I feel like a lot of what made the Bioshock games good was Ken Levine’s social commentary. And while we’ve had Bioshock games that he didn’t write or direct, and it would be silly to argue that he is the only one capable of writing a good Bioshock story, I do think he understands that it’s more important to say something with a game, than just churn out another title within the same world.

Rapture wasn’t just a dark underwater city, it was a Libertarian utopia, with all the exploitation and unchecked capitalism that would come from that. Columbia was a Christian Nationalist utopia, with the cultish brainwashing, revisionist history, and racism that is common in that worldview. I hope the team in charge of the new games understands that the series is more than the locations, and the “Big Daddies” and “Little Sisters.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love more Bioshock (if it’s good), but I’m glad we’re also getting Judas from Levine’s new studio, because I have a feeling it’s going to feel more like Bioshock than whatever the next official Bioshock game ends up being.

Just so you’re aware, Match owns OkCupid now, as well as Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and a bunch of other smaller dating sites. I don’t think they’ve all been ruined as much as Match yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time.

I think it was an interview with Seth Meyers, but somewhere Heidi said she had seen them in costume, but Mikey’s lip prosthetic/makeup was much more extreme in the live performance than in rehearsal, and that was what caught her off guard and made her break.

And if my actions in a game cause chaos, it’s much more limited to a silly little game world, rather than ruining innocent lives IRL.

While I would never wish for a trans woman to have to endure that kind of environment, I’d love to see a trans woman take that as a challenge and go win just to make the “you can always tell” crowd lose their minds. Unfortunately it would probably be super dangerous considering how violent people can get when they discover they can’t always tell, so it’s probably a horrible idea. But a person can dream.

Yeah, I know a lot of the smaller, independent search engines are lacking, but the people using the “udm=14” trick to remove Google’s AI results now, as if that won’t be removed as soon as Google needs to show investors the AI is more profitable.

They know the meaning. Most of the ones I grew up around chose to believe that since “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear in the Constitution that it was a fringe idea a couple of the founding fathers had, that “liberals” today have made into a bigger deal than it should be so they can keep “persecuting” Christians.

Christian nationalism takes all the dogmatic thinking they have about the Bible being instructions from an infallible, all knowing God, that must be followed, and applies that thinking to the US Constitution and the founding fathers. Once you’re in the mindset of reading something like it’s absolute truth that can’t be questioned (at least the parts that tell you you’re wrong, the parts that say I’m wrong are different), it’s easy to get stuck in that mindset for everything you read.

To add to this, Scarlett Johansson took on Disney and they settled. And Disney is like the final boss of litigious companies (either them or Nintendo). If she has the same legal team for this, and they think she has a case against OpenAI, this could open the door for OpenAI to get rightfully clobbered for their tech-bro ignoring of copyright laws.

Yes, if this is regarding the stimulus checks, then wouldn’t it all having been spent be good? Yeah, we spent it, we stimulated the economy during a time when the government decided it needed stimulation. Unless the conversation is about the economy needing more stimulation and that giving stimulus money to consumers works better than tax cuts for the wealthy, because the working class actually put the stimulus into circulation rather than hoarding it.

Does anyone know of Gullikit is still doing the thing where their joysticks have the square active zone as opposed to round like the stock sticks? I bought a set for my LCD SteamDeck a bit over a year ago, and after learning about the square active zone causing issues for some, I haven’t bothered to install them.

Ratchet when Clank makes a bad pun.

I think launchers are allowed, they just have to be usable with controller input. Hitman 3 is verified, and still shows a launcher on Deck, but when launched on Deck the launcher shows and accepts gamepad navigation.

Not to deny any of the very real economic reasons for this (everything from low wages, pensions being replaced by 401Ks, etc) but it’s also important to remember that the babyboomer generation was the largest ever generation until millennials claimed that record, so any statistic that looks primarily at raw numbers as opposed to percentages is going to be higher simply because there are more people.

I’m not saying he wouldn’t be pro-Israel, but considering how much his words say one thing on the campaign trail, and his actions are generally just whatever he thinks will benefit him the most in the moment, it wouldn’t surprise me if Iran could sway him into looking the other way.

You’re in. Now we’ve just got to make sure we get into the right vault and not one that’s just full of the “relics” of body parts from dead saints.

A heist at the Vatican is my best chance at being able to afford retirement at this point, I’d appreciate if one of the more ethical options to steal from isn’t destroyed before I can get to it.

Eh, there are plenty of old quotes that don’t hold up, and the last 1500 years haven’t really been that peaceful. I think it’s fair to be critical of a philosophy that’s been around that long and has really just been better at marketing increased military spending than actually successful at building real peace.

I remember this with nursing degrees when I was in college in the late 2000s, there was a big deal made about a shortage of nurses around that time, and a bunch of kids were convinced they were going to make bank and have guaranteed jobs when they graduated, then they started graduating and flooded the market. A bunch of them ended up staying in school for grad degrees in other fields, since they couldn’t find nursing jobs.

The economic loss of losing a generation and a half of workers who will be unable to save for retirement and will put a giant strain on the economy in 40-50 years when their brains and bodies are shot, but they can’t afford to retire because the money that they could have set aside went to paying student loans. It’s going to be way cheaper in the long run and a better investment to forgive student loans now, than to wait for all those people to hit retirement age and not be able to afford to retire, holding down jobs that should be opening for new generations and screwing over the youth once again. Not that newer generations will be as big, since those strapped with student loans are choosing not to have kids because they can’t afford it. Also if our social safety net for retirees (Social Security, Medicare, etc) is already strained, we’d better give people the best chance we can at being able to afford to save for their own retirements.

If anything, the ROI on paying off student debt is better long term than the auto and bank bailouts - because the cost of not doing it is going to affect the economy for generations.

I had a similar upbringing, but was also guided to go to a Christian University and it took me much longer than it should have to realize that what I was taught about Science and “Evolution” were lies, and how much of the evidence for Creation/Intelligent Design was dubious.

And yeah, with as beneficial as deprograming myself has been for my own personal growth, it’s not easy or fun - or how I expected to spend my 30s.