At this point, Western gaming companies’ monetization schemes are becoming worse than gacha, so you may as well go play Genshin Impact ;-)

Half of this article’s word count seems to be the writer snarking about how he doesn’t care about these games and doesn’t know much about them. I guess it’s good to show contempt for your audience…

If AI really was such a game-changer, it would increase the chances of finding extraterrestrial aliens, not decrease it. If AI allows for superhuman feats of intellect and engineering, then even if 99.9% of all strong AI leads to the destruction of the original civilization, you’d only need the 0.1% of civilizations that develop stable benevolent civilization-boosting AI (let’s call them The Culture). Those would spread around, and we would have seen them. So we’re back at Fermi’s paradox.

since at least the 80s

People have been reliant on “ole’ techno-solutions” since the dawn of humanity 2 million years ago on the African savannah, long before capitalism was even a thing. Just sayin’.

This cloud-brightening stuff seems finicky compared to stratospheric aerosol injection. Clouds are hard for climate models to handle as it is, so it would be hard to predict the impact on climate change ahead of time. If you want to do geoengineering, this seems pretty far down on the list of alternatives.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

I find Pathfinder 2e (and D&D 3e before it) way clunkier. Maintaining a level-appropriate power level requires stacking buffs like the Overlord meme, and if you decline to do so, you’re just crippling your character. It’s bad enough that auto-buffing mods are considered mandatory for the Pathfinder CRPGs.

Lots of RPGs allow rest cheesing. Even if you don’t let players rest in random locations like BG3 does, the players can always hoof it back to town to rest. Attempts to prevent this kind of cheesing often end up feeling unduly punishing and un-fun. It’s not a tabletop vs computer issue.

DOS2 fights felt much more like a slog than BG3. Especially in higher difficulties, every battlefield ended up a nightmarish soup of elemental surfaces, which got old after awhile. I also found whittling down enemy toughness bars un-fun.

Personally, I liked both the BG3 and DOS1 systems better than DOS2.

I’d be shocked if Netanyahu gave any other response. He gets to massacre more Palestinians, and make Joe Biden look weak and impotent. It’s all upside for him.

I would have thought that space debris is deadly no matter if it’s made of wood or metal. If something comes at you at a few kilometers a second, it doesn’t really matter what material it is.

Hardly the only two countries. In the US it’s only masked by immigrants. Fertility is even coming down in most parts of the third world.

It’s mainly attributable to women’s improved education, career prospects, and access to contraception, plus declining infant mortality. Every single one of these factors is a good thing, but the combination of them will lead to a global demographic crunch over the next century.

Pilotless drones

Guess this is dating me, but everytime I see this I flash back to the classic rant…

Mr. Howe! Is there any other kind of drone? You, you tell me right now. Is there any other kind of drone, drone, other than a pilotless drone? Isn’t that what a drone is, an unmanned aircraft? Don’t you check these things? Don’t you supervise the subeditors who write these headlines? Don’t you do your job?!?

Do they have permission from the Iraqi government, which is after all supposed to be a friendly government? Or is this another case of sovereignty not mattering when it’s inconvenient for the US? (Won’t even bother asking about Syria.)

After all the angst and drama over whether Turkey will allow Sweden into NATO, it’d be hilarious if the accession gets sunk by Hungary.

Like, during the many months other NATO members were pressuring Turkey, no one thought they should worry about Hungary too?

Another high profile research group done in by bad photoshopping. I wonder how many frauds never get caught because they have decent photoshop skills.

Missed opportunity for “not great, not terrible”.

I want to like Palworld, but I don’t know if I can support running existing Pokemon through a fusor and passing them off as ‘new’ IP

Imagine being morally outraged on behalf of a multibillion dollar corporate behemoth.

The thing is, individual citizens can’t reform the police, or ambulance services, fire brigade, or power utilities, all of which have been gutted by the ANC. All they can do is to pay, out of pocket, for private sector replacements. No one is arguing that this is better than having working public sector versions in the first place, but that’s not achievable until the national government gets totally overhauled (if it ever happens).

This is what happens as the state gets hollowed out by decades of ANC corruption and misrule.