JohnBrownsBussy2

joined 2 years ago
[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 31 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Looking at this International Crisis Group's list of donors:

BP

Chevron

ENI

Open Society Foundation

Rockerfeller Brothers Trust

As well as various Western European & gulf state governments, billionaires and billionaire-founded NGOs. Of course they're coping: their backers were hoping to get a piece of PDVSA.

[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

The proposal is for a globally-levied tax. Where exactly is capital going to fly to?

[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 12 points 5 months ago

It's been an absurd mishandling of the IP by Take Two. Will probably be permanently stuck in early access with only maintenance development at best.

[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 24 points 5 months ago (1 children)

A lot of people (myself included) had the update installed automatically by Steam with no option for rollback, so it caught people off guard.

[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I agree that D&D will always exist, I am just personally uninterested in the direction the game is going with the OneD&D, and I think the source of this muddling path is do to the failure of the original business maneuver with the OGL revision. I don't really see things getting better under Hasbro, so any major shakeup might be a good thing overall.

[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

Kinda sicko-wistful.

I don't think Tencent would be a particularly great owner for the D&D brand, but they might have been more hands-off than Hasbro went it comes to mucking with the business model, and a major shakeup for D&D could be good. Honestly, WotC (or just D&D) could be doing better if it was an independent operation as opposed to subsidizing the Hasbro revenue sink.

[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

Hasbro has no clue what to do with the game since their games-as-service, closed ecosystem plan went kaput after they backed down on the OGL revision (which would have been necessary to shut out other VTTs and ensure player & DM subscriptions). I think the recent lay offs of senior people in the D&D related teams suggests this as well. This article doesn't seem well sourced at all, but a shake-up would be very interesting at this point.

Side-stepping some of the speculation and impact on the traditional market/fanbase, I am curious about the interest in D&D in China, as a Tencent acquisition would presumably make it much easier to market the game there. From the searching I've done, there doesn't seem to be a ton of interest in D&D, and there's no official translation into Mandarin. The movie didn't do great at the Chinese box office, although Baldur's Gate 3 did fine? Obviously, if Tencent does put together a subsidiary to design a version for the Chinese market, I'm not sure if they'd want to start by translating/adapting existing books or using the ruleset to design a bespoke version (either with a fantasy setting or based on relevant Chinese IP.)

[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Obviously, these attacks are bad, but the impressive resistance by the Jenin fighters (as well as the reconciliation between Saudi and Iran, and Israel's domestic turmoil) do give me some hope for a renewal of the Palestinian liberation struggle.

[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't really care about the honor of Rian Johnson, but I don't think your points are correct.

why are there suddenly cloaking devices in star wars

Cloaking devices were introduced in Episode I

why don't the imperials hyperjump in front of the fleeing rebels?

The tracking device makes hyperspace jumping a game of hopscotch. There's not really a point.

why can several characters leave a chase in progress visit some planet and come back to the chase still in progress?

Yeah, this one is kinda dumb, but it'd be possible for a small ship to escape unnoticed and get out of range in order to jump to lightspeed.

the holdo maneuver breaks several in-universe rules about how hyperdrive works.

Those rules are established in the books/supplemental materials, which aren't canon to the film series. The film-makers have no obligation to respect them. Episode 7 also breaks/rewrites the hyperspace rules.

Luke's character "development" happening entirely off-screen (and throwing out better character development from decades of books) makes the flashback scene completely unbelievable.

None of the books are canon. It makes sense that people change over long time skips, and they did outline the rationale for his mindset changes in the flashback.

[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 22 points 1 year ago

It's also fitting the vanguard of America's descent into fascism will one of the earlier places (in the US) to be rendered uninhabitable by the climate change.

Fascism is a death cult.

[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 50 points 1 year ago (85 children)

I don't understand the logic here. When the putsch occured and then ignomously fizzled out, I saw Putin as weak for letting Pringles walk out with a (relative) slap on the wrist. Taking Prigo out of the picture was overdue. Obviously, anyone would feel threatened by an semi-autonomous mercenary army, so removing its leadership and breaking it up is just a rational course of action that probably should have been done sooner from that POV

[–] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 17 points 1 year ago

That's a bit more dramatic than polonium. He was going to get got sooner or later after his tantrum/half-baked putsch.

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