The Self-Checkout Nightmare May Finally Be Ending
Admittedly, that's helped by them doing terribly at selling hardware.
But also, screw gamepass and the subscription model overall. If we're gonna crap on Ubisoft for their recent foot-in-mouth episode let's be consistent and call all of it out. I'm cool with this as long as I can keep buying these in boxes.
Oh, man, I had forgotten those were this year.
My list also includes:
Pikmin 4
Baldur's Gate 3
Spider-Man 2
Street Fighter 6
Mortal Kombat 1
Dead Space and RE4 remake
The Talos Principle 2
And I didn't even get around to Alan Wake 2, which everybody's been raving about. Or that Dave the Builder thing. Or Lies of P. Or Jedi Survivor. And I guess I'm not counting the new Prince of Persia because that's this year, technically. And I'm not into 2D Mario games, so I'm guessing skipping Super Mario Wonder makes me a bit of an outlier.
Look, I know it feels good to be jaded and edgy and cynical, but... yeah, no, it was an all-time great year for games in 2023. And a terrible year for the games industry. But the games? So good.
Meh, still a better greenlight process than most major publishers.
Well, it can't be that in the context of the story, because as it's presented, they give this test to pretty much everybody they train, including Jessica (although Mohiam clarifies that "seldom" to men).
Don't get me wrong Paul and all the other Dune protagonists don't need much encouragement to go supersaiyan on your ass, and this often comes in similar circumstances, but this particular first example seems to mostly be Paul taking his finals and things getting intense because his examiner turns the dial to eleven. In the book it isn't even that big of a deal, he just says the litany once, has the vision of his hand getting melted for like a paragraph and Moiham goes "phew, I went a bit hard on you there for a second and poofing away".
Also, this doesn't relate to anything else, but I went back to find the passage for this and man, both her and Paul are such little shits to each other in this bit. He calls her "old woman" and threatens to have her killed, she mocks him for being so privileged he has to know about poisons as a a teenager... They're so sassy, and neither movie quite nails that part.
I think the idea was that you knew that it'sa test and that you'd die if you remove the hand, so it's less willpower and more reasoning over instinct/fear, at least in theory. You have to presume the box is at least tuned to different people's pain thresholds or whatever.
Also, the text pretty much says that Mohiam is doing it wrong more or less on purpose:
"Enough," the old woman muttered. "Kull wahad! No woman child ever withstood that much. I must've wanted you to fail."
If you give the benefit of the doubt that Herbert figured out the practicalities and wasn't going by rule of cool (which he absolutely was) the implication is that the person administering the test has some control of the itnensity and you're supposed to deal with some pain you're supposed to hold, not become convinced that your hand is a charred stump like Paul is.
That, and the movie verisons amp the whole thing up a lot, so it comes across a bit differently.
In fairness, that's been phased out in many places.
I suspect less out of faith in humanity and more out of the reality that many people don't carry cash, much less change, anymore and they kept annoying the cashiers.
Yeah, at this point they're only making these because they don't make any major changes and it probably has a bunch of synergies with their camera business anyway.
Between my post and yours I actually got the belated Android 14 update for my 2021 device, which is supposed to be probably the last major update it'll get. Aaaand it's missing the one feature I was looking forward to using.
So not great, and if anybody makes a similar set of specs on a flagship elsewhere I'll move on to that, I have no brand loyalty at play here. But there's literally no other option to match in the flagship space at all. Even gaming phones have started dropping some of these common sense features.
To be clear about what I'm saying, the setup is subtitles in the same language as the audio. So if you're learning French you set French audio with French subtitles.
That REALLY helps bind the pronuntiation to the writing and it actually makes it far easier to understand the speech. Assuming you're reading the subtitles at the same time, of course.
You won't understand a lot of it, and you'll have to put up with the frustration of losing the plot often for a while, but it does help, in my experience.
Subtitles in your own native language just make you tune out the audio and read the dialogue. That's not helpful.
Is the idea to go back to having a SD card slot, dual sim and a headphone jack? No? Because that's why my last Samsung was a S10.
Oh, well, back to my Xperia. Hang in there Sony, all seven of us left still need you even if your software all comes from one intern you keep tied to a broken PS5 in the basement.
This is the answer. The answer is Netflix and Youtube. Anything with media using both audio and subtitles in the language you're trying to learn.
You still need a teacher to get you past learning enough basics of vocabulary and grammar to get started (and no, language learning apps are probably not an effective way past that) but once you have enough basic words and you understand how a sentence is put together the answer is to watch media even if you don't fully understand what's being said, paying attention and stopping sometimes to use dictionaries and translators to get you there on sentences you almost get.
I know people who spent years spinning their wheels on learning apps while refusing to sit through media in the target language because they get frustrated or tired by the effort of trying to keep up. It's a bit annoying, but it really works.
You absolutely did not, but keep guessing.
Yes.
My point stands.
Both of those things can be true at once. I don't know how much the marketing is "stupidity", ideally marketing makes you money. Execs being overpaid is absoutely a thing.
But even if you took those out games would be very expensive to make. When you have hundreds of people working on something for years numbers start to get very high. Scale is a bitch.
If it was all contract work it'd be better, probably. Devs would have representation, like actors or film directors, and they'd sign up for a project at a premium in the understanding that they're getting paid for the downtime after the project ends.
The kinda shitty part is that everybody is a full time employee but you still get frequent layoffs after projects end. That's the worst of both worlds, especially in the US where there are basically zero mandatory protections. In places with actual labor regulations it's... kinda expensive and self-defeating.
It is true that the layoffs get reported but the hires do not, so a lot of devs get rehired fairly quickly or start new projects and studios, so it always seems like there are devs getting kicked to the curb when there's a baseline of churn and cycling. That said, 2023 has been a very, very, very shitty year for the games industry for a number of reasons. Which sucks, because it's been a great year for games themselves.
According to a quick search engine query, EA had 13500 employees as of 2023. He's proposing a $50-150 monthly pay rise, which is... not much of an upgrade.
Making games is expensive, you guys.
Bricks used in houses have big air gaps in the middle (which you can also insulate if you want to, both inside and outside.
That said you can do a lot with mass. I lived in a concrete building in a place with similar extremes and it did keep the heat very well, on account of those walls being half a meter thick. The glass windows were so bad at insulation by comparison that you could sometimes feel a breeze coming from the panels even when they were fully sealed just because the inside air was dozens of degrees warmer than the glass.
Last time I was there visiting a relative I was shocked to find that the "mailbox" was just a hole cut on the door. Like, it was raining outside and they just had a big hole on the front door, which itself was just a wooden plank. May as well have blasted the heating straight out the window.
"We'll have the durability and cost solved in two years" has been in news about this for what? Five to ten years now?
That's not to say it won't get there, but I don't know enough to be able to tell the difference, honestly. You'd think half your appliances would be coated on this stuff by now, even if it's a bit more expensive. At least specialty applications would suggest some industrial readiness.
Did you miss the "no spoilers, please" bit in the OP? That's a dick move.
I get it, I do. I've been a migrant in a place with a language barrier on top of sharing that general feeling, so... yeah, sure. In principle.
But the times I've used it it's twice the anxiety, in that I keep fearing I'll mess up and need help, which is orders of magnitude worse than having to go through the register. Just the potential of issues is enough to deter me, but the times I've had the scales mess up or the payment method not go through were excruciating.