For me, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 modding was the golden age of FPS gaming. The life of a single game purchase was extended well beyond any expectations because of the creativity of the modders.
Unfortunately, mods like Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, and many others are getting developed and released as "Full games" now, to the detriment of the gamer and the industry.
Now we're in the age of relatively easy to use game engines, where anyone can develop and release a game, but there are so many games flooding the market that you look at and think "Why would you release this?". In the past, I truly believe these types of games would have been relegated to the modding scene and filtered properly through the communities to gain popularity naturally and organically rather than getting huge marketing budgets pushing us to buy the next big thing or FOMO.
Having students bike the final mile sounds a lot like Theranos saying they could do all these amazing blood tests on their new, futuristic machine, only to find out that they're still doing most of them the way all labs did them
Agreed with what you're saying about blizzard, but I don't regret buying D4. I enjoyed the story and playing through the classes. The thing that's missing is the replayability. The seasons don't do it for me and the gear is too incremental - there's never the "holy shit it finally dropped" moment.
That's the core of the trial though, right? That through these deals and other things Google does to stay dominant, they stifle the market for competition. Ie Edge, Chrome, and every other Chromium-based browser pushes Google to the end users and FF pushes some unfamiliar search platform, then there's an uphill, arguably unfair, battle for it to gain enough market share to be sustainable.
My understanding is that because it's Linux they can customize it and trim all the fat to make the OS run as efficiently as possible, making it perfect for a portable device where you want as much processing power going to the game. You just can't get that with Windows.
Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series is a good one. Unlike most authors in this genre who tend to be overly descriptive and feel the need to develop the lore of every squirrel in the kingdom, Le Guin writes really tight, well thought stories, where every word is important to the story.
I'm seeing a lot of judgement on pretending Santa exists vs being 100% truthful with your kids. I don't think either way is a bad way, but don't judge others if they choose to pretend Santa is real.
With that being said, I do agree that if you are going to go with the Santa story, when the kid asks if they are real you should be truthful.
I just went through this with my 9 year old. She just came up one day and asked me if Santa was real and I told her no. There were a lot of follow up questions and it made her realize the tooth fairy, Easter Bunny, etc were the same situation. She asked me why we pretended Santa was real and I explained for us it was nice to see the magic that they felt from a stranger being kind just for kindness sake.
For me personally, I think it's a good lesson for kids to begin logically questioning their world and what they've been told.
Skyrim is a great game.... for its time. Todd Howard is the blight on the games industry for putting so many resources toward so many Skyrim remasters/re-releases/money grabs. Even if he outsourced all that work, those are dev houses he could have spent their time helping Bethesda actually fill their huge open worlds and perhaps get the same feeling of "every decision actually matters" that Larion did.
State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution. Accounts belonging to state-affiliated media entities, their editors-in-chief, and/or their prominent staff may be labeled. We will also add labels to posts that share links to state-affiliated media websites.
Conspiracy theories aside, AFAIK there's no evidence that any level of the US government exercises control over NPR.