Yeah, I was watching Potato McWhiskey and this is his take. They have metrics that show most people don’t actually finish a game and that indicates a pretty big flaw in game design.

One interesting thing the devs brought up was the ability to pivot from one civ to another based on new information. Like if you discover your continent is mostly plains and horses, then maybe your next iteration looks more like the Mongols, with bonuses to cavalry. If your early conquest didn’t go off, maybe you pivot to a more science or culture oriented civ.

I don’t hate these ideas, it just depends on how it actually feels in game.

I have a couple of very minor commits in Linux and, in the 3.0 era, had my name at the top of a source file for a platform that never saw the light of day and was later removed wholesale.

Still feel that invisible feather in my cap.

Bah, Imperial Units all the way. How else would I know how many stone I weigh, or how many King’s Pubes I am tall? I don’t want to convert from kilometers (whatever those are!) to gentlemans-strides or shilling miles to get where I’m going.

It’s subjective. Easy builds can be super fun. Especially if you earned it by getting some gear. It’s also an accessibility issue. Not everyone is 25 years old with lightning reflexes (or, conversely, not everyone has 20 years of history with the genre).

Anyway, my point was only that if you’re bored with being OP, try something different. If you think you’re invincible but killing things is a slog, maybe shift your gear to be more offensive etc. The way these games work, difficulty is entirely up to you.

I enjoyed D3 and D4, I think they both do difficulty well (at this point, D3 was stupid at launch). In both there are now hundreds of fine grained tiers you can shift up or down to find the right difficulty for your gear/build/skill.

That said, holding down a button to win is more of a build issue unless you’re running embarrassingly low difficulty. There will always be easy builds and more challenging, technical, timing based builds. Finding a fun build is part of the fun of ARPGs.

So it’s not fully self hosted then? I can’t see how it would do that without registering you with their own service as a middle man. Seems like that kinda defeats the purpose.

Sorry, why would Jellyfin be different from Plex for exposing to the Internet? Dynamic DNS service / static IP and router port forwarding just like any other self hosted thing. It requires a user/pass to login as usual. VPN is nice but not required.

Bakula just hit the Archer casting too perfectly. The man just exudes boy scout, it’s what made Quantum Leap work too.

I’ve only used Jellyfin, what does Plex do better for the non-expert user?

As the old saying goes: soap box, ballot box, ammo box in that order.

It’s possible that it’s not supported on your arch.

I agree that a primary probably still ends up with Kamala and would probably just be the illusion of choice. The DNC would close ranks around her in the name of Biden’s legacy, just like they did for Biden back in 2020 when the vote was splitting in Bernie’s favor, and in 2016 when it was obvious they just wanted to coronate Hillary and move on.

That said, even with a rigged primary, putting your candidate on the debate stage to address your constituents instead of skipping directly to fellating non-existent centrists in the general would have been good.

Cheers to that, fellow Texas drunk

Texas is incredibly resource rich, even if the people who live here are generally fuck faces.

I mean, fuck Elon and Tesla but if you’re spending money on a car you’re giving it to a bastard one way or another. The CEOs of Ford, BMW, et. al. might not be making asses of themselves on the global stage, but I’m sure they’re still horrible. Even used cars run on gas 99% of the time.

It’s a “collectible” piece of plastic that looks like a fat chibi, square headed version of some tired character from pop culture. The only people that own them are psychic vampires.

Everything on that list is typical neoliberal Democrat tinkering around the edges while the world burns.

It’s not that the individual ideas are bad, it’s that they have no vision of a better future for most people. Where is Medicare For All? Where is tuition free college? Where is anything that isn’t just a bandaid for a specific paper cut when the whole goddam country is being devoured by fascists and corporations?

That’s the meat I’m talking about - something that millions of people on the left could vote for in self interest. What we got was meat for checks notes non-Medicare diabetics.

Israel is currently genociding Palestinians under a Democratic president, they didn’t need Trump’s approval for anything. The bulldozers are already running, the people are already having their lives destroyed.

Again, I voted Harris for harm reduction, so I see your point about Harris possibly being better for Gaza in the long run, but it’s not “kill my friends now” or “kill my friends later” it’s “kill my friends now” or “kill my friends now and maybe, just maybe, stop sometime around the midterms when it’s politically convenient and only if Harris doesn’t need to keep getting the fascist vote”. I don’t blame Gaza voters for looking at that choice and holding out for what they really want, which is “stop killing my friends now”.

Those Palestinians were going to lose their land, families and lives either way. Biden has done nothing to stop Israel, neither would Harris. She made it abundantly clear that “protecting” Israel was more important than stopping genocide.

Gaza didn’t cost Harris the election. Maybe Michigan, but even that’s a stretch. Democrats lost ground in literally every demographic other than 100k+ income because, again, they campaigned to the right and offered absolutely nothing to the left.

If Harris told any other assumed Democratic group to fuck off this hard, nobody would be surprised they didn’t vote for her. If she ran as pro-life to court Trumpers and her support from women collapsed we wouldn’t be screaming about them getting in line, we’d be talking about Harris betraying those voters. This is no different, it just affects a far smaller voting bloc that people feel comfortable scapegoating.

Everyone pointing at people that didn’t vote for Harris over Gaza like this is some gotcha moment are totally missing the point. If Gaza was your primary concern (like if you and your family are Palestinian perhaps) neither candidate was going to do anything for you at all. Harris paid a tiny bit of lip service to Gaza two days before the election after months of shutting down and ignoring everyone demanding ceasefire.

I voted Harris purely out of harm reduction, but she offered nothing to anyone on the left. The DNC assumes everyone that is queer or bipoc or a woman owes them their vote and then used the platform to court non-existent center right voters.

But nah, let’s pretend that Harris, who took Biden’s positions wholesale, would have done something different as if they weren’t currently in power. Let’s pretend they would have done something to restore abortion rights too, or tackle climate change or raise the minimum wage when they’re so busy trying to get fascist votes and not piss off the coporate donor class.

The Democratic party needs to be rebuilt from scratch or not rebuilt at all.