There are a small subset of people who legitimately just don’t understand game development fundamentals though, and they actually believe that things would just be fully interchangeable. As in, you buy a skin in Fortnite, and you can then open up Roblox and set it as your player model.

Those ones are especially not the brightest.

The people who are like “you can just take your skin from Skyrim and put it in gta5 and it’ll just work!!” people really are baffling. The hubris and ignorance is so much

I really want people to roll up on the factory, shoot the management, and then shut it down.

This shit is a crime against the environment and humanity.

On the one hand: Good. Google is a monopoly and they suck, too.

On the other, I don’t trust the trump administration to do anything correctly. They’ll probably try to give google to Musk or something.

He really is a profoundly stupid man. Everyone who supports him should be ashamed of themselves.

From the top of my head

• crawl stone soup. Classic traditional rogue like. Less fiddly than net hack, but very good.
• untitled story (an older game by the main person behind Celeste. Looks like Ms paint but is utterly charming)
• everything supergiant did. Hades, bastion, pyre
• binding of Isaac is a classic.

I want to like Into the Breach but it’s too stressful. Like, when I fuck up in FTL and the crew dies it sucks, but when I fuck up in Into the Breach and all those civilians die? Oof. They were counting on me!

I’m not sure if it’s possible to build a healthy social network.

Smaller communities can work, if they’re well moderated. The small size also helps norms become established.

Once the network gets really big, you have eternal September problems. You have too many bad actors in absolute numbers to deal with.

So yeah, the problem is us but we suck.

Maybe federation would work, since that can keep the moderation workload smaller and distributed.

Saint Luigi deliver us from villains like Facebook

I had an issue with installing mint. Never figured it out. Got the older LTS and it worked fine though. Maybe try a different version?

I don’t think I’ve ever bought a microtransaction or cosmetic. I’m doing my part!

*Ok, i think I paid like $5 into warframe after 200 hours, and I used some fake money from google surveys on pokemon go, so I’m not entirely without sin.

But it still spooked Wall Street, as parent company Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.’s shares plummeted as much as 10% following the news.

I think our economy might be predicated entirely on stupid.

Also, $80 is a lot when typical people’s buying power is decreasing. I think like half of americans can’t tank a $500 surprise bill, and they want people to blow nearly 20% of that on a video game? Fuck off, capitalists.

Funny, because when I go to the suburbs or other sparsely populated areas, walking around without anybody else feels dystopian. Feels like a post-apocalyptic setting, where everyone else got taken by aliens or plague or something.

It’s not always tourists but stopping in unexpected places is a common irritation in NYC. Like, they’re walking on the sidewalk and just stop, and mess up the flow of foot traffic. Maybe to look at their map or to gawk at something. It’s extra annoying and a little dangerous when it’s on the stairs

Renting games and music seems like a bad idea to me, but I am in the minority. Buy a new album once a month for $8, after a year I have 12 albums. Pay that to spotify and I have nothing.

Gamepass is priced more aggressively at $12/mo, but I assume it’s a loss so they can eventually raise prices. Even so, if I buy a new somewhat discounted game for $36 every three months, after a year I have four games. With gamepass, I’m pretty sure I end up with nothing.

But I don’t think humans are known for long term thinking.

Magical Diary is a fun little game about being a teenage girl that goes to wizard school. There’s 2 but I only played one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/211340/Magical_Diary_Horse_Hall/

My time at Portia and my time at Sand Rock are pretty chill. They’re kind of like Stardew but 3d, and I liked them more. It has some fighting but it’s very PG cartoon-ish. It has a major mechanic where you just hang out with the NPCs, or go on dates with them. The second game, sand rock, is better but they’re both good: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1084600/My_Time_at_Sandrock/

If you know a way to get from here to there, please share. At my old job I tried to radicalize my coworkers so they’d understand our interests align with each other more than ownership. I had some success.

More generally, it’s in-group vs out-group. For many people, the in-group is “white men” and the out-group is “everyone else”. But this behavior is pretty baked into humans. We’ll form stupid groups over anything. I was reading a book about how people change their minds, and it talked about some experiments they did. Like, they gave kids at a summer camp different colored shirts, and sure enough they formed separate groups. They had to stop the experiment when one group tried to burn down the cabin of the other group.

I don’t know how to fix this.

I ran linux mint for a couple months. It was nice. Very few problems.

Unfortunately, when I tried to install it on this newer desktop it was a shit-show. No wifi or ethernet, no hdmi, it crashed when I tried to play elden ring. I should try another distribution, but I was so distressed after two days I just rolled back. The people in the mint discord were helpful, though, and got some of the problems fixed.

Windows sucks though.

Oblivion is the go-to example of how not to do level scaling. It’s impressive how badly they fucked it up. Like, they managed to make exploring pointless and unexciting.

You find a tomb, but you know that whatever’s inside will be “level appropriate”. If you’re low level it’ll be steel weapons, and if you’re high level it’ll be daedric. There’s not really any point in going in at low level. Might as well level up some other way and come back when the loot will be good.

On top of that, the gameplay is so bland and unresponsive that you can’t really punch above your weight class. The game is very much a levels game. It’s not like Dark Souls where someone can get really good and beat the whole thing while naked (and in the game, too). There’s a lot of “well, this guard is level 30 and you’re 10, so no matter how many times you hit him with your hammer he’s not going to flinch.” Knowing you’re always going to get kind of bland treasure wouldn’t be so bad if the act of getting it was fun. Like, sometimes a tomb or whatever in Elden Ring will have crap loot, but it’s still a solid core gameplay.

Morrowind had a lot of these problems, but it was also kind of wacky and heartfelt.

There are many things wrong with the laws in the US. I’m not even sure where I’d start

But the other bigger problem is enforcement. Some people do a murder and get a nationwide search. Others the victims family get a “lol can’t help you”.

Recommend reading “the new Jim Crow” for one look at one part of this.