SparroHawc

A lot of people in this comments section sure seem to be.

Web developer, or business developer. A lot of inter-system communications these days is in JSON, whether there is any JavaScript involved or not.

Oh yeah it’s TOTALLY caused by Tylenol you guys we figured it out

(it is not caused by Tylenol)

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-evidence-on-tylenol-and-autism

If push comes to shove, you can heat up a screwdriver tip with the lighter, and use that to melt some of the PLA in the screw head enough to unscrew it.

That movie had no right being as good as it is. It’s STILL good, despite the 90’s camp. Or perhaps partly because of it.

None of the big studios wanted it, because they expected it would bomb at the box office, so it was funded - with only a $7m budget - by New Line Cinema, who had no interest in riding herd on the creators. The lack of executive meddling allowed them to make what they wanted to make. (And, of course, Henson did an amazing job with the turtles and Splinter.)

Release the butthole cut!

The Disney live-action movies are a prime example of taking the wrong lesson from critiques. Changes to pre-existing stories need to be done with a plot-driven purpose; the changes to Beauty and the Beast did not, the changes to Snow White would honestly have been served better with a Lord of the Rings-style treatment of dwarves what with the beards and mining obsession and all rather than just forgetting that they’re dwarves, and so when they tried to avoid changing anything at all for Moana, they made something that had no artistic purpose at all. In essence, the people behind the live-action remakes don’t know how to make a story, and when the most obvious change is gender politics, that’s what it gets blamed on. The solution is to hire good writers, not ditch the politics - because there is no such thing as art without politics.

There is an endless cavalcade of weirdness in the Indie gaming scene.

Yes, that’s why I said

We have to go to indies for that sort of experience now

Kojima is NOT an AAA studio; the fact that it’s named after a single person whose vision drives the company is proof enough of that. Larian is an AA studio that is putting out AAA-grade hits in what is normally considered a niche genre, but with none of the watered-down pandering to the lowest denominator that AAA studios have fallen into. The same could be said of FromSoftware. Owlcat DEFINITELY isn’t an AAA studio.

Using Blizzard as an example is very much a misdirection, as ActiBlizz is very much one of the biggest offenders today; of course they were great back in the day, before AAA studios became what they are now. Then they became what they are now. So is playing as ‘a cat girl sorcerer’; not only is that failing to even scratch the surface of what makes Morrowind the weird masterpiece it is, but also, I can do that in Final Fantasy 14.

CD Projekt and 4A are the exceptions that prove the rule. The publishing arm and the developing arm of CDPR are closely tied, similar to how Steam and Valve are. Even CDPR, however, has fallen afoul of some of the AAA pitfalls with the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk - they just managed to course-correct their way to victory after the fact, and were probably able to do so partly because the company is so cohesive. 4A, meanwhile, was founded specifically to avoid the money-obsessed thinking that I’m complaining about here.

Even then, I wouldn’t really call them big publishers. They don’t churn out games, they just make their own stuff.

And Nintendo, of course, is doing its own thing. They seem to be changing only as much as is necessary to stay relevant as time goes on, and it’s working for them.

Mind you, I agree with many of your points, and I look forward to the next Morrowind; it’s just probably going to take a good long while for the conditions for it to arise, and it’s not going to come from Bethesda, or ActiBlizz, or Ubisoft, or Microsoft, or Sony, or EA, or Epic. Or Valve, or 4A, because they don’t make those kinds of games. I’d include Nintendo in that list, but they made Tomodachi Life, so I wouldn’t put much of anything past them if one of their big names got a bug in their ear.

Oh dang, I gotta try that out.

Morrowind is the third Elder Scrolls game though, which means it inherited a good chunk of its weirdness. Bethesda decided to run with it and go weirder instead of leaning on well-worn tropes - whereas with Oblivion, they decided to go the opposite direction and turn the weird setting back into stereotypical Western medieval fantasy. That whole doing-the-safe-thing is one of the reasons why the big publishers are floundering right now; there’s a dearth of fresh new experiences that can’t be gotten anywhere else. And that drought is going to continue so long as the CEO’s of these companies continue to ignore the gaming side of the gaming industry and try to run it like any other tech industry. We have to go to indies for that sort of experience now - and indies can’t afford to build a sprawling, hand-crafted world like Morrowind.

I suspect the ‘You’ll never get another Morrowind’ has more to do with the weirdness of the setting and the feeling of getting lost in a strange land, rather than the number of square miles the game technically consists of.

Also, https://imgur.com/favorite-map-size-comparison-skyrim-other-games-series-B7rBN

…though I suppose you could say that 3/7ths is technically a fraction.

Morrowind is single-player…

I mean, that’s a steno mask, and anyone who’s had issues with hand pain but wants to communicate via text has probably wished for something resembling this. The problem is that they’re obnoxiously expensive. (And they look ridiculous, but that’s its own issue.)

When I’m in public, I wish people had these. I neither need nor want to listen to your phone conversations.

Cool build! …But I don’t see the photo of the game case?

In the minds of the top 1%, the world and its people exist to be exploited by them.

Entirely too many world leaders agree.

Is the name of the service a reference to anything?

What happens if you run out of space because of too many uploads that are set to never expire?

(Also it’s neat! Thanks!)

Productivity gains haven’t resulted in an increase in wages since the '70s, Bezos. Get your head out of the sand.

Less unpopular than you might think.

LLMs are an interesting and potentially useful tool; however, as it does with most things, capitalism is ruining it for everyone.

If they’re only a couple meters wide, how the heck are they supposed to fit watercraft?

It’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that Pascal’s Wager makes more sense in the opposite direction.

Let’s say that there’s a chance that there is no God, and your actions alone impact how future generations live.

With how Christians are currently behaving, their actions will result in untold misery for decades to come as countries succumb to fascism and the environment collapses.

On the other hand, if they behave in a way that would potentially benefit the lives of future generations, that is a moral good and God would approve of this behavior if he does exist.

Thus, it is more logical to act the same way as liberals and raise up the downtrodden.