loobkoob

I hate that how hot she is or isn't has any bearing on her music's popularity.

The owner of the car, who was not identified by name, said he had thought the car was in park mode when he hit the accelerator pedal.

If he thought the car was in park mode, why did he hit the accelerator pedal?

Even of that were true (which it may be), there are loot games and loot games. Personally, I want itemisation to make a meaningful difference to how my build feels to play and how it performs. I want to be able to have a unique/legendary item drop and think, "wow, I'm going to make a while new build around this".

Games where the loot is just +1 damage or 7% extra armour, and where there's no real depth to the loot, would be better off without loot, I think - I'd rather just see an armoury where I pick the weapon I want, and not have to deal with the loot scaling, enemy level scaling, etc. Save the looter aspects for games like Path Of Exile or Borderlands where loot is actually engaging and impactful.

And also just websites compressing images without the user getting any input. A meme that goes from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Twitter to Tumblr to Reddit to here will likely be compressed every time it gets reuploaded. Most social media sites use some form of image compression.

And it obviously doesn't help that artefacts from compression are multiplicative.

It's also just a side effect of being older in general. When I was a teenager, 21-year-olds looked way older than 18-year-olds to me. Now, 21-year-olds still look like kids to me, and seem almost indistinguishable from 18-year-olds.

Mine, too! It really showcases the kind of narrative that is only possible with the interactivity of video games as a medium. If I could experience any game again for the first time, it'd be Outer Wilds!

Absolutely. I think perhaps my all-time favourite romance of any RPG is Parvati's from The Outer Worlds, where you play wingman and confidant to Parvati. It feels so much more fleshed out and intimate than any player romance has ever felt to me, despite the player only being an onlooker.

Branching dialogue and decision trees are great for letting players decide what actions to take, but I feel that giving players that level of freedom with their romantic relationships feels very limiting and shallow - especially when the player is given multiple romanceable NPCs to choose from. The fact that the player character is often a blank slate means it's impossible for there to be any real chemistry built up, too.

Give me railroaded romances between clearly defined characters where I can actually believe the characters are into each other, or give me no romances at all.

Around 15 hours for someone who goes in completely blind, I think. Or 20 minutes for someone who knows what they're doing!

I'm not cheering for the layoffs, of course, nor am I necessarily in favour of monopolies and the consolidation of the gaming industry (although, in this instance, I think it's probably a positive thing for fans of Blizzard IPs). But layoffs during this kind of merger/buyout are expected. Microsoft has its own legal departments, payroll departments, marketing departments, etc, and while they might need expanding slightly as the company grows/absorbs new companies, they don't need an entire second company's worth of those departments.

These layoffs were about cutting redundancy rather than just chasing short-term profits. It sucks for the people who were laid off either way, but I think it's good to be realistic about why they happened.

Does this story end with someone throwing Elon Musk into a volcano?

Yes, as long as they're also white and middle/upper class!

It seems like targeting vaping at children has worked for them. The handful of millennials I know who vape are people who started smoking at ~14 years old before transitioning to vaping instead. I don't personally know any millennials who went from being non-smokers to picking up vaping. And the millennials I know who vape all use the rebuildable, customisable ones, too.

The percentage of zoomers I see who vape is far, far higher. A lot of them have never smoked a cigarette in their lives, they just went straight to vaping. And it's almost exclusively disposable vapes, too.

I think vaping is preferable to smoking cigarettes, but I think not doing either is ideal. And I'm obviously dead set against disposable vapes.

So yeah, in this case, "for the children" actually seems to be appropriate. And not that Sunak really gives a damn about the environment, but I think framing this as "for the children" rather than for environmental reasons is the right approach for a conservative government anyway; left-wing people will support it for environmental reasons anyway, but the government directly saying it's for environmental reasons would probably upset a segment of right-wing people who think doing anything for the environment is "woke". This way, it's seen as a good thing for everyone (except the disposable vape buyers, I guess, but it is good for them, too, even if they don't agree now).