Cylinsier

It’s honestly insanely impressive that these things are still working so long after being built and so far from us. One of mankind’s greatest achievements and even after they die they’ll still be out there somewhere floating around. Maybe long after we’re gone and the Earth is swallowed up by the sun. The last piece of proof that we even existed at all.

By sequencing the genome of this Rip Van Winkle roundworm, scientists revealed it to be a new species of nematode

If this nematode could read I bet it would be offended at being called “new.”

I think it’s down to a few reasons. One you touched on is exclusives. Most consumers aren’t going to have both consoles like you do, they’re going to pick one or the other and Xbox doesn’t really have many exclusives, even fewer than PS, and theirs are much more likely to end up on PC when they do have them. So for consumers who want the larger variety of games, PS5 currently wins.

Another is performance. While both the PS5 and Series X are comparable, the Series S offering has created a very odd phenomenon of accidental exclusivity for Sony because of performance limitations. It’s a relatively new thing but I suspect it’s going to be more common as the generation goes on. The current example is Baldur’s Gate III. It simply cannot run on the S. As a result the developer has put an Xbox release on hold indefinitely and it may never come out on Xbox because they don’t want to have to deal with the confusion of selling an Xbox game that is not playable on one of the two SKUs. They decided that if the S can’t run it then it just won’t come out for the X either.

Third, and probably more relevant earlier in the generation, Sony had some snappy gimmicks on their side that might have been a difference maker for some consumers on the fence. The advanced haptics of the Dual Sense for example. I think the novelty of that wore off pretty quickly but there was a lot of buzz around it closer to launch to the extent that it’s impact on sales is probably more than nothing at all. I think the PSVR2 was also briefly a console mover as Xbox doesn’t have comparable hardware. I don’t think anyone at this point is rushing out to get a PS5 just for VR now, but there was a brief period of time after the PSVR2 was announced where people were eager to have a PS5 because if they did want VR, Sony’s was the cheapest way into that market at modern performance levels without having to give Facebook your entire identity just to game. Again not significant on its own, but it’s impact is more than nothing at all.

Fourth is just that Sony came into the generation ahead of Microsoft with the PS4. More PS4 owners with big libraries are going to want a new system that can play their old games rather than starting from scratch. So if you have a bunch of PS4 games that you still play, you’re going to choose PS5 and it’s kind of a no brainer.

And lastly I’d say Sony has just done a better job marketing it’s console as a must-have piece of consumer tech. From the jump there were a lot of people who already had gaming PCs questioning why they would ever need an Xbox. And Microsoft did little to address this narrative, it almost felt like they accepted that they were going to cannibalize their own console’s sales right from launch because everything gets ported to PC for them and just decided they didn’t care. There are plenty of reasons to own an Xbox but MS has pushed like none of them in advertising. Sony meanwhile did a great job early on marketing the PS5 as a status symbol and has kept in the public eye much more consistently with game exclusivity, and more recently media tie-ins with the Last of Us tv show. And while the exclusives may be few and far between, they are big draws like Final Fantasy, Horizon, and Spider-Man. When Xbox occasionally gets an exclusive, it’s always in the news for the wrong reasons like Halo almost universally agreed upon to be no longer good or Redfall being an absolutely embarrassing catastrophe of a release.

The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.

I agree, but who’s going to pay for it? Those aren’t just freely available additions to any application that you only need to toggle on.

High speed glass cannons were always a fun build archetype to play around with in these games. I had tended to go the other way as a kid though, building hulking behemoths loaded to the teeth with bullets and bombs. Just don’t ask me to walk anywhere in any kind of efficient manner! Next mission waypoint a hundred steps that way? Meet you in an hour.

Barbados is a beautiful country which is poorer than it should be. I had the opportunity to visit it as part of a cruise many years ago and that experience along with similar ones is why I doubt I will ever go on a cruise again. Not to say I didn’t have a good time, it was a fantastic opportunity to visit a number of small island nations in a single week and since it was a gift, it only cost me a single roundtrip plane ticket. But something was abundantly clear in Barbados, St Lucia, and St Kitts. And that was that if you were not the cruise industry or the handful of local resorts who contracted with them for day excursions, you benefitted absolutely fucking nothing from their presence. The economies of these small nations had absolutely no right to be as poor as they were with that kind of money coming into them. I went on several of my own excursions and got to see the local areas outside of the preplanned trips the cruise had in mind and saw very poor but very happy people living lives in the shadows of these high-pollution ships bringing rich people into places they themselves were never able to afford to go in their own countries.

This is all a very roundabout way of saying I hope this works out for them. Barbados is a free, self-governing nation that has a lot to offer to tourists and a lot of locals who should benefit from that but, in today’s economic realities, you can’t start making money until you have enough money to buy your foot into the door first. The specter of white colonialism still hangs over these small nations.

Except with a lot of features removed.

I think Bsky’s biggest challenge is that you can’t get on the damn platform.

God his dumb fucking grin is so phony. This asshole fires tons of hard working people keeping the lights on for him, won’t pay his bills, props up right wing talking points on one of the biggest public platforms on earth, and is a faux-intellectual bigot. But then he still thinks he can act like one of the cool kids and nobody will see through his charade. He mistakes gawking for admiration.

I agree with that but they have also at times banned people for just regular swearing on their own private servers.

I just don’t understand how you can rationalize this by saying it’s not a job. Do they use that paycheck to buy food and pay rent? Then it’s a job, not some arbitrary form of not-job where suddenly it’s ethically fine to abuse your employees. They’re not doing it for fun. It’s not just that I disagree with you, I can’t even see your perspective on this. What you’re arguing makes no logical sense.

Absolutely zero percent chance that happens. The only outcome of this is undisguised dictatorship. The only thing we don’t know yet is whether it’s Wagner succeeding and installing a military junta or Putin surviving and using this as an excuse to dissolve whatever semblance of a democracy they pretended to have.

No, this was their job, not a project. They do this for a living. Jobs do not automatically have crunch time, crunch time is a factor of poor management combined with capitalistic inflexibility. It’s a systemic and societal flaw, not something to be excused as “not for everyone.” It’s unethical. You can just take more time, nothing delayed has ever ended up worse because of the delay, but a lot of delayed projects end up better and have happier crews after the fact compared to rushed projects. “Just quit” is a fucking awful thing to tell people who want to do a job well and still have a life, you don’t tell people to just stop having a paycheck if they can’t handle workplace abuse. This is everything wrong with modern film making and game design, just a complete lack of basic human decency and defending it by claiming the end justifies the means. How about “just treat your employees right and don’t be a piece of shit?” Or “learn to manage resources better.” Star Citizen is an apples to oranges comparison and it’s also cherry picking, the overwhelming majority of delayed media comes out after one or two delays. There should be labor laws that make crunch illegal.

There’s a fallacy from implication there: just because the film ended up being really good does not mean these methods were the only way the film could have been good. It’s not a zero sum game, you can make excellent movies and also not exploit your workers to do it. You just have to be humble enough to take another few months to finish it, a relatively small price to pay for treating your employees with decency.

This already looks better than 90% of 3D Sonic games.

Somebody in a different thread said they would love a SMRPG remake and I almost replied “never gonna happen.” Well…holy shit.

Huffman looked at this clown and said “I want to be like him!”

I would be down for a CT remake and I think it’s eventually inevitable, but it would blow my mind if they gave the Dread treatment to Super Metroid.

It’s starting to get pretty hot where I live, gonna have to bust out the AC units soon at this rate.

Relay. The official app can go fuck itself.