darthelmet
@darthelmet@lemmy.world
- Comment on Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai • Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night - Episode 12 discussion 6 days ago:
This was a surprisingly good show. I guess the only things I can really say that disappointed me about the ending though are:
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It felt kind of rushed. This could have used like one or two more episodes. Like there were 3 parts shoved into one episode: Whatever happened between Mahiro’s meeting and the concert, the concert, then the epilogue. So we kind of had to skip a lot of stuff to fit it all in one episode. Did they not talk between the meeting and the concert? Was their relationship just in suspended animation until they met after the concert?
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I’m surprised they never addressed the kiss. I don’t know where I’d expect that to go, but it’s weird that they just never talked about it again and just left it as a tease for the audience. Idk, it’s not the biggest deal. They still had an interpersonal emotional arc independent of any yuri bait. But why include that at all if it wasn’t even going to affect their relationship in the slightest?
But setting all that aside, great show even within a pretty packed season. Fun characters with relatable problems and a story that kept a good pace at least until the last episode.
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- Comment on The Star Trek Adventures first edition Core Rulebook pdf free for Saturday, June 22 1 week ago:
Yeah. I got this a while ago too, but my friends from college now have jobs and live in 4 different time zones. It’s pretty hard organizing more than two of them being around for more than like an hour or so.
- Comment on Helldivers 2 has received 100,000 negative reviews since announcing players must link Steam to a PSN account 1 month ago:
I tried a 2nd time and no dice on a manual review. Same automated message.
- Comment on Helldivers 2 Players Express Frustration On Steam As It Will Soon Require A PSN Account 1 month ago:
Trying to refund it, although pretty low chance since it’s well past the window. But that’s part of what makes it so bullshit to bring this in long after that window closed. I’d have refunded the game on the spot if it actually required the account creation from the get go. I refunded Red Dead 2 after it turned out to require a Rock Star account. Fortunately that was apparent on start up so I just quit and refunded.
- Comment on NSA ’just days from taking over the internet’ warns Edward Snowden 2 months ago:
One of these countries is the largest military superpower the world has ever seen, has invaded or meddled in countless countries around the world for their resources, and has one of if not the most expansive domestic surveillance system… and the other country is Russia.
Russia has it’s own problems, but they’re not the threat that the US is to the world.
- Comment on What are the best indie games you've ever played? 3 months ago:
- Slay the Spire: I don’t just think it’s the best deck building roguelike, I think it’s the quintessential deck building roguelike. It’s such a complete exploration of the design space of the genre in terms of the options it gives the player to build their deck and the challenges it puts those decks up against. Not that there aren’t any other fun games in this genre, but they all still feel like STS, but worse and with a gimmick that doesn’t add much.
-Will edit with more in a bit.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
Nobody is saying it isn’t. But if you genuinely care about the harm it causes and don’t just want an excuse to throw political enemies in jail, then the solution is obviously not to criminalize its use. The correct thing to do is to provide social and health services to addicted people to get them off of it.
All criminalization does is ruin the lives of the people it targets and enrich the prison industry.
- Comment on These violent delights have violent ends 4 months ago:
Voyager certainly has some great bits in it, but for me I think it’s just that TNG is quintessential Star Trek and DS9 does something very different pretty well. Voyager doesn’t feel like it has enough of a distinct voice to differentiate it from comparisons to TNG.
- Comment on These violent delights have violent ends 4 months ago:
It’s still baffling to me why there is even an unsafe mode in the first place. What could that possibly be used for?
On a related note: why is the holodeck door so hard to open when the computer is on the fritz/taken over? Surely this isn’t such a high security room that they couldn’t just leave the door with a manual latch?
- Comment on AI Companies Take Hit as Judge Says Artists Have “Public Interest” In Pursuing Lawsuits 4 months ago:
For me, I just recognize that AI, or any technology isn’t the problem. It’s context it exists in, who gets to use it, and how.
We shouldn’t have to choose between automating boring or dangerous jobs and letting people live dignified lives free from the fear of poverty. We shouldn’t have to choose between having AIs that can generate all sorts of interesting media quickly (even if a lot of it isn’t that good yet, it can still serve its purposes, like say, quickly mocking up an idea to see if it’s worth going forward with it.) and ruining the livelihoods of the real artists that made it possible. We also shouldn’t have to deal wit the mountain of garbage that will be created and shoved in our faces by corporations that don’t understand what the limitations of the technology are.
These are all capitalism problems. We should probably do something about that instead of asking dumb questions like if AI can really make “art” or if it’s copyright infringement.
- Comment on Apple Vision Pro Owners Are Struggling to Figure Out What They Just Bought 4 months ago:
It strikes me as a mostly non-technical problem. As a method of interfacing with computers/games it just doesn’t offer anything that useful and runs into a lot of practical problems that won’t magically get better with faster processors or smarter software.
- Comment on Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption 4 months ago:
I mean sure. Anything someone is using like currency can be called currency. But we’re talking practical terms here. Things we “collectively agree to value.” My WoW gold might be useful for buying potions, but it’s not generally accepted anywhere outside that narrow context. The fewer people who are willing to accept the currency, the less useful, and arguably less “real” it becomes, in so far as currency is defined by its value to others. I could print “me bucks” that I value at $1B USD, but that doesn’t mean much if nobody will give me a sandwich for it.
- Comment on Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption 4 months ago:
But this is actually why crypto isn’t a real currency: we haven’t collectively agreed to value it, or at least not in any way that makes it useful as a medium for exchange. Ironically it can’t possibly become a proper currency while speculators are making its price so volatile. The very act of investing in it is making it worthless.
- Comment on Apple Vision Pro Owners Are Struggling to Figure Out What They Just Bought 4 months ago:
VR has been a thing for years now and has been getting cheaper over time. I’ve had no interest in using it whatsoever. Clearly the thing that needed to change was for it to get MORE expensive. Thanks Apple! Always giving the customer what they didn’t know they wanted!
- Comment on What's up with Epic Games? 5 months ago:
They don’t even try to be competitive on technology or service though. If they were making a comparable or even superior product and people were sticking with Steam anyway for the network effect I’d agree they’d be justified in doing more to attract customers. But they just want to use their pile of money to buy their way into a market without putting in the work to design and develop a superior product.
- Comment on Pick your poison. Dystopian style 5 months ago:
That’s why police exist.
- Comment on What's up with Epic Games? 6 months ago:
They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.
- Comment on There's no money for education and health care but they'll always find some for war. 6 months ago:
Yeah. It drives me nuts when the media talks about misinformation as if they didn’t help lie us into a war that’s lasted most of my life. Clearly none of the bad things that we all see happening daily are the reason we’re all sad and angry right?
- Comment on Why is it apparently cool and fine for insurance companies to spend countless billions, trillions of our money constantly buying ad time? 6 months ago:
Where do they get the money from?
- Comment on YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker 7 months ago:
I don’t think that’s entirely true. Or at least not in the longer term view of it. YT isn’t just some random store that doesn’t want to deal with an unruly customer. It’s a big tech monopoly platform. Like the other tech giants, their strategy has always hinged on becoming the only game in town. And they predictably use the same tactics monopolies have been using for the past century:
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Offer the product at such a low price that you take a loss and use your hoard of money to outlast would-be competitors who don’t have a massive pot of money to burn. In YT/Google terms this is the fact that it’s a free site and up until very recently they’ve done little to nothing about adblocking users despite being one of the biggest tech companies in the world, knowing it is happening, (It was in their chrome extensions search, plus they don’t pay the creators for the no-ad views.) and having the capability to stop it at least for their browser, which a lot of people were already using. Why not go to war with adblockers sooner when their entire business is built on advertising? Because that’s the cost they were willing to bear to turn YT into a monopoly. They could take the hit on not getting ad revenue from some users, but some hypothetical competitor certainly couldn’t.
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Make switching hard. A site that’s grown as large as YT has massive network effects. For viewers, that’s where all the videos are. For creators that’s where all the viewers are. For both that’s where there is enough of a community that there are lively discussions in comments. Nobody outside nerds like us is going to some external site they’ve never heard of. If you want to get your stuff out there, you use YT. Then there are things like creator contracts to further discourage switching.
Ad block users aren’t valueless to YT, or at least they weren’t. They were a portion of those viewers and commenters that contributed to YT becoming THE video social media site. They comment, share videos around, maybe even contribute directly to creators to allow them to keep making YT video. You maybe lose a out on a couple cents from the lost ad views for each one of them, but the value of the network effect gained by keeping them around this long far outweighs that loss.
They’re doing this now because they can. They no longer have meaningful competition to kill off. The few that kinda cross into their market are also massive tech platform monopolies that are currently engaged in the exact same thing. They can’t expand their customer base anymore, so now they’re extracting more money from the captive audience they have.
And it’s not just adblock users they’re increasing the “price” for. YT has added an insane number of ads to their videos and increased the price of YT Premium. If adblockers died tomorrow, they wouldn’t be like “What a relief, now that we’ve gotten rid of the freeloaders, we can finally lower our prices for everyone since they aren’t bearing the burden of the non-payers.” They just get to tighten the screws even further because they would have gained an even more dominant position over their users.
In a fairer world, we’d all pay a reasonable amount for the things we use or move on to an alternative if we’d rather not. But we don’t live in that world. We live in capitalist hell world where everything is a monopoly and the government is so captured by those corporate interests that they basically never enforce even the meager anti-trust laws we do have.
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- Comment on Tesla warns that a federal probe into whether it exaggerated the range of its cars may lead to a ‘material adverse impact on our business’ 8 months ago:
It feels telling of corporate media that they chose to frame the company under suspicion of fraud complaining about the government investigation ruining their profits as a “warning.” As though they’re experts reporting on their predictions about a natural phenomenon or a policy proposal and not… you know… the criminals crying foul.
- Comment on The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion 8 months ago:
I figured it just made sense to lean into it once I realized what it was. I didn’t go FULL murder hobo, but I ended up doing enough to trigger a bunch of special quest stuff unique to the Dark Urge. I still think this was probably better as a 2nd play through, but I was pretty satisfied with all the content the game had to fill the gaps caused by me… suddenly cutting off some quest lines.
- Comment on The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion 8 months ago:
I’ve been playing the Cyberpunk DLC and just finished that last night. Aside from some annoying bugs that was pretty fun.
I’m nearing the end of my first BG 3 playthrough that I’ve been streaming with a friend. We decided to go Dark Urge and it’s made this kind of a weird first playthrough. It’s been fun but I think in hindsight it would have been better to have a more normal first run then go back for this. Also, found a kind of funny bug (?) in the vampire boss fight. The boss has some property that says he can’t be moved by physical or magical means. But when I threw that legendary spear that has a knock back AoE, it sent him off the cliff and that was the fight aside from mopping up the ads.
Aside from that I’m always playing TFT occasionally. I climbed higher than I ever did before: 200 LP masters before I hit another funk and started backsliding.
- Comment on The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion 8 months ago:
I was playing the new DLC recently and I encountered some brand new bugs that I didn’t see on my first playthrough. Sometimes after completing a quest, the game would just lock me out of certain features like the map, journal, inventory, phone, etc. only way to fix it was to reload.
- Comment on YouTube is cracking down on consumers’ favorite loophole - Adblockers 8 months ago:
Users who don’t directly pay for a social service where user content and interaction is the business are still valuable. They share videos around, they comment, they contribute to it being the place where everything is happening. There’s a reason all these tech platform companies spent so long in the honeymoon phase of monopolization. Without the network effect of people on their platform, they have nothing.
They still need a way to overall make profit from their users, but they aren’t losing nothing by losing people who adblock.
- Comment on amazon anti union posters put up by the company 8 months ago:
It’s only illegal if you don’t have enough money to influence the labor board. :P
- Comment on Terraria developer bashes Unity, donates $200k to open source alternatives 9 months ago:
They’ll stop updating the game whenever the Attack on Titan anime actually ends.
- Comment on Terraria developer bashes Unity, donates $200k to open source alternatives 9 months ago:
It’s crazy how successful they’ve been off just making and selling a good indie game. They’re still doing free updates AND they can afford a $200k donation?
- Comment on Instance Protectionism in the Threadiverse happens because of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (protecting one's own instance is currently more sensible than increasing overall discussion quality) 9 months ago:
The prisoner’s dilemma assumes an inability to collude and strong incentives for defecting from any potential collusion arrangements.
Moderators are free to talk to and work with each other and there’s no particular incentives to compete over. Everyone is here for good discussion. There aren’t any ads or anything at the moment right? So why not just agree on cooperation? I don’t see the problem here.
- Comment on Why wasn't former President Bush of the USA, charged with any crimes, when we marched into Afghanistan and Iraq by his orders, under pretenses? 9 months ago:
In the US? No US official will hold a president accountable for any crimes they’d like to be able to get away with in the future.
In the world at large? No country or perhaps even no conceivable coalition of countries has the power to do anything about the US. We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined. We have so many military bases and warships around the world the sun doesn’t set on the American empire. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. Our intelligence agencies coup governments for reasons as petty as them not wanting to trade their resources with us. The US military is the disgusting end point of might makes right.