conciselyverbose

Still on the Brandon Sanderson train. After finally catching up with Stormlight and reading his excellent secret projects, I'm a little over a book in to mistborn.

I can give you my reasons, but can't comment on anyone else.

A. I would genuinely buy PS5 over Xbox just for the controller. Third party utilization is hit or miss, but Sony games pretty consistently feel amazing with the trigger feedback and precision vibration.

B. There are a bunch of system seller caliber games made by Sony. There weren't many made by Microsoft before the Activision merger and even since stuff like Starfield hasn't been as popular as they'd want. But I'd pick PS5 just for Horizon, just for the Last of Us, maybe just for God of War (over any single game Microsoft has, though I'm not as into it as some), and their catalogue last gen was way better and benefits from the faster storage making a huge dent in load times as well. As someone who likes playing punishing games, loading 20 seconds after a death compared to waiting several minutes breathes a lot of fresh air into them.

C. The low end Xbox along with their requirement for parity between the two made it a lot harder for third parties to support them.

D. There isn't a lot that really takes advantage of it, but their built in hardware compression is still tech that's really exciting to me in terms of how seamless you can make open world games without arbitrary limitations. There are brief loading screens when I die on current gen games, but never hitting them during traversal no matter how dense or busy a world is (without the elevator trick or whatever to hide loading) really adds a lot of immersion. I haven't experienced it in Xbox, and I recognize that the actual speed of the drive is also a key part of the real world difference, but there are also hardware and software components of how fast loading is, to the point that PS5 games pretty consistently load well faster than PS4 games that don't leverage the tech. Also, the PS5 lets you just use a regular nvme drive to expand storage easily.

They also have the same cost restrictions Sony does because they're using very similar components, so they can't undercut them.

Because no one wants an Xbox.

Even during the early launch with Covid killing supply chains and PS5's selling out in seconds every time a retailer added stock, Xboxes were gettable pretty easily and most people didn't want them as a substitute.

He always seems to take a touch longer to really capture me than I want, but he nails the payoff every time. That beautiful set of secret projects books is even more tempting after finishing them all.

I'm just into book 2 of Mistborn now, and doubt I'll be able to stop before getting through those too. I already like reading series from start to finish where possible, and he's just really good at what he does.

It could have evolved since I tried it. I think I'll probably still end up targeting my own, though, because I don't care about any of the social stuff, but do really want to be able to treat series and authors as first class citizens. (The idea being to share a list of favorite series with brief blurbs about what I like about each, ideally kind of ad hoc so I can quickly create a list without rewriting every thought I've had about it but tailor it to a specific person or conversation.)

But yeah, limited by my commitment to it I guess.

Ranked choice is how you get to vote for a candidate that actually consistently has policies you agree with without being the same as not voting.

Fallout has the worst gunplay I've ever experienced.

It's a truly dumpster fire excuse for an FPS.

I doubt it. They bumped their prices in Japan not that long ago, and controllers got a price bump too. Japan might be more about currency, but their costs haven't decreased in the current economic climate for computer chips compared to the normal life cycle of consoles.

The Pro isn't just $700 because they think they can get away with it. I'm guessing it costs way closer than that to make than you think.

It sets an absolutely obscene precedent that a government can globally restrict information. Even global terrible actors like Russia and China haven't succeeded at that.

Yes, that precedent is 1000 orders of magnitude more harm than India losing access (which they won't, because the entirety of Wikipedia is open source and would be mirrored in the country instantly. But even if they actually would, it is literally impossible to get anywhere near the harm of the precedent this sets).

Being available elsewhere is entirely irrelevant. Wikipedia must stand against totalitarian censorship to resemble a reputable organization.

Complying is unforgivable.

They not only can, trivially. They unconditionally must.

It is not possible to ever be a reputable organization ever again if you have to choose between censoring content globally for an authoritarian government and shutting down in that country, and censoring content globally is something they genuinely consider. Open, fact based information is their entire reason for existing.

No, I have no interest in digging through their history. But it's less than trivial to do. Any random no name site can do it in 5 minutes with any source of the geo-mapping information, with virtually no knowledge required. It is not work.

GDPR can do literally nothing but block any site that doesn't have finances under their jurisdiction, and they shouldn't be able to. No one else will enforce their fines for them. It's no different than Russia fining Google more money than exists. You can't just magically rob someone because you're a country.