Reverse onion

My favorite example is from doctors notes, as doctors having unintelligible cursive appears to be a universal constant across the world.

Those regressive polices many wright off the south for exist in the rest of the country, but in different forms better suited to the context of the area. They come across as particularly brutal and overt to other areas simply because they’re not tailored to be hidden from them.

I’d say that animation has always had an issue in the US about having never been taken seriously as art and thus never really been funded well, outside of rare exceptions. The people currently working in the industry are working with in the constraints of what is available, and a lot of them do a pretty good job with in those constraints.

I don’t think that returning to purely hand drawn works is realistic or practical given the realities of the industry, nor necessarily desirable even with better budgets. The digital tools available certainly need to be better developed, and there are a lot of techniques that could be implemented to make better uses of the available budgets.

ah yes where would we be with out the artistic heights of bugs bunny. Clearly steven universe and gravity falls are complete artistic failures in comparison to that monument of cultural achievement.

To some extent it’s a result of how American animation has evolved to embrace animation software to reduce costs and moved away from hand drawn inbetween frames.

It’s not a bad thing, just an approach that leads to certain restrictions.

Clearly they were working very hard on redesigning the logo

The State of Washington is a land of contradictions.

There are large areas that are very progressive and pro LGBTQ. Huge amounts of community organizing and routine public demonstrations. Genuinely quite strong community.

But the conservatives in the state are some of the furthest right in the country, they’ve been politically marginalized for some time now, but still have influence in a lot of institutions, particularly at the local level in some smaller towns and suburbs.

It gets overlooked because it always votes democrat, but the state has some serious internal political divides.

I think for a lot of larger publishers, they want the lock in and monetization that comes with stuff like battle passes or other such things that require an ongoing commitment.

But they also want the benefits of being “co-op” or other wise a cooperation focused multi player game. Namely that if you get one person in a friend group, you might drag in the rest of it as well. They also want the manipulative lock in, that if that is all your friends are playing, you’re kind of forced to play as well. Holding relationships hostage to maximize retention.

And that works to an extent, but it’s largely just wanting to have your cake and eat it to. If the game is commitment heavy, or heavily monetized, it’ll be much harder to get friends to start playing it let alone stick with it.

A game that has a low barrier to entry and does not insist upon commitment, will be much easier for a friend group to pick up. Big publishers salivate at the virality and broad adoption of these games, but also insist upon including the kinds of systems that work against it because including them is industry wisdom for how to “have a successful live service game that makes lots of money.”

Simony, complicate things.

I don’t think I can speak for everyone, but the majority of the games I have on steam that I will never play are older big name titles that I got in bundles on sale with other games I wanted to play.

I have a lot of indie/smaller studio games on steam, and I’ve played all of them a decent amount. I think the reason games from smaller or independent studios do better on steam is because they actually get put forward and highlighted by events. Like, there are mechanisms in place to promote them to people who wouldn’t have heard about them through word of mouth.

I think the larger issue is that other storefronts are just… bad about highlighting games that aren’t from huge studios and massive publishers, obvious exception for GOG who is more focused on game preservation and older niche games, but even there I rarely see new stuff from small/indie studios getting promoted.

Like, sure on epic they’ll get a 80% cut, or what ever it is, but 70% of 1000 sales is a lot more than 80% of 10.

Also, like, the comparison to Netflix is absurd. When you pay for a Netflix subscription, you are paying for literally all of the content they have, and I’m pretty sure it would be impossible to watch everything on there. It also sucks because if I want something niche or novel, there is no incentive for that to be produced because my payment is spread evenly across everything Netflix is producing.

F I B E R

Pick pocketing does exist in the US but it is much rarer than in Europe. Even if you just compare major American cities to major European cities. Pickpocketing is much more common in Europe.

I don’t think that’s down to a risk of confrontation though. I think it’s down to the fact that pickpockets can’t make enough money to live on in the US.

Cash is less common in the US. A lot of people straight up don’t carry cash on them, and the rest barely carry any. Almost everything has accepted cards for nearly 2 decades here.

Managing to steal a card is much less useful than stealing cash. The card is liable to get canceled the moment someone realizes it’s gone, maybe they can get lunch with it before it’s canceled, but they can’t keep that money around to pay rent or buy groceries with. Phones and other things to can be pawned, but that’s another extra step, and another chance to get in trouble, and most of the time the actual money they can walk away with is much less than the value of the item.

And thus a series of new, passionate and innovative studios shall be born, grow, be bought, and crumble to dust under the foot of corporate ownership, and fertilizing the soil for a new crop in turn.

Frankly, I think the only seats he’d have a snowballs chance in hell taking would be seats that are currently red and upset at the disruptions to business. There are plenty of upset people in blue areas, but he’s not offering a meaningful departure from what they’re upset with, infact he’s probably an escalation of it.

Most likely he would just split the vote in red seats.

played a lot of those.

I remember VtMB particularly fondly.

Generally yes, For me it depends on how significant the discomfort is and how broadly it impacts people, but also, how much doing the thing really matters a lot to someone.

Like, there’s a point at which “ok someone else’s discomfort about this thing is marginal compared to how much it matters to a large number of people” at which point I get annoyed at someone trying to force other people to stop doing something that matters to them, even if I’m not doing the thing.

The new term does derive directly from the old disk game, and the disk game derives its name from a juice beverage that originated the disks as part of the caps.

Pog might be the most diversely derived words in the English language, it being an acronym of the words Pineapple, Orange and Guava. Pineapple being derived from apple which comes out of Germanic languages, orange coming out of the Dravidian languages of south India, and guava coming out of the Arawakan languages of South America. These three language families share no known common ancestry.

I was lucky enough to have played fallout 3 before new Vegas. So the series for me went from “that was fun, interesting setting” to “Wow this is genuinely amazing and feels like a living world that I’m inhabiting and interacting with.”

And then fallout 4 came out, and I was hoping that Bethesda would have learned something from New Vegas. But that was foolish, modern Bethesda doesn’t write stories, they don’t understand characters, they are a software company manufacturing a product, not a studio crafting playable stories. What narrative and story do exist, are the minimal needed to serve the gameplay loops. They make toy boxes, not experiences. Some people like that, but that’s not what I play these kinds of games for.

Going back and playing fallout 1 and 2 solidified this for me further, if Bethesda was going to learn from what made new Vegas great, they would have done so from 1 and 2 and implemented it in 3.

I haven’t even bothered to try fallout 76. I know what it is, it’s a looter shooter live service game meant to Skinner box you in to spending as much time as possible grinding up numbers and finding the best stats on rare drops. It’s not what I’m in to. I’ve accepted that.

As much as I love the fallout setting and the potential for story and world, there will never be another fallout game, just Bethesda products wearing the aesthetic. There are plenty of other great games out there that have story and gameplay working synergistically to create an experience.