I really enjoyed Weird West. It mashed up immersive sim elements with Divinity-inspired isometric sandbox combat. Lots of really cool world building.
Rough around the edges in a few places and probably a little ambitious in scope for the size of their team, but overall a pretty solid and fun title for a new indie studio.
tl;dr definitely interested in seeing what they do next.
Pretty astoundingly clueless take from the author of the article:
Procreate’s statements may align it with some gen-AI critical artists, but it is in my view, a little odd and inconsistent of a stand to take for a brand that readily embraced other disruptive tech — such as touchscreens and styluses and pixels — that also competes with more traditional art techniques (e.g. painting or drawing on paper).
In addition, the idea that by rejecting gen AI, Procreate is supporting “human creativity” is a little bit of a straw man argument to me, since humans also still need to enter the prompts and adjust them — sometimes many times — to create images with gen AI applications as well. Even in the case of gen AI software, humans are still driving it.
Clover is so beneficial that pre-WW2, grass seed mixes almost always explicitly advertised clover content. If you look up 19th or early 20th century catalogs, etc, listings for grass seed will nearly always not only mention that they contain a clover mix, but tout its benefits.
As you note, it was only post-war with the creation of modern herbicides that clover stopped being the norm. There was more or less a DeBeers-style PR campaign to convince people that clover is a "weed" since it can't survive weed killers.
The spots that our dogs have destroyed clover, they had destroyed the grass anyway. And that's under an old magnolia tree where everything struggles anyway. The rest of the back yard is fine.
The Fairness Doctrine is a red herring in the conversation either way. Even if it hadn't been rescinded, it would have eventually become irrelevant.
The Fairness Doctrine only ever applied to radio and TV broadcasters, i.e., broadcasters operating using the limited, publicly owned radio spectrum. It was only Constitutionally enforceable because it was intended to ensure equal access to what was essentially a public space.
Cable TV and the Internet turned that completely on its head. Attempting to regulate speech over a privately owned medium is a very, very different legal hill to climb. The most problematic sources of misinformation and bias today tend not to be AM radio but things like NewsMax or Libsoftiktok.
It's a huge problem, but it's not one the Fairness Doctrine would solve.
Political lobbying is kind of inherently political, no? They weren't passive observers or commentators; they hired lobbyists to influence the legislative outcome.
Actively working to shape the legal structure of the country to better suit their company is politics. It's different from culture war politics, but it's still politics.
If anything, economic politics are what traditionally drove a lot of the political divide in this country. That's taken a back seat to a degree, but it hasn't made it not political.
they didn't want their non-political national brand associated with extremely politically decisive right wing media
Worth noting: Dunkin is owned by Inspire Brands, who went out of their way to toot their own horn about how they were successful in lobbying to kill inclusion of a minimum wage hike as part of COVID relief:
So they're perfectly happy to take political positions; they just recognize these platforms are even more radioactive than bragging about opposing living wages for their workers.
Further, Inspire is owned by Roark Capital -- a company literally named after an Ayn Rand character. That's how far out in the loonie bin these folks are. And the MAGAs are too far over the line even for them, lol.
The BSG reboot really suffered from being a product of its era.
It's when shows were first really dipping their toes into telling an overarching narrative, but writer's rooms were still very much geared toward producing stories of the week. The result was that a lot of shows at the time would start incredibly strongly, set up a lot of really interesting premises, and then just meander along because the writers were literally making things up along the way and because there was no coherent plan.
Know how Game Of Thrones fell apart in the last couple of seasons when they outran the preplanned narrative of the books? That's how a lot of TV ended up in the early 2000s. BSG and Lost are probably the two most prominent examples from around that time, but it was a pretty common problem as the format of TV shows was starting to change.
The entire system is deeply corrupt beyond false positives.
We know for a fact that Russia was systematically cheating testing and the grand sum of the punishment they faced for it was having to compete as "Olympic Athletes from Russia" for two years.
So Kamala was also invited to speak, but she had to be at a funeral and couldn’t come. She offered to do it on Zoom, but the NABJ declined. To me this is more an indictment of them
I'm willing to give them a pass on this because Trump complained that he had wanted to do the interview remotely and they had also declined for him.
It sounds like the ground rules for both included "it has to be in person" and the NABJ stuck to their guns on that.
It also helps that their attempts to redirect back mostly serve to highlight their weird preoccupations.
Things are happening like a former Trump speechwriter posting "Emmett Till was weird" on Twitter because they can't comprehend just how unhinged and generally weird saying something like that is to a normal person.
Or they think they're being clever flipping the script and ranting about "boys saying they're girls is weird." "Why do you spend so much time obsessing over what children have in their pants? That's really weird."
It all puts them in a bind. If they try to defend what they're saying as normal, it's very clear that it isn't. If they try to deflect with what they think is weird, it just shows how detached they are from normal reality. It's a surprisingly effective line of attack that largely neutralizes their normal gish galloping.
It's less that it's common platform and more that it's literally Toyota designed and built in Toyota factories.
Similarly, the Toyota GR86 is a Subaru with a Toyota badge. It's built on a Subaru platform out of Subaru parts and every single one of them is built in a Subaru factory in Gunma, Japan. Toyota had more design input into the twins, but it'd still be amusing for someone to comment that the 86 "looks like any other Toyota" because the thing is a Subaru parts bin car.
The Sovjets came at the invitation of the current government of that time.
"The current government of that time" was a communist regime that seized power after multiple successive coups and was deeply unpopular in much of the country. While your statement is technically true, it leaves out a massive amount of context.
I would argue all colonial powers are of similiar blame in repeatedly fucking Afghanistan over.
That does get to the underlying point I was hinting at: imperialism is generally net harmful in all its flavors, whether that's capitalist imperialism or communist imperialism.
The Soviets moreso than the US in the case of Afghanistan.
The country actually received substantial modernization aid from both, but eventually went through a series of coups that culminated in the Soviet invasion of the country and the rise of the mujaheddin.
I really enjoyed Weird West. It mashed up immersive sim elements with Divinity-inspired isometric sandbox combat. Lots of really cool world building.
Rough around the edges in a few places and probably a little ambitious in scope for the size of their team, but overall a pretty solid and fun title for a new indie studio.
tl;dr definitely interested in seeing what they do next.