I don’t get it

As an aside, I always hated how Dems completely caved on the terminology of the ACA. They should’ve been saying the words “Affordable Care Act” at every turn, keeping the actual goal of the whole thing more in the popular consciousness. Going along with calling it “Obamacare” implicitly accepted the GOP’s framing of the bill and allowed them to more easily control the narrative.

I looked it up, and it’s apparently closely related to the datura genus, so that doesn’t surprise me lol

If that’s datura, which it looks to me like it is, you don’t want any part of it. It’s pretty much universally regarded as giving one of the worst, most unpleasant trips imaginable, and its effects last at least 24-48 hours or even longer. It’s also just outright toxic depending on the dosage. It’s just not worth it.

The DLC car packs contain exclusive cars that cannot be obtained elsewhere. The weekly cars are often “hard-to-find” in that they are generally not available elsewhere until they re-run them, but apparently, now that the game is late in its content cycle, they’ve also added a “backstage pass” thing recently, which allows for easier acquisition of some previous “hard-to-find” vehicles.

There are a ton of base-game vehicles that are not exclusive to any particular time or event. Many can be obtained in the Autoshow, which you spend in-game credits to buy cars outright, or in wheelspins, which are basically lootboxes, but they hand out free spins like candy, to the point where I never felt any pressure to buy more. Most spin reward cars are pretty cheap on the auction house anyway (which also uses in-game currency, no IRL money or anything).

When did that happen? I thought the paid DLCs were the Hot Wheels and Rally expansions, plus the car packs. I don’t remember them locking out previously free content, unless that happened within the last year or two since I stopped playing…

I actually had a lot of fun at first with FH5 in the exact same position. The unlocks flow fast and there’s a ton of stuff to tinker around with and explore, and the racing itself is very beginner-friendly. The difficulty settings and assists are very granular and can be fine-tuned to suit your skill level.

I particularly appreciated that it avoided a linear progression system and didn’t make you start off on the slowest cars and slowly work your way up to the good ones, as it’ll give you some insane hypercars right off the bat. The upgrade system and vehicle tiering also ensures that the “slower” cars are never truly obsolete. You can drive what your like, and the game never punishes you for it (in singleplayer, at least).

However, once I got through most of the single player content available, I started to sour on it at a certain point. The constant drip feed of new content in the weekly challenges was fun at first, but felt like a chore after a while, and it definitely takes advantage of FOMO, as the new unlocks in a given week are exclusive to that week and can’t be obtained anywhere else, unless buying them from another player at often exorbitant rates. They do re-run previous exclusive vehicles in the secondary challenges sometimes, but there’s no telling how long you’ll have to wait for a particular car to come around again if you miss it the first time.

So yeah, your mileage may vary, so to speak, but I did put something like 300-400 hours into it before I dropped it for good, and I don’t regret most of that.

I’m cis male, and I think I do a better job of it than many, though I think there are some lingering effects of cultural expectations and upbringing that don’t always make it easy.

The Wii might’ve had higher sales at its peak, but PS2 had a lot of longevity.

I dunno, I think it’s wheely good.

I don’t know much about the restoration projects, but if you’re willing to wait until February, Disney is bringing back the original 1977 cut to theaters. https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-50th-anniversary-theatrical-release

Lack of adoption of ray tracing is one thing, but halting development on a 6-year-old tech demo is completely reasonable on all fronts. They aren’t even delisting it from Steam or anything, it’s still fully playable.

I didn’t even realize they even had any active development on Q2RTX up to this point… Six years is a long time to support what’s basically a novelty tech demo.

Wait, what’s the gore here?

Every MAGA accusation is a confession.

I don’t know, what does a mockingbird sound like?

If his soul could be captured without a black soul gem, that implies that Mr. Beast is not even human at all, but some mysterious creature capable of mimicing the human form.

I suppose the name was a bit of a dead giveaway, huh?

I was always disappointed that they bound the skillbar to weapon types and removed secondary professions in GW2. The possibilities for character builds were virtually endless in GW1’s system, and you could make your character really feel like your own. I did play GW2 for a while, and it was fun in its own ways, but the original still holds much more nostalgia for me.

AI’s tendency to hallucinate means that for it to be actually reliable, a human needs to double-check all of its output. If it is being used to acquire and convey information of any kind to the prompter, you might as well just skip the AI and find the information manually, as you’d have to do that anyway to validate what it told you.

And AI hallucinations are a side effect of the fundamental way in which generative AI works - they will never be 100% accounted for. When an AI generates text, it is simply predicting what word is likely to come next based on its prompt in relation to its training data. While this predictive ability has become remarkably sophisticated within the last few years (more than I thought it ever would, tbh), it is still only a predictive text generator. It’s not “translating,” “understanding,” or “comprehending” anything about whatever subject it has been asked about - it is merely predicting the likelihood of the next word in its response based on its training data.

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