You mean like Tomb Raider?

Why is it suddenly OK to have an attractive female main character? Doesn't that set 'unrealistic expectations' or some other such tripe?

Or is it only OK when it's desecrating and replacing a male protagonist - as it is in Witcher 4? Strange, I thought only men could be witchers. That's not part of the canonical lore or anything (due to the specific mutations witchers undergo)...

Realistically, these 'parental leave' benefits were/are primarily a gender discriminatory benefit : primarily, women will take them, and hoist that burden on their male coworkers.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but most of the AWS services aren't particularly special. There's hundreds of them, and most of them can be summarized as "devops integrations with our web UI of open source platforms". It seems they've got a very Enterprisey process once that product is released, and each new feature gets squeezed out of a rock very slowly. Past initial release of a service, very little actually seems to change, unless it's to add something which leads to you spending more money.

But what do you do for the other 5 hours of your day? If you can't find time to do your work, that sounds like a time management problem... we'll put you under review...

Don't be disingenuous.

It isn't the 45-minute training (which is, in actuality, the better part of a week of training spread out over the span of your first 6 months at Amazon, with regular 'updates'), it's the maxim to do the things in that training to perfection or suffer the consequences of termination and/or a lawsuit.

At Amazon, it's like being brainwashed into Animal Farm. You need to not only treat people equally, you've got to treat the special people with extra difference and preference. This is quite evident (and documented industry-wide, not just at Amazon/AWS!) in their hiring and promotion process, with white men being washed out in favor of the melanated and the rainbow mafia.

Did you include the energy used to fight and justify the petrodollar wars? IIRC the USD has largely propped up by the price of oil for the past 70 odd years.

Our local 'discount' theater does that. Tickets are still like $8/each, and they only get older films (so about 6 months delayed 'official' release, I think). But they often have older films and do movie nights for cult films, and things of that fashion. If I go to the theater, it's there.

The age of cinema as a significant art form - one of cultural significance - has passed.

We're ~20 years out from the era when movies were of significant artistic value. This is due to several factors, but since Netflix took over with direct-to-home DVD rentals it's been downhill ever since.

* Movie budgets have gotten pinched and funding for the kinds of movies that were possible in the 90s and early 00s (think: Shawshank Redemption, The Matrix, Braveheart, Gladiator, Donnie Darko - and many many others).
* Computers have made it increasingly easy to do special effects. This has resulted in quality story being supplanted with special effects, because it's cheaper.
* Traditional values like "good" and "bad" are politically untenable so "moralizing" films with heroes have to be stereotyped and downplayed. (Think: Marvel).
* Film production has gone international. There's now a bigger market for movies outside the US, and as such they have to appeal to international sensibilities.

There are many others, but those are the big ones I've seen, and why anything worth watching tends to be in a long format show variation anymore. It's been years since I've seen a movie I even want to watch. As someone who went to school for film, this is really disheartening.

Nah, you're out of your mind.

You can get an AMD NUC type box for $350 that'll blow the latest Xbox/PS platforms out of the water at half the cost and be a capable desktop computer. Hell, you'll even get AI capabilities.

Case in point: Counter-Strike has been one of, if not the, most popular game of all time.

It's effectively the exact same game it was in 1998. Slightly different engine (Source 2 instead of Source), slight variations in the maps and gameplay dynamics, but otherwise the same game. People still play it, regularly, because it's good. Counterstrike 2 is still the most played game.

Dota 2? It's a game mod, or at least started that way (IIRC, as a Starcraft or a Warcraft 3 map type). Second most played game on Steam.

PUBG? It's 7 years old and is #3 on steam. There's a mobile version too, that's heavily played. As far as I can tell, the game mechanics haven't changed at all (or negligibly so) in my casual gaming.

A very large percentage of the top games are not "latest, greatest" tech big studio games. They're small studio, hobbyist, or older games.

That's because a certain demographic, which is not particularly good at story or tech but has been disproportionately represented in media for decades, has been able to get into game development due to -

- an absence of competition (which happens in all fields when male representation drops below about 60%)
- low pay for game developers (ie not a lot of job competition)
- the ease with which games can be developed now (vs having to code game engines from scratch, 10+ years ago)
- large media conglomerates running things as a massive money-printing bureaucracy instead of the more auteur small game studios of yesteryear.

I'm not sure which of the above came first, but it's how we got to where we are now.

There were games in the late 90s with better 'world engine' physics than what current FPS games present. That was the big talk for a long time: we would soon be able to have fully destructible worlds.

Instead, we just got higher poly count cutscene cinematics and 90 minutes of gameplay. Some time later, extremely low polygon builder games came about with fully destructible environments (eg. minecraft/blockcraft and similar).

We're still not there yet for most games. We haven't even gotten back to the "oh look, I can flush the toilet" levels of interactivity that were possible in Duke 3d in 1995. The NPC interaction in Cyberpunk 2077 isn't as good or as immersive as what was in Deus Ex in 1999 (with similar levels of animation, tbh). Command and Conquer: Red Alert (1998?) still surpasses most current RTS games for playability.

The real "ceiling" for games was hit years ago, and it really has very little to do with FPS, resolution, graphic shaders or any of the tech.

That ceiling is the quality of the underlying game - the gameplay, which is a combination of writing, game mechanics, music, and any number of other things. There are games from the early 90s with story and MIDI 'soundtracks' that I can recall almost instantly simply because they were good, immersive games. You kept opening avenues for exploration as the game progressed; the sum of the game wasn't largely explored in 2-3 hours.

The tech itself was 'good enough' for most games right around the time that the games started getting horrible, too - I'd say around 2003-2008 timeframe. There are absolutely exceptions, but that's when the console FPS graphics bonanza took off and started nerfing the quality of literally every game and franchise, and the game industry started trying to pump out endless titles of the same derivative thing without an attention to quality. They simply rely on the tech to make up for it.

Maybe part of it is nostalgia on my part - almost certainly. But you can't tell me that there are many games releasing games with playability like Civilization anymore (not many) - even Civilization isn't as good (though there are games like Stellaris, which is the only exception I can think of in that genre). FPS games are dull and derivative, and the story in long format single player games has become horrible and breaks the third wall constantly. The number of 'good' titles seems to have been narrowed down to 1-2 every several years, as opposed to several annually - despite the very significant increase in number of games and developers producing them.

Even games like Cyberpunk 2077, which in its -current- version is an enjoyable game, took 2 years after release to get there. The first iteration was basically unplayable and had the gameplay and world depth that didn't compare with even the original Grand Theft Auto.

I work with a team of such people responsible for salesforce dev.

When they get to the change tickets (it can take a couple months), they're just suddenly implemented. The only way I can usually tell that the work was 'finished' is either the case being closed, or running into some other random bug in the UI that wasn't there before - because the requested work wasn't actually done, and a bug was implemented in its place.

It's hilarious how the left has suddenly rediscovered Orwell, now that Trump is making appointment declarations.

Where've you been for the past 4 years?