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Cake day: Aug 08, 2023

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If everyone on the fediverse goes to google.com right now and searches for “best new iphone car insurance shopping aarp member bad credit” maybe we can save the economy.


It’s a bank! It’s a dating app! It’s a video hosting service, a town square, a shopping mall, a floor wax AND a dessert topping! Why go anywhere else? Just stare at the middle of the big shiny X until it makes sense!


No matter how good it is, and I’m hoping for the best, it will definitely be over-hyped.


I wonder how long it will be until Skyrim overtakes Starfield for player count. On Steam right now it seems to be about 26k vs 46k.



They train the children to know and accept that they will be watched closely by anonymous strangers for their entire lives.


It’s generally okay with the big games of 2020, so probably.


I’ve got an older Nitro 5 which has served me well the past 4 years. Build quality is great compared to most other laptops I’ve had. Mine has no problem running Linux.


I just tested my favourite cloudflare-blocked site and it still hangs on “verifying the security of your connection” in my figerprinting-resistant browser profile.


It appears that the other guy didn’t call you a fanboy. He implied that you might be a troll, before you’d listed that software and after you’d called him a fanboy.

But yeah, it’ll probably be a while before there’s a Linux version of Adobe Illustrator, and the alternatives are different enough that it’d be a lot of work to switch even if it’s otherwise practicable.


I understand why they can’t have proprietary drivers

Who can’t have them? 90-some percent of Linux distributions make them available to those who are unfortunate enough to need them.


Will win 7 be the last ever usable OS from Microsoft, or will Windows 13 turn out decent? Only time will tell.


Alternative headline: Google is making it even harder for non-Google operators of mail servers to interoperate with gmail.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_II:_The_Doomsday_Papers

I printed out the certificate it gave me for finishing the game and proudly hung it on my bedroom wall. I guess that makes me an officially certified hacker.


Most of the subs I used to care about are more of a wasteland than I could’ve imagined. And come to think of it I’m starting to suspect that the demographics of social media participation in general are beginning to get narrower as well. After starting with a select few early adopters in the 1980s and then taking 30-some years to gradually broaden out to include basically “everyone” (in the anglosphere at least), people who are tired of the whole affair are perhaps starting to drop out or at least reduce their participation in significant numbers. I wonder how many of the people perceptive enough to leave reddit for one reason or another simply didn’t find anything worthy of replacing it.


Sure, why not? As the user base narrows, those who are left are the ones willing to put up with the most shit, so that is what they get.


From the way your mouse hand twitched when you saw the word “activity” we have deduced that you want to see ads for inflatable kayaks and adult diapers.


One marketing executive’s “super” is another man’s “crammed full of crufty garbage that nobody wants.”


originally set for fiscal year 2022

Perhaps they abandoned the idea when they heard about Skyblivion.


A good review but from what I remember of the game I would add that the “quick-time events” can be annoying. Do not play if you can’t handle scenes of gratuitous button mashing.


Forget split-screen, a lot of people have two monitors these days. Steam hardware survey has “Multi-Monitor Desktop Resolution” as “other” for 50% of their users, which I’m guessing means about 50% of people have multiple screens. Think about it, game devs.


As for Starfield, I don’t know whether it does that or not since I haven’t played it yet; I’d sort of like to find out

Anyway, thanks, I guess that question is more or less answered.


I used to make a living hauling valuable stuff from the outer edge of low-sec in to Jita and such places. Sure it got to be pretty much routine after a while. Well, most of the time. But then it’s always possible in that game to go off and do something else instead. The experience of exploring it all for the first time though, having not yet gathered the knowledge and resources to do it in anything like safety or comfort, was fantastic. If you could just teleport instantly from one place to anywhere without significant cost it wouldn’t even be a game. I’m not saying that the mechanics of transportation should dominate every game like they do EVE, but having at least some of that sort of thing seems like a good idea in a game that’s supposed to be about exploring a space of any kind. I disable fast travel in Skyrim too. It makes things too quick and convenient.


What I want is just something where travel takes enough time and effort that interesting problems can arise during the course of it that aren’t just generic random encounters. Something where different parts of space have local character, something like geography rather than a flat isotropic void where distance is meaningless. In each case the technology used for moving about is entirely fictional, so I don’t see a reason not to make it interesting. I was just pointing out examples of that being done, not advocating for either of them being the one true way to do it.


New Atlantis does look pretty cool, but I worry that it seems a bit empty. From what info I can find it seems to have maybe half as many named NPCs as the average Skyrim city even if it is three times the size. But maybe there are many more and they just haven’t all made it to the wiki yet? I don’t know, it’s little things that annoy me. Like it’s the glorious spacefaring future and every city is still full of fast food franchises selling coffee in what look like exactly the same kind of disposable cups with plastic lids we use today? Maybe that’s a failure of imagination too small to complain about in itself, but it seems representative of how everything is when you look closely. Is it meant to be allegorically examining the social problems of our current world rather than presenting future humanity as doing something genuinely new? If so what’s it trying to say about that, exactly? Where’s the deep lore? Where are the characters you’d actually care about as people rather than video game NPCs that help you advance a quest? I was hoping for Skyrim in space, but to me it looks more like Fallout 4 in space. Never mind the reviewers who compared it to Oblivion and got my hopes up. The only thing it has in common with Oblivion is the Annoying Fan who I must admit is genuinely annoying.

Eh well, it’s a Bethesda game. I’ll probably give in and play it eventually.


There are all kinds of possibilities, and for one example of a video game system for travelling among the stars that gives you a sense of actually going somewhere without getting too dull I’d point to EVE. You can go anywhere, but there are distant and dangerous places that take actual effort to get to. It lets you get some kind of sense of the distances involved. Having made that comparison it’s hard to avoid noticing that the space combat (even against NPCs) and ship outfitting are quite good too compared to how it looks in Starfield. Planetary interaction was pretty tedious when I played it, but EVE is mostly really good at the space stuff.

Another example would be good old Star Control II, another of my favourite space games. Another one that managed to make space feel big. You had to carefully manage fuel and resources, and if you wanted to go all the way across the map you’d have a long and interesting journey during which many things would happen. Combat and navigation were primitive compared to what people expect today, but still it made it feel like you were exploring a vast space, not just a big catalogue of planets.

As for Starfield, I don’t know whether it does that or not since I haven’t played it yet; I’d sort of like to find out before I spend $ on it.


The moon is boring, so every planet in the universe must be boring. Earth is mostly capitalist right now, so every planet with humans must be one form or another of late capitalist dystopia. A whole galaxy made of inert rocks, fast travel, and people eager to exchange gunfire with you.

I haven’t played it yet, but from what I’ve seen the setting looks even more bleak and depressing than Bethesda Fallout.


They took Dark Souls off the market when its remaster came along. Microsoft is not above doing the same. If nothing else, you’ll need a copy of the original Oblivion in order to play Skyblivion when it comes out. Of course I’m sure you’ll be able to get it somewhere. Really I just wanted to play it again with the Shivering Isles expansion.




I never did get any of the DLC when I played it on the PS3. Finally I will get to experience the horse armor.
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