Sunsofold
@Sunsofold@lemmings.world
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 1 week ago:
I didn’t even know about it until I read this comic, but now I’m one of the salty.
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 1 week ago:
Agreed. Role queue was dumb. I liked having the ability to look at how things have been going and say ‘They’re doing X. I’ll swap to this character and screw up their plans.’ The thing I loved most about OW was that it wasn’t locked into the left click first competition. Their Widow is causing trouble? Lucio>wall climb>drop in>boop them out of their safety bubble and get them shredded. Distract them behind a shield to the left so someone on the right can sneak up on them. Or go Sombra and do an invis run/tele to magdump into their head at point blank. Or go monkey and pig meatwall to get close enough to ruin her day. Whatever. Just something with more intelligence than left-click and die repeatedly.
I miss Mayhem too. People complained that it took too long to die/kill but that was what was amazing about it. How many games can you say have ever felt like you were in an epic fight where every thrust, parry, twist, duck, and swing mattered? Where you don’t win by the luck of a single shot but have to tactically manipulate enemy attention so you can change the angle of attack so it favors your healer over their Junkrat? Battles won or lost by the timing and precision placement of a Zarya hole catching the targets thrown by a Lucio boop to hold them just off the payload just long enough to get to the next checkpoint?
Man, I miss that game.
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 1 week ago:
Might sound odd to some, but Overwatch.
Early Overwatch was great. Then some updates made it better. The only things wrong with it were design choices that were made for financial reasons. Then they made it much worse. Then they made it worse. And worse. And then they made 2, which turned it into just another ‘left-click on the target’ game, because those make more money. It saddens me that it died.
- Comment on Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately? 1 week ago:
Don’t forget the internet is global. People for whomever English is a second language are much more common than they once were.
- Comment on Do you use your blinker in a car? 1 week ago:
I do, but I am slightly discouraged from doing so by the drivers in my area. People are always so terrified of not being the first waiting at the next red light, they see a turn signal as a warning to ‘speed up and go past this car before they can get ahead of you.’
- Comment on A French law requiring adult sites to run age checks( facial age estimation, ...etc) and block users under 18 became applicable to sites based in France and outside of the EU. 1 week ago:
A ways back, I saw an article about how the French were rioting because their retirement age was being increased from 62 to 64. I remarked that it was interesting to see the French rioting against a change that wouldn’t even quite bring them to parity with the US but Americans can’t be bothered to riot for almost anything. A Frenchman said they didn’t want to even be more like the US in any way.
This law is absolutely the now-classic American attitude that kids can watch violent movies all day, but if they’rEXC exposed to one female nipple, you gotta shut it all down. Is France turning into America now, following Britain down the red, white, and blue path?
- Comment on How do people develop feelings for someone? 2 weeks ago:
Happy to help.
There are a lot of things in human society you are expected to ‘just know,’ which is silly. Human social dynamics is so complex psychology, sociology, and their various related fields are possible doctorate fields, but when someone says 'How do I know the difference between, ‘love’ and ‘love love?’ people will just say, ‘You just know.’
- Comment on How do people develop feelings for someone? 2 weeks ago:
I’ll toss on a bit more here if they can’t. If you are great at making friends then you probably have some idea of ‘signals’ that someone is interested in someone. Flirting is the process of displaying those signals toward someone you find attractive in the hopes of getting feedback signals. It’s a way of subtly allowing people to show their intentions without risking the embarrassment of a direct rejection. You can learn to play the game if you want. Some people really enjoy it. Some people don’t.
Note, though, it is entirely possible to skip it if you are willing to be a bit forward, and simply say, ‘I find you very attractive and like you a lot. Would you be interested in going on a date and seeing how things feel?’ This risks the awkwardness of a direct rejection, the possible discomfort for the other person if they feel intimidated by you, but cuts through the extra layers of process and can be a refreshing burst of earnestness for many people.
You’ve asked how it’s different from friend interactions. The baseline difference is expectation and physicality. In a basic friendship, there is little expectation and little contact. You might not expect much more from a low level friendship than from a decent stranger. (Pass me the salt) A good friend is someone you can expect more of, and by whom are expected of more. (Help me move.) A best friend is someone for whom you would be expected to take serious personal risk, and who you would expect to take personal risk for your sake. (I need to get across the border, no questions asked.)
Romance takes many forms but the general guideline is friendship, plus physical attraction. Low level friendship plus physical attraction is where friends-with-benefits usually sit. Good friendship plus physical attraction is usually a girl/boyfriend. Best friend status with physical attraction is where you get to long term partner status.
There are a lot of nuances to all of it, so that’s a brutal oversimplification, but it’s a place to start building a framework for understanding.
- Comment on Should we boycott games with loot boxes? 2 weeks ago:
If the loot boxes affect your ability to win, don’t buy the game. If they are just cosmetic, meh.
But don’t stop there. If it has day one DLC, don’t touch it. If it has DLC to patch game functions that should be in the base game, don’t touch it. If it has any kind of pay to win function, don’t touch it. If it has a subscription, don’t touch it. If it’s a pre-order, don’t touch it. If it’s put out by a conglomerate publisher that eats real developers and shits out imitations of their IP, don’t touch it.
And most of all, teach these things to gamer kids and their parents. Kids are ignorant of the effect their purchases, and parents don’t have the time and energy to go learn for themselves. Spreading awareness helps everyone.
- Comment on How wil people react if Trump is right about Tariffs? 2 weeks ago:
Saying ‘the response’ is kind of pretending it’s a monolith. There will be a lot of carefully considered discussion, regardless of what the result is, because that’s what adult humans do. Then there will be the great lumps of BS that are projected by party mouthpieces and parroted by the party followers. I’m less interested in the social media chatter as a response and more interested in the response from the other countries.
China’s choice to place export restrictions on things like Yttrium and other rare earth metals, when they control ~3/4ths of the world’s supply, could put companies around the world out of business or under Chinese soft power. Some of America’s biggest blue chip companies are reliant on those materials. China is not going to make it easy if even possible to get those elements for US companies. Companies in Europe and Asia could also be targetted with it as an implementation of Chinese soft power.
Another issue to consider is the recovery itself. The market always craps its pants when Trump speaks because the thing the market loves is predictability and Trump is unpredictable. It’s hard to say how comfortable the investor class will be with taking risks on new investments when one announcement from the oval office can drop share prices to a new 52 week low.
Facing all this, it’s hard to care much about the chatter from party loyalists.
- Comment on How wil people react if Trump is right about Tariffs? 2 weeks ago:
Ignoring whether he is or not, as that is a DEEP dive into world economics, the response would have some variance, because nothing is monolithic, but I expect the prominent responses would be for supporters to cheer and gloat, for the independents to cheer and hope, with timing deciding the midterms, and for the opposition to drop it and focus on all the other problems with Trump.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 2 weeks ago:
Already transitioning. Been half doing it for ages. This’ll just be the last bit.
- Comment on What open-world games on Steam have satisfying movement, like Arkham Knight or Spider-Man? 2 weeks ago:
Yep
- Comment on What open-world games on Steam have satisfying movement, like Arkham Knight or Spider-Man? 3 weeks ago:
I absolutely LOVED Mirror’s Edge. That feeling of hitting flow in game and out of game as you just move smoothly from point to point was just amazing. I played originally on PS2 and almost got the plat trophy. I loved trying not only to find the fastest path but the smoothest, the weirdest, the pacifist, etc. It was great.
Then I tried 2 for like 5 seconds before I dropped it. It immediately felt like a betrayal of the first game. I hated the UI. I hated the color grade. I hated the style. I hated what seemed like a turn toward the violent.
- Comment on Upvote/Downvote is the first mental skill that infants learn. 4 weeks ago:
That’s practically the definition of ‘like’ to an infant. ‘This makes me feel how boob juice makes me feel.’
- Comment on The specter of a GTA 6 delay haunts the games industry: 'Some companies are going to tank' if they guess wrong, says analyst 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Gaming has a polarization problem 1 month ago:
Don’t forget the vocal minority problem. The subset of people who comment on things is much smaller than the set of people who consume them. And while the threshold of effort for making comment is low, it isn’t zero, so people who hold more extreme views are going to be more prevalent in the selection because the people with moderate views aren’t going to have the motivation to spend 20 minutes explaining the nuanced position they have, while the ‘love’ and ‘hate’ camps will gladly spend 10 seconds on posting their simplistic view.
Add on the way modern systems work, focusing on likes, upvotes, etc. and you get short form responses getting greater engagement purely because they don’t take as long to read. It’s always easier to get traction with a short, maybe amusing, rehash of a common opinion than with a long dissertation on niche, complex views.
That cycles back in at the top to create a visibility bias so the people making the next round of commentary/content see the wave of love/hate and try to ride it. The result is a feedback loop with a terrible signal to noise ratio.
- Comment on Why don't people going to college get HUD, Food Stamps, and free Medicare/Medicaid while enrolled? Instead of the parents footing the bill or the student working 3 jobs and school? 1 month ago:
I’m not one to say it doesn’t matter. I know the benefit good nursing provides. I’m saying, in modern culture, especially in the circles who have political, economic, and cultural power, there is, and has been for decades, a push to think of a college education as an investment product that benefits the purchaser, with little to no consideration being given to societal benefit. They are acting as if your work is not more meaningful/beneficial to society than, say, a Marketing Director. (a position of similar wage which I would say is, at least, not as beneficial, if not actually harmful to society)
Nursing, for instance, is a profession, or even a vocation, which provides tremendous societal benefit, both in the direct ‘people’s lives in medical settings suck less’ sense and in the indirect ‘people get back to health and productivity’ sense. Despite this, it’s not common, as far as I’ve seen, for governments to offer much in the way of benefits to nurses as reward for their service. There’s even a tendency to, when they ask for a raise, to take an attitude of ‘You should be happy. At least you get to know you’re helping people. We need all these extra profits to help compensate us for doing our jobs that don’t help people.’
Mostly as an aside, I’ve actually thought for years that nurses and doctors who are providing direct care to patients (i.e. not people who went to Med/Nursing school and then went into medicine-adjacent business, but people putting in direct labor to help heal people) should have a significant tax cut. Their work benefits society more than the money it would represent, and a cut would make their lives easier, and help balance the years of tuition and effort it takes to get to that position.
- Comment on Why don't people going to college get HUD, Food Stamps, and free Medicare/Medicaid while enrolled? Instead of the parents footing the bill or the student working 3 jobs and school? 1 month ago:
In the current system, education isn’t viewed as a system of societal improvement but as a product to improve the standing of the individual. Because the individual is seen as the only one who benefits from their education, the individual pays for it.
- Comment on Why is there so much separation in the USA between people who identify as "black" or "white" compared to other regions like South America? 1 month ago:
As others have said, there are lots of divides in various cultures. From what I have heard, many people from the Americas look down on those from further south in the Americas. (Americans look down on Mexicans, who look down on Guatemalans, etc.) I’ve heard there are still certain views regarding Han Chinese versus others in China, xenophobia in Japan, sectarianism between subsets of Islam, and a basic level of nativism throughout much of the world. For America, the culture started with the era of ‘scientific’ racism so it started with a color divide. Those old divides remain because certain classes of people keep reinforcing because it helps their narrative. In the same way you can look at what happened with American healthcare through a Marxist, free-market-absolutist, or various other views, you can look at America through various lenses, and the racial one still holds a lot of sway. As long as enough people identify with the grouping, it grants political power to those who have authority in that group. The power is used to reinforce the identity to perpetuate itself and the cycle continues. It takes fairly drastic circumstances to change that.
- Comment on eggs in japan 2 months ago:
They often end up with bits of stuff stuck to them while they’re wet, like feathers, bedding, etc. Poop isn’t uncommon either. The same people who won’t buy salmon unless it has that freshly dyed pink color, and won’t buy potatoes if they aren’t universally convex, balk at the bits that remind them they come from a real place and aren’t just summoned into existence for their sake. Washing the eggs takes off the bits but also the ‘bloom’ which is the natural barrier to bacteria and the like. Hence, refrigeration.
- Comment on Engineer turns old 3D printer into a tattoo gun that you definitely shouldn't use at home 2 months ago:
Honestly, I’m slightly surprised ‘tattoo printers’ haven’t become a thing for those little ‘formulaic’ tattoos. (Stars, hearts, bird silhouettes, etc.) People love getting inked up and I could see it making those sorts of tattoos absurdly fast, albeit probably much more intensely painful due to the speed.