Bougie_Birdie
@Bougie_Birdie@piefed.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Is this an anxiety disorder? 1 day ago:
That aligns with my experience. But for medical advice you really should talk to your doctor
Here’s a free online assessment for Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Here’s another one for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
If those links don’t work for whatever reason, they’re offered online free from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Filling out these forms does not constitute a diagnosis, but it gives you a starting point for talking to a doctor. Normally I advocate for people trying to self-guide their way through therapy when they can, but you really should talk to a doctor, especially if you’re having panic attacks - they’re a serious health concern.
I know it isn’t easy. The nightmares especially leave me feeling pretty fucked up. But I’m rooting for you
- Comment on What's the thing you're supposed to be doing right now instead of scrolling? 3 days ago:
I’m supposed to be taking my pills and I keep forgetting and opening a new tab instead
I guess I better eat those before I submit this comment. Call this your good deed for the day
- Comment on Has their ever been a movie or documentary that shows a person running for an office at the very beginning, the show the middle (and if they get bribed) then to the election night? 4 days ago:
Yeah, the situation’s not great
Bribery is also already legal through lobbying. That doesn’t make it right, but what are you and I going to do about it?
- Comment on Has their ever been a movie or documentary that shows a person running for an office at the very beginning, the show the middle (and if they get bribed) then to the election night? 4 days ago:
I could picture an organization bankrolling a candidate in exchange for political favours when they win.
But yeah, usually the bribery comes after the election
- Comment on Someone said I post an average of 6 posts a day. Where did they get that type of information? Not upset curious cause it's another way I can compliment others with facts about them. 5 days ago:
I remember seeing that comment. I got the impression it was pulled out of the air and wasn’t based on a calculated metric.
To be honest, I would have put your average higher, but I guess that depends on if you’re looking at the mean average, the mode, or even just a recent trend
- Comment on Why does Australia tend to ban or censor video games? 5 days ago:
I was a big fan of both games, Jacket’s the best. Talking with the tape recorder is a nice touch because I can just imagine the inner monologue
“Ah geez, I’ve got to tell them. Let’s see which tape was it again… I think it was Learning German for International Businessmen? Oh wait, it was my Spanish tape. Ah shit, rewind rewind… wait, maybe I want the B-side… Ah, here we go!”
“Ayuda!”
- Comment on I'm A Game Dev Who Got Layed Off From His Non-Game Dev Job 5 days ago:
Well, on the bright side, at least this teaches you the real value of AI is that it tells people what products to avoid:
If it wasn’t AI it would be something else though. Working for the man always sucks.
We will watch your career with great interest
- Comment on Why are so many new programming languages being developed? 1 week ago:
Each time I show up to post the relevant XKCD it’s already here. Truly an efficient service
…is there an XKCD for that?
- Comment on EA VP Urges Companies To Think About In-Game Ads During Development: ‘That’s A Huge Opportunity’ 2 weeks ago:
Honestly I’m for it. I hope all the major players adopt this so we can watch the pillars of the gaming industry collapse.
From the wreckage will be a renaissance of developers whose priority in making games is that they’re good.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
I’ve been a long time fan of the series and never took the time to learn this. I also never knew it was ported to the Saturn, so doubly neat. We’re having a two-for-one special on the fun facts today.
For a long time I held the belief that it was renamed for american audiences to play up the haunted house aspect (The RESIDENT of this abode of the damned is EVIL). Which made it all more amusing when the franchise immediately pivoted away from exploring mansions by the time the second game came out.
- Comment on Contemplating on playing a controversial developer's bought game 2 weeks ago:
You’ve got a lot of replies already advising you to play this game because you’ve already paid for it. I’ll add on to it.
I completely understand how you feel about contributing to their power. I have my own struggle with blizz because while I despise them, they make the only game that all of my friends want to get together to play. It’s infuriating.
You are correct that they get something out of you playing the game after you’ve paid for it. A video game company basically trades on sales, market presence, and monthly active users (MAU). The first two are essential to their success, but MAU is a bit trickier for them to extract value from. The strategy is that MAU is a metric by which they can curry favour with investors, or it gives them an idea how much they could earn from continuing to support the game or creating a sequel, or the potential value of crossover events.
However, MAU also comes with direct costs to the company. As you say, the game runs on their servers even when played against no human players. You cost blizz money every time you play it. That cost, honestly, is pretty negligible. But, the benefit that they get from one single active user is also negligible.
Something I think about is how difficult it can be to protest a game. The saying goes is that even bad publicity is still publicity, and this is true of games. For instance, when people talk about boycotting a game, the name of the game ends up in the news where it will have a wider reach - potentially to people who don’t care about a boycott and are hearing about a game that everyone’s talking about.
This is something that comes up in the piracy community too. A common defense of piracy is that it’s actually good for the company: people who weren’t going to pay for your game are still playing your game and talking about it. They inspire their friends and strangers to play this game, and if they really like it then they become potential customers when they can afford to do so.
My belief is that the two best ways to support a game are through purchase and word-of-mouth. You already paid for the game, so there’s nothing you can do about that. However, if you don’t want to feed the beast, the best way to deprive them would be to simply not talk about the game. Don’t name it, even to shame it
This is a rare case where keeping quiet can ease your conscience.
Is the game you’re thinking about a famous real-time strategy game? They have a few that I’m nostalgic for but I’ve never been able to get running on my computer in recent years. Modern RTS games tend to be a bit different, and they just don’t scratch the same itch. Happy to be proven wrong if someone knows some indie darling though.
- Comment on Why in America is .08 the legal limit for drunk driving? How come it's not an even 0.10? Who decided at what level being drunk starts? Then 4 beers of 12oz's is 0.08 why is it that small? 2 weeks ago:
Liquor stores being closed on the weekend always bothered me. It sounds like a minor inconvenience, but if you’re a hardcore alcoholic then being cut off from your supply for a weekend can kill you.
It feels like a thorny thing too, because like, I get their mission. Drunk driving kills people, so campaigning to stop people from getting killed feels noble. But banning substances has been proven time and time again to cause more harm than good because if people can’t get their fix safely, then they’ll get it unsafely.
A bit of a tangent, but I think about people who campaign against needle exchange programs and injection sites. They probably believe they’re doing good because it’s very easy to see how drugs can ruin lives. I think it’s also a natural but naive outlook to think that if your city is facing a drug problem then these programs can be seen as encouraging drug use.
But shutting down these programs doesn’t fix the reasons why people struggle with addiction. A person will continue to get their fix, even if that means they have to share needles, even if it means injecting in a public bathroom or at the library. Shutting down those programs makes the drug problems more visible, more dangerous, and can lead to a public health crisis. Not to mention being away from medical staff makes overdoses deadlier.
Back to booze, you can look at the Temperance movement and the Prohibition era as a fine example of when things go too far. There you had people who thought they were doing the right thing - but their actions indirectly (and sometimes directly) lead to more deaths.
Do I think MADD is going down the same road? Today, probably not. But if they keep shifting the goalposts, then who knows where their future leads?
- Comment on Settle a debate can potato's and noodles go together and taste great with sauce and other things? (I say it can) However my mother says two starches should never be cooked because it's too much. 3 weeks ago:
You have nothing to apologize for, my guy
I’m just watching the language I grew up with shift while my bones turn to dust
- Comment on Settle a debate can potato's and noodles go together and taste great with sauce and other things? (I say it can) However my mother says two starches should never be cooked because it's too much. 3 weeks ago:
it bombs pretty well
This threw me off because when I think of something that bombs it means it didn’t go over well. Unless it’s “the bomb” which means it’s “the shit” which means it’s the opposite of shit
Your mom’s soup sounds pretty sick (the good sick)
- Comment on Radicality 3 weeks ago:
Well you can’t just drop a bomb like that without backing it up
What the actual fuck is this misbegotten creature? It pumps blood into its hair, and it can break its toes to make Wolverine claws
Nature is metal
- Comment on If it were suddenly revealed that a significant number of questions posted in this comm were ai bots would that bother you? 3 weeks ago:
I see basically two nefarious reasons for bots to pretend to be people on lemmy. I can’t think of a good reason why you’d want them.
A company shilling it’s product by appearing like a regular person. Bots have already ruined user reviews for products in basically every consumer industry. The best way to discover decent products now is word-of-mouth, so I could see a bot that pretends to be a user so it can show up in recommendation threads, like in Ask Lemmy or Buy It For Life.
The propaganda potential for bot users is tremendous. Kind of like the company shilling its product but on a grander scale. This could be orchestrated by those with economic interests, like promoting car-centric culture or climate change denialism which is of great interest to the oil industry. Or it could be as grand as foreign or domestic influence interfering with elections.
The fediverse isn’t a huge place, but it’s not nothing either. Operating costs are technically lower because you wouldn’t need to use as many bots to infiltrate communities. You could even spin up your own instances so that your own bots don’t get banned. I’m not really sure how you’d go about countering this sort of problem.
- Comment on Shrinkflation hits again! 4 weeks ago:
I’ve worked for Loblaw (They own this brand, President’s Choice, and are probably Canada’s largest grocer).
They have this line of product called Always $10. It’s a package of food that’s pretty much devoid of branding except that the $10 price is part of the packaging and not a sticker. Twice a year we get planograms (a merchandising guide / map to make sure all displays across the company are the same) where we have to change all the Always $10 stuff.
It’s always the exact same product, but smaller.
Loblaw’s in the news recently for settling a class-action lawsuit over colluding with other retailers to fix the price of bread. That’s right, a bread cartel. And like, sure, a settlement isn’t an admission of guilt. But a monolith like this doesn’t settle unless they think they can lose, and they wouldn’t think they could lose unless they did a bunch of illegal shit.
- Comment on The Tale of Pangram Jeeves 4 weeks ago:
Well, pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs! Who doesn’t like a pangram?
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
This is the first I’ve heard about the reaction from BZZZT - which is a shame because I thought it was a cute game. In any industry customer feedback should be taken with as much grace as you can manage. You don’t want to alienate your community even further. Then again, with a solo developer and the sort of people this industry attracts, I’m not surprised to see an emotionally driven response to negative feedback.
I’ve dabbled in game dev, and I have to say that - especially as a solo developer - localization is an intimidating problem. Ignoring the technical concerns, for me the biggest problem is in being assured of the accuracy of the translation. Getting that right is important to me, but I don’t have a very good way of verifying that a language I don’t speak has been accurately translated. I’ve played lots of games with poor English localization and it can be quite jarring, especially when the rest of the game is quite polished.
This is a tough problem for me too, because like, accessibility is super important to me. I want everyone who wants my game to be able to play my game. But at the same time, I’m intimidated into inaction when it comes to localization. It feels paradoxical.
As far as how to localize your games, I like the community-driven approach. Sooner or later, I’ll have to take it on faith that the quality of the translation is good enough for the community, and if the community does the translating, well that makes me feel better about it. I could also see hiring a professional translator, but I’m not really sure how you vet those services, nor do I have the budget to hire them. You’ll definitely see AI grow in this area, but I’m staunchly against its use so it’s a non-starter for me.
A question for you: how do you feel when a game provides no localizations? I understand feeling slighted if other languages are included while your market is excluded, but if the game is only available in the developer’s mother tongue does that bother you too?
Okay, I’ve completely derailed that without addressing what you actually asked.
Your reasons for leaving good and bad reviews resonate with me. I feel the same way about most of them, although not being Chinese I naturally don’t have a particular draw to Chinese culture and localization. Marketers who misrepresent their games and the betrayal aspect definitely motivate me to leave a negative review.
To your point 3: I don’t automatically feel that way about my own country’s games and culture. However, I do thoroughly enjoy a game that feels culturally significant while being authentic to its people. Particularly if those stories feel deeply personal or are an underrepresented culture - especially indigenous peoples or queer stories. I also thoroughly enjoy a game that is satirical or otherwise critical of the establishment.
I’m far more likely to leave a good review than a bad one. Reasons for a bad review:
- The game is no longer playable. Either because of OS incompatibility or required online services are defunct
- The game disrespects my time. This is difficult to quantify exactly, and the things I have gripes with I could be forgiving of depending on implementation. Things like endlessly grinding to upgrade a piece of equipment that works the same but a little better, so you can now endlessly grind to upgrade it again. Constant long loading screens and other breaks in the action. Poor management of inventory/collectibles/maps
- The game grossly misrepresents what it is
If the game is good, it gets a good review. Goodness is entirely subjective. Sometimes I think about value for time/money, sometimes I think about how fun it is, and sometimes it’s about the level of polish on the little details. A game that is a joy to play is ideal, so a game that is accessible and has low friction when interacting with its systems. Bonus points for cozy games.
For me, the best reason to leave a good review is if the game evokes an emotional response. For me this is commonly a heartfelt story, or a plea for activism.
- Comment on Load me up 1 month ago:
Mozza sticks (breaded, fried cheese) are frequently seen as a restaurant appetizer
So the idea is that six string cheeses is too much food, but if you dress it up somehow it becomes a first course
- Comment on Can I trust things)/people as far as I can throw them? 1 month ago:
As confusing as it might seem, “I trust you as far as I can throw you,” and “I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you,” essentially mean the same thing.
One could probably argue that the negation is explicitly saying “I don’t trust you,” while the standard phrase implies a limited amount of trust. But in practice, throwing ability is never considered, and both mean that trust is in short supply.
- Comment on Put your seat back or no? 2 months ago:
I’m actually guilty of skipping to the end of the post, but it looks like maybe you didn’t make it that far.
The point still stands though: if one does not want to be ejected from the plane, one ought to listen to the directions of the cabin crew.
- Comment on Put your seat back or no? 2 months ago:
If the cabin crew tells you not to put your seat back, then don’t put your seat back
You don’t want to be kicked out mid-flight
- Comment on truth 2 months ago:
Actually I think you’ll find it was the chemicals in the frogs that turned the water gay
- Comment on Is it weird that I cringe whenever someone calls my name and I avoid using peoples names when talking to them? 2 months ago:
When I worked in sales, it was in our training to try to use the customers’ name once you found it. It was supposed to establish a rapport, but it always felt forced and manipulative to me.
I bet it was one of those things where there was a study or focus group that suggested it increased sales or customer satisfaction. I also bet it’s one of those old business stories that hearkens back to the 60’s, or the sample size was tiny, or it was some CEO spouting bullshit that was taken as fact. My point being that it’s one of those oft-repeated sales techniques that may not be based in reality.
Even if it’s a real thing and statistically more people either like it or don’t notice it: I always found it super alienating and I know I’m not alone in that opinion. When I notice someone using too many of these little psychological tricks, I’ve gone to shop elsewhere because I just don’t trust those people.
When I call into a call center, I try to close the conversation by repeating your name. Like “Thanks early_riser, you were a big help today.” I hate the phone, so I probably don’t actually want to talk to you again (no offense), but somehow that feels more human to me.
Then again, I’m also paranoid that I misheard your name at the start of the conversation. I hope you don’t take it too personally if I call you Thagomizer because it sounds similar.
- Comment on What is the point of abbreviations for short words when they do not reduce times significantly when you type? 3 months ago:
IPA is also the International Phonetic Alphabet.
I’m all for recycling, but sometimes it feels like it never ends.
- Comment on What is the point of abbreviations for short words when they do not reduce times significantly when you type? 3 months ago:
I thought spelling ‘through’ was tough enough though
To a non-native reader (and maybe a few natives) that sentence is insane. It makes more sense as “I thot spelling ‘thru’ was tuff enuff tho,” although I admit I don’t like that very much either.
Aside, if something gets abbreviated a certain way enough times, it might become the word. Like when you want to get dinner at the drive-thru. Also, nobody wants pornography anymore, we’re all into porn now.
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Not exactly what you’re asking, but I have a peeve about acronyms. I suppose acronyms are a kind of abbreviation for common phrases, but often people assume you know the same acronyms as them and start throwing them out like some kind of word salad.
It’s not very hard to make sure everyone is on the same page with whatever TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) you want to use. See how easy that was? Now when I want to talk about my issue with rampant abuse of TLAs, you have an idea what I’m talking about.
You see this problem a lot in academia, software, and honestly probably any industry or hobby space. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s totally fine to use TLAs, brevity is useful in reading and writing. But sometimes those acronyms overlap with other acronyms and add to the confusion. Searching for shows with the BBC might get you the British Broadcasting Company - or pornography. Or if you’re looking for an Automated Teller Machine near you - and get porn again instead. Gosh, is there anything porn can’t do?
Some acronyms are so ubiquitous that it feels silly to define them. Like everyone knows what LOL means, right? Well, unless you’re talking about League of Legends. Or you’re my grandmother who never learned it means “Laugh Out Loud” and signs all of her letters LOL because she thinks it means “Lots Of Love”
- Comment on the more you know 3 months ago:
Split it, lick it, dip it
- Comment on Don't be a coward 4 months ago:
Some grocery stores only give a staff discount on certain days of the week. But the five-finger discount works every day
- Comment on Arc raiders is a horrible game 6 months ago:
I respect that it’s a populat format, but as soon as a game has both PvE and PvP the game is just PvP in my opinion.
I don’t like most PvP games, so seeing both tags scares me off of most titles.
Sometimes you’ll see a game like that where you can disable PvP, or host a private lobby, or some other compromise. Most of the time doing so reveals just how shallow the PvE content really is
