It's obvious to me that a second #Trump presidency would destroy American #democracy - which is, at the moment, on shaky ground. We are in the throes of a global battle against #authoritarianism and #fascism, and each of us must actively choose the path we want for ourselves and future generations.
📌📌 I'll be posting relevant links in this ongoing Democracy Thread. >>
1/3 (Morning Joe, 11/13/23) Over #VeteransDay weekend, in both social media posts and at a #rally, Trump vowed to "root out the communists, marxists, fascists, and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country," and goes on to say that "the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within."
Several hundred people gathered in central #Ljubljana on Thursday evening in support of the #civilians under attack in #Gaza calling for an end to the #violence in the #MiddleEast .
More than 350 UC SantaCruz #students & #supporters#blocked the #campus entrance at High & Bay streets Thursday morning, calling for people to “skip school and work, do not look away from the #genocide .” The west entrance was still open to traffic as of 1 p.m.
#Trump spouts his narrative of the #NYAG's case: “‘Trump had no money & he wrote up phony statements & he defrauded banks,’ even though they were represented by the best lawyers.”
Wallace: “I move to strike that answer.”
(Granted.)
Engoron: “Mr. Kise, can you control your client? this is not a #political#rally, this is a courtroom. I don't want editorializing, we’ll be here forever. We don't have time to waste. We have one day to do this.”
Kise: "You're in control of the courtroom, not me."
Attended the #peaceful#rally in support of #Palestine in #SaintJohn#NewBrunswick. It was a great turnout of wonderful and peaceful folks. Lots of support from passers-by. I'm very happy to report that there were no hateful displays by the time I had to leave.
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
Dirt 5 is an arcade off-road racing game developed by Codemasters.
I don't normally talk about who developed a particular game, but today is a little different.
I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with racing games. Mainly hate; from 1987 (Test Drive) through until 2019 I tried to like racing games, but I just didn't. Racing with keyboard/mouse is awful, and I couldn't "get" racing with a controller (PS2 / Gran Turismo).
That changed with the Xbox One controller and Forza Horizon 4. It finally clicked for arcade racing. I still don't enjoy technical racing sims.
Dirt Rally & Dirt Rally 2.0 were both an exercise in frustration. I'd heard that Dirt 5 was different, and I had a key for it, so I installed it.
They were correct. Dirt 5 is a whole different exercise in frustration.
As a racing game, it's proficient, and feels a lot like a rally cross between The Crew and Forza Horizon games.
Dirt 5 was released by Codemasters in 2020. Codemasters was purchased by Electronic Arts in 2021. Which explains a lot about why Dirt 5 has been almost impossible to play since 2021.
There is a literal gamebreaking bug, in a game that is less than three years old and remains unfixed. Quite simply, my initial start of this game was a fluke, because after that, it crashed every single time.
It's a known issue. It is unfixed. I put on my technical support hat, and went hunting. It appears that older DRM (Denuvo in this case) does not get on with the e-cores in 12th and 13th gen Intel CPUs.
Gigabyte released a workaround patch for 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs that parks the e-cores to enable compatibility, and I located an app (ParkControl) that will allow me to do the same, and it works consistently.
This is for a game that EA still sells.
The Steam forums have multiple posts about it crashing on startup, as do the EA Dirt 5 forums (for Xbox Game Pass PC and Steam).
EA just doesn't appear to care, which is no surprise at all.
Pixel Wheels Release 0.25.1 (github.com)
Fixed an issue where the game would complain about a missing controller when started on Android (#398)....