Yeah. Nobody sane is actually going to use a device like this.

But it is a fun tinkering project that will be guaranteed to “go viral”.

WWE is a special beast. They embraced The Internet a lot earlier than most media and their social media and astro turfing game is on point. It is why you’ll hear that every single wrestler on the planet’s life goal is to be in the WWE Hall of Fame ™ and why Roman “The Rock’s Cousin Who Was Such A Charisma Void That All His Lines In Hobbes And Shaw were cut” Reigns and whoever the hell is the greatest story ever told on television ™ and so forth.

Spend a bit of time discussing wrestling and you rapidly realize you are talking to a “bot” in that different statements trigger the exact same response from different people.

So it is less that The Fans think that cena taking time out of his busy schedule of caping for a rapist sex trafficker was truly amazing and more that people on twitter and PR folk on The Subreddit told them to think that and they are repeating it.

As for the other aspect:

Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?

Because wrestling is “event television” in a way that only sports really is anymore. Andor is one of the greatest shows of all time but, unless you are doing a Reaction podcast, it doesn’t matter if you watch that episode from Season 2 tonight or tomorrow or a week from now. Wrestling and sports? People DO still want to watch that “live” because they are afraid someone will spoil the score of the Bulls game (in large part because we grew up with sitcoms where that was the joke). So, in that regard, it makes more sense to cover it with sports rather than to cut into a movie review with how taylor swift’s boyfriend caught a ball real good.

Which… gets to the last point that is not WWE specific. A lot of people don’t have the time or money to watch it live. This mostly goes back to when PPVs were 50-90 bucks and when all weekly shows were on TV that a lot of “cord cutters” didn’t have. But it also just speaks to the general lack of an attention span. A LOT of the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC)… don’t actually watch wrestling. They follow live threads or watch clips and then they wait for Dave “It’s cool, he just didn’t like her tits” Meltzer to give them a star rating.

It has become a lot more prevalent in the AEW era where we have “something else” on weekly TV (no. TNA didn’t count. I loved TNA but that shit was the #4 promotion even when there were only two on TV in the US) and the “AEW style” is still heavily informed by The Indies and New Japan where people try to tell a self contained story in every match rather than relying on six months of promos on TV. You will RAPIDLY notice that the IWC will barely mention character work that is not part of a clip released by the company or one that was so good that wrestling twitter clipped it themselves. A live thread might lose their shit over how much rotation a tall lady got on a powerbomb spot and then immediately “forget it” because wrestling twitter didn’t care and the company didn’t bother to release a clip of it.

Even when the prompt is better (at all?) articulated, threads like these are a waste of time. People who respond barely read the prompt and OPs generally don’t even know what they are asking for. So obviously you should play a little cult classic indie game called Hollow Knight.

My suggestion is to instead put some time in to find an influencer/reviewer you like. Even if you don’t have a similar taste in games, a good reviewer will say WHY they do and don’t like something and you can make informed decisions from there.

Yeah.

There is a lot of the same barely veiled doublespeak with “game preservation”. I always think back to the days before GoG where abandonware sites were a dime a dozen and a select few torrent sites were AMAZING for having anything you could ever have wanted with very strict rules as to what generations/years were allowed and so forth.

Then comes GoG. Exactly what we had been asking for for years. A store that lets us actually BUY the games we grew up with or that were foundational to the industry. And with “No DRM” to boot. And… overnight almost every single torrent site added exceptions to just allow people to upload the gog installers.

Which is why these days I tend to side eye anyone arguing for “video game preservation” without a decent org behind them. Because having forty copies of Mario 64 on a shelf is not preservation any more than playing Crusader No Remorse upscaled in dosbox on a 4k monitor. Preservation is, more often than not, the full play videos that capture the “feel” of the era combined with interviews with the people who worked on it who can give insight into why decisions were made. And a system so that actual historians (even if they are “just” writing a video essay) can book time to experience it. Rather than a bunch of binaries to play on a stream.

The issue is also that it was added to a game that was already a decade old. So licensing was a giant mess and a lot of mods already depended on other mods.

For a release starting “from scratch” with paid mods would go a long way toward fixing that. Creators would have a much easier time making that demarcation of “I don’t care who uses this support library” and “I would like a few bucks to cover the voice acting I commissioned for this quest chain” and so forth.

Which is kind of what we saw with Make Something Unreal back in the day. UT2k3/4 was “close enough” to the best UT that there was a LOT of controversy over stolen scripts, level design, etc.

I dunno. I won’t at all pretend Bethesda did a good job of rolling out their model. But it REALLY pisses me off when people pretend they are “defending modders” while it is clear they are just angry that they might be charged for the content they consume.

I mean… if you actually care about the people who make your mods you SHOULD want them to be compensated. Even a simple quest mod or weapon mod is hours of work, if not days or weeks.

And while there is an argument as to whether Bethesda should receive a cut of that… people tend to not want to have that conversation about Valve and Steam so…

Just to provide context for those who didn’t watch Resurrections:

Neo is back in The Matrix as Thomas Anderson and is actually a video game developer and his claim to fame game is The Matrix. His business partner shows a lot of signs of being Smith “reborn”. They kind of lampshade that the people who own the rights to their game were going to make another one regardless of whether the creators were involved so it is up to them to either step aside or make the best of it.

Honestly? Resurrection has grown on me a lot, in large part because the credits sequence of all things recontextualizes the entire movie.

So yeah. I don’t LIKE Resurrections but I also kind of love that it exists? Even if… it existing makes me depressed?

Mods of the era largely fixed the scaling and the modern day best practices largely are based on that. Mortismal did a good video on Oblivion last year-ish where they talked about it but it mostly boils down to:

Just stop leveling in (if memory serves) the mid-late 20s. That more or less is what you will get with 60-70% of your levels coming from combat skills and is around where your DPS levels out. The mods of the time basically just tweak the leveled lists to plateau out similarly.

There was other more stylistic choices (stopping bandits from getting full daedric and glass gear) but that prevented the very common problem of “I didn’t optimize my build and now I can’t clear oblivion gates”

Devil Daggers came out in 2016. Daggerfall has been free on basically everything since 2009. So… you probably should name and shame whatever outlet let you spend money for TES2.

Again, fuck that.

“Sorry our trans friends. We would love to stop saying you are going to hell and are inhuman but doing so might mean we do even worse stuff in the future. Hey, don’t forget the alms basket, You… probably shouldn’t be in our churches but you can go to this website and give us money anyway”

Assuming there is any reality to this (big assumption), I assume you are looking at the distance to the nearest distribution center (so Tesla “Not a dealership for legal reasons”). So a lot closer to hundred than not.

Mostly because Factory->House requires a lot of automated charging technology. Whereas Factory->Truck->Dealership->House still lets them take advantage of scale (a truck truck) and can go on a single battery charge.

You’ll understand if I honestly don’t care if a fundamentally hateful and harmful org broke up.

If “maybe we should stop supporting transphobia and rape and…” will kill an org… that org probably shouldn’t exist at all.

I mean… he spent some of his final hours with jd vance. Doesn’t get more hellish than that.

Friendly reminder: Progressive for a pope is still a transphobe who actively facilitated the rape of children. Not to mention all the horrific colonizer shit.

Rest in piss Frankie boy.

DOOM Eternal was very much designed around engaging with all the systems. The problem being… you don’t actually need to do glory kills, crucible kills, grenade kills, etc for the first few levels on the lower difficulty settings. So when you DO get to the later missions… you are now learning how to play the game against encounters designed to push you to your limits.

Which, weirdly enough, meant that DOOM Eternal was actually best played on Ultraviolence. Because on UV? The first level will take you the better part of an hour (… or two). But after that? You know what you are doing and the rest of the game flies by… until the fucking DLC which is some of the best video gaming I have ever experienced. I remember being physically exhausted after some of the DLC levels and having that “This is REALLY not good but also holy crap” feeling.

And before people poo poo TOO much on a game that is five years old: DOOM Eternal WAS DOOM 2016 except with a bigger focus on rushing forward to eliminate key enemies rather than waiting behind doors as choke points and treaing it like an early 00s “cover shooter”. And… that is exactly what DOOM 2 did back in the day. Archviles could resurrect anyone and Pain Elementals were endless sources of Lost Souls. So you also had to be ready to push your way into a room to take outthe baddies.

Not sure how I feel about Quake 202-err, DOOM The Dark Ages. Gonna be there day one because I have been playing DOOM for basically my entire life (I am the guy who still replays the original once a year). But what we have seen so far feels like it was a really big over correction to DOOM Eternal. Which… is also kind of what happened with Quake versus DOOM 2 (and Final DOOM and The Plutonia Experiments and…).

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Somewhat informed tinfoil hat time:

In the short term? Nintendo likely have drastically decreased the supply to the US (and Canada since allegedly that was routed through the US in the past?) and are counting on tariffs not changing TOO much over the next 40 something days. Same with being able to route shipments from different countries. So they’ll take a hit but it won’t be more than they already baked in to the MSRP.

Whereas for peripherals they did NOT already stock up on that in the US and all of those are going to be getting hit by tariffs at varying levels.

THat said? Going forward? My money is on Nintendo taking a page out of nVidia and AMD’s book. The MSRP of the Switch 2 will remain 450 USD or whatever it is. But Nintendo will conveniently not direct sell those and it will be up to Best Buy and the like to jack up prices to cover it on their end. But hey, Amazon are the bad guys, not Nintendo.

Sensationalism/puritanical stupidity will always color this as “depressed and lonely” in the same sense that anyone who masturbates is a freak who can’t get a real partner (and those crowds are ALWAYS implying a cishet partner…).

“Sex robots” are more or less a middle ground between a masturbatory aide and a prostitute. People who use them aren’t looking for (simplifying) a girlfriend anymore than someone who has casual sex is looking for one. They may be looking for a way to blow off some steam. Sex releases a LOT of really nice chemicals into our brains and, if you do it right, is almost meditative when it comes to clearing thoughts.

Some are looking for a way to “get practice” for a “real girlfriend” because media makes them think they need to make their partner orgasm with just a single look. When the reality is… if you even give half a shit about how your partner feels you are well above the vast majority of people out there. And, if you actually ask for feedback and follow it, it is gonna be god damned niagara falls down there. The good Canadian side.

And, with the rise in long term long distance relationships as well as the acknowledgement of asexual folk, it can be a way for one or more partners to get what they need out of a relationship without burdening the person(s) they love.

I dunno. I generally hate most coverage of these topics because it invariably involves folk showing their crusty poorly wiped asses. Sex positivity! But only if you have sex the way the good book says you should (… with your daughter and against her will?). Same with when sex work comes up. It INSTANTLY becomes the assumption that anyone who has ever considered sex work is involved in human trafficking and blah blah blah. And some of that does happen (it is almost like legalization means victims have somewhere to go for help…). But it ignores the idea that someone might just realize they can trade their body for money in the same way that athletes and “the trades” do.

People clean sleeves (fleshlights) on the regular. And an adult sized (please, dear Eothas, let it be adult sized…) android is not something you can hide in a sock drawer. So a cleaning station is very reasonable.

So what bigotry did they add with this update?