here we go again

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’ve been working through my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 - it’s fairly enjoyable, I’m glad I ignored it outright until well after big patches rolled out. There’s something very satisfying about blowing up enemies through a camera.

    I’ve also picked up Dwarf Fortress (Steam) for the first time. It has a lot of depth but has been fun to learn and try and figure out. I just flooded a section of my fortress by digging into an underground river.

    My chill-out puzzle game has been Can of Wormholes and it’s pretty fun! It’s weird for sure… but definitely fun.








  • this is a wake-up call to this industry and any other industry enjoying a glut of “free” (as in beer) proprietary tools owned entirely by private (or worse: public!) organizations.

    this will always be the result. every single time. if you think you and your industry are immune to getting bait & switched, you are very wrong.

    chaining your livelihood to a for-profit organization is begging to eventually be extorted in this manner. greed is inevitable.



  • Developers were right to be in fear of Baldur’s Gate 3 resetting expectations. This isn’t close to all of the reason for this backlash, but for me it’s a notable part.

    Here we all have for contrast suddenly an expansive, complete, player-respecting game that isn’t trying to squeeze money out of you at every turn… it reminds me of old PC games, before the enshittification of the industry began, before the corporate rot set in. When I bought my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, it was complete. It was expansive. It was before micro-transactions were really a thing, so it was a finished product. BG3 makes me think of those games, but with modern technology. My gaze shifts back to the allegedly “modern” games we have now, to Overwatch 2, and it just feels cheap and disgusting. A minimum-viable pile of gameified gambling covered in greasy MBA penny-pincher fingerprints, shrouded by half-truths from marketers trying to puff it up to look like a complete experience. It is still possible to deliver the better experience. It’s clearly just a matter of “want”.

    I feel like I’ve just come from a family-owned restaurant on the beach in Cabo and came back home to a McDonald’s in a roadside casino, and I’ve just realized how genuinely shitty it all is.

    I think I would actually rather just go outside or start a new hobby than touch “games” like this ever again.






  • I’ve made a point to learn and understand commonly “mocked” languages. The reasons they’re ridiculed for are often very tightly related to the reasons why they’re powerful in unique ways.

    It’s hard to defend some parts of PHP, but it doesn’t deserve the hatred it gets. Its standard library is a self-contradictory mess, yes. But it’s backwards-compatible with previous language versions to a fairly remarkable degree. This backwards-compatability might seem strange now, but not that long ago, this guarantee meant it could evolve very rapidly as a language and ecosystem without risking losing users to a continual barrage of updates necessary to keep atop of, lest your application fail. I think this is the reason it overtook PERL as the first major “server-side” dynamic website language of choice.

    It has that goofy dollar sign variable syntax, yes. I personally think a special syntax for variable access vs function calls is one of the reasons coding beginners found it slightly easier to use - you didn’t need to keep so much track of name collisions and stuff. $thing is always a piece of data, a noun. thing is always a keyword or function, a verb. You can thing($thing), it’s OK, they’re different. You’re verbing a noun.

    It could grow fast and be picked up quick, so it’s no wonder to me it persists, ever-improving, in the midst of all these extremely popular, extremely modern languages in use today. Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress, Slack, Etsy, indeed even kbin, the piece of Fediverse software I’m writing this on now.





  • I started booting up other games again after about 200 hours. Credits hit, all shrines and LRs found and completed, full energy upgrades.

    I haven’t gotten all the gear but of the gear I got, it’s all at least 2-star. I think I’ll probably boot it up periodically now and then to run down gear and get mats to get them all upgraded.

    I doubt I’ll ever care to get all Koroks and true 100% map completion, but given enough time, I suppose it may end up happening regardless. Despite moving on to other games again, it’s still quite peaceful and enjoyable in small doses, just like BotW was for me before. I never truly 100%ed the Koroks and map % in that either, but I got pretty far…


  • Imagine if the straw started life as a solid cylinder and you had to bore out the inside to turn it into a straw

    This would mean a straw has a hole, yes. It would be like a donut indeed - donuts are first whole, then have the hole punched out of them. This meets a dictionary definition of a hole (a perforation). A subtractive process has removed an area, leaving a hole.

    But straws aren’t manufactured this way, their solid bits are additively formed around the empty area. I personally don’t think this meets the definition.

    Your topological argument is strong though - both a donut and straw share the same topological feature, but when we use these math abstractions, things can be a bit weird. For instance, a hollow torus (imagine a creme-filled donut that has not yet had its shell penetrated to fill it) has two holes. One might not expect this since it looks like it still only obviously has one, but the “inner torus” consisting of negative space (that represents the hollow) is itself a valid topological hole as well.