“The point of propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

How’s the PDF formatted, is it optimised for print? Because Canva has pretty fucking sloppy output normally.

My top result:

Nobara has been great. I fucked it up once and had to do a full resinstall. I also tried Mint and Bazzite but ended up going back to Nobara. Only had to go boot into Windows a few times to use some old programs but pretty much everything else has been perfect for me.

I use a dock with my steam deck. Highly recommended. I was shocked at how seamless it was as an experience.

I would argue that if you’re an Xbox gamer with no interest in PC and no interest in trying different eco-systems then yes the new ROG Xbox Ally will be your best bet. You might not get quite the same performance as the SteamOS models but you’ll have access to your GamePass, cross-buy library titles if you have any and a familiar interface.

EDIT: Woof, after seeing the ROG Ally Xbox X, there’s no way could I recommend it.

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I get what you’re saying…if that were my experience I’d be jack of it too. I’ve got similar spec and am running Nobara which is pretty much Steam OS for people with Nvidia cards. The only thing. The only thing I got really into the weeds on was setting up Plex. Which wasn’t my first preference but I couldn’t work out how to get Jellyfin to cast to my old Chromecast. Other than that though I’ve had a great experience that ‘just works’.

Fascinating case study. I hadn’t heard of this before.

Called it

Pretty much any immersive-sim, Prey, Deus Ex, Thief, Dishonored, System Shock Remake.

Probably worth doing if you can afford it

I remember when I first started working full time. The exhaustion is real. It doesn’t ever really go away but you will eventually learn to live with it.

“In a Sea Parks??”

We all know it’s actually the hyperlinked text, the buttons are a lie

I worked in advertising for over 10 years before a career change. I saw how much money was wasted on programmatic digital advertising. I’d recommend checking out the book, The Subprime Attention Crisis

‘Targeted advertising’ is shockingly untargeted. As the underpinning of our digital economy, the value of online advertising is dangerously overinflated.

What was that story warning people that if they use RedNote they’ll experience ‘Chinese style censorship’ for the first time?

US using the old if you can’t beat em approach

Aftermath is an independent worker owned cooperative. They rely on subscribers and split the funds amongst themselves.

Anyway here’s the article:

We Can’t Keep Doing This Ubisoft’s XDefiant is the latest live service game to quickly die

By Nathan Grayson 8:14 PM EST on December 3, 2024

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A major publisher launched a live-service game intended to compete with one of a small handful of industry-eclipsing giants. It did not immediately succeed to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Now studios are shutting down and workers are getting laid off. Just another Tuesday in the video game industry.

The latest victim of what’s effectively become a cycle is Ubisoft’s XDefiant – or rather, the people who made the recently-released game and, in doing so, followed management’s ill-advised edict to swipe a slice of pie from Call of Duty’s endlessly mashing maw. By many measures, the free-to-play shooter, which featured factions from a veritable rainbow of wrung-dry IPs like Far Cry, The Division, and Watch Dogs, was solid, a “perfect antidote to those tired of Call of Duty’s modern-day bloat,” according to PC Gamer. But as we’ve seen time and time again, “solid” doesn’t convince millions of people to abandon habits and communities they’ve spent years building up in whichever game rules the roost.

“Solid,” at best, inspires brief curiosity, which is why executive producer Mark Rubin was today able to boast that “we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game” while the Ubisoft mothership declared that it’s pulling the plug on the game, shutting down studios in San Francisco and Osaka, planning to “ramp down” another studio in Sydney, and potentially lay off hundreds of workers.

“Unfortunately, the discontinuation of XDefiant brings difficult consequences for the teams working on this game,” Ubisoft chief studios and portfolio officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert wrote in a post on the company’s official site. “Even if almost half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft, this decision also leads to the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney. To those team members leaving Ubisoft, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your work and contributions. Please know that we are committed to supporting you during this transition.”

This masterpiece in refusing to name the parties responsible – Where are the “difficult consequences for teams working on the game” coming from, de Waubert? Who is making these decisions? Certainly not the workers themselves – harks back to similarly grim ends met by Concord and Redfall, as well as unannounced games from companies like Blizzard and Sony that never even got the chance to launch and face off against their genre’s respective entrenched boogeymen.

The triple-A strategy of trying to muscle in on the turf of giants with just a brand portfolio and a dream, only to throw up your hands when you don’t strike gold after a few months, is a dead end. The Ubisofts of the world cannot keep doing this. And yet:

“Developing games-as-a-service experiences remains a pillar of our strategy,” wrote de Waubert, citing successful series like Rainbow Six, The Crew, and For Honor, the most recent of which began in 2017, all of which arguably tried to do something unique, and all of which were given actual time to find their footing. “It’s a highly competitive market, and we will apply the lessons learned with XDefiant to our future live titles.”