Form Arcostani is the best music fest I've ever been to (I've been four times), and this lineup is full of big gets for 2026 (Lorde, Geese, Turnstile!) but man it does suck to finally get priced out with a more than 2x price increase. It was bound to happen and it is what it is! I'll miss it tho.
User dratsab huffman asks the question: To amuse myself i researched revacholian nationalism as well as measure head's race theories etc etc and focused my character on "traditionalism". Anyway, ive noticed that if i ever click dialogue options that are in tune with my character's political compass, i lose morale. Whats the point of having this as a mechanic if its going to be so detrimental and feels like the character doesnt believe he actually is this or something... is there anyway to overcome that kind of morale loss?
Recalcitrant Jester replies: Being a fascist is a deeply demoralizing experience. You have to not only radically alter your worldview to make reality fit into your unhinged schema, but that worldview is predicated on the notion that the weakest, most unworthy degenerate worms on the planet are somehow overpowering and humiliating you on a moment-by-moment basis. In mechanical terms too, the lowered morale also reduces your volition score—the more you indulge in your delusions, the less you are able to exercise self-control and self-awareness. The point of fascism being mechanically detrimental—the ludonarrative theme—is that fascism is an unequivocally self-destructive ideology, the practice of which only serves to nurture that self-destructive urge and turn it outward. It's not like Dark Side points in KotOR where you can access cool new abilities and get to enjoy being such a nasty lil rascal; you are not supposed to enjoy being a fascist in Disco Elysium. Fascism is the act of self-deception in service of making your own life more painful, solely for the payoff of making life more painful for people you dislike.
"Facism is the act of self-deception in service of making your own life more painful, solely for the payoff of making life more painful for people you dislike."
Why does Bluesky constantly have uptime issues?
The average American just thinks any company can bribe the government for anything they want at any time and I see no reason why people should be dissuaded of this fact when agencies like the FCC are run by people like Brendan Carr. www.theverge.com/tech/911888/...
Geese is bad not because they use bot farms, but because they sound like shit www.wired.com/story/geese-...
Feeling extremely vindicated by waiting like three whole years for an update to the AirPods Max because these headphones rule, just for how seamless they are at switching devices and actually being comfortable for long sessions.
My guess is that Sam Altman takes OpenAI public in 2026 and is no longer the CEO a 2 years from now. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
A WIRED investigation has identified multiple members of the paramilitary units behind some of the most egregious immigration enforcement actions of the last year. from @awinston.bsky.social and @regret.bsky.social
Turns out playing Overcooked on the Netflix app using your smartphone as a controller is not in fact a very fun or non-frustrating experience
The commentariat is fixated on how No Kings will affect the November election. Obviously I'm hyperfocused on how it's overtly or implicitly affecting court decisions, but also, I'm kind of obsessed with how much No Kings is shifting American culture itself www.theverge.com/policy/90440...
"Reminder that the thing you're fundamentally buying when you subscribe to The Verge is our ethics policy" - Nilay Patel
🩵 subscribe 🩷 to ❤️🔥 the 🩷 verge 🩵
You can engage with the game industry without giving increasing amounts of your disposable income to new hardware and software. People will simply spend less. They’ll hold onto old consoles, play indies, and only buy discount and used. Console isn’t growing. This could cause it to seriously decline.
Oh ok so console gaming is going to be *dead* dead when this is all over www.theverge.com/games/902224...
Every Monday I ask my wife “will you watch Paradise with me tonight?” And every time she sighs and says “Yeah… sure.”
The music in Paradise might be some of the most egregious creative decisions I’ve ever seen in a tv show. I cannot believe some of the choices being made.
Hulu’s Paradise proves you can be a comically terrible mash up of Lost, Severance and Westworld and people will put up with it because the puzzle box reveals happen 5x faster than any other similar show.
AI art has no real staying power. And neither does the tools that make it, it seems. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
![Sure. How much do you think you should pay me to use my name?
It's really important to think about attribution and think about impersonation, and so on. As an expert, you have a trade you make on the internet. The idea is that when you put content out there, myself included, you hope people use it. You want to refer to other people's content.
You want people to link to you. You really, really hope they attribute you when they do. When somebody uses your content, should they attribute you? Of course. And to attribute you, you have to use your name.
There's a different line which is, should people be able to impersonate you? And I think that is a very different standard. And we saw the lawsuit. Respectfully, we believe the claims are without merit. The idea that the feature is impersonation is quite a big stretch. Every mention was very clearly, "This is inspired not only by this person, but also inspired by a specific work from this specific person, with a clear attributed link to get back to them." It's far from that test lof impersonation].](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:x56l2n7i7babgdzqul4bd433/bafkreiap5dna6sgosil3plep24dbqaybgtbnj7himxpdgfp37wgcgx3cpu)
Sure. How much do you think you should pay me to use my name? It's really important to think about attribution and think about impersonation, and so on. As an expert, you have a trade you make on the internet. The idea is that when you put content out there, myself included, you hope people use it. You want to refer to other people's content. You want people to link to you. You really, really hope they attribute you when they do. When somebody uses your content, should they attribute you? Of course. And to attribute you, you have to use your name. There's a different line which is, should people be able to impersonate you? And I think that is a very different standard. And we saw the lawsuit. Respectfully, we believe the claims are without merit. The idea that the feature is impersonation is quite a big stretch. Every mention was very clearly, "This is inspired not only by this person, but also inspired by a specific work from this specific person, with a clear attributed link to get back to them." It's far from that test lof impersonation].
Here’s my interview with Shishir Mehotra, the CEO behind Grammarly’s “expert review” feature which attributed writing advice to people - including me lol - without permission. Or, as you will hear us talk about a lot, compensation. www.theverge.com/podcast/8987...
I’m old enough now that I see a game like Crimson Desert and feel not even a tiny spark of interest. I just know with 100% conviction I will not like this. www.polygon.com/crimson-dese...
The almost universal recognition of something as an “AI slop filter” means that there is a flattening sameness to all this tech that no amount of processing power right now can erase.
www.theverge.com/news/895472/...
Many Washington Post readers have been notified via email that their subscription rates are set to increase. Nestled at the bottom of these emails, you’ll find an asterisk and the following: “This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.”
I wrote about Bluesky's CEO switch. Jay Graber deserves lasting credit for building a big and bustling community. But the challenges ahead of the company are significant: www.platformer.news/bluesky-ceo-...
Marathon is easily the best designed, most fun, most addicting online multiplayer game to come out since Apex Legends almost 7 years ago. No contest whatsoever. Sincerely hope there is enough staying power here to keep Sony invested for the long haul. kotaku.com/marathon-mul...
If you’re feeling existentially worried about the state of everything, I do recommend riding your bike to the beach and then cooking a homemade chicken parm. Does wonders.
Anthropic's lawsuit against the Trump administration:
"No federal statute authorizes the actions taken here. Anthropic turns to the judiciary as a last resort to vindicate its rights and halt the Executive’s unlawful campaign of retaliation."
www.documentcloud.org/documents/27...
One one hand this is silly, and on the other hand, Sony is the most reactive, risk-adverse of the big publishers and they're probably seeing the writing on the wall for the next-gen of consoles, which I don't think is going to sell people on anything but exclusives. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
The real tragedy here we don't often talk about is Oath. Or maybe Tronc. I think abotu Tronc a lot.
Yahoo sold another one of the tech sites it acquired via AOL / Verizon over the years, this time Engadget. Last year, it sold TechCrunch. Nice lil scoop from @davidpierce.xyz: www.theverge.com/tech/888364/...
NEW: On Friday night when OpenAI announced its Pentagon deal, people immediately challenged Sam Altman's claims. Why, they asked, would the DoD suddenly agree to red lines when it had clearly said it would never budge?
The answer, sources told me, is that it didn't.
www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
Hey Mike. Producer for Decoder w/ Nilay Patel here. Wanted to get in touch about having you on the podcast to talk about this story and the ongoing Anthropic situation. Let me know if we can discuss over email or DMs. Thx!