Not a right-wing source in and of itself, but Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind explores the history and philosophical underpinnings of conservative thought from Burke/Hobbes on through the 21st century, on a variety of different topics. It’s a serious engagement with the ideas, and attempt to understand them and their origins

Here’s my source. It’s the latter case, they use digital sales figures from the companies that provide them.

You raise a good point: if Larian aren’t sharing sales figures then it’s not possible to definitively compare them. I don’t think the 22M figure is very credible (as the other commenter said it doesn’t match up with the data we do have regarding player count/copies sold, and came completions) but even 5-7M copies sold sounds like it would place BG3 on the list. There’s enough bleakness in the gaming scene as it is, so I’m glad to hear it might not be quite as bleak as I thought.

I genuinely wonder how much it matters though. From online discussions you’ll see that Baldur’s Gate 3 is beloved by fans and held up as a benchmark for community engagement and listening to player feedback. It won GotY, had a launch far beyond anything the devs expected, and got incredible rave reviews.

But if you look at the top 20 best-selling games of the year, Starfield is #10 despite a lukewarm reception, numerous issues, and being accessible via Xbox Gamepass, while BG3 isn’t even on the list.

I think it really brings into perspective just how small a minority the people who post online about these things are, regardless of platform. Maybe the Gamers don’t know jack about your job, or maybe all their criticisms are 100% right. If it sells millions of copies either way, who cares?

The occasional salty dev, I guess

There’s a decent chance you might not be missing anything, it’s just not for you. Minecraft and Terraria are beloved titles that people put thousands of hours into, but I never got into them myself.

A turn-based CRPG is a very old-fashioned thing (the C stands for Computer), and it’s a pretty faithful adaption of a TT (tabletop, so pen-and-paper) RPG, which is even older (though the current ruleset for DnD is pretty new). I can definitely understand how Skyrim appeals to you but something like BG3 doesn’t; they’re fundamentally different games, and Skyrim is much faster-paced

Check out the “Leviathan” album by Mastodon. A good number of bangers on there, one after another

So I recently listened to an episode of the Data over Dogma podcast specifically regarding angels and demons. It’s hosted by Dan Beecher (an atheist podcaster) and Dr. Dan McClellan (a Bible scholar), and they discuss how angels and demons are actually depicted/described in the Bible, compared to the extra-biblical descriptions of both that we’ve gotten over the millennia. It’s about an hour but should serve as a nice little primer on the subject, with some recommendations for further study.

Sure, it’s conventional explosive with radioactive markers to test the detection capabilities of their equipment. I was being polite with my earlier comment, in case I had missed something in the article, but I guess I didn’t.

The Wikipedia page on Explosives gives some reading on the differences between the two. Suffice it to say, chemical and nuclear explosions are fundamentally different things; breaking/reforming of molecular bonds to produce heat and energy, compared to splitting or fusing atoms themselves, which releases FAR more energy than those molecular reactions since the bonds holding atomic nuclei together are so much stronger. If we say that a nuclear explosion is literally any explosion + radioisotopes, then you could buy some uranium online, tape it to a brick of plastic explosive, and say you’ve got yourself a nuke. Maybe someone should tell Iran they don’t need to waste all that money on centrifuges.

You’re half right though, in that this probably is a response to Russia, but demonstrating your ability to detect underground nuclear tests is not at all the same thing as actually conducting one.

Where are you seeing that the US conducted a nuclear test? The article only mentions a chemical explosion

I believe those are total numbers, so that includes both operational warheads (ready to launch) and stored warheads. The article here is specifically referring to the number of operational warheads China has, which is still much lower than that of Russia and the US, but the gap isn’t quite as wide as 500-6,000

Yeah where are those descriptions coming from? Also mentions “the strike workers’ strike” and repeats “politics” twice

Honestly micro lithography and chip design in and of themselves have been moving towards only a few big players in the space. TSMC is more advanced than any other manufacturer, and NVIDIA’s chip designs at the top end just have no competition for raw performance and capability, even aside from their software/AI work. Don’t get me wrong, all the major chip manufacturers have their respective anticompetitive bullshit, but traditional silicon is such a hard space to even keep up in, never mind break into.

Ahh I see now

deleted by creator

I wonder how much sense that would actually make for them. All the major console makers subsidize their products through game sales and online subscriptions. Valve already does the former, but that’s because they’re a game marketplace and it’s how they make money to begin with. I’m not sure what a steam subscription service (that’s not a game pass) would look like, since Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo offer online play and cloud saves for the cost of a subscription, whereas Valve makes those available for free.

It’s essentially the lemmy version of Apollo for Reddit, which was an iOS only app (different devs though)

Oh shit, when they said “around the corner” they really meant it

I’m not on any private trackers. I’d be interested, but not until I have a more dedicated setup; I’m still very much a casual torrenter.

It’s good news then if port forwarding won’t affect my downloads, because that was the only reason I wanted it, but I saw others online say that lacking that feature is what was causing me not to connect to peers shown in my torrent client. Any idea what’s up with that?

It’s been my observation that ambassadorships are often given out as rewards or for other domestic political purposes. The career foreign service people whose job it is to do the real work of diplomacy aren’t political appointees

Well my hope was that it would protect against things like packet sniffing and in case I connect to an evil twin (if I’m using that term correctly). But I’ll be the first to admit my knowledge there is incredibly limited, and I wasn’t aware that it would actually create new vulnerabilities. Would you be able to explain a bit?

I heard about i2p during my search; I’m interested in it. Would it work with the arr suite when I get into that down the road?