evranch @ evranch @lemmy.ca

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465

Joined

2 yr. ago

As ugly as it sounds? Yes. There are nearly 8 billion humans on a planet with finite resources, globally distributed. The resources, unfortunately, are more valuable than any specific subset of humans at this point.

Without trade, billions would die. And they won't be Westerners, they'll be people who live in places where population exceeds carrying capacity. Namely, the ME and Asia.

Yemen in particular is highly dependent on foreign aid. By blocking trade the Houthis are not looking out for the people of their country any more than Hamas is looking out for the people of Palestine. In fact they are the reason Yemen is starving. I'm not sure why so many people on Lemmy are professing support for an illegitimate, theocratic revolutionary force.

“Arab countries and all Islamic countries will not be safe from Jews except through their eradication and the elimination of their entity.” - Al-Houthi

Yes, the Houthi are real opponents of genocide.

If the Houthis really feel like they have a dog in the fight, they could declare war on Israel and deploy and fight rather than harassing non-combatants. They're nothing but terrorists, not combatants - and if the world agrees on one thing it's that we do not negotiate with terrorists.

The crew members are there for a wage, and the ships themselves mostly have nothing to do with Israel.

A huge portion of global trade runs through the area, and it's not just "trinkets from China" as some like to say. It's grain, fuel, steel, all of the things that keep the world running in a globalized economy.

You can't blockade the entire world and not expect retaliation. If anything, I'm surprised it took this long.

And this is relevant to indiscriminately firing into international shipping lanes how?

Even more relevant, "you'll never catch me slipping" in some form has been a common phrase in rap/hip hop since the 80s, meaning to be caught off guard (obviously).

I have no idea why they decided to look foolish by defining such a common word

Why not ask the human lives on the trade vessels?

If the US Navy wasn't swatting missiles and drones, hundreds of sailors would be at the bottom of the sea by now.

Don't forget environmental damage from spilled fuel and actual oil tankers that would be damaged. You know, like the Russian tanker they accidentally fired on today even though it had even less to do with them than anyone else in the sea.

Launching missiles at civilian ships is not a "protest".

Hades is absolutely not a real roguelike, the only roguelike thing about it is that you make multiple runs through a semi-randomized dungeon, and that you can expect to die a lot.

However there is persistent progression and it's rare that you get truly screwed by RNG.

The random part is what weapon mods you get each run, but they are balanced. Part of the fun is not falling into a favorite weapon rut, but running with what you are given. And even a full "winning" run is only about half an hour so if you die it's not a big punishment.

Meanwhile the plot progresses despite your countless deaths, I won't spoil how. It's really a well done game and deserves the praise it gets, and you can get it on sale for like $10, I would go for it if you like beat em up type games at all.

Dread on the other hand appears to be love or hate it, people with weak platforming/traversal skills seem to absolutely hate specific sections where you have to avoid the indestructible EMMI robots with a mix of stealth and skill. I thought it was thrilling myself but YMMV

The rest of the game is a must play for any 2D Metroid fan, but definitely play on PC and not Switch as PC blows it away. With the FPS cap unlocked, I've rarely seen an action platformer flow so smoothly.

I find it's more common as part of a difficulty curve in a game than as optional difficulty, for example Metroid Dread introduces a boss which is hard until you learn the pattern. Then the same enemy turns up as a miniboss, easy now that you know it. Then it starts to show up mixed in with common enemies, forcing you to watch out for them, and when it shows up as a pair it's a challenging boss again as managing two is much harder than one.

Metroid Dread does a great job of making the difficulty track your character's increased abilities throughout the game, and looks beautiful in 1440/60fps on Ryujinx by the way.

However for optional difficulty the best example is probably Hades which is a great example of good game design anyways. In the postgame optional difficulty "Pact of Punishment" you can tweak all manner of game characteristics. Extreme Measures allows some bosses to team up, and changes boss arenas and behaviours. Middle Management mixes up the minibosses totally, adding trash mobs to manage as well as lots of other effects. There's also an option to add new attacks to almost all of the enemies.

Then you can also do the standards like make yourself weaker, enemies tougher, boost the numbers of regular enemies, remove your special abilites and even disable i-frames after being hit (!) Hades probably has some of the best post-game replay value out there.

That's "increasing damage and health."

It varies. I agree far too many games just make the enemies bullet sponges, which I hate.

Increasing numbers though ramps up challenge in a more fun way, I would rather take on a classic "double boss" than one bullet sponge boss. You have to keep track of multiple enemies and change your tactics. It's cheap difficulty but much better than just multiplying health.

I would really like to see more games handle difficulty like Halo for sure.

Also sometimes the player needs to be nerfed for balance. Titanfall 2 for example, in normal I can switch my loadout in combat, blasting rockets as Brute and switch to Ion to fire its laser once the core is charged, totally ruining the whole concept of loadouts. Also when the player has a Halo-style shield and enemies just have regular health... Nerf me already, the game shouldn't feel like you're steamrolling enemies on Normal. 1v4 Titans should at least feel like a challenge, not a cakewalk.

Illustrator I can't see going anywhere as AI still makes too many mistakes. At least technical illustrations, that is. For something like a paperback cover or low-end kids book AI already has that market covered.

Concept artist is probably toast for sure. Except in specific Industries like automotive where you need a real concept for development.

What happens to the pope hats, are they conserved

I finally played around with it with my young daughter a couple days ago for laughs. Now I actually see the point of it.

Yes it's ugly as hell. But it's the rapid prototyping process of art. You ask it to slap some shit together. Nope, that's awful. That's worse, that's hilariously terrible! There is always something wrong.

It's great for throwing ideas at the wall far faster than a real person could sketch them. Especially if that person can't draw, like me. But the finished product is only ever worthy of a meme, not a gallery.

However an artist could easily use that process to brainstorm some ideas. It's like psychedelics but the computer is taking them for you

Sometimes the difficulty will improve enemy tactics, boost numbers or make the player less of a tank, and genuinely add challenge.

But, if the game has a good storyline I like to play on "normal" for the first playthrough as I feel higher difficulty ruins the pacing. Then if I enjoy the game I'll go back and replay on higher difficulty for the challenge.

This was always the way when a new Halo game came out, they have long stated that they are "meant to be played on Heroic" but me and a buddy would rip through in coop on Normal and then bump up the difficulty.

I finally got around to Titanfall 2 and Normal feels a bit easy, but it also feels like I'm playing a robot mecha movie instead of grinding through tactical battles, which is awesome. Definitely going to revisit this one on Hard though.

Used to be but it's been part of the chipset for years now. You can add a USB dongle though

And it's always been terrible at it. And it still is. Pairing issues, overcompressed audio, dropping connections, overcomplicated protocol without universal support... I have no idea how it didn't get replaced by a competing standard.

Like Wi-Fi, honestly. How is Bluetooth not just "USB over Wi-Fi". Literally. Tunnel USB over a 2.4Ghz link. A transport layer that does transport, and then the endpoints can just... Talk to each other. It doesn't sound hard..

Instead we have a system where my wireless controller works great except with an Intel built-in BT chipset. So when I decided to play some games last night on my new TV and tried it out with my laptop, every 15 minutes or so the controller locks up and spins constantly to the right, and has to be re-paired.

Or where if I play anything with any sort of bass in my truck the compressor flattens the mids so you can't even hear the vocals, so I have to use a physical aux cord instead. Why is there dynamic range compression at all? Why is it not configurable? Why is this not just a raw PCM stream. WHY

We have had this protocol for 25 YEARS and it still works like beta

Both are correct but it's a misleading argument. Yes on a geological time scale volcanic eruptions have had a greater impact on the climate that humans have.

However that doesn't change the fact that we fucked up the planet for ourselves by effectively producing a slow burn volcanic eruption over the last century. This wouldn't really be a big issue if we hadn't also exploded our population to the point where we now need all of the land on the planet to feed everyone, and a drop in agricultural output would be catastrophic.

It's just that on top of that you can also lay awake at night concerned that the planet itself might decide to kill all of us at a moment's notice and there would be nothing we can do about it. See: Permian extinction

Super easy, we don't even blanch. We grow like 20lbs of bush beans, cut tips and tails and chunk to an inch or so long, freeze in bags. Toss straight into a soup or stir fry from frozen. Same for beet tops when we harvest the beets, rinse and chop the tops into packable size, dump into just about anything and they are like fresh.

Some vegetables just do not freeze though, no salads of course, only the kinds that you cook.

I rarely buy fresh fruits except for apples these days as they are always poor quality here, and frozen are excellent and far cheaper. Especially berry type fruit like cherries, blueberries, strawberries etc as they go straight from the field to the freezer plant when they are ripe unlike the supermarket crap.

We keep our own apples in the fridge and cellar, same with carrots, beets, potatoes. Onions hang in the basement. Crabapples we have a huge bounty of and core and quarter and freeze, they are great in a fruit smoothie, pie, applesauce etc.

I would highly recommend an upright freezer over a chest aside from secondary bulk meat storage. I have both, the upright you can select your food much better instead of just eating what's on top. Everyone says they will dig in the chest, NOBODY DOES. Modern uprights have similar efficiency and power failure performance, and nothing ends up freezer burnt at the bottom.

I love how you still have to defeat them with an axe.

However if the trees get you this hard I would love to know what you thought of the game's true terrifying jump scare enemy. I'm not mentioning them just in case you haven't run across them yet... But I'm sure you have, right?

Questionable whether it's actually better for the environment as the truck runs every day.

I would say it's better to have a large deep freeze as the energy it consumes yearly likely wouldn't even get you to the store and back once.

I go to the city about once a month and go to Costco, which is really a central location that they truck all of the groceries to, and fill my vehicle completely full of the things I can't grow and store way out here in the middle of nowhere.

I run 2 freezers actually, one I fill with meat when we butcher in the fall, the other with vegetables and fruit from the summer, as well as carbs like perogies, tortillas, breads and buns etc.

I know that obviously most people can't do this to my extent but you can buy a 1/4 beef from a farmer, 1/2 pork, frozen fruit and veg from Costco, sausage from a butcher and so on. Then you barely have to shop at all.

The convenience sounds great but I would say that's the main purpose, not environmental reasons. Also, I would be in for the free beer!

So, uh, that's the joke.

We should probably call some physicists to document this, as it's rare that you see such a perfect superposition of both getting the joke and not getting it. You may in fact be entangled with the joke now... Do you feel unusual in any way?