• 0 Posts
  • 343 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
Cake day: December 18th, 2023
  • DdCno1@kbin.socialtoNews@lemmy.world•Magician David Copperfield Accused of Grooming, Groping, and Drugging Women
    9·
    5 months ago

    One of the most convincing tricks he pulled off was transporting two people from the stage to what looked like a believable beach. Totally fooled me (but I was a kid when I watched it).

    Edit: I started to figure out that something was amiss soon after, because every single one of the supposedly “random” people he invited on stage to do his tricks with (usually by throwing plastic balls into the audience) wore incredibly “inoffensive” and poorly fitted clothes. At some point, I was able to spot which people he would end up picking from a mile away even before he had done so.

  • DdCno1@kbin.socialtoGames@sh.itjust.works•I Want Better Games With Worse Graphics And I'm Not Kidding - Aftermath
    721·
    5 months ago

    That’s not how this works. You can comparatively easily scale up art departments, but you can not do the same with engineering and design. It’s also much less difficult to find competent artists in their respective niches than programmers and designers. Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level. Especially in the area of software engineering, game studios also have to compete with other fields with inherently better work/life balance, which is far less so the case with e.g. texture artists, modelers and animators.

    Art can also be produced sequentially in large numbers and making more of it at a certain high enough level of quality makes a game appear more valuable to consumers. It’s practically guaranteed: Spend more on art, have more stuff you can impress people with, a more enticing value proposition. You can spend a fortune on game design and programming, but that’s invisible and there is far less of a guarantee that it’ll work out in the end (see: the phenomenon referred to as development hell), let alone attract customers.

    Try marketing a game on mechanics and design instead of graphics. Most people pay maybe 15 to 30 seconds of attention to promotional material at best before making a purchasing decision. The vast majority of gamers do not read reviews, let alone whining essays about how some journalist doesn’t care about graphics (which have been written since the 1980s - there’s nothing new under the Sun). You can wow customers with fancy trailers and gorgeous screenshots, but you can not explain why your game that you spent 100 million on game design alone on has better game design than that blockbuster with individually modeled and animated facial hair.

  • DdCno1@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Hamas official says group would lay down its arms if an independent Palestinian state is established
    01·
    5 months ago

    Hamas went all in hoping that once all of the other Muslim nations saw their merry slaughter of Jews, they would happily and immediately join in and attack Israel from all sides to complete the attempted genocide. They forgot about or chose to ignore a few things:

    Israel has nukes and would use them if they felt fundamentally threatened, Israel has conventionally defeated every army that has ever attacked them (if sometimes by the skin of their teeth), has made reluctant, but reliable allies out of some of their former enemies and crippled others. Hamas didn’t consider that Biden would protect Israel and fully commit to it, they kept the preparations for their attack so secret that only Tehran and Moscow knew about them, but crucially not Hezbollah (which ended up being muzzled by the American carrier groups anyway) and they gave nobody the necessary heads up for the months of buildup required for a full on war, because that would have given the whole thing away. While Hamas skillfully (with Russian and Iranian help) overcame the border defenses, they wasted the element of surprise on random carnage instead of overrunning the same airfields that have since been launching thousands of sorties that are, day by day, obliterating their organization.

    And so on and so forth. The entire idea was foolish from the start and had no chance of success. Not that Moscow and Tehran expected any. They just used Hamas as pawns, hoping to weaken the US with this conflict. It’s the standard zero sum game that autocrats love to play so much.