Because he’s an ICE agent, which is to say, a poorly-trained, violent moron.

The game that Stardew Valley blatantly copied - Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town.

It was made for the GBA, so has straightforward and precise controls, with none of the irritating camera or targeting complications that come with making the game 3D.

There are other later games in the Harvest Moon franchise with better graphics, but like Stardew Valley with a gamepad, they tend to have irritatingly imprecise controls. Friends of Mineral Town, with its isometric 2D, doesn’t have that problem.

Years ago - I believe in one of Dostoyevsky’s novels, but I haven’t been able to run it down - I read a wonderful allegory on this topic.

The basic gist of it, told nowhere near as well as it was originally:

Once upon a time, there was a peaceful village of farmers. They went through their days, tending their fields and caring for their livestock and each other and simply living.

Every few years though, a group of bandits would ride down out of the nearby hills and attack tge village and take all they could carry of the farmers’ crops and livestock.

Then one year, an entirely different group of bandits rode down from a different part of the hills, and they attacked the village and took everything.

So when, a few months later, the customary bandits rode down to attack, they found the village already devastated and everything they would’ve stolen already gone.

The bandits knew they couldn’t allow that - they depended on their theft of the villagers’ goods for their own livelihood. So they went back to their camp and, over a hard winter, thought about what to do.

The next spring - long before the harvest, so long before their customary attack on the villagers, they rode down and they approached the village elders with a proposal.

Instead of attacking the villagers and taking everything, they would settle for just taking half of everything, and in exchange they would protect the villagers from being attacked by those other bandits and having everything taken.

And the villagers, with no other hope - being allowed to keep hslf of the fruits of their labors was at least better than losing everything - grudgingly agreed.

And thus was government born.

I don’t know when or why it started - my thoughts’ll start drifting toward unfortunate memories and I suddenly find myself doing this thing sort of somewhere between humming and scat singing. And it’s always made up - I don’t hum real songs (presumably because that wouldn’t be enough to distract me).

It’s to the point that the two things are sort of reversed in my mind, so instead of recognizing an uncomfortable memory then catching myself humming, I catch myself humming so realize I just remembered something uncomfortable.

I catch myself humming improvised songs as a distraction.

With any luck, it will kill google.

I don’t see how they can even pretend that it will do anything other than steal website traffic, since the exact point is to provide you with the information you would have gotten if you had gone to the website, leaving no reason to actually go to the website.

So painfully obviously, Google intends to steal the websites’ content in order to steal the websites’ traffic.

Which would seem to me to be grounds for class action lawsuits on behalf of the entire internet, which, if judged fairly, should bankrupt even that foul beast of a corporation.

And ironically enough, that would almost certainly “rejuvenate the internet.” As a matter of fact, I can’t think of a single thing that would do more to “rejuvenate the internet” than killing Google.

In the interest of clarity, I don’t think that Johnson quite qualifies as a hypocrite, since a hypocrite has to have something at least resembling principles, and Johnson appears to have nothing of the sort.

He appears to be an essentially complete, full-time toady, ready and willing and even eager to mouth whatever he thinks will please whoever he’s desperate to please at the moment. I don’t think he’s ever had a thought or opinion of his own in his entire life.

Not that that’s any better or anything - just an observation.

As far as Pokemon goes, I’ve always been partial to the Team Galactic battle theme from DPPT. And though “catchy” doesn’t quite do it justice, the night theme for Jubilife City, also in DPPT, is tremendous. Walking into that city for the first time at night was one of the defining moments of my video game life.

And the Shiver City theme from Paper Mario is unforgettable.

I don’t think anything will ever beat Still Alive from Portal though.

United Healthcare Group pays off Trump in 3, 2, 1…

I don’t have one.

I have a very simple process for dealing with all of this - I never check my framerate in the first place, so I never know what it is.

I just play games If there’s noticeable stuttering or lag then I maybe try to do something about it, and if there’s not, then I just play and don’t worry about it.

All I know is that Kagi triggered my scam alarms from the start, and moving into the browser market just made them ring even louder.

Very much so (and there’s at least one patient gamers community around, because I’ve posted to one).

The only advantage I can see to playing a game on release is taking part in that first rush of interest, but I’m antisocial enough that that doesn’t appeal to me anyway, so I’m not missing anything there.

Beyond that, I think playing a game at least a year or so after release has all of the advantages. The initial flurry of absolute love vs. absolute hate has died down so it’s easier to get a broad view of the quality, the game is more stable, the price is better, dlc and expansions are out and generally packaged with the game, and best of all, in this current era, I can most likely buy it from GOG and actually have the full game, DRM-free, on my system.

And there are a bajillion good games out there, just waiting for me to discover them.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.

Not to diminish either the abilities of the builders or the sincerity of the researchers, it strikes me that there’s sort of an anthropic principle dynamic going on here…

That this structure exhibits sound building techniques essentially goes without saying, since it’s still standing. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be, so researchers wouldn’t be able to study it and draw countervailing conclusions from it.

I’m entirely unsurprised.

D and D got a lot of heat for the last season of Game of Thrones, but I’ve never thought they were entirely, or even chiefly, to blame. Most of the problem really is that GRRM obviously desperately needed an editor to rein him in as the series went along, but for whatever reason, that didn’t happen. So now he has this huge, sprawling mess of a story that’s going in eighteen different directions at once, and just as D and D couldn’t manage to tie it all together, neither can he.

Most similar to Advance Wars:

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis

Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation

Shining Force:Resurrection of the Dark Dragon

Just in general:

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1 and 2

Drill Dozer

Golden Sun 1 and 2

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town

Guru Logic Champ

Metroid Fusion

Metroid Zero Mission

Medabots RPG

Klonoa: Empire of Dreams

No - it’s 27 times bigger.

A yard is 3 times bigger than a foot so a cubic yard is 3³ (3 cubed) times bigger.

I’m often reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago, with a stereotypical Einsteinish physicist standing in front of a chalkboard, looking at this enormously complex formula with a big blank space in the middle of it. Then he gets a “eureka” expression and starts writing in the blank space. Then he steps back, and you can see that he’s filled the blank space with “and then something happens”.

How is anybody even surprised by this?

This is exactly the sort of thing Beth has been moving towards ever since their first ham-handed attempt to monetize mods deservedly blew up in their faces.

They didn’t give up on the idea - they just shifted to a strategy of doing it incrementally.

And this is just the latest step in that ongoing process.

Think about how bad it’s (very deliberately) going to be by the time TES 6 finally comes out…

I would presume it’s not paid yet (though the CEO certainly is). That phase of the operation comes later.

For the moment, they’re working to solidify as much control as possible of as much of the fediverse as possible, which control will allow them to gatekeep it, monetize it, extract rent from it and inevitably enshittify it. That, so it’s hoped, will be the phase during which their investment now will pay off.