Excrubulent
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release 40 minutes ago:
Ricochet hasn’t recieved the love it deserves. We’ve been waiting on Ricochet 2 for decades. The fans need closure.
- Comment on I put on my robe and my wizard hat 4 hours ago:
Nerds can be so freaky.
- Comment on 'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers' 9 hours ago:
The combat may not have been the most interesting versus basic grunts, but it never got stale. I’ve never played another game where the core gameplay changed so much so frequently.
Physics interactions -> Basic FPS -> Fan Boat -> Mounted Gun -> Gravity Gun -> Zombies & Traps -> Car -> THE CRANE FIGHT -> Rockets & Gunships -> Ant Lions -> Ant Lion Minions -> Turrets -> Resistance Squads -> Striders -> Super Gravity Gun
Honestly the HL1 combat may have been somewhat more challengjng, but it was a grind. Fights were often just frustrating. I’ve abandonded playthroughs because I didn’t feel like spending another 10 hours beating my head against the endless amounts of enemies just to get to the end of… whatever I was doing I forgot.
HL1’s big innovation was never removing control from the player just to tell the story. Beyond that they also had some interesting AI behaviour and weapons. It was a game with old-school length and old-school difficulty.
HL2’s big innovation was the physics engine, and they played with it in so many ways, whole polishing every other aspect of the design. They kept the gameplay tight and did something just long enough to explore it and then they moved on. They never forced you to hang out just repeating the same loop over and over to pad the length.
- Comment on The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’ 2 days ago:
Is Dan the loud one? I’ve never learned their names, but I’m waiting for him to scream something about them horning in on their territorily.
- Comment on The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’ 2 days ago:
I gotta find out what the Knowledge Fight folks have to say about this.
- Comment on Bitwarden Makes Change To Address Recent Open-Source Concerns 2 weeks ago:
Why do they have to “WANT” that? Why does that matter to the criticism? If it’s true, it’s true, and the fact that corporations are the ones in a position to habitually make terrible decisions about FOSS is a big problem. It’s valid to point out that it would be good to find a better way.
If anything it sounds like you “WANT” to ignore it.
- Comment on Advertising 3 weeks ago:
Fellow Aussie, I know instinctively this was Aussie, just not which part.
- Comment on Ukraine graphics is crazy 4 weeks ago:
People have been trying to boycott tome since we had a word for it. If you figure out how you let me know please.
- Comment on This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little. The US government just hired a researcher who thinks we can beat aging with fresh cloned bodies and brain updates. 1 month ago:
I cut a big nerve in my thumb years ago, and apparently plastic surgeons fix that sort of thing.
They reattached the nerve bundles, but I was told the sheathes could be realigned, but the nerves would have to grow back from the point of the cut all the way to the skin.
At first one half of my thumb was entirely numb, and over the course of well over a decade I’d get pins & needles as bunches of nerves would finish regrowing, except attached to random channels in the nerve bundle, so my brain had to completely remap all those signals to what they actually meant. Also extreme nerve pain near the cut whenever it was bumped, I assume because many nerves just didn’t grow successfully and remained near that site.
It felt super weird because hot, cold, pain & touch were all mixed up, but eventually my brain sorted them out. It still feels a little weird, especially near my nail, but I haven’t had a pins & needles experience for a few years.
The problem with doing that with a neck is that it would take wayyy longer and the chances of the patient dying from complications due to no brain signals working right… yeah I don’t see medical science fixing this unless we can regrow nerves in a much shorter span of time.
- Comment on PayPal implements default data sharing with third parties: users must manually opt out 1 month ago:
I found this: …europa.eu/…/what-should-i-do-if-i-think-my-perso…
- Comment on PayPal implements default data sharing with third parties: users must manually opt out 1 month ago:
Can you report that somewhere?
- Comment on Microsoft Edge gets "unfair advantage", browser makers claim 1 month ago:
Exactly this. The point is not that there is no way to do it, the point is that the alternatives are obscure to limit adoption. It’s a dark pattern.
This winget thing is worse than just using edge to download an alternative. The problem is not that people are forced to interact with a browser they dont like, it’s all the people who don’t know enough to understand that there are alternatives, and those people will never use winget.
- Comment on Make a wsh 1 month ago:
Caffene.
- Comment on AI bots now beat 100% of those traffic-image CAPTCHAs 1 month ago:
If you’re using a personal api from google, is that a way that google can track you? Part of using a VPN, noscript and adblock for me is to prevent that kind of tracking.
- Comment on AI bots now beat 100% of those traffic-image CAPTCHAs 1 month ago:
Fellow vpn user here, it’s veen really bad lately. I’m definitely installing this.
- Comment on Hey nerd 1 month ago:
It’s a little jarring in a world of deep-fried memes.
- Comment on Hey nerd 1 month ago:
No worries, Know Your Meme is still fairly reliable.
- Comment on The four horsemen of the dogpocalypse. 1 month ago:
The Freedom Frank is War, Hallowiener is Death, Mtn Dew is Pestilence and Baja Blast is Famine.
- Comment on Hey nerd 1 month ago:
Based on the space I would guess it just had “girlfriend” because that’s a pretty straightforward joke.
But I found it instead:
- Comment on [Official Art] the Dragoon Platoon - the Legend of Dragoon 1 month ago:
I love that opening this I can immediately tell that it’s not AI generated, and not just because everyone’s got reasonable proportions and numbers of parts, and the face can handle being split by that line while still retaining continuity.
It’s obvious because there’s composition, negative space that’s not crammed with prompt-maximising guff. There’s a focus, deliberate lines of action implying tension and intention.
This is what art is, it tells a story or expresses something. This is why it matters that someone made it on purpose.
- Comment on Youtube has fully blocked Invidious 1 month ago:
I’ve told you how the concepts apply, if you found it confusing you could ask. You didn’t.
But you’ve admitted you’re not actually interested in my answers, you just want to accuse me of pulling things out of my arse:
I was simply establishing the fact that neither of us had them.
I don’t know why I’d bother with someone whose only point here is to tear down whatever I’m saying. You don’t even seem to have a position.
- Comment on Youtube has fully blocked Invidious 1 month ago:
That’s not how that works. I told you the point I had a problem with and wanted sourced, and you admitted it was pure speculation.
If you are skeptical about anything specific I’m saying, you can ask for the same thing. You didn’t, you just said I hadn’t sourced anything, which wasn’t true, I gave you links so you could educate yourself, and since you’re wtill confused on what any of it means, apparently you didn’t do that. When I asked you what you wanted specifically sourced, you named everything, which is as pointless as naming nothing.
This is presumably because you don’t actually care about sources, you were just embarrassed that you had to admit it was pure speculation and you wanted to project that back at me.
If you’re actually curious to understand what I’m saying, you can ask a specific question, but you’re not doing that. If you’re just going to keep insisting that I’m pulling things out of my arse, you’re wrong, but I won’t keep replying.
- Comment on Youtube has fully blocked Invidious 1 month ago:
Oh so you want sources for literally every tiny claim with no evidence that you’ve engaged at all, but you’re sticking with “pure speculation” for your claims and you’re fine with that? Just checking.
- Comment on Youtube has fully blocked Invidious 1 month ago:
Rain world.
- Comment on Youtube has fully blocked Invidious 1 month ago:
What? No, the network effect is why they have a dominant position. The network effect comes from their user base.
The way you wrote that shows you don’t understand the principle at all.
I could explain further but you’d have to express interest.
- Comment on Youtube has fully blocked Invidious 1 month ago:
Well I now can’t unless I disable my VPN. Storefronts would probably like VPN users to be able to use their stores, in which case they might be more interested in an alternative.
- Comment on Youtube has fully blocked Invidious 1 month ago:
Source for what? The network effect? I gave you a link, you can read.
And youtube is enshittifying.
These are both well-established effects. My sourcing is finished now.
- Comment on Youtube has fully blocked Invidious 1 month ago:
“Massive increase” I think needs a source.
And they rely on the network effect to be the de facto standard video hoster. Every little bit of that network that they carve off while they’re enshittifying brings them closer to the critical point where people can afford to ditch them.
The logic that they can “afford” to lose marketshare is exactly what will make them keep losing it until people migrate en masse and they lose all of their marketshare.
- Comment on Youtube has fully blocked Invidious 1 month ago:
Could be, maybe it’s intermittent, but the more times they try to lock this shit down and it stops working for storefronts, the more unreliable it becomes.
What percentage of visits can they afford to have this error happen before they seek alternatives? If it were my business and I didn’t know how many customers were closing the store page because the video didn’t play and they lost interest, I would be immediately looking for an alternative.
- Comment on Youtube has fully blocked Invidious 1 month ago:
Sure but it’s really common to see embedded youtube videos on storefronts, and if storefronts en masse abandoned it that’s one more piece of the market that youtube has lost.
They can’t keep locking it down and not lose market share, is my point. They’re enshittifying so much, so fast, and eventually there will be a tipping point.