Thrashy

You've already had a recommondation for most of what I would suggest to you, but I will happily second the suggestions for the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds, the Teixcalaan series by Arkady Martine, and the Imperial Raadch/Ancillary series by Ann Leckie. All have excellent worldbuilding and tell stories that depend heavily upon how their characters interface with the worlds they inhabit.

A little pulpier in tone, but still very well put together, I'd suggest as well the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, and especially the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. The latter is a bit more fantastic space opera as opposed to some of the harder sci-fi you've mentioned, but Muir knows how to write a setting that is absolutely dripping in gothic horror, and still take you on an emotional roller coaster fully of highs, lows, and humor as you read it. It seems to be a bit of a love-it-or-hate-it series from the other conversations I've had about it, but I love it and I'd be remiss not to suggest it.

I'd also suggest, if you're not averse, dipping your toe into the fantasy genre as well. There's a broad range of authors there who have done excellent work building fantasy worlds that are structurally deep and compelling, and have many science-fictional qualities. Along these lines I'd suggest Robert Jackson Bennett's Founders trilogy, or N. K. Jemison's Broken Earth trilogy -- though, fair warning, both of these broke me in the end emotionally. Worth it, though!

For China specifically and at the present time this is true, but China is investing heavily into solar and other renewables that will shift its energy mix dramatically in the coming years. Not to mention that even now, it's still a net benefit to centralize that fossil fuel consumption into plants that can burn it more efficiently and with better pollution controls than are feasible on cars.

It's not strictly true that it didn't mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.

Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.

Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.

Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros' vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta's implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.

In reality, Meta couldn't offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn't have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.

McCarthy needed Dem votes to maintain a hold on the speakership, but the concessions he would have needed to make in order to get them would have meant making himself incredibly vulnerable to a career-ending primary challenge. The political incentives don't line up.

Xbox Live matchmaking was easy, sure, but before it became the norm on PC self-hosting servers was far more common, and there was something about the culture of a well-admined server that automatic matchmaking could never replicate -- and in my opinion gaming as a whole is worse for losing that. Anonymous and unaccountable public lobbies give so much more leeway to assholes than you could get away with on a clan-hosted server.

All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot...):

• Give goods or services away for free
• Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
• ???
• Profit!

Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn't even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with "Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product." High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they're all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.

Priorities will always shift as we move though the different seasons of life, and for sure the launch of a big marquee title that I'm interested in doesn't have the same drama it did, now that I've lived though a couple-few decades of them. I have to say, though, that I still love the experience of being transported to a fantasy setting, or exploring a strange new world with friends, or testing my skill against other players. I'm looking forward to when I can introduce the hobby to my kid, and share that joy with him.

If people want to live in a fully-automated luxury space communist utopia where everyone is free from want and able to make and release games for free as passion projects, that's great, and a worthy goal to work towards, but promoting piracy on principle without concern for how developers will be supported during their work in the context of our current capitalist society is somewhere between naive at best and self-serving rationalization at worst.

We'll need some major spin to control the PR fallout of this leek!

I hit a difficulty wall in the Wrecker's Cave and never picked the game back up. So far BG3 has been more forgiving, but Larian games don't suffer fools gladly.

Also that example of Tomb Raider is really disingenuous, the level of fidelity in the environments is night and day between the two as well as the quality of animation. In your example the only real thing you can tell is the skin shaders, which are not even close between the two, SotTR really sells that you are looking at real people, something the 2013 game approached but never really achieved IMO.

I've noticed this a lot in comparisons claiming to show that graphics quality has regressed (either over time, or from an earlier demo reel of the same game), where the person trying to make the point cherry-picks drastically different lighting or atmospheric scenarios that put the later image in a bad light. Like, no crap Lara looks better in the 2013 image, she's lit from an angle that highlights her facial features and inexplicably wearing makeup while in the midst of a jungle adventure. The Shadow of the Tomb Raider image, by comparison, is of a dirty-faced Lara pulling a face while being lit from an unflattering angle by campfire. Compositionally, of course the first image is prettier -- but as you point out, the lack of effective subsurface scattering in the Tomb Raider 2013 skin shader is painfully apparent versus SofTR. The newer image is more realistic, even if it's not as flattering.

Yeah, you guys have the Winter War and Continuation War relatively fresh in cultural memory, which probably limits the reach of Russian propaganda. Over here, we remember the Soviet Union primarily as our Cold War rival, and neither side of that conflict came out of it with clean hands. For a certain kind of person, the sins of the American CIA and State Department during the Cold War don't just reflect badly on our government; they somehow also make the Soviet Union, and therefore Russia as its successor state, the Good Guys of the last century of global geopolitics.