NoXion

Happy to have more Doom as long as it's good, but I was hoping for the next Id shooter to be a single-player focused Lovecraftian take on the Quake series.

I dumped Twitter before Musk took over because like Facebook, I could feel that using that site wasn't great for my mental well-being. Since Musk took over I've been following the decline of Twitter/Xhitter second-hand. I'm hoping that Musk starts charging all users and thus burns up even more of the 44 billion he paid for it. I know there are good arguments for not doing it, but there were also good arguments for not buying a company for at least twice its value, as well as good arguments for not throwing away the Twitter branding. But Musk has done both of things anyway. So I wouldn't rely on "it's a fucking stupid idea" as a reliable indicator that he won't do it.

One of the perks of being an adult is that you get to spend your hard-earned money on whatever the fuck you want. Video games offer a diverse range of experiences in a manner that can be extremely cost-effective. They can be played alone, with friends or total strangers, and that's entirely your choice depending on what game you choose. It's a no-brainer as far as entertainment options go. As far as people I know in real life are concerned, as opposed to people I see on a screen, video games are a completely normal pastime for adults. My mum is in her fifties and still plays video games. My sister, a mother to two children, plays video games. Her partner plays video games. My adult friends play video games. My workplace at a FTSE 500 corporation has a Slack channel for talking about video games. None of this would even be possible if video games were just a childish plaything one inevitably grows out of. Maybe Maher is doing a bit and is just pretending to be some complete fucking Boomer dinosaur, I don't know him too well. Or maybe he's as much of a fucking pillock as he comes across. Either way, opinions like that are not worth taking seriously at all.

I also got the MCC a while back and played through the first game. I honestly forgot about the painful areas where you went backtracking across cut-and-paste interior levels. They weren't so prominent in my memories of the game. But the outside areas are better and the gunplay was fun, after I once again got used to the idea of only carrying two weapons at once. Halo is definitely more fun when played with friends in my experience.

Not just that, but it seems like a lot of effort for little reward. It's not like this is the kind of site where people are going to be chucking around their bank details.

I felt it was time to get into a game I'd never played before, instead of just playing the same old classic Doom and modded Minecraft sessions. So I chose Elite: Dangerous, because I've hardly played any space flight games and it had been sitting on my Steam wishlist for a good while. I even bought an X52 Hand-On-Throttle-And-Stick in order to complete the whole "piloting your own personal spacecraft" experience. Two months and 360 hours later, and I'm now in my massive Type-10 Defender on my way to Beagle Point at the other end of the galaxy, rendered in glorious 1-to-1 scale in all its 400 billion star glory. Yeah, I think this game has got me. o7

From what I understand, it's possible to make a blockchain that doesn't consume stupid amounts of energy to function. I don't think banning any and all blockchains would be a worthwhile move, from an enforceability standpoint if nothing else. I do think that all of this cryptocurrency and NFT nonsense as it currently stands is entirely parasitic on the real economy, and is probably the 21st century's answer to Tulip Mania. I don't think it's sustainable in the long term, but various countries might choose to help speed along its demise with changes in taxation and other laws.

I'm almost certainly explaining it poorly, because I think NFTs are a fucking stupid idea, if not some kind of scam. Maybe reading the Wikipedia article would be more helpful. They try to aim for neutrality, so you can make your own mind up about them.

They're like a digital certificate that can be authenticated as to their identity and ownership. They can be associated with an artwork, but not necessarily. What you're really paying for is an entry on a cryptographic ledger or something like that. It's all really fucking tedious bullshit and I have no fucking clue why people get into it. People shill NFTs because they have literally no intrinsic value otherwise.

I think the low effort nature of it is part of the problem, though. As far as I can be bothered to understand NFT bullshit, you can make an NFT out of literally anything. Just so long as you can convince a bunch of stupid nerds with more wealth than sense to fork over a bunch of digital Monopoly money, you're good. Maybe it's a bit weird to have the images of actors being used to make films after they're dead, but at least we could have a debate about the commercial and artistic merits of doing such a thing. But all this NFT bullshit fucking stinks to high heaven.

Do their estate still get royalties for using their image? If so I don't see the issue.

I think the context and presentation matters. Doom Eternal is very violent, but the player character is morally unambiguous, and the only possible targets of his violence are the demons of Hell and those who are masterminding the destruction of Earth. So I would feel more comfortable introducing a younger child to that, as opposed to a similarly violent game where the player characters operate in more of an ethical grey area and/or direct their violence towards others characters who aren't just straight-up evil.

I'm sure that YouTube management ran this idea past some finance drones first, but they can't tell you if such a move is going to be well-received by the public. I've no doubt that the decision on YouTube's end was dispassionately made entirely for the purposes of making money, rather than as a means of rubbing it in the faces of the plebs. But ordinary site users are still going to perceive such treatment as contemptuous, and I think there's a good reason for that. The audiences on YouTube largely do not pay for their viewership, this means that they are not customers, they are the product. Like with Facebook. YouTube doesn't want to control its customers, we can see that easily in how lax their standards are for checking adverts. Like any good company, they want to more control over their stock, I.E. the audiences that YouTube pumps ads at.

I think for a lot of people, the issue is not so much the removal of the dislike counter in and of itself, but rather that such a move is as much a statement from YouTube as it is a minor UI change. There is a widespread perception, one that cuts across political lines, that the corporate and political elites of our society view the common person with a kind of contempt. Moves like this from YouTube feed this perception, and personally I don't think it's entirely incorrect. It also reinforces the notion that YouTube is more interested in getting into bed with Old Media, rather than supporting the creators and their audiences which brought YouTube to the position it is today. The fact that YouTube is doing this rather than trying to deal with the porn, misinformation, abuse and spammers speaks a lot about where their true priorities lie. I don't think it's unreasonable for ordinary people to get pissed off when big corporations start jerking each other off at the expense of everyone else.

Berzerk pack, easy choice. The visual effects are temporary but it never runs out.