Well, if the single sentence description is supposed to also describe the popularity, then every musical group in Wikipedia would need to be described by that metric. It might get a bit absurd very fast. (“…a bit obscure band which was really really big in Japan at one point”)

So how big were the Spice Girls? Well, they were big enough to warrant a Wikipedia article, if that is any metric worth of anything. I guess if you need to compare statistics, perhaps you need a deeper dive than a single sentence summary!

Wizards of the Coast spent lots of time in meetings with Bioware to make sure every damn detail of D&D 3e was implemented according to the book. And even longer time micromanaging the campaign design. A lot of the scenarios are essentially repeats of the others - “do these four smaller thingies and then go kick the main baddie” - because getting that approved by WotC was easier.

Why are there so few D&D games these days? Why do video game dev houses want to make their own RPG systems instead? Well, they don’t want the headache of dealing with WotC.

Neverwinter Nights is the best PC game I’ve played, all thanks to the custom content the players made.

Bioware made the toolset and modding support a big part of the prerelease interviews and live demos. The message to the tabletop RPG crowd was “hey, you can finally build and run your D&D modules as a real DM-led multiplayer group experience online”. Probably the only problem with that marketing was that making modules from scratch was still an involved process and making usually needed scripting skill, so maybe the TTRPG crowd didn’t end up as enthusiastic as they could. But people still ended up making boatloads of great singleplayer and multiplayer-capable adventure modules! And the multiplayer persistent worlds were essentially like MMOs but in small scale.

I think the built-in campaign was more of a hindrance in retrospect, because if you hadn’t heard this, you probably expected another game like Baldur’s Gate 1/2. A lot of people went in thinking that the official NWN campaign was the main offering. The campaign was incredibly mediocre by Bioware standards because Wizards of the Coast was incredibly needy. They wanted high level of control, and essentially only approved a committee-built pile-of-meh plot, leaving Bioware to build something around that.

This, by the way, led to Bioware swearing they’d not work with needy licensors anymore and ended up designing Dragon Age instead.

(And if anyone is saying “wait, didn’t this just happen again with Baldur’s Gate 3?” Yes. Yes it did. WotC is basically impossible to work with.)

Every Halloween, I play this Xbox 360 (I think it’s also on PC now) game called Bullet Witch.

Basically a third-person shooter with postapocalyptic supernatural horror theme. You play as a witch who shoots zombies and weird creatures with a magic machine gun broom thing. Also you get spells. Some are bloody awesome.

This game is peak Xbox 360 to the core. The distinct memorable thing about it is that I can actually list good and bad things about it. Level design varies between meh and decent. Some of the particular setpieces are pretty awesome though. (You get to fight at an airport, and you get to do a boss fight at the top of the plane mid-flight!) Spells are fun. The mega-spells are hella fun. (Just call up lightning and watch stuff explode.) Shooting is kinda jank but it works. Jank is explained by lore. (Why is friendly fire not a thing? Well, you see, this is a magic machine gun broom thing, so bullets dodge the civilians and allies by ~*~magic~*~.) Enemy designs are nothing to write home about at first glance, but are actually kinda memorable. (You first meet up the zombies and hey, they’re talking zombies. With military helmets and guns. Like, what? You don’t see this every day.) There are some things that seem just not very well designed, like there’s these gigantic enemies that serve as minibosses and they’re a lot less scary when you note the AI is probably bugged and they often just decide to stand at place for a while and eat a lot of bullets.

I got this thing in the bargain bin. It’s a zombie shooty game that’s perfect for Halloween so that’s what I use it for. That’s all it does. That’s all I could ask it for. And it’s fine at it.

I’m sure they spend a lot of time monitoring right wing extremists.

Now, acting to stop them? That’s a matter of debate if they ever do that effectively.

But the monitoring part? That is what they do diligently. Learning as much as possible!

The first Call of Duty game I played was Ghosts, and it may have coloured my perception of what the series is about. Bombastic popcorn munching action that goes in one ear and straight out of the other. I was like “eeeeh it’s okay”. After playing some older ones I was like “well I’m sure it was groundbreaking at the time”. (Hm. Did I ever finish MW2? And I think I put Black Ops 2 on hold after the first mission. Loved Advanced Warfare tho!)

Fun turtle fact: Turtles have a specific gene related to their ability to produce red pigment, and are the only extant quadruped animals to have it. The gene is also present in birds! So it probably dates back to dinosaur ancestors.

Another turtle fact: Turtles can be surprisingly fast! In fact, much faster than snails. Many species of turtles actually eat snails. I imagine it’s not the most high speed hunt, but it gets the job done!

When I was younger I found it stupid they started putting candy in resealable bags. Felt like a waste of plastic.

I know what you are thinking. “But it falls out if I put the bag in pocket/backpack/whatever-” No. Skill issue. …Usually.

It’s visible and pinned on slrpnk.net (Lemmy) via web, Voyager and Interstellar. Same also on piefed.social via web and Interstellar.

And this is different from the usual YouTube jank how, exactly? I can’t block ads on the YouTube TV app and it’s a buggy mess and I have no idea why one of the major tech companies in the world allowed that to happen.

Organisational inertia. Planes are expensive, and getting them and qualified personnel to fly and maintain them is a long and complicated process for the airline companies (and the governments supporting the airlines).

They get the news about Boeing being crap, but they can’t just reverse a decision in one day, because the decision to go with Boeing was made years or decades ago.

“systemd is the worst implementation of init, except all those other inits that have been tried from time to time” -Churchill, if he had been a nerd

What I was trying to communicate was that Wikipedia has plenty of photographs that illustrate various concepts. This is a photo that displays typical turtle behaviour, which I didn’t think I implied that I was unaware of and I don’t know how you came to that conclusion. Anyway, it’s the sort of photo you wouldn’t need to include in an article but it clearly is suitable for the purpose.

I did post this picture and all of the rambling while drunk and I’m having a bit of a mild anxiety breakdown right now and I just don’t know what I was saying. I’m terribly ashamed of posting this if this caused anyone any confusion.

Yeah it kinda makes sense, turtles are, after all, the tanks of the nature!

However, in this photo, the roles are kind of reversed, aren’t they? These are just Nature’s Tanks, which are unduly harassed by some random thing that literally flew in from the sky!

Events that happen on nature rarely have immediate and direct tangible interpretations on political policy, is what I’m getting at.

I guess the web search messed up then. You should search for biology stuff! Not computer science stuff! Turtles are very computer science related creatures, but there’s more to them!

Turtle Mode is actually a complicated thing! It’s often implemented in two ways: Cryptodira are the turtles that just pull their heads in, while Pleurodira kind of tuck their head inside sideways.

But it gets even more complicated with certain ancient turtle species. For example, we have the snapping turtles. Technically cryptodira, but they don’t really enough shell to cover themselves. Not that they need to because they’ll fucking go snappity snap on everything on range. Or we have things like the megacephalum which again is a cryptodira turtle but probably can’t retract the head because did we mention it’s called the Megacephalum.

EDIT: Forgot: snapping turtle copypasta

Ooh, don’t make me link to That One CGP Grey/Kurtzgesagt Thing. Well I might as well do it. Existential Crisis One! Existential Crisis Two!

Heh, I know. I bought Sync for Reddit originally, and was really conflicted about whether I should buy Sync for Lemmy. Was, like, “what the hell, I’ll be supporting the developer.”…well I’m glad I never bought the ongoing support things this developer offered! Staunch supporter of open source threadiverse apps these days, as you might imagine.

True, the plant as a whole doesn’t die.

But this particular slice of grass on the microscope slide?

Dead.

Of course this gets a lot more grim when you realise the grass had to be sliced to put under the microscope.

So they sliced a smiling organism and captured the expression at the moment of death.

I know I’m supposed to be strong, but I’m shedding tears. 😢

Dunno about RIF, I’ve been in threadiverse since Sync for Reddit bit the dust. (Was in Kbin initially.)