EarlGrey
@EarlGrey@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Bounce launches a service for moving accounts between Bluesky and Mastodon 15 hours ago:
wait till Jack decides ita time to cash out
I mean, you don’t like BlueSky, fair. But Jack Dorsey left like…over a year ago.
- Comment on At Gamescom, it felt like the industry now has a plan: make games quicker | Opinion 1 day ago:
There are exactly two major developers that get an eye raise from me these days. Nintendo and From Software. And even From Software I’m cool on right now because I’m just real burned out on excessively depressing grimdark fantasy.
And Indie Devs aren’t even filling in the gap for me anymore. Granted, I see a lot of interesting concepts put out with them, but they way too often come with disappointing execution. The last two indie games to really floor me were Neon White and GhostRunner.
Games are just in a really weak place right now. I honestly find I’m spending more and more time on the NSO virtual console games.
- Comment on Shenmue III Enhanced announced for PS5, Xbox Series, Nintendo, and PC 1 week ago:
The biggest issue among the Shenmue community was that it left us in another fucking cliffhanger. Seriously. Yu. I love how dedicated you are to your vision…but this is getting annoying.
Most of the other criticisms were about how slow and plodding some things were…which is someone a lot of us liked about Shenmue.
- Comment on Battlefield 6 players are crying out for a 'real' server browser, and it's about time we demanded the basic FPS feature that Call of Duty killed 1 week ago:
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Arguing against servers because you want match making is like arguing that you hate McDonalds serving Cheeseburgers because you want Chicken nuggets.
- Comment on Battlefield 6 players are crying out for a 'real' server browser, and it's about time we demanded the basic FPS feature that Call of Duty killed 1 week ago:
The amount of time I’ve spent playing online games has fallen off a cliff after forced matchmaking, particularly SBMM. They’ve legitimately ruined my enjoyment of games.
I got into Overwatch for a bit, but the SBMM meant that at lower levels it was basically a coin flip if I would get a team that wanted to play as a team, or a bunch of kill whores who only cared about their K/D ratio. I don’t want to have to drop hundreds of hours int mastering the game just to have actual teamwork.
- Comment on What game sequel ruined a beloved franchise or character for you? 3 weeks ago:
Oblivion.
Daggerfall was awesome and Morrowind blew me away. Going into Oblivion I had the highest hopes. Bought the Collectors Edition, took the day off…and biggest disappointment from a game ever. Granted I like Skyrim. Not as much as Daggerfall or Morrowind, but far more than Oblivion. So I guess it didn’t kill the franchise for me.
Bonus popular game that actually killed the franchise for me: GTA4. I loved the Trilogy, but I could not stand IV. All the main characters annoyed the piss out of me, the driving and gun play weren’t nearly as fun…I tried to play it but got burned out around 1/3rd of the way in. Tried to play GTA5 a few years ago and I felt burned out after 40 minutes.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 3 weeks ago:
If you’re talking about that video where he talked about getting $12 for 80 million streams…he was very clearly taking the piss.
He made closer to $200k, which is still pretty low (hence, the joke) and doesn’t account for his labels cut.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 3 weeks ago:
Yes, Qobuz is significantly more mainstream than BandCamp. I don’t know if the catalogue is on par with Spotify or AM or whatever, but most popular music is on it.
Bandcamp is like an indie zine that occasionally ships with a burned CD from a local band that has to live in the same rented house with no A/C and a half empty bottle of makers mark in the fridge.
Qobuz is a record store.
- Comment on Danish Ministry switching from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice 1 month ago:
The Document Foundation doesn’t actually employ developers. They just oversee and manage the development and direction of LibreOffice.
- Comment on There's still no sign of Star Citizen 1.0, but it did just get a revamped referral program so the die-hards can tempt in even more saps 1 month ago:
I’ve spent about $125 on this game, and I would definitely get pissed if I bought in for all the promises they made.
However, I bought just to have a really pretty “Fly around in space while exploring my spaceship and listening to music” game. And I’ve gotten my moneys worth.
- Comment on You're not alone: This email from Google's Gemini team is concerning 1 month ago:
Problem is that if you have a critical application (like banking) that relies on Google services you’re SOL.
It’s Apple or Google at that point.
- Comment on You're not alone: This email from Google's Gemini team is concerning 1 month ago:
Apple has been seriously underperforming on their AI strategy.
Really makes it easy to keep using their devices.
- Comment on The end of Windows 10 is approaching, so it's time to consider Linux and LibreOffice 2 months ago:
- Davinci? Yup
- Adobe? Not even remotely.
- Unreal…yes? I’m pretty sure th development tools still run on Linux at least.
- Crossplatform work? As long as it’s in the same format from the same application, you should be fine. Just format the drive in something Windows can understand.
- Steam? Works flawlessly as do most games now. You will need to change some settings, but only because Steam will by default only show games that are verified by valve to work (most games do though). Your biggest hurdle will be the developers that specifically block Linux.
- Non-Steam games? You’ll need to do some work, but you can get them running just as well as steam games
- Xbox App/Xbox GamePass? Nope.
- Comment on Microsoft laying off about 6,000 people, or 3% of its workforce 3 months ago:
I do try.
Every single former co-worker has ghosted me at this point and even my friends have basically taken a “Hahaha, for sure mate, for sure, hey have you guys ever changed the conversation?” attitude when I bring up connecting me with people.
People suck lol.
- Comment on Microsoft laying off about 6,000 people, or 3% of its workforce 3 months ago:
Cool. I mean I haven’t been able to get past a single 10-minute “I just want to go over the job with you and collect some basic information” phone interview in 6-months.
But ya know. Another 6,000 people on the market is cool too.
- Comment on Giant Bomb, a web site about video games, has been purchased from Fandom 3 months ago:
I hope they take a shot at written content again. It’s less a gaming website and more of a podcast network at this point.
- Comment on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remake Reveal Livestream (starts in 23 hours) 3 months ago:
I actually restarted halfway through because I leveled up so much that every enemy (even animals) were miserable to fight.
I realized you only leveled up when you slept so I just never slept. Game was way easier.
- Comment on Microsoft fires employee protestor who called AI boss a ‘war profiteer’ 4 months ago:
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 4 months ago:
SteamOS-like distributions probably aren’t for you right now. nvidia has massively improved over the year but it’s still not on par with AMD.
Using an immutable distro (which Steam OS and its kind are) is just going to complicate things. Your easiest bet is using a distro that will install the correct drivers at install, like pop_os or mint.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 4 months ago:
If you want SteamOS there are plenty of options that are effectively the exact same thing but with a different name.
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 4 months ago:
Oh Rust is great, and it’s on my learning to do list…but its evangelists are annoying as shit.
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 4 months ago:
But dude, bro, we could put the entire system on the blockchain man, and make it super efficient with an AI backend that will remove all errors bro.
Dude it’s not even written in Rust bro. WTF is this dinosaur shit?
- Comment on The basics of the Fediverse. Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, Reddit, ... vs the Fediverse. What do you think? 4 months ago:
My criticism is that it largely ignores the primary advantage of Fediverse services (Decentralizing services that are designed to operate Centrally), while mostly explaining what I’ve always considered to be the most pointless feature (Cross Service posting).
It’s a mildly neat feature if you want to centralize your entire social profile under one account (which is my security nightmare but you do you), but its not really fundamental to using federated services and its implementation can be inconsistent and confusing.
Maybe have a bunch of “Lemmy” (or whatever) nodes arranged in a circle, the same color, with the same icon, and connected to each other through the middle of the circle. Then have the users connected to each node.
- Comment on Federated wiki software? 4 months ago:
Requiring someone to have an account on a federated instance would mitigate a fair amount of spam and ease moderation.
What would that solve that mandating accounts for a standard wiki wouldn’t?
- Comment on Federated wiki software? 4 months ago:
Can you elaborate on “discoverability”? Finding individual subject wikis has never been a particular problem for me. Even ones that don’t use Fandom, provided they are at least active. Just googling “<insert subject> wikia” (I know. I can’t let it go) always gets me what I need.
Can’t say I see an advantage to universal accounts (I see more disadvantages), but if that’s the big selling point and people really want it. I’m not opposed to having it, i’ve just always treated it as a mild novelty I never use.
As for decentralization, it has already been solved by MediaWiki. Which is GPL and (can be) self-hosted.
- Comment on Federated wiki software? 4 months ago:
What benefit would federating it bring?
The ability to self-host your own FOSS wiki already exists and has for over two decades. It’s called MediaWiki.
You could have federated accounts I guess but do editors on the Doctor Who wiki really need the ability to see posts on Mastadon or edit pages on the That 70’s Wiki?
- Comment on Mastodon Spam 4 months ago:
I feel like in the future we’re gonna start seeing fediverse servers differentiate on feature sets.
Like one requires a subscription fee but pays for yearly audits by a respected auditor, or another offers spam-filtering, etc.
- Comment on Best game ever? 5 months ago:
Not all 3D gaming obviously (I mean they aren’t First person shooters, like most of your examples), but effectively the Action, Adventure, Platforming, etc angle (which makes up a fairly massive chunk of games today).
What I’m talking about is the fundamental gameplay of both. Online Multiplayer was revolutionary, but it wasn’t really a fundamental change to the gameplay itself (Like with Marathon introducing mouse control)
It’s interesting that you mention Tomb Raider though because that’s a perfect comparison. It was a fairly indicative of the industry as a whole with its stiff controls, static cameras, and dodgy combat.
Mario 64 brought a full range of movement and action to games. It was really the first 3D game where just moving was fun (which is why they started the game in a peaceful courtyard, they wanted you to just have a fuck about). It also brought the user controllable camera to games (It hasn’t aged well, but that camera system was amazing when it came out). Also, while it didn’t invent the Hub world (it had been used in 2D games) it pretty much set the standard for it.
OoT built on Mario64 with two major bits of gameplay. Target lock-on (Then called “Z-Targeting”) and contextual buttons. Both of which are just so fundamental to games these days it just feels obvious. More relevant back then (but not now), it created the template for how you could faithfully transition a series from 2D to 3D while perfectly maintaining the feel of the 2D series.
Now, neither of those things alone would justify it being in my Top 5. The fact that they’re both so aggressively fun and well made does that.
- Comment on Best game ever? 5 months ago:
Ocarina of Time
Yeah I know. Cliche as fuck. But for those who weren’t around when It came out, it’s really hard to describe just how absurdly revolutionary OoT was. Between it and Mario 64 (another Top 5 game for me), you essentially had the foundations of 3D gaming that are still used today.
But besides that…it’s an amazing game that I’m still replaying nearly 30 years later. Ever single complaint I have about this game is a tiny issue that has been solved in other versions (like binding the Iron Boots to the C button).
- Comment on Mastodon.online invitation if anyone wants it 5 months ago:
Well, sure I’d like to give it a look