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I still have not forgiven them for what they did to Maxis.

Now now, they innovated by turning Facebook from the way you could see what your friends were doing on your feed into algorithmically determining exactly which batshit insane ‘news’ stories from cranks and posts from crazy people would be the most effective rage bait to specifically you once they figured out that anger and rage are the most effective way to cause retention and engagement.

They basically scientifically perfected trolling, and figured out how to monetize it.

Sure it widely proliferated dangerous anti science nonsense, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, fostered the Q Anon insanity mind plague and facilitated it going mainstream, but hey, hate sells.

Same apologies to you for my edit, but again as with the other similar reply, games are not retroactively rated R 18+ unless simulated gambling is added after September 22.

Yes, if older Mario Party games were patched or updated or remastered and released in a week, they’d be R 18+, but thats probably not gonna happen, and the upcoming Mario Party game doesn’t appear to have any casino like minigames.

Apologies for editing after you replied, I have a tendency of making a quick point and then expanding on it with an edit.

Hard to copy and paste lots of shit on a shitty phone.

But basically, its not a retroactive re rating of any game unless the game is patched to add in simulated gambling or loot boxes.

While sure, Mario Party 3 has simulated gambling minigames, I doubt its getting patched any time soon, and the upcoming Super Mario Party Jamboree does not appear to have any mini games simulating a casino type game.

EDIT: sorry for another edit lol, but yes, I do think its stupid that a poker minigame with in game currency only, which cannot be purchased or redeemed for real currency, is rated worse than a game with lootboxes.

… I’m sorry, what?

Do … does any Mario Party game even have microtransactions? You know, specific game content unlocked by an additional purchase with real world currency? Much less ones where the outcome of a purchase is substantially randomized?

EDIT:

Games that feature “simulated gambling,” such as casino games, will be legally restricted to adults aged 18 and over with a minimum classification of ‘R 18+.’ Projects that were classified before September 22 won’t need to be reclassified unless they lose their current rating due to “revocation or modification.”

This sounds like it isn’t a retroactive change, its a going forward change. It’s explained further in the actual guidelines:

Situations where video games may require reclassification Video games that were classified prior to 22 September 2024, but add in-game purchases linked to elements of chance or simulated gambling content may require reclassification if adding this content is likely to affect the classification of the game. For example: – video games classified G or PG that add in-game purchases linked to elements of chance after 22 September 2024 are likely to require reclassification – video games classified G, PG, M or MA 15+ that add simulated gambling content after 22 September 2024 are likely to require reclassification

So… yeah, Mario Party games would have to be patched or re released or something to add more gambling content.

It does seem to indicate that, going forward, a Mario Party game that simulates casino like gambling would get an R 18+ rating, but the Mario Party franchise does not seem to me to have had any minigames that even sort of resemble a casino type game, even with neutered or non existent betting/staking mechanics, in about a decade.

The upcoming Super Mario Jamboree, though public info on the minigames is incomplete, also does not appear to depict any casino like games.

Thats … amazing.

Reminds me of when someone figured out that a huge part of the reason Halo Infinite takes so long to load and go between various menu screens was something like the game redownloading hundreds or thousands of the same exact image, in very high resolutions… basically instead of just pointing multiple instances of the image being used to a single file and directory, for some reason each distinct usage of this same image had its own unique directory…

Its the kind of oopsie daisy you expect from a first time modder, not some of the most expensive dev teams in the world.

Also along those lines, kind of: BF2042 has had and still does have a fundamental flaw with the engine level code for fucking mouse movement interpolation.

They never fixed it. They admitted it exists in their bug logs, but they never managed to fix one of the most fundamental parts of a shooter game, how aiming itself works.

Sex trafficking is basically when you break immigration laws and/or forcibly transport people against their will, or in some kind of unescapable debt/slavery type of arrangement, where you yourself know that the people you are illegally moving are going to be forced into sex work, often for little to no pay, often with the sex trafficked people having no practical ability to leave due to withholding their passports or bank accounts from them.

Its human trafficking + facilitating or operating a business of prostitution or non consensual pornography production.

Unless you are going to be forcing your gf into prostitution as her pimp following your out of state dinner, then no, what you have described is not sex trafficking.

If she is unhappy with going to an out of state restaurant but ultimately consents to this, and then consents to sex afterward, this is just an awkward relationship with you being pretty weird and controlling, but its probably not a crime.

If, however you threaten her or force her or drug her to get to this out of state dinner, and the do the same to coercively have sex with her without her consent, then that’s interstate kidnapping and rape… still not sex trafficking though.

I do not, could you explain it?

It’s been… about half a decade since I last played GTO.

Its broken in the sense that it doesn’t work, but it isn’t broken in the sense of oops we accidentally broke something.

They added BattleEye anti-cheat to online, without bothering to support linux.

Even though BattleEye can and does support Proton compatibility, and has for years, the developers of the game have to request or opt-in to this functionality.

But uh, Rockstar didn’t, because they don’t give a shit about linux players.

And then right wing media and talking heads run with only that news and voila the election was rigged, against them.

Ok, if its the same person with sleep apnea and two different days, then what you’re looking at is two different data views or visualizations.

The top graph is more detailed, showing many different sleep states in detail, while the bottom is a more general, summarized view of just ‘in bed’ vs ‘good quality sleep’.

Probably the bottom graph is showing a more dull green for just being in bed vs the brighter green showing either just deep sleep, or core sleep plus deep sleep.

Somehow an option has been changed so that now you’re getting the simplified/summarized view.

The facial animations are somehow still wooden and lifeless as fuck, despite Half Life 2 doing significantly better fucking 20 years ago…

… so, acting wise, you don’t even need a mod for Tommy Wiseau levels of quality.

According to a recent FD Signifier video, they have already purged him and a whole ton of other people (cough probably black people cough) from voter rolls in Georgia, he said that hadn’t happened to him in nearly a decade, gotta re register, and of course they don’t tell you if you’ve been purged, that onus lies on you to figure out.

Its already illegal to hand out water to people in line for polls.

I would be entirely unsurprised if say I dunno maybe your scenario happens… or maybe they just call in a bunch of bomb threats to polling locations in blue areas, seems to be doing a good job of shutting down Ohio at the moment.

Judging from what I’ve seen so far from reports which are early and incomplete, I would eduguess that Mossad basically intercepted a particular brand of these ‘pagers’ known to be used by Hezbollah, put small bombs in them and wired them in such that they could be activated by a broadcast signal, and probably a lot of non Hezbollah people who just happened to buy this model of ‘pager’ in the target areas and timeframe for introduction of these tampered device onto the market also got an exploding hot pocket.

Is this data from the same person?

If yes, probably some kind of error is going on, idk what though.

If no, the upper person has sleep apnea.

EDIT: Ok on second look these are two different graphs, presumably of the same night… with the upper one likely tracking heart rate and movement to guess at sleep stage, and the bottom just… location in bed vs some level of deep sleep?

Yeah I don’t know, either its configured wrong, its not sensing correctly, or you have sleep apnea.

A decade ago I was contracting for MSFT as a database admin / data analyst.

A far older and more experienced contractor told me that he had been part of a team in Saudi Arabia, in 1990, that intercepted computer and electronic equipment bound for Iraq’s air defense command and control systems, flashing the firmware with exploits and backdoors as fast as they could before they were sent to Iraq.

Supply chain interception has been a thing for a while.

EDIT: This is a total off topic aside, but hearing about and seeing shit like that at the various tech jobs I’ve worked is why I laugh when people say ‘oh but alexa only activates on keywords’ or ‘no its totally impossible for phones to listen to your convos and then give that data to advertisement systems’.

Call me paranoid, I don’t care: If you don’t have a hardware disconnect for your microphone and personally have the source code to every bit of software, at every level, then we just have to take the giant tech corpos at their word.

So I wasn’t there for 2042. I don’t know what the rationale was, but for me, it’s like the team tried something new.

The rationale was to make a 128 player battle royale ala PUBG or Fortnite. You know, shameless trend chasing!

It was supposed to basically be a spin off, non mainline BF game with the potential to be the next big thing while the next mainline game was being produced, but that only works if BF5 has staying power.

Which it did not.

And EA want MONEY, BIG MONEY ASAP!

So then BF2042 got massively reworked in a tiny amount of time to try to make it into a mainline series game by throwing a ton more developers at it than originally planned, ending up as a rushed, buggy, undercooked mess with tons of crap (half baked half reworked game modes) thrown at the wall to see what stuck.

That is why distinct armies were replaced with a cadre of mercenaries, as well as the entire 2042 timeframe setting in a world where nation states had basically collapsed already.

It is also why the maps are gigantic and seem like they were designed for a battle royale.

I’m guessing also their original plan was to have the much hyped dynamic weather systems serve a similar function as the the closing force fields or bubbles of death that battle royale’s have to force players into conflict and games to eventually end, but they couldn’t actually figure out how to make that work.

Any questions Vince?

May I suggest you take up learning a martial art?

Not sure what they’re like in your area, but when I learned Karate as a kid in the 90s/00s, everyone was treated according to their skill level and discipline, gender/sex is irrelevant (beyond cups for guys and thick sports bras for gals).

Its not likely to make you bullet proof, but it does stand a decent chance at bettering your physical and mental health, give you more options when a gun is not part of the scenario.

Also, I would second the notion of going to a range and signing up for basic pistol and rifle familiarization, as well as basic medical training, unless you legitimately are totally terrified of firearms or have some kind of trauma or PTSD related to them.

Such courses usually provide you with firearms for the course, you don’t own them or take them home, they stay at the range. You just learn the basic principles of operation and safety and shooting technique, under hopefully an extremely serious couple of range masters who will hopefully teach you to treat all guns as if they are loaded until you have personally verified they are not, and to never, not even accidentally, point the barrel of a gun at something you do not intend to destroy.

You don’t need to go buy a gun first and not trust yourself with it.

In fact usually a novice shooter is going to want to experiment a bit with different calibers and guns with differing grip styles and weight distributions untill you find something comfortable to shoot.