[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago

Not a single post about Prey (2017), the Arkane's immersive sim gem set aboard the Talos I space station orbiting the Moon? I expected more of you, people!

Prey is a wonderful game. I think it wouldn't lie make a mistake by designating it an RPG and an immersive sim, given its various skills (that are actually more than a few stat changes here and there - they affect, dictate the way you play the game), the multitude of ways you can approach so many things from puzzles to locations where you're supposed to be to pretty much any in-game decision.

Prey's world is rather small, but in the best way possible - it's a space station, called Talos I, orbiting the Earth's only moon (the Moon), doing some bleeding edge scientific research thanks to its diverse crew of the very best people Earth could send there. Talos I itself is split into different sections, each with its own purpose, making them unique locations with their own dangers and breath-taking sights; some interiors are spacious and let you navigate the level in stealthy ways, avoiding the hostiles entirely (if you have the wits!), and some are narrower, but many still offer you an alternate path to your destination if you look hard enough.

Prey lets you do stuff. You don't like crawling in silence, trying to stay away from a fight until you hoover up every resource you can to make you "ready" to face the enemy? Go gun blazing - there's no shortage of unique lethal tech at your disposal! You want to play a certain role, like be a mad menace to society? Feel free to murder everything you see, either with your own hands or by letting them die another brutal death! You want to be a true video game hero, saving each and every one? Roll your sleeves and get to work, because there sure is some saving to do!

Prey is the game where you think you know what's going on, but you actually don't. There will be surprises, and there will be moments of awe, and they're all just done so well.

And last, but not least, is its magnificent soundtrack by Mick Gordon. The game looks gorgeous, and sometimes can give you some spooks, but the music completes the puzzle, setting its eerie atmosphere.

It's a game you will likely play more than once to experience everything it has to offer. The game does not force you to do this or that, it does not explicitly tell you what skills to pick to be a good person, and it does not block one path if you've already taken another one, but you sure will experience the call of curiosity: "What if I chose only that?" Whatever you choose, you have the ability to craft yourself a unique playthrough, each equally interesting and viable.

10

I was pretty excited to join and hold the boycott against Reddit in its entirely on the 12th of June... right up until I realized that Starfield Direct was going to take place on the 11th, effectively preventing me from reading though the posts of people over-analyzing the details and frames to be seen in the showcase itself.

So far I haven't been able to find a place dedicated to the place outside Reddit, and that's not gonna be enough to warrant a simple get-in/get-out from me.

Is there any other place that is mostly or entirely dedicated to Starfield, preferably active one, too? I think I'm going to okay with anything as long as it's not the subreddit, but please feel free to leave notes on why some places should be ignored/actively avoided due to their policies as well.

[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

Something similar drove me off 4chan'd /b/ back in the day. At some point, it became absolutely not random, but simply dedicated to various porn - porn that surely had their own board, which made me even more confused as to why post it in a place that is specifically made for basically uncategorised content that shouldn't fit anywhere else.

[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago

I don't know when they introduced it, but at some point, in some servers, I noticed a new channel type: forum. The fact that this is a thing is the greatest proof that Discord is not the end all, be all solution to communication.

Nothing is, really. One thing I really enjoyed about the 00s web was its diversity, because different things had different places and different formats, and the ever-lasting stakeholder grasp wasn't as successful at trying to put people in one place to show them ads and drive engagement to please the statistics gazers.

[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

Not to mention that the discussion is almost guaranteed to consist of similarly short (or even shorter) witty one-liners. Twitter format is just horrible, and its restrictions promote equally horrible behavior where you have to look for ways to convey ideas and feeling in a short manner, which almost never results in more polite and sophisticated conversations.

Never used Twitter for anything more serious than some announcements from the game devs I follow. Anything else is just plain stupid, which makes me really surprised over the wide-spread adoption of Twitter by officials and ministries and the like.

And raising the character limit is going to be even more absurd, because then it's going to be reminiscent of an actual forum, just less structured and sensible.

Twitter, as a format, is the worst option between messengers like Matrix and proper forums of any kind.

[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 32 points 1 year ago

It's called programmer humor for a reason: we're just using established libraries instead of inventing a bicycle from scratch.

[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

I'd love it. I don't hate the UI as it currently is, but I'd definitely appreciate some features, like the hotkeys RES has, or a tighter UI in general, with less padding and space between elements.

To be fair, tweaking the UI is surely in my power and skillset, but UI is surely my least favorite part of development as a whole.

[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago

Nothing, really. I've been daily driving Linux for years, couldn't be happier. ;)

I still agree that Linux and FOSS in general is political, honestly. Not because I want to say "what isn't political?", but because a lot of things about Linux and FOSS stand for privacy, freedom, transparency, responsibility, accountability, voluntary effort that benefits others (it can benefit you as well, though), etc. - all of these things seem to me like a piece of political discussion at least to some degree.

The most important point about this, though, is the fact that being political does not necessarily mean that Linux or FOSS has to enforce some kind of opinion among its users or community or around its discussion. You're right in saying it's just a technology, but it doesn't mean that using Linux or FOSS isn't a political decision - even (or especially) if your sole reason to run Linux is money.

I used to get really pissed at people who considered everything to be political, but these days, I think I agree, because everything you like or don't like about your life (including the tech you use) is influenced by politics, so you do discuss it one way or the other in most conversations. Especially tech, though.

[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

Eh, I liked the fact that Reddit has boilerplate rules for everyone to follow, basically. I know a lot of that is ignored, but it's not a bad idea.

The coolest thing about having all that federated is the non-monolithic approach. Different instances can kinda be seen like different backups, especially during the first waves of power users happily self-hosting instances. Everybody wins when there's a healthy balance between what kind of power the everymen and the more powerful ones have. Not that there's some looming overseer for Lemmy, but the point remains.

[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Holy shit, I thought I was alone in the big gaming world!

The reason I never played it is because at the time the game was out, my PC couldn't handle it, so I gave up after my sad attempts to sit through the unplayable frames. And by the time I upgraded, there were simply too many games to steal my attention entirely - that's how it been ever since.

I want to play it, though. I never considered it boring - I liked it even when I wasn't that interested in fantasy, and now I'm gravitating even more towards it. Hope to get my hands down to it one day, but with Starfield (hopefully) coming out this year, and with The Outer Worlds to beat before that happens, I think I'm not slaying any dragons any time soon.

[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Exactly! Screens are so big now, they should pack so much real estate, but they just don't most of the time, and it's not even because of human eyesight limitations.

[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 29 points 1 year ago

Man, this whole API thing really makes me think of how much of a shithole the web is, still after all those years.

I basically have to buy a keyboardless laptop with an awkward resolution if I have to buy a smartphone, all because the software for it is less than optimized crap that mostly just spies on you for the sake of ad revenue, and then leaves garbage all over the system it barely ever cleans up. A wonderful package for a multi-core, multi-threaded CPU paired with at least 3 GB RAM (if that's even enough today) that you almost certainly can't use with any comfort to browse the web because almost no one who pays big money to their devs cares that these devs build a proper mobile version of the website - which is part of nearly every webdev interview anyway, and for what, just to make me download the app anyway? What a fucking joke, honestly.

Web on desktop is just as much of a disgrace for all the bloat.

[-] sailsperson@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago

I don't want to sound like an elitist, but I guess I will regardless: the most important number of people simply don't care.

I think it's safe to say that the people who will be affected by the new API pricing and other decisions, as well as the people who want to protest at least some of it at least somehow (be it boycotting for a few days or migrating to fediverse in any capacity) are simply not the demographic that the Reddit board really cares about. Not necessarily because they're evil, anti-privacy, Machiavellian moneybags (they still are), but because Reddit is a business, a big one, and big businesses care about money more than anything else.

I'm not really optimistic about the boycott and any other aftermath. I think the best we'll see is influx of users on lemmy and other instances, which is good, but that's about it, and I'm fine with it.

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sailsperson

joined 1 year ago