Inbred: chaorace’s family has been a bit too familiar. (Can be inherited)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • This is kind of The Economist’s MO. Their readership is very policy oriented (i.e.: “wonks”) so their editorials prioritize first and foremost how world events impact policy and trade. If you think I’m reaching here, then take a gander at their reader response column and have yourself a good laugh sometime.

    With that being said, I really do think that they’re just that pedantic. Labels are important to them, but not for the reasons that they’re important to us (nor the average Palestinian, I think it goes without saying). The fact that taking umbridge here just so happens to reinforce safe and happy notions held by their editorial staff & their readership is without any doubt a contributing factor… but it’s probably something that was left mutually understood and otherwise unsaid within the walls of the writer’s room.


  • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.orgtoFinance@beehaw.orgMinimum Wage Clock
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    10 months ago

    Nothing quite like minimum wage to help you appreciate the affordability of an air sandwich. It costs zero hours of labor (after taxes!) to go hungry – great bargain – plus you can invest all of that saved lunch break time catching up on sleep in the smoking pavilion.

    The above is absolutely not based on a terrible and completely wasted early adulthood wrought with minimum wage toil. I’m fine, that hypothetical experience has in no way permanently shaped my worldviews.


  • A fellow Xbox gamepass User IT seems.

    Nope, I’m just someone who waits for sales and has a bit of an indie streak.

    This was after my First playthrough. Now, with George putting out his video, im back in. My god, its marvellous.

    I see we follow similar creators! I only just picked Pentiment up last week – Jacob Geller’s recent 2023 video is what originally put Pentiment on my radar and then George’s video gave me that final push into playing it for myself. I’m extremely glad for having done so because Pentiment has quickly become quite special to me. I already look forward to making subsequent playthroughs despite still working on the first.

    Hifi Rush was great, but felt too formulaic for me, so i abandoned it after the first or second Boss. Too much running arpund, No real banger music between Bosses.

    I can see where you’re coming from. From a macro perspective, the game’s essentially just a series of battle arenas stitched together by corridors and platforming challenges… nothing incredible there. What makes Hi-Fi Rush special for me is the novel fusion of rythm mechanics and spectacle fighter mechanics – they complement each other extremely well. (Forgive me for explaining at you like this. I just can’t help myself when it comes to talking about this game)

    Normally, I can’t stand DMC-likes because of the requisite rote memorization. HFR flips this dynamic on its head by making the memorization incidental – it happens naturally as you practice playing the combo on-rythm. Perhaps even more importantly; just as mastery of a combo string comes within reach, the underlying musical qualities all suddenly spring into focus and turn the sequence into a musical phrase. It clicks together in a very intrinsically satisfying way IMO. Naturally, this all compounds in on itself and gets double-fun once you start improvising your own “melodies” during real combat. You like Jazz? Because it’s like Jazz if Jazz killed people.

    Now, obviously this isn’t going to hit the same way for everyone (nor should it!)… but if you’ve not yet buckled down in training mode and truly mastered a string or two for yourself, then I would very emphatically encourage you to give the game a second try. I actually had to do the exact same thing myself before I really “got” the game and my mindset shifted. Hi-Fi Rush truly is the Dark Souls of 3rd-Person Action videogames


  • When it comes to Deep Rock/co-op I think my issues are more associated with the underlying gameloop design. I find it hard to perform well when the “tension” ramps up and these games are kind of tailor-made to create high-tension situations. When a round ends I’m left feeling tired/deflated rather than joyful. I had the same issue with Left 4 Dead, but oddly not so for Payday 2.

    In any case, I’m right there with you when it comes to TF2 community servers. I sorely wish that more games emphasized these sorts of digital “3rd places”. I have TF2 servers where I can go anytime and just… belong for as long as I please. Games should have more permanent places like that, where play and community come before any imposed win/lose dichotomy. People would be happier.



  • I had a really solid year, all things considered:

    • Hi-Fi Rush – Love it, hands down. This game’s like if Jet Set Radio, Scott Pilgrim, and DMC got into a fist fight and then that fist fight had a baby with Jack Black
    • Pentiment – I’m still playing through this one but I can already tell it’s a new favorite. Major Return of the Obra Dinn vibes
    • Against the Storm – This game innovates on the citybuilder genre so hard and I can’t get enough of it. If you love a challenge and hate the late-game, this is THE ONE
    • Psychonauts 2 – Fun and bursting with creativity… but I had to set it down after a certain point because I stopped enjoying the gameplay loop. Can’t put my finger on why…
    • Peglin – Yes, Peglin. The Peggle Roguelite. I like it and you would too if you gave it a chance. It’s not a forever roguelite, but I guarantee you’ll have a blast with it for 5-10 hours
    • Deep Rock Galactic – I bounced off of this one. The game has so much charm… but I just couldn’t click with it. I think co-op games just may not be for me

    Honorable Mention: TF2 – Definitely not a “new” game to me, I own TF2, I bought it with money! Even so… this year marked my return after a looong hiatus. Coming back was a total revelation – I thought I’d grown to hate FPS games – as it turns out, what I’d actually grown to hate was the modern antisocial MMR grindset. Game developers: I beseech thee… abandon matchmaking and return to 2007. Return the slab or suffer my curse





  • You’re confusing Proton with community efforts like Lutris. Proton is a package of technologies (Wine, DXVK, Vessel), not a configuration manager. Each individual game gets an identical, isolated runtime environment without any bespoke modifications except for downloading precompiled shaders (if available).

    It’s certainly true that Proton has hardcoded quirk flags for specific applications, but these are exceptions which prove the rule – there are <200 of these compared with thousands of Verified status games. Almost always, Valve prefers to fix the upstream Wine/DXVK bug rather than hacking around it. Any hacks which Valve does ship are in the Proton source code, not per-game environment scripts.



  • I'll do my best to explain:

    Firstly, not all code executed on an open source OS needs to be open source. For example: Epic Anti-Cheat, which comes with a Linux-compatible mode, is fully closed source. So right off the bat we're going to put to bed the notion that somehow the platform of choice makes it easier for bad actors to pull apart and examine anticheat software.

    Secondly, yes, there is a problem with cheaters being able to hide from anticheats on Linux. This is because on Windows it's relatively easy to run kernel-level code via drivers – this is why most anticheats require admin permission to install a monitoring driver before the game will run. The anticheat is effectively rootkitting your system in order to circumvent other rootkits that may be concealing epic cheatz.

    On GNU/Linux, almost all device drivers come prepackaged in the Linux kernel, so there's no direct equivalent to the Windows approach of allowing users to install third-party code into the most protected rings of the OS. It's still possible through the use of kernel modules (see NVIDIA drivers), but as evidenced by how annoying it is to use NVIDIA devices on Linux, this is a huge PITA for both the developer & the user to deal with.

    So that's the rub. On Linux, anticheats just have to trust that the kernel isn't lying. This has been a perpetual thorn in the side of developers like Google, who'd really really like it if they could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a given Android device is not rooted (see SafetyNet). Google's solution to this has been to introduce hardware-backed attestation – basically a special hardware chip on the device that can prove that the kernel software has not been tainted in any way.


  • Hmm… I think we’re dogging on the author a bit much here. Don’t get me wrong, they’re clearly swimming in philosophical water that’s a bit too deep for themselves, but sometimes you’ve gotta be clumsy in order to explore topics at the edge of theory.

    Let’s dial things up a notch and bring Undertale (the Dark Souls of – nevermind) into the discussion. What does it have to say about branching pathways, tonal consistency, and savescum? It says: I was made for you, please enjoy me.

    The game adapts to the audience – you, that is. You are weird and hard to please, so the game needs to be flexible without feeling compromised. If you want to leave hidden depths unexplored, the game abides. If you want to vivisect every last detail, the game changes to fit your desire.

    It’s alchemy, of course; both magical and unobtainable, so the author isn’t strictly wrong to accuse Baldur’s Gate of falling short. It’s true: sometimes a gap in the curtains opens up and the illusion is spoilt. With that being said, I think what’s missing is the logical conclusion to the criticism: universality – despite being unobtainable – is still worth striving for. To be universal is to distill humanity itself, as great and terrible and impossible as that may be (and here you thought I was joking with that Dark Souls jab!).








  • I’ve been gaming on Linux exclusively for 5 years now. I like it, but it’s not perfect.

    Experience

    Pros

    • 1st-class developer experience.
    • I don’t have to deal with MS’s increasingly insane OS design. No fucking with my preferences. No baked-in junkware. No invasive telemetry. No dark-pattern mindgames.
    • No fighting with the Windows compositor. Better system performance more generally.
    • Better filesystems. Better package managers. No driver nonsense (AMD user btw). Total customization.
      • Yes, really! The miracle of Linux is that almost every driver you’ll need comes baked in. I’ve installed exactly one device driver in 5 years and even that one is technically preinstalled for most people (I manually installed it because I was customizing it)

    Cons

    • Some games simply will not work. Usually for anticheat reasons, but this is also true for obscure stuff more generally. Part of gaming on Linux is just accepting that some games are not for you anymore.
    • Outside of Proton, you often feel like a 2nd-class citizen. Wading out into the weeds when you just wanna game sucks.
      • FWIW: Lutris helps. The experience still isn’t great, but it’ll gets you 90% of the way there. I’ve successfully used it to play games like Overwatch, Hearthstone, and MTG Arena with minimal tinkering.
    • Wayland/X11 shenanigans. It’s a total quagmire. Your issues with that ultrawide were almost certainly related to this in some way.

    Picking a Distro

    There are a lot of pitfalls when choosing a distribution. I can’t personally tell you which one to pick, so instead I’ll give targetted advice.

    Things to avoid

    Avoid Ubuntu. Avoid Fedora/RedHat/CentOS. Avoid any distro with less than 5 years of active development history. Avoid niche single-purpose distros, including gaming ones. Probably also avoid NixOS until you’re more comfortable with Linux in general.

    tl;dr: Pick something that’s very popular, but not Ubuntu. Ideally, the project should have multiple full-time donation-supported maintainers and a detailed wiki.

    Rolling Release vs. Point Release

    A “point release” distribution is one which guarantees a certain level of stability out-of-box. It achieves this by partially freezing the available packages at well-tested & known working versions (explanation simplified for brevity). This way, when you install the distro, there are very few or even no “gotcha” moments where one niche part of the system randomly breaks during daily usage.

    The downside of this strategy is that, over time, the packages on your system get more and more out of sync with the rest of the world. Eventually, you have to sit down and do a big, fat upgrade to the latest version. This has the effect of potentially breaking lots of things all at once, which makes upgrading these systems comparatively onerous.

    A “rolling release” distribution has no numbered versions. You just upgrade your packages and presto: you’re rolling the latest code. Yes, there are more day-to-day difficulties, though you generally experience fewer cascading catastrophic failures, since usually only one thing will go wrong at a time. The risk of day-to-day issues is then addressed by splitting the distribution into time-gated “channels” where new package releases are intentionally delayed for days/weeks based on which one you’ve opted into. This gives you as a user flexible control over how current vs. stable you want your system to be.

    tl;dr: For most newcomers, I recommend using a rolling release set to the safest available release channel. It offers most of the day-to-day stability of a versioned release with none of the upgrade headaches. These days, I feel that versioned releases are mostly only preferable in corporate/institutional usecases (this is a controversial, personal opinion and not a statement of fact, but I welcome flamewars down below…)

    Wayland vs. X11

    Wayland replaces X11 (which is old and bad)… but it also breaks compatibility with stuff. If you use Wayland, you will have more issues, so I generally recommend newcomers choose X11 if the installer gives them an option.

    With that being said, sometimes you have to choose Wayland because you need its modern features, such as display scaling. If you have a >1440p monitor or use monitors with mixed refresh rates, this probably includes you. It’s not the end of the world, but you’ll have to deal with learning to troubleshoot Wayland’s various quirks as you go.

    tl;dr: Use X11 if you can unless you have big/weird monitors. Wayland’s still very workable though, despite what reputation would otherwise suggest.

    Gnome vs. KDE vs. Other

    Gnome/KDE are what we call “Desktop Environments”. I won’t dwell on the terminology too long because it’s a mess, but basically these are the two major “all-in-one” kits that distros tend to bundle for their sytem GUIs. Gnome is the usershare king, so it’s generally the most well-supported by other desktop software and therefore my default recommendation. KDE is mostly interchangeable with Gnome, though it’s a pretty distant second usage-wise.

    There are many alternatives to Gnome/KDE, such as the lightweight LXDE, but I generally don’t recommend these to newcomers unless there is a strong reason. This is because desktop apps can have all sorts of weird bugs if they can’t find a specific Gnome or KDE version of a certain components (e.g.: polkit).

    You can also build your own desktop environment from scratch, which is actually what I do. This allows for maximum ricing, but obviously isn’t a great starter situation. Even if you eventually do want to roll your own environment, I recommend newcomers start with either Gnome or KDE as a base and then slowly replace individual pieces as they go, ship-of-theseus style.

    tl;dr: Just use Gnome and eventually rip out the parts you don’t like. KDE is a good alternative if you really like it, though.