ACAB

Kinda like watching an entire country pull the handbrake and go into a perfectly executed powerslide where they abruptly turn 180 and speed off in another direction.

Impressive af Canada.

Game Pass pricing currently unchanged.

That is because the job of Game Pass isn’t to make money, it is to funnel customers into subscription services and destroy the idea that people buy games from artists.

Game Pass either succeeds and destroys the gaming industry like spotify did to music or Microsoft will abandon Game Pass.

Yeah, you need a gate when adding in the inversed/phase shifted tone so that it only sends signal when their is signal to cancel, but that is a frequency dependent question too…

This is just M$ boasting to the universe that they cut and devalued their human talent and telling on themselves that not only from a business perspective but also from a basic cultural perspective they have brain worms and will be unable to rationalize in their tiny addled minds rehiring human talent and treating them well as a solution to the massive problems they are creating until it is far too late.

If tech workers had successfully organized and unionized they could have saved the U.S. tech industry, but since Covid U.S. tech companies have gone into overdrive hollowing themselves out for short term extractive profit and I don’t believe these companies are capable of being functional at a basic level anymore except as managers of monopolies.

This AI marketing crap is catnip to useless upper management, and in a company like microsoft guess how much say the people actually doing the work get for how things go vs upper management?

Do you remember how weirdly insistent Silicon Valley was that there would be a recession after Covid and that they just hired wayyyy too many people on because everyone was remote and now fast forward and even Zoom forced their employees back to work…? If you see this from the lens of class struggle it is very obvious what is going on.

Even before AI, there was a strong narrative in Silicon Valley and Wallstreet in the U.S. that U.S. labor needed to be taught a harsh lesson and get back in line that they didn’t even attempt to disguise, AI slots perfectly into that narrative and it isn’t a coincidence.

I think the truth is pretty simple here and has little to do with technology, global capital realized global labor had just got a lot more leverage during Covid and it scared them, all of this delusion is a coping mechanism/blowback for that grown out of control like a cancer into ridiculous broken tech, and it is tragic it had to spell the end of a world wide competitive and vibrant tech industry in the U.S.

“ok, time to blame our shocking lack of competence on a vulnerable group we can stoke xenophobia against!”

This is going to age like milk and I can’t wait

1. Make two identical copies of gausian noise track

2. Set one phase inverted and combine both tracks output in a bus/another track, they should cancel each other into silence.

3. Send the tone track (preferably inverted) into the bus aswell so now it has 3 inputs,

4. Add in another tone track that is phase inverted/opposite from step 3 and mixes together with step 3s output

Now, where the fun comes in… what happens when you add fx to different parts of the signal chain so these cancellations become imperfectly dynamic and evolving. What happens when the signals cancelling have compressors with different attack and release settings? What happens when you throw a transient designer like elysia nvelope on different stages of this signal chain?

This kind of effect isn’t too unlike a basic guitar pedal comb filter just a lot more unhinged.

Uber

watttt

It is obvious to many jews, but it is always worth repeating, these people are the enemy, this is just anti-semitism from a weird angle. Look closely at the narrative here, jews are framed in the same secret global financial conspiracy terms as every other tired racist trope about jews always operates in, it just has a temporarily positive spin on it.

Why would jews or anyone for that matter want to be masters of the universe? That sounds exhausting and frankly the title sounds like a 5 year old came up with it.

Stop conflating brutal imperialism and colonialism by a government… with a religion practiced by normal every day people.

What these people desperately want is extreme violent blowback from the Palestinian Genocide so they can continue justifying dragging jews into an oblivion where eventually, inveitably rightwing fascists turn on jews and the brutality of history repeats.

Vultures have been shown to be vital in reducing the spread of disease by scavenging, don’t drag them through the mud by comparing them to freeloading criminals wearing suits that cost more than your car.

0 . 0

I haven’t, I don’t have Stellaris, but to be honest I am kind of exhausted by the theme of 4x games which always boils down to “paint the map your color”… like I don’t want to, I am bored with that. I want to win but the unquestioned assumptions in the foundations of 4x games is a bit too cynical for me even though I love playing war games, but then again there is a difference between two sides blasting it out in a war and an ever growing suffocating empire that consumes all under its color and banner and has no other objective than endless growth…

Almost every 4x game is concerned with consolidating power under your control, I mean yeah it is fun right! I am not trying to bash it as inherently bad but at a certain level I find it a really constricting theme after awhile even though I love playing evil villains in fantasy as the next person. I just want more from the genre in terms of evolution of game design at a foundational level not just more stuff and more dlc and more mechanics and more different kinds of space war. If the only shape of an empire game is of an oppressive unstoppable regime either succeeding or failing to rise I just think that is pretty limited in vision. Not that there isn’t an amazing diversity of strategy games that don’t fit the mold that I am describing, but in general I think there is truth to my point.

For a reference of what something different can look like, see modern euro game design in board gaming, in particular I think the board game Oceans creates a compelling strategy experience that while still being about winning isn’t inherently about just being the most powerful creature or presence on the board at any one moment. Mutual benefits are complex and arise spontaneously because the objective isn’t complete annihilation for anybody.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/232414/oceans

I guess you could argue my criticism is all a matter of perspective, any kind of winning is going to encourage more winning and snowball to some degree in a system that isn’t totally random, but then again the feeling of getting near the end game of almost any 4x gets a little bit tedious for most people, not only because every single turn takes more and more admin/micromanagement of a bigger and bigger empire but also because the most common impact of winning a 4x game is that the gameboard/environment becomes more and more homogeneous and less and less dynamic the closer you get to winning. Winning should reward you with interesting choices and dynamic board states not an experience that feels like a chokehold even though winning again can always be reframed as the process of gaining a chokehold on a system.

(again, a general point, I know and love that there always exception to the rule)

Yeah and the mechanism for adjusting your phasers is in the style of “Don’t Stop Talking And Nobody Explodes” co-operative minigames that border on silliness in their fiddly complexity at points as part of the fun (also a vehicle to poke fun at the goofy technobabble in Star Trek hahaha).

Harry Kim, we all want you to be promoted, but it isn’t productive to be upset with other Ensigns for getting promoted more than you.

I love how upset some people get about Tilly serving on a big burly masculine warship that sometimes has the serious job of killing people.

If a crew like this didn’t have people like Tilly on it, it would have fallen catastrophically apart after the 10th crisis or so.

Especially in this season it so obvious how Tilly’s intelligence manifests in being able to bypass entire complexes of prejudice and social norms (perceived and unconscious, spoken and unspoken) whether they be human or alien, and get right to the point with somebody. In an organization that is constantly trying to establish trust with a variety of unknown actors, Tilly is an incredible asset.

Stay angry, fools.

edit You know what is actually hilarious, TNG failed to really use Troi’s empathetic mind reading in interesting ways for most of its run, to the shows great detriment, but Tilly is basically who Troi would have been if Troi hadn’t been sidelined or written to be unconfident or naive for the stupidest reasons in most episodes. Tilly regularly walks into rooms and nearly instantaneously perceives the emotional context of the people in the room (whether or not she knows them that well) and boldly addresses it head on in a way that somehow isn’t overbearing, aggressive or intimidating. I don’t understand how this can be understood as anything but a minor superpower.

I am loving this seasons so far, does anyone know if I watch the TNG episode that this season connects too if it will spoil anything for later seasons of TNG? I am still in like season 4 or 5 as I am going through TNG, VOY and DS9 all at the same time.

Loved the first episode, I think the way they brought Book back made sense and I think the season set up connecting to an underutilized TNG episode is absolutely awesome, I could not be more down for this kind of season of Discovery. On to the second episode!

I am really gonna miss Discovery, I am not sure Doug Jones is going to miss dressing up as Saru for every shoot though.

Still though wow he really knocks it out of the park with conveying an alien with a physicality much different than ours, he has to easily be one of the best aliens in the whole series.