darthelmet

@darthelmet@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can it be crystal clear your president is a child rapist and every one just carries on? Scary stuff friends.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The same way people go on knowing their president is a war criminal. We’re so far past the line that this doesn’t even register.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are in you're top 3 favourite games of all time?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I tried it out when the testing started. It’s… fine. I’m not much of a shooter/action game player, so the higher skill elements of it are a bit of a barrier on top of re-learning a lot of DoTA-type stuff. I can imagine getting into it more if it came out years ago. But now it’s hard to find the time and motivation I’d need to dedicate to even get back to the level of incompetence I had with DoTA.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are in you're top 3 favourite games of all time?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s really hard for me to separate my nostalgia for older games with what I’d think about them now. There are some games I’ve played a LOT but haven’t touched in years for one reason or another.

  Some pre-Steam games would be things like Halo 3, World of Warcraft, Runescape, and few Pokemon games.

  On Steam my most played game BY FAR is DoTA 2 at ~2100 hours. I loved that game and I still think it’s really well designed… I just haven’t played it in years because it makes me too mad to play with randos and it’s impossible to get 5 friends who play DoTA online at the same time anymore.

  If I was going to pick a top 3 outside of those nostalgic outliers, maybe:

  • Slay The Spire
  • Dark Souls
  • Deep Rock Galactic
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What anime pleasantly surprised you the most?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Some of my favorite shows of the last few seasons have been unexpected. Off the top of my head right now the two I’m thinking of are Apocalypse Hotel and Snack Basue. I’ll maybe add some more later when I have time to look at my list to remind me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When was the first time you cried over an anime?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  First I can think of is the end of K-On! I watched the show for the first time in my senior year of college, so that feeling of having to go away from the friends I had made in my time there was pretty significant.

  Some random others off the top of my head:

  Frieren for kind of the same reason.

  Violet Evergarden, especially the episode about the mom writing to her daughter.

  Grave of the Fireflies.

  Probably some others I’m forgetting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Quite frankly I had such a high Inland Empire on my playthrough that the only things I’m sure are real are the things Kim or my good friend Horrific Necktie backed me up on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are there no universities/colleges that start in the afternoons?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It just depends on what classes you need and when you get access to registration. I got lucky some semesters and managed to craft a schedule where nothing started before noon and some semesters where I was dying because I had a class at like 8am.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Update: Valve Responds] Mastercard Denies Pressuring Steam To Censor 'NSFW' Games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Gotta love it when companies put something in their legal agreements that just says “we can do whatever the fuck we want.” Is the rest of the wall of text just there to hide that somewhere someone won’t read?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too bad we can't have good public transportation⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Then there’s “if it ain’t broke… how can we break it to extract a few extra bucks from it?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you reconcile staying sane while keeping yourself up-to-date with the news?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because I don’t think sticking my head in the sand is good either. Besides, it’s not just abstract far away things that are bothering me. A lot of what depresses me in my personal life is connected to the broader problems we face as a society. I kind of can’t ignore that if I want to make sense of my own life. That doesn’t stop it from feeling hopeless, but the alternative isn’t really an option even if I didn’t care about others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you reconcile staying sane while keeping yourself up-to-date with the news?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the neat part. I don’t. I’m depressed as fuck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do we dream smaller now than we did decades ago?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Was Idiocracy written by a time-traveller?

  I’m always a little irked when people say things like this. Art is a product of its environment. It responds to what it’s seeing in the world and talks about it through abstraction, extrapolation, and embellishment. The world Idiocracy was created in already had these problems. The movie just turned that into a comedy with enough distance from real life for people to laugh at.

  To the question: I think it just speaks to the lack of opportunities we have today. The American Dream was always a lie, but there was at least a period in the post war years where it was somewhat accessible to a relatively larger part of the population. The US was still an industrial economy. It was building new things. Now all that manufacturing is being done in poorer countries and now our economy is largely based on rich people shuffling money around and skimming off the top while the rest of us serve them to get the scraps.

  When success looks like a Wall Street investor making money from doing nothing and failure means barely being able to afford to have a home and feed yourself, it’s no wonder people are dreaming of finding a way to make an easy buck.

  But going back to art looking at the reality it exists in, this isn’t super new either. Look at the movie Wall Street from 1987. The movie revolves around a Wall Street broker who is the son of a union airline mechanic. The father is working in a productive job, but despite the union, isn’t exactly living in luxury. The son, in pursuit of this ideal of success, works in a job that leeches off people like his dad and to advance his career further he starts doing insider trading. So the parasitic criminal gets grossly rewarded while the hard working guy stagnates. And of course by the end of the movie, the son’s greed ends up almost ruining his dad’s job before he finally tries to make things right at great cost to himself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think it's an ok idea for me to get a cat in my scenario? (details inside)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it would be fine. Cats are a lot more independent than dogs, so as long as you can sort out food and litter, they’re fine to leave alone for a bit. I’ve had 4 cats in my life. The first two we had solo and the last 2 were a pair.

  Having a second cat definitely makes them happier if you can’t be home often, but it’s not strictly necessary. It’s not AS much work as you’d think to take care of an extra cat, but that also depends on personality and how the cats get along. The pair of cats we had loved each other, but they’d occasionally get into some minor fights. For food we had to separate them because one would try to eat more than his share and the other cat wasn’t assertive enough to stop him. But otherwise it wasn’t that much worse than when we had a single cat.

  I definitely recommend you go to a shelter and play around with the cats enough to get a sense of their personalities. All of our cats have been super friendly and didn’t scratch much. The cat from the pair that’s still alive (they’re old, so one passed last year.) is so tame I have never had to worry about him scratching me. I can safely rub his belly and stuff and the worst he’ll ever do is get up and leave. But that’s definitely not all cats. My uncle had some cats with some big behavioral issues and he used to be an animal trainer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSA on privuhcy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks. I didn’t know about that. Although I tried doing it and the option was grayed out. Any idea what might be wrong? Do I need to change a setting or something? This was on youtube.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Last Epoch developer Eleventh Hour Games gets acquired by KRAFTON⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wall that sucks. On the bright side, the game has a full offline mode, so as long as I can stop or revert updates, there’s only so much they can ruin it for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ice cream trucks still around?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen one around town still. Although I suspect like 90+% of its business is just from parking right outside the town pool in the summer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨well?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is that most of our problems aren’t really science problems. Or at least the thing holding them up isn’t the lack of practical applied scientists. They’re political ones. We’ve known what we needed to do about climate change for decades but their are capitalists who stand to lose from doing anything about it, so we don’t. We have plenty of housing, it’s just being hoarded by people who do nothing with it but extract free money from people who are desperate to have a place to live. We have amazing medicine, but corporations are able to abuse IP laws to price gouge people who need it to live.

  A scientist or engineer could come up with some amazing sci-fi tech that has the potential to save us and capitalists would find some way to make it bleed us dry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A few angles on this:

  You’re right that nothing is unimportant and I certainly enjoy it when I discover that attention to detail, but part of what makes that special is knowing that they put in extra effort into that. Acknowledging it as something that takes effort, we have to recognize the trade offs associated with that effort. Devs, especially indie ones, don’t have unlimited time and resources. So they have to prioritize. Choose your battles. What are the MOST important things that need to be in the game? What is required? Then after that if you have resources left and can control yourself from doing too much scope creep, then you can spend time on the lower priority things. If you can’t do this you might never release the game.

  Of course, what is more or less important is subjective and context dependent. Subtle, intentional details might be more important in a game with a lot of environmental storytelling like Dark Souls, or a puzzle game where you want to be careful about how you direct the player’s attention, but is probably much less important in say, an action rpg where you’re just running through hoards of random enemies slamming particle effects.

  Another thought I had related to the point about inspiration happening through the process: I don’t really do art anymore, (no real reason I stopped, might be fun again if I ever have the motivation/focus for it) but in high school I took 3 years of graphics design classes for art class. I’d finish whatever my assigned project was and then I just spent a bunch of time messing around in photoshop with random gradients, filters, and other effects. I wouldn’t call it super deliberate at least in the early stages, but at some point I’d end up with some abstract art that I liked and maybe tweaked a bit from there based on the things I saw from randomly trying stuff. I still use some of those for desktop backgrounds. I don’t think I could have ended up with any of that without some of the random stuff photoshop did. I could imagine someone using an ai image generation for similar kinds of inspiration. Although I can see how it’s also a lot easier for them to just stop there and not think about it again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pentagon to start using Grok as part of a $200 million contract with Elon Musk's xAI⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come nobody does anything about North Korea?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is, for all the problems the country has internally, a “deal” with the west is going to turn out the same way it turned out for other countries: Forced “market reforms” that really just mean allowing western capitalists to exploit the country’s resources and labor. There is no good path for a country that involves western intervention. We’ll just make it worse, or at least as bad, but for out benefit.

  Besides, why would they ever trust us? We bombed them to smithereens within living memory and since then have gone out of our way to punish the people living there for whatever reason you choose to believe was our motive. If we cared about the people there we wouldn’t have invaded or embargoed them in the first place. And since then it’s not like we’ve stopped acting like that to the rest of the world. If the US cared about freedom and democracy or people’s living standards, we wouldn’t be allies with places like Saudi Arabia or Israel. We wouldn’t have installed right wing dictators in all the countries we tried to stop from having self-determination.

  The best thing that could be done if we actually cared about people’s living standards would be to back the fuck off and let people sort out their own politics without a global superpower breathing down their necks. They already fought one revolution, if they really want to change their government I’m sure they could do it without our “help.” Maybe if they didn’t have an existential enemy they could deal with their own problems more easily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You are asking this on a platform specifically filled with people who didn’t want to be on those centralized services. :P

  That said, not to be the contrarian, but I think this is one of a collection of issues where the problem is not the technology or organizational structure, it’s just capitalism. Generalizing to talk about any monopolies, there are a lot of benefits to centralized production. Economies of scale, not duplicating work/resources, etc. There is a reason why some industries, called natural monopolies, are either run by the government or a private corporation is granted a monopoly over it in a regulated way. The classic example of this is infrastructure like train tracks. You don’t need 5 different train lines going to all the same places and there’s no space for that anyway. So by having one entity run the trains, you get to avoid the problems with that.

  Going back to the internet: Centralization has some of the usual benefits of a more general monopoly: If we have one social media site, we don’t need 30 different shitty versions of a video player when the first one worked just fine. But more specifically, it has network effects: The more people who use a site, the more valuable it is for everyone else to use the site. If I go to a site to chat with people and there’s nobody to chat with, there’s not much point in being there. There is a consistent UI so I don’t need to relearn how to navigate different sites. Plus it makes it easier to find what I’m looking for or discover new things.

  None of what I described above is directly caused by greedy corporations. Those are just the dynamics that emerge from the material reality of the internet. If we go rid of corporations tomorrow, I think we’d still end up with a decent amount of centralization because of that. Like imagine all of the big social media sites dissipated tomorrow. Everything goes back to being individual sites with their own forums. What happens? I go to a site that has no users, realize it’s dead, and go back to the more populous one. Or perhaps in an effort to make it easier to find everything someone makes a site that links to all the other interesting sites, curated of course because a list of literally everything on the internet wouldn’t be useful. Maybe you add a forum to that site so people could talk about their favorite other sites in one place. The smaller sites where less conversation happens dry up and the big ones snowball until they’re so big that they’re the place to be. Oops we just reinvented Reddit. As much as I’m done with dealing with corporate social media and want to stick with the fediverse or other stuff, it is still just the case that these sites have less people, and therefore less stuff to do, than those bigger sites, so they lack some of the value I got from those. I’m stubborn enough to put up with that out of principle, but for a lot of people, they’re just going to see that they can’t find anyone to talk about their niche hobby they had a subreddit for or whatever and just move on. It’s hard to achieve escape velocity.

  THE problem then, is that these sites are controlled by corporations with profit motives. Their goal isn’t to create the best user experience, it’s just to do whatever makes them the most money. If that means psychologically manipulating people to engage more they’ll do that. If that means censoring speech that scares off advertisers, they’ll do that. If it means making the site worse and then selling people the solution, they’ll do that. If it means abusing their position of power to take advantage of creators on these sites who depend on the site, they’ll do that. And because of this centralized position of power with all of it’s inherent monopolistic advantages, they get away with this. Wrest control away from those corporations and find a way to run these centralized sites with democratic control, and most of those problems go away and we get to keep the benefits.

  It’s not obvious that there is a good way to achieve this under capitalism though. The fediverse is certainly an interesting experiment in this by allowing there to essentially be independent sites that get collated into one place with a unified standard for UX, but we’ll have to see if they can overcome inertia to reach the critical mass necessary to be a genuine replacement to centralized corporate controlled sites. I also don’t know enough about the technology to know if this is the best solution or not. So I’d be curious to see if this takes off or if people find another solution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Switch 2's price won't be impacted by Japan's new tariffs, but its games might⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The way I look at it, it would be better if we had a nice, consistent language with rules that make sense but… we don’t have that. English is a nonsense language with more exceptions than rules. So if I’m going to have to deal with something that doesn’t make sense in the first place, I’d rather just go with the flow. If Shakespeare can make up words, so can I.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Switch 2's price won't be impacted by Japan's new tariffs, but its games might⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  F-RPGs: Freedom RPGs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My Dress-Up Darling Season 2 • Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru Season 2 - Episode 1 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m so glad this show is back. It just makes me so happy to watch.

  Also Japanese question: What was the word confusion that made craft store guy misunderstand what Gojo meant? It wasn’t clear from the subtitles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My Dress-Up Darling Season 2 • Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru Season 2 - Episode 1 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess it was like this before, but it’s only something I really thought about now: It’s nice that the fake anime looked lower fidelity than the real one. I have a running joke with friends whenever we see an anime in an anime and ask whether the anime is photorealistic in their world. But here the thing one level down from their reality looks less real than their normal animation, so it kinda works out. All I’m saying is I want to see an anime where their world’s anime is in 1D just for the gag. The audience never actually gets to see it properly and the characters talk about it like it’s completely normal to them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My Dress-Up Darling Season 2 • Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru Season 2 - Episode 1 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Having seen way too many rom coms… I give it a zero parcento chance of that going anywhere other than just getting interrupted or awkwardly shrugged off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help on Animal Well?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All I’ll say is:

  • try to remember how you got the frisbee
  • you’re not going to be able to do this without some action.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's up with the sudden increase in AI slop?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I just haven’t noticed really. The reality is that memes, even ones that were made by hand with a lot of effort, are disposable content. Most of them will get looked at for like 10 seconds tops before you either move on or maybe check out the comments. Nobody who isn’t obsessed with finding the AI slop is going to notice the difference between an AI meme and just a shitty photoshop job.

  That’s not to say I’m not concerned by the effects of that. Lower effort needed means more low effort stuff, but it’s not really something I’ve clocked as being particularly out of the ordinary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There are major holes in this theory⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok this one got me laughing. Congrats.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Apothecary Diaries Season 2 • Kusuriya no Hitorigoto 2nd Season - Episode 24 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nice ending to the season. I figured the kids were coming back to life. I don’t know if that was meant to be a twist with just how telegraphed it was over the last 2 episodes. I was both surprised and not surprised by Shi Sui being alive. I thought she didn’t seem like she was planning to die and had some kind of plan, but then she got shot… a lot. I don’t know how she survived that. Did she have ye olde bullet proof vest and blood squibs?

  Jinshi still can’t take a hint. That whole relationship feels like one of those things that would be creepy if they weren’t playing it off as cutesy/comedic.

  I’m looking forward to S3. From the teaser trailer I’m hopeful that we’re going to get some kind of status quo shift/reset so we can get back to the more Mao Mao focused stories. But we’ll see.