What’s that? I’m not spending any more money on ZeniMax games? And I’m getting a Margaret Thatcher Doom mod?

What a marvelous day it is!

The canon is anything that appears in the games. There are clear timelines between many of the games, asserted within the game text or game subtext.

Producers have gone on record echoing what’s states in the HH, both before and after it was published.

Do not mistake the canon for something the producers and designers feel in any way bound by. That’s not what the term means when discussing media.

If it’s still 9 months away, there’s no real reason to announce it publicly before the Christmas season. The fact that the original Switch’s sales are flagging is not a reason to announce, since it’s not launching in time for the holidays. Its announcement isn’t going to spurr Switch 1 sales.

When it’s announces will be entirely deoendent on when retailers need to know launch details. Once it’s outside of Nintendo, they’ll have to announce things publicly or risk losing control over the narrative.

Ah, the dichotomy of Linux users:

“wHy DoEsN’t EvErYbOdY uSe LiNuX???”

and

“gEt On My LeVeL nOoB”

No, what they want is to be able to coax more money out of their sales numbers. Retention is correlated with future purchases, both of paid DLC (if the game has it) and of future studio titles.

And it’a an easy metric to point to when talking to a publisher and negotiating funding.

Look at the positions of d and k on the keyboard. _ema_es.

No? I said the opposite of that.

The question I was answering was “why aren’t there more employee owned companies?” And the answer is it’s a lot harder to get seed money for those, because the rent seeking parasites don’t want them to exist.

They don’t fulfill the fantasy of being a rent-seeking social parasite.

Money

All I wanted from the Switch was a console-only version. I know why it didn’t happen, but I picked mine up on launch day, I’ve played on it every week since, and I’ve used the screen like, a handful of times on one trip the first year I had it.

I haven’t disconnected it from the TV since then. I really didn’t need the handheld form factor.

They were actually mostly programmed by Gen Xers.

Doom II remains my favorite in the series, and I still play the original pair regularly. I never really ever quit playing them. They remain comfort games from my childhood.

The mod scene has become absolutely crazy. The things modders put out these days blow my mind.

I never really got into the new games. 2016 was fun, but it didn’t really stick for me. Once I played it for a few days, I had my fill and returned to the originals.

But at the same time, most of the people who played Fallout 3 never played 1 or 2. By the standards of the time, and for what the game presented itself as, it was pretty cool.

I work for an educational tech company that boomed during lockdowns. Parents, teachers, schools, and entire districts started using our product to help manage assignments during at-home learning.

It was during this time that they got a bunch of VC funding, rapidly expanded management and the executive, and then began the process of tripling the head count of individual contributors while simultaneously laying off their entire school outreach and liason department.

Oh, and of course, they set new growth targets.

Then schools reopened, and business, understandably, rapidly declined.

Except no one in management seemed to understand why it was declining? And no one wanted to listen to any explanations that lay outside of the end product or the tech stack underpinning it.

And the best part was, if anyone ever raised the point that it seemed like management expected the company to perform the same after lockdowns as during, every single person would parrot the line “yeah, but all of the tech companies did, it wasn’t just us”.

They’re all just jumping off cliffs because their friends are doing it, too.

The VCs were in the same industry both times, though: Making money by selling property.

They’re not interested in selling do-dads, or softwhizzles. They want to sell the company, and that’s making the same play in the same game every time.

My experience using the *bins has been that they provide a superior community UX, but the microblogging end of things feels very rough and under-invested in. It’s a value-add that doesn’t integrate well, or add real value.

There’s a ton of potential there for cross-posting, but it’s totally unrealized.

The Misskey forks are definitely the best UX as an end user I’ve tested out. And I found them easier to set up than Lemmy. But I also found that they caused frequent CPU spikes on my VPS.

I’m not sure if Mastodon does that or not, as I didn’t try running it, but I didn’t have the same experience with Akkoma or Friendica.

That said, I found Icefish’s implementation of the Mastodon API a godsend for mobile use.

Well, you know, holders of virtual monopolies are well known for being benficient paragons of prosocial goodness. At least, whenever their owners are known by their screen names and they produced a beloved product once, a quarter century ago.

A lot of video games are steeped in hegemonic masculinity, and I find that portrayal of men somewhere between mildly and extremely uncomfortable. Women are sometimes characterized a little differently in those games, because the generic woman’s power fantasy is not coming off like a massive bag of dicks with insecurity around the size of their pecker.

The other reason is that Toadette just doesn’t get enough love.

Also that – thanks in large part to movements like the Arab Spring using Twitter to organize and publicize – it became the go-to social media for reporters. The news -> celebrity -> news cycle closes itself nicely there, making it very difficult for either group to go anywhere else.