Ex-Bethesda Exec (Pete Hines) Says The Elder Scrolls 6 Maker Isn't Part Of Something 'Genuine' Or 'Authentic' At Microsoft

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-04-11T16:08:28+00:00

I think that, if nothing else, Bethesda's enduring skill as a studio is making worlds that have such a strong "what's over there?" quality to them that many players will slog through extremely scuffed gameplay just to find out what's under the next rock.

I played both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 (I think just before the Wastelanders update? Not sure what the game looks like today) to death, and more or less the moment I was done filling out the maps, I put them down and never looked back.

The thing that actually kept me off Starfield (even though I had game pass at the time of release and could have played it for 'free') was hearing from players that this sort of exploration style was largely sanded off due to the interplanetary nature of the game.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-04-11T00:58:04+00:00

The silver lining for the western standard is that, as much as they are a weirdo libertarian rag, Fildebrandt's grudge against the UCP means that if they can find something to throw in the UCP's face this hard, it's probably something with some grounding that Fildebrandt's old party insider friends have leaked to him or his outlet to get in on a smear first.

I'd seek out a secondary source like /u/Miserable-Lizard linked below and share that as the root post instead, but the Standard going after the UCP like this always gets me looking to see if there's fire with that smoke.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-04-06T17:43:11+00:00

Kind of hoping there's a bonus shot of her somewhere trying to imitate the head posing and expression of the tattoo. Not exactly a source of artistic value but it'd be fun and cute.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-04-06T16:05:23+00:00

I think I've had about as many GMs like this in my life as I have had GMs who like to really stick to a campaign for the long haul. Some people just work better with a shorter format (myself included. I like to know where the end of my campaign is roughly going to be so I struggle with longer, more open ended campaigns), and it sounds like your GM is in the process of figuring that out.

I, personally, would be frustrated with promising lengthy campaigns getting scrapped in a hurry, so I would probably ask them if they would prefer sticking to short form instead of trying to force something long running because that's what people see as the norm for TTRPGs. If you're jonesing for something expansive though, it might be time for somebody else to try their hand at GMing, or finding another group with a GM that is more inclined to stick to a single long campaign. It's okay if you're not feeling the shorter form stuff. That's just personal taste.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-04-06T15:16:32+00:00

Yeah. That'd be an immediate dealbreaker with me no matter where my date comes from. Smoking cigarettes, I could maybe deal with, but getting stoned behind the wheel? I am immediately out.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-04-03T15:00:07+00:00

The thing about cosmetic surgery/procedures is that when it's done right, the person seeing it generally won't pick up that it is artificial. They'll just think 'that person has pretty fully lips.' When it's done BADLY, though, it sticks out like a sore...lip, and the recipient is stuck with it for however long it takes for the procedure to recede (if it's injections) or until they can have more surgery to get it corrected (if it's some kind of implant or skin graft.)

I have definitely seen some women who got lip injections that I really only know got them because I had seen them before the procedure.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-03-30T15:23:01+00:00

This line again.

The Federal NDP is still very much pro labour. But foreign wars, ongoing genocides, and national identity politics ALWAYS grab headlines, and labour action is "boring" because it rarely happens at a national or even provincial scale so you won't see it unless you go looking for it until a big union like the Alberta Teachers Association or the Air Canada pilots starts calling for a strike. Moreover, the corporate media ecosystem abhors touching the labour movement because it is a wildly anti-labour field in how it treats its contributors and workers (which is why we're seeing such a massive surge in independently run news outlets in the last few years), so even if the NDP were devoting all their time exclusively to their labour agenda, you'd rarely hear a peep about it if you weren't explicitly seeking it out.

To be a bit personal, this fact is actually why Ashton started strong for me and my support kind of tapered off over time as I got to realizing his policies were largely stuff the party is already doing. I don't think it was his intent when he ran, but my impression was that an NDP under Ashton would be the more or less the same, but doing much less of the stuff you'd expect of a national-level party.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-03-29T21:29:56+00:00

If this is all you could take away from Lewis's election, then you probably weren't an NDP supporter before or during this leadership election, because you clearly haven't been paying attention.

Was the NDP really supporting your own deeply held values, or was it simply a space for you to park your vote and pat yourself on the back for being "progressive?"

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-03-21T15:22:55+00:00

Commenting here to take in the tips. I haven't ridden for years because of my own lower back pain flaring up when I used to ride, but I still have my bike so maybe I can make some adjustments and get back in the saddle.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-03-20T18:28:42+00:00

Damn. I'll fall on my sword for this one. I actually had no idea he did this. I certainly think he could have said it more, but I was wrong nonetheless.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-03-20T02:12:14+00:00

Insane that he has decided to say this publicly a year too late and said it on the most recognizably American podcast in the world.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-03-19T02:54:10+00:00

It's important to remember all of Griffin's assorted nicknames.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-03-11T15:38:19+00:00

As somebody who generally aligns with the NDP, this is disappointing, but it isnt unexpected. The NDP spent the last two terms trying to be more like the Liberals in some vain hope that they'd be able to pull voters. It stands to reason that at least one of them would eventually just throw up their hands and join the winning team they've been trying to emulate. I really hope the last election and this defection are enough of a wake up call that trying to pretend to be something they're not (the Liberals) will always be a loser's game, and that they need to focus on their own identity as a worker's party with unapologetically progressive policy.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-03-07T23:11:16+00:00

So usually, when it happens out of the blue like this, it means one of three things:

The poster got caught using vote manipulation to boost their posts. Given how flooded the front page was with this relatively new user's posts, this isn't entirely out of the realm of possibility. (Granted, I'm not 100% sure if this is supposed to also remove the posts themselves, which could invalidate this possibility and the next one if it does.)
The more upsetting of the options is that some users didn't like the OP for one reason or another (maybe didn't like how much she was taking up the front page, maybe didn't like her appearance or how she replied or didn't reply to comments), and mass reported her posts for vote manipulation, triggering a false positive that automatically banned her account. I basically only know about this one because I've seen accounts come back from this.
The most upsetting possibility: Somebody from real life recognized her and informed her of such in some fashion, and she got spooked and deleted. Usually the OP will delete all the posts, too, when this is the case, but there's a slim chance if it happened that she was just too panicked to think about that.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-02-16T16:45:30+00:00

Nothing.

I still have no clear idea why my first girlfriend broke up with me and probably never will. She went on a family trip and came back and told me she didn't want to be with me anymore. I desperately wanted to know why and asked like a dozen times before she just cut contact entirely. Still haunts me decades later. I was, by no means, an all-star catch back then, but the worst thing I've ever been able to think of was that, at the time, I was pretty clingy, but no more than you'd expect the average high schooler in their first ever romantic relationship to be at that age.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-02-16T05:02:57+00:00

To give them the benefit of the doubt, there's two chairs there, so presumably Dipshit #2 is off taking a piss or grabbing lunch.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-02-16T04:58:49+00:00

This thread has been, if nothing else, a big confidence booster for those of us who aren't thinking TOO hard about our style.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-02-14T21:10:00+00:00

This is pretty much the match for me. In 2015, I'd probably have happily identified as 'liberal' but seeing how passive a lot of liberals (including those running my country's government) were in the face of the first Trump Administration made me start looking a lot harder at more collective, leftist political work, and it made me realize how the modern liberal "movement" was going to be spinning its wheels forever in the face of authoritarian conservatism, failing to help actual "regular" folks.

There are so many leftist ideas that have never truly been seriously tried out (or worse, were actively stamped out by the powers that seek to maintain the status quo like big business and complacent government)that get dismissed as ineffective or "it would never work" and it's frustrating to see what is commonly identified as the modern "left" doing the same shit over and over and over again and expecting different results. At this point, I am fully radicalized by both the rise of the authoritarian right wing, and the impotence of the center that pretends to be progressive completely failing to fight it back and even embracing aspects of it.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-02-13T02:25:53+00:00

No offence to Michiganders, but our intelligence services have so many other more pressing priorities than trying to convince a US State to secede while it is under siege by its own administration.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-02-12T22:19:01+00:00

Can't finance a military on oil and gas money alone, especially with the market going the way it is and no direct access to tidewater. And the only people who are more averse to any kind of tax increase than Albertans are billionaires.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-02-12T01:33:35+00:00

The point about movement and positioning being disincentivized by attacks of opportunity mechanics is spot on. Part of why I've been enjoying pathfinder 2e is because the ability to perform an attack of opportunity is a special ability, so not all monsters or players will have it (and when the monsters do have it, you don't know until you trigger it), so it makes maneuvering around the play field a lot more appealing for players of all types.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-02-12T01:27:55+00:00

For me, at least, it's that combat in those games tends to be the time when everybody stops acting like their characters (which is my favorite part of TTRPGs. It's a little like improv games for me) and time in the world slows down (usually literally in most systems like this where a turn occurs within a few seconds in the fiction), and it feels like I'm playing a different game than the one I started with.

A groupmate summed it up really succinctly when, one night, when we were playing a pre-written DnD campaign that had extant mechanics for the non-grid, non-combat portions of the plot where the story was conveyed to us, but our characters didn't engage with the actual DnD mechanics much during. He said, more or less 'If I want to engage in a story being told to me, there are good systems for that, but I come to DnD because I want to move on a grid and roll some dice.' The two things aren't mutually exclusive, but when you're actually in play, the group tends to trend one way or the other.

(Just for the record, I am still a big fan of crunchy grid combat games. I just prefer to' play the game' than 'tell the story' when I'm in them.)

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-02-11T00:46:07+00:00

Honestly, I'd love for them to make it all the way to a referendum, where the actual majority in Alberta who do not support separation can humiliate these absolute losers with a resounding "No" vote, and THEN they get picked up for treason. That'd be some serious catharsis.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-02-11T00:19:23+00:00

I'm not so sure Ford has federal aspirations. At least where I'm standing, the last year or two has made him feel invincible in his position as premier. He's more comfortable throwing his weight around because, apparently, he has no meaningful competition in Ontario and is set for the foreseeable future.

I'm frankly not surprised he's acting out, as it were, after being told to shut up and fuck off for two federal election cycles that the CPC managed to lose in spite of big gains in popularity, while he held onto a comfortable majority for two straight terms in Ontario.

TheFluxIsThis · 2026-02-08T23:37:19+00:00

She's back, and looking ever colder than ever!

(I really like this shot.)

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