loobkoob @ loobkoob @kbin.social

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Joined

2 yr. ago

instead of continuing to support this company after all the BS of PA

Any context for this? I've played PA a little and enjoyed it well enough, but I'm totally out of the loop regarding any drama / shady practices surrounding it.

It's not just beneficial for Twitch, it can be easier for users, too. Right now, if I want to get updates from all of my favourite Twitch streamers, because it can't be done through Twitch itself, I need to have accounts on Twitter, Discord, Instagram, YouTube, Mastodon and Reddit. And I maybe don't even care about their networking, memes, politics, random food photos, or whatever, I might just want to see them saying, "hey, I'm doing a special stream at this date/time" so I know to tune in.

Over a decade ago, I wanted SoundCloud to implement basic text statuses so musicians I followed could just announce things like upcoming releases, that they were working on an album, that they had a tour coming up, etc. They never did, and it still feels like a missed opportunity to me. I want a way to get useful announcements from creators I'm interested in without having to sift through all the noise and without having to use 15 different platforms.

Rosa Parks for example sat on the front of a bus and got arrested. She didn’t move. She stopped a bus and all the passengers on the bus until she was arrested, nobody critisises her because some people were late that day!

I think a lot of people tend to look at Rosa Parks' act through a modern lens and say, "she wasn't disruptive, she was just sitting there," not realising that it was incredibly disruptive at the time. What she did seems like nothing by today's standards because her protest worked.

Women sufferage

Martyrs, too. Emily Davison threw herself in front of a horse race and died for it in the name of women's suffrage. There's debate about whether she intended to die, or whether she may have just been trying to attach suffragette colours to the King's horse, but the fact is that she was consciously willing to die for her cause. Plus she went on hunger strike in prison to the point where she was force-fed on multiple occasions.

Suffragettes going on hunger strike in prison, and the prison authorities violently force-feeding them to the point where they sustained fairly serious injuries, was common in the early 1910s. It's not particularly pleasant reading, but there's an article from the Museum Of London that talks about some of the lengths suffragettes went to with their hunger strikes that is worth reading for anyone who isn't familiar.

I think everyone should learn about the suffrage movement and the lengths they were willing to go to to fight for women's rights, particularly with civil protest being a somewhat relevant topic over the last few years.

It's necessary for the client computer to know where other players are, though. Like, if someone is walking in the other side of a wall to me, or shooting their gun around a corner from me, it's important for me to get audio cues, for instance.

As for server-side input monitoring, that can only take you so far. It's easy enough to add a random element to a script so things don't happen at fixed intervals, for example. Most of these games do use server-side input monitoring on top of client-side anti-cheat.

This is where it gets tricky and a lot of nuance is lost, I think. There reaches a certain point where it stops being zero-sum because two or more parties can each have an entirely independent and valid claim.

In your example, if you pass the money to your children, they reach 40 years old, spending the money they believe is theirs, and then suddenly they're told they owe $2M they don't have for something they didn't do, that's not fair on them. Have they benefitted from the $2M? Absolutely. Is it fair that they benefitted while the person/people you stole it from suffered? Absolutely not. But your children didn't do anything to deserve punishment.

Now I'm generally fairly anti-Israel, and have been for years, so don't take this as me being an apologist for colonisers. But for someone who has lived all their life in Israel - whose great-grandparents were colonisers - Israel is home and they feel they have just as much right to it as the people it was stolen from 80 years ago. The longer these conflicts go on, the more difficult it is to come up with a fair solution on a human level.

Israel is definitely in the wrong, though. It's very clearly not fair from a Palestinian perspective. But no matter how you try to divide up the land now, there will be innocent people who suffer for it. There's no easy solution to it, unfortunately. It's more complex than just "give it back".

The idea that only having a €15M budget is what caused this game's issues is ridiculous. It's not a game that had good ideas and just failed to execute them properly; it's fundamentally bad on a conceptual level.

The setting and story concept are bad. When the game was first announced, I don't think I heard or saw a single discussion where someone was excited to experience playing through the story of Gollum in that time period in the story. Or even playing as Gollum at all - he's a great secondary character in the books and films, but he's hardly a character you want to play as in a video game. There's no room for character development either.

The game design is bad. It's just bad. No amount of time, money or polish is going to fix the terrible basic design principles the game is built on. And even if they had 10x the budget and hired a world-class lead game designer from the start, it still would have the issues with the story and character.

The whole project is one that shouldn't have left the brainstorming session it was conceived in.

I love that that implies there's a non-zero chance of spaghettification before crossing that threshold, too!

Nah, it wasn't removed for technical reasons; Sony removed it because CDPR went behind their back and blanket-offered refunds. Which was the right thing for CDPR to do from a consumer-friendly perspective and from a PR perspective, but they should have communicated with Sony more first seeing as refunds on PlayStation go through Sony's store. I thought it was a bad look for Sony, though, personally.

That's not to excuse Cyberpunk 2077's performance on consoles in any way - they deserve flak for that.

I just finished playing Cocoon. It was short-but-sweet - it took me two evenings to finish, so probably in the 5-7 hours range - but it was one of the most interesting and engaging puzzle games I've played in a long time. What's especially fascinating to me is that its controls are so simple - everything is done with one analogue stick / WASD and a single interact button - and it's a very linear game, yet it still feels so engaging to play. It's from the lead designer of Limbo and Inside, so it has pedigree.

I played it via Game Pass (ha...) so it's hard for me to say what the value proposition is like. It certainly isn't going to give you the most time for your money, and it doesn't really have much in the way of narrative or themes, at least beyond abstract ones. But it has a gorgeous aesthetic and some fantastic puzzles.

Well let's just say Factorio is known as "cracktorio" for a reason.

It's been rumoured to be in development hell for quite a while now. And last week, Sony removed all traces of it from their YouTube and Twitter feeds, which a lot of people are taking to mean it's been quietly cancelled.

Despite some of the players complaining, a lot of the audience likes the pay-to-win mechanic. It's not a game funded purely by whales; a lot of average players will spend money on the loot boxes. "I like that it means I don't have to grind for ages, I don't have time for that" and "it feels like the sports trading cards I had when I was a kid" are a couple of the reasons I hear somewhat regularly. The idea that it could be designed to not be grindy in the first place doesn't even occur to them.

I occasionally see something tagged as "18+", although it's never been porn. I have wondered if it's bugged, too, but I don't really mind either way - there are other websites that are far, far better for porn if that's what I'm looking for. Maybe there's some great non-porn, non-gore content that I've been missing out on, but I think the chances are fairly slim.

If it helps, I use kbin.social (and its PWA for mobile browsing) and haven't seen any porn at all in my feed. I assume it's filtered out by default, but I haven't checked. I don't get any of the extreme political stuff in my feed either.

This woman, yes, but him serving another 23 years could have just been delaying it happening to another woman in 23 years' time.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but the key point here is that prisons should be about rehabilitating prisoners so that they're fit to return to society. Just locking someone away for 30 years and assuming they'll come out reformed is flawed thinking; the prison system needs to actively work towards making sure prisoners are safe to release into society and equipped to deal with society. And if one of those things isn't true, the prisoner should not be released.

In this instance, it's clear 7 years wasn't long enough either way. But I doubt 30 years would have been enough either with the current attitude of prisons being for punishment rather than rehabilitation.

I didn't dislike Krasinski in Dr Strange 2 but I wasn't fully sold on him. He was fine for a cameo, but I don't think he'd pull off the character in a lead role. Mr Fantastic - or at least my interpretation of him - has always been arrogant, aloof and disconnected. It's clear he thinks he's the smartest person in the room (because he is, and probably the planet), and he's not necessarily a cold person but it's obvious he focuses more on his work than on the people around him, even if he does care about them. Krasinski just never sold me on being the smartest person on the planet, not did he really nail the slightly disconnected aspect of the character, I feel.

It's perhaps a slightly weird suggestion, but I've always felt that Glenn Howerton (Dennis from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia) would be my ideal Mr Fantastic. He can absolutely pull of that arrogant, slightly narcissistic aspect of the character, but I feel like he can do it in a charismatic, likeable way. And he can definitely sell the idea that he's very intelligent. Plus he looks the part.

I am not!

Typically around 04:00-12:00 for me. Fortunately, I have a job that fits nicely around that, so I'm in a pretty good place overall, but when I do have to try to shift to more "normal" schedules it really wreaks havoc on my energy levels and mental clarity.

I've tried all sorts in an attempt to make a "normal" schedule work for me, like sleep monitoring, therapy, sleeping pills, and just being really over-the-top about my sleep hygiene (like not allowing screen usage for X hours before bed, no drinking or eating X hours before bed, etc). I can sort of make a "normal" schedule stick but I never feel good for it. And it takes constant work because my body naturally wants to gradually drift back towards a 4am sleep time, and I find going to sleep earlier than previous nights very difficult so once it starts slipping it usually takes an all-nighter to get it back to where I want it.

Like I said, I've generally got things pretty good right now with my job and lifestyle working around my sleep schedule. But it'd certainly be a lot easier if society didn't think I was lazy and was able to accommodate me (and other people with less "normal" sleep schedules) a little more.

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

This one being missing is what stood out to me. I'm admittedly a bit of a fanboy of the series (and the TV adaptation) but it certainly feels like it deserves a spot to me. Like you said, it's good, accessible and fun, but I also think it handles geopolitics (well, solar system politics) in a fantastic and believable way.

I think the series understands human nature on a fundamental level. A lot of sci-fi is great at exploring high-concept ideas but it often tends to falter when it comes down to the personal, more human, individual level, I find. The Expanse series feels like its high-concept, sociological ideas are an extension of the individuals, which really helps to sell the world, I think. It also means the "villains" and the "evil factions" tend to have understandable, if not sometimes even relatable, motives.

It also just handles the science really well; the physics, especially, but also some biology, is integrated into the plot and world-building really nicely, but it never feels like you're reading a dense scientific journal filled with techno-babble. It gets across the concepts really well without getting bogged down with unnecessary details.

It's not only about being tired enough to fall asleep early. If I stick to a 10pm-6am sleep schedule I feel exhausted during the day, and by early afternoon I'll be falling asleep. It's like being jetlagged permanently; my body simply doesn't want to keep to that schedule. It's not just an "oh, you need to stick to the schedule long enough to adapt and get into a proper routine" situation either - it's something I struggled with for years while I was in school and university, despite getting enough sleep.

It's amazing how much better and more energetic I feel - physically and mentally - now I'm able to keep to a sleep schedule that suits me. Obviously exercising is a good thing, but early/delayed sleep phase syndrome are real things.