No, this is the first time it has been available to the public. It was acquired by Riot Games several years into development, they decided to scrap most of the original work and start over in a new game engine, work on the new engine severely delayed reimplementation of previously completed features, which kept pushing the release timeline back, and eventually Riot canned the project.

Last year the original founder purchased the rights to the game from Riot, they went back to the original engine, and they got a working early access build out in like six months.

And you’re a prescriptivist!

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

He cannot “accept … [an] Office … from any … foreign State.” I suppose he might argue that “accepting” and “seizing by force” are not the same thing.

I don’t understand how this scene, which is only sexual by implication, is not allowed, but Fear and Hunger, in which you can drag a little girl through a dungeon full of monsters that sexually assault you, through orgy scenes, etc., is fine. Like I’m not saying that F&H should be removed, but I am saying that based on what is currently on Steam, it does not seem like this would be over the line.

We are currently clear on opsec

I wish I could recommend the character creator for Phantasy Star Online 2, because in theory it’s great, with the ability to mix and match clothing layers, recolor clothing, fine tune your body proportions, select from various faces, etc. Most importantly, you can attach accessories to your character however you like and adjust their scaling and rotation in ways that let you repurpose them. For example, for a while I was using a head ornment, scaled down, rotated, and clipped into my face, as a pair of fangs, and it looked pretty convincing!

I can’t actually recommend it though because the process of actually collecting outfits and accessories is FOMO gacha hell. (Gacha items purchased with “AC,” the real-money only currency, can also be bought secondhand from other players, but you’ll pay an arm and a leg for them, and you can’t trade items bought with “SG” which is the premium currency that can also be earned in game.)

Mark Epstein told Newsweek the individual was not Clinton. He did not provide any additional details about the identity of “Bubba” or the meaning of the emails.

From the article.

I guess it’s not exactly the same, because it sort of is related, but I always get tripped up on “ancillary” because it is a totally inoffensive English word… except that the Latin word ancilla means “slave girl.”

I’m not a climate scientist, but this is my understanding: the Earth doesn’t heat evenly, because most of the sunlight falls in the tropics. The ocean currents are an important way that heat gets redistributed. If the current collapses, the temperature difference between the equator and the high latitudes will increase, because heat will travel more slowly. Trying to fix this by adding more greenhouse gases would result in the equatorial regions becoming uninhabitable before it thawed out Europe—kind of like how if you microwave a Hot Pocket and it’s heating unevenly, you can’t fix it by microwaving it more, that just makes the already-hot parts scorching.

This doesn’t jive with my life experience at all. If my family could have “programmed” me, I would have turned out very differently. Also all my siblings are wildly different people.

The development of living beings is a messy process and there are significant uncontrollable elements.

I use Youtube a lot. If I see a video from a creator I don’t know, or from one I don’t care that much about, and the thumbnail sets off my clickbait alarms, I just open the three dots menu and click “Don’t recommend channel.” I don’t think it’s a big problem, but it does annoy me and this significantly reduces the amount that I have to put up with it.

Sometimes if a thumbnail is borderline I’ll open it in a new tab so I can entertain it for a few minutes and see if they pay off. If they don’t, they get "don’t recommend"ed.

I’ve also done this for creators who put the “like and subscribe” ask before I’ve actually seen the content they’re asking me to subscribe to, if I’m in a particularly petty mood.

It’s on the list of commercial failures in video games.

I played one zoi through most of the idol career track. The career gameplay is very similar to Sims 4, in that you go to your work lot and try to perform all your work tasks before the end of the day. Similarly to Sims 4, I didn’t feel like there was a meaningful sense of progression in my skills and career. I went from having 0 in the career relevant skills like singing and dancing to having them maxed out in, IIRC, a little over an in-game week, in which time I didn’t perform in any idol shows because that didn’t seem to be implemented: work was always training, never performing. (It’s possible this has been updated since I played, which was in April, or that performing is hidden behind the very last level of the career track, which I don’t think I reached.) Like Sims, you never struggle to advance a skill or have any kind of challenge to overcome, you can improve at anything indefinitely by practicing alone. I started a romance with a coworker, but it wasn’t very interesting: it didn’t cause drama at work, it didn’t affect how my other coworkers thought of me (which was mostly “not at all”), and it wasn’t clear to me if the other zoi had any skills, interests or hobbies outside of work. Similarly to the Sims, I think we were at the point where I could have proposed after only one date, which mostly consisted of hanging out at the park. It seems like, similarly to Sims, the actual game mechanics are fairly basic and you need to invent a good deal of your own fun.

I liked being able to customize items by importing textures. The AI texture generator isn’t any good, but the option to noodle around in GIMP and then put my texture on something in the game is neat. I also imported images to make custom posters for my zoi’s room. There is also an option to turn a photo of an object into a 3D model of a decoration to place in your house or wear as an accessory, which I had mixed results with but was at least novel.

Do the githzerai reject violence? They have a whole order of psionic warriors called the zerth. I got the impression they think violence should be used responsibly when it is necessary to defend the freedom of sapient beings against tyranny—they certainly don’t regret the rebellion against the illithids, for example.

This article is about the big gap in similar games that occurred after the release of Icewind Dale 2 in 2002. And as the article says, it has nothing to do with their popularity among gamers, it was due to retailers throwing their weight around. There weren’t as many good options for direct-to-consumer sales at that time, so you had to sell the game to retailers before you could sell it to customers.

I have so many good memories of playing Rock Band in college. I just picked this up for PS4 for like $10, but it looks like the instruments are going to cost an arm and a leg…

See my other comment reply: directly challenging the government’s monopoly on the use of force seems like one of the most political possible acts.

I don’t think we know for sure, but their slogans suggest that they’re leftists, so it seems worth at least a mention.

You don’t think stopping the current campaign of mass deportations, which seems like a likely motive, is a political goal?

Edit to be clear: politics is the struggle for control of the polity. Directly challenging the government’s monopoly on the use of force is, perhaps, the most political act of violence possible.

This one doesn’t count as political?

Alvarado ICE facility attack: 11 charged in ‘ambush’ on ICE officers, officials say