Did a quick google. Can’t tell if the unpaved rural road is the full 10 miles, more, or less. But even at just one or two miles, that is a LOT of “plywood” that more or less is only usable once before being ruined by the time it is required next year. Let alone if you have dumbasses in overly heavy vehicles (and you would never have that in the US…) who break the plywood and render the road even more unusable.

As for paving? Sorry, but fuck that. So much infrastructure is underfunded and needs work that I don’t want a single tax dollar wasted on a road that is pretty much used twice a year.

I am a climber and enjoy going camping. I spend a LOT of time on unpaved roads and the like. Guess what the first thing we do before heading out the door on a trip is? Check the weather. Guess what the last thing we do before leaving the supply town is? Check the weather. And guess what we do “at some point in the day” on every day of the trip? Check the weather.

And if at any point in the trip the weather looks dangerous? We go home (or find somewhere else nearby we can do stupid shit at).

But, because this is Radically Inclusive ™: It is the government’s job to protect these rich assholes

In a nutshell: A lot of cultures (especially a lot of Native Americans) have a(n often harvest) festival that involves burning an effigy that represents negative emotions, hardship, etc. And it is generally human shaped because that made it a lot easier to spin it as “This effigy represents The Other tribe across the river. They are the bad people and the cause of all your problems” as needed.

And like 40 something years ago, a bunch of white artists were cranky that the locals didn’t want their input on what kind of paint scheme or sculptures would really make that ancestral tradition POP. So they made their own version in a desert with blackjack and hookers.

Then twenty-ish years ago, a bunch of rich folk and the nouveau rich techbros realized that these artists with their excessive amounts of hallucinogenics and “free love” lifestyle really know how to party. So they took it over as a way to party for a week or two every year.

And the key is: Regardless of your socioeconomic backgrond, you can come together with the joys of getting high, oogling some hot chicks, and appropriating some culture. All while talking about how this makes you a better and more enlightened person.

And in all seriousness: if you ever get the chance, go to an ACTUAL effigy burning festival. A lot of, generally Southwest, cities still have them and still respect the origins and it makes for a truly fascinating and, honestly, kind of spiritual experience as you learn, eat amazing food, and take part in something that goes back thousands of years… even if a lot of the Others were the American people…

Citation requested

For all burning man’s many many many many systemic flaws, the organizers tend to be pretty competent (if only for legal liability reasons). And I can’t think of any situation where ANYONE would be told “just piss on the ground”. Latrine pits are a thing and are pretty much bog (hee hee) standard solutions.

I think this is pretty much the perfect time to be doing this.

Plenty of actors and actresses do motion cap, or even full FMV acting, for a lot of smaller tier games. And plenty of major games outright market themselves on getting “real actors” involved. Remember how Patrick Stewart was in 30 seconds of Oblivion and Sean Bean was in five minutes? And not to mention the likelihood that GTA6 is publicly revealing fairly soon.

And looking forward: Anime games continue to be a thing and… that is an ongoing area of concern where the american VAs are openly acknowledging they are afraid to even SAY “union”. And while dubs are very much a third class citizen as far as studios are concerned, they are still a lucrative one and a lot of the major VAs have branched out enough that this could be an issue.

As for “AI”: All signs point toward The Law being about training data. In part because that maps best to the existing structures (if you steal a clip of a movie and don’t credit it, you get DMCA’d) and is something that benefits the actual major studios. With most of the SAG negotiations being about a performer/creator’s rights to their own media. The outcome will almost definitely end up being “all previous content is off limits for training. An actor or a writer can ‘agree’ to having their performance be added to a training database X years from now”.

But in games? Kojima is infamous for just making Snake look like (and be named after…) Kurt Russel’s performance in Escape from New York. And plenty of versions of Lara Croft and the like have looked eerily similar to some actresses. Same with studios over the years accidentally openly acknowledging that they are using episodes of Days of Our Lives or whatever as motion cap to model face emotion and the like. Hell, how many thirsty bois were wondering who the face model of the new soldier lady Jane in FF7-R was?

Right now, that is a wild west. But if that gets your studio put on the shitlist then it starts being a real issue. Especially with the ongoing acquisitions (even if we are in a lull). Get caught training your AI off of Anna Kendrick’s performance in 50/50? Your studio has now become radioactive.

It also doesn’t help that we literally have decades worth of media indoctrinating kids (now parents) into thinking “teachers don’t teach you anything useful”. How many nicklelodean kid sitcoms involved mean teachers who “don’t even understand what they are teaching?”

I don’t know what current kid shows are teaching. But I know my sister’s husband very much likes to “make jokes” about his kids’ teachers to them. I do what I can when I visit but I can already see them shifting from “Wow, school is cool… why is everyone staring at me?” to “Ugh. I hate having to do homework. I am never going to use any of this in real life”.

This cannot “easily be fixed remotely”. The domain was scooped up by a company that pretty much exists to extort other companies.

I don’t know if this is an actual lidl url, a third party, or something that was supposed to be handled by their PR company. But these are not “Hey, we forgot to renew it. Can we just give you the thirty bucks and get it back?”. it is more “So… you want how many tens of thousands of dollars to give this back?”

And they would also figure out WHY lidl/whoever wants the URL back and raise the price even more to avoid people like you complaining that this “can be easily fixed remotely”.

Because it disproportionately impacts the poor, likely doesn’t result in much actual support, AND can be used to justify lesser sentencing otherwise.

A poor person kills someone? They are beggared, the family doesn’t really get anything, and the world moves on.

A rich person kills someone? Well, they already are suffering enough so let’s just go with the child support. And then they likely stiff the bill anyway because their lawyers can argue that it isn’t even worth mailing the pocket change every month.

Weregilds have historically been how the rich get away with murder and how the poor are turned into slaves.

They are literally in the process of needing to unbundle Teams from office in Europe.

Regardless of the reasoning, MS has had eyes on it since the 90s and need to be incredibly careful what they do and don’t bundle together or preinstall. Whereas Apple can do whatever they want. That is why Apple comes with a bunch of shitty office products that only one person at any given company uses and Windows comes with a link to download them.

I was going to talk about how the load times are mostly just masked but still there but you acknowledged that.

At which point: Mark and Recall (or any of the Interventions) on an NVME is nigh instantaneous. And, much like Shang Tsung got neutered, those spells were largely removed because it made it too easy to load into a cell with a LOT of resources rather than an intentionally controlled and safe (asset wise) fast travel point.

If you think WordPad is a replacement for Ms word then the reality is that you don’t do anything that requires word/write.

And I am assuming you just mean word and not excel or PowerPoint because… Yeah

Tracking I will give you (based on current information…).

But Microsoft has semiregularly been investigated for antitrust and monopolies over baking too much into the os. Hence splitting it out

Assuming that sounded more “witty” and less “obnoxious teenager” in your head, huh?

At the end of the day: it is all the same “trick” Morrowind used. You load N cells ahead of where the player is so that they don’t notice the load times because they have been done by the time they get there.

In this case a “cell” could be a room or it could be DM-Deck 16 or it could be all of The Imperial City. It is the same trick. Hell, I think some streaming services even do this at different quality tiers so that you have no delay between one episode and another.

Size of levels is entirely a function of available memory. PS5 had more memory than PS4 and TF2 was targeting PS4 specs (… actually, was that PS3? Let’s say PS4 so I don’t feel too old). Faster load from disk helps a lot but NVMEs alone already get you there, as anyone who has experienced zero load times while playing a game can attest.

Like I said below where I already addressed this exact same point: It is great to applaud accomplishments. But by buying into this “only with the power of direct storage is this possible” nonsense you are not only parroting marketing: you are ignoring the legacy of all the devs who already did this years (really decades) ago.

A week long vacation in a desert with no natural resources that more or less requires people to ship in all of their supplies for their stay is inherently not inclusive. It is “inclusive” in the same way “just take a gap year and go backpacking around Europe” is “inclusive”. The only people who think “anyone can do it” are those who have lived incredibly privileged >= middle class lives.

Like just about all of the “ten principles”: Maybe it was true at one point. It has not been true for decades. And, in a lot of ways (especially “leave no trace” and “civic responsibility”), it is antithetical to them.

And, just to make it clear: I am not saying it needs to be inclusive. I am a rock climber. You don’t get much more “privileged yuppie white guy” than that. But this “it is radically inclusive” nonsense is exactly why Burning Man is more or less “larping as a poor at a rave” for techbros.

Burning Man WAS a step in the right direction.

But for the past decade or two it has been coopted by the techbro crowd to a point of mostly just being rich folk larping “being a poor” while pretending they are artists or care about art. Also, lots of drugs .

That isn’t to say that normal people don’t go too. But it is very much “See, Zuckerberg is a human. he is grilling” in that “This is something humans would do… if you squint a lot”

But yeah, that was very much a “This marvel movie is the worst movie ever made” level comment.

Lenovo and ASUS are very much trying to cash in. Which is not bad.

But if you really do care about “giving money” to companies that “invested”: Aya and GPD have been the real drivers for a viable handheld gaming PC form factor for years. I personally don’t think they ever succeeded, but a lot of Valve’s advantage is that they can tank a failed launch and price accordingly. Whereas Aya or GPD would likely go out of business if their new device flopped and thus need to make sure they profit on every unit.

There have been some fan stories of Troy Baker that make him seem like a real douche bag. But mostly, just watch basically any time he does a big stage interview. It is almost a meme that he will find a way to talk about how amazing of an actor he is and cut off any woman in sight.

He could very well end up being insanely pro-SAG and the like. But he shows every sign of being a Stephen Amell level of “Fuck you for not letting me promote my products”

Good

We already have strong indications of companies like Ubi using AI models based on past performers. And stuff like Tomb Raider/Lara Croft is downright famous for how much they model her appearance off actresses (sometimes the mocap actress, sometimes just a random attractive one). And its worth remembering that the big attempt at “a virtual actress” was from a Final Fantasy movie. Hell, the rumor has been that most of Martinet’s Mario lines were recorded decades ago.

Plus, as much as I love Warframe and DE, it has always been more than a bit sketch how many characters are voiced by non-union employees of the company (and, bottom dollar, Space Mom going out for a pack of smokes for a few years was worries that Reb would leave). And they are not at all out of the ordinary in that.

So yeah. Video games should fucking respect the unions

And for people thinking nothing will happen (like last time) because the vast majority of game dev can be done without the VAs or even the motion capping done?

Take a look at the SAG strike. A24 and the like “rolled over” almost instantly and are largely operating like nothing has changed. Expect the vast majority of indie and “small studio” productions to do so. It means higher cost per game, but the SAG rates are nothing compared to the rest of game dev. And then it gives them a significant advantage.

Whereas the big studios? Rockstar are nearing formal announcement on GTA6. Can’t do that if your talent is refusing to record lines and the like (not to mention the rumors (?) that they blacklisted the hell out of Nico Bellic’s VA after he dared to ask for more money). And you can bet that Sony are trying to find ways to get the TLOU show crowd playing games (although I totally expect Troy Baker to scab the fuck out of things).

I mean… that is another I Did A Thing video (the knife missile is Backyard/Backdoor Scientist). Well, I Did A Thing, Michael Reeves, random ass kids, etc.

Gun+Computer Vision = Autonomous Sentry Turret. Reeves and Aleks made things “harder” by trying to specifically identify faces. But it doesn’t take much to realize that shooting at anything identified as a human approaching on an active battlefield is a LOT easier. And will likely be necessary as more and more “C4 duct taped to a drone” attacks are used against airfields and the like.

I mean, yeah. I Did A Thing did a video on exactly this a year or so back. His setup was a complete shitshow as they had to change robo-dogs at the last second (because Michael Reeves and OfflineTV didn’t want to get sued by Boston Dynamics) but the principle was sound.

But also? You are never going to replace a well trained soldier with this. Even with a proper gimbal mount, you aren’t doing rapid precise shots.

But also… you don’t need to. The advantage to this is to have a relatively low cost platform to handle suppressive fire or fire an anti-tank shot or whatever. Something where you would otherwise be risking a human being.