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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 11th, 2024

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  • Destructible walls. It’s possible to destroy some walls, but that is not in the manual nor hinted at in a classic way (discoloration or cracks). You can complete the game without knowing that. It simply did not occur to me to throw dynamite at blank walls.

    spoiler

    But you need to destroy a wall to get to a fairy puzzle.

    Invincibility toggle is nice to have, but even more of a statement of how bad the balance is. (Didn’t need to use it though - found an exploit to instakill the quarry boss :)


  • Not an avid gamer and play mostly indie.

    Tunic. Was recommended for fans of Outer Wilds (fantastic game), but I see no similarities. Tunic’s cover art looks like a Zelda ripoff, world borrows from Hyper Light Drifter, and the game plays like a Zelda + Hyper Light Drifter ripoff, but very poorly tested, unfair, and misleading at times. I get the impression that game designers had zero external opinions and very little playtesting.

    Exploration is “bump into every nook and cranny to find a way forward”. Bosses are absurdly difficult, clearly catering to the “git gud” crowd, and do not feel fair (as a counterexample, HLD felt difficult but fair). Puzzles are all backloaded to the latter half of the game, they are mostly fun, but at least one relies on a mechanic that is never hinted at nor used in the game otherwise. The untranslated manual, main gimmick of the game, is misleading at times. Midgame apocalypse / dark world is not that, it’s… Night time (not putting the spoiler because that is just absurdity)

    Yes, I finished it, and got the good ending, which only elicited “Um, ok?” from me.




  • Just a fair warning: Element (Matrix client) also had issues with notifications not appearing in time, or attachments/images not loading. (This is on a self-hosted Synapse with a handful of people and 1 bridge).

    I haven’t kept up much with new developments, but last I remember, hosting the official Element Server Suite Community requires Kubernetes. Third-party servers or some install scripts are an option though.



  • (USA)

    Less lawn care and more native plants: save money on fertilizer, save time on mowing, grass looks better too, you get fireflies and birds.

    Own tomatoes taste much better. And they grow like weeds in subtropical regions of the US, so very little effort needed there.

    Repair and DIY: You want to get ripped off by some person who will also put minimum effort into fixing your house or things? Or worse, company salesman who will wear you out with endless speeches until you agree? “Want it done right? Do it yourself”.

    Solar power: This is MY power.

    No car / smaller car / older car: Gas is expensive (ironic for Americans, I know, but it’s a common complaint)

    Smaller house / apartment: Save lots of money on heating and cooling, pay less taxes and lower insurance rates.

    But to even get this far, we have to somehow overcome cultural norms, such as: my neighbor(s) whose hobby is mowing the grass twice a week; people ordering shit on Amazon as the default; stupid laws about solar; wanting a bigger car, house, yard for no practical reason.

    And I can’t find a good selfish argument against big tech and AI - it’s free, and most people are indifferent about external costs and surveillance.



  • IMO the “visual concept” is a weak argument - those are very abstract shapes.

    each character conveys a word or concept rather than a single letter that has no inherent definition.

    And each character consists of strokes, or even unjoined glyphs, making them more eqivalent to a word rather than a letter.

    they even have words that are “swapable”

    In languages that I know, order of compound words mostly matters but order of words in a sentence can change a lot. In Ukrainian and Russian, it could be used for emphasis without tone, e.g. “она пошла домой” (she went home, neutral), “домой она пошла” (she went home), “пошла она домой” (she walked home). But in English, at least in conversational, non-contorted way, word order has to be preserved.

    alphabets (as those are based on sound)

    Well, yes, but, actually, no. Alphabets co-evolved with pronunciation. While Ukrainian and Belarusian (AFAIK) are very close phonetically to written text, Russian has a lot of a-o sound swaps, and English, in addition to a = æ and the th sound is… Well, you just have to know how to pronounce every word because they could derive or be borrowed from Spanish or French or any other latin-script language, but for some reason they keep the original spelling.