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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • On the flipside of this, I’ve been kicked from games because I know how to prefire, and a lot of players see that and just assume you’re wallhacking. Nobody pays attention to the 70% of the time that you prefire at air, but when you guess right and instakill someone holding an angle, it’s easier to say “cheater” than “i’ve been holding this same angle for the past 5 rounds, perhaps I’ve become predictable”


  • I have small hands and still fingertip basically all the time, and I have all my life. I don’t use a small mouse either (G502)

    I hate how smudgy and uncomfortable it feels to have reduced fine control when my palm comes into contact with the mouse. It feels icky and frustrating. I know plenty of people palm grip with low DPI and big mousepads to achieve fine control, but that seems far more exhausting than just developing stamina in the forearm.


  • This comment will include a lot of spoilers for the yokoverse. Continue at your own peril.

    Anyway, just to give you an idea of how little any of this matters to Yoko Taro, here’s how his stories have developed:

    Drakengard: Ends with absolute apocalypse, total destruction of the world, no coming back.

    Nier: Let’s go ahead and change the name and say that all the Drakengard stuff has now entered a new dimension. Our dimension! The story technically goes on, and THIS time we’ll have the absolute apocalypse of OUR world.

    Drakengard 3: Where do we go to continue the Darkengard name? Make it a prequel! Ezpz. Also we already did interdimensional stuff so let’s add time travel why not.

    Nier Automata: Okay the world basically ended for humans, but who cares? Just make it all about legacy of humans.

    You know what, we can do even more already. Why not pepper in some mobile games, like Nier Reincarnation and SINoALICE (yes, this is still Nier universe). Why keep it to games? Let’s write light novels (YoRHa, Drakengard 1.3) and a stage play (YoRHa Boys). I am not even the biggest Yokostan so this list is probably incomplete.

    My personal take is that this methodology is all very intentionally tied to the main theme of the Yokoverse, which is that no matter how dark and hopeless the situation may become, there is always a future; a new opportunity.



  • Pokemon is how a lot of people got into games to begin with. It was a new and innovative experience from their perspective. Pokemon Red/Blue was a competent game with some fresh ideas, but through luck/marketing it became the launch point for a massive population of people into the gaming industry.

    So now you’ve got a few factors playing into Pokemon hype:
    Nostalgia (you never forget your first)
    Production value (this made money, pump more money in)
    Incidentally a formula that favors expansion (just add more Pokemon)

    These factors are enough on their own to carry a franchise for a while, especially for an otherwise ignorant audience that doesn’t play anything else (just like the people who just play FIFA games and nothing else). But at some point, it becomes too obvious even to the most zealous supporters that the formula is, well, a formula, and it’s not changing or improving, and even they finally begin to criticize the product. It’s easy to have a favorite pokemon out of 150, maybe even 450, but now there are over 1000 and it becomes exhausting even for die-hard fans. Even the number of types has exploded to 18 without actually having any interesting interactions to justify them, it’s just more for the sake of more.

    Plus, the most recent releases have been impressively lazy, again so much so that even megafans can’t nostalgia their way out of it.

    All this together makes for a history of a franchise that was one vehemently defended but is now seen as an embarrassing phase one went through as a child.


  • The crux of this is whether Us vs Them is instinctual or learned. I don’t think we yet have a definitive answer, but certainly Us vs Them is so ingrained in our ways of life that removing it would be extraordinarily difficult.

    Again, I may be excessively cynical, but my belief is that some people, maybe even most people, WILL take these mental pathways you describe no matter what, and the best we can do is provide distractions. Bread and circuses. At their best, these distractions channel our self-destructive tendencies into harmless oceans of impunity. At their worst, they are hijacked by ne’er-do-wells to transform the apathetic into frothing zealots of a cause they don’t even care to understand. It becomes the responsibility of those who are paying attention to design a system that is resistant to abuse.

    Presuming I am wrong, that means that there is a path for society to eliminate competitiveness from its apparent nature. I agree that would lead us toward utopia, but I am very skeptical such a path exists, and that those who attempt to follow it will simply be eaten by the wolves they believe they can train.


  • I basically agree, but I think we should also think about this in a solution-oriented way at a large scale, beyond just personally opening one’s own eyes.

    Tribalism is part of our nature. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s fun. It makes us feel good to belong. The sports analogy is frequently brought up and is the example of tribalism being leveraged for entertainment and social bonding. It’s a clever way to us to short-circuit our instinct for tribal warfare and use it for something constructive and fun instead of destructive and tragic.

    Politicians and media outlets have started using this insidiously for their own powergames. Maybe this is too cynical, but it seems to me that the circus has been poisoned. You hear about all these people who “aren’t into politics” but will repeat their CNN and Fox soundbytes. There’s nothing terribly wrong with being personally apathetic about politics, in fact that’s the norm for those people currently benefitting the most from existing policy, but it’s terribly dishonest and destructive to lure such people into the political arena when they have no sincere interest in the impact of their political decisions, but a few powerful people benefit and countless powerless people suffer.

    How do we reclaim our circus? Do we really just need more ESPN and less CNN? Can we punish politicians and news sources for the pervasion and perversion of information as infotainment? Can we educate people to source their identity from their family and culture instead of from their senator?




  • Hijacking to point out to both the dumb lefty lemmies and the dumb righty lemmies that this is an amazing case study in the failure of people to separate their culture from their politics. I apologize for using you as a prop, vector_zero, but you signed up in this thread so I assume it’s all good?

    Here we have a person who believes that are right wing, but lives in a decidedly left wing location. What examples do they provide to demonstrate their right-winged-ness? Gun culture, cooking, sewing, quilting, home projects. Note the absolute lack of policy. When pressed about actual politics further in the thread, we get things like “yeah we need to fix gun violence, healthcare, and the economy, but I don’t think any of the solutions I’ve heard will work.” Essentially we have here a person who is completely disengaged from the reality of politics, but places high value on their culture and identity, having confused one for the other in the process.

    This is all reinforced by the fact that this person lived in left wing area and is active here on a left wing website, where their self-identification as “right wing” earns them demonization, along with some doomed attempts at political discourse. Since vector_zero only really cares about their identity and culture, the demonization is all they notice, internalize, and respond to. It provides a pressure that actually validates and encourages their perceived need to stand up for and defend their cultural values. The political discourse is entirely ignored because vector_zero does not actually care about or understand politics. Meanwhile, the attacking lefties are blind to this miscommunication, characterizing it as “convenient dismissal of the real issues.” No, it’s not convenient dismissal, it’s literally a disability: Our supposed “right wing” friend actually does not have the capacity to see beyond their shoelaces and understand how their emotional reaction to being personally attacked translates into large-scale impact for the rest of the world. So they go out and vote red (or not, since they are “powerless”) without any understanding of what the consequences may be.

    Perhaps the lefties as well are so blind to the importance of identity and culture that they suffer from the same “convenient dismissal” of the content of the discussion that vector_zero values. That’s harder to say, but it’s an interesting supposition. If that is the case, then we’re doomed to go around in circles and continue beating each other until morale improves. But maybe not, maybe one or the other can recognize the tragedy for what it is and learn how to engage with it in a more constructive way.

    It’s painfully obvious to me that everyone involved here actually wants the same things, and there’s a very clear education plan to get us all together on the same track. vector_zero simply needs to be made aware that left wing culture and identity is actually almost the same as right wing culture and identity. That absolutely nothing of themselves would be lost or reduced by voting for a democrat every once in a while. The difference is the policies, and since vector_zero doesn’t actually understand or care about those, there isn’t really any reason for them to hold up the label of “right wing.”

    You can just be a guy who likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day.

    Signed: A guy who also likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day, but also votes democrat every time because I don’t want anybody else to get hurt along the way.


  • It always works out fine for them. I don’t know why anybody says imperialism or colonialism are bad or destructive, seems to me that Britain and France and Spain and Portugal and the Dutch are all doing fine. Really weird how maps of their empires seem to overlap a lot with parts of the world that currently or recently experienced a lot of, idk let’s call it “troubles?” They must be dumb or smth


  • US schools definitely mess with your head the higher of an achiever you are.

    In remedial classes, in most places, 60 is passing.
    In normal classes, in most places, 70 is passing.
    In advanced classes, you may be kicked out for scoring under 80.

    The intuitive concept of “barely good enough” keeps getting higher as you perform better, plus of course each of these types of classes are progressively more difficult by their nature. It really fucks with people who are excellent in some subjects but average in others.


  • You’re missing the scale.

    Everyone knew BG3 would “a success,” but it hasn’t just been a success, it’s been a nuclear bomb of a success.

    Optimistically, people were expecting to get around 1 million in sales. Total. THAT would have been a GREAT SUCCESS. Today I think it has around 10 million on Steam alone, 10x the “hope we get there” number.

    Imagine taking a job and hoping for a $10,000 bonus for good performance, and then your boss drops $100,000 on your desk. It’s that level of joyful shock.


  • The determining question for whether or not it’s the same is this: Are you the physical matter of your brain, or the electricity running through it? In the first case, sleep isn’t death. In the second case, it is. I would argue that you’re closer to the electricity than the brain matter, since an unpowered brain is how we define death.

    But REALLY it ultimately doesn’t matter, if you think about it. An exact clone of you created after any kind of destruction of consciousness is no different than the original you had the destruction never occurred. We just intuitively really do not like that idea.



  • You don’t need a distant science fiction MacGuffin for this. Every night you lay down and “die” for 8 hours or so, then your consciousness turns back on and you simply trust that it wasn’t altered too much in the interim. We know very well that the way we think can change from one day to the other, so who’s to say you’re really the same person?


  • I’m a huge book fan, and I have to say that book purists are the worst.

    The show has made some changes that I don’t love, and some of the characters aren’t portrayed as I imagined, but for the most part it has been wonderful to see one of my favorite fantasy series brought to life, and to be able to enjoy this world with new fans. I always expect screen adaptions to make creative changes, since things that work in a book just don’t work on screen sometimes, and I’d say the changes and presentations have been pretty sensible for the most part.

    For every change I dislike there’s at least one I appreciate, and all of the actors are killing it (with what they are given at least, looking at you weird Lan funeral scene). I’m looking forward to how they handle the story going forward!



  • Flash drives are not a lasting medium. You’d need something like a quad-layer blu-ray, which is not cheap and has slow read speeds compared to solid state storage. Also nobody has blu-ray readers anymore. Also blu-ray publishers are tiny. Also the expense of distributing physical media.

    So we’ve arrived back at the beginning - you can have this cake and eat it too, but you’re going to have to eat the expense yourself. Imposing it upon the entire consumer market is selfish and wasteful.


  • I’m a bloodsucking corpo dev and honestly my read of this was very sympathetic to the FOSS dev.

    Pretty much all of my FOSS contributions have been to software that I’ve integrated into my for-profit projects. I will find a nice helpful tool, see it doesn’t have all the flexibility or functionality that I need, I’ll improve it, write tests, submit a PR, and do my best to fulfill the requests of the maintainer.

    INEVITABLY I will start getting messages from MY COMPETITORS saying “hey we saw you added this feature to this tool, that’s great but doesn’t quite integrate with our software, can u plz fix?” It’s comical. Like, I’m already leveling the playing field by making my improvements to the FOSS tool freely available to you, and now you want to pay me zero dollars to improve your competing product? This happens all the time, it’s a funny nuisance to me, and I expect a massive headache for popular maintainers. Nobody is under any obligation to help you with integration problems - you can ask, but you aren’t entitled. Fix it yourself, adhere to the maintainer’s standards, and put it out for everyone to benefit from.