I would love to know more, especially how law enforcement is tracking us, but this has a paywall. So I guess I’ll die in ignorance.

Until we find that Nestle is just bottling the same tap water at twice the price. Oops!

I doubt it matters what we think anymore. It barely did before, but I can’t see any light at the end of this American Experiment tunnel.

I play FFXIV. I’ll break it down by expansions, but it’s the one that didn’t follow the general downwards trend so much.

1.0 - trash. They couldn’t figure out how to work together. One guy spends forever making the best looking water wheel ever, in the background, that you never interact with. It’s too graphically intensive, and flows the wrong way from the water. It doesn’t match the building it’s attached to. Meanwhile, they forget to add roads towards main cities. It’s an unplayable mess. It’s literally unplayable, as they killed it off to replace it with:

2.0, A Realm Reborn - they really fixed it under one guy’s leadership. It’s playable, and works. It’s outdated somewhat today, but has a lot of moral grey areas and twists. There’s a lot of running around and time wasting, which was common back then.

Heavenward - they made a great story. It’s one of the best expansions. Streamlined and faster. No needless “talk to 5 villagers” quests like previously.

Stormblood - not as great. There’s a lot of setup they use later. The world building is really great, though. Some of the best looking areas.

Shadowbringers - the best expansion they’ve ever made. Perfectly balanced world building and characters, and story. This is peak FF, with the best music as well. Probably because they can ditch much of the old A Realm Reborn story.

Endwalker - ties it all together. The story leads up to “death is inevitable for everything that has ever lived, so just die now” kind of depression hopelessness that you wonder how they’ll get out of it. Well, because it’s Japanese and FF, it’s the power of friendship that saves the day. But, this really feels like the culmination of everything they’ve learned in the previous expansions.

Dawntrail - this is the downward slide. They force you into a role to support someone for ruler that is almost slapstick bad. Characters don’t make logical choices. The theme is all over the place and can’t decide what it wants to be. Many people say to stop at endwalker, but we’ll see how the next expansion goes, which is years away.

There’s plenty to say about the game otherwise, but the general thought is that they’re gradually cutting corners, taking longer, and under delivering as they’re stretched too thin. They’re feeling the same pressure everyone else in the world is - not enough money. Which is crazy, because FFXIV is THE game keeping Square Enix alive.

Whatever glue they’re using has a different expansion/contraction rate than the stainless steel, and the fairly smooth metal doesn’t give much surface area to hold, anyway. So in cold or hot days, you’re going to see separation.

And it doesn’t help when they don’t even glue the right pattern from the factory.

Certainly not his estranged family that didn’t even live with him. Typical CEO behavior, pursuing profit over his own family relationships. What a miserable way to live.

Allegedly, he was given liquid capital by Russian oligarchs to buy Twitter when the courts ruled that he was obligated to buy it. He might be rich, but that kind of money wasn’t just sitting in his checking account. It was his company valuations.

Once he got tangled into Twitter, that’s when he seemed to really go off the deep end.

Oh, gross. I haven’t seen many videos of him (especially lately) so I guess I hadn’t seen enough of his stuff for his personality to come through.

Why is Musk mad at AsmonGold? Did he dunk on Elon for paying others to play his account?

I just… Fail to see the reason Elon should dedicate his time to fighting with a neet shut in. Asmon turned off donations on his stream. He doesn’t care about money, political influence, or bathing. Just games. What possible gain would there be in trying to mess with him? The richest person to have ever existed in history, in a slap fight with a dude that lives in a dirty hovel? It almost sounds like trying to fight Diogenes.

And exposing his editors isn’t the “gotcha” you think it is. They just protect him from YouTube’s crappy rules.

It sure seems like a cool accessibility tool, but he spent the whole time taking about why he did it, and magnets, that it glosses over the “how does it work?” Part that really matters. It’s not just a keyboard, so I’m sure there’s more to it. I’m hoping he has other videos that explain the concept.

Yeah this is exactly what we should want from AI. Filling in an immediate need, but also recognizing it won’t be as good as a pro translation.

IDK, that could be different. I bought some surfaces ~2 years ago that apparently aren’t capable of upgrading to 11. They’re perfectly usable, so I’ll have to put Linux on them. I think anyone that’s capable will find that they have to do that, or throw out perfectly good hardware to buy the next shiny thing.

The only problem is I did switch my laptop to Ubuntu back in the day to avoid W7. Or maybe to was 10? All I did was stream video, like Netflix, on it. Turns out, Netflix wouldn’t run because they locked it down to specific OSes. WINE could run it, with a horrible stutter. So I had to dual boot, then I switched to a VM of Windows in Linux, which ended up just being another step to get to stream a movie. Coupled with hours of driver problems to solve, it just wasn’t worth the hassle.

Now, it’s a matter of “can I stream?” Because otherwise, they’re e-waste. I really hope they can, because while I’ll have to keep my gaming PC on w11, my htpc and tablets I will gladly switch.

I can’t imagine I’m alone. If people can get their programs out of the walled garden of Microsoft, I think they will. Not so much new features, but that they can just do what they always do. We’re creatures of habit. We probably won’t see adoption in high numbers, but more than before.

Also, it’s entirely possible I’ll have to eat these words if streaming still doesn’t work right.

I used to sell books at Borders (so far before MAGA crap) and you are 100% correct. Most men were reading books as well, but they really didn’t gravitate to Ann Rice’s vampire series, Twilight, or even most mystery books. Is was Sci Fi, fantasy, history, general knowledge sort of stuff.

The sheer volume of women buying romance novels was staggering, and I think speaks more to porn habits than anything. These women kept the store alive long enough for corporate to fuck up and bankrupt themselves.

Now that I think about it, there was a whole row of JUST Star Wars books. But because Disney erased so much of the Expanded Universe canon that they wrote, they all faded away. I don’t even have one in my local Barnes and Noble. Not even a single novel, from what I saw. Everyone totally lost interest and Disney doesn’t care to rekindle that spark.

I expect that he’ll push for some kind of corporate tax credit to companies that have in-person employees. To help tip the scales.

He thinks it’ll increase control, but it’s just as likely to rile up discontent. Especially targeted towards him.

Maybe I suck, cause I typically have to watch the YouTube guide on the fight, and take a few tries to not die/debuff and get it down. And it seemed more complicated than last raid tier, which I was able to just do all of Pandemonium fine. Usually first try.

Maybe it’s better to just wait until they unlock the weekly rewards so you can spam it and get good.

I haven’t even done the last raid. Spent all my time doing ranked CC matches to Crystal rank and took a break until ranged rewards come in after Jan 1st. It’s a very different skill set, and you kind of have to relearn it all when you switch.

I mean, it’s good but “E for Everyone” is also available.

Well shit. I guess I can’t play it anymore. There’s still duotrigordle, waffle, and a million others though. Plus I was starting to see ads on the app.

I’m speaking mainly of the distrust against the public having access for fear that we’d abuse it and not give them a cut. We can’t have access to these things now, but we used to. Regardless of form, regardless of piracy.

It’s more of a move to restrict ownership when you make a purchase, that has a farther reach than just games. I could see this being applied to cars, houses, etc. In that you only rent a license, and don’t actually own anything. I see this as just a first step, and the logic they use to justify it doesn’t make sense.

We used to rent these games from Blockbuster Video! On DVD when we had DVD burners and little to no drm! How did it suddenly not become acceptable?

Oh no, they’re putting denuvo on it? Man I loved the first game. I don’t think they even had anything close to a problem with piracy because it was a huge hit. Like, it not only did amazing for Warhorse Studios, but it made a huge tourism jump for the region.

That’s a bummer, and as much as I want to support KC:D II, I can’t support denuvo.