Cylinsier

The thing is I don’t think Sony cares about peeling PC gamers away anymore for exactly the reasons you said; they just release most of their games to PC eventually anyway. But PC gamers and console gamers are not the same market. There are certainly people who play both, but I rarely play PC games anymore because my whole gaming setup is centered around the couch with family now. I simply don’t have time to also park myself in front of a PC and game that way as well, and as far as purpose built PCs that connect to a TV go, well, none of those bring the same features for the same cost the way the PS5 does. Pretty much the only PC gaming I do now is on Steam Deck and those games are chosen for playability on the go. So you’re not really comparing Sony exclusivity to PC at that point, you’re comparing it to Xbox. And between the two Sony wins on exclusives so far this generation.

All just theatrics. Red meat for the base who will fall for it because they’re gullible and let their thirst for hate cloud their judgment. This is DOA in the Senate and McCarthy knows it but still has his caucus go through with this waste of time. Tells you exactly everything you need to know about his character and fitness for leadership. Both are, to put it mildly, lacking.

The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.

I agree, but who’s going to pay for it? Those aren’t just freely available additions to any application that you only need to toggle on.

Obviously it varies from person to person but Sony exclusives would be the main reason most people want to be in the PlayStation ecosystem. As others have said even when those exclusives do eventually reach PC, the ports are usually lackluster at best and unplayable at worst. So why upgrade to the 5 if you have a 4? For me the difference in load times alone justified early adoption. Probably not everyone can justify the cost and hassle just for faster loading of their PS4 library, but as someone whose time is at a premium and who still tries to play a lot of games often, I have probably saved countless precious hours of time and therefore played far more of my gaming library in the same time frame just be being on the 5.

High speed glass cannons were always a fun build archetype to play around with in these games. I had tended to go the other way as a kid though, building hulking behemoths loaded to the teeth with bullets and bombs. Just don’t ask me to walk anywhere in any kind of efficient manner! Next mission waypoint a hundred steps that way? Meet you in an hour.

The US is far too large and powerful a nation to hide from. The consequences of four more years of Trump climate policy alone will find you anywhere on this planet. You cannot run away from the fallout of a second Trump term just by moving to a different continent. Only choice is to stay and help the fight against it.

People are still going to bitch about this administration not doing enough for student debt relief, and that’s understandable considering how long it’s been a problem and how little effort has gone into fixing it up until now. But just remember which party is trying to do something about it now and which party built the current SCOTUS that has blocked those efforts so far. Democrats’ track record is far from admirable, but the GOP is flat out telling you to your face that you will get nothing you want or need and you will like it when they are in power.

Besides that, consider that Republican policy in general is about obstruction, regressive judicial interpretation, and brazen inaction on social issues. As such it is possible for Republicans to achieve a lot of their agenda by just holding one branch of Congress or having just the Presidency and courts without Congress. Because they achieve most of what they want via state legislatures suing to get their activist judges to rewrite the law through legal precedent. Contrastingly Democratic policy is often about taking action to address things which requires both Houses of Congress and the Presidency to have a chance at success, particularly with the current courts making litigation as remedy a non-starter for them.

Knowing that, look at the makeup of our federal government over the last 30 or so years. You will see that Democrats had about 3 months of true supermajority under Obama (72 working days to be exact) and the rest of that term with a strong majority, and then two years of a split Senate for Biden’s first term with DINO Manchin and turncoat Sinema being part of that Democratic split. So we, the voters, have given Democrats two years out of the last 30 to actually have a chance to install an agenda. Just two. And those two years ended over 12 years ago.

If you want student loan forgiveness along with other things like abortion protections, voting rights protections, climate change action, and so on, you’re not going to get it overnight with Democrats. It’s going to be an uphill battle, it’s going to take participation in primaries to get DINOsaurs replaced with younger progressives who actually have a stake in these things, and it’s probably going to take a few consecutive cycles of sustained federal control. You will not get easy and satisfying victories with just one or two votes. But I can absolutely 100% guarantee you that for every second you let Republicans control even a single branch of government, even just one chamber of Congress, you will get NOTHING on any of those topics and in fact, those situations will be made actively and maliciously worse out of pure spite. And the following Democratic administration will be that much more behind the curve and it will require that much more time and effort just to get back to zero and to even begin addressing those issues in a meaningful way.

My condolences.

Given that the studios have now openly admitted their plan is just to wait the writers out, actors need to step up and throw their weight in on the writers’ side. Because its not that easy to replace quality writing with AI just yet. But we’ve had the tech to replace quality acting with CG and text-to-voice for years already. So actors aren’t even doing this for the writers, they’re doing it for themselves because they’re next. They cost way more to employ but are easier to replace with existing tech.

Edit: I realize this strike isn’t about the writers but rather the actors own collective bargaining, but my point that they’re all in on this together and being threatened by the same emerging technologies stands.

Barbados is a beautiful country which is poorer than it should be. I had the opportunity to visit it as part of a cruise many years ago and that experience along with similar ones is why I doubt I will ever go on a cruise again. Not to say I didn’t have a good time, it was a fantastic opportunity to visit a number of small island nations in a single week and since it was a gift, it only cost me a single roundtrip plane ticket. But something was abundantly clear in Barbados, St Lucia, and St Kitts. And that was that if you were not the cruise industry or the handful of local resorts who contracted with them for day excursions, you benefitted absolutely fucking nothing from their presence. The economies of these small nations had absolutely no right to be as poor as they were with that kind of money coming into them. I went on several of my own excursions and got to see the local areas outside of the preplanned trips the cruise had in mind and saw very poor but very happy people living lives in the shadows of these high-pollution ships bringing rich people into places they themselves were never able to afford to go in their own countries.

This is all a very roundabout way of saying I hope this works out for them. Barbados is a free, self-governing nation that has a lot to offer to tourists and a lot of locals who should benefit from that but, in today’s economic realities, you can’t start making money until you have enough money to buy your foot into the door first. The specter of white colonialism still hangs over these small nations.