That’s the part that people don’t get and is intentionally hard to find numbers on. The entire appeal was on it not being an influencer centric space. The entire value was always at odds with monetizing that value beyond it’s upkeep and paying the people (who apparently aren’t that many) a reasonable salary. It is the worst growth case you could have ever had.

Literally means “have you eaten”, except it doesn’t really require an answer.

Grandmothers in every culture

It gets even more complicated. Deer for instance, cause some property damage, sure but nothing like hogs obviously. HOWEVER, if there are to many, they’ll eat up all sorts of plants all winter that other animals and insects depend on in the spring. When state environmental authorities set bag limits, it’s not only to preserve a species, they’re also depending on hunters to remove a certain amount.

Snow geese were a huge problem for a while because they’d migrate far up north, and spend all summer picking apart vegetation on small islands. Vegititaiton that takes forever to grow up there, and was important to making sure some of those islands didn’t erode away… which they did. So near me while the daily bag limit for most birds was 2/day, for those snow geese it was like 25, with no limit on the season.

A good portion of what drives this are things like urban sprawl, etc, but there is no way to remove ourselves from the environment, which means we should do your best to maintain it. Most of these limits and programs are set by highly dedicated people who usually have advanced degrees in a field that pays very poorly. They do it because they care, so I tend to trust them.

I get hunting is unpalatable to a lot of people, but predation is an important part of how ecosystems balance. Left to their own devices these things certainly would stabilize, but the “new normal” may not be pleasant. Those plants excess deer population decimate over the winter may be important to an insect population, which is an important food source for a specific bird during it’s migration, that is important to balancing a beetle that decimates a specific tree species later in that birds migratory path or something. So that deer population becomes important to several other species and ecosystems across a broad range.

I’m not really qualified to talk about specifics, but it was really eye opening talking to an ornithologist friend of mine.

edit: another for instance on deer: When tag limits are placed, you usually get something like 2 bucks and maybe 8 does or something (depending on region, what the environmental authority saw doing surveys etc). This isn’t just to preserve bucks, it’s also that environmentally, it’s important to remove more does. Again my point being these hunting limits aren’t just permission to a hunt a species, but a request that a species is hunted.

Yeah agree. They’re kind of sold as a cure all, which they’re not, but if you have a very specific problem they’ll help. I think the thing is a lot of times people use them without addressing the root cause. But it’s definitely saved me a deep clean before.

I think that’s exactly the point though. “We didn’t mark it up to mark it down, the price is just the price”. As a chronic patient gamer part of me hates that (I love finding older classics for like $10) but I don’t mind shelling out for a good game. The biggest expense is my time, and if a bunch of years later the price hasn’t moved it’s probably worth my time.

oh yeah, I didn’t want to be dismissive of the mtx stuff. It’s absolutely predatory and awful, but I don’t think it fully stands in the way of developing good games.

Which is related to what you’re saying about indies going under even after success. Game development takes time, and you need money to underwrite that time. I just think there’s going to be a split; right now AAA studios are shitifying their games, turning them more into CandyCrush skinner boxes. But the demand for good games hasn’t gone away, there’s just less financial upside than making CandyCrush. My point is, even though it’s less money, there’s still a good amount of money to be had there. Eventually the gaps going to be filled. Microsoft cant fill it because on the balance sheet, things like COD and anything from King are where they should be focused. And it sucks right now because they sucked up a stupid amount of talent and thanos snapped them, but thats not a sustainable practice.

But yes, it’s going to be painful. It’ll suck seeing really nifty indie stuff have to struggle so hard. Like I said I’m also going to miss the polish that comes with AA stuff. I’m going to miss the hell out of Arkane. Their games weren’t perfect, but they had so much soul. They didn’t deserve to have Redfall be their epitaph.

Oh I’m well aware lol. The game is a godamn miracle. But thats the thing, Bethesda has been on this trajectory for a good lonnnnnng while. Like the whole “obsidian good bethesda bad” thing isn’t quite right, but what is true is Bethesda has been incredibly strategic about shittifying their games: there’s always just enough there to keep you going “ok… one more”.

Starfield is the first one I just didn’t even bother with.

FO4 is why I waited and ultimately didn’t buy starfield. I LOVED elderscrolls, and FO:NV is like my alltime favorite. I didn’t hate FO4, there’s some fun to be had, but you can see pretty clearly from it where FO:76 came from. From what I’ve seen and read, I’m not missing anything with starfield.

NMS is tough. They did an amazing job trying to salvage it, but it will always be a game that was never meant to be that big. It’s not bad but at somepoint in the loop you just go “wtf am I doing?”. I give that team all the credit in the world, but that game never belonged where it is.

Eh, skill up had a great take on this. The thing is it’s wayyyyy easier to be a small indie developer than it ever was before. Making a game (or any art) still isn’t easy, it never was and never will be, but it’s viable without a giant publisher in a way it just hasn’t been before.

Its the AA titles that are on the most precarious footing, but I bet even those do ok. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy some AAA stuff time to time, I’ve got a stupid amount of hours in overwatch, but I’ve never once paid for a skin because… why would you?

The thing that’s going to suck is losing the studios like Arkane. Their games weren’t perfect but they were freaking cool, and they basically always got the raw end of the deal. Even Prey(2016), their masterpiece, is the product of corporate bullshitiery they had nothing to do with. So we’re probably going to miss studios like that for a while (as they get re-tasked to fortnite/cod support teams) but “indie” stuff has already been stepping up to fill that void, and is less indie all the time.

Look at Dave the Diver. That’s not exactly an indie studio. They had resources. There’s going to be a gap for a bit, but there’s still a demand for good games and art. Those AA breakthroughs are what people want. Again, I continue to spend dumb amounts of time on overwatch, but it’s not where I spend my money. Microsoft hovelled themselves by buying all these studios and not taking the leap with supporting them. Distribution just doesn’t have the value it once did. So if microsoft wants to become CandyCrush, feeding an addiction loop to grab the whales, sure, whatever, but there’s plenty of bread out there for studios doing other stuff.

I did really like this, but it is a bit generic.

The audio book is fantastically done and it’s written well enough. Characters are fleshed out and interesting, the universe makes sense.

Again: I really enjoyed it I just don’t think it really put anything new on the table.

Edit: wanted expand on both the good and bad, no spoilers.

The plot is nifty enough but you could guess it from start to finish with like 2 cues (and you get those pretty early). There’s really nothing challenging there we haven’t seen before.

That being it said plays out well. The “big” plot elements you’ll see coming but the little things and character reactions are why I say it’s well written. I may have seen this movie a bunch but I liked watching these characters do it.

I’m just going to give a quick overview of what wastewater treatment is and does.

The basic idea is that you can have something like a can of 7-up, it looks clean, but would kill a fish dead. It’s got loads of dissolved sugar, and if you dumped it into a river, microbes would go nots on the sugar, sucking out all the oxygen as they grew, and causing a boatload of other problems.

But you can’t filter dissolved sugar. I mean you can but it requires a highly specialized filter that would imeaditley foul is wastewater. And we’re not just talking dissolved sugar, there’s a whole range of everything in there.

So we do something very simple: we let the 7up grow moldy. 7 up would go through a coffee filter, but mold wouldnt. We let the mold suck up the sugar, then seperate that.

In reality it’s a bit different but that’s the idea. We grow a ton of microbes, let them suck everything out, then move them to another tank where they all stick together and settle to the bottom. The result is that the liquid at the top of the tank is clear, and free of anything dissolved as the bugs ate it all. (how we then get rid of all of that bug mass is whole other thing but basically we squeeze all the water out we can and it becomes dirt).

The problem with stuff like pfoas or any other micropollutant is that the bugs aren’t that interested. And they’re at such a low concentration it’s incredibly hard to get such a small amount out of millions of gallons every day.

Wastewater treatment was meant to mimic natural ecology so that when it was discharged we didn’t overwhelm the environment. If you poop in the woods, it’s probably not a problem. If everyone poops in the same area of the woods… The woods are going to look different and not in a good way. We solved that problem, but not the one of what to do when the poop is “radioactive”.

One last note: what I described above is secondary settling (letting the bugs settle and taking the liquid off the top). There ARE filters to seperate the bugs from the liquid, but they are no where near selective enough for specific compounds. Again, think coffee strainer.

Bare with me here because I am not an expert. I think what they’re getting is the same as how gravity doesn’t exist. Vsauce did a great video on that, but the general notion is that because space time is curved, objects traveling in streight lines will appear to be drawn closer to one another. “Gravity” isn’t fundamental, warping spacetime is. Nothing changed but our understanding of it, which does matter for some more complicated areas.

I think this is similar. Just like gravity “doesn’t exisit”, it’s just an emergent phenomenon: they’re saying so is time. They’re saying time isn’t fundemental, except that it’s an expected phenomenon that would arise from other factors, those factors being proposed to be some entanglement crap I have zero ability to talk about.

And I’m putting some words in their mouth with “time isn’t fundemental”. What they’re really doing is proposing a new definition that better fits observed phenomenon/models.

And still, none of this explains why we still have daylights savings time.

I’m a chronic “patient gamer” belive me I get it. The underworld awaits you my friend ;)

The only crash like I said was almost certainly due to a multi-monitor display and one monitor disconnecting and reconnecting. I didn’t even bother submitting a report.

And yeah there’s definitely going to be a few extras. Its wild, like I never play games at launch, specifically because they always ship broken, and here this thing is with the stones to call itself early access when it’s so polished narcissus would gaze at himself in if.

Thanks for pointing out! I see what you mean now but didn’t even notice.

I hear you, but I caved lol. You will NOT be disappointed. EA is such a weird choice for this one. It’s where I’d call it well past beta (a true beta, not the marketing betas that we usually see where there’s no time to fix anything). Like it truly is “early access” but we’re so used to that term meaning “somewhere in dev”.

If they’re targeting 2025 release this thing will be incredibly polished by then.

I don’t know when the person above you played, but I didn’t notice any of that (got it last week, binged it, 35ish hours). I didn’t notice any missing graphics, and yes there are some spots where you can tell somethings coming, but it doesn’t feel janky, it feels exciting. With game loop being all about upgrades, you can tell there’s a few that aren’t available, but there’s so much meat their absence feels like part of the loop not part of the dev cycle.

The voice acting is all there, the mechanics are all there. I think I had like… One line of repeated dilouge? There’s a good breadth of characters and they’ve got that same slow, well thought out progression they did in Hades I. With only one exception that I can’t mention due to spoilers, you could tell me this a complete game with free DLC inbound.

Bug wise it’s almost entirely free. I had some crashes but I think that was due to a bad HDMI cable repeatedly becoming unstable, and making the game freak out as to what screen it should be on. I haven’t had an issue since I fixed the cable and it’s the only bug I encountered.

I definitely feel like I got my money’s worth.

I have a friend that flies, I got a very stern talking to once that it’s because Ford has a taste for old aircraft. Which… remember this is a hobby where no one raises an eyebrow for a Cessna made in the early 90s. I guess the one where he landed the helicopter on the golf course involved some autorotation maneuvering and whatnot. In any event, turns out he’s an excellent pilot in the air, but maybe a not so great one on the ground before takeoff lol.

It would have been nice, but part of the reason he left was the frustration with type casting. So it would have been cool but I’m more happy he’s had a pretty solid stream of totally unrelated roles rather than dusting off the old hits.

That being said, you know who his entertainment lawyer is? Jeff Cohen, aka: Chunk from The Goonies

… I had never thought about it this way. You’re totally correct though. I spend way more time fighting with my windows machine than I do my linux these days. I also just have a lot less patience fighting it because it’s always due to some dumb shit it didn’t need to be doing in the first place.