• 27 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • For all of y’all anxiety-pilled people: this is great news. Biden was stuck in negative momentum because his health issues had been exposed and were not going to stop resulting in terrible headlines, which is a problem whoever comes next is not going to have, unless the delegates are somehow stupid enough to pull another dinosaur from below the rug.

    More interestingly: now that Biden has pulled out because he’s patently too old, as it was a concern for plenty of voters, this is a golden opportunity to put the focus on the other candidate whose age is a somewhat less obvious but still noticeable issue.



  • This would have been much less of a clusterfuck if they hadn’t hidden that Biden’s state had already been declining for a long while now, or if he had been consequent with his declared intentions of being a one-term president from the very beginning, and there had been real primaries.

    The very obvious good news is that whoever is chosen now will have much better momentum than Biden, even if only by virtue of being capable of reaching out to low information voters, while Trump’s less obvious cognitive decline is going to become far more evident now.





  • I’m roughly on the same boat. A format I’ve come to enjoy is streaming a pausable strategy game with a group of friends and taking decisions collectively (so if the game is Frostpunk, we’re basically the oligarchy that’s deciding how much is the working class going to slave away and how many deaths are acceptable), but it’s hard to find stable friend groups that like it.


  • This will be great for the workers, but I don’t think it will necessarily fix the issues in Bethesda’s organization when it comes to game development (and it won’t make them worse either).

    Given what we know from Starfield, Bethesda is really lacking when it comes to planning: they aren’t doing a good job at establishing a compact vision for the final product which also results in having issues to establish an agile workflow to get from start to finish. In the best cases, this results in ludonarrative disonance where the story isn’t really supported by the mechanics of the game (example: Fallout 4’s story incentivizes the player to hurry up and look for their son, but they assign a lot of resources into making sandbox mechanics such as those related to base building); in the worst cases, this results in teams returning the ball to each other all the time because they aren’t properly coordinated to build things in the way other teams of the studio needs them, which loses a lot of time and becomes even more glaringly obvious the larger the project is.

    The silver lining is: this problem isn’t so noticeable when the designers have the template of Oblivion in their minds and they’re making Skyrim, but it was going to be completely exposed when making the jump to a new IP (and thus a new universe), with a new engine, with some large design jumps such as ceding ground to dynamically created areas; so ES6 doesn’t have to be as much of a low point as it has been Starfield, as long as they’re conservative in their design choices. I’d vastly prefer the leadership of Bethesda to be completely reorganized, which would allow them to innovate by taking well measured risks, but I don’t have much hope for that scenario.