Maybe I'm alone or a rare breed on this, but do any adults actually take game awards shows seriously and not see them as just a giant advertising event? Or are they just aimed at kids? I see articles about them every year...and it makes me think there are people out there who actually take these awards shows seriously

Shame about Dave Coulier. I hope everything works out for him and he gets better, as I would for anyone with medical issues. I was never really into Full House, but I remember him from "Out of Control" in Nickelodeon as a kid. This made me go look for the old episodes, and sure enough they are on Youtube. This is a good era to have Nostalgia. I went down the rabbit hole to look up "Tomes and Talisman's" and "Voyage of the Mimi" as well. No more work getting done today I guess.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Nov 13, 2024, 12:49:
You don't necessarily have to lose the discount. I got my Prime account through the education discount years ago and just changed my contact details to an address on my own domain. I still maintain the discount and they haven't ever checked.

I can take a look, but I think I have to change the entire account. This is the message I get, even if I change my e-mail address:

We’ve had a great run, but all good things must come to an end.
Members are only allowed a maximum 4 years of discounted Amazon Prime benefits. You can continue to receive FREE Two-Day shipping, access to thousands of movies TV episodes and 2 million songs, unlimited photo storage and more with a full-priced Amazon Prime membership at $139/year plus taxes or $14.99/month plus taxes.

I just want an Amazon Prime membership with no Prime Video, just the shopping/shipping part. There are better streaming options, and I can rotate around streaming services based on what I want to watch at the time. I'd love it if they would give "a la carte" pricing for the two services, and then a bundle discount if you buy them both. I'm losing my student discount this year (I had it for 4 years using an old college e-mail address) and the new price is a tough one to swallow when shipping is free for most of my orders anyhow, if not a little slower.

Saboth wrote on Sep 15, 2023, 21:50:
...
It's not just sitting around in pajamas, but it can save you an absolute fortune in childcare, pet care, transportation, etc.
...

As someone who had to work in the office during the pandemic to support those working remotely, I can tell you that what I quoted above is the biggest issue with people working from home. Child care is an activity that requires active engagement. If your pet needs a sitter, that is also an active engagement task.

From my experience, responses are way slower from people working at home because their attention is constantly divided. We're on a call and I hear your (the royal you) TV in the background, laundry buzzer going off, oven timer, etc and it tells me you aren't focused on working. Your slow responses decrease my productivity and the productivity of everyone downstream from me. This doesn't even touch on people who don't know how to run their own IT infrastructure at home creating additional delay and work for others.

I do agree that work from home can be beneficial in many cases, and not a burden in others, but as an across the board rule it is bad IMO. Problem with picking and choosing who gets to work from home is it causes resentment in those who get left behind.

So I get it is popular to say companies are just doing it for the hell of it, but in my personal experience it's bad for business and not about using an asset to prove it's value. YMMV of course.

Well crap. I literally just went and got my booster for COVID and the Flu yesterday. Guess I should have waited till the end of the month.

Acleacius wrote on Sep 6, 2023, 12:24:
Good luck to all the Pigskin'ers!

....

Am I just overthinking this, is it generally considered safe to install Backup progs, in C:\Program Files and the backup on another drive?

You are over thinking it. You're making this backup because you need to update Windows, or you need to update Windows to install the backup software? I use Acronis, but any legit software should be fine. I back up my home PC once a week (incremental) and once a month (full) to an external drive. I have the backup software installed in my Program Files directory. No one can guarantee you won't have any issues, but I don't see any reason you would. If you're doing this to avoid people "hacking", make sure you air-gap the backup drive when not in use, and to keep at least a couple months of backups (ransomware doesn't always hit right away, sometimes it has a timer).

I'm all for testing out new technologies that may help us reduce our reliance on Fossil Fuels, but public testing of wireless charging seems like something for WAY down the road. I can't imagine the efficiency of this will be very good at all (the article says "The efficiency of the energy transfer is also not yet known"), and it seems like it will make any road repairs much more expensive. I feel like we should concentrate more on localized power generation or improving the grid capacity and efficiency before we worry about this type of investment.

I see stories like this and it makes me wonder how the UK has a say in this. Unless I'm mistaken, both Microsoft and Activision are American companies so I wouldn't think a merger would fall under the pervue of UK authorities. I can understand why they would bow to an EU regulator, but what is to stop them from saying "Ok, we won't sell our products (Including the Windows operating system) in your country"? Missing out on a a 60+ million market would hurt, but it seems like the UK would be hurt more then Microsoft. Am I missing a part of this picture that would show why they would have to listen to the UK, or is it that the potential profit from sales in that country outweighs the financial benefit of a company merger that excludes that country?

I'm gonna need something more then an anonymous letter to a celebrity gossip podcast to condemn Henry Cavill. Knowing he wanted to remain more true to the source material and the show runner/writers didn't appear to (in season 2) could explain his acting like a "gamer bro" to an outsider. It feels like a game of telephone at this point, a story about a podcast that reports on an letter that was anonymous. So....no way to check the facts, and lots of people to point the finger at if any blow-back occurs due to falsehoods being spread.

Tipsy McStagger wrote on Sep 27, 2022, 15:05:

I'll answer:
There's no time limit.
there's no reputation system so the gangs are just scripted sequences.
The game is missing some "Features" that would make it easily one of the best games ever made. I'll list them:
-Reputation system
-Kill versus non-kill system impacts
-Police system
-Sneaking (comically bad)
-Driving is just badly done code.


That being said.. side quests are fucking amazing and the main story gets fleshed out better. On every quest, click the right side panels and read the descriptions of characters and areas. The setting is amazing and the story is extremely well done as long as you pay attention to how Alt/Johnny/Saburo/Yorinobu all fall together.

Cool, thanks. Yeah, the time limit thing when The ripperdoc guy says you only have a few weeks until the construct takes over your consciousness made me think there was a time limit....but then I was able to just roam around and do whatever, it seemed like the world waited for me so I had my suspicions that wasn't a real time limit....even though there's a clock and day/night cycles.

All of what you posed I agree on early in the game. Seems like some things they could fix or patch in in the time since release, unless it was really as buggy as the internet says at release and they've spent all this time just squishing bugs.

Oh, I would love to do all of the quests....I just know myself and after 40 hours or so in the game I'll start to get bored and want to move on. So far the side quests I've done have seemed more like filler, hopefully that will change. Even the Taxi AI quest line with Cabs giving pop culture references seemed a bit out of place (like the GLaDOS cab for example) for a long term interest. Dunno, so far I'm having fun with it though, seems worth $30 in it's current state.

Steele Johnson wrote on Sep 27, 2022, 13:28:

I waited mainly due to youtubers that I’ve watched play it, pointing out some crazy defects and performance issues. And because I didn’t have a current gen gfx card at the time of the game’s release, there was no way in hell I was going to pay full price. Waiting a year or 2 for fixes and a sale is sometimes the way to go, especially these days

So I just picked it up on the 50% off sale and I had similar to you on the release. I didn't have a card capable of running it, but did some upgrades this past year. Visuals are very nice, but it definitely is a "console first" title. I'm not crazy far into the game, but the opening quest line was pretty dang good I thought, even if it was very "on rails" where it didn't really feel much like your choices made much difference.

It definitely feels like GTA. Constant phone calls and messages with offers of side quests as I drive around, but not much guidance on how to turn that off so you can just enjoy the game and concentrate on your mission. In one particular part I was listening to the dialog from an AI taxi-cab and my phone rang and just took it over, so I missed half of the dialog. Driving with KB and mouse is a challenge for me, but that could just be my lack of skill. Driving with the controller seems to be the way to go. I have a wireless controller that turns itself off, and it will pause the game EVERY TIME to tell me to turn it back on. If I unplug my keyboard it doesn't pause....one of the reasons I say it's very console focused.

Dialog options on the quests are very limiting, you don't really get to play your character how you want (so far for me) or ask any real questions that a normal sane person would ask in lots of the situations. The "net" doesn't seem to have much ability to search for or look up information, but again maybe that's just me not knowing how to use it. Vendors all over the place, but you can't talk to most of them, for example the food stall vendors. You'll get spam e-mail, but can't talk to the food vendors so I know it's not like they're trying to eliminate useless stuff. A lot of the dialog choices you pick aren't ACTUALLY what you say, sometimes it's not even what the choice was. I think they're going for "A/B, True/False, "Good Guy/Bad Guy".

From where I am in the story, it sounds like there's a time limit, but so far I haven't see one actually exist.

The gangs don't seem to actually do anything except spawn scripted quests or random "attack on civilian" pop-up quests. I had a couple interactions in scripted scenes with gang leaders where they're all nicey-nicey with me, but then I walk out a door and their random gang members decide to attack me. Again, I've tried not to read much on the game in advance so maybe gangs will play into it more later? They're your bog standard "Guy dressed like this, uses this weapon, and is a caricature of this type of person" gang members, like GTA-V.

You can't just respec your character without download a save editor or mod program, which I always find silly in a single player game. I guess you can respec your talents, but not your attributes. Unless you go read a bunch of guides in advance, you may put attribute points where you don't want them down the line. I already had a "what?" moment when it came to my attribute points and just downloaded the mod program to move around my attribute points so I could change my playstyle.

I know that all sounds like I don't like the game, but overall I'm happy with it and I'll get some good playtime out of it...although I doubt I'll finish it unless I just power through the main story and skip most of the side quests. For $30 I'm happy with it and would recommend it if you have a system that can run it well since I really fell like the graphics, voice acting, and just "Feel" of the city are the biggest draws. You do have to put up with a game built around consoles and some very cheesy shoe-horned in parts of the story, but those can be overlooked. If you can deal with "Harry Potter" level of "magic works when it's convenient" style of story telling, it won't be an issue. I can, so I do enjoy it to an extent.

I don't own a handheld gaming system, and don't have much interest, but I am really glad to see Valve embracing "right to repair" by selling parts for do it yourself-ers. I wish more companies would stop planning their business around disposable technology.

Is this about game reviews, or game journalism in general? I understand gravitating to reviewers who share characteristics (sex, gender, culture, highest level D&D character, city or rural lifestyle (Thanks Adam Orth), etc) with me, but I've never really thought race would play much role in that apart from it's intersection with culture. I think of Journalism as articles that present factual accounts or issues, then support them with facts. For me it's like "Entertainment News" vs "The News" although today I'm not sure there's much of a difference in that anymore.

I'm not really sure I'd put this article as "trusted" journalism.

The author starts with an anecdote about an unnamed "video game outlet". What is a video game outlet? I would guess he doesn't mean writing copy for GameStop's outlet stores (if they even have any) but instead is talking about a review site. He doesn't name the "outlet", but then details he noticed no black writers on their staff. At this point, he should name the outlet and detail how he determined the race of the writers they employ. That is important to having this anecdote taken as anything more then then a random story. Assuming it's a true story, I can understand why an "outlet" would sever communication with someone once they start asking diversity initiatives, especially if that person is a journalist. At that point I would do the same, either cut off contact, or refer them to legal council (assuming it was unrelated to the previous conversations, and was more "out of left field". But again, one can't determine any of that because there are no facts presented to support this story).

He then talks about the support minorities received during the summer of 2020. He posts some links, and I checked them out. None of them link to anything about equity in the Journalism industry. I'm not sure how this relates to his initial point about minority representation in journalism. None of those sites addressed what he is talking about. The "publishers" link just goes to a Rockstar tweet where they were shutting down 2 online games for 1 day in memory of George Floyd, the "journalists" link goes to a tweet by Polygon which just links to a page with a bunch of donation links for anti-police brutality and supporting protestors (nothing about journalism or other career/industries), and finally a "halted story" link to GamesRadar stating they're not posting stories for a day. I'm not sure how any of that is momentum to address a lack of Black writers and video game creators at the structural level. He would be just as correct to state those sites were helping address the lack of Black research submarine captains.

Where I really feel this article falls out of the "news" category and into the "entertainment" category is when he mixes together statistics. He uses the International Game Developer's Association statistics liberally, but fails to mention that those statistics are for a combination of Canada, the UK, Australia, and the US. The US made up 66% of the responses in 2005. In 2021, the country of work selected as "US" falls to 39%. This, by itself, invalidates all conclusions he makes related the the "13.4%" number he puts for "percentage representation of the general population" as that is the US % representation. There is no way, based on the facts given, to know how much of the 4% of respondents in 2021 chose Black as their race, come from the 39% who also selected "US". For example, Canada accounts for 12% of the respondents where 3.5% of the population identifies as Black, Finland accounted for 8% of the responses and they have a 1% Black population. This makes the statistics useless for any type of comparison since the author is mixing and matching statistics from different countries. Does it mean there's a 13.5% representation in the gaming journalism industry of Black Americans? I doubt it, but...I DON'T KNOW because the data he provides is flawed in a major way, making it useless.

One more thing stuck out as disingenuous use of statistics. As others have mentioned, the author pulls out a "25% identified as being part of an ethnic minority" statistic from the 2021 ESA report. He links it right there, and looking at it....page 3 shows the breakdown. 8% of the respondents identified as black. Why would the author use that larger number when the data was right in the report he linked. He's not investigating Latino/Hispanic, Asian/PI, or Native American writer hiring practices, so why would he suddenly include them? He jumps right back to a single race in the next paragraph.

Then he jumps into quoting a deputy editor from Eurogamer that he claims is trying to help rectify the situation, yet he is quoted as talking about how they literally have 1 minority (not black, but minority) intern for 2 months a year, and then they give them freelance work. Which is exactly what the author is complaining about in paragraph 1! I'm not even going to get into using a Youtube channel with fewer then 500K subscribers as an actual source.

At the end, maybe this writer got ghosted because he doesn't support his points and uses statistics improperly. I clicked through his website and I see 4 stories written for RPS and 3 for GamesRadar, all within the past year. His Linked In shows he was a writer for the Duke student newspaper in 2018, and he lists a MFA from NC State (where he is also an English Comp Instructor), so I assume he graduated in 2020. To me, it seems like someone who is upset he's not getting full time work in a field he has little provable experience in and wants to blame it on systemic racism. Is it possible? Of course, but he provides no proof to outweigh the doubts IMO.

The issue is that FAA/Airlines claim the upper limit of the frequencies of the 5G service in the US is too close to the frequency used on many airplanes to measure their distance from the ground. The "C-Band" that the telecom companies purchased runs from 3.7 to 3.98 GHz. The airplanes use 4.2 to 4.4 GHz. The US government sold off this chunk of frequency a few years ago, and now the companies that bought it want to use it. The FAA has had plenty of time to raise their objections or work out what to do and to run some actual real-world testing, so the FAA dragged their feet on this. It was first addressed over 3 years ago, and nothing substantial was done about it in that time.

Verizon and AT&T are playing the "nice guy" card by agreeing on a 6 month moratorium for switching on the towers near 50 of the busiest US airports. They own the use of that spectrum and have the support of the FCC, so if they were to flip the switch, there's not much the FAA could do. That said....it would be a horrible business decision since then the government would have to step in and tell them to turn it off.

My Opinion:
I think that's the mess everyone is trying to avoid, the carriers want to use their investment (understandably), the airlines are worried about safety (understandably), two government agencies are in a pissing match over jurisdiction (FCC and FAA), and the broader executive branch doesn't want to have to "force" anything since owing either industry favors wouldn't be in their best interest coming into a policy year when the political capital needs to be spent on the average voter, not on businesses. Of course, this is the FAA that claimed electronic devices on airplanes weren't allowed because they could interfere with and cause planes to crash (turn off your phones), which was a bit silly from the start....if it was that easy all a bad actor would have to do is place a call during a landing.........

On top of that, the father is a stay-at-home-dad, so one has to wonder how the kid goes unsupervised long enough to rack up that kind of bill over a couple of months.

Armengar wrote on Aug 21, 2020, 11:29:
They also revoked keys of regular people, to which they have refunded and told them to repurchase at the higher price.

They haven't reinstated them or offered a key back.

Right at the bottom of that statement they tell people to contact them to get their key back.

Cutter wrote on Jul 27, 2020, 13:04:
No, I don't recall when TVs weighed that much, and I doubt anyone else does as well. CRTs in most homes were heavy but not 200 lbs heavy. Probably more like in the 50lb range. What they were like in the 50s I have no idea.

I definitely had a heavy TV growing up, I don't think 200 pounds is an unreasonable guess. It wasn't just the weight of the CRT and components, but it was a console TV so it was an entire piece of furniture. The "wood" was MDF/Particleboard so it was a hefty beast. When it died and couldn't be resurrected, it remained in place as a TV stand for it's successor, although it was gutted and turned into a backlit liquor cabinet so not quite stereotypical redneck of TV on a broken TV, but it gives the general Idea. When I finally dragged that thing out of my parents house for them, I did it in pieces as even without the electronics it was too much for 1 person to carry. This was in the mid 80's.

It was similar in style to this console TV, but the center TV was "built in" where this looks removable:

Flatline wrote on Apr 11, 2019, 13:02:

Will W wrote on Apr 11, 2019, 09:05:
I'm all for another place I can buy games. Most of what I get these days doesn't even come from steam, but I will pay extra for a game with a steam code so I can keep it all in once place. I'm 100% against exclusives though and won't buy from the Epic store as long as they are using their money to reduce my options.

In my opinion, there are a couple of ways they could have gone about this without doing exclusives.

• If developers/publishers are saving 18% by putting the games on Epic's store, why not give the consumer a 9% discount and keep the other 9% for themselves.
• If developers/publishers put the games up on steam for 17% more, they will make the same money on each sale and let the consumer decide if Steam's interface and features are worth the extra premium

So you're blaming Epic for publisher decisions? Seriously? Epic doesn't set the price, the publisher does. If you want a discount, go bitch at the publisher.

No, I'm stating that I won't purchase from a particular reseller (Epic) due to that businesses's practice of using large pay-offs to secure exclusive rights to distribute a game and thus preventing me from purchasing that game from my preferred reseller. I understand the confusion based on my switch from the first paragraph to the bullet points where I focus first on epic and then on the developers/publishers. I could have worded that differently. Thank you for the constructive criticism.

I'm all for another place I can buy games. Most of what I get these days doesn't even come from steam, but I will pay extra for a game with a steam code so I can keep it all in once place. I'm 100% against exclusives though and won't buy from the Epic store as long as they are using their money to reduce my options.

In my opinion, there are a couple of ways they could have gone about this without doing exclusives.

• If developers/publishers are saving 18% by putting the games on Epic's store, why not give the consumer a 9% discount and keep the other 9% for themselves.
• If developers/publishers put the games up on steam for 17% more, they will make the same money on each sale and let the consumer decide if Steam's interface and features are worth the extra premium