Yeah. All I can find about this is that Iran launched a swarm of low-flying drones to cross Iraq and Lebanon/Jordan to get to Israel. And Jordan already said they'd try to shoot down any drones that cross their airspace. Given that Israel had (or has? Not sure if the drones got there yet) a bunch of advance warning on this, if the IDF doesn't swat all of them they're just incompetent.

That said, Israel will certainly use this as an excuse to try further escalation, and the cycle will continue getting worse.

Sounds perfectly fair to me.

Personally, though, I refuse to touch games with monetization schemes like they've got with a 10 ft pole as I know myself I'm stupidly vulnerable to whaling. Much easier to just avoid it entirely.

OK, "getting impressed by Genshin Impact music" was not on my list of things to do today, but wow. Haven't heard game music remotely as good as that in years.

Hope the demise of the Western AAA game industry comes soon.

Looking at SteamDB, only 4 games released in the last year are in the top 25 of 24-hr player count. Those are:

Helldivers 2. #6, highest player count in the last 24 hrs is 242k

Palworld. #15, 100k

Baldur's Gate 3, #17, 87k

Football Manager 2024, #21, 67k

Taking IGN's list of biggest games of 2023 (archive here - https://archive.is/yg2fP), and listing the ones on Steam:

Forspoken: 24 hr peak of 57

Dead Space: 570

Hogwarts Legacy: 8.5k

Wild Hearts: 127

Atomic Heart: 627

Company of Heroes 3: 3k

Sons of the Forest: 12k

Kerbal Space Program 2: 601

Octopath Traveler 2: 592

Wo Long Fallen Dynasty: 704

RE4 Remake: 6k

System Shock remake: 130

Minecraft Legends: 22

Jedi Survivor: 2k

Redfall: 58

Suicide Squad: 475

Street Fighter 6: 23k

Diablo 4: 4.5k

Starfield: 6k

The Expanse: 34

The Day Before: shut down now

Armored Core 6: 2k

Forza Motorsport: 6k

Lies of P: 2.5k

Payday 3: 357

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: 878

Granted, those numbers could change drastically when you factor in other platforms, but of those 26 games "most promising" games, 14 don't even have 1k concurrent players a year (or less) after release, and only 2 have above 10k. Sure sounds like you all are on the right track.

You mean like the NY judge who summarily declared Trump guilty of fraud without hearing any witnesses or asking anyone any questions?

I offer aspiring writers this advice: Never apologize to a Morlock when called upon to do so. They do not call upon the guilty to apologize, but the innocent. Never believe a word they say. The social justice warrior always lies; always retrenches his lies when caught; always accuses you of his own sins.

Yep. Never apologize, they always lie and they always project.

Makes me wonder what the Life is Strange devs did. Do we have a MeToo accusation about to drop, or was someone caught with CP? Did one of the devs happen to start noticing things, meaning they need to stomp down on them hard? Or is this just self-cannibalization?

after alleging that drug cartels were using Indigenous land to facilitate crime.

Wow, someone dared suggest that large areas of space with limited law enforcement where alcohol-related deaths are about 7x the national average may be involved in facilitating drug trade? I'm absolutely shocked as to why someone would think that!

Signs point to no

The thing is, they're not (especially for the people they're looking to import). Oh, they have tons of land but right now 90% of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of the US border - and about half of Canada's population lives south of parts of the US.

While people can undoubtedly live out in northern Alberta or Manitoba, taking a huge number of low-skilled 3rd world immigrants who are dependent on government assistance and sticking them up by Hudson Bay or in the Northwest Territories or something is just going to lead to mass death of all of them as you can't sustain cities up there with a lot of work - oh, and a whole lot of fossil fuel consumption too which the same people pushing this plan keep trying to get rid of.

Yeah, Canada has a lot of land, but good luck settling it to any large degree.

Europe: "I'm so sorry to hear that. We'll get you all the help you need. Are you free Tuesday afternoon in 3 years?"

Large parts of Europe are going "have you considered dying" as well.

Another one that immediately comes to mind is the guy behind Darthmod for several Total War games going on to Game Labs, and making the Ultimate General and Ultimate Admiral games.

Was it a day later? I thought it was only a few hours later. Either way, super suspicious.

And of course these vague issues are never “solved”

Why solve them? If they are solved "solved" then you can't keep using them for grifting and bludgeoning people. And then not only does a lot of the political power and income evaporate, but then you need to find a real job as well.

Just another step to cyberpunk dystopia becoming real. Lone Star and the Knights Errant are preparing to enter the chat.

I don't really like going to fights, but you know Ernest Hemingway did so maybe it's OK to go

That's a whole new level of "I'm a smug 'intellectual' who is better than you" attitude

This. Can't even think of any remotely new AAA game I put any substantial time into over the last couple years. Maybe Age of Wonders 4, if that had a high enough budget to count as AAA, though I doubt it? But, I've been going through a Divinity: Original Sin 2 run with some friends where we're well north of a hundred hours at this point, spent a good amount of time in Palword, Death must Die and Against the Storm. And I've got a huge backlog to get through.

So let the AAA studios crash and burn. They're just obsolete at this point.

I'm kind of wondering what was this for again

Slightly waking up then, but too bad you didn't come to that realization 4-5 years ago before getting into a massive pile of debt to get a psychology degree of some kind. What kind of job were you hoping that degree was preparing you for? What were you hoping to do with your life?

And, probably most importantly, what are you going to do now that you realize your pieces of paper are just pieces of paper, just whine about it on the internet or go make something of yourself? Will you deign to do something like answer Bart's phones (or something similar), or are you just going to beg Big Daddy Government to subsidize your whole life? Sadly, I think I know the answer there.

they were made up for some reason.

"For some reason" being "we need to keep the MUH RACISTS train running until November"

So

1. Baltimore Harbor closed for the foreseeable future, until the debris gets cleared

2. MASSIVE traffic problems in the area (apparently 30,000+ cars used that bridge daily, they have the tunnels but those are going to be way too over-stressed to accommodate all of that)

3. Third longest continuous-span bridge in the world is now rubble

Will this finally wake people up? I doubt it.

That's a good one, I'll add in the Today Show Canoe incident too, and the Weather Channel's hurricane coverage in NC.

Yeah, and looks like they're all white as well. They should be happy they're out of work so some Strong, Diverse, Disabled Person of Color can be in their position.

Ah, a man of culture when it comes to siege weapons. I approve!

This. IQ is a cap on your ability, and most schools don't push students anywhere near the cap. Let's say, for example, you take 2 people with, say, 85-90 IQ and put them in two different classes, one class which actually demands stuff of one student and the other is equity-math BS or something. The one from the class that demands stuff is going to be at a much better state at the end of the year than the equity-math guy. True, neither will be going on the calculus but the difference will be quite noticeable.

Only half? So it's improving then!