Ubisoft has been run by assholes for at least 20 years

The path for European conservatives is xenophobia and nationalism as it has been for pretty much forever. For conservatives outside of the US, anti-Trump backlash I bet being a temporary setback against them as anti-Trump backlash mixes more with nationalism and xenophobia. Russian invasion of Ukraine I feel I noticed a lot more nationalist rhetoric that borders on racism/xenophobia from even leftist Europeans and on this website. It can all quickly devolve into racism in the name of national security and independence from outside influence

This is becoming the norm. Don’t think there can be some new payment processor based off traditional finance and banking that can get around this. Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Square, SEPA, FedNow, etc will all rather block transactions to companies that deal in NSFW or whatever is considered dangerous content than try and be some neutral payment rail.

Any in terms of cryptocurrency, any stablecoin will end up subject to the same problems where the issued stablecoin is backed by a governments currency or bonds or even like corporate bonds which are regulated by countries and those are all clear ways to regulate what is appropriate for spending money on. Stablecoins have freeze and clawback mechanisms, at least the ones that are legally compliant. Really to me the only solution is for non-stablecoin/gold/etc backed cryptocurrencies to become popular for payments

Ya but they started the always online DRM for single player games back with AC2 and the lawsuits about the companies culture of sexual harassment/assault

Don’t buy Ubisoft games. They’re the epitome of trash culture in game publishing

It’s been like 4-5 years since I’ve purchased a Ubisoft game. There’s too many games out there to be spending money on a trash publishers games. Along with how slp on the wrist it seemed with their workplace sexual harassment/bullying/assault, always remember that they pioneered always online DRM for single player games. They’ve been a trash company publicly for almost 20 years. Culturally probably longer

Right now it’s not packaged up for easy use but KDE has supported Raspberry Pi’s for ages so I wouldn’t be surprised if you ran Plasma desktop, it’d be simple to build and install. I’d wait until they got it back onto the KDE release cadence with everything else though for simplicity

For anyone who wants to test this out, you can do as Devin did by installing Plasma Bigscreen on a Raspberry Pi using postmarketOS, though you would have to compile it yourself or pull from the nightly repos to get the latest changes.

Everyone I know around my age that have purchased either bought before 2019 in the smaller cities of Texas where it was a house or it was sometime 2020-2022 when rates were sub 4% and home prices didn’t explode yet and those were condos. Also everyone was dual income or it was to co-own a house. I know one person that purchased by themselves but they sleep in the smallest room and rent out every other room to siblings and friends

Since some point in 2022, the only people I know that bought a home were a married late 30s couple that were high income and the home was like 70+ years old and a pipe burst and there turned out to be a lot of mold that made it unlivable for a period of time

That also reminds me and some troubles of picking breakfast with some people. Some people really need pancakes/waffles with butter and syrup for breakfast. Or something similarly sweet and fatty.

Bagel with what looks and feels to me when eating, an insane amount of cream cheese. At least that I can ask for a thin swipe

I didn’t realize until around like 2016 realizing from a steady stream of new coworkers out of high school to fresh college grads talking about their doctor telling them they were prediabetic. Then lunchtime with them either they brought from home or purchased during work lunch time, I didn’t realize how many families made juice/soda and desert a part of every meal. Bag of chips or slice of cake or it wasn’t a full meal so it was hard for these now adults to feel complete without a sugary drink and either a fried salty snack or sweet pastry

People snack during the day, and for many that means smaller main meals, but some people snack equivalent of whole meals. Like 3 meals a day plus the equivalent of at least one more just in unfocused regular downing of small bites, whether in reasonable amounts healthy or like mini slim jim’s, and energy drinks

The hardest online privacy is not operating in a way that just links all your “private” activity because you logged in around enough places to link them together and at least one place somewhere can be linked to your real identity

It has to be PC. FFIX without the mod to speed up combat animations, it’s a pain to play these days compared to 20+ years ago

Tl;dr: If you have a good paying job, you should consider getting over the distance for it and find fulfillment outside of work

One thing I’ve learned with age is that everyone complains about their jobs. Everyone. Even the most idealistic jobs. Filmmakers, painters, community organizers/outreach, your everyday local DJ doing any event that’ll hire them, doctor, scientist, tradesperson, etc.

Anecdotal, but practically every freelance artist I’ve met has been like, “if you can find a steady 9-5 corporate gig, take it so you can have a chance at being able to live a normal life. It’s too late for me.” As in the years of constantly having to market themselves, look for contract after contract, constantly traveling because often times your best shot at making it as a videographer is doing remote shoots weeks at a time, constantly budgeting just to make rent and keep your going to next gig, learning about the costs of health insurance and that it gets higher as you age, every other type of insurance they didn’t think about until they were a freelancer, etc has made them into a bit of a scatterbrain and kind of selfish. Reasonably selfish as it’s unstable work and your relationships are constantly distant and passing. But still selfish. So ya, I always hear don’t be like me as a freelancer because it’s really hard to live the nice idyllic life without the time to build out a committed to home community. Like, “I wish I could work a normal job but mentally I can’t do it anymore so I keep freelancing.”

Community organizers/outreach, non-profits. Anecdotal again but I’m used to hearing from non-management employees about how little they trust organizational leadership to care for them. Very often the phrase I hear is, “these non-profits don’t care about us” and a co-worker say, “preach, amen.” Doing good work but unless you’re in leadership, you’re working poverty wages and at some point most will start questioning what they’ve even accomplished and how much longer can they do this and whether they deserve better in life than poverty wages as a social/political outreach employee. Those that don’t work the job will always gush about the work to them and make it awkward and unlikely for the workers to tell people how they feel about the job rather than the mission. Ideally a fulfilling job turns to a fulfilling mission not job, to then neither and wanting a good paying job

Everyone thinks grass is greener and people think they can just get into the trades and make big money. There’s the cost of training and apprenticeship. Then there’s the grind to journeyman. Then there’s the low chance of being one of the ones to run their own business and doing so is a trade-off of work-life balance. Make more money owning your own trade shop but until if ever you make it to owning a fleet of vehicles hiring a bunch of tradesperson, you’re going to be working insane hours

Work for a company as a tradesperson and you’ll have better work life balance but just solid pay eventually that’ll cap out lower than some office job where you can move up into corporate stuff.

One thing that hit me talking around was a tradesperson telling me that in the trades you don’t have downtime. You can’t let yourself chit chat with a client pausing work or else everything gets delayed, you can’t take as many clients as you need and operations can fall apart by being too social on the job. You don’t have time to just scroll on your phone randomly throughout the day.

The other being hearing stuff like trades jobs feel worse than playing on the line in football. At least in football you’re mostly upright and when you fall you fall but it’s all mostly deliberate and comfortable games and workouts. Trades you’re moving your body to fit places that place weird strain on your body for 8+ hours a day. You inhale all sorts of whatever. You may be doing work where shavings of whatever is constantly flying around getting all over your clothing at least but also any bit of skin that it gets to through the day. Shit can be real loud regardless of ear protection. Could be lifting steel beams that are heavy as shit over and over for hours of the day

Like people will lift weights for 1-2 hours a day cycling muscle groups different days of the week. Take some days off. People will still get workout injuries from overuse or tiny mistakes. Trades, it’ll be the same muscles and joints day in and day out 8+ hours a day

Regardless you got to do what you got to do to survive and trades are good respectable work that deliver a service and can raise a family. Anecdotal but old tradespeople that have gotten over the machismo have always told me I and anyone should get over the grass is greener mentality. They didn’t just start making $100k+ doing a trade. It was mediocre for a decade+ until they sniffed $100k and by then their body was already aching and they could legit try to start their own business where they’d now have to work more hours to hopefully someday just be the boss rather than the boss that also works every job as well

People in office jobs that required degrees that gave them starting wages over like $70k with clear growth prospects looking to get into trades for self-fullfillment, get some hobbies you can do with friends and alone. Make some friends. Use the energy you’re not spending crawling around breathing in who knows what to become really good at cooking so that people want to have cookouts with you

The data I’ve seen is that it’s mainly bad on the entry level

https://www.newsweek.com/computer-science-popular-college-major-has-one-highest-unemployment-rates-2076514

But this is focused on comparing college degree outcomes in entry level rather than degree + non-degree. Also the longer term studies that consider career outcomes degree vs trade vs non-degree/trade certifications long term regardless of career path

Everyone’s got anecdotes but I swear I’ve been hearing the same thing about trades jobs where proof is anecdotes and then data paints it as generally worse than a university degree

https://fortune.com/2025/07/02/gen-z-ditching-college-secure-trade-jobs-blue-collar-electricians-and-plumbers-worst-unemployment-rate-than-office-jobs/

https://wallethub.com/edu/best-entry-level-jobs/3716

I’d suggest young people not rely on anecdotes and focus on data. Don’t trust a person when they say they’re happy with their office job or their trades job. Don’t trust strangers/people you barely ever talk to to be truthful about the condition of their health; most people spare people the weight of knowing their mental and physical struggles

Instead look at unemployment rates per profession that you’re considering. Depression rates. Suicide rates. Salary trajectory and median wage by career stage. Like early, mid, senior, and wage at retirement. There’s data out there for some professions like average yearly medical costs by age in profession. Average benefits value like health/dental/vision/401k match/etc data.

It’s a ton to really consider but the ones that are able to do so without just shutting off their brains and turning off the web browser from stress/frustration will have done themselves a favor

Fables got to be far along enough to not get cancelled but my expectations are incredibly low. Nothing against Forza Horizon but giving a studio that has only ever made Forza Horizon games a AAA RPG reboot where the original game was known for it’s super endearing and fun writing along with a hodgepodge of promised god game mechanics in a third person RPG is a bad idea. Also using the Forza engine

So they need writers, they need game designers that do third person combat, level/creature/etc designers since racing simcades replicate real world stuff, I imagine them even needing a different voice acting director rather than whatever they do with Forza Horizon.

It’s pretty much a startup studio with a huge budget that has to upgrade the Forza engine to make content creation for quest/gameplay designers/non-programmers easy. Also studio heads have to learn how to manage the staff and content pipeline for a huge RPG game. Recipe for terrible growing pains. Should have never pushed almost all their studios towards Kinect and then live service. Maybe then Lionhead wouldn’t have atrophied and been shut down

Forza Motorsport coming out real mid was a huge surprise. It for so long was solidly competitive with Gran Turismo and then the last one just seems to have disappointed so many