Computerchairgeneral

Doing things and not spiraling is about all we can do at this point. I suppose it depends on the things you care about or want to prioritize The massive cuts to government spending Trump has talked about are inevitably going to impact services like Social Security and Medicare so mutual aid resources are going to be important for a lot of people:

Mutual Aid Hub-Resources Food Not Bombs FAQ

If you’re concerned about what will happen in places like Gaza and Ukraine there are charities that are helping those affected by those conflicts:

Charity Navigator Gaza UNITED24-Offical Ukranian Fundraising Platform

Finally, if you are not in a position to donate money then there are ongoing election efforts that need volunteers. At this point that’s mostly ballot curing, helping voters sort out issues with their absentee or mail in ballot. Some of these ongoing elections are incredibly tight and making sure those ballots are accepted could make a difference, especially in low profile races:

Mobilize.us Ballot Curing

At this point we can only really guess. It’ll probably be days or weeks before people can dig through the voting data and do substantive post-mortems on the 2024 campaign. Th economy seems to have played a big part. People are angry at high prices and they naturally punish the incumbent party even if the President doesn’t realistically control how much eggs and gas cost. Along with that it’s looking like there was a collapse in Democratic turnout in the Rust Belt while Republican turnout stayed steady, handing Trump narrow wins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. It also looks like the Harris campaign’s bet on Republicans who didn’t vote for Trump in the primary breaking for her failed to pay off.

Thanks Youtube, I hate it. Like I can see some arguments for taking away the view counter, even if I think it’s a bad decision. But the date the video was uploaded? Who does that even help? I guess Youtubers will either need to start properly dating their videos or we’ll just have to use context clues to figure out when a video was uploaded.

This actually isn’t a terrible use of an LLM. It’s actually kind of refreshing to see a news story about a beneficial use of it in a very specific context.

Considering I would have never heard of this otherwise, yeah I think it’s the Streisand Effect at work. But what a bizarre thing to want scrubbed from the Internet. Like it’s not a particularly hard-hitting question and the CEO clearly had a prepared, corporate-speak answer ready. It feels like something that wouldn’t have attracted any attention if they hadn’t called attention to it. So, classic Streisand Effect I guess.

Clicked for a game announcement. Got a political manifesto about art and culture. Not disappointed. Definitely interested to see how this develops.

Ridiculous, but depressingly unsurprising.

Honestly, perfectly understandable that she would want to quit. Tons of content creators burn out after making the same type of thing day in and day out. Walking away when it’s not fun anymore is better than sticking with something that makes you miserable.

Well, the leopards are eating good again.

It looks cool and I like some of the little callbacks to the original PlayStation, but I imagine the price for this is going to be ridiculous and that’s before the scalpers inevitably get their hands on them.

Kind of surprised it took this long to be honest. Also a little surprised it’s a patent lawsuit, but then again it might be easier to prove infringement on a gameplay concept you have patented rather than copyright.

This actually doesn’t sound terrible? I mean I’m sure people will find ways to abuse it, but the concept seems pretty good. There are plenty of tiny channels that could use something like this to get more attention when they put out a video.

Been bouncing between Wizordum and Void Stranger over the last few days. Wizordum is a fun “boomer shooter” that takes a lot of inspiration from games like Hexen and I’ve been enjoying mowing down monsters with fireballs and a magical shotgun. Void Stranger I’m still not sure how I feel about. Heard it mentioned a few times as a very meta game with a lot of layers. In theory I like games like that. Figuring out the core puzzle gameplay of moving blocks around has been fun, even if I don’t consider myself that great at puzzles, but the meta stuff is riding that fine line between being just cryptic enough to be intriguing to being so cryptic that I’m not sure how I’m supposed to figure this out without a guide.

Good luck with that, I guess? Don’t really see that stopping anyone. If something can be modded into the game someone will mod it into the game.

Glad to see the campaign still going strong. Almost being past the minimum threshold requirement for seven countries is impressive. Hopefully it can reach one million signatures, even if I’m a little skeptical about the EU taking this seriously and passing a decent law. Still, anything that keeps the topic on peoples minds is a good thing.

Two weeks? That’s got to be a record for the shortest amount of time it took for a live service game to completely crash and burn.

Well, my expectations for this game were already on the floor. Guess it’s time to put them in the basement. I mean I want a good sequel to Bloodlines, but that’s looking less and less likely.

Sega is definitely winning the console war now.

“We have looked at these difficult economic times and decided to make them more difficult for our employees by firing them all.” Nice. Always a great move. Also, I don’t see how they can say with a straight face that none of their ongoing projects or releases are going to be impacted by laying off the entire team. Even if they are just a publisher firing everyone and “restructuring” the company is going to have some kind of impact.

So, has Embracer officially surpassed EA’s killstreak of video game studio closures yet? They’ve got to be getting close.