Argurotoxus

Yeah absolutely. I think with a lot of these older games that are considered to be the GOATs of their respective genres you'll run into the same problem: They were so good, that the mechanics/ideas become the minimum requirement for all games thereafter. So, if you played the game on day 1, it was an innovative masterpiece the likes of which you'd never seen before. If you play it 10-15 years later after having played modern games in the same genre, it feels like the same old shit except without the 10-15 years of improvements.

For me personally, the game I'll get crucified for not enjoying is Half Life 2. I played through the entire game. It was ok. I was pretty bored for most of it though. Shooters aren't generally my thing for one, but even that aside the game was very milquetoast to me. I did a lot of reading up on the history of HL2 afterwards because I was astonished that I didn't enjoy such a legendary game and I think I came to the conclusion that some new mechanics such as the cover system and story-driven nature of HL2 were what made it such a hit in 2004. But 15 years later those mechanics weren't new and exciting to me and the story is decent but a far cry from amazing.

The other game that stands out to me is Assassin's Creed 1. I couldn't make it more than a few hours into that game. Just so boring and repetitive, the combat was boring, the collectables were boring, most mechanics didn't actually seem to matter...I just hated the game lol. I do think it's another example of later entries in the series/other games doing the same thing but better so going back to the OG just felt like a slog. But I really hated AC1 hahaha.

Agreed. The author seems like a bummer of a person to me.

Collecting data on users is not inherently bad, there are lots of ways that data collection can be used to the user's benefit.

If course in this day in age that is typically not the case and companies are normally collecting data at the detriment of the user but I really don't see that with what Wrapped shows.

Plus it's fun to see little metrics like how many times I listened to a song this year, or see how my listening habits changed as the year went by.

It's just a fun and cute thing imo.

It's a bummer. This is the district I went to high school in, and it was a fantastic district while I was there. It had its issues but I got a great education.

It's truly depressing to see this kind of mentality take hold in my community. Sadly I live in a different school district now so I couldn't have even voted against these board members, but I definitely had to vote down my fair share of people just like them in my local district.

Man you just really hate to see it. I hope this inspires a reaction that will ultimately oust these people before they can do irreparable damage.

Just so you're aware that refutation was also spoofed.

Whole situation remains funny af though. And Walz is adept at twisting the knife.

If you do it 15 times while holding down the B key Mew appears for you to catch too!

Unfortunately Temtem is a terrible game entirely due to Crema's incompetence.

It's actually impressive how consistently they make horrible decisions. If I had to summarize their attitude, it's that you can't criticize them because "Hey, we're human, we make mistakes and when you criticize us it hurts our feelings". And when I say you can't, I mean it literally. They will suspend or ban you from whatever platform it is for saying anything they perceive as negative.

They take an "us vs them" attitude with their player base which results in the equivalent of Crema stuffing their fingers in their ears saying LALALALALA YOU'RE WRONG WE'RE RIGHT.

It's a shame, because the foundation of the game, the battle system, is genius and a huge improvement over Pokémon. The game showed real promise for a long time. But Crema has been dropping the ball with every update for years and it's long since entered its death spiral.

I was able to figure out that I needed to light a deku stick on fire and roll over cobwebs to get to the floor below in Ocarina just fine at 7 years old.

And that's not even touching on the Water Temple.

People, especially game devs, underestimate children.

Spotify like many others here. Just haven't had many issues with the program and it does what I want for a reasonable price.

Wanna give a big shout out to Nebula. It's meant to be a YouTube-esque site but solely for educational content. I found it via LegalEagle but it has a ton of documentaries and other educational content creators. I believe my subscription is $5/year or something like that. Just insanely cheap for really high quality content.

I have the Disney+/Hulu bundle. I love Disney movies and with all the franchises they own now I feel it's worthwhile. Hulu happens to have quite a few of my favorite shows and the bundle made it worthwhile to me.

Currently trying out YouTube premium and, I know this won't be a popular opinion, but I think it's worth it to me. I use a lot of YouTube and also chromecast it. While it's possible for me to get ad blocked YouTube for free on mobile and cast it to my TV it's... Cumbersome and unstable. I generally have the opinion that I don't mind paying for services I enjoy using so... For now, gonna stick with YouTube premium. Just so much less of a headache.

AmazonPrime but only for Amazon's services really, the few shows that are on Prime Video for free are a nice bonus though.

And currently I pay for Netflix and share it with my family but the very first second Netflix cracks down on that I'm dropping it and have told my family as such for years. Already started torrenting most shows I kept up with via Netflix in preparation.

The only other one I consider is HBO... But there just hasn't been enough of an allure thus far.

I would think most of those applications should be able to use an alumino-silicate based refractory ceramic fiber. Kaowool is one brand, but there are many like it.

It has its own problems in regard to silicosis but that's only after it's been exposed to higher temperatures and are easily mitigated with most particulate respirators. Also, if I remember correctly, the silicosis threat requires very long term exposure. I do know of at least one company developing a silca-free version too, which would eliminate the silicosis threat.

I use it in glass manufacturing with temperatures 2000°F+ so I'm quite confident it'll hold up to any application where asbestos is being used.

EDIT: It will hold up in any application unless there's a problem with certain chemical reactivity I should say*. I don't expect that would be a common problem, but I'm sure it could happen. I'm admittedly not well versed on asbestos since I've never tried speccing it out for anything, haha.

It's the best I've found, but I wouldn't call it a "good" alternative myself no.

Many others have commented on the small communities/lack of niche communities so I'll simply say I agree with the takes in this thread there.

Personally though, I generally find Lemmy to be far less tolerant of any dissenting opinions across most communities. And man do I mean any. There's a plethora of topics that aren't even worth trying to discuss here because if you introduce the slightest bit of nuance to a hardline take you'll be downvoted, insulted, and ignored.

A quick example that comes to mind are services such as Spotify/Youtube. To make a long story short, I find that I use Youtube often enough that I don't mind paying for Youtube premium. They need to make money somehow to continue providing that service and I can't fucking stand ads so hey sure it's worth the monthly payment to me. I'm a pretty satisfied customer all things considered.

Try offering that perspective in any related thread and you'll be called bootlicker and made to feel like you're propping up Satan himself for daring to pay for Youtube and be happy to do so.

There's other, similar topics. Some are easier to avoid, like the FuckCars community. I was a pretty big fan of that community on reddit but on Lemmy most threads seem to truly believe we need to go 100% no cars at all and there is no middleground damnit. Other topics manage to work their way into damn near any thread. Biden could literally pull a child and puppy from a burning building and there will always be comments about how he's still a genocidal maniac and basically evil. That entire war is basically just not worth talking about here imo.

And then there's little stuff. For example, don't ever say you use Windows here lest a whole horde of people jump in to call you an idiot for not having switched to Linux I mean really what's wrong with you using the most popular OS in the world by a large margin. Stuff like that.

So I guess to summarize my feelings here, I personally believe the echo-chamber is far worse on Lemmy than reddit and that's primarily due to the smaller community. A lot of likeminded people came to Lemmy and we're missing a lot of middleground opinions that come naturally with a larger, more diverse population. Too many people view everything as black and white and if you sit in grey both extremes are against you.

There are absolutely exceptions; I have seen respectful discourse on the site. But the general trend I perceive here is that the echo-chamber is far worse.

I'm sure there are people who genuinely find that kind of work to be really cool, but I'm with you. It wasn't enough for me.

I just could not get motivated over my projects being "Maybe we should store the pallets right here in packaging instead of 100ft away on the other side of the building" or "Let's replace the screwdrivers in assembly with drills to increase productivity". Who the fuck needs an engineering degree to tell them that drills are way faster than screwdrivers?

Let alone the bullshittery around monitoring every minute of each employee's day and trying to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of it. One manager gave an entire presentation about how if every operator is 1 minute late coming back to their station from break it adds up to like 2 full weeks for 1 employee by the end of the year.

Like...I saw that manager gossiping with HR for anywhere from like 15-45 minutes every day. But here we're trying to harass our employees for taking ONE EXTRA MINUTE of their 30 minute lunch break.

I just couldn't. Continuous Improvement can be cool but not when it's that kind of stuff, not to me anyway.

Just wanted to say that if you feel similarly and it's making you miserable there are cool engineering jobs out there. Even Continuous Improvement can be really fun if the manufacturing process is complex and requires actual engineering to improve.

I agree with the NDA comment, it's difficult to give a lot of the cool details without breaking NDA.

I feel pretty safe in saying that I'm working to come up with new ways to melt glass for our process in order to be more flexible about what compositions we're able to use. That's a pretty fun one for me.

Simply put, the attack is shorter and easier to understand than the nuanced defense.

Politicians can put "you're against education!" in a 15 second attack ad on the radio/TV/a poster. It takes a short media appearance to explain the nuance. Which isn't worth the time or money typically, since so few people will see it.

Especially since a huge section of our population gets 100% of its news from Fox, Newsmax, and other right wing media. That interview will never air there. In fact, those sources will repeat the party line of "you're against education!"

Strange that they don't count comments IMO. My first reaction was that I like the self-promotion rules because the ones I'm familiar with just require posters to interact with the community. i.e. For every post to their Youtube channel/whatever there need to be ~9 comments.

I always liked that because it prevented the subreddits I browsed from becoming giant ad spaces where content creators just dump a link to their video on all related subreddits and move on. If someone is never answering questions asked of them in their own threads and not participating in discussions in any other thread then they're more of a leech on that community than a contributor IMO. I like the idea that in order to have access to the views of the community, you need to also view other people's work within the community and interact.

But to count only posts is weird for sure. I don't feel like the rule really helps anything. For example if I had a channel that was relevant to r/pcgaming to meet the rule criteria I feel like I'd just post my content, then post 9 other inane threads that I didn't really care about/intend to participate in. "What's your opinion on Final Fantasy XIV?" "Someone explain to me why Epic Game Store is so much worse than Steam" "What games are you getting from the Steam Summer Sale?!" etc. etc.

Mr. Happy if you like anything Final Fantasy! Excellent stuff and he goes deep into all lore.

Josh Strife Hayes also does a good job just in general.

Thanks for sharing! This was an amazing read.

I'm still sad that steamingpileofshit.com finally got killed. I think within the last year or two.

Used to redirect to steam.com since the old days when everybody hated Steam lol. It's hugely improved now and I love everything that GabeN has done for the PC gaming community; Steam being a huge part of it.

But I still laugh a bit at the old days.

If you enjoyed FFXVI, it's worth considering FFXIV.

It's currently free to play through its first expansion and the second expansion will be free next year. So it's a safe game to try from that perspective.

The producer of FFXIV is the same as FFXVI. His mentality has been that he's wanted players who don't want to play an MMO to be able to play through FFXIV's story as if it were a mainline FF game. I'd say 95% of story content can be soloed at this point.

The two caveats are these: This is like playing through five full length JRPGs. To finish FFXIV's story takes months. It's easily 400+ hours of playtime imo.

The initial base game story, called A Realm Reborn or ARR is mediocre. It's not bad, but the story quality spikes up in a big way at the first expansion and then never backs down. Even the end of ARR is really good, but it's only decent up until then. However, after ARR is some of the best story writing I've ever had the pleasure to play. Shadowbringers and Endwalker in particular still bring tears to my eyes when I hear certain songs or rewatch some cutscenes. Truly a beautifully told story.

My reply was a lot wordier, so I just wanted to say I 100% agree with pelotron here. They have the right of it IMO.

I focused pretty hard on the negatives because many other posters here have already hit a lot of the highlights and I felt they left out the negatives. It's certainly not all bad. Absolutely try it out.

TIL about this and it's a freaking lifesaver. Thank you!

Just to start off: I would recommend experiencing it for yourself first. A lot of people hold a very different perspective from me, even just in this thread. Maybe it's the specific communities I frequent that are like this, I dunno. But it certainly is worth giving a chance if nothing else. Costs you nothing more than however much time you decide is worth investing into seeing if the site is a good fit for you. And also, I truly believe Lemmy has the potential to grow into something greater than it is currently. Which is why I'm still here checking it daily. I don't find it's a good replacement right now, but I have hope that it has the best shot at becoming a good replacement.

I hate to say it, but generally if I want to see discussion around a new game/TV show/book/whatever I find Reddit to still be the best place to do that. IMO, Reddit's overall quality has dipped quite a bit (browsing /r/all) but the smaller communities are often still good. Of course, all it takes is one shithead mod to ruin that, but I suppose I've gotten lucky.

I took steps to distance myself from reddit with the 3rd party app fiasco. I never bother browsing /r/all anymore, I don't use reddit on mobile anymore, stuff like that. But I hopped into Old School Runescape recently and, well, just look at the OSRS community on Lemmy. The top posts are 9/10 months old. So I browse r/2007scape in order to discuss the game.

There's a great silver lining to Lemmy being so small though: one person can make a large difference. I believe with enough effort it's possible for one person to grow communities on here and that's pretty cool. I don't have the time/energy to do that, so I go to where others are already gathered to discuss things But, if you've got the mind for it, there's opportunity to be the change you want to see. It's just not going to be easy and it's going to be slow.

With pretty much all of these types of games there'll be a cheap deck that's really powerful. You can build that and then spam it to climb the ranks and get more resources to buy another deck. Back when I tried out Master Duel it was the Salad deck. It was pretty fun; I liked it a lot and I had it made on day 1. No idea what it would be currently.

However the games are absolutely designed in a way to entice you to spend money. They will always be slightly frustrating to play without doing that. It's hard for me to recommend any of them if you're not wanting to spend money.

Do you mean Alyx? I actually do own that, but haven't got around playing it yet.

I grabbed Terraria and Tiny Tina's Wonderland. Looking forward to them both! Gonna boot up Terraria now, Tiny Tina's Wonderland will have to wait until some friends are free.

Just two unfortunate people honestly.

Interesting. I'll have to play around with it at some point.

Strange, I had YouTube Vanced but I remember it outright dying maybe a year ago. Had been using NewPipe for a while before I finally decided I use YouTube so often it's perfectly reasonable for me to just subscribe.

YouTube Vanced is still up and running?

I often have multiple tabs with different inboxes open in Firefox. No extra features required AFAIK it just works.