If anything, Duskbloods further confirms this is a B game. They took a mode of Elden Ring/Dark/Demon Souls that people have historically loved (jolly coop) and built a game around that. It is no different than building a game around dodging (Bloodborne), blocking/parrying and traversal (Sekiro), or even just one off arena fights (… MANY of the Armored Core expandalones).

They built it for Nightreign. They did a much scaled down version for Duskbloods as a way to get a sack of cash from Nintendo and to pressure Sony into letting them go back to an IP they like (Bloodborne).

It really IS fun to watch reactions from people who have never had any experience with From outside of as “The Dark Souls company”. They have ALWAYS done this kind of shit (hell, they even did it recently with the VR game nobody played). They have their A team work on their flagship IP whether that is Dark Souls or Armored Core or King’s Field. They have their B team(s) work on more experimental games. Sometimes it is something nobody ever remembers (was it Decirine?) and sometimes it is a cult favorite like Shadow Tower Abyss or Bloodborne. But the existence of Master of the Arena didn’t mean an AC2 wasn’t coming just like AC2 Another Age being weird barely connected missions on a pseudo-tactical map didn’t mean we weren’t getting AC3 and so forth.

If I were them, I’d be worried about targeted violence against me and my party more than random spree killings.

They very much are. The endless “You shouldn’t be able to track my jet” was very much about making it harder to plan a blue shell than it was about caring about getting clowned on for hating the environment. I honestly suspect THAT is the big reason that musk wanted to be a government official and destroy things. Now he can get a secret service detail (or at least pretend his hired thugs are secret service) for life.

You’re right, I don’t care about the plight of veterans any more than the plight of anyone else. If anything, I care slightly less because of their culpability in our military misadventures and the trail of death and destruction we’ve left in our wake. That said, they should be taken care of. Like anyone else should be taken care of.

That is more or less where I come down. I do not at all think that we should shake people’s hands and thank them for their service in shooting a brown kid and destroying a mosque… or sitting in an office chair while their coworkers did that for them. I don’t like salmon THAT much.

But the US military is more or less proof that socialism and planned economies work. And we have done wonders implementing aspects of UBI for them. But the moment they put down the gun/wrench/pen? Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Like… fuck the VA. You shouldn’t have to have been told to look the other way from sexual assault of a fellow soldier to get medical and psychiatric treatment.

But deleting the VA without providing anything better? That is the same as destroying the orgs that apparently helped lower income households not freeze to death in the winter and is just about suffering for suffering’s sake.

And, of course, the call of duty generation just fantasize about how everyone is soap mcprice and is going to do a rambo because they don’t ACTUALLY understand how militaries or modern warfare works and refuse to acknowledge just how dangerous the guns on store shelves actually are.

And they won’t be.

Back in the day of bolt actions and single aimed shots? Yeah. Training matters a lot.

In the era of semi automatic rifles with high capacity magazines? Just aim at a crowd and squeeze a few times and you’ll get a couple kids.

Let’s break down the Call of Duty wank fantasy, shall we?

It’s the strategic operation planning, explosives training, understanding of communications, battle logistics and OPSEC training that makes them a possible threat to the government.

• Strategic Operation planning: Ah, yes. Because the average grunt is coordinating combined arms efforts. Let’s not forget that probably the most effective planned (alleged) murder of the past few decades was allegedly done by a rich comp sci kid
• Explosives training: Oh, okay. So they are going to be given a backpack full of C4?
• Communications: See above regarding how every grunt is Jack motha fugging O’Neill himself.
• Logistics: Ah, so those unhoused people are going to have the best supply chain to ever exist?
• OPSEC: Dude… it has been a decades long struggle to explain to the military why fitbits and cell phones aren’t good things to carry around

Again. Maybe we should discuss reality and not just thank Rambo for his service before he draws first blood for the fifteenth time?

The military aspect of this doesn’t make much of a safety difference because of all the other horrifically stupid decisions this country has made over the past century or so. What matters are that people are losing their homes. And maybe, just maybe, we should think about why one class of people get basically UBI but the rest of the country doesn’t.

You don’t need much training to commit mass murder with a semiautomatic weapon you bought from walmart. You just need money for ammo.

There is this propaganda (can’t imagine where it comes from…) that the real danger are poor people. It isn’t. It is middle and upper class people who have a dozen ARs in their closet who snap and decide to go on a killing spree.

And if you are going to pretend you care about military veterans: Maybe don’t imply they are all one bad day away from going on a spree?

The reason the switch 1 was emulated so fast was a hardware vulnerability on nvidia’s part. Presumably we won’t see that again.

Also: While switch games DO run better on a steam deck, they don’t run great. And I think estimates put the switch 2 at closer to a PS4 than PS3 in terms of power? But even PS3/360 games don’t run gerat on a Steam Deck.

Not to mention nintendo’s lawyers putting the fear of mario into the emulation community.

So in a few years? I could see MAYBE some proof of concepts. But I doubt we’ll actually be able to properly emulate switch 2 games until at least 2030.

Its almost like those “politics” are related to why the pricing is weird?

But hey, fuck em. This is hype train time, right? We should be thankful it is only eighty bucks for Mario Kart because REAL fans would give them a hundred bucks for the greatest game ever made or whatever asinine bullshit.

You DO realize that a port is not just as simple as picking the dropdown in your editor to compile for switch versus xbox versus PC, right?

There is a substantial amount of effort to do any kind of port. And for one where the default experience is a 1080p handheld display? The kinds of games that only have M+KB support (because people are also forgetting the “KB” part…) are not the ones that run the best on tiny screens. And where the default use case is having both joycons still connected to the device.

Don’t get me wrong. There are definitely corner cases. But we literally went through this with the Steam Controller a decade or so ago (15 years?). Consoles are a giant part of the market and targeting xinput gets you an interface that works on all of those AND improves the experience for a lot of users on PC. Versus finding a way to downscale your input to just a mouse and 8-10 buttons?

The number of third parties that meaningfully benefit from the switch-mouse are going to be very small. And most, if not all, of them will also have gamepad support for people who don’t want to have to sit at at a table with a surface that is compatible with said switch mouse.

OH! If studios were really going to specifically target switch ports for RTSes and Grand Strategy games, we would have seen a lot more that took advantage of the motion controls of the Switch 1. That shit was wild.

Eh?

Conceptually I like the idea.

But even if it isn’t uncomfortable to use and has decent DPI? It is going to have the same problem the OG steam controller or even the PS5 adaptive triggers have. If only one platform is going to use an input type then it is not going to be used by any third parties.

Yes, in this case it is two platforms: Switch and PC. But the number of developers who will say “I can make a switch port and only a switch port of my game” are few and far between. They’ll once again focus on how to make gamepad work because that gives them ALL the consoles, the Steam Deck, and even helps us olds with RSI.

It isn’t quite that easy.

The US is a MASSIVE part of basically every luxury industry and isn’t insignificant in many others. So while alternate trading partners can be found to handle stuff like lumber, plenty of industries are going to be hit real hard and not have alternative customers. And they aren’t going to just want to lower their profits for national pride.

But yeah. I REALLY hope trump is just actively destroying the US either in the name of putin or just out of anger and spite over not winning in 2020. Because the alternative is that we are all going to suffer so fucking much because that piece of shit doesn’t understand what tariffs are.

I assume it will be on basically every subscription IGC.

Big lump sum to start with and guarantee they have a successful launch for any investors. And then people will buy it when it leaves the IGC in 6-12 months because they put it off or were waiting for a DLC or whatever. And then they’ll buy it on every single platform because Hollow Knight is that damned good.

But the actual price to get something in an IGC is not as high as people think it is.

Its hard to tell what exactly their MS deal is and it would be surprising if MS had much influence beyond “We are part of the first release date”

But 2025 is actually pretty plausible. Pure speculation, but if Silksong was in the polishing/padding stage in even late 2023 and Team Cherry are financially stable? Waiting for a new console release makes a lot of sense. ESPECIALLY the Switch 2 since…

Look. The Switch 1’s launch year was a fucking shitshow. Yeah yeah yeah, they had the greatest wii u of all time and blah blahblah. But the first party releases were pretty jacked up. It was “the Nindies” that carried the Switch 1. And it was ridiculously good for those indie studios who basically were the only games available for the latest Nintendo gameboy.

And Switch 2 is looking the same. That sizzle reel was almost all “We have a small DLC for the Switch 1 game!” and “This will be available in 2026”. So you can bet plenty of indie devs and publishers were in talks with Nintendo about when the release window was so they could decide if they wanted to wait or not.

… The entire hour long show IS an ad.

The modern world needs to change. Humans are getting more and more depressed, broken, struggling and mentally ill just to get more and more exposed to ads, social pressure and the lot.

This is by design. People are rightfully criticizing the US for barely protesting our fascist regime. But everyone is either living paycheck to paycheck or well aware how quickly their savings will burn away if they get fired. So protests in the middle of the week, when politicians MIGHT see it, are a no go. And weekend protests mostly are ineffectual and just antagonize people who “just want some peace and quiet on their day off”

UBI is definitely something we have needed for decades now. I personally come down on the side of UBI for basic living expenses but encourage people to work for luxuries and advancement (and if that sounds like the dystopia of Mars in The Expanse…). But we need something so that people can actually live without a job as we put more and more work into automating those jobs away.

As for the topic at hand: I was fortunate enough to have a 9/80 job for a number of years (basically every other Friday off) and loved the schedule. And it is why I am so skeptical of the 4/40 movement and am increasingly suspicious it is a poison pill.

Because it isn’t like the workload is going to drop. So people are going to be expected to get a full week’s work done in four days. For some that is going to be trivial because they have such a small workload (that they are super eager to find ways to use AI to automate…). For others? That means early mornings and late nights and even faster burnout where they have to fit every single errand and the like into that Friday off and have even less energy to do anything on the weekend.

Like I said, I loved my 9/80 and it was really nice for making me value that every other Friday off and try to do something with it. But the number of times I had to swap a Friday last minute because of meetings or just come in for a half day to get a deliverable done…

And the logical reality is that companies will decide 4/40 is good for productivity… and pay people 90% of their former salaries because “We respect the work you are doing but you also only work four days a week…”. 90% of already stagnating salaries during a time of global inflation.

Having consistent uptime and not locking broken IMAP behind a paywall would beat Tuta.

I have a proton subscription (although I am in the process of switching to fastmail since that better suits my needs) but I think “privacy respecting email” is a fool’s errand and increasingly a red flag. In a lot of ways, it is no different than a VPN: They can say whatever the hell they want. If you are in a situation where you are trusting them then you have already made a mistake.

Proton et al ARE awesome because you can get a mostly functional email for free without any other identification (mostly functional in that a lot of services put the proton domains on a spam list… because anyone can get a burner). But if you are sending ANYTHING sensitive, you want to be encrypting that. And you want to do that in a way that is not asking the company to do it for you.

So as long as thundermail doesn’t require a phone number or some other form of personal ID to make an account: f’ing A. After that it is just a question of their support for IMAP et al (highly probable considering… Thunderbird) and what it costs to use your own domains.

Yes-ish.

The problem is getting a hold of that medication. For The Pill: Some monthly pills are prescription and others aren’t. Same with Plan B (emergency birth control to be taken within a day or two of the sexual encounter). Depending on the person’s health and body, they may or may not be able to get away with the non-prescription variants

But for “real” abortion pills? Those are basically all controlled to one degree or another.

So yeah. Anyone sort of kind of can mail whatever (blah blah blah, surveillance state, blah blah blah). But getting a hold of the materials TO mail is very much a challenge.

Hell. How do you know they were ever “good” to begin with? We have seen an increasing trend in long cons in open source projects and social media and the like.

Especially when most discourse is largely indistinguishable from AI anyway. Just make a vague non sequitor that aligns with the politics of the audience and everyone cheers.

And all of that is super easy to detect and assumes that the majority of major instance owners are actively fighting this. Just like how free market capitalism ensures everyone is happy and satisfied.

This is not a simple problem to solve. It was a problem in the days of message boards, a problem in the days of digg/reddit, and is still a problem today.

Understand the risks and dangers of what you use rather than just assuming things will be ideologically pure.

While I obviously support and use lemmy:

You DO realize that lemmy has even fewer protections against bots and no vetting of instance owners (or even mods on those instances), at all, right? The big difference is that there won’t be a news post about “special interests” controlling discourse on here.

I think Switch 2 is more likely. Which run their sizzle reel in April?

I obviously don’t know their financials, but I am going to assume a month or two isn’t going to change things all that much for Team Cherry.

So they can either launch for Switch 1 (and everything else) and be “just another game”. Or they can launch for Switch 2 (and everything else) and be the ONLY game. Plenty of “nindie” games did exactly that during the, quite frankly disastrous, first year or so of the Switch 1 and it was amazing for their studios.

Launching as part of the XBOX Boy or whatever MS calls their handheld is also an option. But MS is almost definitely going to take advantage of the albatross that was the Series S to have significant cross compatibility.

It is more than a bit of a fallacy, but the general idea is that any product worth using will distinguish itself. Whereas the products that spend vast amounts of money on advertisement “can’t stand on their own”.

Like I said, it is a fallacy that insists companies should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and ignores the reality of the landscape these days.

THAT said: nordvpn goes REALLY hard on the advertisements and is still one of the more popular/few remaining big sponsors for podcasts and influencers. And THAT gives me pause because it has generally been shown that those are horrible venues for “getting a product out there” and mostly exist to take advantage of parasocial relationships. And, based on the linus media group leaks and corroboration from various twitch streamers, the big outfits are asking for a LOT of money per sponsorship spot.

And considering there is no way to really vet a VPN and you are inherently trusting them to do what they say they do (or do the good version of what they don’t even bother to talk about)…