Por que no los dos?

Reading further, it’s a pretty compelling argument that sanctions are the root cause, and this kind of instability and pressure is exactly what sanctions are meant to bring about.

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I think it would probably become “2X” in that case, given the “exploit” and “exterminate” parts. :P

Against the Storm is sort of a citybuilder/ 4X hybrid, that’s all about a bunch of fantasy species (humans, beavers, lizards, foxes, and harpies) working together to reclaim the world from this (un)natural blight.

The Bustling World is an RPG/ Citybuilder/ 4X hybrid that looks pretty interesting, but is not out yet.

I can’t really think of a 4X that leans towards the Grand Strategy side, that isn’t pretty combat-heavy. Distant Worlds: Universe can be played without focusing on combat, but it’s definitely still there.

I’ve played 8.2 hours of BO:BB according to Steam, and it feels much closer to the OG Ghost Recon ( +Desert Siege and Island Thunder)… BUT right now the AI is pretty mediocre (and often breaks entirely and enemies just sort of stand there), and the shooting doesn’t feel as good as Ready or Not.

Incursion: Red River is a singleplayer + co-op extraction shooter that feels very Ghost Recon.

holy shit, fucking MICROPROSE is still around!? LETSGOOOOOOOO

Little side-tangent, but @trslim@pawb.social if you like base-building RTSes, you should check out Earth 2150 if you have not already. It’s old, but it’s imo one of the best out there.

• There are 3 factions, each with their own campaign, and very different styles of units, and during the campaign you have a home base that you build, and from which you can build and send out units to your in-progress missions (i.e. build a tank in your homebase, load it into a helicopter, send the helicopter to your in-mission base’s landing zone, and unload tank for use… and vice-versa for keeping units that you build in the mission zone, etc).
• Eurasian Dynasty is very traditional tanks and helicopters, and ballistic weapons
• United Civil States is bipedal walkers and sleek hovering aircraft, and uses energy weapons
• Lunar Corporation is space-y hovercraft with arcing, electric weapons and AOE pulse weapons
• There’s tunnel-building and tunnel warfare, which is so damn cool…
• There’s unit customization, like choosing the types of weapons for the tanks, building giant bipedal walkers with 3 different weapon systems, etc
• There are aircraft and boats, not just ground units
• You are using the resources you farm in the mission locations to construct a giant colony ship to escape from Earth, which is a great mechanic to give you a reason to actually extract resources other than just to build more units

Now I have to go reinstall it… xD

There are also Earth 2140 and Earth 2160, but I never fell in love with those 2 (Earth 2160 isn’t bad, and has a cool alien faction that is basically a roaming mothership that builds units, rather than a traditional ‘base’).

Ooph that’s rough… :(

Sadly true.

Not to take away from the importance of voting Harris today (or hopefully, prior to today), but this:

We can eventually have that conversation as a nation, but in the '90s, when I lived in Germany, it was still considered gauche to be proud to be German. Is that the 50 years you want going forward here?

feels out of touch. It’s already gauche in most progressive circles to be proud to be American (What are you proud of? The settler-colonialism? The Imperialism? The choice to back genocide? The still-haven’t-abolished-slavery-ism?). Lots of us know that this supposed “eventual” conversation will never actually come. We’re never going to get the country to move to RCV or abolish the electoral college, if we forever stick to the parties who directly benefit from the status quo.

Vote Harris today if you can, people, because it’s too late for anything else this cycle, but we have to stop this spiraling descent rightwards by adhering to a party that would rather lose Leftists than “Centrists”. As people who care about social justice and progressive politics, we should be abhorred that our platform is palatable enough to Dick The-Fucking-War-Criminal Cheney to get his endorsement.

For every person claiming that we’ll eventually totally have the conversation about the party platform, there’s another Centrist Democrat who is saying, “No, actually, the party doesn’t need to move leftwards… It’s always been a lesser of 2 evils choice… Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good by drawing hard lines like not supporting genocide…”.

Republicans unshackled themselves from their Centrist arm of “respectable” anti-social-justice goons to fully embrace their white supremacism in the open, and those goons have now taken up residence in the Democratic Party in response.

If we’re just fundamentally unwilling to consider unshackling ourselves from them, we’re never going to stop the rightward-shift happening now. We didn’t move Leftwards in the 60s because our politicians led us there, people protested and rioted and made people uncomfortable until they acquiesced and got off their asses. And unless Citizen’s United gets overturned, that route isn’t going to work within the Democratic Party, because the police are now powerful enough to keep protesters from actually making politicians feel uncomfortable enough to choose their constituents over their corporate donors.

At the risk of not be(e)ing kind, unless you can give me a timeframe for when “eventually” is, you are part of the problem, providing cover and excuses for our rightward shift as a country.

We got Bush instead of Gore because of 700 votes for Nader in Florida.

No, Gore likely had more votes (if they had performed a statewide recount). We had Bush (and Cheney the now-Democrat) because SCOTUS stepped in to stop the recounts, and the Democratic Party chose to “keep the peace” instead of fighting it. Just like they will every time.

Not friendly enough when talking to customers? Bad employee.

Too friendly when talking to customers? Bad employee.

This is just about 1) creating an algorithmic justification for the racial profiling that managers already do, and 2) keeping employees in fear of termination so they put up with bullshit.

Side story about how shitty retail management is:

When I was working retail years ago (big box electronics store), our management employed a system of getting every new employee to 3 write-ups as fast as they could (I’m talking, within a month of starting), using literally any excuse they could, so they could hold the “one more write-up and you’re fired” over their head.

“AI” is definitely going to become a new tool for employee suppression.

“I am Iraqi, and I am also American, and Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”

Us Millennials and GenXers are old now. :P Fortnight used to be a kids game, because GenZ were still kids. Now they’re adults, and Fortnite ain’t a GenAlpha game.

or the outrage over the non-endorsements is contrived, irrational, and/or self-important; an embarrassing freak-out

I think it’s more that most ‘normies’ never actually thought we’d get here (this close to an open autocracy), and this is the clearest indicator to most of them that autocracy is rapidly arriving, and now they’re freaking out. Obv the capitalist class was always going to align with an autocrat rather than risk their wealth, and never should have been allowed to run newspapers, but here we are.

I think you and CrimeDad are kind of talking past each other.

Since they’re now showing signs of obedience to Trump in fear of being punished, important scholars are pointing out that it’s a huge problem with a long history in the collapse of democracies into autocracies.

I think this is simply the intrinsic interplay of the capitalist class and autocrats, though. They (millionaires, billionaires, etc) will, as a group, always protect themselves first when an autocrat comes along.

You are looking at the situation and saying, “Well, them kowtowing is clearly evidence that an autocrat has come along, because when it’s not an autocrat they don’t kowtow”, and CrimeDad is looking at it and saying, “Yes, but they’re just the indicator, they should never have been expected to try to stop this. They just intrinsically will align themselves with autocrats in order to maintain their positions of power, but despite that we’ve allowed them to take control of a core protection of our democracy (press freedom)”.

Go fashy, get bashy

We’re a security engineering group (other 2 teams are Compliance and SOC), so we do security automation, vuln mgmt, binary/ malware analysis, web app testing, SIEM management, level 2+ IR, etc. Basically anything that requires using a shell, or scripting. Right now I’m doing prep for a FedRAMP ATO attempt, so lots of image build pipeline work, prepping for ConMon reporting, etc.

Definitely interested in hearing what y’all are about (and I am in the US).

That’s awesome, thank you for that!

The short form ones go on insta and tiktok.

It’s important to distinguish between why a company offers a service, and what people use the service for. TikTok gets used for lots of content that doesn’t go viral, and that doesn’t try to chase the algorithm.

You heard them, you’re in charge of video hosting now.

There is no such thing as a form of media that is only applicable to a specific scale of use. Long form and short form media is useful to large and small groups.

For example, my partner coaches high school policy debate, which has long form video training content, short form content (30 seconds - 5 minutes) like clips from tournament rounds or practices, for recruitment, and very short form (1 - 30 second) clips that are mostly memes.

Their shorter form content is explicitly meant not to be viral, it’s purely for their school, and other kids in their debate league. Most of it’s not even parsable by non-debaters. It’s only useful to their small community, but that’s what they want.