This is also why there was such coordinated effort to shut down wikileaks, or to at least stall out the cultural movement that was building behind it.

If you give people a methodology to whistleblow that at least on paper allows them to stay anonymous and avoid putting their life/livelyhood/survival in jeapordy, that removes one of the biggest disincentives.

The difference between 4chan and Reddit is pretty small

I’m sorry, but I sincerely doubt you’ve been on 4chan recently.

Reddit All Hot:

Reddit All New:

I haven’t been watching Second Wind since all the drama that Frost unearthed when he left, so I don’t know if this is a trend with Yahtzee lately, but did this seem incredibly short to anyone else?

I could have sworn that he usually went into more detail in these year end best/worst/blandest videos. This one barely had a single throwaway joke for each entry.

Where have you guys been? Half Life 3 was confirmed December 13, 2007.

I’m sure it’s coming any day now.

They have been “working” on Half Life 3 for over a decade, with many promising leads found through datamining things left in other source games over that time. There is almost always absurd levels of speculation over the smallest crumbs of datamined material.

For example, there’s been an unfinished NPC worked on for Episode 3 left in Half Life 2 that was first shown in a tech demo in 2006, literally prefixed with “Ep3_” in the code. It’s been around for 18 years and the most that was used from it was graphics for the gels in Portal 2, vs all of the speculated things about it.

The recent documentary they released had what was effectively a post-mortem section where they talked about why Episode 3/Half Life 3 never came out.

I can see why you might think that their new controller and headset might be enough of a game changer that they feel like making 3 is worth it again, but the overall feeling I’ve gotten from them from following all of this closely since the pre-Orange Box days is that: 3 isn’t happening due to the immense pressure and expectations that have built up over the many years people have been waiting. Maybe we get Alyx 2 or some other spin off, but the only thing they’d accomplish with 3 at this point is disappointing a wide variety of people with countless conflicting expectations.

At the very least you also have to contend with “Valve Time”. What would take a normal studio a year takes them four due to their obsession with polishing everything. Team Fortress 2 started development in 1998 and didn’t release for 9 years.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see where they go next, and I hope this means more than a voice actor sending a fun new years message. But you need to understand that “definitive evidence” of 3 coming based off datamined material has been floating around for 15+ years now.

That means that roughly 20% arent. That’s 1 in 5, and that’s pretty ridiculous.

Windows and Office are incredibly easy to generate an activation key for using MASgrave. As I understand it, it tricks MS into giving you a valid Windows key, but the Office side does some trickery to fake activation.

Either way, very easy and no need to install shady cracked versions. Just install like normal then use MASgrave after.

If you want to go more legit for any reason, you can find OEM key resellers for Windows (and for Office too I think). OEM Windows keys are only good for one install, but they’re also only around $30.

There’s also a ton of benefits to installing Windows yourself instead of using the manufacturer’s version with even more added bloatware from the manufacturer. There’s a lot you can do to roll back Microsoft’s bullshit through customizing the installer ISO yourself. Unfortunately it’s pretty technical though. Not something easily explained in a single comment.

As a note to myself: When I get around to upgrading to Windows 11, record all the shit I do so there’s at least something vaguely reputable for the community instead of bits of good info across tons of otherwise crap SEO spam articles. Remember to cite the sources too.

Probably less of a desire and more apathy. Money’s already spent, and some bean counter mathed out that it would be cheaper to delist them than to keep paying people to manage the accounting and any payout to the devs.

Same thing happened earlier this year with all the Adult Swim published games, and some of the devs impacted (and I think some of the people on Adult Swim’s side too) were semi-open about it once any of them knew what was going on.

They’ve already been removing a ton of the CN and Adult Swim content from the (HBO) Max service.

A good example of what can be possible, from the Super Mario 64 PC port: https://youtu.be/Lav8wgQP9rc

Looks like the old magazine ads for the game brought to life. That’s a combination of the Render96 3D models project and the ray tracing mod for lighting.

Ocarina of Time’s port (by the same team as this one for Star Fox 64) doesn’t have anything quite as impressive yet graphically, but there are high quality texture replacements and an import of all the enhanced 3DS models. You can also replace most of the character and enemy models with the ones used in Twilight Princess if you want. And there are a ton of great quality of life changes like letting the iron boots be mapped to the D-Pad like a normal item. Water temple isn’t anywhere as tedious anymore.

The .bat is for extracting the game data from the rom. As the readme unclearly says: you need to run the .bat to make the data files (the .OTR) you need to run the game, then you run the .exe to play.

Can’t speak to proton compatibility, but I would be surprised if they don’t release a Linux native version as well. Just give them some time, this just released and they are apparently still missing the .sh file for extracting the .otr on Mac.

These ports don’t tend to be one and done releases, they get updates/bug fixes/upgrades/additional features over time.

About time. One hell of a wrap up.

At least that one has a simple solution: delete your saved card.

The term Ante in the game is used instead of “round” or “level”. It’s a measure of how far you’ve gotten. Each “ante” is made up of three “stakes”, point totals you need to beat in a set number of hands played and cards discarded.

There’s no aspect of choosing how much you risk, of “ante-ing up”, or how much you stake. You either beat the points goal (called “chips”) or you lose. There’s no playing of your hand against other hands, bluffing about how good your hand may be to convince others to fold, etc. It’s just you against the score goal. If you beat it faster than the amount of hands you’re given to work with you get extra rewards.

The game has no elements where you stake chips for rewards or anything like that. It borrows basic elements of scoring mechanics from poker, and uses a lot of poker terms for other purposes, but the closest part to gambling is the ability to buy random card packs between rounds (to customize your deck instead of just having the standard 52 card deck).

In between rounds you have access to buy various things to add further modifiers to your scoring, and to adjust the composition of your deck in order to make getting specific combinations more likely.

You can learn most of this in about 5 minutes with the demo, or by taking some time to watch someone else play on youtube.

And people pretend that only American ratings systems pull this kind of bullshit.

My daughter isn’t even two yet, but I’m definitely trying to plan a balance with this. It’s a huge part of how I learned, and I don’t think I would have learned nearly as much or as well otherwise.

At the same time though, I can’t help but feel like ads and the internet are far more insidious than they were when I first went online in 2000.

Malware is much more sneaky. There’s more spare resources for it to use without impacting performance. Ads have likewise had plenty of time to develop/advance/get worse.

Thankfully, ad blocking, anti-malware, and recovery tools have also advanced.

I think for the early days I’ll have her on an isolated, locked down, pre-protected device for learning the basics of using a computer (mouse, files, the type of stuff they used to teach in elementary school).

Then slowly take off the training wheels.

I laughed when I saw the note in the changelog recently. It was something like “removed added collision on an underwater pipe speedrunners enjoyed”

While you aren’t wrong that every automated system needs human oversight and occasional intervention, when the average person hears “fully automated” or any of the many marketing terms used for these things lately they are going to take it pretty close to face value.

It also doesn’t help that it was largely marketed and reported on as if it wasn’t an experiment, but a solved and working “product”.

Every system will have its own requirements and acceptable margins for error and required interventions, but I think most people would feel that even the one in twenty (5%) goal is a lot for a project like the Amazon automated shops. It would be a lot for any of the automations I come into contact with (and have built) at my job, but admittedly I’m not doing anything as remotely novel or as complicated as an unattended shop.

Beyond that, people have a lot more reasons to dislike these systems than just the amount of human intervention and I think they’re just going to jump on whichever one is currently being discussed in order to express it. Like displeasure that the teleoperation positions are outsourced the way they are, taking even more jobs away from the local population.

Agreed. I’m not sure how exactly it would work, but I feel like the analog sticks and touchpads should be switched somehow.

I really wish brick and mortar stores would have displays of controllers to try out like they do with laptops and phones, but I’m not sure the money is there. Most people just go with whatever the standard xbox or playstation controller is and call it good enough.

A lot of this is coming from all the documentary and developer commentary content Valve released recently for the big 20th anniversary of Half Life 2’s release, so that’s spot on.