I consider myself a pretty big science fiction fan. I’ve read a ton of science fiction novels, both old and new. I enjoy Star Trek. Love Star Wars. I like a lot of science-fiction themed video games, like Zone of the Enders, the original Bioshock, Borderlands, Prey (both the original and remake), Halo, Metroid, Half-Life, Fallout, etc.
I utterly loathe Mass Effect. I consider it one of the worst pieces of science-fiction ever created. I consider the overly sleek aesthetic of everything, from the ships, to the weapons, to the armor hideous. I consider the characters underwritten. The political entity that runs the galaxy is an uninteresting and derivative bureaucracy. The conflict between the various member races and their respective histories are far more interesting than the looming conflicts of the giant undead space robots looking to destroy the galaxy. And as a game, the gameplay is repetitive and uninteresting. Many of the enemies eventually just become damage soaks. The weapons and abilities are generally forgettable. I don’t think I’ve ever had less mentally impactful combat in a game before (as a note, I consider this a general issue with third-person shooters). And the inventory management in the first game was painfully terrible. I remember getting to the end of the game and having to spend an hour to manage my fucking inventory right before the last fight because I literally ran out of space and at a certain point all the crap you’ve collected just becomes worthless and pointless to have.
I played the first two games. I hated the first one when it came out and still hated it when I revisited it years later. I did like the incredibly janky Mass Mobile, as it was so poorly implemented that it was hilarious to watch it bounce off of random pieces of landscape like it was made of rubber. The second game I also really disliked because of the bifurcated Paragon and Renegade oppositional morality system that seemed really popular with that era of RPGs. And I didn’t even bother with the third. The games are just dull and frustrating, and I’ve never understood the love people have for them.
If anyone enjoys the game, that’s great. Nothing I say should take away someone else’s fun, but from my perspective, if you let another person’s negative perception of something you enjoy diminish your enjoyment of that thing, the only one who has “yucked your yum” is yourself.
In terms of AAA video games, I can’t help you. I really like Becky Chambers novels, though. Lots of people talking about their feelings in a space opera setting. Big emphasis on character development. These are things I enjoy. The ball numbing action violence of your typical mass-media space opera stuff? Much less so.
I’m emotionally incapable of accepting that other people dislike things I enjoy and I perceive their criticism of those things as personal attacks. When they tell me that this is a personal problem that I have and that I should learn to accept that people are complicated and that enjoying something someone else does not is perfectly valid and shouldn’t impact my sense of self-worth, I piss and shit myself and tell them that they’re calling my baby ugly. Because that’s how I think of the mindless entertainment I consume: as the closest thing I’ll ever have to children.
That’s fair. I’ll admit that I have a problem with getting overly mad at people for making stupid, accusatory comments that actively misrepresent what I say for their own benefit. I mean, they made a dumb comment and I can, and should, just ignore it. But I also have a difficult time letting things like that go and it’s something I should try to be better about.
I remember watching Red vs. Blue back before it was even on Youtube. Fuck I’m old. That was the era of the internet that, for me, was at its best. Before everything became a collection of solidified super services and people made shows by just moving a character model in Halo around. As others have said, the true end of an era. Also RIP to Monty Oum. Man was an auteur. Horny weirdo, too, but also an auteur.
This is one of the more scathing pieces to come out on Ars about Reddit. As the site did not respond to inquiries, all that was available to report on was profoundly negative statements that Advance is unlikely to enjoy seeing.
This is my thinking as well. IPOs are almost never profitable. If the stock lists at 50 a share, six months later it’ll probably be way closer to 20. And it’s not like Reddit is Facebook, either, if you want to compare it to another publicly traded social media website. Facebook, for all its faults, diversified its corporate enterprise years ago. It’s not just a social media company, but a legitimate tech conglomerate. It now handles payment processing, offer a functional storefront for small businesses, and also owns Oculus, Instagram, and a massive truckload of other shit. What does Reddit own? Well, it owns…Reddit. Its valuation is…maybe 15 billion dollars. What does it have to offer other companies? Well, it has user data. Which is not valueless, but also worth way less than it used to be since every single company you have an online account with collects and sells your data to someone else.
Yeah, it’s really more about two massive industries colluding to extract additional income from working Americans. Rental agencies contract with Spectrum, get a cut off the top, and the renters are stuck with a shitty internet service they don’t want. Honestly, renting has never been a great experience for the average American, but it’s been getting worse over time. Rental agencies are starting to cut staff, reduce actual beneficial services offered, force renters into paying for additional junk services they don’t want or need (what the fuck is a $50 a month “beautification fee,” anyway? Nobody ever fucking cleans this place…), and, of course, increase rent every year. And they can do this because…what the fuck else are you going to do? If you’re working class and live in a high cost of living area, you can’t just move, or buy a house. You have to rent. No other options, really. And while you’d think “well, if someone else opens an apartment complex that offers better services, you can just move there.” Sure, and spend 15 grand moving a mile and a half only to have the apartment complex you moved to suffer the same enshittification after 6 months that the first one did.
As an FYI, this is a very old thing that people are doing. There’s actually a term for it (beyond just “corporate censorship”). It’s bowdlerization or expurgation. And, on some level, I understand why people of a certain ethos would be opposed to it. Beyond the obvious reactionary agenda of being “anti-woke,” there are concerns here over artistic or authorial autonomy and the fear of a slippery slope in which previous cultural attitudes are historically white washed. And I think it’s good to acknowledge the past honestly. Not to celebrate those old attitudes, of course, but to let it stand as it is, scars and all, as a cultural artifact of a very different time. Editing the content of the original work to hide what is and was reduces it from that status of cultural artifact to just pure entertainment. That said, content warning wouldn’t really rob much from the book, unless you believe every book should be a complete and total surprise to the reader. I can’t comment too much on the beliefs of the author of this article, but their opposition to much of what they’re complaining about comes more from a place of “the woke mob is ruining books” rather than anything I would say is a more complete or salient examination of how we collectively relate to the art of the past.
Sure. These things are products to be purchased, after all. Regardless of how you feel about the content of the books themselves, I’d be extraordinarily annoyed if a company could just edit on a whim the content I had paid for and expected to have in perpetuity. That said, you should never realistically buy anything from an online publisher that doesn’t let you save a static text copy of the book as a PDF or other file offline. More generally, if you want to buy a book, the best thing to do is to buy from a used bookstore, if you’re able. Not like Amazon needs any more money.
The odds of that are so incredibly low. DE is a fantastic standalone game. Arguably one of the most artistically complex and rich games ever made, and it stands alone perfectly well. It raised the bar for gaming in a way that others have aspired to but not ever really reached. The best we can hope for is that the makers of the game can make a new game in the future. One whose IP they know how to protect, this time.
I don’t see how they can be releasing a Nintendo Switch 2 when they just released the Nintendo Switch like…a year or two ago. Wait…when did the Switch come out? March of 2017?! Holy shit it’s been 7 years.
Isn’t it great that the only way the supreme court can be recused from a case is if they decide they have a conflict of interest? You know…because the fact that Trump appointed 3 of them and the wife of one of them actively participated in an attempted insurrection don’t qualify as “conflict of interest.” What a fucked institution the Supreme Court is. Who could have predicted this would happen with a branch of the government defined by “all power and no accountability?”
This thing is so technically complex and has so many moving parts that I can only imagine it breaking literally constantly and costing a fortune to repair whenever it does.
I can only assume the reason you’d work for Disney as either an engineer or technician is if you have a kink involving being in a constant and inescapable state of overworked frustration.
Smith’s execution by “nitrogen hypoxia” took around 22 minutes, according to media witnesses, who were led into a viewing room at the William C Holman correctional facility in Atmore shortly before 8 pm local time.
Gaming, like all software development, becomes plagued by popularized anti-patterns every so often. Remember back in like 2010 and every. single. fucking. game. had unskippable, frustratingly difficult, often instantly fatal should you fail them, quicktime events? Because I fucking remember. And now those are nowhere, because they’re terrible. And, yes, the use of AI is not a game design pattern so much as it is a development tool that will be used to fastforward development and decrease costs around, presumably, asset generation, but to some extent that was always going to happen. Any time a tool comes about that fundamentally reduces human labor, it always sees widespread adoption. Eventually it’ll be industry standard, and it’ll be…fine. It’ll suck for people with aspirations around graphic design and 3D modeling, but those are just the first places there will be cuts. Eventually you’ll have the physics engines, game systems, state management, etc. and other core components of game design automated via AI processes, which will kill a shitload of dev jobs. And eventually the people who make these AI game engines will, instead of selling to a studio who will parameterize the AI with prompts, will automate the prompting process with AI itself, so instead of selling to studios, they’ll just have an AI service that will take your description for a game that you want, run it through a bunch of canned AI subroutines and it’ll crap out a boutique game of your design that they technically own and have full copyright over and which is just incredibly derivative of a ton of other IP - imagine every single game being Palworld, “like X crossed with Y with a bit of A and B thrown in.” That’s right: eventually the end user will design the games themselves. A world in which you never have to consume any game, or probably eventually any media of any kind, beyond the one you already liked and wanted. You’ll never have to be challenged more than you would like or experiment with different forms of media. It’ll be a brave new world, filled with brave new games.
A lot of companies overhired during COVID, Trump basically turned the Federal Reserve into an unlimited money hack for banks and other companies, the tech sector is particularly sensitive to boom and bust cycles of mass hiring/layoffs every few years, there’s been Fed rate hikes recently, and other factors. Your more conspiratorially minded would say it’s a concerted effort to make people too afraid to unionize by making them think their jobs are in danger.
I think part of the reason the word has caught on so much recently, especially in 2023, is that we are fully in a new era that I like to call the “solid internet.” The internet as a predominately web and mobile accessible media and social media landscape emerged after 2010, and for about 10 years continued to grow and evolve. I remember fleeing to reddit after Digg died (see the original famous case of enshittification). At the time, the internet was far more fluid. Facebook was popular, certainly, and Twitter was gaining in steam. YouTube was the de facto video hosting platform, but it still had some degree of nominal competition. Same with reddit as a content aggregator. The monoliths of the modern internet were growing, but still rising in popularity. And they were good. Better than anything we’d had before. Easier to access than usenet, but still strange and spontaneous and ever evolving. A brave new world, filled with brave new people (as well as a shitload of racism, homophobia, porn, and gore). This is a period I call the “fluid internet.” As of 2023, the internet has solidified and congealed around the current monolithic services as we know them. And now that competition is dead, they get to squeeze - they get to set prices, block VPN connections and unpaid API access, ban problematic or dissenting content, and create a truly corporatized, milquetoast experience - something that caters to everyone, but truly appeals to no one. Like the world’s dullest theme park.
The one thing that Cory Doctorow was wrong about in his definition of enshittification is that the final step is that a platform dies. Platforms used to die when they enshittified in the fluid internet, because competition existed and people would throw venture capital at plucky startups. But the reality is that we live in a post-competition world, and people are less adventurous and more “on rails” in how they expect to engage with the internet than they used to be. Google will continue to get worse, but it’s still going to be the de facto search mechanism here on out. Same for videos and YouTube. Because that’s what people use now and there are no other options. There’s not going to be some “hot new platform” that pulls the rug out from under YouTube as a video hosting solution. And if you think the Fediverse and its various alternatives is going to ever be anything other than a niche microcosm of the internet, you’re dreaming.
This is it. This is the internet we wanted, I guess, because this is what we made for ourselves, with the only thing to look forward to is it getting worse with time. Eventually Valve will go public at some point in the future and its marketplace will become horrible. Eventually Firefox will shutter its doors and if you want to access a web page, you’re going to have to sign a blood contract with Google for use of a chromium browser. I imagine there will come a day when I don’t even really use the internet anymore because it’ll be so terrible and unrecognizable to me.
The internet became mass adopted via phones. Or rather, the internet as we understand it warped itself around mobile devices. Phones and communication have always been cool. If you were “cool” in the 1990s, you had a beeper. People wanted to engage with you. Talk to you. Fuck you. Do drugs with you. Whatever. But computers were always nerd shit. And when the internet was dominated by computers, it was a nerd space. Phones allow you to have constant, but physically limited access to the internet. There’s no full keyboard for typing out long replies. Not a physical one, at least. It’s all algorithmically generated text responses. Engagement on the modern internet is clicking a “next” button on a social media website.
I say this as someone who loves computers and hate phones, and it feels like the internet is less and less of a place for me as time goes on. I like talking to people and having discussions, but that’s more and more ghettoized as time goes on. And that’s sadly what the Fediverse sort of is. It’s a ghetto for us oldheads who loved how things used to be and thought what we had is what we’d always have. We didn’t realize the high water mark when we were floating in it. And now that the tide has receded, we’re left stranded on an island in the middle of a very shallow ocean.
Article seems pretty flawed. Relevance is a vague metric, and the author relies pretty heavily on data related to government site visitation, which seems subject to bias toward certain types of users....
The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies. Almost every “alternative” browser is chromium under the hood. Google’s next big plan is basically constructing a walled garden around the internet (at least the HTTP part) via complex DRM. Eventually, if you want to access an actual web page, it’ll have to be via a Chromium browser. Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don’t fucking render correctly and I’ll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them. That’s only going to get worse with time.
Let's discuss: Mass Effect (beehaw.org)
The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!...
The Man Who Killed Google Search (www.wheresyoured.at)
Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google....
Rooster Teeth Shut Down By Warner Bros. Discovery, The Roost Podcast Network To Continue (deadline.com)
Report: 75K loyal Redditors can snag shares before Reddit goes public (arstechnica.com)
This is one of the more scathing pieces to come out on Ars about Reddit. As the site did not respond to inquiries, all that was available to report on was profoundly negative statements that Advance is unlikely to enjoy seeing.
Cable can't compete with 5G home internet, so it's cheating (www.spacebar.news)
Amazon Kindle e-book updates need a public changelog (goodereader.com)
Disco Elysium standalone expansion reportedly cancelled and quarter of staff facing redundancy at ZA/UM (www.eurogamer.net)
Reuters claims Nintendo Switch 2 is expected later this year (www.eurogamer.net)
Livestream audio of Supreme Court arguments over Trump's removal from Colorado ballot (www.msnbc.com)
Inside the shifting plan at Elon Musk’s X to build a new team and police a platform ‘so toxic it’s almost unrecognizable’ (fortune.com)
Disney Unveils the Holotile Floor Inching Us Closer to a Real Life Holodeck (www.ign.com)
This technology looks legitimately impressive....
Alabama condemned for nitrogen gas execution: ‘They intended to torture him’ (www.theguardian.com)
Smith’s execution by “nitrogen hypoxia” took around 22 minutes, according to media witnesses, who were led into a viewing room at the William C Holman correctional facility in Atmore shortly before 8 pm local time.
According to Kotaku: 25 Days Into 2024 And 5,800+ Video Game Layoffs Have Been Announced (kotaku.com)
this is a running tally they’re compiling in a single “article” and yeahhhh. not looking very good right now
The Future Of E-Commerce Is A Product Whose Name Is A Boilerplate AI-Generated Apology (defector.com)
the Amerian Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year Is “Enshittification” (americandialect.org)
The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance (www.zdnet.com)
Article seems pretty flawed. Relevance is a vague metric, and the author relies pretty heavily on data related to government site visitation, which seems subject to bias toward certain types of users....