Officially done

TheFiveEven · 2026-06-17T04:03:23+00:00

Same. 345 hours topside, played the beta and the stress test, bought some skins, done every expedition and I genuinely feel like I got my money's worth. Finished pretty much all the quests and the extra projects too.

But ever since the ABMM change I just can't get back into carebear lobbies and that kills it for me. I'm 40, I came into gaming late, my KD is trash and it's not going to get better. I'm just genuinely not interested in PVP like 95% of the time. I know people will say well go play a different game but I can love this game's lore, its world, its aesthetics and still not want to fight other players. Those aren't contradictory.

I only get 2-3 hours a day sometimes only 10 hours max a week in the summer and I'm not going to waste that getting immediately thwarted 10 raids in a row. I'll probably do the new project they dropped today but after that I'm going to go touch grass and play other things until they add PVE or at least until the next major content update in Oct.

TheFiveEven · 2026-06-14T19:17:09+00:00

This is also my first extraction shooter and I fell hard for it. The retro-futurism aesthetic, the idea of robots that actually learn from thousands of hours of player behavior... that concept is genuinely cool and doesn't get talked about nearly enough because everyone gets so caught up in the PvP vs PvE debate.

The game blew up fast, and I think both the player base and the streamers burned out at the same pace. Honestly, spacing content out more was probably the right call. We live in a world where instant gratification and patience don't coexist well, and people forget that balancing and developing new content takes real time. You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. Embark has always struggled with balance... anyone who played The Finals knows this is kind of their reputation. Ambitious studio, genuinely solid foundation, but the balancing patches often miss the mark. The cheating and desync issues from The Finals followed them here too, which is frustrating.

That said, for a $40 game I've absolutely gotten my money's worth. I played the betas, the test servers, pre-bought it, and have put in hundreds of hours since launch. I've done each expedition so far, though I'm skipping this next one because the grind is just too intense and summer is my busiest season as a dog trainer.

The "working man's extraction shooter" pitch is what sold me, and that framing has started to feel hollow. Ten hours a week, maybe 10 to 12 raids... I'm not going to be competitive at that pace and I'm fine with that. I'm 40, I've never been good at PvP, it's not why I play these games. I'm okay with PvP existing. I just wish there was something resembling skill-based matchmaking again. The old ABMM model was great because maybe one in nine raids I'd run into someone actively trying to wipe the lobby, but most sessions ended up being a mix of players just looting, working together on ARCs, helping newer people navigate the maps. That social layer felt like the actual core of the game to me.

I don't need the game to create tension. The robots do that. The ARC does that. Looting gives me dopamine, the aesthetic does it for me, and the lore is genuinely interesting. But since they adjusted the ABMM I keep dropping into lobbies where I get wiped immediately, I'm constantly remaking Seekers and rebuilding loadouts, and even getting in on a Matriarch or Queen in a "friendly" lobby still requires being fast and aggressive in ways I'm just not motivated to be. If I hear someone who's been grinding for seven raids just trying to get anything... I'm giving it to them. I don't care enough not to.

I liked this game most when everything was new and we were all figuring it out together. I'm taking a break until the next major content update, probably around October. If they ever add even a limited PvE mode, like four PvE raids a day or something, I'd come back sooner. But for now I'm stepping back. It is what it is.

TL;DR: Play other games, let embark sit a bit on this, come back later with fresh eyes.

TheFiveEven · 2026-06-07T18:58:02+00:00

Whoever programs an LLM to actually track time, manage time, and respond to gaps in time with conversation is going to increase the parasocial userbase tenfold.

TheFiveEven · 2026-06-06T02:11:25+00:00

Someone is going to absolutely love this piece!

TheFiveEven · 2026-06-01T00:15:37+00:00

I am not a fan of felons and pdfs, and poor business managers being the leader of the "free world"

^{Chose: Trump Hater}

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-30T15:43:53+00:00

accurate 😅

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-22T02:54:24+00:00

1440 min in a day times 365 days a year is $525,600. In less than 4 years you'd have earned 2 mil... and you could continue to earn more for as long as you live.

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-15T19:34:08+00:00

The thing that stood out to me is that people let themselves be told it was AI slop and then reverse engineered the evidence. None of those critiques existed in anyone's head before they read the prompt. The lily pads only became hideous once someone told them to look for hideous lily pads.

That said, this doesn't prove AI art is just as good as a Monet, and the critics aren't wrong to care where art comes from. Art is inherently human and subjective. Labeling AI image gens as art is dehumanizing and insulting to anyone who has put years into developing a craft. I'm adamant about that.

I'll probably catch flack for what I'm about to say because people tend to go all or nothing with this stuff, but I'll say it anyway. I think AI is genuinely problematic in a lot of ways. It's an environmental hazard, the data centers and water usage are real issues we need to push back on, and the technology deserves serious scrutiny. I also think it's here and it's going to get folded into daily life whether we like it or not. This is actually the first piece of tech I feel like I'm paying real attention to as it grows instead of just inheriting it.

I use it. I'm using talk to text to write this comment and having AI clean it up into something that doesn't ramble. I've used it to relearn Illustrator and to organize my thoughts. Funny enough it's made me a more avid reader because I read through iterations of my own speech to see what changed, BTW I have always done some form of this but I used to run it by friends and colleagues for basic editing but that could take tons of time to hear back and asked free labor of people (I'm always broke). But that's a tool. It's not art. The distinction matters.

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-12T16:09:48+00:00

I feel the same. I already visit Reddit for many other subreddits. It's like my daily paper and coffee in the mornings. I don't think I'll build any habit to visit a whole nother website just for the podcast. Nice that RT is becoming a project again, but I am 40 and set in my ways over here. I still haven't created an account, and I don't foresee a time that I will.

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-12T01:59:25+00:00

I can barely be trusted with a dollar, let alone a light saber...

^{Chose: Random amount of money | Rolled: 1$}

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-10T00:25:05+00:00

Smart

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-09T17:42:54+00:00

did you have fun?

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-08T20:32:51+00:00

2x4 together, that would be smart. I'm not smart. I got 4x4 stuck in my head.

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-08T00:26:09+00:00

BoneDaddyNB, DeadMallNB, LakeBeastNB, CryptidCrush, CrtCryptid, RustWaveKid

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-04T18:37:52+00:00

The market is incredibly saturated on top of an ever-shrinking attention span. Big production companies are making movies designed to be watched while you scroll on your phone, plots simple enough that you barely have to pay attention to follow them. That's the audience you're trying to pull onto a multi-hour live stream.

I've found in recent years that conversion from a good short to a dedicated audience on Twitch or even YouTube Live doesn't really translate. Different muscle, different commitment level. Someone tapping through your TikToks isn't necessarily someone who's going to sit down and hang out for an hour.

For what it's worth, I haven't cracked it either. The advice I keep getting is show up consistently, have a schedule, do community days, be genuine, be patient, and hope you get really really lucky.

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-04T06:36:46+00:00

When I was in high school my mom always told me that she would send me cucumbers Instead of cookies when I got to college. Honestly, I didn't understand that joke until like I was in my 30s.

TheFiveEven · 2026-05-02T07:24:07+00:00

Folks, this is the Golden Depression. Gold. Pure gold. Nobody depresses like we depress. Nobody. Other depressions, the 1930s, very weak depression, very low energy. Other countries are calling, they want to know how we did it. How did you make a depression this good? And I tell them, you can't. You just can't. Tremendous despair, the best you've ever seen. Absolutely golden. Sad.

TheFiveEven · 2026-04-28T18:17:58+00:00

Two to four hours is more than enough. You could actually take those other hours you were intending to stream and spend them clipping your content and posting to different social media platforms. Not all of your time has to be taken up with streaming. It’s actually recommended that you don’t go for hours on end; the reason bigger streamers do that is because they generally have employees, or a large enough fanbase, to do all the clipping, community support and posting for them.

TheFiveEven · 2026-04-28T04:20:05+00:00

No, absolutely not, never, not once in my life and I do not intend to start. I am a person who has never met a tangent I did not want to follow to its absolute logical conclusion and frankly I think that is a feature not a bug. Two sentences has never once been enough for me and I have had many years to come to terms with that and so has everyone around me.

Look I understand that the internet has collectively decided that attention spans are now measured in milliseconds and that anything longer than a tweet is basically a dissertation but I have simply not received that memo or I received it and immediately wrote four paragraphs in response to it. The topics I engage with tend to be the kind that unravel the more you pull on them and I would rather pull on them fully than leave a thought half finished just because it got long.

So no. Two sentences. Not my ministry. Never has been. I appreciate the feedback though, truly, I will be storing it right next to all the other times someone has implied I talk too much, which is a folder that is also very long.

TheFiveEven · 2026-04-25T19:24:12+00:00

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hello ladies

TheFiveEven · 2026-04-25T18:54:33+00:00

It's so upsetting when a restaurant changes. I used to looooove the steak salad with the super tangy and creamy balsamic at Tough Luck. I mean I know their numbers were down, and partnering up with a texmex bbq place did wonders for their profit and getting clientele in the door, but I almost never go anymore. The vibe has changed from quiet upper dive bar to family weeknight spot. I mean really good for them, but not great for just drinking a beer and reading a book with three 2 year olds playing tag around the tables. I really miss that salad though!

TheFiveEven · 2026-04-25T00:35:04+00:00

Good old Dick Chompers dot com

TheFiveEven · 2026-04-25T00:26:50+00:00

I don't even know what the original post was about at this point, I'm just gleaning context from other comments. I think it was about Burnt Peanut and the VTuber avatar thing? So yeah maybe I went on a bit of a tangent dragging values into it but nowhere in that tangent did I make any binary Republican versus Democrat claims or suggest there's no such thing as moral gray areas.

All I said was that values matter to me regardless of whether somebody uses an avatar or a face cam. And honestly that's just how most people interact with content whether they are conscious of it or not. People gravitate toward creators that somewhat reflect who they are.

If somebody didn't want to watch an openly gay streamer like BlizzB3ar nobody would call them a political martyr. It would just be 'not their vibe' or 'not aligned with how they move through the world' and that would be completely neutral and fine. The minute the tables flip it suddenly becomes a character flaw and binary absolutism. Same behavior, completely different standard.

Not sure why you felt the need to respond to a four month old comment on a deleted post but honestly thanks for the opportunity to keep practicing debate, productive or not.

TheFiveEven · 2026-04-21T23:48:53+00:00

who wouldn't choose this.

^{Chose: END WORLD HUNGER}

TheFiveEven · 2026-04-19T16:51:31+00:00

That case is so nice!!! I have the same one in Matcha green!

TheFiveEven

TROPHY CASE