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submitted 7 months ago by loobkoob@kbin.social to c/dadjokes@lemmy.world

...people had to weave their own sigourneys by hand?

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submitted 7 months ago by loobkoob@kbin.social to c/uk_politics@feddit.uk

Ex-health minister Dan Poulter who also works as a hospital doctor, says Conservatives have become ‘nationalist party of the right’

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 95 points 7 months ago

Honestly, most "ugly" people can be reasonably attractive if they get in shape, eat healthily (especially in a way that clears up their skin) and style themselves (clothes, hair, etc) in a way that suits them. Plus finding good angles and lighting for photos/videos, and building up some confidence and charisma for in-person interactions. Those things aren't necessarily easy and they take patience and commitment, but most people can easily go up a few points on an attractiveness/10 scale if they manage them.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 82 points 8 months ago

They're both certainly people who know how to burn bridges when they see them.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 73 points 9 months ago

$14m seems far too low:

  • 40 years at $350,000 per year
  • 480 months at $29,170 per month
  • 14,600 days at $960 per day

Those don't sound too bad until you get to:

  • 350,400 hours at $40 per hour.

$40 an hour in exchange for losing most of your life - and the vast majority of your best years - is a fucking disgrace.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 62 points 9 months ago

It's not just about AI in Firefox, but rather making an open-sourced AI in general. The world is absolutely heading towards AI integrations being normal; personally I'm glad we've got Mozilla working on an AI rather than being limited to closed-source AIs made by for-profit companies.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 90 points 10 months ago

"Landed gentry" was a social class of people who owned estates and, well, land. They didn't have to work; they made their income by profiting off the work of the farm hands, merchants, etc, who worked on their land. The estates these landed gentry owned, along with their wealth, would be passed down to their children when they died. It meant the gentry did very little to earn their station in life, but still had a fair amount of power and wealth.

How spez thinks it applies to Reddit mods, I'm not entirely sure. But he definitely meant it as an insult. His full quote was:

And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.

So I guess he was upset that mod teams get to select who else is a good fit to join the mod team? Of course, the issue is that he is the landed gentry - users didn't vote for him, nor can they remove him; and he's profiting off the work of the people who post content and the people who spend their time moderating.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 64 points 11 months ago

Nah, Scott Adams is a hateful bigot. He thinks black people are a "hate group" - he truly went off the rails.

I don't really think this comic reflects its author's personal views at all. C&H has always been filled with shock comedy, black comedy, deliberate insensitivity, and silly puns, and everything is a target. This one doesn't really stand out as any different to how the comic's always been.

I don't really feel like there's ever really been a right-wing slant to these comics either. And I say that as someone who's ardently left-wing.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 63 points 1 year ago

It's not just a thing in fiction either; I've seen plenty of threads and discussions over the years where real-life sex workers have essentially been saying the same thing. A lot of men are lonely.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 75 points 1 year ago

Well I'm just glad Harry Mack managed to release his 100th episode of "Omegle Bars" this week. He decided to take a break from doing Omegle-based content at the right time, it seems.

For anyone who doesn't know, Harry Mack's a freestyle rapper. He has (had) a series where he'd ask strangers on Omegle to give him a handful of words and then create a full song out of them on the fly. And not just saying those words then immediately moving on like most freestyle rappers do; he actually creates entire verses on the topics he's given and really raps around them. Plus he'd be calling out things the people were doing as they react to him, responding to things they say, mentioning things he can see in the room, etc, as he raps.

Here's one of his freestyles that's really stuck with me ever since I first saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehcA4zCeaPI

He takes what are some fairly negative, "cry for help" words from the girls and turns them into a really beautiful, positive rap overall. He's a very positive guy in general, and I've watched him consistently since I discovered him. Binging his videos got me through a breakup, in fact.


My own experiences with Omegle have either been penises or just bland, and it's not something I've used for many years as a result. But videos like Harry Mack's show what wonderful things could come from it and I do think it's a huge shame it's gone. It feels like another part of the old internet's gone, and that we're moving even closer to the sanitised, heavily-monetised internet run by megacorporations. I hate that.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 97 points 1 year ago

The idea that only having a €15M budget is what caused this game's issues is ridiculous. It's not a game that had good ideas and just failed to execute them properly; it's fundamentally bad on a conceptual level.

The setting and story concept are bad. When the game was first announced, I don't think I heard or saw a single discussion where someone was excited to experience playing through the story of Gollum in that time period in the story. Or even playing as Gollum at all - he's a great secondary character in the books and films, but he's hardly a character you want to play as in a video game. There's no room for character development either.

The game design is bad. It's just bad. No amount of time, money or polish is going to fix the terrible basic design principles the game is built on. And even if they had 10x the budget and hired a world-class lead game designer from the start, it still would have the issues with the story and character.

The whole project is one that shouldn't have left the brainstorming session it was conceived in.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 247 points 1 year ago

This makes me sad. Not just because of what happened with reddit, but because I'm still missing that high-brow discussion. Most of my reddit comments were replies to other people, rather than top-level comments, and I spent more time reading comment sections than I did looking at the content they were discussing.

I like it here, but I don't feel like I come across the depth of content I did on reddit. I don't mind the lower quantity - that's expected on a small platform - but I'm definitely not enjoying the lower quality. Most of the activity seems to be around memes and American politics, neither of which particularly interest me, and most of the comments across most posts feel fairly unsubstantial. It's so much rarer for me to find something I want to reply to on here than it was on reddit.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 115 points 1 year ago

It's not only about being tired enough to fall asleep early. If I stick to a 10pm-6am sleep schedule I feel exhausted during the day, and by early afternoon I'll be falling asleep. It's like being jetlagged permanently; my body simply doesn't want to keep to that schedule. It's not just an "oh, you need to stick to the schedule long enough to adapt and get into a proper routine" situation either - it's something I struggled with for years while I was in school and university, despite getting enough sleep.

It's amazing how much better and more energetic I feel - physically and mentally - now I'm able to keep to a sleep schedule that suits me. Obviously exercising is a good thing, but early/delayed sleep phase syndrome are real things.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 141 points 1 year ago

This is stupid. I have no love for Overwatch or Blizzard - I've been boycotting them for years, in fact. But there are far, far worse games on Steam than OW2. The fact that, to my knowledge, it runs properly, doesn't have crypto miners built into it, and isn't just made from stolen assets already puts it at like a 5/10 at minimum.

I'm all for consumers standing up for themselves and being critical or poor products, but I really wish people wouldn't get caught up in these hate bandwagons.

37

I'm sure we've all played at least one survival game at this point, right? Minecraft. Valheim. Subnautica. Project Zomboid. ARK: Survival Evolved. Don't Starve. The list goes on.

So what makes something a "survival game"? Well, surviving, of course! The player will often have limited resources - food, water, stamina, oxygen - that will drain over time. They will have to secure more of these resources to survive by venturing out into the (often hostile) world, while also collecting other resources in order to progress.

Survive and progress are the two key objectives here. What progressing looks like can vary from game to game. Some are sandbox games where you set your own objectives. Some have technology trees to work through. Some have stories. All of them have some kind of balance between surviving and progressing. Too much focus on moment-to-moment survival and you'll never feel like you're getting anywhere; too much focus on progression and the survival mechanics feel sidelined.

I'll start with the latter. Minecraft is a perfect example of this, I think. For the first hour or so in a brand new world, surviving will be something the player has to focus on at (almost) all times. Food will feel scarce, enemies will feel scary and you really have to focus solely on survival. But then, after a while, you'll reach a point where you're got plenty of food and don't have to worry about it any more. You'll have decent armour and weapons so fighting monsters isn't risky at all. The survival aspect of the game becomes something you only really engage with when you're forced to - because your hunger bar is empty, because a monster is attacking you and you want it to go away - but it's more of a tedium than a system that's exciting or interesting to engage with. In fact, the more you progress (whatever your version of "progressing" is - building cool things, exploring, etc), the less engaging the survival aspect of the game generally is.

And on the flip side, you have something like Don't Starve. The game is all about survival, with the goal largely being simply to survive as long as possible, with very little in the way of non-survival progression. To its critics, this is to its detriment; the player rarely feels like they're making much progress, just prolonging their suffering. This is, of course, the tone the game is going for, but it doesn't make for engaging gameplay for many people. It doesn't have something they can get invested in - there's no reason to survive.

I've largely been talking about the negative aspects of survival mechanics so far, but I do feel they can have positive, interesting aspects to them as well. They can add to a game's immersion, for one. They can certainly make for great, personalised stories, too; not tailored narratives, but the sort of individual, one-off experience in a sandbox game that you remember. For example, you didn't just build a simple house...

You went on a dangerous journey into the forest to the west to get some wood. You'd just finished chopping the last tree you needed when a wolf pounced on you. Lucky you'd found that old, manky leather armour earlier, eh? You managed to kill it (with your bare hands after your spear broke) but you were losing blood and had to limp back to base with your lumber. You didn't have any medicine so you fashioned some from some plant fibre you'd collected - not ideal but it stemmed the bleeding for now. And at least you had enough wood to get some walls up around your cabin.

That's the kind of story made out of mundane events (well, "mundane" when it comes to video games anyway...) that you can only experience in survival games. Because in a game where you're not as invested in surviving, that sort of situation has far less impact. This leads nicely to my next point: there needs to be a cost to not surviving. The steeper the cost, the more invested in survival the player will be:

  • the ultimate "cost" is a hardcore world/character, where the player loses all their progress if they die. I personally find this a little excessive, especially in games that are often already on the grindy side.
  • a lesser cost is perhaps losing some XP, or losing all the items your character was carrying at the time. It's a great motivation to avoid death, but it isn't too punishing. It's nothing you can't bounce back from, at least.
  • an interesting mention here is games like Rimworld or State Of Decay 2. You control a community of characters, each one having different stats and attributes. If a character dies, their death is permanent. It sucks, and it's almost always a major setback for your colony. But it also makes you really value each character's survival. And a character dying becomes part of your story in the game. It's woven into both the gameplay - you have to figure out how to adapt going forward without that colony member - and the history of the colony.

If there's no real cost to not surviving, there's no real reason to engage with the survival mechanics in the first place. None of it matters. If you can die, but 30 seconds later you've reloaded the game and can just carry on from where you were, can you really get that invested in the survival mechanics in the first place?

So what's the right balance? It's hard to say - it depends on the game! How deep and complex a game's survival mechanics are and what its progression looks like definitely affect what will feel right. But I think that, if a game is going to include survival mechanics, there should be an effort to make them interesting and rewarding (if not fun) throughout the entire game. If they can't be interesting and rewarding, players shouldn't be made to engage with the mechanics at all, and it should just be a problem that players can solve instead. And there needs to be more to the game than just surviving. There needs to be goals available - narrative, creative or otherwise - that give the player a reason to survive.

The process of surviving itself needs to feel interesting throughout the duration of the game. You need a reason to survive (something to work towards) and you need a reason to not die (some form of cost or punishment).

So do any games actually manage all this? I'm not sure... Subnautica probably comes the closest for me, personally. It does a great job of constantly pushing you to progress, but the more you progress, the more scary things get and the harsher the conditions you need to survive become. The survival mechanics are not just relevant but central throughout the entire game, but you rarely feel like they take too much focus away from the rest of the game.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

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loobkoob

joined 2 years ago