• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • The harm would be reinforcing medical misinformation. If you validate one misconception, it’s very likely for that person to gain a lot of misplaced confidence in other incorrect beliefs.

    Remember, people were eating horse deworming paste for a while, to treat a disease they didn’t even believe existed, all because somebody validated some medical misinformation. People are dangerously stupid.



  • Honestly, I’d rather see another studio take a crack at the franchise. I don’t know whether Gamefreak have lost a lot of important talent over the years or if they just got lazy because their games are guaranteed to sell no matter how poorly they’re produced, but they do not know how to make games in the current era. Full stop. The last handful of mainline Pokemon titles have been unacceptably poor quality, and Nintendo won’t light a fire under their ass because… why would they, when they’re already printing money?

    I think it would be wildly beneficial to the health of the franchise if a completely new studio took the wheel for a minute. They don’t have to reinvent the game mechanics or take the story in some dark and gritty direction or anything like that, but if they just made it functional that’d already be a huge step up over Gamefreak’s last few releases.

    Personally, I’d love to see Retro Studios take a crack at a mainline Pokemon title. They’ve already got a very close relationship with Nintendo, and have released nothing but bangers.


  • The electric costs aren’t nearly as high as people think. For huge datacenters, yes, but that’s because they’re processing requests for hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously. For a studio using it to translate lines for a single game, they could easily get away with doing it locally, and effectively for free. You can train your own local model on a consumer-grade PC without any issue, and it’ll still run just as fast as the big server farm-powered models.

    My roommate has been playing with a bunch of different local AI models on his own PC for a couple years now. There’s been no discernable change to our electric bill. His PC draws more power playing an anime waifu gacha game than it does training/generating AI.


  • I think a big part of this sentiment has to do with Bungie burning a lot of bridges with their fan base in recent years. I’d played Destiny 2 for several years (from Shadowkeep through The Final Shape), and in that time Bungie had made a lot of very unpopular moves. From things like the “Destiny Content Vault” (where old content was removed from the game to make room for new content), expansions getting delayed by several months, massive studio layoffs, apparent mismanagement of an entire expansion (Lightfall), more studio layoffs… It’s just really hard, as a player, to back a Bungie project right now. I no longer feel like their priorities line up with mine.

    Meanwhile, I’ve also been a huge fan of Embark’s previous game, The Finals. It’s a totally different type of FPS compared to Destiny, yet they managed to capture my interest by doing correctly all the things Bungie did wrong. They nailed the monetization of the game and it doesn’t feel predatory, they listen to their community, and they constantly show a commitment toward making The Finals into the best game it can be (and not necessarily the most profitable game it could be).

    So while Marathon looks like it’s got all the makings for an amazing game, I just don’t feel like Bungie fans have enough faith left in Bungie anymore. For a lot of people, myself included, The Final Shape was the “end” of Destiny; not because Bungie stopped making it (they’re still releasing content), but because we got the closure we wanted out of Destiny’s story and we’re just done with Bungie’s antics.

    That said, I just don’t like extraction shooters. I played a bit of Arc Raiders to see how it is, and it’s just not for me. Honestly, I hope both games do well, because it’s clear that both studios put a lot of heart into these games and I’m interested in learning about both games’ stories. But right now, Bungie has to overcome their reputation if they want Marathon to succeed.











  • Here’s my “Fuck BofA” story. A long time ago now, I was really tight on cash on a Friday and needed a few things before my next paycheck on Wednesday. I knew how much money I had in my account, and knew what I could afford, and what I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t afford the gas for my car if I bought my groceries and paid a few other bills, which meant that I would just overdraft the card for the gas. I’d be about $10 short of filling up the tank, so I was okay with paying the $35 overdraft fee for the gas, because I needed it to get to work. I did the math, and I’d be roughly -$50 when it was all said and done.

    Come Monday, I find that I’m at -$500. I look at my account history, and I see that BofA reorganized all my transactions from the weekend, processing them from largest to smallest. So instead of ONE large purchase overdrafting my account and accruing a single overdraft fee, they hit me with like 6 overdraft fees because of all of the smaller, ~$5 purchases I had made that weekend.

    I fought with them for months, telling them that I’d pay the single overdraft fee if they agree to charge me based on the timeline in which I actually made the purchases, but they refused to budge, and eventually closed down the account, and also blacklisted me from opening an account with any major bank again.

    The next year, a law was passed that made it so they can’t do that anymore. But the law didn’t make them pay back anybody that they already fucked over.