The only thing I can think of is sending actors out to pretend to be Americans in American TV shows. Australia & New Zealand are strong in this field too, but I think we’ve still just about got the edge on it.

I think they’re falling into the same trap Bioware fell into, whereby they have a couple of critically acclaimed franchises under their belt and are universally praised and all is well, but then obviously that can’t last forever so as soon as the wheels start to wobble a bit, they start over-thinking, over-developing and over-managing their games because the next one needs to be a massive hit, but then what inevitably happens is they end up sabotaging development as they keep throwing out ideas and polishing all the rough edges off. So you actually end up with something that feels under-developed and bland because it’s all designed by committees and middle-managers, and built by underpaid devs on a crunch who just want to be done with it.

Also Microsoft bought them in the meantime, which can’t be helpful.

Yeah that was my first thought too. While I kind of get the spirit of it, in practice this is so absurdly dangerous IMO. Even if someone has the best possible intentions, there are so many things that could go wrong with this, especially if you include things like long-term effects that aren’t immediately apparent, or interactions with other drugs, especially if you’re taking other home-made pills with potentially unknown ingredients. While it can be frustrating to hear about a promising new medicine that won’t be available for years, there’s a reason why they spend so long testing these things.

IMO the better (but much more difficult) solution is reforming the medical industry so that it’s easier for people to see a doctor and actually afford to get medicine. I’m not usually a fan of big government stuff, but medicine is one of those things that just needs to be kept under supervision I think.

The A is for “Actually this game is $90 now instead of $60.”

I could, but even the base version here is $90. I’m good to just wait, honestly.

Yeah I feel like you could tie these crises into player actions pretty organically - like if there’s a war and a big enough percentage of Civs get involved, then it triggers a World War crisis, or they could tie something into the global warming mechanic from Civ VI, or have a Cold War come up from excessive espionage actions, stuff like that.

Which is a weird move IMO, 'cause normally you’re supposed to steal the homework of someone who’s doing a better job than you are.

I don’t like denuvo but for me it’s the price that’s the deal-breaker. Nearly $170CAD for the full version is absolutely bonkers, and I simply can’t justify it. So I guess I’m picking it up in a Steam sale in 2028 or something when it’s $40 with all the DLC.

Literally every site in my regular rotation is completely unaffected lol.

Yeah same here, my backup for media is basically just a text file with the names of all the folders in my Movies directory so I have a list of what to download again when the drive craps out. I could buy terabytes of extra storage or a NAS or something and make sure it’s all synced, but it’s not really worth the expense/trouble for me TBH.

Luckily I live in a country that doesn’t really seem to give a shit. I still use a VPN, but a friend of mine didn’t bother at all and used to be downloading constantly. Eventually he got a phone call from his ISP asking him to not seed so much lol

My first impressions:

• I like the art style, I’ll have to see about the leaders.
• Gwendolyn Christie is a really good choice for the narrator.
• I don’t like the sound of there only being three ages, but maybe there’s more to it.
• Also not sure about switching civs mid-game, but being able to do things like a French Cleopatra might be fun.
• Are they going to restrict this to avoid potentially offensive combos, especially in multiplayer? I’m thinking of things like using real-world colonizers for leaders of places they occupied (like an English ruler in charge of India and stuff like that.) At the very least it seems like they’re inviting trouble unnecessarily.
• The prices are completely bonkers, nearly $170 CAD for the Founders Edition! This is gonna be the first Civ game in a long time that I don’t pick up on launch day.

Yeah I’m just downloading random data for fun in little tiny bits. If that data happens to arrange itself in the form of the latest episode of Doctor Who then that’s not my problem.

As a person from the UK, it really does feel sometimes like the UK is just the place where America tests out all of its most dystopian ideas before it rolls them out at home.

Yeah I’m glad I nuked mine right after Musk bought it. I already hadn’t used it in a couple of years by that point but that was the final straw.

I think in theory the police are meant to. But the ‘theory’ part of that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Well now they have that supreme court ruling that the president can’t commit a crime if it’s an “official act” so genuinely who knows. But I could absolutely see someone like Trump using it to squash a protest and then jamming the whole thing up while the courts argue about it for the next 15 years or so.

Well then I’m not pirating anything, I’m just downloading data and if it happens to correlate to the new Aliens movie then that’s not my problem. 😮

Yeah at first I thought maybe he wants out but his ego won’t let him just step away from it like Biden did, so he’s trying to ramp up the crazy shit to force the party to kick him out, that way he doesn’t have to run but he can keep the grift going by saying he was betrayed etc.

Then I thought, he’s not that smart. All he has is saying crazy shit, which seemed to befuddle Clinton and Biden but doesn’t work on Harris, so all he can do is panic and say even crazier shit.

I use Mullvad personally, but probably any of the major ones would do the trick.