This is also why bluesky picked up over all the other twitter alternatives. The average user doesn’t want to learn all this shit, they just want to use something that works (which in that situation is unfortunate, because Mastodon is right there and works perfectly fine out of the box with their default public instance, but it is what it is I guess).

Realistically I don’t see Matrix picking up as a widespread discord clone. Just the entire idea of Matrix being a protocol and having different clients to choose from is enough to turn a lot of folks away from it. Meanwhile, Stoat is practically building a 1:1 discord clone, and is much easier for the average user to understand.

I’m as distanced as I can be for now but have one more big cord to cut - Google Fi. It’s just by far the most affordable carrier for our use here, and frankly every alternative sucks ass just as much anyway, but I’d still like to move to something else sooner rather than later.

Otherwise, my gmail accounts are still active but rarely used, both forwarding to Tuta. Been using GrapheneOS for over a year now, Aurora and the Play Store are last resorts for app installs. I only use youtube through a self-hosted Invidious instance. Photos has been long replaced with Immich, Drive long emptied and replaced with OpenCloud. For navigation, Magic Earth’s been the most reliable, not FOSS but so be it, CoMaps is good for browsing/exploring but kind of terrible for driving.

I sunk a couple hours into it today, pretty good stuff so far, though strategy games aren’t usually my forte so I’m just full sending cats out at random lmao

It’s unmistakably an Edmund game, that’s for sure.

EDIT: Aaaand refunding, because holy fuck dude (Dogshit article, especially that it still tries to frame Israel’s genocide as a “conflict”, but the words taken right from McMillen’s mouth are enough to toss this game right into a dumpster)

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/edmund-mcmillen-on-assembling-mewgenics-meow-cameo-list-the-inclusion-of-people-with-clashing-ideologies-felt-appropriate

You know I didn’t even realize I said this and I’m gonna start using this one LMFAO

Interesting, seems like this has been around for a while but I haven’t heard of it until now. With how much Discord’s shitting the fan and becoming (well, always has been) a privacy nightmare, this seems worth a try. The alternatives out there either need time to mature (Stoat) or don’t really fill the same role (Matrix).

I played through it once (twice?) and put a good amount of time into endgame. Fun game for a bit, better than 3 at least, but god the performance is abysmal.

All the random bullshit they kept adding and the emphasis on hats are what made me stop playing it around that time. Definitely want to give this a shot

I’ve been loading up my Jellyfin server with their shows for a while and I’ve been meaning to grab a subscription purely to support. Great people and great content.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Gaiden (the Daidoji in general are imo one of the worst plot devices they’ve ever introduced), but 7 was phenomenal for sure. 3, 4, and 5 are admittedly all over the place and products of the time, but each has their merits.

Never go for Y5’s platinum completion though. Worst mistake of my life.

It’s sad how much this franchise has fallen off since Nagoshi left. The demo may have been some of the worst combat and visuals I’ve experienced in this series, and I’ve 100%'d every single game. A clunky mess in an oversaturated world with 3 movesets that all feel like amateur modpacks. Plus Rikiya’s recast is extremely jarring especially next to Mikio, they brought back the annoying friendship thing from IW/Pirates and made it worse, so many issues already.

It’s actually wild how they went from Lost Judgment to this. Like Y6 and K2 were rough but they were working out the kinks of the new engine. LJ was phenomenal. All downhill from there

And that’s just the demo experience, let alone how the full game recast Hamazaki with a known sex pest (should’ve kept the original model but with a new VA, since the old VA was actually even worse in that regard).

anyway when’s Gang of Dragon coming out

The Hague for every single ICE and DHS nazi is the bare minimum moderate position.

I absolutely swear by these things, and the upcoming Steam Controller is the only thing that’ll make me shelve it. I’ve got 3 of them lying around at this point.

Usually if this happens for me it’s an issue with the gluetun end, since all the big names love to throttle known VPNs. Fixes itself after a few minutes, but if I’m not feeling lazy a quick stack restart tends to fix it too.

The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.

This especially. Just as an example, I sunk way too much time into Destiny 2, and recently picked up Warframe after putting D2 away last year, and the difference between the studios behind them both is night and day. The former feels like an abusive relationship, built on constant FOMO, removing content, and constantly skirting around the community’s numerous issues with the game’s systems and sandbox (and that’s all on top of Bungie/Sony execs treating the actual devs like garbage).

The latter feels like a game where the players are genuinely treated as the game’s lifeblood and rather than nickel and dime them for every last thing, the devs give them what they want, and the devs get to make what they want to make. Not to mention literally everything in the game minus community-created cosmetics can be earned without spending anything at all.

These sorts of comparisons are all over the place. PoE2 compared to Diablo 4 or post-Krafton Last Epoch for example. You can’t just pump out a live service game and hope shit sticks, you need to foster a community around it.

The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2, both relatively smaller dev teams with large publisher backing but mostly left to their own devices to do whatever the fuck they want. Coming from the predatory FOMO hell that was Destiny 2, getting into similar games but ones that actually respect the players is refreshing.

I have zero interest in throwaway AAA slop in general, let alone with all the usual live service shit tacked on.

The amount of genuinely good and successful live service games is so minimal that it’s actual insanity seeing AAA execs trying to reinvent the wheel and failing every time.

Yeah this is something that keeps getting completely lost in this conversation.

The assets in question were from development during 2022-2023 at the latest. GenAI image tools at that time were extremely primitive compared to what’s out there now - remember DallE-Mini? That’s the kind of thing they were using. And because these tools hadn’t breached containment yet, literally no one was talking about ethical issues yet. Sandfall was basically just experimenting with brand new tech long before it was “good” and long before anyone was talking about it.

Now? It’s good to see them committed to avoiding it. GenAI is a plague and should be treated as such. But 2022-ish was totally different than today.

I was already leaning against getting a Switch 2 when they first announced it, but advertising a tech demo as a paid product sealed it for me.

A contractor used it for placeholder background assets in 2022 when the best genAI tech available was DallE-Mini and literally no one was even remotely aware of any ethical concerns yet.

Like I get that time feels nonexistent since 2020 but people seem to forget genAI was literally not even a known thing until 2024 at the earliest.

Today genAI and all those who support it in any capacity deserve to rot in hell, and it shouldn’t even be used for placeholders or concepts at any stage in the process. That’s a given. But why are we applying 2025 standards to something clearly done at a time before anyone knew anything about this shit?

Also the article people keep bringing up about Sandfall admitting they use “AI” is nothing but conflated buzzwords and has literally nothing to do with genAI, they’re very obviously referring to regular ass machine learning and Unreal tools that have existed for ages.

GenAI shouldn’t be used in any part of the process, including concepts and placeholders.

That being said, the assets that slipped through in E33 were from 2022. The most powerful publicly available genAI tool at the time was fuckin DallE-Mini, which basically just spit out fuzzy messes. None of the ethical concerns were common knowledge yet, Altman and his ilk were basically nobodies at the time, this was far before any of the current tools and companies that are driving everything to hell.

On top of that, there’s a dogshit article going around where Sandfall says they “use a small bit of AI” internally, and elaborate that they’re referring to Unreal machine learning tools and such, not genAI.

Fuck genAI, fuck Altman, and fuck anyone who intentionally uses any of this shit today, but the E33 case is a literal non-issue. They had 2022 fuzzy garbage slip through the cracks, immediately removed it, and there’s absolutely nothing to indicate that they’re using the modern, problematic tech today.

The only issue here is that there’s no reason for it to be considered an indie game. That’s it.