Bruh if you’re still giving a shit about what any pre-election polls were saying after they’ve repeatedly failed to predict so many elections I don’t know what to tell you.
I said it before he stepped down- America is too misogynist and racist to vote in Harris. Even the economic left. Would Biden have done better? I can’t say. But I do think it’s pretty damning that Harris didn’t even win the popular vote like Biden and Hillary did.
What the fuck are “modding values”? Women with ridiculous anime proportions and almost non-existent armor? Adding Shrek and Thomas the Tank to Skyrim? Gatekeeping mods to a small community of individuals who play on PC and have the technical skills to do that? Slaving away while the rent and bills like up out of some sense of obligation to a community? Hoping people donate? Putting all the time and effort into creating something and taking on all of the risk? Being. Subject to the whims of Bethesda’s management and hoping management doesn’t change their tune to be more like Nintendo?
How can you calin that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about modders getting paid, when they pioneered the first real legitimate attempt at paying modders? That’s some serious cognitive dissonance. And perhaps the most important piece of the equation is the financial security it provides. The Creation Club paying modders up-front greatly mitigates the business risks of investing that much time and effort. It is not the best fit for everyone, but that allows a lot of mods to be made that never would have been possible otherwise. And it doesn’t remove any of the mods that already existed or prevent anyone from making free non-CC mods.
As for donations to modders- those companies like Patreon are taking their own cut as well. And that’s a legal grey area because modders are profitting off of Bethesda’s platform. Then you have the issue where Bethesda updates their game and provides an improvement for literally millions of people while a couple hundred PC players flame them on Twitter for breaking the mod they paid or donated for.
Personally, I’ve never donated or paid for any mods because I don’t use them. I’ve messed around with mods and the vast, vast majority of them suck. They feel completely out of place and ruin the vibe of the game. It’s not worth all of the hassle of installing a mod manager and working through all of the issues just to add memes to the game. The ones that add more quest lines are usually just way worse versions of the radiant quests that already exist. Maybe if I had a more powerful computer back in like 2012 or 2013 then graphics mods might have made sense, but with the updates in the Special and Anniversary editions there’s not much point. If I wanted to go back to Fallout 3 then maybe there’s an argument there, but I’m not really interested in going back there in general.
The “best” mods can be created In a variety of ways. I’d argue that the Hearthfire, Dawngard, and Dragonborn DLC’s are better than any free mod I’ve ever seen. The vast, vast majority of free mods are shitposts or school projects that no one cares about.
I mean… It’s hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn’t published them, but we know that Prey’s opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2’s was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.
It got great critical reviews. People who identify as “gamers” seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.
So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can’t automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.
You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG’s and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.
And it’s not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can’t just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.
I still don’t understand why people have so much hate for Bethesda for… Paying independent creators to make better mods for their games and charging for those mods.
I can understand criticizing the execution: the quality and price of each mod, the grey legal area where these weren’t included in Season Passes that were supposed to include all DLC, etc. And I certainly wouldn’t call the results a success.
But nothing about it ever seemed particularly greedy or “unfair” to me. It solved a lot of problems that the modding community has. It protected the creators from having. Their content stolen and re-used or re-distributed. Mods (especially for-profit) were always kind of a grey area legally because… It’s Bethesda’s platform and IP. Bethesda may not be as great with modders as other companies, but they’re a lot better than the worst offenders like Nintendo. The Creation Club has better quality control. And it’s better for the end users- easier to install, usable on consoles, no need to go to sketchy 3rd party websites or mess with the installation. I know people complain on the Internet anytime Bethesda updates one of their games because it breaks their mods- I could be wrong but I’ve never heard of that happening with CC mods.
Seems to me like most of the hate for CC comes from people just wanting more content without paying for it.
My thought is that it’s revealing the construction and weak points of the death star. It may have been constructed in two hemispheres that were joined together, and that seam might have been the failure point where gassed were released when the internal pressure got too high.
Except then we should see the two hemispheres blow out from each other a bit, which they don’t.
It’s neither as simple as the article states nor what I see in the comments here.
It’s not just about staying on Trump’s good size to avoid his wrath, getting lucrative government contracts, or getting personal tax breaks. It’s also about stopping or rolling back regulations that would hurt profits.
Keeping the minimum wage down. Eroding worker’s rights, allowing the union busting tactics that Amazon is famous for. Removing consumer protections. Allowing mergers and acquisitions without all those pesky antitrust lawsuits. Rolling back environmentally regulations, staying on fossil fuels. Foreign policy that allows these companies to exploit cheap global labor and sell to the wealthy. Heck, Musk at least seems rather cozy with Putin- i would not be surprised to see these billionaires try to roll back Russian sanctions.
A war crime according to… Who? Is there some treaty or convention that happened? Is there some customary international law that he violated? I can’t find the Hague anywhere on any maps in this universe but maybe I missed something.
Scarlet and Violet may only run at 10FPS and there are plenty of other flaws, but it’s still a ton of fun. And those are sequels, not remakes. The gameplay is a dramatic shift from everything the mainline series has done before.
Legends Arceus has performance issues too, but was was critically acclaimed.
As for the remakes, they’re generally pretty good upgrades. Gen 1 has really aged poorly, but FRLG are fantastic. I never liked Diamond or Pearl, but BDSP were really solid and fixed almost everything they could without making fundamental changes to the game. I’m really hoping they re-make Gen 5 because those are my favorite and they are stuck on the DS- my adult hands can’t handle holding something that small for hours on end.
Or… Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of “intellectual property” has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?
Depends on how you define important"
The HD Zelda remakes would be nice to have on a real console.
It’s notable that there is still a Kirby game stuck on the WiiU.
I’ve heard good things about Nintendoland but I’ve never played it. Still, that’s kind of the soul of the WiiU so might not be likely to get ported.
Paper Mario Color Splash is notable, though I don’t think it sold well. If they ever do a compilation of the second wave of Paper Mario games it’ll probably get included.
I liked Pushmo World. I wouldn’t mind a new entry in the series, though as a puzzle game the line between sequel and remake is kind of blurry and irrelevant.
Sega loves to do Sonic compilations so I would guess Rise of Lyric would get re-released at some point.
There’s the infamous Star Fox games. Nintendo has been known to re-release old games that were obscure, sold poorly, or were just plain bad before. But I wouldn’t expect that for a decade or two. Either as part of a compilation or hidden away with a bunch of other games on a digital storefront.
Devil’s Third may end up as lost media someday. The spinoffs probably do too. Pokemon Rumble, plus the “party” and “sports” games.
There was the whole big lie about Obama’s birth certificate because he was black.
John McCain was born in Panama but no one seemed to care about him.
Melania Trump was an illegal immigrant and that didn’t stop her career or prevent Trump from winning the presidency.
Raphael “Ted” Cruz was born in Alberta yet no one seems to care.
White and Right is alright. I’ll cede that maybe if some useful idiot with dark skin and murky citizenship rose to power conservatives might decide to look the other way, but you need to be at least one for them to do so.
But would sovcits even register? Or would they just show up to the polls to harass workers with a bunch of made-up pseudo-legalize documents they found on the Internet?
Not a big enough age gap for lib-right
It feels as though there’s a cycle with waves of this kind of junk. Stuff that consumers really don’t want but companies are so convinced are revolutionary they try to shove it everywhere
3D TV’s were pushed, but not that hard. Cryptocurrency had a brief moment in the sun where it looked like it might be viable. There’s smaller things like physical buttons being replaced by capacitive and eventually touch screens on everything from phones to appliances to cars (it seems Apple might be reversing that). There’s been a huge push away from digital media, but 80% of PS5’s sold have been the disc drive version and the markets for DVD’s and Blu-Rays seems to be heating up despite stores saying they are going to stop carrying them. There’s probably a lot more I can’t remember.
Companies have been shifting away from meeting consumer demand and towards trying to shape consumer demand themselves instead. I blame the Marketing industry- with the rise of the Internet, TV, and even cheap printed materials over the past couple hundred years. It’s so easy to make a new brand that there’s no incentive to maintain a reputation anymore. Craftsman is a famous example.
The power has shifted to investors. Announcing AI integration makes the stock price go up. We saw the same thing with crypto a few years ago- the most famous example is probably the Long Island Iced Tea Corporation changing it’s name to Long Blockchain Corporation and getting a stock price boost without actually changing their operations or products at all.
We will buy what our oligarch overlords decide to sell us and we will be grateful to them for the privilege.
That’s a good point. I’ve decided I’m not going to vote for Obama.
Tragic that someone so old still has to work a drive through to make ends meet
Crazy how the HC with the most Superbowl trophies has had a reputation fall off so hard.
The bad Browns tenure I can chalk up to the Browns just being a bad organization. The Jets incident was more funny than anything else. But then the cheating scandals kept coming and putting asterisks on those wins. The question of whether Brady or Bellichek was more important loomed over the franchise. Matt Cassell had a decent year in 2008 that suggested it might be Bellichek, but the question was pretty solidly answered with “Brady” when he went on to win another one with Tampa and have a couple of good years there while Bellichek floundered without him and was eventually let go.
He was a terrible GM. So many bad contracts and bad draft picks. Brady’s willingness to play for less could only go so far to fix that. Despite going under .500 in 3 of his last 4 seasons he left the cupboards bare.
His coaching tree is almost a meme for his bad it is. Matt Patricia, Josh McDaniels, Eric Mangini, Romeo Crennel, Jim Schwartz, Joe Judge, and more have been anywhere from some of the worst coaches in the league to maybe mediocre at best.
There are a couple of guys with potential still. Flores really got screwed by the Dolphins and seems to be on a path to getting another shot, but how much credit does Bellichek deserve? Do Tomlin and O’Connell get credit (although I suppose you could argue O’Connell should be part of Bellichek’s tree from his time as a backup QB?). Daboll… Idk what’s going on in New York but I wouldn’t be shocked if they make a change there within the next couple of years. Mayo is just getting his first shot here so maybe there is hope for him. Bill O’Brien I thought was a good coach and terrible GM for the Texans.
And now here he is trying to absolve himself of culpability for the terrible team he left behind in New England. He should have retired when Brady left- could’ve rode off into the sunset as a hero and no one would’ve cared if he left behind a roster full of holes in the 2020 covid season.
I’m trying to verify these numbers and I’m not finding much.
The closest I can find to a source is that these were claims from Moshe Elad in articles in Tablet Magazine and Algemeier.
In Mashal’s case, he was the treasurer of Hamas at the time and Elad seems to be just attributing the entirety of the organization’s assets to him personally.
I’d be really interested to see if anyone else can find more concrete proof of this claim than I could.
Except that’s not the whole story.
The song was co-written by Victor Willis (the lead singer) and Jacques Morali (their producer). Originally, executive producer Henry Belolo was also credited, but his name was later removed after lawsuits.
Willis is straight (as far as I can tell publicly in any case) and has indeed claimed that the song is simply about the YMCA and has nothing to do with gay culture.
However, Morali is gay. He was essentially the founder of the group and has been quite explicit that the group was created to because he “[wanted to do something only for the gay market”](wanted to do something only for the gay market). The name “Village People” is a reference to Greenwich Village, a gay community.
So we have 2 writers credited. One of whom was the singer who was hired on and later left while the group continued in without him, who claims the song was not about gay people at all. The other was gay, was basically the founder, and has been explicit about how the whole project was intended to target gay people all along.
So I suppose every listener needs to judge for themselves. But my own conclusion is that it’s 100% about gay culture, just like most of the rest of their catalog. I could only speculate as to why Willis wants to distance himself from that.
Maybe he never expected to become a gay icon and was never comfortable with it. Maybe he’s trying to to make sure that the song appeals to the largest market possible for the sake of getting more royalties. Or maybe there’s something else going on.
Are they even good at gauging general sentiment though?