I love this game so much. Lots and lots of reactivity, and so many weird branching paths.

The combat/stealth is pretty broken. I went pistol/stealth and it quickly gives you the ability to overwhelm most combat encounters. Really fun, though. 

They should, and facebook/X actually do face a number of regulations. They should probably face more, though there’s a big chunk of Congress that doesn’t want to because their party benefits from the rampant misinformation and privacy problems on those sites.

But TikTok is also a higher priority, because of who the…

Nope. Not fear mongering.

The US is concerned when potentially hostile states have significant access into our populace or systems. That’s not “fear mongering”, it’s a pretty normal security stance.

It’s like saying that since you’re fine with your wife having access to your underwear drawer, it’d be fear-mongering to…

True, in many ways. But also very different in two specific instances:
1. Owned or with significant interference by a semi-hostile foreign national government. The Chinese government being involved makes this a security concern
2. Ubiquity - this is installed on a ludicrous number of phones

Both of those combined make it…

Nah. Just over the last 20 years, I’ve watched one political party in the US solve problems incrementally, and the other party fuck things up.

It’s not hard to notice, if you don’t want to be a nihilist douchebag. 

There are now a couple of replies saying “but facebook is also bad!” and “the US government refuses to solve this other problem, so why are they trying to solve a security problem?”

It’s not that funny. There’s a pretty marked difference between some other US company having access to your phone (which the US Gov could get access to it if they really needed it) and a foreign government having that direct access.

If a bunch of politicians and security folks think TikTok is a bad idea, probably worth…

Sure. If you want to actually solve problems, there’s a group of people to vote for and a group not to vote for.

That said, if all those politicians think that TikTok is a problem it’s a good idea to consider why they think that. 

I’m still personally sad about ICQ, actually.

But you’re not wrong. If TikTok went away, it’d be fine over the medium term.

There’s a lot of good stuff on TikTok. There’s also a lot of really awful stuff on there.

My understanding from a few security professionals is that it’s basically an invasive spyware app on your phone, and one that’s installed on an enormous amount of devices all over the States. There’s also some concern that the…

Oh yeah. That would have been much better - actually meaningful.

There’s even gradations that that would be really interesting? What if Shepard convinced the Reapers to only harvest half of humanity, because maybe that’s enough? Or making it a voluntary thing? Or convincing the Reapers to do it but set up ‘game…

Made an ending that actually made sense and was foreshadowed slightly? Nah, couldn’t do that. 

Nope, it sucked. Even the extended ending was still bad.

It did ambiguity badly. It also shoehorned in a revelation and debate “AI and biologicals can’t co-exist” that you could literally disprove if you’d done the previous missions correctly. And it tossed aside any real consideration of the thoughts or decisions…

I hate Chadley so much. With one exception.

In the Queen’s Blood tournament, he gets some real backhanded snotty insults/taunts that I loved. Likewise, beating that fucker into the ground via a card game was vastly gratifying.

I got 40 points. He got zero. It was the most validated I’d felt the entire game

I started HZD and then switching to BotW almost immediately afterwards when HZD didn’t grab me immediately. I think I liked BotW more overall, though HZD had a much better story.

HFW grabbed me less. Horizon just seemed more like moustache twirling villains rather than (very) flawed humans like Faro, and the reveal was…

The post credits scene was amazing. The final followup to what we learned about her and a perfect ending for the game. 

I liked the combat a lot more than I liked other OW games (in particular - that you could brute-force your way through some fights or you could do them right and the game just let you do whichever you had the patience for).

But I agree that the story was amazing. I loved finding out slowly what had happened to the…

Horizon is usually considered a great game. I think it’s suffered a bit in the past few years as it’s aged. The game is astoundingly pretty, and the mixture of stealth/combat is pretty excellent for an open-world game.

But I’ll admit that I loved the story (and found it incredibly depressing in a good way), but it’s…

That’s a ludicrously good price. The Series S is a pretty great little system - gets you into the next-gen ecosystem and runs things pretty well, if not as awesomely as the X/PS5.

I actually have two I use as media and gaming boxes for my kids, but this is the sort of price that would prompt me to buy one as a gift…

What’s interesting is that some of the descriptions are just flat-out copies of their pokemon equivalent. The Eevee analogue (for example) has an encyclopedia entry that talks about it being a ‘neutral type pokemon’ and lists some of its behaviors. All of which feel like they come straight from pokemon.