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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • On the flipside of this, I’ve been kicked from games because I know how to prefire, and a lot of players see that and just assume you’re wallhacking. Nobody pays attention to the 70% of the time that you prefire at air, but when you guess right and instakill someone holding an angle, it’s easier to say “cheater” than “i’ve been holding this same angle for the past 5 rounds, perhaps I’ve become predictable”



  • I’m a huge book fan, and I have to say that book purists are the worst.

    The show has made some changes that I don’t love, and some of the characters aren’t portrayed as I imagined, but for the most part it has been wonderful to see one of my favorite fantasy series brought to life, and to be able to enjoy this world with new fans. I always expect screen adaptions to make creative changes, since things that work in a book just don’t work on screen sometimes, and I’d say the changes and presentations have been pretty sensible for the most part.

    For every change I dislike there’s at least one I appreciate, and all of the actors are killing it (with what they are given at least, looking at you weird Lan funeral scene). I’m looking forward to how they handle the story going forward!



  • Flash drives are not a lasting medium. You’d need something like a quad-layer blu-ray, which is not cheap and has slow read speeds compared to solid state storage. Also nobody has blu-ray readers anymore. Also blu-ray publishers are tiny. Also the expense of distributing physical media.

    So we’ve arrived back at the beginning - you can have this cake and eat it too, but you’re going to have to eat the expense yourself. Imposing it upon the entire consumer market is selfish and wasteful.


  • I’ve already said that I appreciate your efforts. I’m not going to block you, your work is valuable. I’m just explaining that you ARE going to be criticized for what you choose to post, and you shouldn’t act surprised. If you really don’t care about whether or not the stories you are propagating have merit, then just ignore anyone who pushes you on it. Consider attacks on “OP” to be the original author of the article, not you.

    Or, be more selective about what you post, if the approval matters to you. Consider it constructive feedback.


  • You post a lot. I see your name come up non-stop. That is great! It is really appreciated. I’m certainly not doing that work.

    You also post quite a bit of inflammatory clickbait without having any personal knowledge to back it up. That’s a bit confounding. At the bare minimum, you need to be prepared to accept criticism for that.

    I can personally say this is the second time you’ve posted a FF16 ragebait article and gotten offended when prodded about the fact that you yourself haven’t even played it. Why are you spreading information that you don’t even have the ability to evaluate?


  • As a fan of souls games and mech games, I wouldn’t be TOO worried. OP is overstating the problem. I sympathize, because this is indeed a different Armored Core, but it’s nothing at all like a souls game. It’s still a mech game and a good one, but it’s not as technically deep as previous AC games while also being dramatically more difficult.

    I would say in older AC games having a terrible build vs a great build meant the mission was either literally impossible or braindead easy. In AC6 a terrible build means the mission will be much harder, but still perfectly doable, and having a great build means the mission will run smoother but may still be quite challenging since threats are generally a lot more deadly than they were in previous titles.

    I can totally understand how that can kill the vibe for someone who wants to seek victory in the build screen and enjoy the rewarding power fantasy during the mission, but it’s still a great mech game with a lot of meaningful variety.

    Proof of this is that while, yes, AC purists are upset that this game is more action-y, there are just as many Souls fans who are mad that the mech building game they bought is - get this - actually a mech game and not just Robo Souls.


  • AC6 is both more and less accessible along the same lines. It’s a simpler game. The space given to customize your make is smaller, you can’t go into debt by making stupid builds, and in exchange bosses will wombo-combo you from full AP to dead even with a heavy build if you get stunned at the wrong time. There’s a person who experiences that wombo-combo, says, “this is bullshit” and puts the game down forever. But there is also a person who tries AC2, fails a mission with an expensive loadout, realizes they can’t afford to make the build that failure inspired them to make, and say “no THIS is bullshit” and put the game down forever.

    Likewise, Elden Ring is both easy and hard because it gives you a ton of freedom. There are more solutions than just “git gud” which is refreshing for someone who can’t tolerate banging their head against Iudex Gundyr for a couple hours. But it’s obnoxious to someone who sees Tree Sentinel and doesn’t want to “have to explore” to find level appropriate content.




  • Disclaimer that I am completely talking out of my ass and speculating, but I have a personal theory.

    COVID has been around long enough to have two interesting effects.

    1. Almost everyone has gotten it by now. Some of us got it really bad, and/or acquired long-term secondary conditions. Some of this likely caused impaired cognitive function.
    2. Kids had their school schedules totally fucked up for years, and those kids are now the young teens on the internet. Young teens on the internet are already by default a disruptive demographic, but now add the effect of years of desocialization and missed education.


  • Xfce is a great example of how solving a problem in the best way results in low adoption.

    People tend toward extremes. There is something in particular they really want, and they will gravitate toward the product that gives them the most of that thing.
    I want total control over configuration: KDE Plasma
    I want maximum performance: LXDE
    I want something that looks good and I don’t want to think about it: GNOME/Cinnamon

    Xfce isn’t on this list! It’s not the best at anything. But it’s pretty good at everything. It’s an overall best (in my opinion) but because it’s not beautiful, nor lightning fast, nor incredibly flexible, nobody will ever take it as their first choice. And the majority of people make a first choice and then never change, as whatever they start with is probably good enough for them. I’ve tried all of the DE’s listed above, but I’m the crazy guy: that’s a lot of work and churn! Any and all of them work well enough, why bother installing 5 separate environments?

    If you want to develop something and have people adopt it, then your goal is to have a killer sexy feature at the expense of all else, rather than to be satisfactory in every metric.


  • I think it’s that the world has changed and left him behind. He was a racist misogynist 30 years ago, but back then the system enforced those things to his satisfaction. The systemic oppression of people he doesn’t like has been challenged more and more over the past few decades, and he takes issue with that.

    It makes sense for him to be the angriest “progressive” in the world if you think about it. All the progress we’ve made has been the things he DOESN’T want (metoo, BLM, etc) and none of the things he does want (healthcare, secularism)

    This is why a lot of old people “become more conservative.” No they don’t. They just stew in their shitty comfort zones while the world around them moves forward.


  • He’s really the same as he’s always been, just the more you watch and listen the more you find out about his questionable views.

    I disagree with him on most things, but I respect him as a pundit because you can really tell that he’s providing opinions that are truly his own. He’s a conservative democrat that everybody hates, and he ignores the pressure to fall in line with either side. He’s pro-military, pro-gun, pro-surveillance, but also all for drug legalization, medicare for all, and vehemently supports separation of church and state. It’s a weird mix and even inconsistent at times (he loves individual freedom but hates women so abortion is tricky for him!) but you at least have to admit he’s one of the last remaining pundits that isn’t a mouthpiece for politicians.



  • Gandalf isn’t a superhero because he’s more like an angel. He played a part in the creation of the world, and is entirely inhuman. He’s a primordial spirit masquerading in a corporeal form.

    Luke Skywalker is much closer to a superhero because he’s a mortal man who was inadvertently blessed with incredibly rare powers and chooses to use them for good.


  • The Johnston & Murphy XC4 line has become my go-to. They are not cheap, and the selection is limited, but the construction and versatility can’t be beat.

    I’ve had my oldest pair for over 4 years, with no functional degradation at all, and minimal signs of wear (minor creasing in the leather, hardly worth mentioning). They’re casual and comfortable enough for everyday wear, and stylish enough for business events. Easily the best value in a shoe I’ve ever gotten.


  • Looking at each piece in isolation it’s hard to see the real world value. You have to put it all together. Let’s do the airline ticket example.

    Real world today, the information involved in purchasing a ticket is controlled by three parties: The customer, the airline, and the financial institute (assuming you didn’t walk up and pay cash). Anybody involved here screw up or be malicious. You lost your ticket. The airline had a database malfunction. The bank/creditor improperly recorded the transaction. All parties are aware of these potential failures, so there are contingencies in place in case of a missing ticket, a ticket that can’t be found the system, a bad or missing financial transaction. But these backup plans also open the door to fraud, so there need to be even more plans on top of the backups: How to verify the integrity of a seemingly real ticket, protocol for re-verifying a financial event, etc.

    It’s simple because it’s familiar, but it’s really ridiculously complicated and error prone.

    Let’s introduce NFTs and blockchain.
    You buy the airline ticket and the following things happen:
    The bank performs the transaction and records it to the blockchain, which is decentralized and owned by no one, so it is verified by all parties before anything else happens. Bank errors are now impossible.
    You and the airline perform a mutual authentication, which generates an NFT proving existence of the ticket and attaches it to your identity. From your perspective, this would be unlocking your phone and clicking “approve.”

    Now you approach the airport kiosk and there’s a problem.
    Airline has no record of purchase - well, the blockchain does, so it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
    Airline can’t match your ticket to their database - You show them your NFTicket, which their system verifies is a valid, unspoofable, immutable ticket for what you say it is. Again, it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
    Conversely, you say you have a ticket for today, they say it’s for tomorrow. You inspect the ticket, it is in fact for tomorrow. You fucked up, no further argument.

    The only way any of this goes wrong is one of the following:
    Multiple forms of your identification are stolen - phone, password, biometrics. Obviously a lot harder than nabbing a CC number.
    Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.
    State-level villains sabotage the entire system. Possible, sure, but this is an apocalypse-level event and probably an act of war.

    It’s effectively impossible for someone to steal or fake a ticket or transaction in this system, and because of that, anybody who has receipts is automatically proven right and you don’t need to jump through any more hoops or threaten to sue anybody. It’s complex behind the scenes but it makes life for businesses and consumers braindead simple. There are so many layers of trust in action that no individual party can reasonably claim something did or did not happen just because THEY messed up.