cobysev
@cobysev@lemmy.world
- Comment on Natural Disaster Risk in the Continental U.S. 3 days ago:
The Northern West may have the lowest risk of natural disaster right now, but the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming is a supervolcano that’s way overdue for erupting, and it’s gonna take out at least a third of the US when it does. I live on the east side of Minnesota and I’m still in the blast zone from that eventual rupture.
- Comment on Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate - Leiden Medievalists Blog 3 days ago:
Ah. Well, that would explain it. Folks usually share current articles, so I assumed this was written recently, not a half decade ago. That’s my bad.
- Comment on Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate - Leiden Medievalists Blog 4 days ago:
Thank you! That’s because I don’t have corporate requirements for writing. Nobody’s paying me, I’m just doing it as a hobby, so I’m not limited in my writing. I can gush about anything I want!
I try to stick to the format of walking readers through an introduction to a game. So many times, I see people talk about games but not explain what the game actually is. They assume their audience has some base level of experience with it. So I introduce the games I play so my readers are familiar with them when I get to gushing about why I’m enjoying it.
Plus, my posts started as sharing a bunch of screenshots of my gameplay, so of course, I try to share as many visual aids as I can while walking through the gameplay.
- Comment on Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate - Leiden Medievalists Blog 4 days ago:
I blog about video games as a hobby (all my posts here on Lemmy are blog reviews of games I play), so I tend to write a lot when I’m interested in a game. I’ll admit, this is the first time I’ve been accused of potentially being an AI bot, but I get your skepticism.
Manor Lords is not a game I’m particularly interested in, because as I mentioned, it was pretty difficult for me and I gave up pretty early on. But it was a unique style of gameplay compared to other city builder games, so the experience has stuck in my head.
When I read this article, every complaint about modern city builder games reminded me of Manor Lords, and I was disappointed that game wasn’t addressed anywhere in the article. I had hoped to see the author’s thoughts on it compared to other games in the genre.
- Comment on "Oh wow a kryptonite radiation machine, I volunteer Superman to go inside! Doesn't feel so good does it?" 4 days ago:
The value of minerals is based on their scarcity (or companies agreeing to price-fix *cough* ~diamonds~ *cough* ). If Superman brought a large chunk of gold back to Earth, it would upset the market value of gold, thus devaluing the chunk he found as well as all gold on the planet.
You can’t just “print money.” That’s how you get hyperinflation. Same goes for rare earth minerals; bring home more and the value for all of them globally is reduced, creating a hyperinflation of minerals.
If Superman brought home a large enough chunk of gold, he could essentially crash the gold market and then it would be a practically useless shiny rock. He couldn’t even buy bread with it.
- Comment on Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate - Leiden Medievalists Blog 4 days ago:
I was hoping the article would mention Manor Lords. It’s a medieval city-building game where you fight against brutal changing seasons and invading enemies, hoping to eventually develop your own kingdom from scratch. And you can plan your city pretty early on or grow it from a single small farm. It’s surprisingly difficult because there’s not a set progression. A single bad winter can kill off your entire civilization.
The article mentions building curved roads rather than just straight plots of land. Manor Lords sort of plots its own roads based on where NPCs travel most. So if you put a well in a central location and a farm off to one side of a strip of homes, roads will automatically form in desire paths between resources and homes. Your city infrastructure can follow these desire paths while expanding, or cut them off and force your citizens to form alternate roads around new buildings.
I haven’t played much of Manor Lords because it was so difficult. I was having trouble keeping a civilization alive with neighboring armies ransacking my villages, or not stocking enough resources before winter set in to survive the season. But it seems like a game the author of this article should check out.
- Comment on Random Screenshots of my Games #66 - StarRupture 2 weeks ago:
I haven’t had any problems, except for fighting that Goliath alien. I managed to take one down solo, but only by jumping across a chasm and then taking pot shots at him while he stared at me from the other side. I could not get clean shots off at him while running away. I actually killed him by throwing a grenade behind him, and when he turned around to shield from the blast, I shot him in his soft unprotected backside until he collapsed.
I personally have yet to die in the game, but two of my friends who joined me just ran off without any introduction to the game and proceeded to get themselves killed over and over again. So if you pay attention to the training at the beginning, it shouldn’t be too difficult.
The farther you wander from your starting area, the more difficult the aliens get. So stay closer to home until you’ve leveled up your weapons and base defenses and you’ll be fine, even solo. Of the 7 bases I currently have set up, only one has been attacked by aliens so far, and they were easy to clean up by myself.
As far as factory automation, it can sometimes be a chore as a single player, but it’s not too hard. As long as you have the patience to plot out resource production lines, it’s not too bad. The hardest thing right now is that there’s no transportation between bases besides walking there yourself, so it can be time-consuming going back and forth to check on various bases. Especially since most of the resource nodes are scattered. And you can’t just build anywhere like Satisfactory, so you need to drop Base Cores here and there so you can run rails between bases for resources.
I still don’t know how large the game’s map is, but what I’ve uncovered so far is massive. It takes me maybe 10 minutes to walk across my currently-explored area, and there’s still a lot of black undiscovered areas on my map in all directions!
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to games@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Comment on That boy is all right 5 weeks ago:
Hank Hill is a die-hard Republican, fiercely loyal to his grifter of a boss at the propane store. Of course he’s going to advocate for the bland, simple taste of meat cooked by propane. He’s not adventurous and he definitely wouldn’t betray his brand.
- Comment on Do you cheat in video games? 1 month ago:
I always attempt to play a game the way the developers intended the first time through. If I decide to give it another playthrough and I don’t want to put up with the extra grindy parts of the game, I’ll look for legitimate cheats to help me fast-forward through the rough parts.
I mean “legitimate” as in, cheats the developers put in the game, not outside hacks or mods that alter the game itself. I’m not big on mods in general, and I don’t usually use cheats, but I will in rare situations.
Back in the day, Warcraft III had cheats that let you power through each level with stuff like infinite resources, invulnerability, or just letting you automatically complete a level. I used those on recurring playthroughs because each level could easily take 30 mins to an hour to beat, and it was very grindy.
In Satisfactory, there’s a cheat where you can add a single stack of a resource into the back of a factory cart, then deconstruct the cart. You’ll get all the resources of the factory cart in your inventory, plus double the resource you put into the cart.
Do this dozens of times and you can exponentially grow resources without having to wait on factories to make them. I’m pretty sure the developers are aware of this “glitch” because it’s never been patched out, even after a bunch of people started pointing it out on official Satisfactory forums.
I played hundreds of hours of the game and made some pretty massive continent-stretching factories. Upon building a new world, I started to implement this “strategy” to hurry up and acquire rare resources so I could get factories off the ground. Saved me from hundreds of hours of gameplay, waiting on production lines to make basic resources into more advanced resources so I could get to the next step.
A buddy of mine asked to be part of my Steam Family so he could have access to my 4,000+ game library. He regularly streams games online and figured it’d save him tons of money buying games to play.
But he’s also completed all achievements on almost every game he’s played on console and uses some website to automatically complete all the achievements for his Steam games, so he doesn’t need to redo them on PC.
The thing about Steam Family is… if someone’s caught cheating and earns a vac ban, the owner of the family account receives the ban, not the individual player. I told him I was worried that cheating of any kind might affect my immaculate record and/or library of games and he decided to just buy his own games instead of risking my account. Good friend; he didn’t even argue. I was still willing to let him have access as long as he was careful, but he chose another route.
- Comment on The family name goes first in East Asian names, reflecting the fact that they view family over individual; Whatever the parents' idea of "family" is, triumphs over the children's individuality. 1 month ago:
I can’t vouch for all East Asian countries, but in Japan, it’s a matter of formality. When you meet someone, you always refer to them by their family name and an honorific. (Like we would say, “Mr. Smith.”)
Once you start to get more friendly and familiar with an individual, you’ll move on to more intimate honorifics, until you’re allowed to call them by their direct first name, no honorifics. That’s a sign that you’re very close with someone.
It allows people to refer to you without being too direct and familiar until you’ve gotten to know them well. And you can tell what relationship two people have by what names they use to call each other. Heck, really close friends will probably make up nicknames for each other too.
When I was in the US military, it was kind of the same mentality. Everyone was referred to by rank and last name only. As you got to know someone of the same rank or lower than yours, you could refer to them by last name alone, no rank required. But only the closest of friends would refer to each other by first name.
- Comment on When you get right down to it, cereal is just cold breakfast soup 1 month ago:
Depends on how much milk you add to it. Personally, I see it as more of a breakfast stew; more solid food in the bowl than liquid.
- Comment on Science-centric streaming service Curiosity Stream is an AI-licensing firm now 1 month ago:
Ah dammit… Curiosity Stream was the only streaming service I’m still actually paying for. I dumped everything else for raising prices and enshittifying their services.
- Comment on I dunno 1 month ago:
The way I was taught growing up, brackets are [these]. Parenthesis are (these).
Yes, technically the latter are also brackets. But they can also be called parenthesis, whereas the former is exclusively a bracket. So we were taught to call them separate words to differentiate while doing equations.
- Comment on Someone At YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled 1 month ago:
I have a Google phone, which has YouTube embedded on it. I can’t remove it. I had to disable it, then tell my phone to redirect all YouTube links to my browser. Now I can block ads again!
- Comment on It's important! 2 months ago:
- Comment on It's important! 2 months ago:
I was stationed in Germany with the US military once, just 30 minutes from the French border. My American coworkers visited Paris and complained that everyone there were snobbish assholes. Every time they tried to ask someone for directions, they got ignored at best and insulted at worst.
My wife and I went to Paris a few times and we had the complete opposite experience. We both took several years of French in high school, so we had an extremely basic knowledge of the French language (thanks, American public schools! 🙄) and we tried to speak to people in French.
Every time we spoke up, they would notice us struggling and immediately switch to English for us. And then they were very helpful. Turns out, my coworkers were just speaking English to French people and expecting a response in English. Which insulted a lot of French people, so they ignored them.
TL;DR: Speak the local language as best you can and French people can be very nice and helpful. Just assume they’ll speak English and you’ll get some rude responses in kind.
- Comment on Would you like to playtest a new indie game? Just completed first playable version of my psychological horror/moral choice simulation. 2 months ago:
Hmm, this looks interesting. And you can’t beat the free price tag. I’ll check it out.
- Comment on Would you like to playtest a new indie game? Just completed first playable version of my psychological horror/moral choice simulation. 2 months ago:
Are you retired or young?
I’m retired AND young… well, relatively speaking. I retired 3 years ago, at 38 years old. I’m 41 now.
I was in the US military for 20 years, earned a pension, plus 100% disability through the VA. With the passive income and benefits (free medical/dental for life), I can afford to be fully retired now. I’m not filthy rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I make enough to live a quiet, relaxed life and have my basic needs met. And that’s good enough for me. Plenty of time to indulge in my many hobbies. And I have ADHD, so I’m always finding new and interesting things to deep-dive into.
I actually started a movie review blog about 6 years before I retired. I ended up taking a hiatus from it shortly after retirement and just haven’t been motivated to get back into it lately, despite all the movies and TV shows I watch regularly.
I switched to reviewing video games sometime last year and have been mostly keeping up with that; although it’s been over 2 months since my last review. I should probably make a new post soon, or declare another hiatus. 😬
- Comment on Would you like to playtest a new indie game? Just completed first playable version of my psychological horror/moral choice simulation. 2 months ago:
I’ve been playing it this morning. Virus scan came back clean, and the game has been interesting so far.
- Comment on Would you like to playtest a new indie game? Just completed first playable version of my psychological horror/moral choice simulation. 2 months ago:
That’s cool, no reviews yet then. Not a problem!
- Comment on Would you like to playtest a new indie game? Just completed first playable version of my psychological horror/moral choice simulation. 2 months ago:
I play a lot of games (over 4,000 games in my Steam library) and I’ve made a hobby of reviewing them here on Lemmy over the past year. I especially love horror games. I would love to give it a playtest and provide constructive feedback.
It’s up to you if you’d like me to also post a review of it here on Lemmy or wait until a finished product is available. You can see my post history to see the kind of reviews I write, or you can check out my blog where I’m archiving my reviews here. Easier to browse the history of posts on the sidebar at that website.
- Comment on Purrfect Diagram 3 months ago:
That’s definitely a dragon in disguise. Looks like a cat to mortal eyes, but weights a helluva lot more.
- Comment on Which one and why? 3 months ago:
#4 looks like a shoehorn. Is that even concave enough to use as a spoon? Likely not. That’s out.
#3 is definitely not a spoon. No idea what it is, but it’s not gonna work well as a spoon. Not gonna deal with that one.
#2 is actually a spoon, but a small one. It’ll be frustrating to use forever. I’d prefer not to use it.
#1 is actually a decent sized spoon. Oddly shaped, but it’ll hold a decent amount of food or liquid. I guess I could live with that one.
- Comment on Lara Croft is a Sociopath 3 months ago:
But she’s the Hero™ fighting against the Bad Guys™. Branding is everything.
But yeah, viewed objectively from a third party perspective, a lot of heroes in games and movies are actually borderline villains. Inserting themselves into a situation they don’t need to be involved in, and then the end justify the means. They may murder tons of no-name henchmen, but a greater threat to society has been eliminated!
I actually find it interesting that a lot of superhero characters came from healthy, sane family environments and fight to protect the Status Quo™, while most villains come from hardship and trauma and attempt to change the Status Quo™ that allowed their injustice of a life to exist, so others don’t suffer the same fate.
But some happy-go-lucky hero always comes by and stops them because their plan changes the Status Quo™. And we can’t accept changes to our structured social environment!
- Comment on Not rule 3 months ago:
I still clearly remember others’ embarrassing, cringey moments from my high school years, and I’m in my 40s now. I shudder thinking about who still remembers the embarrassing things I said/did way back in my childhood.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 4 months ago:
[…] the Internet (it was a written with a capital I back then)
Back then, an internet (lower case “i”) was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.
The World Wide Web, being a massive collection of computers across the globe that are interconnected, quickly earned the title of “THE Internet” (upper-case “i”), to differentiate it from smaller isolated networks.
“World Wide Web” turned out to be a mouthful to say, so we replaced it with “the Internet” instead. Although most websites still start with “www” to represent their global reach.
Nowadays, we’ve stopped using the word “internet” to describe smaller networks, so the word mostly just refers to the global network. And as such, if doesn’t really matter if you capitalize it or not.
However, I was there when the web became accessible to the public and the nomenclature has stuck, so I always capitalize the Internet when referring to it.
- Comment on Self hosted music server that remembers playlist location and song time stamp 4 months ago:
It’s not FOSS, but Plex does that. I host my music from a server I built at home (you can literally just use your desktop PC) and then I have access to it from anywhere. I like to stream it to the Plexamp app on my phone, which I connect to my car via Bluetooth, then I have my own homemade “radio” on the go. No ads, just my own music that I can shuffle through.
I paid for the Lifetime Plex Pass, which gave me full access to all their features and apps. It’s expensive, but it’s a one-time payment, vs. their monthly subscription which can add up over time.
I actually got annoyed at Plex for remembering exactly where I was in every song. I’d return to an album I hadn’t heard in a while and it would skip right to where I left off in each song instead of playing from the beginning of the song
Sometimes while trying to find a particular song, I’d skip around in a track, then move to the next until I found it. Then when I returned to that album later, every song would start somewhere in the middle. I eventually needed to turn that feature off. It still remembers exactly where I left off the last time I played music, but it doesn’t save my place in each individual song anymore. Just the last one I played.
On the app, it keeps a list of all the playlists I’ve recently played, so I can pick up on my latest playlist or scroll back in the history and start up one I played a while ago. This is great because I like to just shuffle my entire library as a playlist while I’m mowing my lawn, but my wife likes to hear specific genres or bands while we’re riding in the car together. So I can just keep alternating back and forth between playlists depending on the situation and it remembers where I left off in each one.
- Comment on sponge dna 4 months ago:
Maybe I’m just old, but I read that last line in Popeye’s laugh instead of Mr. Crabs.
- Comment on Thagomizer 4 months ago:
Yup, because of his comic about it, paleontologists have officially named it the Thagomizer.
