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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • When I first played Skyrim it was the “complete” edition with all the DLC. The game starts fun enough, I complete the intro, wander around a bit and find an interesting quest that takes me to a big city.

    Immediately two vampires attack me. I know now this is the start of a plot hook for one of the DLCs, but it was so confusing. Suddenly I was forced to do a whole vampire side plot because every time I ignored it more vampires showed up.

    I hope DLCs have improved since then because it was a terrible introduction to the game.



  • I agree with everything about this article except the title.

    For me this film is at its best after the vampire reveal and ends when most of the vampires are killed. The intro is fine but goes on a little long and while I’m always a fan of killing Klansman it feels like an unnecessary action scene after the climax of the film.

    My vote is for One Battle After Another. It could be argued it starts slow as well, but once it gets going it is paved perfectly.


  • Hacks is excellent. The Last of Us is excellent. Although both of those are preparing for their final season.

    Euphoria is excellent, although I expect season 3 to be their last.

    That leaves The White Lotus which is also excellent.

    I’ve also heard IT Welcome to Derry is excellent, but I haven’t seen it.

    That being said they’ve been trying to get Dune as a series, Prophecy is getting a second season but I’m not sure the first season really worked.

    We also have the whole of DC Studios. I agree it’s possible Gunn departs if the deal goes through, which would cause some major quality issues.

    But there is the golden goose that is Harry Potter. It’s probably going to have a shit ton of people watching it.

    So for big existing franchises, they’ll probably be ok, and GOT fits in there. But for original stuff, I agree they have fewer options.




  • An “Aegon’s Conquest” film is probably the best way to tell the story. It’s not a particularly interesting story since it’s just man (and sister-wives) steamroll Westeros with dragons.

    I’m sure you could spice it up a bit, but also Aegon is a conqueror and kind of a “bad guy” in that sense. He’s just chilling at Dragonstone and Westeros is mostly just chilling doing their own thing, and he just decides naw… it’s mine now. I’m guessing they’ll add some prophecy to give him reason, we saw this touched on in season 1 of HOTD. Basically there must be a Targaryen on the throne in order to stop the white walkers. Although GOT season 8 sorta disproved that, which I guess makes the whole of Targaryen rule and Aegon’s Conquest moot. So…

    Either way, could be fun, but I don’t expect a lot from it.




  • That’s difficult to quantify, but not that hard.

    Modern consoles are just like modern computers.

    Lots of complicated things are abstracted away or covered by something else. For example if you developed a game using an existing engine you probably can just check a box and like magic it just works.

    If you built your own engine, you probably only tested it against dev kits and real console hardware. It’ll probably mostly just work but might have some unexpected bugs. These too are probably also abstracted away in a lot of cases, which means it either just works or doesn’t take a lot of work to make work.

    I imagine Sony’s logic is that it isn’t worth the effort. They probably don’t see the return on investment they want.

    They probably look at someone like Nintendo who never port their games and often sell them for full price, it’s kinda shitty for consumers but Nintendo makes bank (and to be fair they usually do make great games). Plus it looks like Microsoft is walking away from consoles so Sony has less to compete with.




  • Interesting article and I think it really highlights how toxic some parts of the Internet are. My only issue is the conclusion,

    A social media ban for under-16s might prevent young boys seeing endless content that treats women with contempt and hate. Boys at this age are very susceptible to the cool and funny framing of what is, in reality, relentless misogyny. A ban might not fix the problem, but it would help. If society can’t stop it, it can show it disapproves.

    Emphasis mine. Having grown up in a different era I can confirm that boys of a wide variety of ages, including much older “boys”, can also be scumbags. Even if we had the perfect technology to ban under-16s from social media, once they hit 16 they’d still be exposed to it, still become terrible people, and the author of this article, although a but older, would still see it. I don’t know if that really is a better world, just a slightly delayed one.

    I don’t know the solution, but I remember reading once that some online game would put all the reported and abusive players into a special category where they would be forced to play only with each other. Maybe we can do that in this case.


  • So I’m never going to 100% say no to a sequel, but this is probably the closest you can get.

    First off, you need a story to tell. Face Off tells a ridiculous story that is absolutely wild. You can’t just “face off” again in the sequel. You’d have to find a way to body swap but in a whole new way, likely one that wouldn’t even make sense with the title.

    Second, the primary antagonist is dead. So now you need to retcon the ending, which is usually a bad sign.

    Third, no clear mention that the original cast is returning. I struggle to find a sequel without the original cast that worked.

    Fourth, it’s too many years later. You can sometimes make years later sequels work, Blade Runner 2049 comes to mind, maybe a few others, but that list is short.


  • I want to highlight what I found to be an important part of the article and why this hack is important.

    The journalist wrote on their own blog,

    At this year’s South Dakota International Hot Dog Eating Championship

    And they include zero sources (because it is a lie).

    But the Google Gemini response was,

    According to the reporting on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Eating Championship

    (Bolding done by Gemini)

    The “reporting” here is just some dudes blog, but the AI does not make it clear that the source is just some dudes blog.

    When you use Wikipedia, it has a link to a citation. If something sounds odd, you can read the citation. It’s far from perfect, but there is a chain of accountability.

    Ideally these AI services would outline how many sources they are pulling from, which sources, and a trust rating of those sources.