stract has same issue mentioned above where search engines are actually the only time i want data on me to be easily accessible. not being able to search “food near me” is frustrating, and no privacy-centered google alternative i’ve been happy with has had that feature. im fine with my location and other relevant metadata on me getting used in a search, as long as that metadata is in a black box restricted to me that doesn’t create a profile for advertising companies

Would you mind sending it my way? I’d be curious to use it

the ability to run a pokemon game above 20 fps, ideally

I love scarlet and violet, I was quite fond of them, but I really want a pokemon game that doesn’t feel like pulling teeth to play

This is a good looking piece of hardware, but i hope they keep the price low. That’s the biggest thing that these sorts of systems have going for them is making a desktop ecosystem affordable, and if this is expensive I fear it’ll be fighting an uphill battle against the steamdeck bc it seems most steamdeck competitors tout their windows compatability as an upside, and as far as most consumers are concerned that’s true

Either way, if this is good (and I can afford it when it hits the market), this might be the handheld pc i pick up. Great looking chassis, good feature suite, hall effect sticks out of the gate, and it helps get me back to tinkering with linux more. Seems like a win all around

the thing is, cyberpunk 2077 released and did gangbusters (after perhaps the rockiest launch cycle in recent memory, but still. game sold well). Deus Ex taps into a lot of the same themes and aesthetics that got cyberpunk 2077 to sell well, it just seems like embracer doesn’t see it as a safe bet, and their definition of safe is informed heavily by their recent fuck-up with their sauid acquisition gambit. It’s a function of a bunch of executives with eyes bigger than their stomach and then having to ballast every possible IP they can manage in order to not ruin the ~shareholder value~ they’re working so hard to not shunt into the atmosphere.

its one of the use-cases that AI truly makes sense in to me, because it feels like voice assistant technology has really plateau’d, and an LLM seems like a good way to process natural language

No, there’s no point in time that would grant Israel legitimacy. The same way America/Canada has to confront their colonial past over Native Americans, or Australia with the Aboriginiees, or any other number of colonial nations, despite the time that’s passed since. I’m sympathetic to the plight of Israelis that were born into an apartheid system and now feel they have a claim to the land and a life there, but by saying they have equal claim by nature of being born there you let time erode the culture and heritage of the Palestinian people that were also born into that space, but into a different and much more unfair system. That concept of time granting increasing legitimacy to Israel as a state is exactly what Israel needs, the longer it’s able to commit these atrocities to enable further existence of the state of Israel, the more and more ridiculous “why not just give it back?” Seems as an argument.

Palestinians do have more of a right to violence, but I don’t think that violence should be directed at those of whom don’t have power within that system (civilians). Violence is a tool of the oppressed to fight back against the oppressor. The child who was born into Israel and hasn’t even been able to grow enough to form an opinion on the system they were born into isn’t an oppressor in the same way the Israeli government is, the same way the idf is, the same way other facets of the system that serve to squash Palestinians are, and as a result should not be a target of that violence. That’s abhorrent. But Palestine’s very existence, these people’s lives are at stake if they don’t fight back. Ignoring how unfair a two state solution even is to people whose homes were robbed from them in 1947, Israel hasn’t even been so much as willing to come to the table regarding that solution, so Palestine needs to fight for its continued right to exist outright, and that’s a natural consequence of Israel trying to weaponize the passage of time to further legitimize it’s existence as a state, and giving them that is dangerous for the lives of those Israel has a vested interest in murdering.

I agree.

I don’t care who is doing it because it’s abhorrent from both ends, regardless of the frequency or scale. It’s bad no matter what.

But the ends don’t justify the means in either case, so in stead we need to evaluate what’s being fought for in the first place for context, because both sides are commiting atrocities on various scales so you can try to one up whichever side you disagree with so we need to look at the context of the fight and what’s being fought for. Under that lens, israel is an occupying colonial force by any metric and was given it’s current territory by other colonial, imperial forces. It’s claim to the state of Palestine is tenuous at best and isn’t even consistent with the Jewish faith, where Jews see themselves as perpetually in exile until their Messiah comes. Israel leverages it’s position as a colonial ethnostate to make people correlate support of the Jewish faith with support of their apartheid ethnostate, which is also a false equivalence. None of this is a conspiracy theory, it’s rooted in fact and also agnostic to which side is committing more atrocities. I’m not saying Hamas is doing nothing wrong, I’m saying relative to this point it doesn’t matter if they are or not. Hamas are Palestinians that had their homes robbed from them, Israelis are not.

This is a false equivalence. Most of the rhetoric I’ve seen about Hamas is that it’s an inevitable consequence of Israel’s treatment of restricting the Palestinian people to an open-air prison. Saying “We can’t support either Hamas or Israel” ignores the fact that most people in favor of Palestine are in favor of the civilians, the people who did nothing and are still bombed and tortured and executed. Not to say that Hamas deserves to be bombed and tortured, they’re citizens as well that shouldn’t be in this situation in the first place, but the large majority of support is in favor of the Palestinian people more broadly that are just unfortunate enough to be adjacent to the conflict and are forced to deal with the consequences of Israel’s bloodlust

to be clear: I do think Palestinians have a right to fight for their own freedom. But with the amount of disinformation at play here i don’t know how many atrocities are actually committed by Hamas and how many are the result of Israeli misinformation campaigns. But the amount of any of that doesn’t change how I feel – Innocent civilians should never die in a conflict like this. I don’t care if Hamas is doing it [edit: or not. The purpose of this statement is to show that I don’t care if Hamas is doing something abhorrent and Israel isn’t, or vice versa because it’s irrelevant to the broader point. Just to clarify, my language was unclear], Israel is very clearly ALSO doing it, and it’s abhorrent and gross no matter who. But in terms of the conceptual “high ground” the west likes to bandy around, Palestinians have a right to fight for its freedom from an occupying colonial force.

And brave being built on chromium is somehow markedly better?

Apple doesn’t, teenage engineering does, and both teenage and analogue both belong to a distinctly apple flavored school of design

This is a great idea and if it exists I’d love to use it

I haven’t enjoyed a “pokemon clone” as much in a very long time, coming from both a lifelong pokemon fan and a competitive battler. It respects your intelligence, buildcraft is fun, the monsters are cool, the story is surprisingly good (not incredible but still well done and touching and fun, big pokemon black/white and black2/white2 vibes in that regard just a bit more adult). I loved it

Easier to keep people scared when you don’t let them learn about what they’re afraid of in the first place

I think the mod is fucking stupid and entirely unnecessary but the guy that made it is well within his rights to make it, in much the same way that I and nexusmods are more than within their rights to say this guy’s an idiot, and nexusmods is in a position to do something about it. if he’s able to express free speech by making his mod in the first place, he is not exempt from the consequence of that expression of his right lol

Oh it looks like it’s an old rumor that kind of got out of hand, see here. It appears that it’s not actually what happened, I just assumed it was true because nicalis isn’t super pleasant

I love cave story but cs+ plays better and has many more creature comforts than the original. I’d never encourage someone to buy it over the original, but at the low price of free, vs. an already free game it’s hard to say “play the original.” You’re right that the original dev got fucked over by Nicalis but my understanding for free games on services like this is the devs get a big lump sum from epic or Amazon or whoever else is distributing them and they move on. In that case, they already have their payday so why not just take advantage of that to play one of the most important indie games ever made with like. Remappable controls and actual 60fpa (the original ran at 50 lol)

I want to be clear I’m not blaming you specifically here, or I’m not trying to paint you as a bad actor intentionally. I’m saying that this trend of behavior is common around drama discourse, and I think it’s to the detriment of the situation overall. You’re free to act as you please, you’re free to think I’m virtue signaling, that’s fine and I’m not going to push on that. I’m just trying to use this as an illustration of something that I, as my own individual person, see as an issue surrounding this type of discourse and I wanted to make a point about it accordingly

You’re not wrong that people will tie their sense of self up with internet celebrities and refrain from criticizing them accordingly but that doesn’t mean that instincts for someone whom you have ever met justify showing up to vindicate yourself in a thread like this. If you were a victim in a position like this, do you think seeing people say “oh I always knew he was bad” makes you feel any better for putting your faith in someone like this? Do you think that Linus, if he were innocent (not saying he is or isn’t I’m using it to illustrate a hypothetical) wants to see people saying they always thought he was a horrible person if this all shakes out in a way that absolves him of Madison’s abuse with LMG? Who does it benefit to say that you always knew someone was bad?

Trust your instincts, absolutely. You don’t need to engage with someone if you don’t think they’re good people. But saying “I KNEW” implies you had perfect information, it implies that you’re smarter than dozens of other people about how a situation like this would eventually resolve. That doesn’t benefit anybody, it’s better and more productive to go to the victims, support them, listen to them, and let them speak their piece because ultimately situations like this have to be about them, not about you and how you got a bad vibe from someone on a YouTube video or a Livestream or a few tweets.

I agree, I always feel like the “I always knew X was a bad person” discourse that always pops up in the wake of this stuff indicates that like. Somehow you had more knowledge than anyone else about this. It’s basically just fueling your own ego as a result of a situation like this. You don’t know these people, what makes people feel like a gut instinct suffices as sufficiently damning evidence? Like, it’s fine to not like someone and abstain from engaging with them accordingly. That’s okay. But going “I always knew that he was bad” does no good.

Obviously listen to Madison, trust victims and support them (do note that this doesn’t mean not to listen to further developments and adjust your moral judgment accordingly, come what may) but that doesn’t mean to indulge yourself and over-justify your ability to judge someone you’ve never had an interaction with based on vibes alone, that’s a pretty unhealthy pattern to fall into in my opinion that has negative effects long term that don’t benefit anybody.

EA is an immensely useful tool for game devs, the issue is EA as an excuse to ship unpolished games or to leave games unfinished forever. Neither of which are problems intrinsic to early access, they’re just bad business practice that should be shunned like any other

I want to echo the steam deck recommendations, but not because I have one, but rather because I daily drove gaming laptops for the better part of a decade and hated it

Sincerely. Get a device dedicated for gaming, not a compromise between form factor and expected output. A cheap used Thinkpad with some knock around Linux distro will do 90% of what you likely need a laptop for, and put the rest of your budget into a tricked out steam deck. You’ll have money left over relative to a gaming laptop, too, which are always – and I mean, always, terribly low on battery life, extraordinarily hot, and rarely performant enough to justify either shortfall. Usually they weigh a ton too.

I’m glad gaming laptops are improving steadily and integrated graphics are improving to shore up the slack through things like the steam deck and also just letting most laptops play games better without breaking the bank, but I’d have been far happier with a cheap gaming computer and a cheap laptop than an expensive gaming laptop as my only option. And in lieu of a full tower for gaming, a steam deck is your next best option

The only exception, in my eyes, is if you need a laptop as a portable video editing workstation as well as for gaming. Then gaming laptops become a more valuable proposition, but even still I’d go with the above. I just figured I’d mention something that gaming laptops have over a steam deck or other comparable offerings, steam decks make a creative workload a lot more cumbersome than a proper laptop would be

I have never been happier to download an app in my life. Connect was great for the time but the polish and ux of sync is unmatched

Yeah I agree, especially bc it’s on steam now and the steam deck puts a premium on games with controller support. But even on PC sometimes I feel like I’m short on buttons, but there’s probably some way to play comfortably on a controller and anet really aught to invest in it

I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 a ton over the past two years and honestly I’m really glad I’ve spent so much time in the setting, it’s so not traditional fantasy and it’s richer for it. I wish that more fantasy played with the expectations of the genre. Tolkien-esque fantasy is a great jumping off point but I wish authors/creators did more with it than just start and stop there

I completely agree. And it’s deeply frustrating too because this is something the right does EXCEEDINGLY well. There’s a lot of ideological diversity on the right (none of which holds up to much rigor, but there sure is a lot of it) but they all agree that step 1 to getting their way is pulling the Overton window further right. Which is true, so while the left quibbles about whether anarcho-syndicalism or marxist-leninism or whatever else is really “correct” the right gets to sway common consensus in their favor BEFORE trying to get people to identify with a label. It’s fundimentally missing the forest for the trees, and ignores the #1 thing that the left is supposedly all about: helping people. How can you help people if you’re too busy telling them that x left-wing ideology is better than y? People don’t really care, frankly. They care if they can make rent. If they can eat. If their kids won’t get shot in school.

And if someone shows up to tell me that “actually anarcho-syndicalism is a marxist-leninism philosophy” you’re making my point. These labels matter very little. And until your favorite label is struggling to make rent, it never will.

Provided you can get the model to land at a place where it’s replying like a well constructed character and not, well, an AI model (hopefully through the input and effort of a talented and well-supported writing team) I don’t see a future where this isn’t where this kind of tech lands. Games are always striving for some sense of realism (some correct away from reality but the driving force of the games industry is in that direction) and while I don’t think absolute realism is a healthy direction for people to aim, realistically realizing characters has a lot of room for unique and incredible games to strive for. Obviously bespoke writing is still the heart and soul of a good narrative but there’s some areas it can’t really cover and I think that tech like this is great for covering that uncharted water

Given that, the voice actors who train these models for moment-to-moment interactions and other stuff that can’t really be easily written for if a game’s content creates a need for it really NEED to be properly compensated otherwise it’s an incredibly unhealthy precedent for the industry. The speed at which this sort of AI develops outstripping proper precedent (legally and professionally) is much scarier to me than some sort of like, ai-overlord type future

Honestly this is a really frustrating way to look at it. Because like, live service games are wack from a games preservation perspective but regular content releases are how you make games like this tenable long-term for the people that enjoy them. They don’t need to be THE next love service game, they just need to find a stable audience and remain profitable. The issue is when devs and publishers get eyes bigger than their stomach and it comes a the cost of that player base, or the devs don’t know how to sell a really good idea and the game falls apart accordingly.

Live service games aren’t inherently bad, there’ve been some really incredible games that I’ve enjoyed that are live service and that content release model makes sense. But it’s a shame when they fall apart because of developer ineptitude (see battlerite) or corporate greed (this, probably)

Yo! I love guild wars 2, if there’s anything I can offer to help you click with the game? Or answer any questions for you? Regarding tab targeting vs action, really you can play it almost entirely like one or the other and you don’t need to interact with the other system if you don’t want to. And I’m happy to give you a breakdown of boons, hopefully it’s not as complex as it seems as first blush? But I love helping people click with the game because it took me a while and I’m glad I finally stuck so I’d love to pay it forward

I’m on Sakurajima.social because it was partered with the small anime-oriented masto instance I used previously so it felt like an easy swap and i could trust the moderation policy but my advice is, if you wanna use it like mastodon find a small instance where you can trust the mods and talk to them, and if you want to use it like its own platform (using channels, namely) find the biggest instance that’s catered towards the niche you’re most passionate about. Channels are a big feature sell of firefish for me so being on an anime-centric instance makes a lot of sense for me :)

It also sounds too much like Firefox. But either way, it doesn’t sound like accounting software anymore which was my issue with calckey’s branding prior to now anyway lmao

But it’s by far the best fediverse platform I’ve used from a functionality standpoint and I’m quite fond of it so hopefully this puts more eyes on it

Yeah it’s wild to me that 2017 isn’t brought up more often in these conversations it’s an absurdly stacked year

Honestly I genuinely think that 2017 might be the best year of gaming, ever. Breath of the wild, nier automata, mario odyssey, fortnite, cuphead, horizon zero dawn, hellblade: senua’s sacrifice, destiny 2, xenoblade chronicles 2, prey, sonic mania, injustice 2, divinity original sin 2, nioh, splatoon 2, hollow knight, middle earth: shadow of war, night in the woods, pubg, pyre, yakuzas 0 and kiwami, even tekken 7’s console release and persona 5’s western release if you want to count those. And that’s not mentioning the smaller indie games that were acclaimed within their circles like Absolver or the expansions for games that were critically acclaimed like Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire or Final Fantasy: Stormblood. Like, '98 is legendary for a reason but I think that as far as just, number of incredible games released we’ve never seen a year like 2017.

even around the game people are good provided you aren’t broadly exposed to it via tiktok/twitter/reddit/twitch. Some of the smaller genshin discords have been really helpful and sweet and full of good people. But honestly I think there’s just a critical mass where communities like that kinda blow up so that’s not a genshin problem so much as that’s a “so many people in one place at one time” kind of problem lol

Yeah cults of personality + ipad kids on social media tend to be the large problem with genshin imo

Tbh the genshin community isn’t necessarily toxic, genshin is so large that it’s genuinely difficult to pin down an entire genshin community. There’s the twitter genshin community, the tiktok community, different content creator’s communities, etc. It’s not a monolith just because the game is so gargantuan. The social media communities tend to be horrible but like, i watch a small genshin tiktok-er and theorycrafter and his discord and related communities around that have been genuinely lovely and actively elevated my experience with the game. I think it’s important to look at how, past a certain point, specific communities dont really exist? and that’s not just a genshin thing that goes for anything, different communities sort of splinter off and it’s hard to hold the whole thing to task ig

In any case, FFXIV is a weird pull because in my time playing GW2 I have many friends that have gone to ffxiv and come over to guild wars from it and almost always I hear nothing but good things about the broader community. It might have a bit of a toxic positivity vibe to it at times but I think the broader community seems to be pretty good? But uh. Valorant’s gotten pretty bad. I love the game and the people I’ve met through my time with the game, and the community was quite good around the beta but it’s just at a point where it’s just. fueled by ego and weird horny tiktokers, it’s not a great time lol

What does the UK’s rejection of the merger mean going forward now that the US has allowed it to pass?

Honestly being dismissive of these concepts as trite rather than recognizing the implicit value of tropes as a means of conveyance for a good story reads as contrived criticism attempting to convey an understanding of media broadly.

Tropes don’t make a story ineffective. Simple story structure doesn’t make a story ineffective. Contrivances don’t make a story ineffective. Did a story make you feel? Did it make you think? It did it’s job. This is non-constructive at best and an active effort to not understand media at worst and I’m really not sure what you’re trying to even get across given you gave zero examples of productive, fruitful storytelling that is more worth engaging with.

Gems are the premium currency and what you can turn into gold by way of the black lion trading company. They’re almost entirely used for cosmetics or convenience items, because a lot of the stuff in game that you spend gold on that WOULD be a power boost is almost always associated with a resource that cannot be purchased with gold, and usually you get the lions share of the gold you would need by way of working towards whatever those resources are.