brenticus

It is genuinely ridiculous how much content there is in this game for the price. Like, a lot of it looks like an excuse to play the same levels a dozen times with minor variations, but then there are tons of levels, lots of events, ongoing updates with new content of all types, so many different towers and upgrades to play with, community maps to add even more variety... It looks like I've played over 200 games and I have so much of the game that I haven't even touched yet.

Just to throw a few other options on the pile:

• Valheim is more combat oriented, but is probably my favourite survival crafting game after Subnautica. You're playing vikings trying to earn their way into Valhalla. I die a lot. Very fun.
• Planet Crafter is more chill, more jank, and more linear, but it's a survival crafting game that is clearly heavily inspired by Subnautica. You are sent to a mars-like planet to terraform it as part of your prison sentence. It's a great podcast game, just build and explore and watch numbers go up.
• Less on the survival crafting side of things, the environmental storytelling is also really good in Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn. Very different games, but they were actually what I went to after Subnautica to scratch that itch and it worked weirdly well.

The irony kills me on this one. I would like to imagine that if you send your ID in they auto-fail you, but I'm sure they're not that clever.

My prediction is that people will overhype it with lots of hopes for super complex systems, call it shit when it has fewer mechanics and civs than 3/4/5/6 with all their DLC, and then eventually decide it's good after a couple years of DLC and patches.

You know, the usual Civ cycle. I'll probably buy it day 1 assuming it isn't actually broken, per usual, and dump a couple hundred hours in it, per usual.

Cats. Mastodon has a lot of cats. It's great.

I follow hashtags on Mastodon sort of like how I follow communities on Lemmy, but instead of "content" I get quick thoughts from people. It's different but, as someone who also didn't use Twitter, it's nice to have a space where the barrier to engagement is a bit lower; you need a thought, not a link or discussion, and sometimes that's enough to prompt engagement.

My only hesitation points when I first heard about the laptop was whether the company would survive long enough to make upgrades/accessories and whether the main board upgrades would actually work. The concept was, as you say, a dream.

Both of those concerns have faded away for me, my next laptop is pretty much 100% going to be a framework. Just need to stop spending money on dumb stuff so I can afford it...

You can't fool me, that's just being a normal girl with a dope hat and sword!

Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn't even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it's basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.

There are actual use cases for satellite internet. I heard from an evacuee from the Northwest Territories in Canada here that he was basically only able to get updates on what was happening—i.e. what roads weren't on fire and where evacuation centers were—because of a couple of people with starlinks. There are huge areas up there with little to no internet infrastructure, and this summer much of that was damaged in the fires.

Ground infrastructure is expensive to run out to extreme rural areas, and it's also vulnerable in different ways from satellite infrastructure. In the US, yeah, it's dense enough that ISPs mostly need to get their shit together, but there are very large areas where running a cable has a lot of problems.

On principal I don't use cloud-based password management solutions like this, but Proton Pass does make it somewhat tempting, especially since I have a Proton Unlimited subscription anyways. KeepassXC + syncthing do well enough, but PAM integration would be kind of nice some days when I'm opening and closing my vault a ton.

Shit. I used to use most of these apps when my life was more degoogled, but even now I like the gallery a hell of a lot more than other options I've found. Guess it's an opportunity to see what else is out there.

Man, OSRS dodging most of the scummy monetization has been fantastic and has contributed greatly to it being relatively lively for so long. I can't imagine a new owner won't want to extract every possible drop of value from it, especially an investment firm.

Mizuki from One Punch Man.

I forgot her name, but I knew "one punch man thigh crush" would be a good search to find out.

It's a good philosophy, to be sure. It doesn't take many migrations to realize that keeping your files in open, easy to read formats is preferable.

I also use obsidian, but I do sometimes worry that the linking and metadata will be difficult to work with in the future when the software goes away. It's all there in the files, but my vault is slowly linking together in interesting ways that rely on obsidian functionality.

Since release I've been playing BG3 every week with a friend and we finally beat the game on Saturday. Great game, but man we've been playing it for a long time.

Picked up Viewfinder yesterday. Fun little indie puzzler. Very cool concept, don't know how much I care about the plot or anything but it's got some of the same trippy fun as Superliminal.

Oh, and I played a couple hours of Against the Storm and have been hesitant to pick it up again because I'm pretty sure it's going to be problematic for my already busy schedule.

Framework is a private company so they need to agree to be bought. I don't know enough about the leadership to be able to say the likelihood of accepting an offer, but it's not just a thing that automatically happens because Dell has a lot of money.

I've been using Obsidian lately. Proprietary with an open plugin ecosystem. Works well, makes it easy for me to integrate with other notes and such, but I haven't figured out a good workflow for exporting work for submission. That said, it's all markdown and there are lots of plugins for stuff like that, so it's probably mostly just that I haven't tried very hard.

In the past I've used Google Docs (proprietary), Scrivener (proprietary), Manuskript (open), Zim (open), and probably a few I'm forgetting. Really it just comes down to what you're looking for out of the software, there are lots of options.

The biggest thing to keep in mind from a self-hosting perspective is local storage and easy backups under your own control. I use syncthing to keep my whole Obsidian vault synced across a few devices; for some software that's easier or harder due to file formats and accessibility.

The art direction seems kind of off, but sometimes that can shake itself out in game.

The tone of the trailer is definitely not the Dragon Age vibe. Lighthearted Oceans-style crew selection to deal with what looks like some sort of world-ending calamity? Yeah, that's not right.

Things could work out but I'm sure not feeling optimistic.

A definition I saw recently that I like is that time is the direction of entropy. You follow time one direction and you get the big bang where everything is chaotic and happening, and in the other direction you get the heat death of the universe, where everything has settled into a base state and nothing's happening.

Shit, that picture outside Edmonton is hardly even distant, there are a bunch of communities in northern Alberta and BC that don't even have roads going to them because they're too far away.

I've cried a few times in my life at games. This is the only one that had me outright sobbing.

This is one of those games where every time I see it, I want it, it looks so crazy, but it also looks like it will require so many hundreds of hours to understand that it's hard to commit to buying it.

Still, congrats to them on the 1.0 announcement, the game has so many weird interactions that I wasn't sure they'd ever be comfortable pulling the trigger on that.

Keep in mind that the main comparison point for it was Skyrim, which was pretty much the previous RPG people got sucked into.

The story was pretty good and it had a good number of meaningful side quests. Gwent was also a lot of fun, and the Blood and Wine DLC was another step above to keep the hype alive for longer. The combat can get fairly involved without feeling overly complex. Rather than the blank slate of many games of the era, you play as Geralt, who actually has relationships in the world to draw you in.

Basically, rather than the unfocused sandbox of random stuff in Skyrim, it was a more involved story-rich experience that a lot of people appreciated.

That said, the hype was ridiculous. It's a very good RPG, not the second coming of Christ. It didn't really do anything new, it was just a solid experience.

There's been some controversy around the governance structure and culture with NixOS that has a number of people unhappy. I'm honestly not sure of the details but it's ptesumably less about the software than the people.

I'm curious to see where they go next. A lot of modern consumer electronics have repairability and upgradeability problems, but I also wouldn't expect they'd be able to crack into the phone market as easily as the laptop market, so presumably there's some more niche target they have.

Mount and Blade: Warband has multiple incredible total conversions. I've dumped a lot of time into Prophecy of Pendor and The Last Days, probably more than the base game.

For actually free games there are so many options that it really comes down to taste. Unciv is a fantastic reimplementation of Civ 5. Super Auto Pets is a fun casual auto battler. HoloCure is a really good Vampire Survivors-style game themed after Hololive vtubers. There are tons of MMOs and shooters that are F2P and good, but I know most of those from hearsay rather than experience.

Honestly? I just let the hype train roll me into the steam store. Not gonna pretend it was a smart decision, certainly not gonna advise anyone else do it.

What were the serious technical flaws at launch? I remember some performance issues but nothing super serious.

Have you ever followed a group account?

It's basically that, but with what sounds like some functionality to make them easier to create and find for users of their app/server/API.

The couple I've seen boost my posts in the wild seemed more like bot accounts that just boosted what they saw in the hashtags I used, but it sounds like some of them are probably a bit more curated.

I've happily paid $70 CAD for games significantly shorter and smaller in scope than Shadow of the Erdtree looks. Plus I'm wanting to jump back into Elden Ring anyways and I more than felt like I got my money's worth the first couple of times. So $56.16 CAD (what my receipt says it cost me) is pretty much fine for that.

This might be a weird take, but I don't really care whether I'm paying for a new game, a DLC, a microtransaction, or even a gacha pull. If it seems like it's somehow worthwhile, whether that's by fun or hours played or novelty or whatever, I don't really worry that much about what form it takes. This usually means I just buy new games (how often is a microtransaction at all reasonable to pay for?) but I don't really worry about DLC pricing if it looks good.

I finished playing through with a friend a few weeks ago. Act 3 wasn't notably more buggy than the rest of the game for us, and most bugs we came across were fixed by a quick restart anyways.

Great game, highly recommend even if it's probably overhyped to some extent. We clocked over 100 hours in our playthrough and still want to keep playing.

SMTV nailed the general gameplay for me better than any other SMT or Persona game, so I'm interested in better performance on PC and what looks like a semi-functional story. Despite all its flaws I've been wanting to play through again, this would make that feel less wasteful.

... But I do wish I didn't need to rebuy the whole game.

It's tricky for sure. The plain text is great, and all the functionality is built off of plain text (even the canvas!), but replicating the functionality isn't trivial by any stretch of the imagination. Migration is easier because of the text files, but will it be as easy to see the links between notes? Or query all the notes I need more detail in? Or map it all out visually?

I think reimplementing the core obsidian functionality in a FOSS clone would be fun... except I already have a queue of projects and not a lot of time, so here I am complaining instead 🤷

For your first case while evacuation and such, there are alternatives and you shouldn’t need full internet access for situations like that. (obviously this isn’t the case right now)

People absolutely need internet access in evacuation situations. They need information to know where it's safe to go, where they can get help, what routes are still open, whether it's safe to return home, whether their home still exists... in some cases the only communication methods are either internet-based or literally flying a plane in, there aren't even roads to some communities that need to be evacuated. There is way too much information people need to be able to rely on local communication methods like radio.

And that's really one of the only other options in these situations. The fibre line (pretty much singular, because the cost to run fibre over thousands of kilometers is enormous) going through the NWT was destroyed in the fires as a fire was approaching Yellowknife. Cell towers can literally melt from the heat of some of these fires. Ground infrastructure is vulnerable to all of the climate disasters our world is currently facing. And that's ignoring it getting destroyed by actively hostile actors like in Ukraine.

Do Starlink and Musk suck? Absolutely. Fuck them. But satellite internet is increasingly showing itself to be a necessity, and to think otherwise really underestimates the size of our world and the vulnerability of our infrastructure. We need better management of it, but we definitely need it.

As a wee lad I rented it a few times. I never actually figured out how to play it, I just ran around and died but I liked the vibe of it.

I only played a few hours of Dome Keeper but it was quite a bit of fun. There's already a fair amount of variety possible in the runs but not so much that this isn't appreciated.

I picked up Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and have been doing runs now and then. I played the original when it first came out and couldn't get into it; the years of development seem to have done it a lot of good, feels much more playable than I remember.

I installed steam by going into my discover app, searching for steam, and clicking install. This is how I get most things, excepting a few appimages I downloaded that just work. I change my settings via GUIs that came with KDE. The only extra configuration GUIs I installed were pavucontrol (just like it for some reason) and protontricks (for doing weird stuff with games most people never need to do).

I don't know what distro/de/wm you're using right now but what you're saying doesn't need to be the case. Linux desktop is honestly working better than windows for me lately.

Chants of Sennaar. Thought it would fun, turned out to be probably my favourite thing I played this year.

BG3, TOTK, and Vampire Survivors are all very up there as well. Really great year for games.

I spent a whole sick day blasting through a good chunk of the games a while back. It's weirdly fun. I basically just bought it for the pin pull game that always infuriates me in ads but spent several hours getting all the stars in the parking lot game instead.

My most direct use of fzf is to search large result sets for something I can't 100% remember the name or location of, so this actually sounds nice. I've managed to get fzf to slow down a few times and... well, I'm sure as hell not organizing that folder structure.