Which is a shame, because classic Luthor had extremely valid concerns about ceding ultimate power to someone you can't take it back away from. He used to be one of the most sensible "villains" I knew of.
I love those in particular just because of how absolutely inescapable they are. If the Hounds are hunting you then you're going to be found. Period, done, end of story. You can't exist in a place that has geometry without throwing open a door for them.
I'm sure at least one mad wizard has sealed himself inside a perfect spherical prison with no corners only to find that the Cornerhounds don't much care what corners they come from, and your knees and elbows work just fine if better solutions aren't available.
I buy things in early access for just such a reason. If it looks like something I'll like, I'll buy it early to support development. If it's great then great. If it falls through then I'm out a bad investment of like, $10.
I've got probably a hundred indie games in my library that I've supported in exactly such a fashion, from raw pre-alpha to 1.0 release to post-release content update or dlc. They aren't all winners. But many of them were worth the cost of investment and then some.
From what I've been able to gather, it's basically a sandbox. Imagine if F:NV had no main quest but allowed you to create your own faction. You're just unleashed onto the wasteland to do whatever and let everyone else respond to it.
That is to say, much of the fun comes from building drug running bandit empires.
I like Lex Luthor as a villain a lot more than I like Superman as a hero for exactly this reason. He's a villain, sure, but his villainy is all centered around this one highly logical and concerning idea of never giving Superman total power because they'd then never be able to take it away from him.
Dr Doom I straight up don't even consider a villain tbh. He's antihero at worst (though he'd be pissed to hear me say so). His subjects love him. A bit megalomaniacal, maybe, but he genuinely wants to rule the world to do what's best for everyone.
If Fantastic wants to fight you because he thinks it's the right thing to do, and Doom wants to fight you because he thinks you're destroying his property, I know which one I'm putting my bet on because I know which one is going to show up to that fight more pissed off. His reasons are weird but Doom does still frequently show up to fight the bad guys, if for no other reason than "this is my fucking planet and I won't have you breaking the place". I love that.
Their problems are smaller than us adults', but they feel those problems with the same intensity we do. Being ostracized from your social group is a big problem even for adults. It's worse for kids.
And kids, being kids, will bandwagon the hell out of anything. If somebody clowns on your shoes every day, give it a week and half the school will be doing it. Give it a year and you're "that guy with the shoes".
Is your brand of shoes important in the long term? No, not at all. Your social status in high school also, largely, doesn't matter in the long term. But "the long term" is difficult to keep your eye on when you're looking at 4-8 years of pointless bullying in your future.
All this to say - yeah I think this is pretty dumb, but it's important to the people who are living it. And something that's important to a child should also be important to their parents, in my opinion. I was the kid with the ratty shoes and the hand-me-downs. That stuff can really do some permanent damage to a kid's psyche.
Does this mean that every middle schooler needs to have a fresh set of Jordan's and a fitted suit every year? No, of course not. But if I can spend an extra $50 once every two years to make my son happy then why wouldn't I?
All it takes is for one determined furry to pull up their programming socks and hack into Truth Social and start posting under Trump's name and we'll see that dry up real quick, unless he wants to make all his official announcements surrounded by uwu's and lewd pictures of Pokémon.
Dollars to donuts it's going to be stupid easy to do as well, because Trump is incapable of hiring competent employees or of paying whoever he does hire.
Look man, we work with what we've got. We just stuck to the struggle a little longer than everyone else did.
There was a time in our history when America had a very rich and robust set of independent culinary practices, homestead food adapted from whatever cuisine that particular family or community brought with them to America, cooked out of whatever you could rustle up locally. A lot of that disappeared when grocery stores and mass production of food became practical and available. But the Cajuns, being the stubborn French children that we are, just decided nah, we'll keep cooking up the gators and the sea bugs. I don't need to go buy meat from the butcher when I can literally take a rifle twenty paces out my back door and sight three gators with it. Hell we had to kill a gator once that I wasn't even hunting, but he came up on our property and tried to pick a fight with my dog. Well, now we have this big old dead gator laying in the yard. What do we do with it? You skin him and cook him, obviously.
This was in 1999. I haven't lived there in a while but I'd bet my left nut stuff like that is still happening down there.
We still like the grocery store because you can't go hunt up a case of Pabst out of the bayou, but some combination of the fact that a) cuisine is a big part of our culture, b) hunting your own food is cheap, and c) most parts of Louisiana have been poor as hell since the beginning of recorded history - all comes together to mean that the local cuisine has remained weird for a lot longer than most other places in America. It also means these same local recipes have been being perfected for 200 years. Your meal might be gator tail garnished with frogs and topped with a sauce you can't pronounce, but it will be god damn delicious and that's a promise.
[...] because they don't allow you to run older versions of games.
They do if the dev makes it available, I'm looking at four different versions of Terraria in the beta menu right now that stretch back four major versions. I'm pretty sure a couple games in my library somewhere have their entire update history in there, though I can't think of one to name off the top of my head right now, that's not a feature I use very often. [Edit: Rift Wizard is one that does precisely this, I knew I had at least one in here]
This is not true of all games, but it could be, either directly by game devs without Valve even having to care, or via pressure by Valve by just making older versions available whether the devs want it or not. I think the latter option is probably the better move, but there's technically nothing stopping the former other than the game devs themselves.
There's also a valid argument that making downpatching very easy would be a huge boon to piracy. This is a reasonable talking point no matter which side of that fence you sit on. It would also probably benefit modding as well, which I think is a more objective good but some game developers or more likely publishers would probably disagree.
skulblaka @ skulblaka @sh.itjust.works Posts 4Comments 1,350Joined 2 yr. ago
Which is a shame, because classic Luthor had extremely valid concerns about ceding ultimate power to someone you can't take it back away from. He used to be one of the most sensible "villains" I knew of.