She was jealous of them? I had assumed she had an allergy, or just couldn't tolerate being around animals for whatever reason.

That's not even choosing between her and the cats, that's just choosing not to date a person who just told you they're psycho.

Having a legacy is overrated IMO. I would settle for just knowing I had a net positive effect on the world, but even that's a pipe dream.

Support for this feature would lessen the need for such players though, and anything that lessens the amount of JavaScript in the world is an objective moral good.

Its kind of hilarious to me that in this movie the main character beats a healthcare insurance executive to within an inch of his life, probably crushing his windpipe and breaking every bone in his body.

And this is treated by the film as a more-or-less morally justified act (neither Mr Incredible nor the audience are meant to suffer any compunction over the act itself, merely the consequences the blowback causes for his family) and moreover society at large determined that this is wholesome enough to be in a kids movie.

Like, imagine describing a plot point like that in any other piece of media: "in this movie a Superman-expy loses his temper and throws a non-superpowered person through a wall, putting him in a hospital bed for months". You'd be like "wow that must be some edgy deconstruction of the superhero genre like The Boys or Invincible", but nope, its a PG rated Pixar film.

Which draws a pretty stark contrast between that and the faux bewilderment and outrage at the reaction to a certain shooting involving a CEO. Like, you can't be that surprised at what is clearly a pretty mainstream view, right?

Its so bizarre seeing this.

For me the chart goes:

Call of Duty (2003) - the first one, it had sprint and ADS. Also two primary weapons and a handgun slot.

Call of Duty 2 (2005) - the first one with regenerating health. This might also be where prone and the true two weapon limit was introduced (but I'm not sure).

...

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) - At this point people are criticizing the game series for being propaganda for the military industrial complex, for bland mindless gameplay, for being generally bland and uninteresting as a piece of art, for cranking out the same game over and over again, and for spawning so many imitators that creativity was choked out of the AAA development space.

...

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014) - the one with that actor in it. People were surprised that it actually changed up its gameplay by adding jetpacks.

From 2014 onwards: I have never heard of these games before. I was vaguely aware that they kept making COD games but never cared to read about them. I think one of them was 150 GB, which some people think was a conspiracy to fill up your hard drive so you couldn't play other games (considering how much a repack was able to reduce its size).

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.

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.