Personally I found the combat as fun and balanced as can be expected in a game where power scaling is not directly tied to progress. If you just fuck around doing side quests and farming loot for 20 hours, it's going to feel super easy, and if you try to blitz the story and run early game stuff then enemies will feel like bullet sponges. That's just a mechanic endemic to the open world rpg genre. My first playthrough I did side missions as I stumbled across them on my way through the story, and the combat felt pretty balanced. Second time I went much more methodically and ended up cruising through story missions like nobody's business.
Mlem. There isn't really a main reason. I like it because:
It's native SwiftUI, so it feels super snappy and "Apple-y" the same way Apollo used to
It's FOSS (though that's sort of table stakes around here)
The widget customizer thingy on the beta build is absolutely fantastic
It's not ugly. There are a bunch of apps that just sorta aped the Apollo UI without any of the attention to detail
I have a ton of faith in the stability of the dev team. There was a bunch of drama early in its development and I was pretty sure the project was going to die, but it didn't and it's been (as far as I can tell) smooth ever since
My only gripes are that the scrolling is still sometimes funky on the beta build and development isn't the fastest, but once all the apps are in their fully-built stable state I think Mlem is absolutely going to stand out among the crowd.
There are a lot of good resources in this thread, but nobody has mentioned the single most important part by far:
actually practice philosophy
Study is worthless if you don't engage in the practice of philosophy. Find people to debate with, preferably ones who have a formal grounding (and I mean a real debate, where you make reasoned arguments and investigate the truth of a matter, not the bullshit-flinging points game that gets popular online). Write arguments, revise them, give them to people to tear them apart.
The literature is good, but it will only teach you (a) how philosophers approach questions, (b) what arguments and counterarguments have been successful or popular, and (c) what the big questions are. If you do not practice philosophy, you will never learn philosophy; you will only learn what philosophers have said.
Yet another thing the lord of the rings movies absolutely nail. The evolution of the Rohirrim theme from a single lonely violin when Gandalf and co. arrive in Edoras to a grand orchestral arrangement over the assembled host gets me every time.
Passed mine first try. It helps to take it somewhere suburban-almost-rural--the roads will be way easier and the instructors are more inclined to pass people because it's much more important for people in those places to have licenses.
Mlem. I miss Apollo dearly, and used Voyager for a bit, but while it's faithfully aped the UI you can feel that it's mobile in a way I just can't stand--it's sludgy and just subtly off. Mlem is snappy and feels at home on an iPhone in the same way Apollo did, even if it's still a little rough around the edges.
The game just has two too many buttons. I played it on both, and it feels much better on controller. Holding down both triggers to unload twin Gatling guns right into the spider's pinecone ass is just satisfying in a way that mouse and keyboard isn't. That being said, the fact that you need six easy-access buttons and constant camera control makes it really awkward/borderline unplayable unless you have a controller with back paddles.
Pile bunker is genuinely my favorite weapon in the game. That charge shot is a pain to land but there’s nothing better than staggering a chunky enemy and just gut punching them into oblivion.
I'm curious what uses you have in mind--anything that's an online competitive (i.e., you compete against other players--doesn't need to be esports sweaty) game I don't think there's a strong case for allowing injected code, since that's an avenue for gaining an unfair advantage and thereby worsening other players' enjoyment, and anything offline I can't see it being worth a company's time and money to prosecute.
Ayup, there it is: you've completely missed what I actually said, which is a commentary on the manner in which Hexbear users comport themselves, and jumped directly to the exact same copy-paste talking points. Thanks, mate, you couldn't have made my point better if you'd tried.
Aye. They're more or less another Exploding Heads: an echo chamber with a potent and very precise set of opinions which they smear all over any wall they can find.
I'd add the caveat "badly designed for solo matchmaking." Dota with friends--especially a five stack you get along with and play well with--is sublime. Dota with four randos is a complete and total crapshoot, though if your behavior score is good and you're not in the total shit tier ranks it's usually pretty fun.
Hell yeah. Never played AC before as well--picked this one up on launch day and have been having an absolute blast. It's FromSoft, so it kicks your teeth in a little bit, but once you get the hang of the combat system and make sense of the info on your screen it's a ton of fun. If you like the dark souls style of combat (heavy emphasis on dodge-and-punish, demands near-perfect execution), you'll like AC.
I've slept on futons (thick, dedicated bed futons, not the couch/bed combo) basically all my life, I personally think they're fantastic. Reading these comments it seems like the sort of thing that either really works for you or really doesn't--I am fairly tall and have a back that loves to complain, but it gets along swimmingly with my futon.
Cheap, thin futons are a nightmare though. Even nice futons tend to be cheaper than most traditional mattresses, so it's never worth cheaping out if you don't need to.
Fair enough, though I contend that for a common-case application like a database-backed REST API where the architecture is basically standardized there is no meaningful time difference between writing crappy code in a clean architecture and writing a crappy pile of spaghetti.
I've been tasked with updating some code a senior programmer (15+ years experience, internally awarded, widely considered fantastic) who recently left the company wrote.
It's supposed to be a REST service. None of the API endpoints obey restful principles, the controller layer houses all of the business logic, and repositories are all labeled as services--and that's before we even get into the code itself. Genuinely astounding what passes for senior-level programming expertise.
Personally I found the combat as fun and balanced as can be expected in a game where power scaling is not directly tied to progress. If you just fuck around doing side quests and farming loot for 20 hours, it's going to feel super easy, and if you try to blitz the story and run early game stuff then enemies will feel like bullet sponges. That's just a mechanic endemic to the open world rpg genre. My first playthrough I did side missions as I stumbled across them on my way through the story, and the combat felt pretty balanced. Second time I went much more methodically and ended up cruising through story missions like nobody's business.