Is anyone surprised? This isn't a jab at Hasan, it's just a reminder that fascists will crack down on opponents. The likes of Hasan will be deliberately targeted until they've been silenced one way or another, and then they'll come for you.

Exactly. Skepticism is about casting doubt on beliefs and dogmas, not outright rejecting facts. When it comes to germs and vaccines there's scientific consensus on those matters. They're as close to facts as you can get. But rejecting those you're not a skeptic, you're a denier. There's no scientific debate on those topics, only a political debate on whether to reject science or not.

I was just about to say that if you had spent your entire life doing parkour then you too could do parkour with ease. The reason we allocate specific times to train our body is because our daily lives don't contain enough activity to naturally train us.

Once maybe twice, sure. Enough times for someone to make a post about it? I also wouldn't say it's a red flag but it's definitely weird.

If you take 1kg of steel and 1kg of water, which is heavier? That's right, steel is heavier.

People who oppose Israel's participation didn't watch and didn't vote.

Why would people not watch? Do you think Israel has such a huge influence on people that they'd outright ignore watching the show? I would argue that's not a factor because there were people in the arena who booed Israel. They paid money to see it live. I didn't like Israel participating, I still watched it because Eurovision is not about Israel.

Even if they did vote, their votes were spread across dozens of other candidates.

That's a roundabout way of saying you think Israel's song was popular among people. I'm supposed to believe Netherlands, who just had a massive protest about Israel, gave maximum points to Israel? Norway, who is known to be pretty anti-Israel, gave almost max points to Israel? Same with France, UK etc. Countries that have polls showing the majority being against what Israel is doing turn around and give max (or close to max) points to Israel? How? Why?

Except the production costs have also gone down. The development itself is easier thanks to better tooling and developers no longer require putting out physical media (which used to be a pretty significant part of cost).

And there's no excuse for $80 when Clair Obscur released at $50 and is one of the best games released this year. I seriously doubt BL4 will be $30 more impressive than Clair Obscur. How about studio heads do their job and streamline their production process to make better products for lower costs instead of offloading their bloat onto the customers.

Exactly. They can charge $200 if they want to but it doesn't mean people are going to buy at that price. The price point needs to be where people are okay paying for it and I don't see it happening at $80. Okay, I lied a bit, I see it happening for some games but not for BL4.

Best example of character growth in all of media.

After giving it some thought I kinda agree with the author. Not in the hyperbolic sense that it's the worst thing ever, nor in the sense that I don't like parrying because I suck at it, but I agree on the point where he's talking about fencing.

There's so much more creative freedom and depth in actual martial arts, HEMA, fencing etc. that is just completely missing from most games. You don't get the contact feel of your opponent, you can't physically feel what your opponent will do. You can't really gauge how far your attack will reach or, more importantly, how much range your opponents have. You can't choose your angle of attack and, again more importantly especially in the context of parrying, choose how you defend. Your attacks are generally just a button click at which point the character does whatever attack has been programmed. Your defense is just a button click that generally blocks all attacks in front of you. Your parry is also just a button click that if timed right just parries (and sometimes automatically ripostes as well). All the nuance of melee combat is simplified to "one button for blocking/parrying and one button for attacking".

So yeah, parrying does suck until we can turn it into something more engaging than just timing a button press.

You're telling me we're not going to get generation after generation of teenage "guitar players" who can only play Wonderwall?

I get it now. They're comparing only trunks because the hash of the trunk wouldn't change.

I'm willing to eat my words but I doubt I need to. In a world where Clair Obscur costs $50 I don't how see how BL could be $30 better than one of the best games released this year.

I've been saying it for the last decade, there's no real "games are too expensive to make" problem. There's only studios choosing the "go big or go home" death spiral where they inflate the budget and need a hit to stay afloat. But then after every hit the budget grows even bigger requiring an even bigger hit until eventually they're going to flop and the studio goes under. They could just not do that and have a sustainable business. And I get that it's not only the game developers fault. Part of the blame falls on the publishers who most likely force budgets to balloon so they could make more money (if the game is a success). But when I say they could just not do that I mean both the developer and publisher. Both of them should be smarter than that.

But clearly even with all the major flops it has been a successful strategy, because they've been at it since at least mid 2000s. It's only in the recent years where it's really starting to strain all the AAA publishers as the budgets have grown too big even for them. These price increases are an outcome of this budget ballooning. They're feeling their bottom line taking a hit so they increase the price to mitigate the risk.

Personally I said fuck them, let it crash and let's get more studios like Sandfall, who made an exceptional games for a reasonable price.

That's also not entirely correct.

you've never had to ask for permission to store cookies that are required for your site to work

You don't need to ask permission for cookies that are strictly necessary for your site to work. They can contain personally identifiable information (PII) but only to the extent that is strictly required for the functionality to work. If your "required" cookie does anything more than what is strictly necessary (such as collecting more PII than it needs or has built in tracking) you need to ask consent.

you have to ask for permission for third party trackers to store cookies when people use your site.

If you're using something like on premise tracking, like Matomo, then you still have to ask permission. There are some exceptions like if you don't use cookies and you don't track PII.

And just for extra clarification, if you are collecting PII (for example into logs) you need to ask permission even when you're not storing any cookies.

A company can become more agile with layoffs if you have a bunch of useless middle managers who exist only to justify their existence and you lay them off.

I don't remember who but someone made a good example with the "this is fine" meme in Clair Obscur. Someone on the development team came up with the idea and it probably took a day or two to set up. So they took a day or two and it's in the game. Had the game been made by Ubisoft that meme would've never ended up in the game because the idea would've gone through 5 different managers who need to give their blessing (because none of them want to take the full responsibility in case it sucks), then it goes through legal to make sure there's no infringement, then through pr to make sure it's not somehow offensive. Eventually a week has passed and management is still deciding if it should be implemented. Finally it gets canned because the time spent on making the decision had already made it too costly to implement. Something that could've been done in a day took a week and nothing got done.

But I'd be surprised if that kind of downsizing is what Jagex had in mind.

I never refuted that?

Hydras can jump.

I agree with you but I do want to clarify this point.

switching to something completely different and incompatible would be extremely damaging.

Since Lemmy uses the underlying ActivityPub protocol you can use something completely different and it is compatible. For example in response to this latest drama with Lemmy devs I switched to fedia.io, which is running on Mbin and not Lemmy. Mbin is compatible with Lemmy because Mbin also uses ActivityPub. The compatibility happens on a protocol level not the service level. You can go search up Mbin magazines (which is essentially the same thing as a community) and interact with the same way as you would with a Lemmy community. You can't set up a community on an Mastodon instance because it doesn't have that functionality but you can theoretically comment in Lemmy and Mbin communities thanks to the ActivityPub. You can also use Piefed as it fills the same social media niche. The platforms that are incompatible would be platforms that are not using ActivityPub.

Instance owners can't just rip out Lemmy, shove in Mbin and call it a day, sadly it's not that simple. But for the average user you can create an Mbin account and as long as the instance is federated with all the instances your Lemmy account was then you can subscribe to all the community you were subscribed to before and the only functional difference in your daily usage is the sorting algorithm (. For instance owners the only possible solution may to be have a migratory period where you have two instances running, so people could slowly transition from one instance to another but looking at how hard it was to get people to move from Reddit I think moving instances is a whole other topic.

I'm not saying people must move away from Lemmy but I do want to remind people that Lemmy is not the only option and that moving from Lemmy to something else in the fediverse won't be as painful as moving from Reddit to Lemmy.

She's not just the main character towards the end, she is the main character of the story. We play Geralt, who is a side character in Ciri's story.