I have a strong abiding loathing for Gearbox’s CEO, Randy Pritchford, but the team they have behind RoR2 now seem to really want to do a good job. They’ve been very up front, in a way I only sometimes see with small indie devs, about the process of fixing core game parts they managed to break when they released the core game patch that coincided with this DLC.

I’m still waiting a good long while before I touch RoR2 again, but I feel like it will be fixed eventually. Can’t say that for all of my games.

Yeah, I’m a big supporter of expanding the nuclear footprint as more green options (and power storage solutions) are further developed (and in addition to rollout of those options), but this is outrageous.

This isn’t even to power critical communications infrastructure that needs to be disaster resistant, like any of the internet backbone locations.

I feel like there’s a lot of script writers that want the emotional wrenchingness of “this character’s personality and history means that they will never see the simple solution” but have no idea how to actually pull it off.

Breaking Bad pulls this off wonderfully multiple times, where the “right” decision is right there but for the character to be able to do it, they couldn’t be who we’ve learned them to be so far.

But most directors amd scriptwriters are nowhere near that level.

Better yet, don’t use an explanation at all!

If you establish something as just being part of your setting that is accepted by the characters in it like it’s no big deal, you can just move on with the actual plot. If it’s not actually going to be relevant to anything plot wise, don’t waste time with useless technobabble!

Slap a “Zephyr FTL Communications” logo on the side of the terminal and call it a day. The audience doesn’t always need to know how, just what. And show, don’t tell.

You can have a character exposition dump about a piece of tech that should be as normal to the other characters as a telephone (so why would anyone talk about it existing casually outside of very specific circumstances), or just… have the character use the damn thing and add a little splash screen on the device “Thank you for using Cisco Intergalactic FTL calls”.

What recent events? People being weidly offended by “woke-ot” and the unnoficial community mod who apologized for being shitty years ago, or is there something new I missed?

The linked Github doesn’t have any information on why it was forked. The readme hasn’t been updated at all to say anything about why this should be used over normal godot.

You’re being ridiculous. It’s not a far strech to think that most people would believe that a company shouldn’t be able to take back something you bought from them. This has implications with digital content in general.

The issue is that you’re looking at group that shrinks at every step.

How many people own digital copies of things? How many of them have been through a situation where a company removes their access to that digital copy? How many of them actually noticed? How many of them had that experience with a videogame? How many of them got upset enough that it stuck with them rather than moving on? How many of them even know this movement exists?

If you get the word out, and frame it as the first step in a fight for improved digital ownership rights for all digital media, you increase your base of potential joiners.

The biggest thing is that you need to get the word out even further about it. I’m subscribed to a ton of gaming youtube channels and the only coverage of this that I’ve seen is from Ross and one other channel. Get bigger youtube names in on this.

Reach out to individual indie developers to ask them to sign a charter to support the movement and spread the word. Run a game jam on itch.io to start making it cool to support it and spread the word. For very small devs that are just putting the game files for single player games out there with no drm applied, it’s literally free to throw in behind this and could be free extra marketing for both parties.

Without a counter movement, or some way for people to register that you are against this movement, you have incomplete info and cannot assume that people not supporting this are actively against it.

It would be just as foolish to say that everyone supports it because 361,826 of 361,826 who spoke up said that they support it, right?

Movements like this live and die on awareness.

At this point we’re just anecdote vs anecdote, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised during most of my attempts.

I’m not going to try and sift through collections on abandonware sites and try to cross reference them against known copies sold. The only person who can speak to your personal white whale is you.

archive.org has many gigs worth of 90s era “900 in 1” shareware/freeware CDs on it. Games that never sold copies and were just stolen personal projects shoved onto one disc.

Recently I found multiple users on SoulSeek that collectively have nearly the whole discography of a relatively unknown japanese house music label, Far East Recordings. The main artist Soichi Terada’s work on the Ape Escape game soundtracks (only thing he’s known for in the US) is easily available as are his CD releases, but there’s a ton of vinyl only releases (he was prolific in the late 80s through mid 90s) that I could find evidence existed but couldn’t actaully find the music anywhere. On top of that he did a lot of collabs with japanese artists that just don’t exist online, and I found a ton of their stuff on SoulSeek as well.

Also, be the change. I’ve backed up all the CDs from my childhood, and put them up on the archive if I couldn’t easily find them on it already. When I find time I’ll do the same with all the old freeware games I downloaded back in the early 2000’s. Keep backups. I’ve got easily accessible backups going back to my family’s Windows XP, and I have our Win 98 drives whenever I decide to buy the right adapters.

Anyway, hope you find what you’re looking for.

You might be surprised. Plenty of sites backing up whatever they can. Try archive.org and various abandonware sites.

They are, even in name. There’s some weird business structuring loophole where the “uber” OpenAI group is a non-profit, that runs/oversees the for-profit subsidiary OpenAI. It’s like OpenAI inc vs OpenAI co or some rediculously meaningless distinction.

Sigma Star Saga is an odd RPG game where the random encounters are short side scrolling shmup segments. I really enjoyed the amount of it that I played, but you can get screwed in some encounters as it gives you a random ship each time, and some are worse than others.

Calling it now. Next Borderlands game is going to have some referential jokes about this train wreck that are meant to be funny self-deprecation but will actually be transparent attempts as covering up how much Randy Pritchford is malding about this.

I’m honestly surprised we aren’t seeing more public meltdown from him. Can only imagine what’s happening behind closed doors.

It may be a good idea to look at what impovershed areas of the world are already doing with “junk” parts. Lots of carts and wagons out there made from old car frames, using torn out seats as chairs and couches, reuse of lights. Old radio units can sometimes be run without the rest of the vehicle. Less likely on newer vehicles that shove everything through the BUS in the touch screen head unit, but older casette deck radio units that were for audio controls only are good candidates. Screens themselves might be able to be reused with clever wiring.

It might sound silly, but checking out old Top Gear’s challenge sections where the hosts frankenstein vehicles together could give some ideas. Also old shows like junkyard wars.

Maybe I’m too used to consoles and low powered computers, but with a VRR screen I don’t tend to notice slowdown until it hits 20fps.

Assuming this is anything like the previous games, this is a massive open world shooter/survival game that simulates events and npc/faction interactions map wide. There are loading zones, but each area is massive. And shit isn’t just sitting waiting for the player to appear, shit is happening in the world constantly.

I don’t really blame the devs for struggling on performance on a game like this with a multiplatform release on console hardware. Especially when this generation of consoles is getting long in the tooth. The previous games were PC first (if they ever got a console release at all, not sure they did).

If they release it in this state, yeah yuck. But being open about the process isn’t something to be derided.

Gundam Wing was a trip. I think it’s meant to be a drama about child soldiers set against a mecha backdrop (like a lot of Gundam), but you really have to fill in the gaps yourself when it comes to character motivations. Even with that, the dubbed dialogue is so hamfisted it’s a hilarious watch.

It’s also possible that in 24 months, I grow wings made of fish and get into anime style battles in the sky with hungry seagulls. Just as likely.

Yep, it’s blatant attempts to decrease costs of employment. Just like outsourcing various tech jobs, automated phone trees, and every business tech “no code required” automation/workflow platform ever devised.

Convince people they can do more with your particular flavor of less. Charge them enough that they save money on the books but you make a profit through them using your toolkit.

At the end of the day, you will always still need someone to fully understand the problem, the inputs, the expected outputs, the tiny details that matter but are often overlooked, to identify roadblocks and determine options around them with associated costs and risks, and ultimately to chart a path from point A to B that has room for further complications.

Whatever the tool set, job title, or perceived level of efficiency provided by the tools, this need will never go away. Businesses are involved in a near constant effort to reduce what they have to pay for these skills, and welcome whatever latest fad points towards the potential of reducing those costs.

That entire article is based off coincidental reasoning, and does nothing to connect the review bombing (which did occur) to anything incel or right wing.

Yes, it’s absurd that the Acolyte’s audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes dropped to below the Holiday special or any other piece of Star Wars media faster than any other piece dropped, but that article itself calls out the most likely reason: people believing that the third episode was retconning the canon of Anakin’s “virgin birth” making him the chosen one by implying the twins were also “virgin birth” force babies.

That’s kind of a massive, setting breaking retcon, if that was in fact what the show was saying (which still seemed to be the implication as of the end of the series). I can understand why that would draw more ire from fans than any other new piece of Star Wars media under Disney. No outside agitators needed.

Please pardon the ramble.

Most (not all) of the interpretation issues in Excel are because people don’t know how to use it and click ok without reading message boxes.

Modern Office 365 Excel on the desktop asks if I want to convert numbers as text with leading zeroes into numerals (eliminating the leading zeroes) whenever I open a csv that has them in it, and has had this feature for at least a month now. You just hit no.

For more complicated data, open a new spreadsheet, go to the data tab, import from text or csv, select your csv. In the data import wizard thing that pops up, select every column and set format to text. Boom. Problem solved, no data mangling. Delete the link back to the source csv so there’s no weird sync being attempted, and the data is just flat data in your spreadsheet in table form.

For commas in “cell” contents in your source csv file, wrap the contents in quotes and excel won’t treat the comma within as a column separator. Exporting csvs from PowerShell does this automatically for string data.

Personally, I always try to keep the flat csv output as a separate copy from the xlsx file I format for human reading. Csv for at rest data storage, xlsx for display. Non-cosmetic edits get worked back into the program generating the csv, or I whip up a basic PowerShell script to import the csv data in, work with it as objects, then export back to csv.

Mixing the two use cases of display and data processing is where the footguns are all hidden. Business users absolutely deserve a better set of tools than Excel for data manipulation. It works so much better as just formatting.

There’s a handy “Take Action” button at the bottom of the article where you can look up your representative and send them an editable pre-written email.

I think there are a lot of people who weren’t around for, or don’t remember, how buying digital titles was before Steam got quite so popular.

It was pretty rare, and the overwhelming majority of indie games were released for free. There just wasn’t many good ways to get the word out, and most ways of taking payment were costly enough to set up that it was rarely worth trying to get some meager amount of pay if you were just a one man show with no external financial backing.