Gross blech gross yuck. No, please god no. I'm subscribed to communities from loads of instances. The whole point of federated applications is that no one really has control over the whole.

You're missing the point.

If I strip all the DRM BS from my software (not just games, it's a big problem with ebooks, music, etc. as well) I actually own this stuff. I can hoard it away on a hard drive, use it without anything like Steam or any online service, I don't need to ask someone for permission to use this thing that I bought and actually physically have with me any more. Or in the case of ebooks, I can actually use this file I've got sitting around on whatever device I wish, because I bought the book. It's mine. They don't get to tell me what I can do with it.

...And frankly, while I don't "pirate" software because I agree that people deserve to be paid for their work, the single greatest advancement of modern technology is that things can be freely copied. We went from copying books by hand, to printing presses, to now being able to distribute them at no cost whatsoever beyond the infrastructure of the internet. If that makes a lot of typical business practices untenable, I think we should let them be untenable and figure out how to respond to that rather than nerfing the single greatest invention of the modern era just to make sure some capitalists stay happy.

COGMIND.

COGMIND COGMIND COGMIND.

Cogmind is legitimately the most underrated "real" roguelike around. Everyone knows about CDDA and Caves of Qud or whatever, I never see anyone talk about Cogmind. It's such a rabbit hole both gameplay and actually story-wise (because yeah, it actually has a story, despite being a traditional roguelike) that I can't help but wonder how the hell it's developer keeps going.

They have a blog where they talk about the game. It's borderline obsessive.

If I look at any one aspect of it closely I inevitably end up going "wait, what the hell?" because it goes farther than I expected. In-game computer terminals, the way word of your presence travels throughout the caverns you're in, each tile actually being a 3x3 space which affects how much "cover" you have... playing for quite a few hours before meeting other truly sentient robots and realizing that oh, there's, like, lore. A lot of it.

...Nasty, what the hell? Why?!?

Well, shit. I hope I have under two hours so I can refund it.

On one hand- This is a good trait, sort of?

On the other- On an aircraft, if you're in a situation where oxygen masks drop, you're always reminded to put your own mask on first before helping others with their own masks. If you did it the other way around you'd likely pass out and not help anyone.

I've been using meditation to train the less controllable parts of my brain to shut up when I need them to. It's been said that mindfulness meditation can make people more selfish, but if I'm passing out trying to help other people, the best thing I can do for my community is to first make sure that I'm a self-sufficient human being physically, mentally and materially.

Since some of my beliefs are wildly unpopular, this often winds up in me feeling ostracized, rejected, and depressed.

In this case, the phrase "speak softly, but carry a big stick" sometimes applies. If you're somewhere where there's enough cultural / social resistance to an idea, particularly among lots of people, you're probably not going to get anywhere, as you've already found. Potential alternatives include talking to individuals when you're able, helping individuals when you're able, if only by letting them know they're not totally alone, and by operating on that oxygen mask principle again. If no one's gonna do anything, sometimes you need to do it yourself, but it might take a long time to get there.

I remember a video some dude put out where he discussed how he's pretty sure he discovered that those hats were just some other article of clothing rolled up which is why they're a little silly... I'd need to look for the video again. He'd made something, I forget what, and realized that it folded up into that hat exactly.

I love peanut butter, especially the plain 'ol natural stuff, but I'd never put it on crêpes, unless it was peanut butter that had a little bit of sugar in it or something.

I just wish people weren't so adamant about the whole "no spoilers" thing with it. It sort of soured my time with it when I finished the intro and was kinda just like... oh, it's the Majora's Mask thing. That's the big mind-blowing twist people are talking about.

I guess what I'm saying is thanks for just talking about what actually makes it so unique / impressive.

Counterpoint, sleeves.

For anything that you really can't get on Linux:

People have probably told you that Wine is the way to use it anyways, but maybe no one's mentioned Bottles which makes using Wine dead easy. Most of the time you can sort of just open up Bottles, run the installer for the software through there, make sure Bottles knows where the .exe is for the actual program is and you're good to go.

Does Cogmind count? Because even when I see people discussing games like it, which are already pretty niche, it never comes up. That's tragic, because oh my god, just read some of these articles. This developer is obsessive and even if you don't get too deep into Cogmind it's an incredible toy to just screw around with and just see what happens.

I have, in fact, talked to people who are insistent that any RPG made in Japan is a JRPG and any game not made in Japan isn't. They argued that Dark Souls is a JRPG. They were entirely serious.

First thing's first: Luciole is right. Making hardline categories doesn't work and you're better off coming up with properties games could have. But if we're gonna go down this route:

Dwarf Fortress adventure mode is one among a few games (Stoneshard being another?) that go for... an open-world with fairly traditional rogueish mechanics?

Hardcore Diablo, alongside other ARPGs and stuff like Tales of Maj'Eyal and Rift Wizard, I'd call "skill rogues"? If we're not gonna care whether they're turn-based or not. Games where you have a bunch of skills to unlock with cooldowns and very little importance placed on map loot.

Calling everything that isn't turn-based an "action rogue" seems wrong. Like, Barony? Sure it's real-time, but it's seriously the classic Roguelike experience, except in first-person and co-op now. It's rad as hell.

Something you're missing IMO is... sandbox-ness? Like the "skill rogues" don't have a lot of systems that can interact in weird unexpected ways. Nethack is the quintessential systemic sandbox. More modern examples would include Spelunky and to a much greater extent Noita. There's a lot of overlap with totally different genres here- Immersive sims inherit some of Nethack's sauce, and so does Dwarf Fortress (as in Fortress Mode).

What the heck even are DoomRL and Jupiter Hell? They're turn-based but built to almost feel like they're not. I feel like they're their own special thing in a way.

The guns didn't make them suicidal, but they provide a very easy way to be impulsive.

I'm vaguely suicidal a good chunk of the time. I don't want to be anywhere near a gun.

...I mean, it's more like the web browser makes it easy to use the Tor network. The network is the slow part. Your requests are getting ping-ponged all over the world intentionally taking the long way around.

I really want to see someone get Doom running in Emacs. I've tried to figure out if anyone has but of course what actually comes up is "Doom Emacs" which is a specifically customized version of it.

I hate religion. I hate ""spirituality"" (what does that even mean?). It makes my skin crawl. I hate that people willfully delude themselves into believing things that they clearly know to not be true, on some level, and then argue wholeheartedly for their actual truthfulness. It's the most nonsensical practice I can imagine someone engaging in and I struggle to see people who do so as willful, rational human beings. Just look at all the people in this thread searching for one that "speaks to them as if they can just pick the nature of reality out for themselves. How in the world can people do that and not make themselves crazy with cognitive dissonance?

BUT. What I do understand is that people are searching for structure, community and a sense of reverence towards... something. There have been attempts at replicating that experience sans-nonsense, but every time it's tried it's mostly ridiculed and laughed at by the sort of jackass atheists who can't even empathize with that longing. It's sad.

Honestly, the game I like the most that deserves the praise the most is so obsessively discussed by it's own developer that I think they should speak for themselves: https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/index.html

It's really, truly underrated. No one talks about it, even when traditional Roguelikes come up, despite the absurd amount of effort poured into it.

Specifically the article about designing "information warfare" into the game way back in 2014 (it's still being developed) is a great example of how much is going on in this little ASCII game: https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/11/information-warfare/

I guess what I could add is that surprisingly enough Cogmind actually has a story, a pretty dang extensive one, and the fact that it's sort of just hiding away in places you might never see blew my mind.

Also, that despite having as much depth as Dwarf Fortress (just more focused depth), the interface and controls aren't completely inscrutable. because thank god, it actually has mouse support.

The biggest, obvious one to me is news. Say what you will about mainstream media but some great investigative journalism still happens, and these companies are in an awkward position where no one wants to pay and everyone uses adblockers.

When I'm not living paycheck to paycheck I want to support Standard Ebooks (they're doing a great job of showing how to make ebooks that don't suck, check out their style guide) and maybe Neocities.

The more I think about how Medium works, the more I think it makes sense? While they could have done the typical thing where the people hosting content there pay for their share of the servers, by doing it in reverse the individual monthly cost can be lower (casting a wider net) and the people writing for them can actually get paid a bit for doing so.

I'm thinking about throwing some money at Obsidian, too, since I practically live in that app.

Is this not all kinda well-known information?

Considering Lemmy's apparent deep-rooted technical issues, I'd be perfectly fine with Beehaw searching for something else. Leaving Lemmy doesn't mean leaving the Fediverse, which a lot of people seem to be misunderstanding. It's sort of a hard requirement for anything Fediverse-related to be about as advanced in terms of mod tools as Mastodon at least, and otherwise, what's the point? People are focusing way too hard on perceived ideas about "what the community is like" or whatever, look guys, it's the internet, it's always like that. Maybe stay away from places as general and wide-ranging as Technology (honestly I'd say that's the flaw of a good chunk of Lemmy instances and people need to start looking for / creating more specific stuff. It's out there, please god just look.)

Ultimately the purpose of Lemmy is to be something like a traditional forum system, but networked in a way that makes those forums highly discoverable. Lemmy achieves that, but if there's actually technical barriers to content moderation, yeah, that sucks.

Oh that's absolutely why. If they dumped everything at once people would play what they wanted to play and drop the subscription. By doing this people come back.

If Nintendo doesn't keep NSO as-is for their "Switch 2" people will be EXTREMELY pissed, but it's Nintendo, they're fine with that.

Well, for a practical example, my Ryzen 5 5600x and Radeon 6600xt combo is juuust out of the running for games coming out right now, I'd say. The VRAM limitations at 8GB are becoming apparent and there's been a few instances where the 5600x struggles in games that hit CPUs hard. But I'd say that's because there's been an oddly big jump in system requirements, recently.

I mean, I've used it. It works. But I don't get why you would bother most of the time. It's slow as hell and while I'm generally fairly concerned about my privacy there is a point where I can't be bothered.

FOSS software is developed in such a way that you can build it yourself freely (In other words, you can download the source code and compile the actual application yourself, free of charge). Obsidian doesn't really work that way. Even if most of the code is available, the full app is only available as prepackaged binaries which might introduce god knows what (and make forking the application impossible).

Somebody calls my request for respectful language and symbolism “political correctness.” Although this respect exists barely anywhere, it is portrayed as enforced, and therefore something that must be rebelled against.

This seriously frustrates me so much. People actively resist respecting someone's wishes in as basic of a way as language and then they have the gall to suggest that by pointing out that there's a problem, you're the one causing problems.

Thanks for keeping the Thanksgiving tradition alive.

Sounds to me like you just don't want to think that hard, which is fine, I usually don't either. Half of the time I just play Doom .wads

BG3 specifically: It's D&D 5e, so... yeah It's gonna be complex.

Complex systems more generally:

The best way to learn about any complex system is to bite tiny chunks out of it and ignore the rest, even if you know stuff is interconnected. You'll never learn everything at once, so don't try. Eventually you get bored with the little bubble you've carved out for yourself so you move over and learn about some other bit. You don't even need to care about whether you'll understand everything eventually.

Same. I write as if I had Parkinson's. I guess part of my typing this out is me trying to process how I keep flip-flopping between "people keep telling me this is useful" and "no, getting to the point where it would be useful for me would take way too much effort".

Yep, what's promising about Veloren is I feel like everyone had a pretty cohesive idea of what Cube World was "going to be". It's pretty hard to disappoint a community when the developers are the community.

I just wrote a comment on my own thoughts, and essentially, I think anarchism "works" until a sufficiently willful person shows up. There's a reason the majority of human beings have existed under states of some kind, anarchist societies failed to prevent states from arising.

I'm this person and god do I wish I wasn't, sometimes. So many games have been way less interesting than they could've been for me because for me, fun is learning to play the game well. I'm not sure what frustrates me more, the way people who don't have that attitude say "I play games to have fun" as if I don't, or me looking at the recent LoZ games as failures design-wise because they're too easy to cheese.

What deeply frustrates me about it is that a lot of people who would otherwise be big advocates for FOSS software get completely turned off by creeps like this being absolutely everywhere.

Wikipedia's page on Fidel Castro is pretty fascinating. Dude was the IRL equivalent of movie villains who get some people like "wait, but they have good intentions, though", he was batshit insane, and his life was very public.

This is a very good point, trademarks are pretty much identity theft protection for things other than individuals and that's pretty important to have.

Copyright and patents... lately, I'm feeling like the world is just kicking and screaming against the single most beneficial aspect of digital technology, the ability to freely copy information. If the ability to freely copy information makes something unprofitable, honestly, I believe the importance of not nerfing that benefit comes first. It would be better than the cyberpunk DRM hellhole we've created for ourselves.

...And another thing, despite putting a massive level of value on individual freedom as a movement, anarchic societies are inevitably very close-knit culturally to a degree that harms anyone who doesn't gel with that culture. Keep yourself socially acceptable to the majority, or find yourself shunned and completely, utterly alone. Truly alone.

Seriously, ArchWiki has taught me most of what I know about Linux.

Uh... the whole article is discussing how "the western left's" sympathy for Palestine and criticism of Israel is being criticized?

"It feels like there's thousands of us competing for a handful of jobs,"

Isn't that pretty much it? Everyone wants to make video games. All of the sudden everyone wants to invest in video game development because they realized there's money in it. But video games are a big commitment for consumers (compared to most consumables), we literally only have so much time to dedicate them and there's SO MANY GODDAMN GAMES. Like, an Eldritch horror inducing amount of video games if you have FOMO. And that's still a drop in the ocean compared to all the people who want to make video games. Hundreds if not thousands of cool games go completely unnoticed by basically everyone every month, seemingly.

There's a bizarre sort of supply / demand triangle going on.