This is greed, pure and simple. At $60, the industry was more profitable than Hollywood, and they raised the base price of games to $70 just a few years ago before immediately talking about raising prices again.

Do you have a general practitioner that you see for an annual physical or anything? Ask them about it. I had a weird skin condition thing happening in one specific spot on my body that I asked my doctor about, and he pulled up a big medical directory on the computer and cross-referenced symptoms and stuff through it. Eventually, we were both like, “It’s not cancer or anything, but damned if I know exactly what it is.” And he asked me if I wanted a referral to a specialist to get it checked out. These kinds of things are exactly what they’re here for. They can probably recommend things like what to eat and things to avoid for prostate health, and even order tests to get it checked out if you and they feel it’s necessary.

As others have said, talk to your doctor, but I’m pretty sure that doctors use ultrasonic vibrations to break up that sort of stuff, so I think you’re gonna need something stronger than a vibrator if you’re worried about it.

Don’t forget to draw the rest of the owl, too!

They also said at one point that these guys were “corrupting the youth with their long hair.”

NVIDIA ass DLSS, unfortunately.

Rereading my comment, I think I left out the double negative, so you were right to be confused.

If I had to try and diagnose the issue, I think it comes down to the fact that I have an early 2060, which means not just an old card, but an old card with less VRAM. Consistently, I find that DLSS drops textures down to the lowest possible setting or constantly cycles between texture resolutions every few seconds when I can get a consistent 60 fps on medium settings in most games at native 1080p. It may net me a few extra fps, but the hit to quality simply isn’t worth it if I can’t make out what’s what with the texture popping.

Another possible culprit would be shader caching since games are more and more demanding that you use an SSD to stream directly from the hardrive, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to get that deep into it.

Add DLSS to the list. I’ve never had an experience where DLSS didn’t make my game run better. It always makes the textures worse and the game run worse than just setting it to native resolution and a specific texture quality.

Okay, Karen.

Tell me you’ve never worked a shitty “essential employee” job without telling me you’ve never had the kind of megalomaniac managers that these jobs attract.

No, but he does have a history of racism and supporting/promoting white supremacists.

Enough of it could DDoS the system, though.

He has a long history of incidents like, “Hey, why are you following those white supremacist accounts on Twitter and promoting their books?” or “Oops, I was wearing an iron cross just as a joke!” and “I paid a dude to yell, ‘I hate Jews!’ as a prank, bro.”

He did more than make fucked up jokes, though. He was pushing white supremacist accounts that he followed on social media at one point to his young and impressionable audience. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and he hasn’t done anything to rectify that situation one way or the other. Given the evidence we have, he could’ve simply started wearing his iron cross behind closed doors instead of on stream.

Having lived long enough to see the edgy teenagers making 4channer jokes grow up to and have those become their actual beliefs, I believe in Philosophical Inertia. You say something often enough, and it becomes what you truly believe. And until you prove otherwise, I am going to assume that your beliefs continue on that same course.

I actually based my comment on some stories that I’ve heard from vets dealing with the office of veterans’ affairs (I think that’s what it’s called), specifically an artist I followed on Tumblr years ago who had to have surgery on his hand and physical therapy related to an injury he got in the military and got turned down because the injury had become a chronic issue after he got out and therefore “wasn’t service related” despite it being directly caused by an injury he received while in the military. Kept him from being able to draw and really solidified my opinion on how the government takes care of its people. That, and the percentage of homeless people who are veterans/the percentage of veterans who end up homeless.

Is. Continues to be. And it isn’t just Japan. Worldwide, the games industry has always had horrible work-life balance (some cases being better or worse than others, of course).

I went to college to go into the industry 10 years ago and never did because of the things our professors (who were all industry veterans, some still actively working in the industry and some having been in the industry since the 80s) told us. “Nobody makes video games because they want to get rich.” Upon graduation with a 4 year degree (and a hundred thousand in debt probably), I was expected to make the same annually as I did if I worked year-round at my summer job. Everybody today talks about crunch time as a problem in industries. Video games are crunch time. We were told to expect to work on a project for 4 years, with the last few months being spent in the office 7 days a week, no holidays, and orobably eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the office. Maybe even sleeping there as well. Clocking out after 8 hours would be seen as being a traitor to the company. And after a project ships? Dust off your resume, because unless you’re senior level, you’re gonna be fired as the company downsizes until the next project.

The mass layoffs the past 3 years have been worse each year than in the 2008 recession. There are people working at the Blizzard main office who live out of their cars because they can’t afford an apartment within commuting distance of the office. The list goes on and on. And they can get away with it because they’re exploiting the passion of people who just want to make something that people will enjoy and there’s an endless stream of starry-eyed college kids ready to throw themselves into the grinder.

Except she’s a woman, so very likely to be sexually assaulted in the military (and that’s if she even gets in, DEI and all that), and vets get shafted as well. Her losing a leg to an IED will be ruled “not service related,” and she will be denied any funds related to care or issues resulting from said injury after she leaves the military.

Yep, the vaccine is recent enough that if you were born in the 90s or before, the vaccine wasn’t available when you were of the right age to get it. I didn’t even know we had a vaccine until probably 5 years ago.

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice […]

-MLK Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail

What I meant by generational line wasn’t genetics, but location and culture. Many European countries wouldn’t make the top 10 list for the biggest states in the US. If you look at a map of the US, Maine is about the same size as Portugal. The distance from Rome to Brussels, for example, is about 100 miles less than Boston to Altanta. So if you live in southern France, and your parents moved there from northern France, that’s like moving from one end of a state to the other. An American visiting family across the country would be like if you went to visit relatives in Latvia or something (in terms of distance). Americans have such a different sense of scale when it comes to distance. And then you add in the amount of immigration that the US has (or at least had historically), and you get very diverse groups that, while they are American, may be first-generation Americans whose grandparents still live across the world in different countries. I myself am 100% American, but like 50% French and 45% Portugese due to my grandparents being immigrants on both sides.

The culture here is weird as well, because it’s both homogeneous and not at the same time, and I think that massive scale of distance plays a part in that. Because you could listen to somebody from Boston, NYC, London, and somebody with a southern drawl, and you’d swear that they’re all from different countries despite everybody speaking English because of the difference in dialect/accent. Oddly enough, I took French in school from a Belgian immigrant, so if I still spoke it, I’d have a bit of a Belgian accent (enough that people picked up on it in Montreal and Paris when I was a kid, at least), and I’d say the difference between Boston English and New York English is about the same as Belgian French to Parisian French, while a Boston accent to a Southern drawl is more like Quebecois French to European French. The distance from Brussels to Paris is less than from Boston to NYC. And the same goes for culture. We all eat Mac and Cheese, but Cajun food is specific to a “small” area of the southern US because the spices and ingredients simply don’t grow in other parts of the US. And then you add in stuff like immigrant owned restaurants, and it gets even more varied. And as you go across the country, you can see stuff like massive architectural differences in the way houses are built. New England houses largely look like houses from the UK (with the occasional Slavic style house popping up here and there in my experience), while the south and the west have very different styles. And the reason that New England wouldn’t look out of place in Europe is because the culture there is very much influenced by those European roots. When people immigrated here, they brought their culture with them, and many settled into little enclaves of fellow immigrants from their country. Everybody speaks English, but you know when you’re in an Italian neighborhood in NYC or an Irish neighborhood in Boston. Many places are starting to put both Spanish and English on things like road signs (especially in the south near Mexico), but I’ve seen cities where roads are marked in both English and Chinese due to the large amount of Chinese immigrants to those cities.

The US is such a weird situation as a country that I don’t think there’s anything you can compare it to. It’s like that 10 year period in Japanese history where they went from feudal fiefdoms to a countrywide rail network, electricity, and an army armed with gatling guns supplied by the US. There’s no real frame of reference to draw parallels to.

I’m not sure exactly what you mean by why this stuff matters, but the stuff that you’d be generating with AI for a game wouldn’t be a loading screen or something - it would be assets. Character models, weapons, buildings, textures, voices, that’s the kind of stuff that companies want to generate with AI. Right now, you can buy stock assets to use, and that’s where all the garbage asset flips come from, but companies want to replace employees with software that makes their own assets for them for cheap. Replace the people who make games with software that spits out gacha products. But if they aren’t protected under copyright, then any asset flipper can use your main character - taking the model right from your AAA game - and throw it into their 99-cent asset flip scam, and you can’t do anything about it.

I believe Steam has the policy on AI that they do both because of public opinion about the use of AI (and the way it’s being used to steal from creators) and because AI generated games tend to fall into the same category of outright scams that NFT games do, and games containing NFTs are straight up banned from Steam.

Edit: Going back and reading through the article, I see that they were straight up putting in AI generated images into the game as skins and loading screens and stuff. These also fall under the asset flip thing, especially if they’re so obvious that they have six fingers like the zombie Santa. The same goes for their social media promotional material. You can just straight up use CoD’s ads for your own game and they can’t do anything about it.

People are upset by the use of it because of the poor quality, and, as I said, these companies want to replace the people who make games with software that churns out slop to consume. They think of gamers as pigs at a trough and developers as leeches stealing their hard earned profits.