General rule of thumb: no one with the power to enforce dates has any idea what the devs are dealing with.

“Hawklike”: video game genre, or genre of tweets in which someone tells a certain famous skateboarder that he really looks like Tony Hawk?

Regrets I have about nuking my Blizzard account and swearing off buying anything else from them:

Honestly, that’s pretty good. In comparison, I worked on projects for, well, let’s just say large technology companies that were...much less exacting. At least in this case there’s pretty clearly a defined pipeline and processes to clear, which helps. (And I’m sure it’s not super fun when you’re getting nitpicked, but…

I was about to really go off in ways that my employers past and present would not be happy about, but as far as the stringency of approval processes go, I’ll just say this:

I am a writer, with the upshot that I get bored and irritated with games that give me a gaping black hole of a protagonist and expect that to be fulfilling somehow because I can pRoJecT mYseLf oNTo hIM! Oh, honey, no. If I have to do all the work of making the story worthwhile, I will write my own. 

The first half of the Starfield presentation just plain depressed me. You’re trying to sell me on space adventure and...everything is gray. All gray. Plod along. Scan things. Mine things. And the only excitement is SHOOT KILL KILL. I honestly just felt sad. The latter half perked things up a bit, but I’m afraid I know…

Speaking here as a documentation writer whose job tends to involve struggling to understand and explain things that don’t actually make sense, and hitting a wall every time I raise these issues to the devs or, more to the point, the PMs: you have my sympathy.

There’s a story that some Bethesda developers believe: That it is special among big-budget studios. That its scrappiness can overcome any major creative challenge.

All that said, I’ve now got the theme song stuck in my head.

Your last sentence is largely accurate except for the typo, which is honestly too funny to fix.

Seconding this. I got my PS5 from Sony last October that way, and it was pretty much painless. They also ship VERY fast.

Key words in that announcement, though: “full-time staff.” I’d love to know how many contractors work for them who are shit out of luck. (I had the same grim thought the other day when Starbucks made a similar announcement. I contracted for Starbucks for a while. They bragged like you wouldn’t believe about the…

For some perspective on the voting front: Bungie’s based in Bellevue, WA. Just for starters, Washington has a Democratic governor, seven out of ten house reps are Democrats, and both of our senators are A: Democrats, B: women, and C: NOT HAPPY RIGHT NOW. https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/sen-murray-furious-spitting-mad-…

Ahh, nostalgia.

I should play it. Would love to play it. Don’t have a Windows machine. Am sad.

Moira and Mercy make out? Hot.

Tangent here, but since you mentioned office perks: that can happen with other kinds of buy-outs, too. I used to work for a company that got bought by Disney. Most of the free drink selection vanished overnight and got whittled down to Coca-Cola products. Guess who had an exclusive deal with the Mouse...

Yes, but the follow-on problem is that it can still be very difficult to get proper diagnoses and treatment for severe period pain and the root causes thereof, specifically because so many people, medical professionals included, write it off as “everyone goes through this, deal with it.” Awareness is improving, but…

Today in TMI: Oh, I absolutely have diarrhea once a month.