queerlilhayseed

@queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox Player Voice Quickly Reveals What Players Want Most⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I could have worded that more clearly. I’m not saying consoles are themselves profitable, but that shipping consoles is the first step in building the captive audience that buys the games, accessories, live services, etc. that make consoles profitable. That vendor lock-in allows console makers to then milk buyers for the entire lifetime of the console.

If consoles were more like PCs i.e. anyone could play any game from any studio that cared to publish for the platform, console makers would have to focus on making their hardware stand out on its own. Which is particularly funny because, at least back when I was buying console gear (xbox 360 / beginning of the xbone was about the era I fell away from consoles) Microsoft was actually making really good peripherals. I still have my 360 controllers and I break them out for PC games whenever I have a bunch of people in the same room. they’re nice to use.

Instead, we get profit-maximizing tactics like taking a game that people want and putting it behind a several-hundred-dollar paywall, forcing people to either pony up for another 99% redundant console, or not playing the fun game everyone else has. No judgement to those who choose the latter, I bought the original xbox because Halo looked fun and my friends were playing it and guess what? It is a really fun game. I still play it from time to time. I just like it a lot better now that I don’t have to buy another expensive hunk of proprietary hardware.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ultimate Chicken Horse - 10th Annifursary Update (and sale)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
This may be my favorite party game of all time. Exceptional concept, exceptional execution. Really solid balancing mechanics that don’t feel artificial because they’re (mostly) not. Really well designed graphics that still read pretty well when the screen is overcrowded, which happens often in this game (by design). Also, super cute graphics, I think. I main raccoon but I love all of them.

It’s set the standard of “casual couch / voicechat multiplayer” for me.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox Player Voice Quickly Reveals What Players Want Most⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Because console makers make money by selling consoles, and exclusive titles are bait meant to entice players to buy into the platform? It seems like it lines up really well with how Xbox makes its money, but I don’t see how players benefit at all.

I’m not saying every comment is fake; I’m sure some people on that forum genuinely feel strongly about Halo or whatever remaining an Xbox exclusive, but that can’t possibly be their number one most important thing they want Xbox to do. I don’t have any evidence but my gut says there’s some skullduggery going on. I don’t think it would be too hard for Microsoft to manipulate a forum they control either, and the incentives seem pretty clearly aligned with Microsoft. It’s just very convenient for them that this article exists.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox Player Voice Quickly Reveals What Players Want Most⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
This reeks of manipulation. Console makers have an interest in making exclusives look attractive to studios. Players are interested in exclusives because… why? If you already have an Xbox why do you care if a title is exclusive or not? I don’t
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there anything still on comparable to Steven Colbert?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I think people underrate the other hosts on that show. Desi Lydic, Jordan Klepper, and Josh Johnson are all outstanding. Store brand Rob Riggle guy is OK.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there anything still on comparable to Steven Colbert?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Seth Meyers. I actually think he’s a better late-night host than Colbert, though I like them both. Seth is much more willing to let his staff take risks and do silly experiments that may or may not work. I think landing the Late Show gig infected Colbert with “Smart White Guy Whose Success Renders Him Unable to Smell His Own Farts” syndrome. Not that he’s not a talented comedian, he is, but after the show found its footing it started to feel pretty same-y to me.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What character is the king of plot armor?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Been a while since I’ve watched Archer but didn’t he die several times? At least once I think.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What character is the king of plot armor?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I think HP is a strong contender. Plot armor as a concept exists because character-centric stories need their characters to stay alive in order to keep telling the story, so the character survives against unbelievable odds because the character has to live to advance the plot, even if it doesn’t make for a credible story.

That’s your everyday, ignoble, garden-variety plot armor. HP is on another level because his plot armor isn’t just in service to the plot, his inevitable survival and triumph over Voldemort is also a central component of the actual plot of the series*. If that doesn’t make him the king of plot armor, it at least merits some title of plot armor nobility.

* I’m like 80% sure. It’s been a few years and IIRC, the reasons Potter survived and triumphed were hard to tease out. Rowling is many things, but one thing she ain’t is good at articulating the metaphysics of magic. Her theory of magic is inconsistent and contradictory and left me with the impression that she didn’t actually care all that much about the worldbuilding of the series. So I think there’s plenty of room to argue Potter isn’t the king of plot armor just by dint of plot confusingness. I think he’s an honorable mention at least.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what’s your best “nitric acid acts upon trousers” moment?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I am no expert but this feels like a fun and useful bookmark:

https://phr.org/our-work/resources/preparing-for-protecting-against-and-treating-tear-gas-and-other-chemical-irritant-exposure-a-protesters-guide/

Something I learned / remembered from reading that:
```
Though tear gas was classified as a chemical weapon in 1993
and banned from use in international warfare, law enforcement
officers are still allowed to use it on civilians in the United States.
```
That’s fun.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨????⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
wow, TIL. Poor guy.

That whole wikipedia page reads like a tall tale.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what’s your best “nitric acid acts upon trousers” moment?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
It’s a remarkable material. one of my favorites. Gonna go watch videos about it on youtube right now, now that I think of it. it’s been a while, there might be some new ones.

I feel like it would make a good 3d printer material for certain applications, and there are formulations that are highly recyclable. I would love to be able to print prototypes without wasting tons of plastic. But I need to learn a lot more about materials science and a little more about robotics before I can really reason about how a working cyanoacrylate printer would behave. It would be a fun project to try if I had tons of money.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what’s your best “nitric acid acts upon trousers” moment?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
When I was a kid I discovered that cyanoacrylate acts upon human skin. It also acts upon all the change in my parents’ giant change jar.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what’s your best “nitric acid acts upon trousers” moment?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I was not prepared for

spoiler

FOOF
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨????⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I would love to find out but the man keeps denying my grant applications.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨????⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
That is way more impressive. Any idiot can eat a baby.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do people claim when they buy lets say an M16 Fully Automatic Assault Rifle it is for hunting or self protection? Could you just bow and arrow during a hunt for more of a challenge?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I know a few people in the south who bow hunt, but I think they all also have guns. From what I can tell, it’s unusual about the same way someone having an antique car is unusual. Most people don’t and it’s a talking point, but not unheard of.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do people claim when they buy lets say an M16 Fully Automatic Assault Rifle it is for hunting or self protection? Could you just bow and arrow during a hunt for more of a challenge?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Buy the gun for the job you want, not the job you have.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They're somehow always baffled that their cakes are melting⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Didn’t even think about all that heat. I bet fire safety is a significant factor too.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's about the *option*⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t wear a black hoodie to indicate that I know computer stuff, but it is remarkable how much more receptive non-techies are when I wear one. It’s like a lab coat for computer doctors.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oh.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
It surely does, though I don’t think self-harming mental patterns are exclusive to neurodivergent folk.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oh.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Wounds don’t really heal if they’re being constantly reopened / irritated. Once the source of the injury is removed, some wounds will heal with time, and others require more specialized treatment. For that latter type, the lack of constant reinjury can feel a lot like healing, but it’s not quite the same, and old injuries can flare up and/or have secondary issues down the line. Finding and healing them is a long and inconstant process that only really starts after escaping the cause of the damage. An analogy might be pulling someone out of a collapsed building, then treating them for the effects of asbestos exposure.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ISSPissTracker⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Jupiter you tricky minx
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ISSPissTracker⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
God Jupiter, get your shit together.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ISSPissTracker⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I have a vague recollection from the past that Jupiter is a “failed star” in that it is “close” to the mass required to begin fusion, so I was confused about how an exoplanet could have several times its mass and not be a star.

Turns out, the threshold for deuterium fusion is about 13x the mass of Jupiter, so I guess it’s “close” in that it’s closer than anything else in the solar system (other than the sun), but less close than I assumed. Still, Epsilon Indi Ab is even closer to becoming a brown star. Or perhaps a golden star? Because of the pee smell?

And lest you think this planet is dorky, according to science:

with a temperature of about 275 K (2 °C; 35 °F), [Epsilon Indi Ab is] the coolest exoplanet to be directly imaged.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They got us by the balls⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I am somewhat familar with ERIC’s CLARIN (or ERIC CLARIN? or just CLARIN? I’m not sure how the two names are supposed to be used together). from the linked site:

CLARIN stands for Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure and ERIC stands for European Research Infrastructure Consortium.

I don’t fully understand how to operate it because it’s complicated but it does seem like a distributed scientific repository. It seems to focus on language but it’s not clear to me why it can’t, or doesn’t (or maybe it does IDK) function as a general datashare. I’m not sure if it’s a model for a full replacement of for-profit publishing houses but it seems like a promising direction for research to go.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They got us by the balls⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Why do academic journals still exist? I’m not trying to be “journals bad” glib here, even though they are awful and have been as long as I can remember. What technical or academic hurdles are preventing researchers from publishing their work to free outlets like, say, a university’s public website? I genuinely don’t understand why they haven’t collapsed with the rise of the internet. Is it really all street cred?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do people force themselves to write something, even if they're NOT inspired?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
When I was younger there was a hot new book called The Artist’s Way. I never finished it, I don’t even know if I would recommend it, but one of the practices it recommends is morning pages, and morning pages helped me.

What you do is you get a pen and a notebook, and write three pages every morning. If you miss a morning, wait til next morning and write three pages. It doesn’t have to be good or even sensical. A lot of my early morning pages were line after line of “I don’t want to do this, this is bullshit, I’m just kiiiiiiiilllllllling trees and wasting space this is dumb”. Eventually I got bored of writing that stuff and started writing other things, but it took a long time.

The trick is you gotta do it every day, even on days you don’t want to. No one but you can make you write so if you don’t do it, you won’t do it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a platform like github that isn't for code?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Specifically for writing textbooks, you might enjoy looking at https://www.americanyawp.com/ for inspiration. Their documentation is light on technical details but you could email the contacts at the bottom of https://www.americanyawp.com/text/about/ with questions about how to structure your specific project.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a platform like github that isn't for code?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I haven’t found anything better than codeberg. The following novella is a reflection on my experience with a similar problem.

I have all my poetry and short stories (and D&D snippets and board game / video game design snippets and screenplays and draft policy proposals and diatribes on the nature of being and other misc stuff that’s hard to categorize) in a single giant git repo. It works okay though I find it really hard to organize everything in a strictly hierarchical structure and I often have a hard time finding things I wrote because I can’t remember if it’s in the “boardgames” dir or the “video_games” dir, etc. I don’t think anyone but me would ever be able to use it. Not because it’s too esoteric, but because the organizational structure grew up organically over the years and makes no sense when viewed in its current form without an understanding of the history of the repo. It’s a very similar phenomenon to opening up an old code repo for the first time and being overwhelmed by the messiness of it, when someone who has been maintaining the repo for years has a built up schema of how the repo is acutally organized and can navigate it somewhat more effectively than someone new to the project

What I’m saying is that keeping git repos organized sensibly over time is really hard, even when dealing with something as highly structured as source code, and IMO it’s much harder with more loosely-categorized creative writing snippets, if for no other reason than there’s not a strong tradition of creative writers using collaborative editing tools like VCS (though there are, I think, other good reasons why it’s harder).

If I were to reformat my repo, I would probably start by trying to come up with a more formalized type system, a formalized metadata system, and a linking system (e.g. I would like to be able to create a link from a scene in a script to a character bio or a macguffin description). You can do links with markdown if you’re familar with it, I sometimes do that but I am pretty inconsistent with it, most of the time its too much bother to maintain them when I keep shuffling documents around (because I don’t have a well-defined type system…). Obsidian also has this feature; I haven’t been able to get myself into a natural flow writing Obsidian documents, but it’s worth checking out I think as a tool for creative writing on top of a VCS like git. If none of these sound immediately useful they can be put off until they’re needed since it’s easy to overcomplicate projects in the beginning by anticipating future problems that may never materialize, these are just things that I want for my own writing style.

Whether or not you use something like obsidian, I think for creative collaborative projects it’s perfectly doable to use git, but it makes sense to spend some time at the top thinking about the shared rules that collaborators will need to know in order to keep all the contributors from stepping on each others’ toes. These rules should be in the repo itself in a README and should be regularly reviewed by collaborators because you will almost certainly find better ways of doing things as the project grows. These rules should cover things like:
- How are files structured? Does every project get its own top-level dir?
- Do projects share a common structure or does every project get to define its own structure? if the latter, should each project be a separate repo?
- Do you have a metadata system? If so, what types of metadata do you anticipate and how should it be formatted?
- Who gets to commit to each project? Is there a review process? The answers to these can be “anybody” and “no” but I would recommend at least thinking about it before
- how do edits work? Are you going to commit everything to main before it goes to editorial review? or do you want to have feature branches that editors review and approve before merging to main?
- How does the team update the rules? which collaborators can submit PRs for the rules document? what is the mechanism for making sure that the rules are being followed, at least well enough to keep the project usable?
If you are like me, all this might sound like extreme overkill for something as simple as loosely structured creative writing. That’s because it is, until a project grows beyond a certain size, and historically I do not recognize that size boundary until I am well past it and my repo is an unmaintainable mess. It might help to discuss with your collaborators what they think the project would look like when it’s a few years and a few complete projects old: what problems will you want to solve then? Can they be anticipated in a way that doesn’t unduly burden the very difficult task of getting the whole endeavor started? A little of that can go a long way to preventing the project from losing steam because they repo just gets too unwieldy to be fun to write in.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bring in the trumpet⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Sometimes I can replace an earworm with something else that’s less sticky. Other times, I just have to find the thing that’s stuck in my head and listen to it, and that can help dislodge it. Sometimes nothing works and I just have to let my brain tire itself out.