7. Los Angeles

I’ve really begun enjoying the whole Challenge Run stuff on YouTube. It’s kinda like speed runs, but it’s not the same challenge each time, and they can get *really* weird.

I mean, I should probably see the first one before I see this one...

It’s almost like the game that’s all about fucking with the player and delivering rather incisive commentary on the gaming industry is trying to make a point about achievements, by guaranteeing that the game will never, ever be 100%’d legitimately...

This game is the source of one of my favorite weird gaming tidbits: The time that the devs had to nerf a gun’s sound for the sake of balance.

I’m fully in camp “Fuck Crunch”, I think that it’s a plight on the gaming industry, and live-service games in particular need to make sure to prioritize developer health as, ideally, they’ll need to keep things going for a long period of time, it’s no longer sprinting to release, you’ve got to settle into something of…

Seriously, this sort of bullshit should be classified as assault, asshole should be feeling grateful that he’s not getting charged with a crime.

Or you’re manual labor and your loan is owed to the company that brought you to Mars.

Even leaving aside all the reasons I’m going “Noooooope” to WoW right now...

Okay.

It’s not impossible, but if that were the case it’d be more likely that they’d just mutter something noncommittal about exploring all options, just exploring the marketplace and seeing what customers thought, don’t worry about it.

I mean, yeah, I’d rather game companies go to efforts to take the temperature of their communities before trying to get involved in predatory, scam-riddled business plans.

Sure they are.

The Magic Castle is actually a really fun time if you’re in LA, a lot of good close-up magicians who have fun acts that they’ve had honed for a long time. Worth going to if you’re in LA for a bit, just hope Pitchford keeps his bullshit off of it as much as possible.

A villain or an antagonist?

Oh, absolutely. You should also know the actual conversion for when you have time to think about, but it’s really only when you get over 100 F that the estimated conversion starts to drift notably from the actual conversion. It’s why it’s mostly only useful for weather, because a drift of a couple degrees (either of…

Yeah, I’m much more of a fan of the double and thirty method, personally. Memorizing two numbers to get a close-enough guess for human habitation is significantly easier than memorizing, effectively, eight numbers that only give you good benchmarks.

Online streaming is indeed DRM, but it’s DRM that also comes with various upsides, assuming you have a strong internet connection (and, in a lot of places, a strong internet connection is easier to come by than a gaming PC).

This is really why PC gaming will reign supreme. You get rid of all these idiot publishers and over-bloated developers and you still have PC gaming so long as people are still buying the hardware. And on PC that’s a small threshold.

The thing is, there really isn’t an industry hard-on for NFTs. Executives are going around saying “Oh, yes, we’re super interested in NFTs for gaming!”, sure, but they say that about every big new tech trend. The only major gaming company that’s done anything in this sphere is Ubisoft, and they got their faces pounded…