It led to this crazy debate about how a city should be so safe and saccharine that a child can walk around unattended. Weird

(Emphasis mine)

TBH, I think this is a very American and kinda conservative take. In most places outside the US and Canada kids walk to school and other places by themselves in urban areas.

Now, I don't think that means you shouldn't be able to buy a dildo or whatever, but I don't agree with the idea that suburbs or small towns are inherently more safe and wholesome. That's literally just conservative propaganda.

But, if there are public spaces that are actually physically unsafe for a child to be in, that's a failure of society IMO. For the same reason that its a failure if a woman, or a trans person, or a neurodivergent person is put into danger just for existing in the wrong place. People under the age of 18 are human beings too, just ones with different needs from adults, and like all human beings they deserve to be able to exist in public without fearing for their life.

Honestly "it’s this game but with that." could be a pretty good way to innovate unless you're totally phoning it in IMO.

Metroid was created when people at Nintendo wanted to combine the skill-based platforming of Super Mario Bros with the exploration of a Zelda game. That ended up being one of the two founding games in the Metroidvania genre.

System Shock was created by people who wanted to make a game with the same "emergent gameplay systems as a puzzle/playground" aspect of dungeon crawling RPGs like Ultima, but in a SciFi rather than fantasy setting. What we ended up with was something that combined fast paced shooter gameplay and a tight narrative presentation on the one hand, with letting the player make their own solutions to levels by manipulating open-ended gameplay systems on the other. This is very similar to the situation with metroid IMO, in how it tried to combine two very differnt styles of gameplay. Today we have an entire genre of games inspired by System Shock called immersive sims (though its more of a design ethos than a genre IMO).

The famous level design and exploration of Dark Souls was inspired by the 3D Zelda games, and while I don't have a source for this its hard for me to believe that the lock-on mechanics and basic idea for the movement weren't at least a little inspired by Zelda too. Or, in other words, Dark Souls is basically a 3D Zelda game but with the tone and difficulty of their earlier King's Field series.

Now, I don't mean to imply that combing two good things is a guaranteed way to get something good. Or even that, if you do hit upon a good combination, that that's the only thing you need to put into your work. The games I've just talked about are all absolute classics and obviously a lot went into that. For example, the genesis of the iconic multiplayer aspect of Fromsoft's games came about during the development of Demon's Souls, when Miyazaki was trying to drive up hill in a bad snow storm. There was a line of cars, and when one began to spin it's tires then ones behind it would intentionly push on it to help it up. This all happened without the drivers being able to talk to each other, and, seeing this, Miyazaki wondered what became of the last car in the line, but knew he would never get an answer since he would never see these people again. It was this experience that inspired the creation of phantoms.

However, what I am trying to say is that taking something you like and understanding what makes it tick, then making it work in a new context, can end up creating something that then seems wildly innovative in that context.

As an aside, both Zelda and King's Field were inspired by a dungeon crawling game called "Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord". Both Wizardry and Ultima were derived from earlier games that were basically "Dungeons and Dragons, but on a computer". Some of them were even named "DND" on the early computer systems they ran on.

DnD itself was created when people wanted to do wargames with a greater emphasis on unconventional warfare (such as spying, diplomacy/intrigue, propaganda, etc) that by necessity required roleplay. After one of these kinds of games was set in a half Conan the Barbarian half Gothic horror medieval fantasy setting with a spooky underground labyrinth beneath a town we got the trope of dungeon delving and returning with treasure to a (relatively) safe town just outside the dungeon entrance.

What's interesting to me about that phrase is that no one uses the word "powerhouse" for anything else any more, except maybe to call something powerful.

Since it's not the 1920s any more and we have an electrical grid and centralized power generation. We still sometimes do use temporary off-grid generators, but we no longer have any need for a dedicated word that means "building or shed that we keep our generators in".

Mozilla is a nonprofit (or it at least it should be, technically it's a for profit corporation that's wholly owned by a nonprofit foundation, shady asf).

They shouldn't be trying to make a profit, they should make enough money to pay their programmers to maintain the browser.

They should not be dumping money into more executive hires and AI bullshit like they are doing.

Even if this is true, which it probably isn't, the time to say something was 6 months ago, or 9 years ago.

At this point it wouldn't matter if Osama bin Laden came back from the dead and said Trump helped him plan 9/11.

Nowadays you instead have "gameplay trailers" that are movies made to look like gameplay, but in actuality are completely non-interactive.

Its like selling people units in an apartment building by showing them a video of a film set:

And saying "look at how far along we are in construction!"

That was a different technique, using simulated evolution in an FPGA.

An algorithm would create a series of random circuit designs, program the FPGA with them, then evaluate how well each one accomplished a task. It would then take the best design, create a series of random variations on it, and select the best one. Rinse and repeat until the circuit is really good at performing the task.

I don't think I've heard any European say this about American junk/fast food even once.

About the only thing I think I've heard in regards to flavor is "sickeningly sweet" and "even stuff that's not supposed to be sweet is sweet".

I'm going to sound a little pissy here but I think most of what's happening is that console hardware was so limited for such a long time that PC gamers got used to being able to max out their settings and still get 300 FPS.

Now that consoles have caught up and cranking the settings actually lowers your FPS like it used to people are shitting themselves.

If you don't believe me then look at these benchmarks from 2013:

https://pcper.com/2013/02/nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-performance-review-and-frame-rating-update/3/

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/review-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-6gb-185/

Look at how spikey the frame time graph was for Battlefield 3. Look at how, even with triple SLI Titans, you couldn't hit a consistent 60 FPS in maxed Hitman Absolution.

And yeah, I know high end graphics cards are even more expensive now than the Titan was in 2013 (due to the ongoing parade of BS that's been keeping GPU prices high), but the systems in those reviews are close to the highest end hardware you could get back then. Even if you were a billionaire you weren't going to be running Hitman much faster (you could put one more Titan in SLI, which had massively diminishing returns, and you could overclock everything maybe).

If you want to prioritize high and consistent framerate over visual fidelity / the latest rendering tech / giant map sizes then that's fine, but don't act like everything was great until a bunch of idiots got together and built UE5.

EDIT: the shader compilation stuff is an exception. Games should not be compiling shaders during gameplay. But that problem isn't limited to UE5.

This is a symptom of the absolutely insane way digital payments work.

You give a company your card details and they're able to charge whatever they want, whenever they want, by default. That's like paying at a restaurant by handing the waiter your entire wallet and telling them to take out the cost of the meal.

Most diagrams don't include the mesentery, so people just think their intestines are sitting there like a pile of rope inside their torso.

Man I am so tired of the endless parade of articles with the premise "How could conservatives possibly think this?? Surely if we just take the time to carefully understand their reasoning we can blah blah blah...."

Here I'll answer the the "why" right now:
A) Most US conservatives live in suburbs and rural areas and generally hate and fear inner cities and the people who live there. They also generally hate and fear environmentalism. They also greatly resent the idea that the USA isn't the best country on earth at literally everything. They're also violently homophobic and have such deeply toxic ideas of masculinity that they consider it to be weak and "gay" to drive a smaller vehicle.

So when an urbanism advocate says they want people to give up their lifted truck to live in a city and ride a bicycle so the US can be more like Europe and East Asia to help the environment how in the world do you expect them to react in any other way?

B) This is a population that's addicted to hate, fear and opposition like a drug, and conservative politicians and news orgs are the dealers. They need to periodically find something new to tantrum about. If there is no reason to hate something then a reason will be created. This was the case with LED lightbulbs, with COVID, with Romneycare, and so on and on and on. The 15 minute city conspiracy theories are not some sort of new unprecedented pattern of behavior.