Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.
or that China is doing in Taiwan.
?
Do you mean that they’re threatening to do to Taiwan? Because so far they’ve done nothing but posture. Or maybe you meant Hong Kong, which is certainly really, really bad, but I don’t think rises to nearly the same level as Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestine.
I saw that source video on the Wikipedia page, before you edited it in, and yeah, thanks for sharing. It’s angering. The thing is though, it’s much less surprising of 2013 Microsoft than it is of 2024 Microsoft. Today’s Microsoft has paid much better attention to its gaming products, and in particular has been an incredibly good steward of the Age franchise. The game itself of Age of Empires Mobile is such a huge departure from this, feeling like a massive kick in the arse to Age fans. And up to now, the only real criticism of how they’ve handled media and the fans of the Age franchise has been a comparative lack of communication directly from them. There’s been nothing similar to this.
It’s disappointing to see that they’re still pulling the same shit we thought they got out of their system when they replaced the CEO in 2014.
As a side note, that video makes a big point of referencing the Dreamworks movie Antz. I just finished watching another video that popped up in my feed that did the same thing (though for entirely unrelated reasons). That was a weird experience. (To be more accurate, I just finished watching a movie that I decided to put on immediately after watching a YouTube video that popped up in my feed. The video in my feed was not about Antz, and neither was the movie I watched. So technically I watched said video about 90 minutes ago.)
For anyone who see the preview back in February, this is not exactly surprising, but it certainly brings home the reality of the situation—that the preview did not unfairly represent the actual game.
This deeply upsets me, because the Age of Empires franchise is one I really care about. 1, 2, 3, 4, and Age of Mythology are all excellent games, and every one of them belongs in the top 20 RTS games of all time. Microsoft might not be developing this game (that’s getting outsourced to Chinese company TiMi with a history of producing trash mobile games), but they are tarnishing their brand by allowing it to be associated with this game.
But it gets worse. They are apparently also silencing critics of it. Back when February’s announcement came out, some select few creators were allowed to put out videos about the game using exclusive footage of the game, and were told they’d be paid for their role in promoting the game. But they retained editorial control over the videos. YouTube channel Age of Noob put out one such video, and while tempered in its tone, it was largely negative.
Yesterday, the YouTube channel Age of Noob put out a video saying he never got paid, as well as more specifically saying how bad the game was. Today, he put out another one saying he was forced to take down that one (in vague terms—it would not even be clear he was talking about AoE Mobile, if you hadn’t seen the first video). In a pinned comment he also said that after making the second video, he found out he had been removed from the Age Franchise Partners programme.
If this is how Microsoft is willing to treat their biggest game franchise (well, biggest one that they didn’t buy after it was already huge), and the creators that help promote it, that is incredibly disappointing.
I started playing the original game ages ago but got distracted by life, and finally picked it up again a couple of months ago. The game is honestly very janky and unpolished, much more than I remember it being the first time I was playing, but it’s still so much fun. It was refreshing to see in their announcement video that they acknowledge that the first game didn’t live up to their hopes, and that with a bigger budget and more experience, the sequel should get them closer to their dream.
Some thoughts:
I started playing the original game ages ago but got distracted by life, and finally picked it up again a couple of months ago. The game is honestly very janky and unpolished, much more than I remember it being the first time I was playing, but it’s still so much fun. It was refreshing to see in their announcement video that they acknowledge that the first game didn’t live up to their hopes, and that with a bigger budget and more experience, the sequel should get them closer to their dream.
Some thoughts:
Maybe, but money was probably not the only thing keeping people away, and a statement like that would have drastically decreased confidence that it would stick around, which may reduced take-up among people for whom other concerns—like the mental energy of spending time in a doomed platform may have taken—were more at the fore.
Google never had a chance to succeed because when Stadia was announced people were immediately saying “oh, I wonder how long until Google shutters this”. Google’s reputation for killing its services is coming back to bite it. It almost wouldn’t have mattered how good the games they developed were, if people were scared to try out the platform they’re on for fear of losing a lot of money and time investment.
I respect enormously where he’s coming from, but he refuses to acknowledge the very simple fact that spoilers do occur, and in close-run races, they can change the outcome for the worse. He says the Democrats didn’t understand the winner-takes-all Electoral College in 2000, while he himself dismisses his own part in that. Yes, ideally, Democrats would have played a better game and won by a larger margin and the spoiler wouldn’t have mattered. But they didn’t, and I think every factor that lead to Gore’s loss should be looked at and criticised, including Nader’s run.
The first and most important change that could be made in America is moving to a real voting system. First Past the Post is a sham. It isn’t democracy. Whether the move is to IRV or MMP or STV or whatever almost doesn’t matter. Just move to something real. Eliminate the spoiler effect, and then you can begin to see real meaningful policy change.
Seriously, at this point it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. None of the dedicated users start using a Google service because they know it won’t last. Or maybe they do use it to play around with, but they certainly don’t recommend it to their less enthusiastic social circles. Either way, this severely restricts how much the service can grow by word of mouth. Thus it doesn’t get enough users for Google to consider it viable, and they shut it down. And next time, people are even more cautious about getting invested in a Google tool.
VPNs are big because Vietnam is big on censorship. Not nearly to the scale of China, but a lot of popular websites are or have at some point been blocked, so people get used to finding ways around the censorship, which then also lends itself to doing the same for media.
That said, piracy is also very popular there.
So roughly a 175 year sentence, at cap.
Sentencing guidelines usually have specific rules for whether sentences would be run concurrently or consecutively. Charges are grouped if:
(a) Counts involve the same victim and the same act or transaction.
(b) Counts involve the same victim and two or more acts or transactions connected by a common criminal objective or constituting part of a common scheme or plan. © One of the counts embodies conduct that is treated as a specific offense characteristic in, or Chapter 3 adjustment to, the guideline applicable to another count. (d) Counts use the same guideline and are included for grouping under [subsection §3D1.2].
A group’s value is then determined by the most serious count in that group. Then, separate groups are combined in a way that is not as simple as adding the groups together. This United States Sentencing Commission PDF document explains how that combining is done. And this YouTube video explains more about how the severity of each charge is calculated and what that means in terms of time in prison, through the lens of explaining what it would mean if Trump were to be found guilty of all the charges laid on him in relation to the retention of classified documents.
I’m not even going to begin to try to work out how that would be applied here, because I am woefully unqualified. But I doubt it would actually be anywhere near 175 years for Assange even if found guilty on all charges and given the harshest interpretation of the sentencing guidelines.
Not sure the ADL is really a reputable organisation worth looking to as and authority on what is and is not hate. They’re an explicitly zionist organisation with a history of defending genocide.
That said, this particular article seems completely fair. They don’t say the ok gesture is a symbol of hate, only that it is sometimes used that way. Which is accurate.
But also:
Since the early 1800s, the gesture increasingly became associated with the word “okay” and its abbreviation “ok.”
Whoops guys, got that one wrong. OK is the original form, and okay is a lengthened form of that.
Yeah like the other guy said, Reignited is great. I think this video does it a bit of a disservice. You can make any argument that the art direction loses something compared to the original, but even then it’s only losing a tiny amount, and all the gameplay and sound design are every bit as good.
Wait you can buy bits? I thought they were earnt by watchtime and clicking on a little button next to chat.
Doesn’t Twitch make most of its money through donations, and the insanely high cut Twitch takes from them?
Is this account a bot? It’s taken over literally my entire front page (when set to “subscribed”), and some of page 2, with multiple posts in a single minute at times.
Not exactly. It’s concerning, for sure, but they’re not actually displaying your name in association with your review. It’s only stored alongside your account. They seem to be claiming that the purpose is to ensure people aren’t providing fake reviews.
I’d like to know what source that page is using. What does it count as “gaming”? Because too often, these stats include both intentional and incidental gaming. Those are my terms because I don’t know what the official terminology is, but it’s a distinction that I know gets talked about in serious circles and it’s worth making here. When people talk about who is a “gamer”, they instinctively always mean people who have made a deliberate decision to sit down and play a game now. They don’t mean “oh I’m bored, let me pull out the phone and play a round of Candy Crush”.
In all seriousness, I’m struggling to figure it out. I thought it might be an Ingress-style game which could be interesting for the Monopoly IP, but the Wikipedia page makes it clear that’s not the case, without being clear enough to understand what it is.
fyi it’s the garlic flower that protects from vampires, not the bulb.
And more important that ensuring you don’t accidentally take it off is making sure your mother doesn’t. Also, make sure she doesn’t open the windows because you seem “stuffy”.