Thalestr

Forgive me for the pessimism, but I sincerely doubt that they honour any opt-outs. Meta has shown time and time again that they’d rather just pay fines as business expenses instead of abiding by law(s).

This. Numerous industries in the US make use of forced prison labour.

Goddamn, I wish we could act like our own independent country for once instead of just puppeting whatever the US does.

Appeasing shareholders and investors.

Microsoft has so many spinning plates up in the air right now and they have no idea how to handle them all. Eventually they’re all going to come crashing down and smash on the floor and it’s not going to be pretty.

Most of the beloved Arkane team had left long before the closure.

I do not have hope that this developer will make another good game let alone one that respects the TES IP or in any way lives up to expectations.

Not in Utica, no; it’s an Albany expression.

• The option to skip puzzles and not get punished for it.
• Independent difficulty options for things like exploration, combat, crafting, etc. Whatever the game has.

I stopped playing ESO years ago after around 10,000 hours of playtime. It’s nice (or perhaps unsurprising) to hear that they still haven’t addressed how badly they messed up the story structure and pacing. Rather than have the expansions be an accessory to the main story and tutorial - they acted as replacements. A game design choice I’m 99.9% sure was made by management and not by any actual dev team. It was a confusing, convoluted mess with only a few expansions but I can’t imagine how bad it is now with even more.

I cannot trust any publication that “reviews” a product like this without taking at least a little time to go over the legitimately harmful business practices against the customer.

People with lots of money want even more money. Less employees means less money that has to be paid out which means more money in the short term. Makes line go up for a while. Makes suits happy.

Technically not free if you have to have a paid sub in order to access them. In that case it’s a paid trial with the opportunity to pay even more. Which sounds even worse for Spotify.

15 hours/month is… pretty awful. An avid reader (or listener, in this case) will chew through that in no time at all. Another thing that concerns me is payouts. Spotify is notorious for having atrocious payouts to creators. I wonder how this carries over to their audiobook offerings.

I think we’re starting to see the beginning of YouTube’s end. The algorithm is actively choking the life out of the platform, they’re forcing viewers to pay fees that seem to keep getting bigger and bigger, and they’re making life miserable for creators while also paying them less and less.

Once another platform comes along that ticks enough boxes to satisfy people then YouTube will be absolutely screwed. The only reason we all use that wretched site is because there is no viable alternative. More and more creators are moving to premium platforms like Nebula that offer better deals for viewers and creators alike. I’m likely to jump ship myself once more people I watch also join up.

You can hit the big round turn-based button in bottom right of your HUD to activate turn mode at any time, even outside combat. This effectively pauses the game. The game even makes a sound effect of a clock slowing down and stopping.

Enshittification marches ever onward

I played through Spider-Man 1 with the puzzles enabled for a few hours before turning that crap off. I’m very glad they gave the option to do so because they are annoying and tedious at best and downright frustrating at worst. They absolutely grenade the pacing and flow of the gameplay. There are numerous puzzle games out there I could play if I wanted puzzles; I don’t want half-assed, janky, pace-destroying puzzles in my action games.

I find it works great for navigation and the map quality is so much better than Google Maps. My only complaints are that it lacks extra features such as business information, reviews, etc. It’s better than it used to be but they still use things like Yelp (ugh) at least in my area.

Thanks for the offer! I don’t use any form of Linux on my desktop at the moment, however, and don’t plan to for the foreseeable future.