skulblaka
@skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on YSK: There's an easy way to make retro game memes 22 hours ago:
I can’t imagine what might have given it away.
- Comment on YSK: There's an easy way to make retro game memes 23 hours ago:
- Comment on Stardew Valley dethrones Valve classic as Steam’s top-rated game 6 days ago:
I buy things in early access for just such a reason. If it looks like something I’ll like, I’ll buy it early to support development. If it’s great then great. If it falls through then I’m out a bad investment of like, $10.
I’ve got probably a hundred indie games in my library that I’ve supported in exactly such a fashion, from raw pre-alpha to 1.0 release to post-release content update or dlc. They aren’t all winners. But many of them were worth the cost of investment and then some.
- Comment on Stardew Valley dethrones Valve classic as Steam’s top-rated game 6 days ago:
Less AAA trash fires and better access to actual passion projects because they aren’t being drowned in a sea of mediocrity?
This is an absolute win on all sides
- Comment on Robot performs first realistic surgery without human help: System trained on videos of surgeries performs like an expert surgeon 6 days ago:
More than the doctors? No, absolutely not.
More than the bean counters who want to replace these doctors with unsupervised robots? I’m a lot more confident on that one.
- Comment on Lo-Fi Games know you've spent a billion hours with Kenshi, so they're working on making the sequel's discoveries even less predictable 1 week ago:
From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s basically a sandbox. Imagine if F:NV had no main quest but allowed you to create your own faction. You’re just unleashed onto the wasteland to do whatever and let everyone else respond to it.
That is to say, much of the fun comes from building drug running bandit empires.
- Comment on Tech support 'trained monkey’ fixed problem with two fingers 1 week ago:
I’ve never met this man in my life and I am 100% confident it was the latter.
- Comment on Welcome to petty lane 1 week ago:
You ever tried to pull over an entire freeway full of cars at once?
- Comment on Yep, I actually own 7,255 games on Steam. I’ve played 23% of my library. I regret nothing. 1 week ago:
[…] because they don’t allow you to run older versions of games.
They do if the dev makes it available, I’m looking at four different versions of Terraria in the beta menu right now that stretch back four major versions. I’m pretty sure a couple games in my library somewhere have their entire update history in there, though I can’t think of one to name off the top of my head right now, that’s not a feature I use very often.
This is not true of all games, but it could be, either directly by game devs without Valve even having to care, or via pressure by Valve by just making older versions available whether the devs want it or not. I think the latter option is probably the better move, but there’s technically nothing stopping the former other than the game devs themselves.
There’s also a valid argument that making downpatching very easy would be a huge boon to piracy. This is a reasonable talking point no matter which side of that fence you sit on. It would also probably benefit modding as well, which I think is a more objective good but some game developers or more likely publishers would probably disagree.
- Comment on Yep, I actually own 7,255 games on Steam. I’ve played 23% of my library. I regret nothing. 1 week ago:
Family share is actually great for this now.
It used to be that if anyone in the group was playing any game it would lock you out of playing anything else on the main account without kicking them off.
But they eased up on it now so you can both play at the same time as long as you aren’t playing the same game at the same time.
So just make a burner account for you or for your kids and family share the library to it and now you don’t even have to go offline unless everyone in the house wants to play BG3 simultaneously.
- Comment on Elden ring night reign single player 1 week ago:
Regular enemies fall over like wet tissue, yeah.
Big boss fights in particular (and some of those in particular, in particular, looking at you Maris and/or Gnoster) often have either a gigantic AoE attack that is very difficult to dodge when you’re the only source of aggro, or else charge across the entire arena after every attack and have you spend half an hour in the fight, 27 minutes of which was spent just chasing the guy across the map. Not impossible, but very annoying.
But 90% of what makes coop easier in my opinion is just having a spare body around that can pull aggro so you can heal. Elden Ring base bosses were designed around being able to be beaten solo so they usually have big wide windows where you can get a breather if you need it. Nightreign bosses have much less of that because they expect you to be running 3 deep. Nerfing their defenses helps with the solo DPS race but it doesn’t really solve the problem that these fights were designed from the ground up for a team who is able to rotate aggro. Nightreign bosses were designed with a sort of raid-boss mentality.
I think if this game were going to be appropriately balanced for single player they would need to go in and edit a lot of the main bosses’ movesets. But that was never part of Nightreign’s design philosophy and trying to shoehorn it in now isn’t doing them any favors in my opinion. This is the equivalent of a World of Warcraft player complaining that they can’t solo all the endgame raid bosses. Sure, you can’t. They weren’t designed to be fought solo. We could try to nerf them down to the point that you can fight them solo, but then it’s no longer a raid boss, you’ve lost the essence of why people wanted to come to this fight in the first place.
Also, are the enemies designed for multiplayer, except in scaling? Everything I’ve seen looks like standard Fromsoft stuff, no weird abilities that just fuck over solo players.
Compare base game Morgott and Nightreign Morgott and I think you’ll see what I mean here. Boss enemies are much more cracked out with longer combos and shorter downtime than in Elden Ring proper, because the developers expect you to be trading aggro with your teammates to give yourself a heal break.
- Comment on Elden ring night reign single player 2 weeks ago:
I’ve played quite a lot of Nightreign.
In co-op you have fully infinite lives, your teammates can pick you up at any time and even if they fail to do so you’ll respawn back at a grace. If you fall over in a boss fight you have an unlimited timer to be picked back up and automatically rez at the end of the fight even if they don’t do it.
In solo you’re fighting a boss intended for 3 players and if you die twice the game is over completely.
Co-op, even with randoms, is much much easier by an order of magnitude. I’m usually a solo player in most games and thought this would be awful for me, it isn’t at all. Map pings are plenty of communication for most matches. It is, however, definitely better with friends on a voice call.
- Comment on Kids are making deepfakes of each other, and laws aren’t keeping up 2 weeks ago:
You’d think so, right?
- Comment on Kids are making deepfakes of each other, and laws aren’t keeping up 2 weeks ago:
We’re at 56 pages of this now for a nice round count of 1400 charges
So far as I am aware all of these are publicly searchable court cases
- Comment on What are the games you played in your youth that you still play today? 2 weeks ago:
My DnD DM talked about this constantly for like a year straight, so I haven’t played it but I can vouch for it being a good time for old wowheads.
- Comment on What are the games you played in your youth that you still play today? 2 weeks ago:
Ayyy ToME oldhead gang represent. Been playing since about 2014 myself.
The modding community is what really kept breathing life into that game for me for so long. I’m hoping once we finally see the next (final?) DLC expansion that the modders will pick the game back up again. It’s been very stagnant for a couple of years now, presumably waiting for DG to release his expansion like a sudden kraken as is tradition. But it’s been 2 years now since the last update (which was primarily a scaffolding update for the Lost Lands content to come) and I imagine everyone who would be otherwise interested is now hanging in a limbo of not wanting to start work on a project when DG might drop a major update at literally any time and invalidate a bunch of your work.
Even just the regular base game kept me playing for years and years though. Solid 10/10 freeware game. I used to bounce between ToME and DCSS (also freeware, also recommend, this one actually gets regular updates) pretty regularly and that kept me covered on dungeon crawling roguelikes for the better part of a decade. I still keep coming back to them on occasion though, I’ve played a bit of both of those games within the last 2 weeks.
- Comment on What are the games you played in your youth that you still play today? 2 weeks ago:
My_House.wad has been making the rounds on YouTube semi-recently as an example of the sort of fuckery that has been made possible by the progression of doom modding.
If you’re not familiar with it, do yourself and go in blind for an hour or so and then only look up a video when you’re stuck.
- Comment on I'm doing my part 3 weeks ago:
Sure, maybe. But my yard has frogs and fireflies in it and my neighbors’ don’t. That seems pretty empirical to me.
- Comment on The Elder God 3 weeks ago:
I’ve begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It’s there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, I don’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to ‘God’ are all answered at about the same 50% rate.
- George Carlin
- Comment on It's interesting that gun rights were sold on the basis of "resisting unlawful government." They seen to have caused unlawful government. 3 weeks ago:
Steve Bannon, as much of a piece of shit as he is, had a good plan and executed it well. He’s talked about it openly. This has been brewing for decades, at least.
- Comment on xkcd #3104: Tukey 3 weeks ago:
Oh I keep this one memorized.
[Mr. Madison,] What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
I’ve successfully used this twice in DnD and once in real life.
- Comment on Good job 5 weeks ago:
I’ve been using Fences for like 10 years with roll-up containers. Now that I’ve switched to Linux actually having icons on my desktop again is kind of driving me nuts.
Do you know of an alternative?
- Comment on ICE thugs pounced on a man right there in the courthouse, mere minutes after his immigration case was dismissed 5 weeks ago:
They aren’t agents unless they have a badge and a warrant. Failing to produce those means you are being assaulted by unknown assailants. Your freedom and life are already in danger at that point and you have a legal right to self defense.
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 5 weeks ago:
Fair enough, you got me there. Didn’t realize there was such a population of internet craving people in what’s supposed to be one of the last relatively untouched areas of nature on the planet.
That being the case though, why didn’t this all happen in 2013, when O3b launched to specifically solve this problem for them? It’s still running, by the way, after several rounds of upgrades, and significantly more stable than Starlink with their dinky little 5 year disposables. Microsoft, Honeywell and Amazon all use it. But the original and ongoing intent of the project was explicitly to bring internet access to all otherwise unreachable areas, such as islands, deep in Africa, and the open ocean.
I don’t oppose Brazilian villagers having internet if they want it, but the situation in which it arrived to them feels suspect to me. I have no proof that Starlink actively went out and pushed internet service onto them like a drug dealer but it would not be out of character for Musk and his subordinates to do so, and that just feels bad.
Regardless there is already an existing solution to this. If you want internet in the Amazon you can use satellite internet. It does not have to be Starlink. If you want good internet, maybe don’t live in the Amazon. People in general should probably be leaving that place alone. The article you linked even talks about one of the village leaders splitting his time between the village and the city. We can try and run a fiber line to Manaus and/or Porto Velho and that should be able to serve a reasonably large enough area around them, but even if that fails there are already other solutions.
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 5 weeks ago:
People paying for internet service don’t live in the Amazon rainforest
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 5 weeks ago:
But they specifically don’t want to do that because ensuring a 5 year service life means you are required to continue buying more satellites from them every 5 years. Literally burning resources into nothingness just to pursue a predatory subscription model.
It also helps their case that LEO has much lower latency than mid or high orbit but I refuse to believe that that is their primary driving concern behind this and not the former.
- Comment on How to hold onto a subway pole 1 month ago:
- Comment on Amazing. 1 month ago:
Lost my job around 2017 and it was real difficult to get a new one in the tech sector without a college degree. I lucked in to the one originally through professional connections. No such luck the next time after I got downsized.
So I ended up working at my local auto parts store to make ends meet in the meantime, and figured out that I actually really like fixing cars. It exercises the same sort of problem solving capacity but the problems you solve are usually a little less arcane. Made a few new connections including a guy who worked at an actual garage, got offered a position at that garage if I wanted it, and the rest is history.
I still dabble in programming as a hobby, but I enjoy working with my hands and the feeling of fixing a physical object is more fulfilling to me than fixing software. So here I stay (for now).
- Comment on Amazing. 1 month ago:
I used to be a programmer and now I fix cars professionally, I feel like half of my professional life has been gazing upon some ancient work of dark magic and cussing loudly because I know I’m about to have to go in.
The line between jank and wizardry is sometimes blurry. The best magic has a little bit of jank in it, and the worst jank is sometimes a little bit magical.
- Comment on Four New N64 Recompiled and Ported Games Coming "Soon"! 1 month ago:
You would have fought him in Brannoch Castle shortly before finding Beigis and Bartholomew and going to Mammon’s World.
