#this includes EA I think

[felassan]

SAG AFTRA news update:

"SAG-AFTRA Members Who Work on Video Games Go on Strike July 25th A.I. Protections Remain the Sticking Point SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, acting under the authority delegated by the SAG-AFTRA National Board, and with the unanimous advice and counsel of the Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee, called a strike of the Interactive Media Agreement, effective July 26 at 12:01 a.m. Today’s vote to strike comes after more than a year and a half of negotiations without a deal. The convenience bargaining group with whom SAG-AFTRA is negotiating includes Activision Productions Inc., Blindlight LLC, Disney Character Voices Inc., Electronic Arts Productions Inc., Formosa Interactive LLC, Insomniac Games Inc., Llama Productions LLC, Take 2 Productions Inc., VoiceWorks Productions Inc., and WB Games Inc. Any game looking to employ SAG-AFTRA talent to perform covered work must sign on to the new Tiered-Budget Independent Interactive Media Agreement, the Interim Interactive Media Agreement or the Interim Interactive Localization Agreement.��These agreements offer critical A.I. protections for members. Negotiations began in October 2022 and on Sept. 24, 2023, SAG-AFTRA members approved a video game strike authorization with a 98.32% yes vote. Although agreements have been reached on many issues important to SAG-AFTRA members, the employers refuse to plainly affirm, in clear and enforceable language, that they will protect all performers covered by this contract in their A.I. language. “We’re not going to consent to a contract that allows companies to abuse A.I. to the detriment of our members. Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate,” stated SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher.   “The video game industry generates billions of dollars in profit annually. The driving force behind that success is the creative people who design and create those games. That includes the SAG-AFTRA members who bring memorable and beloved game characters to life, and they deserve and demand the same fundamental protections as performers in film, television, streaming, and music: fair compensation and the right of informed consent for the A.I. use of their faces, voices, and bodies. Frankly, it’s stunning that these video game studios haven’t learned anything from the lessons of last year - that our members can and will stand up and demand fair and equitable treatment with respect to A.I., and the public supports us in that,” said Crabtree-Ireland. “Eighteen months of negotiations have shown us that our employers are not interested in fair, reasonable A.I. protections, but rather flagrant exploitation. We refuse this paradigm – we will not leave any of our members behind, nor will we wait for sufficient protection any longer. We look forward to collaborating with teams on our Interim and Independent contracts, which provide A.I. transparency, consent and compensation to all performers, and to continuing to negotiate in good faith with this bargaining group when they are ready to join us in the world we all deserve." said Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee Chair Sarah Elmaleh.  For more information and to search whether a video game is struck, please visit sagaftra.org/videogamestrike."

[source]

[virsancte]

me in the studio writing 50 pages of lore for the ts4 vampires over the course of a day

[iamthepulta]

Also I just have to say. Loan documents with 1/6th shekel interest are just as boring as today's .025% financing.

[unopenablebox]

Tell me more about the worst things about the rationalists? The point about “you are experiencing a feeling as though you’re having an insight” (sorry don’t have your exact wording in front of me) is sort of giving me a light bulb moment re: their whole thing

so... the answer is at least kind of "yes, i can do that", but in attempting to answer your question i found myself writing several thousand words of explanation about who i think "rationalists" even describes anymore/ever, why i've encountered them and what my background is, etc, so if you'd like to write back clarifying your own knowledge of/level of interaction with internet rationalism that might help me cut out some of the thousands of words of historical context. regardless i'll think about it and try to figure out which takes i think i'm actually qualified to air in public/which will be meaningful to anyone less immersed in weird rat history inside baseball than i am

[official-rolli-und-rita]

trying to keep myself from buying the new sims expansion pack which gets the most unbelievably bad reviews on every platform and is generally regarded as an overpriced load of bullshit that adds absolutely nothing of value to the game and has a very good chance of rendering your game completely unplayable bc of how badly it's produced. but on the other hand i want to build apartments...

[chronurgy]

Erg part of the problem of putting pre-game timelines together is just the sense that Larian didn't really want the spellplague and the second sundering to have happened that close to the game if that makes sense. Like you can look at the published preexisting lore and put together dates and all of that but I can't help but think things flow much better if you just kinda ignore it - for Durge especially

[riddlerosehearts]

i have heard so much about how EA wyll was different from full release wyll and i've been so curious to see that for myself. and well. this is how wyll used to react when you encountered the goblins that had barcus tied up!!

and this is for if you tell him to stand down:

and then this is what he says after the fight if you let him have his way:

[the-faultofdaedalus]

every day i think about howard and maria’s deaths in the 2004 draft script

[piquira]

Do you think Shak is gonna sing Acróstico at her next tour? I've been thinking, it's been so successful, and she definitely likes to include a ballad or two in her tours.

It's also gonna be her first world tour that's gonna focus on just 1 recent album. (Eversince she went worldwide she toured for every 2nd album.) I wonder if that means that she's gonna sing more tracks of the new album, or if she's gonna take more time for classics. I hope she'll sing some songs that she's never done live before!

I would be extremely surprised (and disappointed tbh) if she didn't sing Acróstico. My assumption is that all of her recent singles, released for her album will be performed in her new tour (TF, Monotonia, S53, Acróstico) with the exception of TQG because that's on Karol's album. I'm also pretty sure she's going to scrap most El Dorado songs from the tour just like she did the SES & SW songs, which imo is a win. From ED, I only expect Chantaje to make the cute. Beyond that, nothing else impacted or were significant enough for her to sing again, especially with recent developments.

[grimgrinnr]

Hi I have no other space to talk about this so just lemme say (spoilers under cut)

Tears of the Kingdom owes me fucking child support. You give me a daughter in the form of Josha and a son in the form of Tulin, and then don’t even begin to compensate me for it???

Giving me a wife in Purah almost makes up for it. But there may be more children in the future. I need to be compensated for that too damnit

[andromedasummer]

Good morning, today im going to pirate 5-7 videogames made by small indie game devs who are heavily dependent on sales 😚✌️

in WHAT world is the sims 4 or fucking crusader kings 3 an INDIE GAME

[panahedvn]

It's because of bad writing. It's all because of bad writing.

A good story in a continuing franchise will be crafted in a way that expands the existing lore and adds to it. Because they didn't have... I don't wanna say the skill, but definitely the organization and time to actually do that, they needed to retcon, chop up and glue together the preexisting lore to make the stories they cobbled together even remotely make sense.

I can see why it happened but it was an objectively horrible lot of decisions on EA/Bioware's part that led to this. They really shot themselves in the foot.

i think my main issue with veilguard is that there’s absolutely nothing redeemable about what they did with the lore. i can’t find a thing that i like about it because it was absolutely destroyed in every direction. they went scorched earth on the entire series. i do not understand why.

[vivalasthedas]

looking at the difference between the base game and the deluxe edition and wow. So not worth 20 extra quid. Here's a handful of cosmetics with nothing else. Enjoy.

[lightdeficient]

90s Motel Set (Maxis Match Build/Buy CC!)

This is a build set I really wanted for my own gameplay as I was building a motel. It has items that not only suit the old motel style, but also look good in most homes. I spent a lot of time fine-tuning this set, and I think it turned out great in the end!

The objects are low-mid poly, handmade, and come in all EA wood swatches so they should match lots of other items in the game. They also have a basic white and black swatch without any wood grain. Not showcased is also a curtain rod to make the curtains modular, they are also designed to look mostly seamless in their patterns when placed next to each other.

Download (Patreon, Early Access until 12/01)

10 New Assets are included in this set!

Comfort: Dreamy Discount Bed, Just-a-Chair.

Decoration: Breeze Curtain (+ Rod), Frill-Seeker Lamp, Room Service Telephone.

Surface: Roundabout Dining Table, Everyday End Table, Plain and Practical Dresser.

Floor: 90s Motel Carpeting.

Enjoy!

[asharaks]

it is, i think, symptomatic of the way larian has built this brand: bg3 was always marketed as being mature (read: sexual), and that was one of the big draws for players - myself included! especially as media pulls more towards extremes, with mainstream video games starting to get increasingly graphically sexual, graphically violent, and the vogue for 'grey morality' becomes the norm, those boundaries get pushed, and it becomes more and more of a selling point.

larian obviously focused on this, along with the How Do You Do, Fellow Kids brand, the increased accessibility of game devs on twitter, and adopted it heavily into their marketing strategy, and are now pretty reliant on the horny gamer crowd for a lot of their audience, and more importantly, they're doing this on purpose.

which is how you end up in situations like this.

characters (white men) the players want to fuck get centred: they get updates, they get more content, they get favoured. halsin's gone from a side character in EA to a half-fledged romance option, to a full romance option: he shows up in the promotional material, is larian's poster boy for the sex scenes, he gets more content with every update.

now gortash gets more heavily implied situationship lines with the dark urge, because players are horny for him. nevermind that some people aren't playing that way, or that he was originally set up to be a lower-level antagonist; nevermind that if the durge's storyline needed expansion, it should've been with orin and sarevok and bhaal, or that it muddies the writing for the rest of gortash's arc + characterisation: people want to fuck him, so it gets put in the game. it's not even to do with karlach, whose quest so desperately needs expansion! it's specifically catering to the people who want their character to have a Relationship with the slaver, because they're either not interested in or not able to focus on strengthening the weak spots in the narrative: they're just doing things that will net the 'my favourite dating sim' people lmfao.

meanwhile, literal main character wyll gets his quest demoted to a subquest, doesn't get bugfixes, doesn't get a single unique romance greeting after 6 patches and months of requests. he's not a Horny character, so he doesn't get the focus: he's not a player favourite, so he gets nothing. it's just... so unbelievably, indisputably racist, and it's incredibly grim and disappointing to watch it happen in real-time.

[harrie-cc]

The Klean Collection - Part 4

This month I focused on creating the Klean Home Office. I focused my attention on what a designer's home office would look like/contain. I have wanted to make shelving like this for quite some time & was excited to try out Sims 4 Studio to angle the slots, unfortunately many painful hours later after trying to troubleshoot why exactly the rotation didn't work in game, I managed to come up with a workaround, so that you can still snap flat books and deco items onto the slanted shelves at the correct angle. For some peculiar reason the rotated slots would not work unless I locked their orientation. As a result once an item snap into one of these slots it will stay at the 45 degree angle even when you snap it to a regular slot. If I did this for all the slots to work it would end up being very difficult for you to effectively clutter all the other shelves as all your items would snap to these angled slots instead. So I've created only 3 of these slots on each shelf to help you to orientate your deco items to the correct angle. They are located in the middle and either end of the the shelf, so you should be able to avoid them while decorating the regular slots on the other shelves. I think this issue is down to EA changing the slotting information in the game as it a very simple process to rotate these slots and both programmes I used to do so ended with the same result. Fingers crossed this is changed in the future so I don't have to irritate myself and you all with such a workaround and they just work how they are supposed to! 

Items Include:

Bookshelf configurations 1 to 5 (short & medium)

1 tile bookshelf configuration (short & medium)

Left ending bookshelf configuration (short & medium)

Right ending bookshelf configuration (short & medium)

Bookshelf post (short. medium & tall)

Desk chair

Glass desk

Statement desk/ conference table/ dining table

Design portfolio

Open design portfolio

Pantone swatch books (3 options)

RAL swatch books (2 options)

Fabric sample book

All items are Base Game compatible and you can find them by searching KLEAN in the build/buy catalogue.

As per usual textures are linked between similar items, so if you download the unmerged file, make sure to include all items from that family, so the textures appear correctly in your game.

Now Available on Patreon Early Access

Public Release: 7th April 2024