It is basically just a web form these days (just google “xfinity outage” or whatever).

They cut you off after a certain number of outages per quarter. And they decide how much money you get per outage. So if your next door neighbor has never reported an outage and you report every single one, they’ll get more for that one report.

Been a minute (this was a nice reminder that I hadn’t even booted up my PS5 in almost a year…), but I want to say it depends on if you have your console set as your primary console or not. Primary doesn’t need to go online to authenticate. Secondary does.

Most people just have a single console so it is auto-primary. But people who bought a ps5 pro or who do super convoluted account sharing shenanigans always have trouble when auth servers are down.

Also, I think the PS+ IGC requires network to make sure you still have PS+?

We would get them on spaghetti and meat sauce days. And we loved it because the spaghetti was so nauseating due to being consistently overcooked and the sauce having almost no seasoning.

…

Okay, I think I just answered my own question as to why people love the olive garden breadsticks.

Meh. Even back in the 90s and 00s they were trash. My grandmother loved olive garden for some reason or another (I assume horrifically racist) and even as a kid I remember “… this is the exact same breadstick I had at lunch on tuesday?”

Don’t get me wrong. Bread is awesome and worth all the horrors of carbs. But olive garden has always had mediocre breadsticks (I want to say there were periods where they had actual bread that was decent though?).

I know it is obviously not the point but:

the olive garden breadsticks thing has to be astroturfing, right? Because that shit is mid as hell. It is barely better than school cafeteria breadsticks. At least red lobster (?) cheddar bay biscuits have flavor.

That data is largely worthless. Mostly because so much of it has leaked so many times over the past decade or two. That is why so many people have a special tax code or whatever.

The real “value” of having access to the treasury is not the data itself. It is the ability to change that data in a manner that directly defies congress, the budget, and everything else.

Last I saw they still have two “special employees” with “read only” access. So he still has “read only” access

But also? They already made code changes. And while I doubt they would be able to do anything meaningful, it is not hard to add another user account or an ssh tunnel to get through the “air gap”. And it would not be beyond musk et al to call that “hacking”.

I don’t know what nonsense internet beefs he is in right now but I know there is someone dropping “bombshells” every day. I would be wary of associating yourself with that dumbfuckery.

Hasan Piker is formerly an intern (and nepo baby) at the young turks who struck out on his own and gained pretty large fame around the 2020 US election because of his open support for Sanders and general willingness to watch and React to political content with a heavy emphasis on (American) socialist stances.

In recent years a lot of us have mostly written him off as a tankie due to his initial stance on the war in Ukraine and his ongoing stance toward the genocide in Palestine. Most of the “genocide joe” takes and the like were regurgitated endlessly by him. He has still done a lot of good during that period (his coverage of the SAG strikes were spectacular) but… yeah.

That said, he is still probably THE biggest pundit/Voice on the left and him covering the protests would go a long way toward making ordinary people aware of just how fucked everything is.

Its why I think all the “Early access bad” people are fucking idiots.

A lot of games abuse EA, no arguments there. A lot of games also just rush to 1.0 so they can do a console release and then abandon the game (the Time at Portia devs did that with like three kickstarters?). And then you have the labors of love like Dwarf Fortress or Caves of Qud or Project Zomboid that basically will always be EA (although Qud hit 1.0, finally).

Not to mention studios like Amplitude who use EA in the best possible way. They have a vertical slice of the game and they work with the community to figure out what features to add or rebalance. It isn’t always perfect but it genuinely feels like they are listening and it is great.

There are many layers to this.

At the highest? It shows politicians there is public support for something. Many politicians still think there will be elections in 4 years (hell, probably not even 2) and will make it a point to act so that they don’t get primary’d and so forth. We already saw shades of this with congress realizing what signs their checks and protesting musk dismantling the treasury two days ago. Albeit, the outcome of that is very much “okay, we’ll keep most of the foxes out of the hen house but not all of them” but… baby steps.

The next level is to show the american people there is support. That said… the news media basically refused to cover any of the protests. THAT said, I assume the usual talking heads on twitch et al did (although I think hasan is still on vacation and making videos showing he is bigger than a Japanese person?). It is well worth remembering that a ridiculous number of people didn’t even realize biden wasn’t running last year.

And then we start getting to the point where lemmy admins will nuke stuff. So I’ll just cut off after this point. Cops and fat white kids who want to shoot some n****rs are going to act sooner than later. That will be caught on camera.

Except that isn’t what happens with stuff like this. It isn’t reflecting “the values and prejudices of the people” at the time. It is reflecting them in the modern day.

The problem with KCD1 wasn’t that it depicted low tech people (which it didn’t. It very much went the route of “alchemy is science”) or even the very questionable views on women (that is a very complex topic). It was the insistence that medieval Czech was a land of white people (and a specific phenotype at that…) and blah blah blah. When the vast majority of historical evidence is that medieval Europe was a mixing pot (there is a reason that terms like “moor” existed and plenty of people brought servants, slaves, and even wives back from the various crusades and Crusades).

Which gets back to “the dark ages” being about a lack of records more than anything else. But people interpret “Well. there is no record of an arab being in this entire country for 300 years!” as “The white men kept the brown folk out” rather than “Well… there also aren’t a lot of records period. But if you look a few miles to the east you DO see records acknowledging this as though it weren’t a big deal”

Which also lines up with the lead dev being a piece of shit chud who was a loud voice during gamergate.

And it also left a REALLY bad taste in the mouth of people (who give a shit) who read any of the discussion on this and saw WAY too many people talk about how it is important to have a game about Czech that remembers the glory days back when everyone was white and strong and blah blah blah.

And, as a quick aside: KCD1 is still the most bog standard power fantasy fantasy there can be. The combat is more or less “What if you took two HEMA seminars?” and is still star wars kid slicing through plate mail. And it is especially funny because the “historians” that were consulted? No, they weren’t medieval history specialists or even HEMA specialists. If memory serves, it was a guy who specialized in WW1 tanks. And, while people can obviously have multiple passions, it really showed. Also, you are the son of a blacksmith (?) who bangs his way around Bohemia to become bestest friends with the king and blah blah blah.

Which brings us to Ghost of Tsushima. I genuinely love this game even if there is zero chance I ever finish it (I can’t stand ubi open world games and it is more ubi than ubi has been in years). Yes, it is 500% written by a white guy who studied the blade. But it is well acted and well “directed” and really feels like I am playing a Kurosawa film. That said, it definitely depicts the Mongols as violent barbarians who outright use civilians as target practice and do nothing but <REDACTED> and pillage because violence is fine but the other thing triggers ratings issues.

And in the sense of needing a villain that justifies Jin giving up the pretense that samurai were anything other than violent warlords in armor? It works. But if you actually look at politics and cultural shifts in Japan over the past few decades, you’ll see why it was very well received that All Mongols are Barbarian Monsters and so forth. It is the same problem as depicting “generic brown people” in “generic Middle East” as more or less slobbering zombies to be mowed down.

Which gets back to the key point. Pretty much all of these “We are just depicting the <blank> period as it was” isn’t doing that. It is portraying things through the lens of the modern day which is something that is accepted amongst historic fiction writers (more on that shortly). So if they crank up the whiteness? There is a reason.

Now, I said I was going to talk about historic fiction writers. If you ARE interested in “what things were like”, I STRONGLY recommend authors like Miles Cameron (I think that is his pen name for SFF, but they redirect to the same site). Historic fiction can be awesome and the best stories are the ones that need to have a footnote or appendix of “Yo, this ACTUALLY happened.” because of how wild it is. And you’ll find that the writers who actually put the effort in to cite things tend to have much more nuanced depictions of both sides (because it is incredibly rare to have a genuinely evil empire) and are a lot less focused on racial purity because… that shit wasn’t a thing once we got past “The people on that side of the river all have red hair and are evil. I hear their wives and daughters are hot though…”

Iron Galaxy was semi-unique in that they basically existed as the company you go to when you need to contract out some support work. Think Bluepoint but the idea is that the end customer never realizes that this wasn’t made by a time traveling Rare from the 00s or whatever. Whereas they basically just stay afloat from a constant stream of low-medium price deals.

The leadership are dipshits and have made it a point to show it many times over the years (and Giant Bomb/Jeff Gerstmann have always done a great job of covering for them…) but it was a solid company that was pretty loved in the area and the industry (leadership aside).

So for IG to be going under is a REALLY bad sign for the health of the industry as a whole. Because this wasn’t “Hey, we have an excellent track record of new IPs and always release our games on time and under budget”. It is “Hey, we have an excellent track record of letting you sell more copies of a sure thing”.

And “voting” favors developers/celebrities with userbases to flood the system. This was a well documented problem and many of the indie devs of the era complained. The influencers of the era could get anything greenlit. Amazing games like even frigging Mount&Blade were in an endless struggle. And let alone the truly new developers who just had a game and a dream.

Also: I am pretty sure you are just showing your ass, but people who make “furry hentai games” aren’t inherently “pieces of shit”. Valve 900% needs to improve the filters to let people who don’t want to see it ignore it (Will Smith is basically the only person who knows how to hide it, it seems) but those games deserve to exist just as much as the latest call of duty.

Everyone gets their start somewhere.

And you can be sure that the old hats are making sure to record and broadcast everything. So when the jackboots inevitably see a black person and start unloading with “rubber bullets” and tear gas, people will see.

Tumblr was already in a bad place and was further cannibalized by instagram (and reddit).

Reddit still has no meaningful alternatives. Yes, we like lemmy. Most people don’t and won’t. They want corporate social media. Just look at how long it took people to leave twitter. And they only did once BlueSky had open sign ups.

My money is on a bunch of “protest” posts and subreddits to track this and people mostly just sit around and not care. With a lot saying “I don’t need porn on reddit, I have the internet” while completely ignoring things like trans erasure.

What? But I was told that elon is “not the fed” and nothing would happen to reddit who would fight tooth and nail for everyone’s rights.

Gasp, shock, and amazement.

There is zero chance an impeachment goes anywhere. He controls the house and the senate and they have already made it clear they would rather protect trump than even themselves at this point.

And as nice as it would be for the mushroom kingdom to roll up with some fire flowers, the secret service and military would just unload on full auto and mow them down. Or we would have president vance which will still be doing all the same project 2025 bullshit (but with less tariffs).

At BEST we are looking at a military coup (assuming they don’t just jerk off over the idea of being able to unload on The Gays) and… those have basically never ended well for the people.

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Its annoying as hell but I guess I don’t really see a meaningful impact. Yes, not everyone has a cell phone. But… I would say anyone who is flying doesn’t have an excuse of poverty.

And basically every single airport has “free” wifi these days. So either install the app or open the web page to get up to date info. Because there are countless stories of people who missed their flights because they were waiting at the original gate and somehow ignored everyone around them getting up and walking away when the gate changed.

Also: My excuse with departure boards has always been that EVERYONE crowds in front of it to have long conversations or “just stand there” and it is a shitshow anyway.

So yeah. Would REALLY prefer it to not be just even more ads being shoved down our throats. But this very much feels more like phasing out phone booths than anything else.

Heads up: Maybe just link to Emily’s video rather than an article about it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt1kS52V3MM

And yeah. Emily The Engineer is increasingly the (number two) youtuber I wish would have a second channel to do deep dives into the actual engineering behind these projects (nothing beats Shane at Stuff Made Here). There are just so many factors as to how this even works and I would love a deep dive on what was done to actually compensate for the… curvature of flesh? I feel real dirty now…

But yeah. Her videos have kind of hit that sweet spot of “completely unhinged” and “really really cool from a design and engineering standpoint”.