This unpacks on so many levels, so let’s take the awful view of how it impacted ONLY the monetary policy, and not factor in the holocaust and millions dead…and erosion of civil liberties, dismantling of democratic institutions, and the bypass of the parliament…let’s just say look at it from that statement “considerable gains in stocks” that supposedly indicated good times were ahead under the new government.

The US depression reached global markets and brought everything down, while also the massive fucking war tanked Germany’s economy under the war machine strain.

Leave it to investors to make awful miscalculations over and over, then amazingly, we still listen to those fuckers a hundred years later after repeated miscalculations and massive financial ruination. But hey, around 500 people got shit rich so fuck it, yaaaaaay capitalism.

When 15 million voters who could have swayed the election said “fuck it”. 15 million voters who voted democrat in 2020, that is.

Like, what exactly? States are still moving forward with their climate change plans. The states who aren’t, have a very small impact and are largely canceled out by those who do. Deportations will likely go up, support for Ukraine will likely evaporate, but the impact to citizens inside of the US are largely unchanged. The economy isn’t going to change course, and we’ve been getting fucked in the ass with no lube by all of our administrations going back to Reagan. The ceiling isn’t falling, it’s been fallen for quite some time.

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What the fuck??? Insert Jumanji meme “What year is it?”

Numbers check out too. Wintel, slayed, and we didn’t even notice.

Time for some Barves.

The Netflix exec talking about how generative AI is going to create “mindblowing experiences” reminds me of a Mondelez Executive for the Oreos brand talking about a slight tweak to the Oreos product line with a new line of Oreos, how it was going to “take snacking to a new unbelievable level”. The reality was a slightly different Oreo cookie that helped increase obesity rates, with the same shit.

This is even worse, because most people see through all the AI slop, what we’ll get are cheap ass AI produced mobile game clones, and this guy’s talking about them being “mindblowing experiences”. In reality, if you go out and get some sunlight and touch grass, you’re getting a far more rich experience.

I love this, best comment I’ve seen in a long time and couldn’t agree more.

“mindblowing new experiences”. Fuck me, imagine if that guy got outside and touched grass.

I wish critics wouldn’t even bring up the preachy-ness of it. I’m finding other tangibles really fucking annoying like the cringe dialogue itself “Who doesn’t like talking about dragons?” or how fucked the companion and enemy AI is. We haven’t seen AI this bad since Colonial Marines, but nobody’s really talking about it because of the flashy combat animations for the main character acting as a curtain covering how dogshit the rest of the gameplay is.

My character can slam the ground and make a shit ton of visual effects, which is acting as a red herring to my companions that don’t do shit the vast majority of the time at enemies barely smart enough to navigate the terrain to run at me. This is like Doom 1993 AI.

Irritating jokes less amusing than the most formulaic of trashy sitcoms, and they don’t address that either. I think people irked by this article are really put off by the way it adds fuel to the fire of criticisms toward progressivism. It’s well written and does bring out the irony of it, but it seems more of an attempt to undermine the progressive messaging and justify the audience polarity. In reality, there’s no need for the division, people who positively react to the game are wearing rose colored glasses to a game with serious issues that don’t get fixed on the technical backend.

On the technical front, if you ignore the absolute garbage AI and look at the rendering engine’s performance, this is the best release of the year by far.

I have so many mixed feelings on the game. This shit going back and forth over the wokeness just gives everyone a red herring to defend or attack.

While I’m happy that AMD remains a viable competitor, their absolutely anemic competition with nVidia in the PC gaming segment is very disturbing. This means that nVidia’s still showing a 9% revenue increase YoY, and still getting an impressive rate of return for their gaming investments despite their horrendous price gouging and large number of customers exiting the PC gaming segment.

The fact that the console revenue isn’t making up for the loss of PC customers means Radeon just abandoned post in the PC gaming segment overall, with the public news that AMD isn’t even going to target performance oriented price-insensitive customers anymore at all, and not even trying to increase the TAM.

What I just heard was “We kept ourselves just slightly cheaper than nVidia, and don’t really care about bringing value back into the TAM for PC hardware, so we’re just going to focus our efforts on console-only going forward in the pipeline, and customers can join us there”.

That means as a customer in the PC hardware space, we all just ultimately lost, and it’s a single-vendor market now going forward.

Fuck.

Granted the semi I saw had a guard on the front of it, but I witnessed one smoke a fully grown cow at 70mph. Sent the cow and pieces of it flying about 100 feet, with no visible damage to the truck at all. There was a tremendous amount of blood and spatter everywhere and my own car got a ton of blood on it from the cloud of guts and blood made by the truck. Mostly there was just shit everywhere leading up to the remnants of the carcass, but the truck gave no fucks whatsoever. I asked the driver if he was ok and he didn’t even seem to have any agitation whatsoever, more like “oh, another one”.

A truck will not disintegrate, there might be damage if it didn’t have a guard, but against a deer, that must’ve been a paper mache piece of shit truck if it disintegrated on a deer.

Lol, how is that political? It’s a “water makes wet” kind of thing. I’m sorry you have such fragile feelings about Bioware and don’t like the narrative. If it’s any consolation, it’s not even the same people who made the prior games. Whether the game’s a massive success or financial failure, EA’s just going to fire them all anyway. That’s cool though, we’ll see how it looks on the Steam reviews this weekend. If past experience is any indicator, whenever a publisher resorts to funny business, it’s because they have to. Nobody was needed in the defense of BG, MDK2, BG2, NWN, Kotor, Jade Empire, ME, ME2, DA:O, DA2, SW:TOR, DA:I, etc.

I don’t even really care about the studio anymore to be honest, after the layoffs and turnover, we have no idea whether this crew delivered or not, and judging from the review oddities, it paints a bleak picture. Let them sink or swim based on what EA allowed them to do, then through no true fault of their own, face a studio closure because of the obtuse fuckwads in EA corporate. Either way, the future sucks for the gaming studio called Bioware, in name only.

This sure seems to indicate coaching on catchphrases. As for conspiracy theories, this isn’t a conspiracy, it’s pretty obvious. IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku, and Polygon have a long history of rating games higher based on their budget and publisher influence. Standard review outlets are inconsistent, and since 2010 have been the butt of many jokes. This seven year old video from Dunkey albeit, satire, rather well breaks down the inconsistency between review outlet staff even highlighting their own subjective contradictions from individual reviewers (look at the bit about the Sonic game in this one).

When you look at the first wave of reviews given by those issued pre-release review copies, the trend speaks for itself.

[Edit] Mass media manipulation never happens, no, never, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad

Fextralife was not given a review code due to their pattern of objectivity

Fextralife also mentions they host the most widely used DA:I wiki, they went through the effort of preserving the original Dragon Age forum threads from the Bioware forums prior to EA’s closure of them. They have a long history of being one of the central hosts of the largest community of Dragon Age enthusiasts, and longtime proponents of the Dragon Age series overall. When they expressed cautious optimism after the reveal trailer, their press contacts at EA went silent and they were not selected for an advance review code due to the risk of them being critical or not giving a high enough score to the game and dragging down the initial metacritic score.

Either way, if the company is worried about the perceived quality of the game, they wouldn’t have cherry picked favorable reviewers. It looks bad.

It depends on how you frame it. I don’t see it as “hate” as I don’t hate Bioware, but objectively speaking, the work speaks for itself. Hyperbole such as disaster, catastrophe, etc are embellishments, but to say the game isn’t bad or just so-so isn’t a scathing criticism.

Anthem was treated the way it was due to ME3 and the narrative choices, for better or worse. People wanted to tell off Casey Hudson, and the game suffered unfairly. Granted it wasn’t a good game, it wasn’t as terrible as it was made out to be either.

Now on Andromeda, however, it was fairly criticized. The gameplay was fun and engaging, but the narrative and storytelling were given their fair treatment. That stuff was just bad, and the developer responses didn’t help either. The pathetic rants amounted to “I put mah heart and souuuulll into it”, and just because people worked really hard on something, doesn’t mean it was a good thing. People worked really hard in the sewers of London to get rid of fatbergs, but in the end all they achieved was moving shit around, and that’s more dignified than the trash we got in Andromeda’s writing and character animations.

Looking at the current marketing situation and the “Bioware hate” as you refer to it, I really think there’s more EA hate at this point. EA is blatantly manipulating the review scores by means of review embargos and selectively cherry picking only favorable review outlets, and in some cases we are even spotting reused catchphrases that indicate signs of coaching by EA to say positive things about the game. They do this in light of the consumer sentiment about preorders “Not touching this or preordering, I want reviews first” is a common sentiment amongst their video comments telling their marketing engagement experts to use dirty tricks like review manipulation.

I’d honestly love for Veilguard to be fantastic, but the layoffs and staff turnover tell me they didn’t value their developers, didn’t value the product, and don’t value the art or anything really beyond making some flashy flim-flam with marketable gimmicks. The reviews I’ve read mention that the characters in the game must definitely know what Tiktok is, due to the cringy dialogue, and that’s a review that gave it a favorable score.

Just wait until the objective reviews hit and this game is widely panned. That will draw the line between “hate” and “oh, this is actually shitty”, and make things especially clear.

EA’s been manipulating the review scores, and can still only muster their current metacritic rating. I’m interested to see what the audience scores look like later this week.

Fextralife’s take on EA review manipulation

I’m really sorry man, first off thank you for being a veteran, and your story carries weight. Your dad making that statement is a terrible thing. Nobody should be doing that, especially when you’re voting with your conscience. There’s no need for “with us or against us” absolutes, and the common ground between people is there. People just tap into being told how to think, the rhetoric, and absolutes that don’t need to define us. A large part of conservatives I talk to aren’t actually anti immigration, they just say shit like “they need to do it legally” to which I ask them “Do you have any idea what legally means, and how long it takes?”.

I think back to the mass influx of immigrants that had to come by Ellis Island in the late 19th century, and how wide open the country was back then, to which those people built a nation and powered through racism of a different nature back then. The whole history of “I don’t hire Irish” and the “black Irish”, or even how Potter derisively refers to “garlic eaters” in “It’s a Wonderful Life” shows the long history of harshness towards immigrants in this country yet the best of times were built by immigrants themselves. When conservatives hear this stuff, they deprogram and become pro-immigration, but then realize how shitty our legal process is. I hope that some of them can hear this type of thing and start advocating for the right kind of change instead of treating humans as lesser for factors they have zero control over, like where they’re born.

I don’t know you or your family, but that you stood by your wife and kids after serving a country with ungrateful parts is beyond commendable and a show of your awesome character. Respect, sir, I truly hope you and your family are well, and I wish more people could demonstrate the compassion you and yours deserve.

I agree with you, and it’s also a shame that Democrats are writing their family off instead of deprogramming in a non-hateful way. You’d be surprised how Trump supporting relatives can get onboard with socialized medicine, by just talking to them as if they’re not monsters. That’s something a lot of the fucking idiots here on LW could benefit from, instead of yelling “bigot” while acting like a bigot themselves.

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