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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”



  • 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.


  • There hasn’t been a “good one” since WW2.

    Short explanation: The arms Iraqi forces fought with during the Gulf War were largely bought or built by Americans. Isn’t that interesting?

    Long explanation: It’s all connected to the Israel-Palestine issues we are seeing this very day. Iraq was dealt a very nasty hand by the UN after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, becoming a landlocked country, with lines drawn such that they were made caretakers of ethnic enemies and forced to forsake much of their geopolitical power and resources to tribal rivals. It’s difficult to say their claim to Kuwait was justified, but it’s certainly just as difficult to say it was unjustified.
    On top of that, we had just gotten done with fucking over Iraq due to their failure in the Iraq-Iran war. They had initially allied with the USSR to prop themselves up, and when that went to shit they turned around and tried doing the west and themselves a favor by grabbing a piece of Iran. We were directly supporting them (anybody taking a punch at Iran is a friend of ours!), and had been increasing our support, but when they agreed to a ceasefire we stopped, leaving them war-torn, deeply in debt, and with really nothing to show for their experiment of working with the west aside from all these shiny American weapons of course.

    Medium explanation?: Iraq had been engineered to be an Israel-like anti-Arab agent in the region, but when they failed and sued for peace, we left them no other option but to wage another war to survive. When they went in a direction we didn’t like, we got all our buddies together (including a surprising number of old enemies) and decimated them. Twice!


  • Yeah, I’m juuuust old enough to have a firm memory of when things that were laughably petty were the biggest problems in the world. You mean to tell me the PRESIDENT got a BLOWJOB?!

    All the real issues that sowed the seeds for our intractably broken future were sidelined and mostly ignored. Desert Storm, woowoo go world police. LA Riots, oh you crazy minorities and your intolerance for extrajudicial murder. Climate change, what’s that?


  • 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


  • 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.


  • I’ve already said that I appreciate your efforts. I’m not going to block you, your work is valuable. I’m just explaining that you ARE going to be criticized for what you choose to post, and you shouldn’t act surprised. If you really don’t care about whether or not the stories you are propagating have merit, then just ignore anyone who pushes you on it. Consider attacks on “OP” to be the original author of the article, not you.

    Or, be more selective about what you post, if the approval matters to you. Consider it constructive feedback.


  • You post a lot. I see your name come up non-stop. That is great! It is really appreciated. I’m certainly not doing that work.

    You also post quite a bit of inflammatory clickbait without having any personal knowledge to back it up. That’s a bit confounding. At the bare minimum, you need to be prepared to accept criticism for that.

    I can personally say this is the second time you’ve posted a FF16 ragebait article and gotten offended when prodded about the fact that you yourself haven’t even played it. Why are you spreading information that you don’t even have the ability to evaluate?


  • As a fan of souls games and mech games, I wouldn’t be TOO worried. OP is overstating the problem. I sympathize, because this is indeed a different Armored Core, but it’s nothing at all like a souls game. It’s still a mech game and a good one, but it’s not as technically deep as previous AC games while also being dramatically more difficult.

    I would say in older AC games having a terrible build vs a great build meant the mission was either literally impossible or braindead easy. In AC6 a terrible build means the mission will be much harder, but still perfectly doable, and having a great build means the mission will run smoother but may still be quite challenging since threats are generally a lot more deadly than they were in previous titles.

    I can totally understand how that can kill the vibe for someone who wants to seek victory in the build screen and enjoy the rewarding power fantasy during the mission, but it’s still a great mech game with a lot of meaningful variety.

    Proof of this is that while, yes, AC purists are upset that this game is more action-y, there are just as many Souls fans who are mad that the mech building game they bought is - get this - actually a mech game and not just Robo Souls.


  • AC6 is both more and less accessible along the same lines. It’s a simpler game. The space given to customize your make is smaller, you can’t go into debt by making stupid builds, and in exchange bosses will wombo-combo you from full AP to dead even with a heavy build if you get stunned at the wrong time. There’s a person who experiences that wombo-combo, says, “this is bullshit” and puts the game down forever. But there is also a person who tries AC2, fails a mission with an expensive loadout, realizes they can’t afford to make the build that failure inspired them to make, and say “no THIS is bullshit” and put the game down forever.

    Likewise, Elden Ring is both easy and hard because it gives you a ton of freedom. There are more solutions than just “git gud” which is refreshing for someone who can’t tolerate banging their head against Iudex Gundyr for a couple hours. But it’s obnoxious to someone who sees Tree Sentinel and doesn’t want to “have to explore” to find level appropriate content.



  • Disclaimer that I am completely talking out of my ass and speculating, but I have a personal theory.

    COVID has been around long enough to have two interesting effects.

    1. Almost everyone has gotten it by now. Some of us got it really bad, and/or acquired long-term secondary conditions. Some of this likely caused impaired cognitive function.
    2. Kids had their school schedules totally fucked up for years, and those kids are now the young teens on the internet. Young teens on the internet are already by default a disruptive demographic, but now add the effect of years of desocialization and missed education.


  • Xfce is a great example of how solving a problem in the best way results in low adoption.

    People tend toward extremes. There is something in particular they really want, and they will gravitate toward the product that gives them the most of that thing.
    I want total control over configuration: KDE Plasma
    I want maximum performance: LXDE
    I want something that looks good and I don’t want to think about it: GNOME/Cinnamon

    Xfce isn’t on this list! It’s not the best at anything. But it’s pretty good at everything. It’s an overall best (in my opinion) but because it’s not beautiful, nor lightning fast, nor incredibly flexible, nobody will ever take it as their first choice. And the majority of people make a first choice and then never change, as whatever they start with is probably good enough for them. I’ve tried all of the DE’s listed above, but I’m the crazy guy: that’s a lot of work and churn! Any and all of them work well enough, why bother installing 5 separate environments?

    If you want to develop something and have people adopt it, then your goal is to have a killer sexy feature at the expense of all else, rather than to be satisfactory in every metric.




  • Gandalf isn’t a superhero because he’s more like an angel. He played a part in the creation of the world, and is entirely inhuman. He’s a primordial spirit masquerading in a corporeal form.

    Luke Skywalker is much closer to a superhero because he’s a mortal man who was inadvertently blessed with incredibly rare powers and chooses to use them for good.


  • The Johnston & Murphy XC4 line has become my go-to. They are not cheap, and the selection is limited, but the construction and versatility can’t be beat.

    I’ve had my oldest pair for over 4 years, with no functional degradation at all, and minimal signs of wear (minor creasing in the leather, hardly worth mentioning). They’re casual and comfortable enough for everyday wear, and stylish enough for business events. Easily the best value in a shoe I’ve ever gotten.