pjwestin
@pjwestin@lemmy.world
- Comment on Loops is a new short form platform created by Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault. 4 days ago:
I hate TikTok too, but it’s not going away without comprehensive legislation regulating social media. Until then, a fediverse alternative that’s not ruled by corporate algorithms would at least be a form of harm reduction. Think of it like a Safe Injection Site program; it’s not great that they’re still using, but at least they’re getting clean needles.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 1 week ago:
I did vote for her. I live in a comfortably Blue state, but I agreed to vote for her in solidarity with some of my swing-state friends that didn’t want to vote for her.
As for strategy, well, Kamala’s entire strategy was, “our base is already going to vote for us, so we’re going to instead pursue disaffected Republicans by campaigning with Lize Cheney and Barbara Bush.” That choice depressed the turnout of her own base and cost her the election. Motivating Democratic voters instead of chasing imaginary moderate Republicans would have been a better strategy, and it probably had a bigger impact than the Gaza protest votes.
Anyway, let’s just say you’re right, and the electorate is full of childish leftist dummies that won’t vote for Harris because they’re idiots that can’t see the big picture. Well, then what? You can piss and moan about these voters all you want, but you seem to think they were the deciding factor in 2024, so what are the Democrats gonna do to win them over? It seems unlikely that all of these people you think are idiots that can’t reason or forecast will be radically different in the next two years, so are the Democrats going to do something different in 2028, or have you just resigned to losing now?
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 1 week ago:
It’s getting hard to tell if they even want to win. Even a year ago it might be plausible to argue that centrism is a smart strategy, but at this point, with victories like Mamdani and Mejia, it’s just demonstrably wrong. Hell, Platner is still leading Mills in Maine even after the whole, “having a Nazi tattoo,” thing. If the Democrats are still pursuing centrism going into 2028, then they have to admit they would prefer losing to fascists than adding progressives to their tent.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 1 week ago:
Honestly, I’m not even sure that’s the right term for it. She was to the right of most centrist liberals on Gaza, immigration, and even guns.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 1 week ago:
This continues to be the stupidest, least productive way to think about elections. The lesser of two evils argument may be true, but it failed to motivate people to vote for Kamala in 2024 (or Hillary in 2016, for that matter). You can bitch about protest votes or an apathetic electorate all you want, but at the end of the day, you don’t win elections if you don’t get votes, and, “yEaH, bUt TrUmP iS wOrSe,” didn’t get votes. If the Democrats once again run a candidate who doesn’t reflect their base and once again lose the election, it will once again be their fault for repeating a losing strategy that produces losing candidates.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 1 week ago:
however, enough of the protest votes would have swung the election in her favor.
I have never seen a single piece of data to back up a claim like that. If you have, I’d love to see it
they didn’t all protest the vote. I would say most of them just didn’t vote because they couldn’t be bothered.
I would guess this is true, but this is a failure of the candidate, not the electorate. In a country without mandatory voting or a national holiday for elections, motivating your base is extremely important, especially when you base is working class people who are less likely to be able to take time off to vote. Even ignoring her centrist economic platform and genocide support, her strategy was explicitly to target disaffected Republicans instead of energizing her own base, and that strategy failed. Kamala and the incompetent consultants she surrounded herself with own this loss, and whining about the voters won’t change that.
- Comment on i mean 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I played the N64 version of Rainbow 6, and that game seemed to want me to regularly switch between joystick and D-pad, so I guess some 3rd party developers didn’t get the memo, but you’re not supposed to design games that way. Technically the Sega Saturn had a joystick on one of it’s controllers, but you could also get a D-pad only controller. My friend had that Mario party glove, but we wouldn’t let him use it, since it was an unfair advantage. He had to rip the skin off his hands just like the rest of us.
- Comment on i mean 2 weeks ago:
I just left two long comments about this, but tl;dr, there’s no DualShock without Nintendo inventing this derpy thing first. DualShock was an industry defining design, but they were refining the functionality Nintendo created.
- Comment on i mean 2 weeks ago:
The N64 invented 3D platforming with this controller, which is why Mario 64 puts things like Crash Bandicoot and Laura Croft to shame; they’re creation of the C-buttons allowed for a free moving camera that could be used simultaneously with the joystick, which no one else could do at the time. Here’s an old promotional video for the DualShock where a developer even says, “What I’m really excited about is that we can do this on Sony, we don’t have to go do it on Nintendo.”
Nintendo invented an entirely novel system of inputs to give unprecedented control over a 3D environment. Sony looked at what Nintendo was doing and found a way to simplify those controls, and it was a great design; it’s the template for every modern controller. But criticizing Nintendo for not taking the time to, “reflect or refine,” the design, even though the design was a groundbreaking achievement in game development at a time when there was literally a new dimension being added to games, is ridiculous.
- Comment on i mean 2 weeks ago:
It wasn’t impossible, it just hadn’t been done yet. 3D games were a new concept, and no one was really sure how to implement them. A joystick made the most sense for moving a character through a 3D world, but the D-pad would work better for pretty much every game that had been developed up until that point. The Sega Saturn and the Playstation both prioritized the D-pad; they both launched with D-pad controllers (the Saturn had a joystick-optional controller, but it’s games could be played with the D-pad). The drawback to their designs was camera controls; their games either needed a fixed camera (like Crash Bandicoot) or camera switching (like Laura Croft), where you alternate using the D-pad to, “look,” or, “walk.”
The N64 controller’s design was basically a, “best of both worlds,” senerio. Hold it one way and it was a standard D-pad with 6 buttons. Hold it the other and it’s a joystick controller with a small D-pad (the c-buttons) and three regular buttons (A, B, and the Z-Trigger). That design made Mario 64 the industry standard for 3D platforming; the c-buttons could control a fluid, free moving camera without giving up access to the joystick. It was revolutionary and set a new standard for 3D gaming…for about a year. Then Sony invented the Duelshock controller, which pretty much every modern controller is based on. But for a while, the N64 controller was the only controller capable of fully utilizing the joystick and the D-pad, and years later, it gets ridiculed for being first.
- Comment on i mean 2 weeks ago:
Honestly, I think, “both,” really was the only choice. No one had developed for a joystick-exclusive console since the Atari days. Most third-party developers would have had a tough time porting and adapting their games over to an exclusively joystick layout. The other consoles of that generation, the Saturn and Playstation, both had D-pad only controllers and D-pad/joystick combination controllers; no one went joystick only. The N64 design was imperfect, but it allowed them to launch Mario 64 and Mortal Kombat Trilogy in the same year (and it was a step up from Sega’s crack at it).
- Comment on i mean 2 weeks ago:
I mean, at the time it was designed, “both,” pretty much was the right choice. Without the D-pad a lot of the titles they could reliably develop, like fighting or puzzle games, would have been incredibly difficult to get working well, but without the joystick, they couldn’t launch with titles like Mario 64. It’s easy to look at the PS1 Duelshock controller and assume they were idiots, but original PS1 controller only had a D-pad. The N64 beat the PS1 to the joystick by two years, and while it was much derpier than the Playstation’s solution, it was integrated from day one.
- Comment on i mean 2 weeks ago:
LOL, yeah, you’d kinda have to.
- Comment on i mean 2 weeks ago:
How the hell did you use the Z-trigger?
- Comment on i mean 2 weeks ago:
It’s gotta be Zoomers looking at it with no frame of reference. Anyone who played this at the time would have recognized the layout here; they were taking the SNES controller, adding an extra set of buttons to be more in line with the 6 button layout popularized by Sega, and then sticking a joystick in the middle. Assigning the c-buttons as directional was actually pretty insightful. They work for camera controls on stuff like Mario 64, but they also function as a top-row/bottom-row for strong-attack/light-attack on D-pad fighting games like Mortal Kombat.
- Comment on i mean 2 weeks ago:
The worst has to go to the Phillips CDI. In fairness, this was designed primarily as a remote control, and there was a much better dedicated gaming controller available, but they believed this layout would be adequate for gaming.
- Comment on i mean 2 weeks ago:
It was designed at a transition point between joysticks and the D-pad. Your right hand goes on the right prong for the A, B, and C buttons. Your left hand should be on the center prong when using a game designed for the joystick, or on the left prong when using a game designed for the D-pad. It’s not the most elegant design, but it’s really really not that hard to figure out.
- Comment on If WWIII broke out tomorrow do you honestly believe america would win? 5 weeks ago:
No. Facism rewards loyalty and cronyism, not competency. We have the most powerful military on the planet, but the regime is full of bumbling idiots whose only skills are flattering the president. For now, there’s enough brainpower left at the Pentagon to pull off the Maduro abduction or invade Greenland, but after a few years of Trump/Hegseth/Miller calling the shots and firing anyone who points out their mistakes, we’d be toast.
- Comment on /c/fuckai in shambles rn 5 weeks ago:
A recurring criticism of Data’s art is that he could masterfully reproduce other works, but his creativity was limited to borrowing elements of other people’s art and recombining them. It’s why he is often told his art lacked soul. The advice his friends repeatedly give him is to try to use art to express himself as an individual, not to feed more works into an algorithm until he produces a better art slurry.
- Comment on Trump wants the NFL to change its name so that soccer is the only sport called football: ‘We have to come up with another name for the NFL stuff’ 2 months ago:
- Comment on *confused flatfish noises* 2 months ago:
My old biology teacher used to say, “evolution only works as well as it needs to.” Rabbits digestive systems are so inefficient they have to eat their own shit just to get enough nutrients. Hyena clitoris are so large they sometimes suffocate their offspring during birth. You’re mouth is full of vestigial molars that will likely require surgery in your lifetime. None of those things matter, as long as your genes are successfully being passed down effectively
Panda’s have a digestive system that’s not well suited to their diet, and they’ve adapted to that mostly through behavioral changes. Since they don’t have kind of stomachs that efficiently digest plant matter (like a cow’s four-chamber stomach), they’re constantly hunting for different types of bamboo to get the nutrients they need. They eat young bamboo shoots of one species in the spring, then migrate to higher elevations to get the shoots of another. Both shoots lack calcium, so they migrate again in late summer to get more mature plants calcium-rich leaves.
One weird physical adaptation they’ve developed is in their pregnancies. They mate in the springtime, but fetuses require lots of calcium to develop, so females embryos basically get, “paused,” neither developing or dying, until later in the season when they have more calcium in their diet.
Anyway, I guess my point is that evolution did fix the pandas digestive system to work with plants. It’s just that, like most of evolution’s fixes, it’s a solution that’s barely held together by duct tape and hope, and it could fall apart at any minute.
- Comment on *confused flatfish noises* 2 months ago:
Yeah, but Pandas aren’t herbivores, they’re vegetarians. They’re too slow and clumsy to actually hunt prey, so the only thing they can catch is bamboo (which is the fastest growing plant, so I guess that’s something…sort of…). Anyway, the point is, Pandas as a species are from a family of predators, and they would absolutely eat meat if you gave it to them.
- Comment on *confused flatfish noises* 2 months ago:
Birds? No. Though, even on the side they do often have a tilt toward frontal in a lot of predatory birds. It could be argued…
Birds of prey absolutely have their eyes positioned on the front of their heads. It’s most obvious in owls, since they have the largest eyes and wider faces, but all of them have front-facing eyes for binocular vision.
- Comment on Controversial startup's plan to 'sell sunlight' using giant mirrors in space would be 'catastrophic' and 'horrifying,' astronomers warn 3 months ago:
Scientists: One desperate plan we are considering to combat climate change is a series of gigantic mirrors to deflect sunlight away from the planet.
These assholes: OK, but what if, like, the opposite of that?
- Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States 3 months ago:
That’s the Senate.
- Comment on We'll never have anything like the DVD screensaver ever again 4 months ago:
Wait…it can actually hit the corner? I thought that was just a legend.
- Comment on International Shitpost Wednesday! 4 months ago:
Chicken or bird?
- Comment on James should have used his money 4 months ago:
The Pokédex also heavily implies that Meowths are using coins that they find and collect, not generating money out of thin air (though I don’t know if the anime follows the same rules).
- Comment on But also, the correct answer is Devil's Due 5 months ago:
I envy you.
(He was an annoying self-insert character for young boys that was more prominent in the first two seasons. You migr know him from the, “Shut Up Wesley,” meme. He was played by Will Whedon who, by all accounts, is a pretty chill dude).
- Comment on What is in for the antivax in a government? 5 months ago:
RFK is a true believer; he actually thinks, against all evidence and logic, that vaccines are bad for your health. Trump does not give a shit about vaccines, but he offered RFK the CDC position because A) RFK was running a third-party candidacy in 2024 that could have cost him several swing states and B) anti-vaxers are a large part of the Trump coalition, but he was losing their trust after promoting the covid vaccine. Most congressional Republicans are just going along with this out if cowardice.
So, tl:dr: ending vaccines is what RFK (stupidly) believes in, Trump put him in power to return a favor/appease a portion of his base, and every other Republican is too chicken-shit to do anything about it.
