It was a disaster. Trump lied for 90 minutes straight, but he did it confidently, with a straight face, and without rambling. It was a vast improvement over his stump speeches. Biden mostly told the truth, but he meandered, stammered, got mixed up, and was obviously ill. That’s just what happened.

I’m going to vote for Biden anyway, because the old man stands for policies that actually benefit me personally (and a second Trump term is a threat to the existence of the Republic). But the debate was bad for him, possibly catastrophic. His campaign desperately needs an October surprise, and at this point it’s hard to guess what it might be.

Really? Didn’t stop me…

Just cheat? Whatever happened to class cheating? In the old days if the game was too hard and you didn’t have a big brother to do it for you, you just put in the godmode code or turned on a trainer or something.

Some games are just hard. That’s what makes getting good at them feel rewarding. The Souls games haven’t really been for me either (due to the pking–not so much the difficulty), but it’s not like the game makers owe me anything.

Yeah, my bad. I forgot how cool it is to just spout whatever bullshit you want. Hurray for ignorance.

No wonder humanity is doomed.

That an opinion lacks evidence does not alleviate the requirement that its factual allegations be supported by evidence. “I don’t think the surface of the earth is curved” may be an opinion, but it’s a provably wrong assertion, and adding a disclamitory phrase to it doesn’t excuse the statement from evaluation.

Citation needed.

A pretty dress?

That’s a game of legal Russian roulette I wouldn’t want to play. Eventually he’s going to rip off the wrong person, and in the meantime all his victims have the option of sitting on their claims (SOL notwithstanding) to find out if he ever makes any money.

It’s a broad generalization, but it’s not really a matter of opinion. We can scan people’s mouths and faces when they talk (and have in order to demonstrate this stuff). I think the last example probably only applies that way in particular circumstances though, since English speakers automatically group, contract, and arrange certain phonemes in certain orders (e.g., I’m not, I ain’t, but never I amn’t–and in real speech “I ain’t” is almost always one syllable). In this example, more frequently my country ass contracts the first syllable of “gonna” away instead of the second, so “I’m 'na head to the store; y’all need anything?”

The hot potato example just stands for the premise that in real speech the t at the end of hot and the p at the beginning of potato slur together, and if you deliberately enunciate both consonants, you sound like you’re reading to a transcriber. Compare the way a normal person says “let’s go” to the way you sound if you force separate the words: you sound like you’re doing a Mario impression.

The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can’t be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.

Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. “Being unkillable” or “controlling this space” can’t be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you’re now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that’s a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.

Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you’d interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can’t punish a playstyle because playstyles aren’t that well defined, and you can’t create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There’s also no energy denial in GW2, and you can’t give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1’s mesmer–like a lot of things that were better in GW1.

If you ask me, we don’t need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs–stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have–and we need the elites to be “de-elited” so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they’ve taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Say more about this? Why is it a worse profession? Anywhere I can get a layperson-friendly deep dive on this (that doesn’t require a graduate degree in mathematics)? I’m fascinated by the nuance between niche academic disciplines and the “politics” of academia.

Windows 10 LTSC 2021 ends support in 2027 (although it doesn’t matter quite as much). And it’s likely that the Win 11 LTSC later this year will necessarily be free from much of 11’s bullshit. Linux is still the right call, but for those of us who need to run a Windows machine for whatever reason, there are alternatives, so, you know… yarr.

That was the point… Did you reply to the wrong comment?

That’s flattering, but I was actually just expecting a press release. So where is it?

She sure can’t. Sounds like all OpenAI has to do is produce the voice actor they used.

So where is she? …

Right.

Trailer’s fine–tells the story. This season was always supposed to be about correcting some of the unforced errors they committed on release. Still early to tell whether it will pan out (and this definitely isn’t everything that needs to be course corrected). I’m trying to give it a fair shake, and I’ve been having a good time so far, since I haven’t really spent much time with the game since launch other than to check in here and there. We’ll see if I still feel that way after another ten hours.

If anybody is a fan of trailer music like I am, the track is Hypersonic - Believe the Hype

AI = Absent Indians

Better late than never, but it still feels like a lot of this stuff (ahem, Codex) should have been in at launch. Unsurprisingly, we’re retreading a lot of the learning that happened in the early days of D3, and I think many of us predicted exactly that.

All the same, it’s enough to get my attention, which is more than I can say for the first three seasons. I hope it indicates movement in the right direction. If it takes a full year to “catch up” with where they left D3, that still leaves plenty of time to push the franchise forward.

Christmas.