“Real world politics”? Did I miss the news that Undead Demon Margaret Thatcher is running in the next UK election?

Open-ended, “sandbox” style MMOs are a lot trickier to get right than “theme park” style ones like Star Wars: The Old Republic. Games like SW:TOR require a lot of content to be developed, but you can at least be pretty sure that if you develop fun quests then players who like questing will have fun.

For a “sandbox” style MMO, you have to design systems that lead to interesting player interactions… and then hope players actually interact. This is complicated by the market share for sandbox games being smaller overall, meaning you can’t guarantee there will actually be a sizable player population. Also sandbox-style players are sharply divided on basically every topic from “how much PvP should there be” to “how much grinding should there be” so you quickly find yourself either targeting increasingly narrow slices of players or trying to appeal to multiple playstyles at once, which is even harder.

I think this is why sandbox games have mostly moved towards smaller worlds and self-hosted servers, like ARK and Rust, where they can thrive with small player counts and individual play groups can tweak the experience to better suit their needs.

This is my second favorite solution!

My favorite solution is fireball.

https://meetunmeat.us/product/luncheon-style-meat/

Water, Non-GMO Soy Protein, Palm Olein, Seasonings (Onion, Black Pepper), Natural Flavors, Potato Starch (Thickener), Modified Vegetable Gum, Wheat (gluten and fiber, Sugar, Yeast Extract, Vinegar, Potassium Salt and Paprika Oil (color)

In Oldschool Runescape it’s pretty common to see characters that are just blatantly bots. If they had plausible usernames and picked a random appearance it wouldn’t even be that obvious, because it’s a whole game about repetitive actions, but a lot of them have the default appearance and gibberish names.

Botting is sort of a different problem because it’s often related to real-money trading, so there’s a more obvious incentive to cheat: running bots generates gold that can be sold for cash.

In addition to that, many people run bots as a sort of side hustle, either to fund their main or just to fund more bots. And I suspect many people use scripts to automate tedious tasks on their main accounts as well, although that would be hard to notice unless you directly interacted with them while they were AFK.

My last character who was getting well known in the local area was also well known for blowing his gold on booze and gambling at every available opportunity, which is a good way to deter the money-seekers!

All, top 6 hours.

Much safer than fidgeting with your actual switchblade, which is extremely tempting, lmao.

I don’t understand the chart in this article about body type vs. underwear style. It doesn’t relate to the question that it’s located directly under, and it makes no attempt to explain why, for example, thin men shouldn’t wear boxers.

I can’t tell if this article is AI generated or just rushed out by someone trying to meet a quota.

Okay the image is messy but the snake coiling around the scales is actually a sick concept.

That’s not what the article is saying though? It doesn’t say the Greeks thought the sea was red, it says they didn’t have (or at least rarely used) a word for what color it is, so they only described it by its other attributes (like how dark it was).

Is that bad? I love almond milk but I feel like it deserves its own word. :P

I usually am pleasant, though. I would feel much less human if I just demanded things!

Wait, is this my “nightmare sound”? When I have nightmares (fairly rarely, but I’ve gone through times when they were more common) there’s a sound that goes with them, and builds in intensity as the fear comes to a crescendo. It’s like a high-pitched whine that starts as a hum (like tinnitus) and slowly grows to ear-splitting intensity, except it’s more like head-splitting because it feels like the origin is in the center of my head. And I say “feels” intentionally because it’s not just a sound, it feels like my consciousness is vibrating apart.

Often the actual content of my nightmares is mostly abstract (like worrying about why the room is dark, or feeling followed but not knowing by what) and the terror is completely disproportionate to the events, but directly proportional to the intensity of the sound.

Uh, for me it’s firmly inside the dream though, I wouldn’t classify it as a hallucination. When I was taking antidepressants I used to have hallucinations wake me up—like waking up because I heard my mom talking, when she was in a different state—but that felt different. That was like hearing someone in the room with you and having it pull you out of whatever dream you were having. The “nightmare sound” is inside the nightmare, it isn’t what wakes me up.

Very cool! I’m looking forward to it, but it also seems like the first expac that I might not want to enable for every playthrough, which is interesting—I wonder if we’ll see more of these themed packs going forward.

Ahhh I see. That second-from-last comic image where he’s dodging lasers was the first one I found, and I was like “Wait it says this is from 2016 and he kinda looks like this Agustini guy already?”

So the controversy actually predates the casting, it just brought it back to the forefront.

But they haven’t found the facial database and Invenda claims they don’t have one, right? Their story is that the machine takes an image, runs some local processing to determine demographic info about the user/customer/target/victim, and then stores that instead of storing the image or biometrics.

There’s a good chance they’re lying but claiming the database has been “revealed” when no one has found it yet seems like sensationalism.

Edit: “Secret demographic database derived from facial recognition” would be true but sounds less snappy, I guess?

I did as a kid, but my tinnitus covers it up now.

I have not read any stats on coin spinning, so I don’t know!

They’re only off by about 1% and the bias depends on which side was up, it’s not that bad. I wouldn’t expect most inexpensive dice to be substantially fairer than that.