There is no expectation that Putin will ever stand trial for his crimes. That’s not the point. The point is that he should not be allowed to have those crimes swept under the rug. Putin should be a global pariah, like Netanyahu; a man who has to fear setting foot outside his own country because of the very real danger that he could be arrested.

Just because we can’t punish him, doesn’t mean we have to forgive him.

I seriously doubt that any of the decision makers involved in this process actually watch anime.

Anyone in management who cared probably didn’t have enough pull / authority to do a damn thing about it.

1. Internal review also takes time and expertise. Those things cost money, and the whole point of the exercise is to not spend money.

2. No one uses generative AI because they actually care about the quality of the end product.

But even allowing for those points, it’s entirely possible that they did, in fact, do quality review. Extensively. But at some point the generation costs exceeded their allowed budget and this is what they settled on. This is the thing that lurks behind bad quality AI art; the fact that what we see is often the best result out of many, many tries. The Coca Cola holiday ad had to be stitched together from hours upon hours of failed attempts. Even the horrendously bad looking end product wasn’t as bad as many of the failed outputs they got.

OK. How does it wash your ass?

Just seems like a lot of downside for a $350,000 device that can barely do the job of a shower.

“The user lies down…”

How does it wash your back?

Only if someone throws some milk at him next.

It’s actually a brilliant monetization model. If you want to use it as is, it’s free, even for large corporate clients.

If you want to get rid of the puppygirls though, that’s when you have to pay.

The worst part is that this failure will probably kill any chance of The Chinese Room getting to actually take a proper swing at this, from scratch, with time and a real budget. It really feels like if they were allowed to do that they would hit it out of the park. Bloodlines 2 is a much better game than the review scores suggest, mostly weighed down by the expectations people put in the Bloodlines name.

Correct. No matter how much noise Russia makes about the sanctions not affecting them, they desparately want them gone. They’ve been able to weather them better than originally predicted, but only by mortgaging today to pay for tomorrow. Their economy is starting to show serious strain. Investment is basically zeroed out, consumer spending is collapsing and they have a workforce shortage. It’s getting dire.

Depends what you want to do with those character sheets.

If you just want a text file that people can paste their character sheet into, this will work: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/taf/ If you want to actually build full custom character sheets, you probably want something more like this: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/universal-tabletop-system/ Or this: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/custom-system-builder/

There’s also a general purpose PbTA system that’s meant to be customised into different PbTA hacks: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/pbta/

I guess in the sense that you have to load some kind of system to play, there’s a requirement to use some sort of plugin, so maybe that’s a dealbreaker. But it’s generally not an issue. While premium content for Foundry exists, it’s mostly in the form of rulebooks and scenarios that have been ported into it by the people who make and sell those games. The actual systems are all free, with literally only one exception (Brambletrek, for some reason).

So, it seems like the plugins don’t really affect you either way then? If you don’t want that added functionality, you’re good to just not use it, right?

Can you help us to understand why the plugins to add games is a problem for you?

Maybe I’m missing your meaning here, but it reads kind of like you’re expecting some kind of situation where a single VTT would somehow support every game system out of the box?

Someone who likes small dicks, obviously.

Do not cite the deep magics to me, I was there when they were written. I grew up on System Shock and Deus Ex, and that’s exactly why I found Dishonoured so hard to get into. Those other games gave the player a complete free choice in how to approach them, but Dishonoured doesn’t do that. It presents an apparently wide open field, but the moment you pick a particular path and set off down it, the game wags its finger and says “Oh no, not like that. That’s not how you’re supposed to play.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/zohran-mamdani-new-york-city-run-grocery-stores/

This, BTW, is why the deal with Argentina to import more beef will do nothing for prices. Argentinian farmers pretty much exclusively raise very high end free-range grass fed beef that sells for a very high sticker price. This might be good for, say, Michelin star New York restaurants, but it won’t help anyone out in the grocery store.

They can’t say ‘lie.’ It’s one of the few words you can basically never use as a journalist.

It’s not about the incontestability of the truth. It’s about the fact that a ‘lie’ (as opposed to a ‘falsehood’) requires intent. Basically, unless you have psychic powers, or a written, signed declaration from the person saying “Yes, I intentionally lied,” you can’t prove it’s a lie. And in journalism, you do have to be able to prove the things you say. Potentially in a court of law.

He could just be stupid. He could just be ignorant. He could just be suffering from serious mental decline. We don’t know for sure.

I get that’s not a satisfying answer. We all know, intuitively, that Trump lies, constantly and endlessly. He tells himself ten lies in the morning just to get out of bed. I get it. We all know it. But journalism has to be held to a higher standard, and that standard has to be applied consistently, not just when it suits us.

There’s also a lot of stuff throughout the game about how the city gets more corrupted, more rats everywhere, that sort of thing. Some of this makes some stuff harder, some of it is just vibes. But all of it is the designers very noticeably wagging their finger under your nose for engaging with the mechanics they made and actively encouraged you to engage with.

I’d be happy with either option. If you’re going to punish the player for not doing perfect (eg, no kill) stealth, don’t tease them with a bunch of really exciting combat mechanics. If you’re going to include all the exciting combat mechanics, don’t punish people for using them.

I bailed on Dishonoured for one very specific reason; the morality system.

Dishonoured is, in my opinion a spectacular example of game design, and an equally spectacular example of how to break your game design by not understanding the way players interact with the tools you give them.

Dishonoured is a stealth game. It’s also a game with a superb combat system, and a really fun and exciting set of powers for the player to enjoy using. These things can, sort of co-exist, if somewhat uneasily. But then you add the morality system.

The morality system, in effect, punishes you for playing the game in a non-stealthy way. Or, more specifically, for playing with the wrong kind of stealth. The morality system wants you to ghost the whole game, slipping past every opponent without the slightest evidence you were ever there. But doing that means not engaging with most of the powers and any of the combat.

Having the option to follow a ghost playstyle is great. But when the game sets up a bunch of really fun mechanics, then punishes you for engaging with those mechanics in exactly the way they were designed to be engaged with, that just sucks.