In this sense it reminds me a bit of the best souls-like games, where you have to be really working with and understanding the systems to do well, and when it comes together it feels great - the moments when you work through a difficult section with a well-laid plan and the right timing.
Re Marathon I do want to say, what you will see from all the content creators is dead-on : the game is unforgiving and only really becomes most enjoyable hours in, when you vibe with the maps and the tools and the match flow. Then you get the great stories of success or failure.
I know where they can find something like a quarter million qualified Federal employees to help with this...
Also worth pointing out, it's primary season so if you are John Cornyn, to pick someone who I think at least knows the national politics of this stuff, you need Trump specifically to support you as a candidate.
The thing that has really stuck out to me is that Trump 2.0 barely has any legislative outreach - which in turn means your only way to express dissatisfaction is votes, and the Fox/Xitter landscape makes that near-suicidal as a Republican. Plus, the Cabinet is legit insane.
(The pew-pew bang-bang is pretty damn good too)
More than anything else, I just adore the art in Marathon, the design pattern and the color choices and the sound and music, it's all so strange but cohesive, and effective at communicating what it needs to communicate. A privilege to see artists working at the top end of the craft.
And there it is - XBOX is dead, long live "XBOX on Windows"? Only way I can make this make sense is as a kind of internal sop to the hardliners who want hardware - in the PC space you are competing directly with Valve, who will have a console-like product out this year.
Extremely Trump move that Noem got rewarded for a week of eating shit on the Hill by being fired. No one treats an ally worse than Trump, once again.
I do not understand the impulse, which I now have seen widely across professional and social contexts, to contribute "here's what ChatGPT told me about this" to any conversation. I keep seeing folks do this sincerely, but I can only read it as "let me Google that for you".
I know a guy who is using the Qwen Code terminal agent to automate a lot of system administration tasks, and he's using it with a local (Qwen3) model, he doesn't even have to call out to Claude or another API endpoint.
Paul Verhoeven watching this ad, weeping and screaming ...
I expect we'll see more "foreign adventurism" from Trump as his domestic affairs are constrained by politics and the courts. The only alternative they have to telling him no is letting him order murders overseas - and I hope they all have time to sit with these decisions in the Hague.
The Rook role can be crushingly hard, you are barely surviving and are thrown into maps with full teams to lurk in the shadows. But my last run of the weekend I pulled off the fantasy, grabbing overlooked loot and escaping in the teeth of hostile players. It was great!
I would just strongly advise playing Marathon while its free, if you are at all interested in it, because each run and each play style will lead to different experiences. And I'm much more convinced now that if it succeeds, this game has a ton of room to grow.
The biggest difference is just the ambient hostility, because TTK in Marathon is so low you can't afford to wait to find out if something is hostile - and UESC and players are hard to distinguish. The loot goblin play style feels scary in Marathon, but pretty chill in Arc Raiders.
Fascinating experience playing Marathon after a lot of Arc Raiders recently, while the basic "extraction shooter" pattern is there in both games the gameplay loops and feel is totally night and day. Both are games with excellent foundations but going different directions.
Mentally he is still in the white house and it is January 7, 2021, fuming over past wrongs, and he will never leave.
It is very hard to adequately characterize the depth and breadth of these kinds of school-centered networks, and I think they are almost invisible from the outside.
Even if Trump thinks he's pulling a Putin or an Orban - Putin has to use real, hard power to enforce the ideological conformity the regime pushes out via state-affiliated TV, and Orban seems like he's about to lose an election while controlling all the major broadcast media.
I believe industry consolidation is inherently bad and should be opposed, and government should intervene to prevent these big mergers. But I don't think it is particularly meaningful whether Paramount or Netflix owns Warner. Even CNN is already pretty dreadful propaganda in my view.
And for me, as someone who mostly missed out on the right wing "autopen" obsession, it's confusing - my first read was "what are they even talking about". Maybe they just assume everyone in Florida understands the state goverments weird obsessions?
Coming off of Arc Raiders, my biggest question about Marathon is the matchmaking and the variety of experiences for team size and skill level. AR has fun, more casual loops for solo players, but can get oppressive in a 3 stack because of who you get matchmade with. Marathon may be the opposite.
One could easily get a whole thesis out of this clip - and in at least two different disciplines no less!
I really object to this use of "sectarian" as if it shouldn't be addressed - that's who Modi *is*, it's how he made his political career and how he's running India. In this sense it's exactly like Netanyahu or Trump or Putin.
The Verge's big story wasn't a comprehensive account of the leadership changes. It was a chance for people inside MS to blame someone who was heading out the door for problems far wider and older than her tenure.
(content warning for spurs fans: story includes substantial tottenham references)
In the world where RFK Jr is the head of HHS, any expectation that a computer will be able to sort out truth claims is bizarre to me. What any AI is doing is still just information processing, the "information" still comes from people - and people are frequently wrong, or liars.
I ... Don't think I believe the Platner v Collins number.
I think it's really relevant here that the files were released as the outcome of regular democratic order. Clearly there was a bipartisan sense that justice had been denied here, though of course individuals can disagree.
