot of folks who lose interest in a game if they find out there’s AI involved. And that goes triple for AI voice acting. A bad human voice actor can at least be interesting, but AI has that uncanny valley quality that really turns people off once they notice it.

I think it’s going to get even better in the next few years, too. The tools for 3d modeling are poised to improve in a way that makes it dramatically easier to create very high quality graphics. Nanite is one component of this, reducing the need for multiple levels of detail in polygon-based rendering. But 3d reality capture is improving too, both thanks to hardware like depth sensors and software like Gaussian splatting and NeRFs.

Indie games are just going to keep getting better, basically. As will AA games. I think the days of the AAA blockbuster may be numbered.

I reject your premise that loving Israel means being unable to tolerate any criticism of Israel’s actions. I’m a citizen of the US; I would argue that I’m critical of the US because I love it, and want to see it improve. That’s why I’m so critical of our military and our foreign policy. We commit a lot of war crimes; it’s a huge problem. I’m also critical of our shitty healthcare system, our lack of social safety nets, our institutional racism, and so forth. As an individual I don’t feel like I have a huge amount of agency to affect those things, but I do try my best, including voting and communicating my views to those around me.

So yeah, I think it’s totally fine to be Jewish, and totally fine to love Israel. What I don’t think is fine is being okay with every aspect of Israel’s current actions in Gaza–in particular, the multiple instances of the killing of journalists, health care workers, and children, and the extreme restrictions on supplies entering the country. Those aspects are all obscene. The level of suffering in Gaza overall right now is unbelievable.

If someone takes offense at my calling those actions by the military obscene, I would argue that’s not a matter of Judaism. That’s a matter of rather extreme nationalism.

I’m not sure it’s just on Reddit…

I’ve heard his segments get rebroadcast on Russian TV fairly often.