Just not sure where they would even go with this or how it would be very fun.

I think Bully happened at a time in gaming when it was pretty groundbreaking and unique. I don’t think they could recapture that.

Upon replaying Bully as an adult, it felt like it was a good story built atop a lot of mediocre mini-games.

Sorry - I really loved the game when I was young so this was hard to admit to myself.

The whole thing with folk music and punk rock is that it can be good whilst not technically sounding good.

As an example, Johnny Hobo is perfectly situated between folk and punk rock. Horrible chain-smoking voice pushed to its max, shitty acoustic guitar just being beat on, and it sounds so like it was recorded on a laptop.

But it’s completely unique, authentic, and heart wrenching.

You can feel his despair and a lot of it is precisely because of these things. I don’t think any high-quality version of this song would make nearly the same impact. In fact it would probably sound like shit.

I mostly agree with you.

I think there are a crowd of people who think that devs and writers can easily recapture the magic of the series and expand upon it in meaningful ways at will.

Then I think there are people who just love a game so much they want more of the same style content with few or no changes.

As an example, I really love The Outer Wilds, but you can only play it once since it hinges on you solving a bunch of interconnected puzzles which lead to an answer that was there all along. In other words, once you know, you can beat the game in about 7 minutes or so.

I would pretty much do anything for more of the same game. In fact, they could just keep making DLC for outer wilds with new planets and I’d play every release immediately.

Anyway, no complaints from me. The base game and the one DLC they released are literally flawless. I have the memories and warm feelings.

Yeah, I too am worried about militant Biden supporters overthrowing our democracy and taking away even the most basic human rights.

/s

I’m interested! Can you PM me? I currently use an IPTV service that’s just okay.

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Capitalism can commercialize anything including critiques of capitalism.

Similarly, corporations can sell anything, including critiques of themselves.

Reminds me of the Beatles selling “Beatles Hater” merch.

You’d miss exactly nothing.

I have tried several times over the years to pick up a game of theirs that looks interesting due to the story, setting, or due to the fact that it’s a sport game my friends are playing.

Every single time, for well over a decade now, it’s taken me about 20 minutes to realize they haven’t changed one thing about their formula in any genre.

All of their games feel kind of cheap, floaty, and/or just “off” somehow in terms of physics and gameplay. They have nonstop in-game purchases, and they fill their game with hundreds of thousands of copy and paste quests. Like, the most tedious thing in the recent Zelda games is getting the Koroks seeds, and even that is more varied and interesting than the vast majority of Ubisoft quests.

If Ubi made smaller games less frequently, they’d be an amazing studio I’d bet.

The sports games from EA are also the same exact thing every single year. Similarly, if EA released fewer sports games, instead just updating rosters and stats through free downloads, they could probably make some pretty incredible games.

One thing I’d like to see EA do is add more fun and experimental features. First person mode in Madden where you play with a full team of guys, creative rule sets, totally off the wall fantasy settings and rule sets, career modes where you start as a high school player and get noticed, marathon games where you don’t get to call plays and instead it’s a constant stream of making it to the end zone and having to immediately punt the ball to the other team so they can start running and passing freely instantly, etc.

They could do so much to make sports interesting to non-spors guys. And someone who likes sports more could probably tell me some of the more realistic/simulation style upgrades they’d like to see from these games. Things that have been missing way too long.

Holy shit.

^sometimes, ^we ^need ^dark ^humor ^to ^make ^it ^through.

I’ll assume you meant that in good faith.

If being trans is caused by microplastics, alright. They’re still not hurting anyone. If there is an environmental culprit, then hopefully conservatives would finally acknowledge that there is a biological process at work and it’s not a choice made by deviants or whatever.

That’s a good counter argument.

I suppose you would get the rapper equivalent of the Vegas residency. Not sure what that is.

I don’t think so. Not to be cynical, but I think we overestimate the potential impact of those who die young. In fact, I think their impact is almost always made larger because they died young.

Like many other once-great artists, Tupac, were he alive today, would probably be retired after doing a few years in Vegas with dwindling audience numbers.

He probably would have gotten a reality show and maybe been on stage at the Superbowl for a nostalgic throwback act, but beyond that he would have probably faded into history.

I say the same about Nirvana, Amy Winehouse, definitely Nipsy Hustle, and the others who passed too soon.

Sorry, I know it’s kind of grim and I’m definitely open to a good counter-argument here.

It’s a classroom management thing.

I didn’t understand this until I was a teacher but unfortunately, “if I let you do it, I have to let everyone do it” ends up being pretty true. Kids will absolutely point to other kids and say, “but you let Joey put his head down and listen.”

My response can’t be “but Joey is passing my class.” As much as I would like it to be.

It’s also a respect thing and I don’t mean that like you might think. I don’t demand unearned respect from everyone like an asshole. But one thing that happens is, if you let kids skirt classroom expectations and let them avoid doing things you ask them to do, they learn that your rules/expectations are actually just suggestions. Everything becomes negotiable.

Sorry dude, I would have made you take your notes too.

Prime example. Atomic bombs are dangerous and they seem like a bad thing. But then you realize that, counter to our intuition, nuclear weapons have created peace and security in the world.

No country with nukes has been invaded. No world wars have happened since the invention of nukes. Countries with nukes don’t fight each other directly.

Ukraine had nukes, gave them up, promptly invaded by Russia.

Things that seem dangerous aren’t always dangerous. Things that seem safe aren’t always safe. More often though, technology has good sides and bad sides. AI does and will continue to have pros and cons.

As a recovering heroin addict, I wholeheartedly believe his story. His later stories contained some region-specific drug slang and his post-recovery updates were the perfect amount of mundane and specific for me to recognize exactly the same feelings in myself.

Side note: if you’re watching a movie or TV show, one thing that non-junkie writers never get right is withdrawal. They often show characters skipping withdrawal entirely, or show them mildly sick but still moving through the story without any real issues. Worst case, they’ll show a character being sick and then totally fine after a short time. Huge pet peeve of mine. Really undersells the catch-22 you find yourself in when using heroin.

What withdrawal is actually like is pure, unadulterated misery and suffering for two weeks at minimum, followed by months or even a year of exhaustion, depression, suicidal thoughts, restlessness, and feeling like everything is weird and new. It feels like you’re a reptile that just shed its skin and everything is raw including your emotions and thoughts. Those first two weeks are just nonstop puking, shaking, sweating, an uncontrollable urge to kick and jerk your body, total insomnia, scary and suicidal thoughts, full body aches and pains, and enough self-loathing to last a thousand years.

I made it three months cold turkey once before relapsing. Fucking never again. I honestly don’t know how people quit dope before modern medications like Buprenorphine and Methadone.

Feeling like you want to break the cycle of addiction but knowing you can’t get through the withdrawal is an incredibly scary and traumatic experience.

The uptick in solar activity that has been weirdly increasing at roughly predictable rates every year since the rise of industrialization?

I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for, but I was so fortunate to find an amazing job where my coworkers treat me like a good person who has value.

I teach middle school, and I am just surrounded by hardworking teachers who treat each other well. We all compliment everyone behind their backs and to their faces. They tell me I’m good at my job and that I’m a nice person. I used to reply jokingly, “sometimes!” because I honestly could not accept that compliment.

This was incredibly hard for me to handle when I started teaching here. Never felt super loved at home as a kid, only person who told me I was unequivocally “good” was my grandmother, so deep down I always doubted it. I had serious imposter syndrome when people would say nice things to and about me. Still do from time to time, but overall I feel so much happier and more confident than ever before. This job is the best thing to ever happen to me. I’ll work there until I retire - found my forever job. But you could do this without the job.

Surround yourself with people who know you’re good. Be as good as you can be. And know that multiple narratives can be true - I know I have stepped on toes and put my foot in my mouth with coworkers who love me. I have kicked myself for it. But I truly believe that it’s only a very small, very human part of the positive narrative we have all decided to focus on at my job. The positivity has bled into my home life too. I catch myself being better.

I guess what I’m saying is that some of this is “fake it til you make it, then realize you weren’t faking it at all.”

I actually think this a decent piece of left-leaning humor, if a bit dark.

It makes light of an awful thing that happened (the shooting) and then links it to another awful thing that’s happening (abortion bans in America).

It kind of highlights the absurdity of it all.

It’s like jokes about racism. Decent people know that the jokes are mocking racist people and showing the absurdity, while racists just laugh at the racism part because they don’t get it.

Can’t let a bunch of train virgins take away my Ford F-750.

I think the issue is that these service providers are more than capable of providing “unlimited” data, but choose not to because they can make a lot more when people inevitably go over their limit. The salt on the wound is the fact that ISPs usually have no competition. They usually have a monopoly on the area in which they operate.

Where I live, we have unlimited data that only gets throttled if you use a truly absurd amount (like if you’re constantly pirating large amounts of 4k movies or something). No caps or unexpected fees. Overall, I always felt like I had it pretty good, and I still think that…mostly.

The funny part is that my ISP had competition move to town recently. I kid you not, the week before the competition officially started up their service, my ISP sent a letter saying they were doubling my Internet speed for no extra charge.

They were trying to show how awesome they were but really it was the biggest slap in the fucking face. You’re telling me you were overcharging me that much for years?

Another issue is that advertising, which you never asked for, makes up part of your monthly data usage, as do routine and unavoidable downloads like security updates, video game patches, etc.