ConstableJelly

I don’t do multiplayer games, so Elden Ring I think is at the top for me at around 200 hours. Although, if you looked on Playstation it would probably be one of the Spider-Man games because my kids use my account to just play them as a sandbox.

I like the Dualsense a lot at its best, but I go through roughly a controller per year probably. One of them something with the rumble loosened. Not noticeable in some games, but when I was playing Returnal it sounded like a jackhammer. Another the sticks got…sticky in a way that was really distracting. Stick drift on another, and my current one the right arrow stopped working. I had to re-map it to the left stick click to play Infinite Wealth, and other games like Elden Ring just won’t work with it.

We got terribly swarmed in a very remote area in Michigan’s upper peninsula while walking in the woods. My partner and I grabbed pine branches and started waving them around us while we ran back, but my dog kept thinking I was playing as I tried to wave them around her and would run off from me. Within 20 minutes of getting back, she was covered in massive lumps all over her body, her lips and ears were grossly swollen, and she started breathing really, really shallowly.

There were no open or emergency vets anywhere nearby, so we tried to give her some benadryl and water as best we could. Luckily, she was well-recovered by morning. But the danger posed by swarms of mosquitos became abundantly clear to me.

“Actual malice” is the high legal standard that public figures must meet to prevail in a defamation case.

I was curious what side enjoys the benefit here given, y’know… the First Amendment, and it seems like this is definitely a performative move on the government’s side.

Adam Steinbaugh, a First Amendment lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, shared a different assessment on Monday.

“Patel said proving actual malice is a ‘lay up’ (no), but the allegations in this complaint don’t even hit the backboard,” Steinbaugh wrote on X. “It will, however, accomplish the primary goal: making media outlets weighing a story think about the cost for attorneys to get a meritless lawsuit tossed.”

I’m not sure this holds up logically. WaPo and NYT did gangbusters during Trump’s first term, before their ownership structure and content guidelines pivoted hard toward institutional supplication.

There is value to the credibility that comes from standing up to actual authoritarianism, if you’re not captive to the billionaire mindset. I have to imagine that the cost/benefit for publicity like this is pretty attractive to these publications’ accounting departments.

The linked article is from California’s office of the attorney general related to an existing lawsuit. As a non-Californian, I am supremely disappointed that this is happening just at the state level, but credit should still go where its due. And if their legal action sets a precedent that makes it easier for other states (or dare I hope, at the federal level if and when we get strong antitrust regulators like we had under Biden), then all the better.

Search results on Amazon are fully pay-to-play anyway. You don’t get anywhere near the top of the list without paying for the privilege. No big deal for slop producers who sell in volume, but basically useless for small businesses or private sellers.

I’m also playing this for the first time after owning it for a while. Took me a while to really get into it - it’s the first high-production, AAA action game that I’ve played in a while, and it felt strangely linear and repetitive. The puzzles are so clearly tailored to your specific abilities they feel kind of silly against the otherwise immersive world. The rewards and upgrades are kind of trivial on normal difficulty; I’m still mostly spamming normal and sidekick attacks for every battle.

Eventually though I settled into the rhythm and I noticed that stuff less. The acting and scene choreography are outstanding - it feels like theater in a way that’s unique to my experience with games. And I’m enjoying it more for what it is. It’s just overall not landing as satisfyingly as the first one did, and I think that’s because indie games have done increasingly cool things since the 2018 game came out and I’ve been playing them more, and my tastes have just changed a lot.

I did read the synopsis of it and thought it sounded like an interesting take. I’m not sure I liked the movie enough to bother with the sequel though. As an ending to its own contained story, it felt really tone-deaf.

I just watched The Black Phone last night. Spoiler:

Fucking yikes.