We could do a lot for climate change, world hunger, homelessness, disease prevention and eradication, and so on with that much money.

All of these people are doing mass murder via opportunity cost, and I hope they pay for it.

I’ve been buying stuff from Bandcamp. They sold recently so their future is uncertain, but as it stands right now it seems like a pretty good deal. Artists get a good cut, and you get streaming + drm free copies of the music to download.

I don’t really like subscriptions for music. It’s like renting. I’d rather pay $10/mo buying an album and have a big library after ten years than have nothing.

teenager who acts like a dick all the time would be equally annoying.

Was Morrigan popular when da:o was new? She’s an extremely edgy teenager.

This topic would be great for a dontnod game that could appropriatly handle that topic - not an RPG.

I really don’t think queer stuff needs to be banished from the realm of RPGs.

Several times I’ve set the max warnings to whatever the current warning count is, and then decreased that over time.

Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age. However, I don’t think she finished it either.

Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!

I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.

Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.

Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.

My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.

My old computer took to Mint without much of a problem. My newer one… many things didn’t work. The mint discord was very helpful though!

It’s a shame more manufacturers don’t sell machines that are already set up with Linux, so you don’t have to worry about like “oh WiFi doesn’t work for some esoteric reason?” as much

A solid black.

I thought the game was pretty okay. The romance with the detective lady was a little disappointing. The difficulty fell off a cliff pretty early on as a mage with life drain.

The arc with whatstheirface and their mother not accepting them seemed pretty plausible to me. I’ve got a friend going through something like that now. Seeing something like that in media is meaningful to people.

The loyalty mission prompt was kind of meh. I can see that they wanted loyalty missions, but it felt like they struggled to fit them in.

Overall it wasn’t quite the game I wanted, but it wasn’t bad.

I’m reminded of an old job’s database where every key was named “id_foo” instead of “foo_id”

You didn’t have user_id. You had id_user. You didn’t have project_id, you had id_project. Most of the time, anyway. It was weird and no one could remember why it was like that. (Also changes to the DB were kind of just yolo, there wasn’t like a list of migrations or anything)

I feel like how big I want the game to be is a weird quantum unstable value. When I’m interested in the game I want it to keep going. But at some point I lose interest, and I want it to wrap up. But usually I don’t want to skip content that’s at least okay, especially if it affects endings and other choices.

Like I enjoyed Veilguard, but there were bits near the end where I was losing focus and kind of wanted it to pick up the pace. There have been other games where I finished all the side quests but was like “that’s it? I want more”

Not sure how to square this circle. I don’t think procedural generated or AI content is quite up to the task yet.

I do think we’ll see a game that has AI content in the critical path in the next couple years though. You’ll go to camp and talk to Shadowheart, and it’ll try to just make up new dialogue. I don’t know if it’ll be good. There will probably be at some weird ass hallucinations that’ll become memes.

I mean… right now I’m using windows on my desktop computer because when I installed mint I encountered a bunch of problems (no Ethernet, no wifi, no HDMI out, crashes on steam games…)

I really wanted to use Linux, but the out of the box support just isn’t always there. I’m not using windows because I like or prefer it.

It’s really minor when you just walk in and grab like… some vegetables for dinner. It’s like a 5-10 minute detour.

Another way that Reagan really shit the bed, huh

At my job, me and another guy were given stuff to work on. But unknown to product, there’s a lot of shared code there.

In my imagination, it should be someone’s job to coordinate this. Instead, I finished a chunk of mine, he finished a chunk of his, and then there was confusion. Maybe that’s just a technical team lead’s job.

…what do you mean by using dev containers? Are your people doing development on their host machine?

I feel like as games and technology get more complex, the question of “Are we a company that makes an engine or a company that makes a game? Because doing both is hard” becomes more relevant.

I guess they have microsoft money now so they could probably hire a whole team and build a really nice engine to rival unreal, but they probably won’t. They can shovel whatever garbage out the door with “The sequel to skyrim” on it, and it’ll sell.

Also they’re kind of competing with themselves by also making Avowed.

… we should be breaking up these big companies.

There’s some narrow slice where a “landlord” does something useful for money like maintaining the property. I don’t want to deal with the plumbing or repainting.

But almost all of the time it’s just taking money for nothing, or charging way more than that’s worth. That’s not admirable. So fuck them.

Huh. That’s neat I guess.

My initial guess was it would somehow capture the energy from hitting keys. I guess that’s implausible? Too little energy without making the key press resistance too high?

This seems like obvious advice.

I mean, way back when Myspace was new (I’m old) I looked at it and thought “This is going to make me sad.” Like, if people post fun stuff without me I’m probably going to feel left out. If people post sad stuff about their life, I’m going to feel sad. If people don’t interact with me at all, I’m going to feel lonely. There’s such a narrow path forward on that kind of thing that’s a consistent, net positive.

People could keep in touch with email, or texts, or even ancient modes like phone calls and letters. Would probably be happier. The social media stuff is a black hole.

Also remember that time Facebook tried to see if they could just make people sad? And they could? And somehow no one went to jail or anything?

I mean there’s a wide range of possibilities between “diablo 1, but you can walk faster in town” and “Diablo 1, with battle pass”