Easily the most effective for me has been to develop, review, and/or do one action item off a plan to be able to leave the job and work towards something I want to spend my time working on. Knowing I have a plan, remembering it and seeing that it’s a good plan, and taking steps on that is a concrete reminder that the job I hate is temporary and I’m not stuck. That reduces the scaries significantly for me.

Then I also like to clean my place, light a scented candle, and read/watch something to make where I live feel cozy, comforting, and home-y. A reminder that even though the job is shit, I have at least built a home that I come back to. Might call a friend and talk it out too - works on both levels.

What do you do?

They’re not entertaining the idea; they’ve already executed it. Women have already been arrested for miscarriages in multiple states.

They all quit, so presumably they’ll attempt to establish themselves as a new publisher. I am.very much hoping for an announcement of that soon. If Annapurna, the parent company, was trying to blend their agencies, it’ll be interesting to see if they can maintain the quality of their productions.

Can’t answer as to why you would buy it again, but for me, I thought about replaying Braid recently only to discover that it was a pretty blurry mess. This looks a lot nicer, and commentary on video game design and development can be really interesting to me, especially since a lot of that is kept behind closed doors still.

Haha same! There’s a place for us though: if you ever get into research, robotic writing tends to work out fairly well!

Sounds like the intro paragraph to someone’s term paper at uni.

Collective action can certainly be powerful. But your plan seems to have some pretty glaring holes. Strikes aren’t protected in the US for non-work-related issues, are they? And you’d have to decide when the strike ends, i.e. when a “good” candidate is proposed, which everyone will have different opinions on. Seems to me the better move would be to be pushing for a rework of the voting system into one that allows voting for other parties without throwing away a vote.

Sony has already stated they are working on PC support and hope to release it this year: https://blog.playstation.com/2024/02/22/coming-soon-to-ps-vr2-zombie-army-vr-little-cities-bigger-wanderer-the-fragments-of-fate-the-wizards-dark-times-brotherhood-and-more/

Same; first time in years I’ve let it lapse and I’m realizing that I haven’t missed out on anything yet. It was really convenient when I had the higher tier for a bit there because they had a good amount of indie games I wanted to try. But I don’t have the same amount of time for gaming right now, and I would rarely finish those games anyway.

It’s heavily inspired by Chrono Trigger…heavily. It’s got dual-techs, the writing feels very similar at times, the equipment has predictable scaling as the story progresses, and lots more. The dialog is a bit saccharine for my taste; I’ve far preferred Chrono Trigger’s. Chrono Trigger has pleasant and supportive characters, but it hasn’t ever felt over the top. Sea of Stars also has some modern niceties, like timed presses for defense and offense, some interesting spell-boosting mechanics, it’s very pretty at times, etc. And it plays on jrpg tropes at times in a fun way, and didn’t feel like it overstayed its welcome. Since you love Chrono Trigger, my best guess is that I think you’d have fun with Sea of Stars. It won’t blow your mind by any means, but I don’t think you’d regret spending time with it.

I’ve started and stopped it a number of times over the past 20 years or so, and I’m finally playing it all the way through right now. At least one of those times was because I thought I HAD to fight Lavos through the bucket and thought I was expected to grind until I could defeat it lol. This time, I’ve found it really remarkable how tight it is and how well it still holds up today. Even though Sea of Stars came out last year, it feels like Chrono Trigger could have been released alongside it and it would only feel a bit more dated in some respects.

I’m not seeing anyone here praising Microsoft; actually the opposite. Who’s praising Microsoft?

And yet, I believe LLMs are a natural evolutionary product of NLP and a powerful tool that is a necessary step forward for humanity. It is already capable of exceptionally quickly scaffolding out basic tasks. In it, I see the assumptions that all human knowledge is for all humans, rudimentary tasks are worth automating, and a truly creative idea is often seeded by information that already exists and thus creativity can be sparked by something that has access to all information.

I am not sure what we are defending by not developing them. Is it a capitalism issue of defending people’s money so they can survive? Then that’s a capitalism problem. Is it that we don’t want to get exactly plagiarized by AI? That’s certainly something companies are and need to continue taking into account. But researchers repeat research and come to the same conclusions all the time, so we’re clearly comfortable with sharing ideas. Even in the Writer’s Guild strikes in the States, both sides agreed that AI is helpful in script-writing, they just didn’t want production companies to use it as leverage to pay them less or not give them credit for their part in the production.

From what I’m reading, they’re not set to go to market; that’s just their goal. Most recent article I found was middle of last year that they had raised more money and were hoping to go to human trials by the end of the year. That aligns with what I remember about Vasalgel from years ago - they had finally made it to monkey trials but their monkey study was not showing a consistent ability to return to virility with the second injection. I seem to remember the proposed reason being that vas deferens in the monkeys/apes they were testing with are actually more delicate than humans’ and so humans should still likely be reversible. Last I heard, I believe they were trying to move forward on the human trial of proving that it works as a contraceptive, to be followed by a human trial showing reversibility. Then radio silence and funding issues. My assumption has always been that they struggled to jump to human trials because of the primate study results hurting the likelihood of reversibility. Hopefully they have reworked it to solve that, or maybe the acquisition and new funding is enough to just push through that regardless and see if humans will be fine.

You want Valve to develop a version of Steam that circumvents their own DRM to play local files? What would prevent people from using that to pirate things even more easily? I can imagine they’d have some trouble with publishers as well for doing that. There are already largely standardized cracks for steam and emulators for steam; just use that. Regardless, no solution will work for any game using DRM other than Steam, like Denuvo, so you’ll have to rely on pirates for those regardless.

It does serve as a wonderful example of exactly what they are talking about, funny enough.

Yeah, this is why I’ve urged so many people to shop around for a country like they do a job. See what country aligns with your values, with your goals, with benefits, etc. and start working to get there. You don’t have to stay miserable if you feel like your country is not where you want it to be and you’re not the one to help fix it.

A question no one has asked yet: how often are you farting and how smelly are we talking? Because there may be a diet change worth considering if you’re putting around like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Yeah, I think that’s probably best, mate, if the argument is shifting towards “why does being reasonable matter?”

Mate, me asking “how much is reasonable of us to ask of one person?” is not grandstanding; that’s just me countering your point. He has used his biggest platform to address issues in the game industry before, just like you want, so my point still stands: how much is reasonable of us to ask of him? Is it his responsibility to address each issue the industry has or is it reasonable for him to pick and choose his battles?