To be clear, I’m enjoying XVI, and XV was the one game I disliked so much I dropped it. But try either one! Different people may like different games, and that’s fine.

As far as XVI goes, my main gripes are that combat is pretty slow until you’ve unlocked three sets of abilities, and it relies just a little bit too heavily on its Game of Thrones inspiration. But once combat gets going, it feels really good. You can dodge or parry almost every attack in the game, and it feels pretty badass to get right in the enemy’s face and have them not be able to touch you because you’ve learned the moveset.

I’ve beaten XIII twice, so I know it well. I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it either. My main criticism of XIII is it suffers from a lack of sense of place. It feels like a disjointed series of unconnected environments, and there’s no sense of a cohesive world that you’re exploring and learning about.

Lightning is on a train. Where does it come from? Where does it go to? We’ll never know. Now we’re in a crystal ice cavern. Now we’re in a dense forest. Now we’re inside an airship. Now we’re at an amusement park. There is no sense of how these places relate to one another or how they’re connected, and that dramatically impacted how engaged I was with the story.

The battle and hunt systems were the more enjoyable parts. The worldbuilding was lackluster bordering on non-existent. I also really dislike… actually, the whole cast. I don’t think there’s a single character I like. I dislike Sazh the least, if I had to choose.

But I still finished it. Twice. XV was the only main series game that I disliked to the extent that I didn’t see it through.

To each their own. I know a lot of people were disappointed by XVI, and again, I could criticize a number of aspects of it. But overall, I’ve had more fun than I’ve had with an FF game since X.

I’m close to the end on PC, and I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. FFIV-FFX are some of my favorite games of all time, but I really didn’t like XII-XV.

There are plenty of things I could criticize, and it’s by no means perfect. But altogether I’ve had a good time with it.

It’s in Likud’s founding charter, so yeah, pretty well telegraphed.

I strongly agree that all of these are under threat or direct attack in the U.S., if that’s your point. But these are some of the measures by which academics evaluate whether governments are “democratic” nonetheless. The U.S. in particular was much stronger on these measures twenty years ago than it is today.

Free and fair elections, rule of law, stable governmental institutions, individual freedoms, and a free and independent press. Just to give a few academic measures.

Life imitates art, as they say.

Now I’ll finally know how many rocks to eat each day, even if I still won’t know how many Rs are in “strawberry.”

I just lie in every encrypted message I send so even when they crack it they won’t know the truth

Yeah, but his base thinks that China pays the tariffs because they don’t know how anything works. Hell, Trump might believe that China pays the tariffs because he doesn’t know how anything works.

The problem is the Chinese market, which has been a huge market for VW. That’s where they failed to come up with a viable competitor to the cheap EVs that are selling like hotcakes in China. Yes, the U.S. sales have been lackluster but that’s not what is driving VW’s woes. The U.S. is a relatively small market for VW.

In about 60 hours of playtime, Luce will be level 99 and set off to kill God. What have they unleashed?

We are wildly far away from having the technology to do that. A single genome wouldn’t provide the genetic diversity for a sustainable population. We would need hundreds or thousands of genomes for each species to ensure that non-related individuals could mate.

Yes, and that’s exactly the point, isn’t it?

There are some areas of business that are still built on trust and personal relationships and people trying to right by each other so they can each support their families.

But that’s not the case in modern politics or tech. It doesn’t matter if you have a relationship dating back decades. It’s inconsequential to a billionaire who’s earning a margin on an all the goods - and increasing share of which are brazenly counterfeit - that he sells globally.

Bezos doesn’t care about you, or me, or my aged parents. It’s not only that he doesn’t care about us, but instead that the billionaire class in general doesn’t care about anything besides contingencies to maximize profits and mitigate losses, real-world consequences be damned.

He will never notice any of us. It will not meaningfully affect his paycheck. It is up to each of us, including you, to determine whether to construct meaning in a symbolic act of protest, if an effectual act of protest is no longer an option.

Just spoke to my parents. Uninterrupted subscribers since '73.

I called them right after canceling my own subscription and they’d already canceled theirs.

I hope Bezos is happy losing 51-year patrons of his paper.

Yeah, unfortunately there’s almost no chance that he sees any real consequences over this. A different justice system for him vs the rest of us.

The article says he was chatting with Daenerys Targaryen. Also, every chat page on Character.AI has a disclaimer that characters are fake and everything they say is made up. I don’t think the issue is that he thought that a Game of Thrones character was real.

This is someone who was suffering a severe mental health crisis, and his parents didn’t get him the treatment he needed. It says they took him to a “therapist” five times in 2023. Someone who has completely disengaged from the real world might benefit from adjunctive therapy, but they really need to see a psychiatrist. He was experiencing major depression on a level where five sessions of talk therapy are simply not going to cut it.

I’m skeptical of AI for a whole host of reasons around labor and how employers will exploit it as a cost-cutting measure, but as far as this article goes, I don’t buy it. The parents failed their child by not getting him adequate mental health care. The therapist failed the child by not escalating it as a psychiatric emergency. The Game of Thrones chatbot is not the issue here.

Sounds like bog standard language of ethnic cleansing to me. Still amazed how many people refuse to call a Nazi a Nazi.

It was a staged photo op and the restaurant was closed to customers. He didn’t decide to do actual work for the first time in his life. It was BS like everything else. Nobody ate that food.

It’s hard for me to even track when it’s an article with more details about a previous massacre versus a report of a new massacre. Israel attacks civilians with such frequency that there’s a new slaughter even as the previous one is just being fully reported.