It’s starting to look like Facebook comments out here

No new games

It’s still unclear to me if you are always a trio.

Is “solo” you + 2 bots?

Can you play as 2 friends + 1 bot or 1 random player?

Get some sort of speaker or use a smartphone. Play some music or video and put your volume around your talking volume, or a little louder. Then leave the room and close the door. This way you can get a sense of how much noise bleeds outside to your roommate.

Have you all received any updates about beef strogonoff lately?

Why? Did something big happen?

• Be in MS Teams meetings all day and talk with your hands
• Delegate software and system changes with confidence based on the sales pitches of vendors who over-promise and under-deliver
• Be a punching bag for executives when the solutions that were meant to save money for the business end up costing more time and money than before

I’ve heard about that and through multiplayer have been able to experience it. Honestly I prefer the base game without either DLC. Even the Void DLC is too chaotic for my taste.

The cost of doing laundry is insane. I started doing mine by hand at home.

TUNIC.

My goodness this game feels like it was made for me. I feel the magic of Zelda (LttP, maybe Link’s Awakening) and Dark Souls, and I would say the game wears those influences on its sleeve.

The game drops you into the world with no explanation. Signs are in a foreign language. You can collect pieces of the instruction manual which includes map pieces. The manual is littered with the occasional word in English, just enough to guess at what you can / need to do. There’s basically no hand-holding at all. Combat is similar in that it can be difficult if you find yourself in an area you aren’t ready for yet (like I did).

There are lots of hidden pathways, ladders and chests to find. They do a good job of showing you treasure chests and shortcuts that are just out of reach, and you have to really observe and think about how to navigate to get there. To me the world design has big Dark Souls 1 energy in that way - already I’ve had that same “omg it’s Firelink Shrine?!” experience as I explore and open up paths.

The 100 hour mark is a tough one to hit - even some of the best games I’ve played aren’t that long or replayable, and the ones that are usually cost more than $10. Still, here are some to check out if you want. I’ll list the price on Steam in Canadian dollars and my current total play time.

• The Messenger - on sale for $5.19 - 35 hours
• Infinitode 2 - Free to play - 47 hours
• Ori and the Blind Forest - on sale for $6.24 - 23 hours
• Risk of Rain 2 - on sale for $9.56 - 81 hours (new to my library, less than 1 month)
• Undertale - on sale for $2.74 - 28 hours

What about other stores?

They’re $75+ elsewhere. And I refuse to buy from sketchy “marketplace” sellers on sites like Best Buy where I see reviews saying they’re used but advertised as new, missing components, etc.

Yeah, I shouldn’t have been surprised. This is normal psychopathic behaviour for a corporation.

I tried and I got, “Wayback Machine has not archived that URL.”

You didn’t happen to take screenshots did you? It’s something that should be reported to the media as well

I wish I had thought of it. I tried the Honey extension which sometimes shows historical prices, but no luck this time. I couldn’t find any other way to double check the previous prices either.

They are ridiculously expensive to begin with, thus my waiting for a special occasion to spend that much money to get a first-party one. Here it is, probably priced lower than the others because of the ugly colour that I kind of like.

Report them

How?

I have not been able to find anything about restrictions to stop the price gouging.

It’s not all bad - now instead of saving $7 I will be saving the whole $55 since I won’t buy it!

It was so hastily-implemented that I think it’s either an oversight or by design.

It’s not confirmed afaik, but there is big motive behind it for Spotify to flood listeners with artists they don’t have to pay.

There’s also the apparent problem of third parties uploading AI slop. Spotify is putting in minimum listener requirements to supposedly deal with this, but what it will do instead is it choke out real small artists, and the AI artists will just get botted above the minimum pay threshold. To me, this gives Spotify even more motive than before to dilute all artists on the platform with their own AI music. They already make deals with large labels and podcasters, they don’t care about the other 90% of artists who eat at their bottom line.

“Spotify … anticipates reaching profitability for the full year in 2024, which would mark the company’s first full profitable year since it launched 18 years ago.”

Interesting that they anticipate a full year of profit when there is this “AI problem” plaguing them. How convenient it would be if it turned out to be their own AI artists they don’t have to pay.

"Ek said moving forward, Spotify will be more disciplined about how it spends money. “You should not expect that we’re going to go back to 2021 behavior. We want to be very resourceful,” he said. "

https://www.axios.com/2024/11/13/spotify-projects-first-full-year-of-profitability-ever

This video shows some AI artist profiles and talks about it more:

Da Colinata - Spotify’s MASSIVE Fake AI Scandal

Bandcamp is a good option for directly supporting artists for the time being, especially if you queue up all your purchases for a Bandcamp Friday, where artists/labels receive all the money rather than BC taking their 20% cut.

Not just a good option, but the best option I know of. If you buy an album for $5, that’s equivalent to the earnings for thousands of plays on Spotify. And that would be assuming the artist even gets enough total Spotify plays to qualify for their payout under the new rules.

They are stealing from artists who bring business to the platform, and using the guise of protecting themselves from bot streamers. Oh, and they recently raised the subscription price by 25% in my country. Spotify was the most satisfying subscription to cancel that I have ever cancelled.

They’re also being accused of pushing their own AI-generated slop music so that they have to pay out even less to real artists. Fuck Spotify.