sylver_dragon

Seems people have to relearn this lesson every few years:
If you don’t want something to be public, don’t put it on the internet. “Privacy” controls from these companies fail regularly, sometimes by design. If you put something on the internet, it will be public eventually.

Or two decades fighting an asymmetric war which President Bone Spurs personally managed to avoid.

It’s a bland, clunky story with writing that occasionally manages to rise above the '80’s Saturday morning cartoon level. Without the draw of the LotR name and insane amounts of money dumped into the visuals which faithfully copy the look of the Jackson films, this show would have been lucky to make “cult show” status.

If you’re a LotR super fan, who just wants more LotR, give it a go. Otherwise, it’s probably not worth the time.

By “de-shitify” they meant removing all the shit which isn’t owned and controlled by Microsoft.

The real miracle in the Bible is that Joseph didn’t fuck for his entire marriage and was ok with that.

According to Christian mythology Jesus has several brothers and sisters from Mary and Joseph. So no miracle there. One just has to wonder if they waited until after Jesus was born to start fucking.

nasa is about to remote into the computer

I’ve dealt with slow RDP sessions while fixing servers in the past, but the lag on this connection must really suck.

Yup. Being young and stupid, a group of us were lighting those rose fireworks (the kind which spin and light up on the ground), putting them in a water balloon launcher and flinging them into the sky. While we were aiming for a river, this also meant we were aiming for some brush. Unsurprisingly, we eventually had one land short while still burning and started a bush on fire. We ran down and started trying to put it out with dirt. This wasn’t going well until we remembered we had a small container and a ready source of water (the river) and managed to douse the fire.

This is one of the reasons vigilantism works better in fiction than in real life. In cases where some vigilante left a beat up suspect and some sort of evidence, any competent defense attorney is going to move to have the evidence suppressed due to issues around chain of custody and possible tampering. They would likely also push the narrative that the vigilante is the real criminal and left the evidence to frame their client. Between possibly getting much of the evidence suppressed, and building doubt around anything remaining, a conviction could be really hard for the prosecutor.

This also ignores issues around vigilantes going after the wrong person for something (see: lynchings) and applying wildly disproportionate, extra-judicial punishments for crimes (see: lynchings, again). Crime and punishment really are hard problems which don’t lend themselves to easy answers. And there is a reason the Code of Hammurabi is seen as such a big deal in history. Rule of Law is an important concept which protects people.

Unless the romance is central to the game, that sort of focus and depth just isn’t going to be put into it. There is also the issue that the writers in video games have far less control over the main character than they do in other mediums. In a book, you don’t have to worry about your main character deciding to to fuck off for a week collecting all the boxes in a village and stacking them on the town well, just because it’s funny. That main character stays on task and on plot for the writer. There are games where that high level of control is possible, visual novels exist, but that starts to push into the question, “why not just make a book/movie instead?”

Similarly, I think it’s going to be hard for any video game romance not to come off as transactional, due to the nature of a game being a computer program. Imagine trying to tell Romeo and Juliet as a video game. At some point, Romeo and Juliet will need to interact. Romeo arrives at Juliet’s window and professes his love. How does the player interact with the game for that scene? Is it just a cutscene? Or a cutscene with quick time events (press X to woo). Trying to replicate a Jane Austin style story would be even worse. As books about people sitting about in drawing rooms drinking tea and being catty to one another, replicating that in a video game is all going to boil down to dialog trees. Perhaps the first time through it could feel fresh and interesting, but on a second playthrough it’s going to quickly be obvious that the whole thing is really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”. Maybe we could get a Jane Austin Rouge-like, in that each time you load it up the characters’ personalities change and you really do have to pay attention to verbal and social queues to get anywhere. But even that is still really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”.

Ultimately, I think video games are always going to be fairly transactional in nature. They are computer programs and are ultimately deterministic. All the interactions you have in a video game need to be planned out, scripted and maybe even voice acted. It’s what makes all the interactions in Baldur’s Gate 3 so amazing. Everything those characters do was planned for, written and recorded. Every comment, every facial expression was planned, written and coded. There is no spontaneity, because there can’t be (maybe with AI, but that’s a different can of worms). That so many little things actually did get covered is amazing. But, the trigger conditions for playing that bit of animation and voice acting will be hard coded. Whether or not a character likes the main character must be a set of numbers stored in memory, because that’s how computers work. Yes, it could be far more complex than just an easily identifiable number. And perhaps hiding those numbers from the player would make it feel less obvious, but they aren’t going to go away.

And all the work which goes into planning, writing and coding those interactions is time spent during development. Going back to Baldur’s Gate 3, wouldn’t it be awesome if some of the NPCs started pairing off with each other? If the main characters isn’t getting busy with Shadowheart, maybe she discoverers an interest in big men who can turn into bears so you come back to camp sometime to find her and Halsin sitting very close together talking softly. This could even have the whole random element where different characters have different crushes/interests each time you play through. That would be neat to see, but it’s going to require a lot of extra development. Unless that’s a feature which starts selling video games, it’s not going to happen. Perhaps this sort of thing will show up in indie games, I wouldn’t expect it in major titles anytime soon.