A fellow Xbox gamepass User IT seems.

Nope, I’m just someone who waits for sales and has a bit of an indie streak.

This was after my First playthrough. Now, with George putting out his video, im back in. My god, its marvellous.

I see we follow similar creators! I only just picked Pentiment up last week – Jacob Geller’s recent 2023 video is what originally put Pentiment on my radar and then George’s video gave me that final push into playing it for myself. I’m extremely glad for having done so because Pentiment has quickly become quite special to me. I already look forward to making subsequent playthroughs despite still working on the first.

Hifi Rush was great, but felt too formulaic for me, so i abandoned it after the first or second Boss. Too much running arpund, No real banger music between Bosses.

I can see where you’re coming from. From a macro perspective, the game’s essentially just a series of battle arenas stitched together by corridors and platforming challenges… nothing incredible there. What makes Hi-Fi Rush special for me is the novel fusion of rythm mechanics and spectacle fighter mechanics – they complement each other extremely well. (Forgive me for explaining at you like this. I just can’t help myself when it comes to talking about this game)

Normally, I can’t stand DMC-likes because of the requisite rote memorization. HFR flips this dynamic on its head by making the memorization incidental – it happens naturally as you practice playing the combo on-rythm. Perhaps even more importantly; just as mastery of a combo string comes within reach, the underlying musical qualities all suddenly spring into focus and turn the sequence into a musical phrase. It clicks together in a very intrinsically satisfying way IMO. Naturally, this all compounds in on itself and gets double-fun once you start improvising your own “melodies” during real combat. You like Jazz? Because it’s like Jazz if Jazz killed people.

Now, obviously this isn’t going to hit the same way for everyone (nor should it!)… but if you’ve not yet buckled down in training mode and truly mastered a string or two for yourself, then I would very emphatically encourage you to give the game a second try. I actually had to do the exact same thing myself before I really “got” the game and my mindset shifted. Hi-Fi Rush truly is the Dark Souls of 3rd-Person Action videogames

When it comes to Deep Rock/co-op I think my issues are more associated with the underlying gameloop design. I find it hard to perform well when the “tension” ramps up and these games are kind of tailor-made to create high-tension situations. When a round ends I’m left feeling tired/deflated rather than joyful. I had the same issue with Left 4 Dead, but oddly not so for Payday 2.

In any case, I’m right there with you when it comes to TF2 community servers. I sorely wish that more games emphasized these sorts of digital “3rd places”. I have TF2 servers where I can go anytime and just… belong for as long as I please. Games should have more permanent places like that, where play and community come before any imposed win/lose dichotomy. People would be happier.

Yup, that about sums it up: fun, but shallow. Nevertheless I think it’s worthy of a recommendation because it has a great honeymoon period before falling off.

I had a really solid year, all things considered:

• ⭐ Hi-Fi Rush – Love it, hands down. This game’s like if Jet Set Radio, Scott Pilgrim, and DMC got into a fist fight and then that fist fight had a baby with Jack Black
• ⭐ Pentiment – I’m still playing through this one but I can already tell it’s a new favorite. Major Return of the Obra Dinn vibes
• ⭕ Against the Storm – This game innovates on the citybuilder genre so hard and I can’t get enough of it. If you love a challenge and hate the late-game, this is THE ONE
• ⭕ Psychonauts 2 – Fun and bursting with creativity… but I had to set it down after a certain point because I stopped enjoying the gameplay loop. Can’t put my finger on why…
• ⭕ Peglin – Yes, Peglin. The Peggle Roguelite. I like it and you would too if you gave it a chance. It’s not a forever roguelite, but I guarantee you’ll have a blast with it for 5-10 hours
• ❌ Deep Rock Galactic – I bounced off of this one. The game has so much charm… but I just couldn’t click with it. I think co-op games just may not be for me

Honorable Mention: TF2 – Definitely not a “new” game to me, I own TF2, I bought it with money! Even so… this year marked my return after a looong hiatus. Coming back was a total revelation – I thought I’d grown to hate FPS games – as it turns out, what I’d actually grown to hate was the modern antisocial MMR grindset. Game developers: I beseech thee… abandon matchmaking and return to 2007. Return the slab or suffer my curse

Wow

Except you can define a value with undefined and accessing that value will have different behavior than attempting to access an undefined value.

Hmm… I think we’re dogging on the author a bit much here. Don’t get me wrong, they’re clearly swimming in philosophical water that’s a bit too deep for themselves, but sometimes you’ve gotta be clumsy in order to explore topics at the edge of theory.

Let’s dial things up a notch and bring Undertale (the Dark Souls of – nevermind) into the discussion. What does it have to say about branching pathways, tonal consistency, and savescum? It says: I was made for you, please enjoy me.

The game adapts to the audience – you, that is. You are weird and hard to please, so the game needs to be flexible without feeling compromised. If you want to leave hidden depths unexplored, the game abides. If you want to vivisect every last detail, the game changes to fit your desire.

It’s alchemy, of course; both magical and unobtainable, so the author isn’t strictly wrong to accuse Baldur’s Gate of falling short. It’s true: sometimes a gap in the curtains opens up and the illusion is spoilt. With that being said, I think what’s missing is the logical conclusion to the criticism: universality – despite being unobtainable – is still worth striving for. To be universal is to distill humanity itself, as great and terrible and impossible as that may be (and here you thought I was joking with that Dark Souls jab!).

You’re about 20 years late for that particular shitshow, but here’s a fun video retrospective on the war on Pokemon if that’s your thing.

We can do better.

I’m guessing “wrong-sider” would be a step in the wrong direction?

Ah, nevermind sorry about the trouble. He’s a cofounder of the company whose logo you’re using as an avatar (“Ronimo”, i.e.: “Robot Ninja Monkey”).

This is a long-shot question, feel free to disregard… but I have to ask: is that you, Joost?

Time to call a doctor 😳

Though, for the record, this is one of the few situations where humanity would have been better off if Google had simply paid their web engineers to go out into the world and kick animals all day long instead.

Skill issue

You’ve assumed that I want to explain the root cause of the initial decline. This is not the case. Historically, SO has seen several periods of decline. What I’m actually addressing is the question of why the decline has not stopped, because the sustained nature of this decline is what makes it unusual. If you look at the various charts, you can see a brief rally which gets cut off in late Winter 2022 – this lines up rather nicely with the timing of ChatGPT’s release, I feel.

Let’s ignore that. Tell me more about your Google angle: what’s the basis of your hypothesis?

It’s too much to attribute to any one effect. 50% is a lot for a website of this size (don’t forget that Lemmy exploded from a migration of <5% Reddit usershare). Let’s KISS by attributing likely causes in order of magnitude:

1. ChatGPT became the world’s fastest growing website in a single month and it’s actually half-decent at being a code tutor
2. ChatGPT bots got unleashed on SO and diluted a lot of SO’s comparative advantages
3. Stack Overflow moderators went on strike, which further damaged content quality
4. Structurally speaking, SO is an environment which tends to become more elitist over time. As the userbase becomes progressively more self-selective, the population shrinks.
5. The SO format requires a stream of novel questions, but novel questions generally get rarer over time
6. Developer documentation has generally improved over time. On SO, asking about a well-documented thing is a short-circuit pathway to getting RTFM’d & discussion locked

My comment is actually an unrelated in-joke forcibly coerced into the shape of a discussion about git. It’s a whole fictional magical universe thing with a lore wiki and stuff:

• “Odium”/“passion”: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Odium
• “invested”: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Investiture
• “Pushing”: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Steel#Allomantic_Use
• “Pulling”: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Iron#Allomantic_Use

Js is what you make of it. It can be a godawful mess but it also can be really awesome.

Agreed. It wasn’t always a great language, but by some miracle it eventually became pretty alright.

But it’s also a double edged sword because that means that novices can write absolute spaghetti code in it. That’s not the fault of the language though.

Disagree. The best languages are those which can be intuitively used without having to learn the pitfalls. Take Rust vs. C++, for example: both languages have pitfalls, but only Rust is intentionally designed to help you steer clear of them. JS is like C++ in this regard – decades of cruft have coalesced into tempting yet painful footguns, much to the chagrin of many a new learner.

An IDE written in Electron?? What a terrible idea! Nobody would ever be stupid enough to let something like that take off…

Pushing/Pulling might seem simple to you, Odium, but not everyone is so passionate or invested.

I’m a plaintext git patch sent via email and lost in the maintainer’s spam folder

Bold of you to assume that an Emacs user will have anything remotely resembling the default keymap by the time they’re proud enough to brag about it

That’s why my terminal is emacs

You can improve the reliability if you provide it test cases. You can now be the PM you wish you had for the robot that will eventually replace you.

Just wait until 2024 and it won’t be deprecated anymore

Look at me! I am the product owner now!

You’re clearly not yet a Sr. Developer. Everyone knows that you start getting apocalyptic software visions the day after promotion.

Source: It was revealed to me in a dream

Ah, yes. The problem commonly known as PM-who’s-also-the-BPC-but-also-doesn’t-understand-what-either-role-actually-does, or “PMWATBPCBADUWERAD” for short.

Here’s the current usershare breakdown by instance, if anyone’s curious:

Source: https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/tree/main/frontend/public/data

Oh my god this comment gave me an aneurysm

With that being said… Lemmy is still a huge win for the /r/blind folks. Being able to fork the project puts the power to be better into their own hands. It’s also another glowing endorsement to the power of federation that blind community members will be able to browse any Lemmy/Kbin community while still enjoying the benefits of their fork’s accessibility enhancements.

The current state of the fork is already a better screenreader experience than browsing either version of the Reddit website. The fork has been running for 8 days compared to /r/blind being founded 15 years ago. I repeat my previous statement: their fork is already a better in-browser experience. What more needs to be said?

I quite enjoyed reading that quote. You can practically see the columnist rolling their eyes. Does this spokesperson not understand how to say “no comment”?

Who do you think gets captured and tossed into POW camps? This guy’s just some rank & file grunt who was either stupid enough to volunteer or unlucky enough to get drafted. In either case, I find it hard to blame him for being disillusioned after getting shipped off into a meatgrinder and realizing that reality didn’t measure up to the state propaganda.

Hopefully these sadsacks manage to take something home from the experience that can stop the next war from happening before it wastes more young lives.

AKA: The Zone

Alright, let’s say I do that. I’ll take my $12 and split it equally between every unique channel I’ve watched in the last 30 days. Eyeballing my watch history shows… about 100 different channels.

Let’s ignore for the sake of argument the incredible overhead I’d have to take upon myself in order to facilitate and account for 100+ recurring micro-donations. How much more money do you think these creators would get from my direct donations rather than going through greedy Alphabet? Let’s do math together:

• Subscription: $12.48 (the extra $0.48 is applied at checkout for the 4% VAT)
• 4% VAT (rounds up): -$0.48 ($12.00)
• 1.9% + $0.30 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.53 ($11.47)
• 45% Platform Split (not rounded!): -$5.1615 ($6.3085)
• 100x split: $0.063085 p/channel

Ok. That’s ~$0.06 instead of the $0.12 each creator would have gotten had I simply hand-delivered two pennies and a dime to every single individual. Now, I don’t know about you… but I’m kind of too busy watching YouTube to go outside right now, so let’s go ahead and factor in what would happen if I managed to donate using a platform like Patreon instead:

• Not-Subscription: $12.48
• Rounded up: $13.00 (the donation has to be evenly divisible by 100)
• Per-creator donation: $00.13
• 4% Local Digital VAT (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.12)
• 5% Platform Fee (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.11)
• 5% + $0.10 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.11 ($0.00)

In other words: I’d be paying $0.52 more to donate a grand total of: no money. If we ignore the “no money” problem, there’s also the issue of it being literally impossible to donate such a tiny sum in the first place. We also conveniently ignored the challenge of individually navigating numerous currency conversions…

Let’s be honest and come clean with each other now: you weren’t being completely serious with me when you claimed that your suggestion was about helping ✨the creators✨. Even if you were serious, I’m certain that you don’t actually follow your own advice because it’s quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.

I’ll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?

• I use it every day and I’m a human who likes boosting the things that I enjoy
• I think YouTube’s content recommendations are a genuine value-add and not easily replaced
• A cut of my subscription fee goes directly back to the video creators that I watch
• The “premium” encoding levels are actually a substantial improvement to video bitrates
  • Important: the premium bitrate is higher than anything previously offered and probably would not have been otherwise practical to serve for free

So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly trying to win at every transaction in life is a drag though, so I think I’ll continue to enjoy getting swindled.