I agree with most of that however The King in Yellow was made when he was around 5 years old. People sort of put it into the Lovecraft universe because of the themes but nope has 0 connection at least in its inception. The whole Lovecraft universe is sort of a hog podge of other’s authors work as well who sort of expanded and formalized parts of it. Its honestly very cool what a group of authors can do when IPs and such aren’t hoarded in a huge vault being left untouched until its economically advantageous to use.

Yeah it does make it a bit hard to listen to those audiobooks in the car…

I mean if they have read some of his stories, it should be pretty obvious he was pretty fucking racist. The cat thing is a fun meme but if anyone has read at least call of Cthulhu the work most people know about its pretty on the nose. Every human antagonist is either black or a foreigner and he is pretty blatant about it. Hell don’t get me started on Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (or The White Ape), that one is just so funny with how bloody racist it is because the conclusion is so absurd, you can’t take it serious.

I mean sort of. While I get what you are saying but it seems a bit weird, as long as the person isn’t being fired for being part of a protected class I see no issue with a company trying to distance themselves from someone who function is to be a “Brand Mascot” where what they say will be associated with the company hiring them. Fame is a rather fickled thing and reputation sort of plays into the worth of a “celebrity”, like sure behind closed doors these asshats can be as vile and shitty as they want to be but the second they are exposed in the public, the public’s desire to see said person probably drops dramatically since they are isolating a section(s) of the audience who will be wanting to watch something with them in it.

Hell a decent example would be Ellen Degeneres, after it came out publicly that she was a bit of a cunt to her workers. The rating for her show dropped quite a bit (apparently about 40%) after the backlash leading to many of her side shows getting canned and her not getting renewed for a new season for her talk show. At the end of the day its just a big popularity contest where everyone is vying for people’s attention in an already saturated market.

I mean the only reason smallpox was wiped from this earth is because it took 20 years of dedication by the WHO to fully wipe it out.

The top 10 countries with measels cases as per the CDC are

1. Yemen
2. India *
3. Kazakhstan
4. Ethiopia
5. Russian Federation
6. Pakistan
7. Kyrgyzstan
8. Democratic Republic of the Congo
9. Iraq
10. Azerbaijan

The top 10 is based on data from the dates of June 2023 - November 2023. Each one of these are over 3k cases and the top one being at 23k and #2 being 13k.

So yes, some parts of the world has problem with Measles and unless we dedicate the time to fully eradicate it, it will never truly be gone. The antivax nonsense in the first world countries will only make this worse. Can’t wait for the fucking return of Polio (however polio may be the next disease eradicated since its currently only in 2 countries and there were 6 reported cases in 2021) or TB

Note: WHO classifies all suspected measles cases reported from India as measles clinically compatible if a specimen was not collected as per the algorithm for classification of suspected measles in the WHO VPD Surveillance Standards. Thus numbers might be different between what WHO reports and what India reports.

You are referring to Doom 2016 actually. While that turn out decent, one of their key arguments was due to it being online focused. We all know Doom 2016 had rather generic multiplayer.

With that said, it feels silly not to have issues when publishers refuse to send out review keys. Its a huge red flag for a game, this doesn’t mean it will be bad but its a trend we shouldn’t be happy about. Its only done to help preserve preorder numbers.

That is funny but not as bad.

Can’t say too much but god I hate this so much. Used to work a call center and someone had a username that was all 1,l,I s and there was no way to easily identify between those 3 characters. For someone to verify who they were they needed to tell us their username and some other info. So I had to waste nearly 30 fucking minutes dealing with this stupid shit before we could proceed forward and we couldn’t just DC the person.

No personal person (except maybe freelancers) were ever going to buy Adobe for its list price, it was always about getting businesses to buy it, its the exact same scheme that there is for Winzip. Also you are acting like it was some act of kindness when really if it was that case, they would have kept perpetual licenses around with their subscription plan but they did away with it since they knew they can rake in way more money with the scheme. The plan for Photoshop was around $600, their subscription plan is $22 per month. in 2.2 years, you have paid basically the same amount but one you actually keep the product in the other you have to continue to rent it. Apparently the " Creative Suite Master Version" was $3000, today creative suite runs for $60 per month, so that would be around 4.2 years to pay it off. I doubt most people are using every single new feature they add. Hell some companies avoid updating to make sure everything is compatible with their current workload. So having perceptual licenses just make sense in these kind of cases.

I mean couldn’t they just still make their own “class base” shooter in S&box without the TF2 IP involved? So you get the enjoyment of those tropes while not “stepping on the toes” of Valve and out compete the game.

Edit: hell it would even let them try new and different things with the formula. Change up the look of the game maybe even bring it closer to the classic TF look.

With that said though, while Hasbro is fucking evil it would be weird for them to deny they were using AI at first until now. I wonder if one of their partners sort of fucked them over and actually used AI without telling them. Its possible they were 100% for the AI art since the start but think due to how large wizard of the coast is and with the likely usage of sub contractors it may not be on them fully with that said though, they probably should have double checked the images for any of those signs.

Clearly following the religious text.

Deuteronomy 22:28–29

28 If a man encounters a young woman, a virgin who is not engaged, takes hold of her and rapes her, and they are discovered, 29 the man who raped her is to give the young woman’s father fifty silver shekels, and she will become his wife because he violated her. He cannot divorce her as long as he lives.

While not the same, it sort of catch the drift. Like people can worship whatever religion they want but Jesus this section of the bible is horrific and sort of highlight women as mere property (one of the countless examples in the bible), which should be expected coming from that time period but crazy this kind of thing is still expected to be followed unquestioned.

It is funny or sad depending on how you look at it that the fan modding community has done more for VR in these last few years than most of the big names. Then again it does make sense since there isn’t much big money to be earned in the VR space right now. Hell while not a big fan of what Meta is doing with titles, they appear to be the only ones paying out a premium to have games developed for them resulting in a closed garden but for some indie devs, it actually pays the bills.

Can’t wait to see what 2024 has for VR since with the release of the Unreal engine universal VR wrapper, we will likely see a boom in VR mods at least for the Unreal scene. Great job to all the mod developer out there putting so much effort into the medium.

but but we saved them from the evil doctors and liberals when they were in the womb, they should be thanking us.

I think it is a mixed bag. Maybe there are people who are god damn idiots especially looking at these parents trying to deny “proven” vaccines, this isn’t a comment on the covid vaccines, I’m vaxxed and had the most recent booster but I can at least in a way understand people’s fear around it. I think Covid was able to slip on by because “2% VeRy SmAlL NuMbEr, StOp BeInG CoWaRdS!” maybe I’m wrong and this whole thing was a trial run for the next super bug that will come out in the coming decade but I think a disease with a mortality rate comparable to the black death (30-60%) with a spreadability of covid though may lead to people taking it slightly more seriously. There will be obvious exceptions, hell I imagine many industrial leaders will still push the front line staff saying its “fake news” so they keep making profit while not caring about their people. Then again a disease with that kind of mortality rate would probably collapse modern society for better or worse at the bare minimum greatly reform it, the after effects of black death are fascinating read.

once we have gotten past the ethical quandaries and doing it the right way. It would be cool to just synthesize voices for npcs and PC from a list of “character types” and maybe add accents for the main PC. So all games can have voiced audio (could be cool if it can also work in a retroactive way, like play a classic CRPG but have fully voiced characters would be pretty neat), which can be a mixed bag in modern day since realistically there is a budget and voice acting can take a ton of money if done right. So it means we as gamer if we can mod in new quests, we can use such system to truly expand thee game. Like I love real VA performances so I can see this as a “stopgap” so you can get the main questline done and many of the “good” side quests done but you can use this AI trained voice for the more smaller tasks that may not get as much love or as I said use it for modding.

In some ways I agree, people love to tear each other down but one of their examples is around “Genshin Impact players”, Like cool you can enjoy those games but god damn them getting popular is fucking scary to me as a gamer since it means Gatcha gaming is coming to the west and I’m sorry to all you Genshin impact player but those mechanics are some of the most cancerous things in modern gaming. The huge gambling aspects, paying for power, just the constant daily grinds, etc. The same is said for sports titles and other things. So people use it as a “Har har I feel I’m better than you” but I think there is a fear of such monetization catching on. We as gamers should be fighting against these things because we are becoming nothing but a god damn piggy bank for these large gaming corporations, who are trying to make us gamblers. Its honestly the reason why I try to stick with the PC market and indie games since the biggest problem area is the AAA scene since they are trying to extract the most amount of wealth. I want a developer to succeed and I think there is a fair place for monetization in the gaming scene but right now a ton of devs (realistically publishers) don’t respect players and their money.

I mean even from a core concept, melee with big animations just seems like an odd way to go for that style of game as you point out with multiple enemies. Also its brain dead simple unless they have changed it where you just go left, right, left, right. So difficulty setting basically just goes down to how tanky is this enemy (which is a pretty common way to artificially inflate a game’s difficulty).

He was certainly above that. Hell his story “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” also known as “White Ape”. Is literally a book about the “one drop rule” to the point its actually funny because of how absurd it comes off as. Its so insanely racist, it fucking becomes funny based on the character’s reaction. Its not a great short story but basically he find out his great great great great grandmother was a “white ape” (which is not human per say but lets read between the lines since the white apes come from the congo region), his response to this news was pouring gasoline on himself and burning himself alive. Like yes its fiction but the fact he made a fucking short story where the focal point is discovering that you are mixed race and learning that is so mind breaking, death was the only logical option is god damn hilarious.

I mean even federal holidays don’t help. At least for the lower classes since businesses are not forced to follow said holidays. It may be good for federal/government workers but from the private sector it will mean very little.