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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • If you haven’t played Inscryption, just ignore everything else and do that first. It’s the most innovative deckbuilding game I’ve played, but saying more would spoil it.

    Ascension is a short-ish one I’ve sunk a lot of hours into. It’s sort of like dominion meets Magic. The expansions make it a lot more interesting, but the full package is pretty cheap. It was designed by an MTG pro player who was sick of exactly that.

    Black book is excellent, and managers to put a compelling narrative spin on a TCG.

    Monster train is a good “it’s like slay the spire, but not slay the spire” option for when you just can’t look at another shiv.



  • I’m having a great time, but I also love FO4 and No Man’s Sky. The toe-dip I’ve done into colony building shows that they put real thought into Astroneer-like automated manufacturing stuff, which is my crack, and something I missed in NMS and FO4. It’s also clear from the first city that they know how depressing FO4 is, and wanted to add more variety.

    Story and characters are a cut above any other Bethesda game so far, but that’s not saying much. My wife is replaying BG3 next to me, and it makes Starfield’s writing look amateurish by comparison. It’s not the core of the game though, so eh.

    Downsides so far have been that the minor planets/moons don’t have much to do, and that inventory management is annoying with how much crafting components weigh.

    Ship combat is… Fine. It’s not as intricate as Elite: Dangerous or SW:Squadrons (for sim gamers, weapons are all on REALLY forgiving gimbals, which makes precision unnecessary), but not actively bad like NMS VR. I think it’s a good compromise, because not everyone wants to deal with a realistic sim in what is essentially a minigame.

    It’s also complex, which is good, but adds some awkwardness to the beginning.






  • The problem is that the articles from exploring heads take an average of two sentences to reach an obvious and malicious lie. There is no room for discussion under those circumstances.

    For those who don’t respect the authority of conservatives as the arbiters of reality, they have no purpose except as a glimpse into the abyss. It’s like having your stream of memes interrupted every few pages by a graphic crime scene photo, only with the dread that comes with knowing that the criminal has a wide support base.





  • I see both sides.

    They’re probably going to completely (and intentionally) collapse the labor market. This has never happened before, so there is no historical prescedent to look at. The closest thing we have was the industrial revolution, but even that was less disruptive because it also created a lot of new factory jobs. This doesn’t.

    The public hope is that this catastrophic widening of the gap between the rich and poor will force labor to organize and take some of the gains through legislation as an altenative to starving in the streets. Given that the technology will also make coercing people to work mostly pointless, there may not be as much pressure against it as there historically has been. Altman seems to be publically thinking in this direction, given the early basic income research and the profit cap for OAI. I can’t pretend to know his private thoughts, but most people with any shred of empathy would be pushing for that in his shoes.

    Of course, if this fails, we could also be headed for a permanent, robotically-enforced nightmare dystopia, which is a genuine concern. There doesn’t seem to be much middle-ground, and the train has no brakes.

    The IP theft angle from the end of the article seems like a pointless distraction though. All human knowledge and innovation is based on what came before, whether AI is involved or not. By all accounts, the remixing process it applies is both mechanically and functionally similar to the remixing process that a new generation of artists applies to its forebears, and I’ve not seen any evidence that they are fundamentally different enough to qualify as theft, except in the normal Picasso sense.

    Interesting times.