frog 🐸 @ frog @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I don't need a server, nor an office desktop. I need something that can play games and do digital art, both of which Linux is not stable enough for, which I stated in my initial post. A computer that crashes every couple of minutes while gaming or doing digital art is not useful for me. Chucking my perfectly good Nvidia graphics card in the bin so I can buy something else that is more compatible with Linux is wasteful. And since starting my degree, I have also determined that about 50% of the software I need to use for group project modules doesn't work on Linux and doesn't have appropriate open source alternatives that wouldn't cause compatibility issues when the files are sent on to other team mates - we've all got to be using the same version of the same software.

So yeah, Linux in its present state doesn't suit my needs.

The real ewaste problem here is not people like me that keep using components until they die from wear and tear, and replace only broken components not entire computers. I'm quite happy to keep using Windows 10 as long as it is compatible with my hardware and software, regardless of whether Microsoft are still supporting it. The problem is the people who throw out perfectly usable computers because the OS is no longer supported.

I might as well have tossed my computer in the trash if I'd kept Linux on it, since I couldn't actually do anything with it.

Yeah, my feeling is that if I wanted a server, Linux would be great for that, and if I just wanted a PC for email, internet, word processing, spreadsheets, and the like (ie, a basic office computer), Linux would do just fine too. It's just not stable enough for the huge variety of stuff I need my computer to do.

I have to agree with this. I tried Linux a couple of months ago, and ran into those issues with Nvidia. My computer was reasonably stable in the desktop environment using a particular version of the drivers, so as long as I was happy to never update the drivers and never do anything but email, web browsing, and word processing, Linux would have been fine. If I wanted to play any games or do any digital art or anything else that required my graphics card, it was either unstable or running barely faster than continental drift, depending on which set of drivers I was using.

Like, I do think Linux is pretty cool, but it very much feels like a project for people who have the time and money to continuously tinker with their computer to get it working exactly as they want. It's not there yet on the "it just works no matter what you do" front, which is what the vast majority of computer users need from their operating system. Windows, for all its many faults, is broadly stable and can largely be ignored once it's installed - although I do think it benefits from a reformat every 12-18 months.

Spirit of the North

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1213700/Spirit_of_the_North/

An indie adventure/exploration/puzzle game. There is no combat in this game. You explore, solve puzzles, and take in the vibes of a story told without any dialogue at all. It's all in the visuals, music, and mood. This is Abzu with foxes.

The gameplay is fairly simple, but also pretty forgiving - there are very few places where you need fast reactions or precise timing, and if you fall off a platform you only have to redo the last few jumps, not the entire level. It's the kind of puzzle game where you have plenty of time to think things through and even more time to just enjoy the journey. Definitely a game for the casual gamer who wants to look at pretty landscapes, listen to beautiful music, and bark at things.

If you stick exclusively to following the story, it's maybe 2-3 hours long, and getting 100% completion on all achievements, collectibles, and alternate skins took me 16 hours. So it's not a huge game - which means the best time to buy it is when it's heavily discounted, like right now.

I love this game so much. I like a lot of games, but it's rare that I absolutely adore one. In fact, I might just go and play it again tomorrow.

“We make the best cars,” he said of Tesla at a New York Times event last month. “Whether you hate me, like me or are indifferent, do you want the best car, or do you not want the best car?”

Even if this were true (and I don't think it is), I'd buy the second-best car if it comes from a manufacturer that respects consumer rights law in the UK. The example given in that article, of a Tesla in Cambridge that collapsed after being driven only 115 miles on the first day the dude owned it, would have gotten a serious response from any other car manufacturer, because there is actually consumer rights legislation that protects people in these circumstances. Any car component that fails on the first day of ownership (excluding things like tyres, for obvious reasons) will have a presumption in favour of manufacturing defect (or inadequate inspection in the case of second-hand cars) over consumer abuse. If Tesla won't obey the law, I won't buy their cars.

There's also Rapunzel in Tangled, who repeatedly whacks Flynn with a frying pan until he does what she wants him to.

how many woman would put up with a stay at home guy. Maybe some but not likely.

I would guess that would be primarily because even when the woman is working full time and the guy is at home all the time, the stats show the woman still does most of the housework and child-rearing. Plenty of women do "put up with" a stay-at-home guy when he's doing all the unpaid work that traditionally falls on the woman in the relationship.

The sad thing is that torture didn't used to be a staple of kids films. I watched a lot of animated films in the last few months (research component of an animation module at university), and the torture scenes only really start appearing in the last 30 years or so - and seems to be more of a thing in the 3D animated films than in the traditionally animated ones during the brief time period where the two mediums overlapped.

There's violence in pretty much all of the older ones, for sure, but that feels different to torturing someone for information, I think, because there tends to be two contexts for the violence: a hero is using it as a last resort to deal with an enemy (eg Jungle Book, where Mowgli initially goes "well I'll just talk to Shere Khan so he understands I'm not a threat", and only engages in violence against the tiger when Shere Khan is literally trying to murder everybody) or it's used to demonstrate how cruel and petty a villain is (eg Lion King, where the hyenas shove Zazu into a geyser - they're not torturing him for information, they're doing it because they find it funny). In both cases, there's no ambiguity about whether the violence is justified or not - it is justified when the hero is doing it in self-defence or defence of others, and it's not when the villains are doing it for the giggles.

Even in, say, Pinocchio, where Stromboli uses the threat of violence against Pinocchio, it's in a situation where it's undeniably evil. He had been using cooperation and persuasion up until that point, very successfully, but when Pinocchio basically goes "okay, I've had a nice day, but I'm going home to my father now, I'll be back tomorrow", Stromboli cannot find anything that would persuade Pinocchio not to go home. So violence and the threat of violence are the only options remaining, but there's no question that using threats to prevent a child from going home to their family is in any way justified. And a key part of this is that when Stromboli does this, Pinocchio has absolutely no interest in helping him anymore.

I think the most troubling element of torture in animation films of the last 30 years is how often it's used by the heroes. There is, perhaps, some leeway when the villains do it, because if a villain does an evil thing, then it creates no grey area about whether torture is acceptable. (And it's probably an easier way of having a good character reveal information that they shouldn't, than have them do it voluntarily, which would have audiences going "WTF Mike Wazowski just betrayed his best friend! What a shit guy!") But torture does seem to be increasingly used by the protagonists, when what they should be doing is trying cooperative methods - why does Dory opt for threatening the crabs after taking "there's nothing you can do to make me give you the information" at face value, instead of at least trying cooperation first?

You know, now you mention it, torture scenes of some kind do seem to be very common in kids films, and not just the Disney Pixar ones. The non-Pixar Disney ones often do as well, as do the Dreamworks ones. Not always, but a lot of the time.

One big question comes to mind: are there any kids animated films that were written by women, and do they feature torture scenes?

(I'd be willing to bet a lot of the Hallmark films are written by men, too.)

Breaking: organisation that indiscriminately steals everything that is not nailed down discovers garbage amongst things it has stolen.

It does increasingly feel like the EU is the only institution that has any willingness to stand up to big tech.

I don’t want to believe that hundreds of actual people are independently stealing and making variants on this one artist’s work to get fake internet points…

The really sad thing is I can believe that there are hundreds of people that are doing this. I have encountered people who straight up stole other artists' work and posted it, claiming they made it, in order to get fake internet points. I used to be a moderator on a site that had very strict rules about art theft - used to issue bans for it at least once a week. I can totally believe there are people on that site now using AI images in order to avoid detection.

What strikes me as being utterly pathetic is the people posting this AI-generated shit in order to have people praise "their" work. How empty their lives must be if the only ego-boost they can get is Facebook likes for something they're lying about having made themselves.

I played the entirety of "Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion", which was short, fun, and cute. I'm increasingly finding that I lack the stamina and mental headspace for large games, and I'm appreciating the little indie games a lot more. Something about the combination of cute food characters and running around committing petty crimes and ripping up documents just really appealed to me.

Yesterday I started "Earthlock", which I got a couple of months ago in a giveaway. I'm liking it so far. Has a lot of "Final Fantasy games in the 1990s" vibes which is working for me. There's more frogs than I expected, which is always a pleasant surprise.

Actual serious answer: electric eels are exclusively South American, so the indigenous peoples there probably do have their own names for them which would likely pre-date the discovery of electricity.

(Electric fish known to other cultures would have been electric catfish, not electric eels.)

I haven't played it yet either (waiting for the price to come down, and I'm largely withholding judgement until I've played it myself), but my understanding is essentially it's not a bad game, and if it had been launched 10 years ago, or from a much smaller studio, it wouldn't have attracted so much criticism. But it's using what is now a very old engine (and a notoriously buggy one, which I can confirm from having played other games with the same engine) which limited its potential. My feeling is it was a difficult decision either way: do you keep using the engine that the dev team has spent the last decade learning inside and out, or do you switch to something newer with more capabilities but then have the enormous challenge of retraining everyone? I don't envy that choice.

I'm expecting to enjoy Starfield but not be wowed by it. But that's fine, because I'm fine with playing games where I go "I enjoyed that" rather than "this changed my life", and it's also pretty rare for me to really dislike a game.

But... yeah, definitely sticking with my thinking that I totally understand the guy's frustration with the way gamers so often think they know more than they do, but I don't think his public response is very professional.

I have mixed feelings here, because on one hand, I actually do see where this guy is coming from. I'm a game design student on a degree course structured around live client briefs and projects for contests (ie, the stuff we make has to work for people outside the university, not just ourselves), and as design lead for the first project of the course, I was fighting with a member of my own team about design decisions throughout the entire project. Dude with zero capacity for empathy spent a considerable amount of energy arguing about how it was a waste of time developing the relationship between the characters in what was explicitly supposed to be a character-driven story. The words "character-driven" were literally in the brief, and right up until the last day he was insisting it was a waste of time focusing on the characters. So I really, really feel the Starfield design lead's frustration on the "stop arguing about shit you know nothing about" front.

On the other hand, I don't feel it's very professional to air this frustration in public. If people don't like Starfield, then they don't like it, and the design lead complaining about it on social media isn't going to change that, nor does it paint Bethesda in a good light. It just makes him look a bit petty, I guess?

I guess it all comes down to whether the product meets expectations. Players are disappointed in Starfield, and even if they don't know why design decisions were made, it doesn't change the fact that the game hasn't achieved what it was meant to achieve. People that spent a lot of money buying it have a right to feel annoyed, and being told "I'm right, you're wrong" by the design lead isn't helpful. And if the project does meet expectations, and it's only a few assholes complaining, then nobody needs to say "I'm right, you're wrong" because the end results speak for themselves. If Starfield had been a massive, widely-loved success, a few armchair devs saying "you should have done X, Y and Z instead" wouldn't be taken seriously.

IANAL, and I get that this varies by country, but at least some of TikTok's users are in the UK, where the courts have very thoroughly established that some contract terms are automatically unreasonable and are completely unenforceable even if someone agrees to them (the biggest example actually being most non-compete clauses in employment contracts!) This would seem to be one such case. This contract term is so blatantly unreasonable that I don't see how a court would uphold it even if the users agreed to it.

I'm pretty relieved that it's not! Beehaw is a good community because it's small and has standards about who is welcome. Marketing the site would go against that principle.