Watching a dude stream himself learning to play Age of Empires II and I would say that on average it's about 60% actual AoE content and 40% this guy -- who used to be a competitive RTS player and has played videogames professionally in public literally his entire career -- trying to gently walk all the feral, poorly socialized fourteen-year-olds in his Twitch chat through the mind-blowing concept that, actually, it's okay to be bad a videogame.
DOCTOR: (looking at my lab results) Well, these were precancerous, and if you'd waited another five or ten years, it would've been disastrous. So good thing we got them taken out.
ME: Right. In the procedure you insisted I didn't need and I had to repeatedly cry in your office to get you to refer me for?
Shoutout to the new #Firefish dev team, who've done a lot of work updating docs (as well as the app itself); that was the easiest and main painless update I think I've done yet.
So this place we’re staying is next to a zoo, and I would say if you go outside there’s a rather pungent lion smell that makes a very primal part of my brain want to run away very fast.
I know this is not exactly news to, for example, the entire population of Japan, but I can't believe it took me this long to think, "I wonder if it's good to put noodles in the miso broth?" (Answer: Yes.)
Honestly for something with only four base ingredients (water, noodles, hondashi, miso paste) if I'd thought about this at uni it would've been all I ate.
Finished Rogue Trader on the weekend and got... an actually okay ending, I guess? Which would be a first for an Owlcat game (I didn't walk out of it feeling like I'd wasted the last 80 hours, at least).
It's probably the least "Owlcatty" of the Owlcat games, which is a good thing; it feels shorter and a bit tighter than Kingmaker and WotR, though the space exploration stuff still drags (fly to a planet, click scan, click to mine a resource, rinse, repeat).
Main gripes are:
1. I know everyone gave Bioware shit for this, but I need CRPGs to bring back big obvious "[Flirt]" tags for romance dialogue. I keep triggering romances with characters I'm just trying to not be an asshole to which is, like... no. Particularly if it's locking me out of romances I actually want to do.
2. Kinda disappointed how little impact being a psyker, particularly a Telepath, has in dialogue. I guess it's a balance thing, but asides from a bit of throwaway flavor text I really feel like I should've been able to read minds and/or been tormented by daemons more.
3. Not enough Tyranids.
But those relatively minor gripes aside... yeah this one was pretty fun. (And also please please please more 40k RPGs please.)
I did like that you could basically say "fuck you" to the Imperium, and solve most conflicts sort-of peacefully, particularly with the Aeldari.
40k in general has always sat in that uncomfortable space of being a British satire of the British Empire that got, uh. Americanized and taken more and more seriously over the years? (Ref. also Judge Dredd, for e.g.) I have the 8th edition of the core rule and it's like... guys, this is so obviously taking the piss, like it is total "are we the baddies" material my god.
Rogue Trader is more po-faced, and I wouldn't say it engages comfortably with its themes of empire, exploitation, religion and xenophobia but it also doesn't present them as uncritically "good," either (probably most obviously reflected through whenever Marazhai approves of anything human). I think it also treads a pretty reasonably line between "the Imperial Cult provides ordinary people with a unifying positive force in a hostile universe" and "the Imperial Cult provides the worst people in the universe the means to indulge in their base excesses... and do the ends justify the means, really?" (Disclaimer: Yes I am a "the Emperor is a Chaos God" truther.)
And you can be the one person who says "fuck that shit" and the game mostly respects that, even gives you a literal deus ex machina ending to stop the Imperium invading and obliterating all your planets post-game. Being nice to people does work, in other words, which in something as cynical and, uh. Shall we say... misappropriated as 40k, is probably the biggest subversion of all.
So I see Google has entered its full "well if you're going to threaten us with antitrust we'll just take the whole internet down with us" tantrum phase, huh?
The short version is Google is allegedly paying "small publishers" to use an algogen tool to produce large quantities of regurgitated content. The "publishers" (I would say "regurgitators" except... no) pick a list of target websites to scrape, and then:
When any of these indexed websites produce a new article, it appears on the platform dashboard. The publisher can then apply the gen AI tool to summarize the article, altering the language and style of the report to read like a news story.
So I've been pretty happy using (and paying for!) Kagi for the last few months, but Stract has a similar vibe, as well as being free and also running its own independent crawler.
Random question but why are axe murderers always the go-to idiomatic murderers? Like we don't talk about "knife murderers" or "pipe murderers" or whatever nearly as commonly. Like what is it specifically about axe murdering that so captures the imagination? :bunhdthinking:
So my friend was obsessed with this song in high school, and I've had the MP3 in my library for all that time and never before now have I thought to go looking for the music video... and yet somehow it is exactly what I expected it would be?
So I've really, really wanted to like Maestral, a third-party macOS client for Dropbox, because Dropbox's native client is an egregious piece of shit.
But I think it just... doesn't work with Scrivener syncing? And after losing yet another 10k words in this project due to documents suddenly appearing as empty I'm just... I think I have to switch back.
(I've been taking obsessive snapshots and backups so have been able to recover most of what was lost, but it's still just... not a problem I want to deal with, and it's not a problem I've ever had to deal with previously. So something is obviously fucking up, and sadly Maestral is the most obvious culprit.)
Just as an FYI if you “illustrate” your blog posts with algogen images I immediately think less of your opinion on whatever topic you’re writing about, hey.
Huge shout-out the terrifying vacuum elevator at my in-laws' beach house which is like... you know one of those old vacuum tubes they used to send mail around in in offices back in the olden dayes? Like that. But for people. And sounds like forty vacuums running all at once.