For anyone who wants to have a look at a full issue of that magazine: A few of them can be found online.

My ‘I’m No Fucking Predator Or Pedophile’ T-shirt is raising question already answered by my ‘I’m No Fucking Predator Or Pedophile’ T-shirt.

Love it. It’s almost like an unaired episode of the original show.

Yes and no. Like in Stardew Valley, technically you can romance every NPC in your party, but in practice you have to meet certain criteria to do so and those differ from character to character. Of course, it is possible to “game” that system.

The most famous one ATM is probably “Baldur’s Gate 3” which offers a wide variety of mechanics and stats to measure if an NPC member of the player’s party is romantically interested in the player character. Two examples given in the talk I linked are the VNs “Monster Prom” or “First Bite”.

I love this game (500 hours played), but I have to bring up a point of criticism…

One aspect which has not aged well IMHO is the “kindness coin” mechanic: The exchange of goods for the NPCs’ friendship and/or affection. You give the NPCs stuff, then you give them more stuff, then some more on top, then you get a cut scene and then you get back to giving them stuff until you trigger the next one.

Yes, the requests on the blackboard and the occasional personal quest mix up things a little bit, but overall the mechanic remains the same and for me over the years this has cheapened the interaction with the NPCs for me somewhat: They are mostly transactional and predictable to the point where you can calculate their outcome.
You have to give character A so-and-so many objects X to romance them. It takes so-and-so many days to do that.

Sure, the “kindness coins” mechanic was industry standard at the time, but I wish there were more variety in regards to the interactions with the NPCs, because they are amazingly written and I wish there was more to do with them besides giving them stuff over and over again.

AI execs: Our AIs are going to be so powerful. More powerful than anything. Soon they could be able to destroy humanity!

Governments: Well, then we better regulate that shit and make sure that doesn’t happen…

AI execs: Nooooo! We did not mean it that way!

There is a legitimate reason why we may see “something” in the future.

Ubisoft accepted subsidies from the French government for the production of BGE2, which puts BGE2 in a similar place like “Skull and Bones”: “Skull and Bones” was partially financed by subsidies from the Singaporean government. So BGE2 is trapped in the same weird limbo “Skull and Bones” was trapped in for years. Ubisoft has to figure out whether they actually want to finish the game or write a big, fat check to the French government.

We all know how that turned out for “Skull and Bones”, so I am not going to get my hopes up.

No, you see it’s not like education makes you see past your own prejudices and that makes you more liberal. If you are liberal you get awarded an education by the shadowy cabal that controls the education system with DEI measures! This guy only wants a tRuE mERiToCrACy where disenfranchised, downtrodden bigots get a chance to attend university where they are taught about the superiority of their white Aryan race.

/s if it isn’t apparent.

Visual agnosia?

A little long maybe, I assume it won’t be long until it’s just “likensub”.

How often does it need to be said? Do not preorder games based on what they looked like in the trailers!

Seems like Elon thinks he can use Teslas as compute resources without the cars being charged…

The benefit of use high-end cameras (like those from Arri) is that they usually have a higher range for ISO (light sensitivity) and aperture, which makes it easier to shoot without setting up lighting for every specific shot. Most people know this from smartphone cameras: Cheap ones struggle in low-light settings while better ones will still be able to produce decent pictures.

The original article that went with the picture spoke of “a new race of amazons” and calls the woman on the right, “Diana”, which may be a reference to Wonder Woman (AKA Diana, Princess of the Amazons).

One of the keys to strategic success is picking your battles. When you have the chance to choose the enemy you’ll face, don’t let fate decide for you. At the end of the day, you are going to fight, so pick the fight with the enemy you think you have a better chance of defeating. Take this whichever way you want.

Yeah, Majestic was incredibly interesting because it was an attempt to create an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that was more than just a marketing campaign and could support itself financially. Its failure led to ARGs being abandoned as standalone games and ARGs mostly remained marketing which - ultimately - led to a slow, but inevitable decline of the ARG as a genre when the marketing money dried up.

They also leave out half of the story: The whole thing already started in October. After months of harassment one of the employees snapped and called their shit out. But they leave that part out, claim they got attacked out of nowhere and play the victims.

It’s a cult. Altman is one of the TESCREAL devotees. He truly believes that he can build the electronic messiah.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

In that regard, you cannot make a manager understand a thing that may detrimental to the profits of the company. Because the profits decide upon the size of the manager’s bonus - even if the profits are entirely fictional, only exist as a plan, a power point presentation or are pure hype for investors. So managers have a vested interest in insisting that they can circumvent regulations/disregard laws/lobby for exemptions/… in order to make more money, no matter what reality looks like.