arquebus_x

It also has a 1v1 mode (player vs computer or PvP) that is just fantastic. I actually spent most of my time playing the 1v1 mode way back in the day.

“I lost a brother once. I was lucky. I got him back.”

“I thought you said men like us don’t have families.”

“I was wrong.”

Ever try a hot cola?

I once drank a Coke that had been sitting in my car console for a day during the summer.

It was a revelation.

If Kbin defederates from Threads, I’ll just leave Kbin, and stay with Threads. Defederating over vibes is not how the fediverse is supposed to operate. And for everyone advocating for this dumb idea, I’m just using this thread as a honey pot.

Star Wars, drive-in, 1977. I was 4.

Simplest answer (other than obviously Ep 4 was written decades before Eps 1-3):

He lied.

He doesn’t know the circumstances of Luke’s appearance at his doorstep (as it were), and his job - his ONLY job - is to keep Luke safe. Until he sees the message, he doesn’t know WTF is going on. Why would he admit owning a droid? He’s supposed to be just some old geezer in the desert.

At what point does the world look at this and say that enough is enough.

Do we ever, really? Over the sum of all war-related humanitarian disasters, the West responds to very few of them, and only when it’s economically or geopolitically useful. The Palestinian crisis is no different; it’s not exceptional in any way. There’s an ongoing nightmare in DRC that’s orders of magnitude worse than what’s happening in Gaza and… no one cares. Europe and the U.S. are on the verge of disengaging from Ukraine.

The thing is, it doesn’t even matter if we “condemn this behavior.” We could do that all we want and it wouldn’t make much difference. And no one wants to be interventionist - there’s too much awful history around it, and it smacks of colonialism, and it means taking resources away from “domestic issues” that always seem to matter more.

We’ve got to move away from the notion that the situation in Gaza is somehow unique. It allows us to conveniently ignore the root causes of the problem, which is much more universal, and stems from the ongoing sense of cultural superiority on the part of Europe and the U.S.

You probably already know this, but there’s a free open source version of all three original games, plus others:

https://alephone.lhowon.org/

I’m much more interested in the original games, which are now available for free as Aleph One.

https://alephone.lhowon.org/

It’s fish and children, isn’t it?

Welcome back to the 1980s!

Bots aren’t a “problem” for Twitter unless the advertisers think there are more of them than there are real users. But if you can convince advertisers that you’re reducing bots, while also not actually reducing bots, you’ve got a winning formula. Bots are reliable posters, they contribute a lot more than a regular user, and they make high-engagement tweets/posts/tweex that end up getting a lot of views, aka advertising opportunities.

In other words the idea might have the opposite effect - keeping potential new human users out, but allowing the bots in

The galaxy brain shit here is that I suspect the bot problem actually doesn’t concern Musk in the way he claims. If he can make it seem like there are fewer bots (because of these policies) while at the same time not actually getting rid of them, the engagement level stays up and the advertisers are happy in their ignorance. Bots are better users: they’re not fickle, they don’t go to sleep, they can be reliably expected to be posting more regularly than normal users. The trick for Musk is convincing everyone they’re gone.

@JohnnyCanuck is right in a bunch of important ways, but there is one additional factor to consider. The reason the Hollywood guild system works the way it does is because no one is contracted to any given studio. It used to be that actors and writers were required to have locked-in contracts - they couldn’t work for anyone else - but that hasn’t been true for a long time. (There are exceptions: writers and actors can choose to have multi-picture/script deals, in exchange for an up front wad of cash, but it’s not the norm outside of the really heavy hitters.)

A standard union protects a worker’s existing job, and helps that worker negotiate terms for an existing job.

A Hollywood guild protects a worker’s future jobs - because the one they have now will absolutely not be the one they have in 2 years, a year, maybe even in 6 months. This is the nature of the Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA): it dictates minimum terms of employment. It’s not designed to give writers/actors the best deal, it’s designed to give them the least shitty deal the studios will agree to.

Why does this matter?

It matters because what most people think of as “Hollywood” is all the extremely pretty, extremely powerful, extremely prolific actors and writers who make lots of money and show up on magazine covers and in media podcasts. (No writer is showing up on a magazine, I don’t care how pretty he is.) But the MBA is there for the day players, the low rung people, the staff writers, the gal who had one spec script produced in her career so far.

What the WGA managed to achieve recently with its negotiations is an absolutely phenomenal success. But it still only really impacts the MBA - the minimum basic agreement!

So… uh… why does this fucking matter?

The game industry doesn’t really have superstars. It doesn’t have the equivalent of Tom Cruise and John August. At least not at scale. And the ones who are that shiny are usually studio heads or creative directors, not “employees.” So they wouldn’t be covered by a union anyway (which cannot apply to managers - i.e. anyone who has authority over other workers).

Suggesting that the game industry adopt the Hollywood guild model is to suggest forcing a pear into a box shaped like an apple. The MBA protects low level employees in their future employment, and isn’t really all that great - at least not the way most non-insiders think. It still results in a ridiculous number of workers making poverty wages.

Is that what you want a game voice actor to have? A minimum basic agreement for their future employment? A programmer? A graphic designer?

No. You want them to be in a union.[1] Which will protect their current jobs and create conditions for advancement, sufficient income at the lowest tiers and long term stability. None of which the Hollywood guilds really do.

[1] The distinction between a union and a guild isn’t a “real” one in modern U.S. law, strictly speaking. But conceptually, as above, a union is for people in regular employment with a single employer, and a guild is for (effectively) contract workers. The terminology of “guild” came from the older, pre-industrial idea of “the X workers guild” (masonry, carpentry, bricklaying, etc.), which were really just social organizations that sorta kinda acquired enough power to flex their muscles against the people who were contracting them by having minimum demands in solidarity within the guild (does that sound familiar…?). Guilds eventually “became” unions in the modern sense, once people were working with single employers over a long term. Put simply (and a bit stupidly), unions make contracts between workers and companies; guilds make contracts between workers and their industry. Part of the reason gig workers (Uber/Lyft/etc.) in California have been more active about getting better terms is because that state is super familiar with how guilds work, which is exactly what gig workers need, since their employment is with the industry as a whole (they can work for more than one company), not so much with a specific company. (It’s also why they’re having a much harder time - because California employers are super familiar with all the shenanigans Hollywood studios use to suppress the guilds that feed into them.)

Textual critics are fairly confident that a fair amount of the texts of the New Testament were reliably copied until we get to the first extant manuscripts, and for the stuff that is very obviously messed up, they have a decent set of analytical tools that help them retroject the likeliest original wording. Not perfect, but decent.

Things were written mostly by eyewitness or those who interviewed eye witnesses.

The scholarly consensus is that this is not the case. The earliest written Gospel (Mark) couldn’t have been written any earlier than the occupation of the Temple during the First Jewish Revolt in 66-67, and all indications are that he was writing down traditions that came from his community and others, with no immediate connection to any “eyewitnesses.”

(Source: I have a PhD in this stuff.)

I make 30 minute videos with ads at 10 and 20 (with natural breaks) and refuse to do more than that because ewwww. (The automatic ad populator puts like 10 ads in the same amount of time. It’s insane.)

My channel is tiny and I still manage about $25/month (making money isn’t my goal) so I feel like my limits are good. I’d rather someone watch my stuff than bounce because there are too many adds.

I think people around here have a vastly overestimated opinion of how important the fediverse is to other social media sites.

Within the first 7 hours of Threads, they had 10 million users.

Meta absolutely DGAF about us. They don’t have to. Using ActivityPub is at worst an anti-monopoly play. But by the time they turn on federation, all of the people who were going to leave the fediverse for Threads will likely already have done so.

Their third and optional goal is to starve twitter-like fediverse apps from users. […] Thus robbing mastodon, calckey, pleroma, etc from potential users and attention.

They can (will) do that without federating. Federating (or not) is not going to make any appreciable difference.

They can do that without federating. In the first 7 hours of Threads being open, they got 10 million users. There’s nothing additional they can do to “extinguish” the fediverse simply by being inside it.

Any fediverse users who prefer Threads are going to go there anyway - remember, you have to create a new account on each server already! And anyone who detests Meta is going to stay in the fediverse regardless. They’re here now, when the fediverse is minuscule. Nothing Meta can do is going to make the fediverse smaller.