There’s no winning strategy to reveal the price. Announce a low price early and release a much more expensive product, they get flayed alive. Announce a high price, public interest falls off a cliff. Keeping potential customers guessing at least keeps the Gabecube in the news cycle.

PLEASE CRANK THE SILLY THING AROUND should not be as hilarious as it is

still sorta developing what would become their open world formula

The formula was already fully developed when AC2 was released in 2009. You didn’t have to literally climb radio towers, but WD2 was still the same map marker collect-a-thon with a slightly different, slightly gay coat of paint.

The wisdom of (violent toilet plunger noises)

I liked Watch Dogs 1 mainly because I didn’t consume any pre-release media about it. Whatever downgrade there may have been, I was unaffected. The game and its story are about as Ubisoft as they come (and I don’t mean that in a particularly positive way), but it was great for fucking around.

I also liked Cyberpunk 2077’s launch version, but at the same time, I think the people who are trying to memory hole the objectively dogshit launch state of both 2077 and The Witcher 3 are perpetuating the problem.

Skirt and programming socks. The skirt provides optimal airflow and the socks can be adjusted using a PID algorithm to achieve the desired thermal equilibrium.

Clanker equivalent of telling an angry spouse to stop overreacting.

storage: ZFS RAID2 array of three hundred free icloud accounts

I bet somebody’s been bored and/or psychotic enough to have done that, booted a Linux machine from it, and played DOOM on it.

The acquisition was finalised in late 2021. No, Kim was stupid entirely by his own power.

That entire situation was ridiculous. The major points:

• Yes, that contract was stupidly favorable to Unknown Worlds. It was negotiated by none other than Chang-ham Kim, CEO of Krafton.
• Kim later realized that and wanted to back out of the contract because it would’ve made him look like a pushover. He employed the help of ChatGPT, which told him that it was a stupid fucking idea.
• He went ahead with the plan anyway. He fired Unknown Worlds’ three co-founders for made-up reasons and appointed Steve Papoutsis as the CEO
• He tried to sabotage the game’s development by disrupting communication between Unknown Worlds and other departments, to push the early access launch beyond the window where the 250M could be earned.
• Obviously it went to court. Krafton tried to change the story about the reason the co-founders were fired based on information that they discovered afterwards (they kept backups of documents, which Krafton argued was industrial espionage), but the judge was having none of that chicanery.
• During discovery, the ChatGPT logs and some conversations were revealed that personally implicated Kim.
• The court ruled in Unknown Worlds’ favour. The judge ordered Ted Gill to be reinstated as CEO (the other two co-founders chose not to return) and the bonus window to be extended by several months to account for the time that they didn’t have conrol of the company.
• As a last fuck-you, Papoutsis prematurely announced Subnautica 2’s early access launch. Gill had no idea about the state of development.
• Subnautica 2 then went on to be a massive success, Krafton has joined EA and Activision in the doghouse, and Chang-ham Kim is now known to be both a pushover and a fucking idiot.

Thigh-high socks

They’ve even put programmer socks behind subscriptions, world is a fuck

One shudders to imagine what inhuman thoughts lie behind that mask. What dreams of chronic and sustained cruelty.

Satisfactory is rainbow sprinkles compared to Factorio’s crack cocaine.

Games the size of Destiny just don’t last this long.

Warframe is still going strong. Much of that is the result of competent developers and managers who don’t absolutely suck dog eggs.

Potion of Ventricular Tachycardia (grande)

Comedian suffers culture shock and downs an American quantity of Cuban coffee

There is an enormous difference between the conduct of police officers between the US and Europe. Again, it mostly comes down to the public’s access to firearms, but the quality of training, institutionalized prejudices, and corrective actions (or the absence of those things) are also significant factors.

The US is not a punching bag. It’s receiving fair criticism and experiencing repercussions for decades of failure to improve public safety, and using both legal mechanisms and populist rhetoric to sanctify gun violence and the persecution of vulnerable groups, leading to a deeply divided, damn near tribal society (Us against Them), and the rise of the American Gestapo under the false banner of immigration control. Be patriotic, absolutely. But patriotism without awareness and due criticism is nothing more than zealotry.

Stakeholders. Journalists. The market. The ignorant public. They’re constructing a narrative to shield themselves and minimize the hit to their reputation when they stop offering lifetime license plans. The announcement won’t look nearly as damning if it contains a reference to the falling number of new lifetime customers, even if it omits the context of why that number has been falling.

You know that shooters have the ability to stay quiet, right? A calm atmosphere doesn’t mean there isn’t someone who is in imminent danger. Back to the thought exercise: you’re a hostage, you call 911, police arrive. Then they wait five minutes and fuck off because nobody’s firing at them or shouting threats. Do you think that’s reasonable? Wouldn’t you want them to breach the house and get you out of the situation?

It’s fucked up that this happened in the first place, but “well, the police should have…” is not how you fix it. Misuse of emergency resources needs to be a federal crime, and doing it to harm another person needs to be investigated and penalized as attempted murder with prison sentence for first time offenders, both as punishment and as a deterrent. But I’ve seen enough court cases to understand that the US justice system has neither the motivation nor the competence to implement or enforce a law like that.

someone called the swat team on her?

some anonymous tip

That’s not what happened. Someone called 911 and described a situation that involved a shooter who has already shot someone. The 911 operator then had to relay that to the responders (in this case, LE). The responding officers might have only received an address, that there was a barricaded active shooter, and that there was at least one shooting victim.

It’s not up to the police to debate the veracity of a report. Imagine being in a hostage situation, you manage to call 911, and they respond with “sounds fake, not coming”.