TheBananaKing
@TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
- Comment on are terfs actual feminists or do most transphobic women just call themselves that? 2 days ago:
Now explain how to convince nazis with facts and logic
- Comment on why do transphobes mention pedophiles/compare them to pedophiles when most trans people (as do most people) hate pedophiles? 4 days ago:
Apart from concerted sociopolitical efforts to make an underclass that can be harmed at will and blamed for everything, there’s a couple of less deliberately malicious explanation for a lot of people.
1: Category violation -> perversion -> predator -> monster.
2: I don’t think it’s real -> they are lying -> why would they lie about gender -> to lull people into a false sense of security -> predator -> monster
Both are of course incredibly false and hateful, and both of course are pushed maliciously and cynically by many, but I think some people are actually taken in by one or other of these.
- Comment on What even is fire? 2 weeks ago:
Individual oxygen atoms are very very grabby; they’re stage-5 clingers on PCP. They’re straight-up homewreckers, and they cannot and fucking will not be alone. They need a friend or two, and they will go and rip molecules apart to take them because fuck you.
Now, if there’s nothing else available, they’ll pair up with another oxygen atom, and form O2, what people normally call oxygen; the stuff you find in the air.
But it’s an uneasy alliance, and the bond angles are all wrong so it’s kind of spring-loaded.
And the same goes for lots of other molecules - carbon-carbon or carbon-hydrogen bonds ferinstance are also kind of tense and uncomfortable; it takes a surprising amount of energy to snap them into place, like building a tower of interlocking mousetraps.
So smack an O2 at reasonably high speed (or in other words, at a high temperature) at big structure of carbons and hydrogens, and it’s fucking chaos.
The oxygen-oxygen bond splits, and the two halves grab the other atoms, ripping the structure apart and releasing all the energy that went into spring-loading those bonds.
The main byproducts are CO2 (a carbon with two oxygens) and H2O (an oxygen with two hydrogens), both of which are very low-energy, strong bonds.
They’re both gases, and all that energy leftover is released as heat, which does two things:
- raise the temperature enough to do the same thing with even more O2s, causing a chain reaction
- heat up the released gases (and any bits of random gunk that break off with them) so much that they glow red hot, just like hot iron.
So you get plumes of glowing hot gas-and-particles streaming off the stuff that’s burning - and hot air rises, so the plumes point upwards.
But they also cool down quickly in the air, below the glowing-hot point, and that’s why flame has a shape: the boundary is how far as they get while still hot enough to glow.
Of course, hydrocarbons and carbohydrates aren’t the only things that burn, there’s lots of other molecules you can do this to, and the same principle applies. It’s just that carbony things tend to burn easily and well, and we’re surrounded by the stuff because that’s what living things are made of, so that’s what you tend to see being on fire the most.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Perhaps they misheard ‘dog’s bollocks’, and ran with it.
- Comment on Can I lose a beer belly working out one day a week? 2 weeks ago:
Humans are horribly, miserably energy efficient.
Seriously we evolved as exhaustion predators: pick an animal and just keep walking after it until it drops, then eat it. That’s our whole schtick. We are the goddamn terminator.
Just being alive and breathing uses up about 1500-2000 calories a day.
An absolute bastard of a workout will use up maybe 100 on top of that, which makes up for like a spoonful of peanut butter.
As such, you can’t practically lose weight via exercise alone. You need to bring calories-in down to less than calories-out.
The tricky part is doing it in a controlled and sustainable manner so you don’t just say fuck it and scarf down two whole pizzas for lunch in a week’s time because you’re hangry and don’t care any more.
- Comment on Anyone else suddenly itching to blast Nazis in Wolfenstein for no reason at all? 4 weeks ago:
In wolfenstein? No.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Whining about downvotes gets you an automatic downvote.
Asking how to evade a ban is asshole behaviour and gets you a downvote.
Expecting people to give a shit about reddit gets you a downvote
Dragging your reddit grievances in here and expecting people to take your side gets you a downvote
Nobody cares about forum drama on another fucking platform, especially one they joined lemmy to get away from.
- Comment on Help me out: which looks better for the Duck - the neck tie or the bow tie? 5 weeks ago:
Necktie.
Bowtie is trying a little hard, at least in comparison.
- Comment on Why is it considered sexist to ask women to smile? 1 month ago:
It’s not women’s job to be attractive.
They aren’t there for your viewing pleasure.
They’re not for you; they’re not a public amenity.
You have no more right to expect them to smile in order to make your surroundings more aesthetic than you have a right to expect them to get their tits out for you to gawp at.
- Comment on Guy never bought a game on the Epic Store... Owns 200+ 1 month ago:
And never plays any of them.
The whole UX is just so bad
- Comment on It's 54 degrees Fahrenheit (12 Celsius), raining moderately hard, the rain is cold, and there's a guy blowing around wet leaves with a leaf blower. What the hell is the obsession with leaf blowers? 2 months ago:
if I ever live somewhere with a garden, I’m ripping out the grass and planting a dandelawn.
- Comment on Netanyahu claims Melbourne synagogue attack linked to Albanese government’s ‘anti-Israel position’ 2 months ago:
Dear albo: netanyahu will never give you the reacharound you’ve been hoping for.
- Comment on What was going on in England in the 1970s to give Monty Python so much comedy fodder that is still relevant today? 2 months ago:
The 1970s was going on.
- Comment on Serious statement: I don't understand the argument that not voting for Harris was the morally correct thing to do, because of Gaza. Why does anyone believe this? 3 months ago:
Consider how you’d go about exploiting the opposite case.
If people will always vote for the slightly-less-worse candidate, then you only ever have to be slightly-less-worse than the opposition. You can sleaze right up to them and be almost as corrupt and evil as they are, so long as there’s just a little bit of extra sleaze sticking out that you can point to as the worse alternative. And you can farm the shit out of that, because then the other side never has to improve either - it’s an anti-competitive duopoly, where they both agree to only compete over surface details, not their overall horribleness, leaving them free to sleaze right up to the fucking-monster end of the spectrum.
Presumably a percentage of people refused to enable that behaviour, and said that slightly-less-genocide is a bridge too fucking far.
They made it plain from the outset that if the dems wanted to play chicken on this, the dems would lose. That they were not to big to fail, that daddy wouldn’t bail them out this time; put down the bombs or you’re getting kicked out for real.
The morally-correct choice would have been for the dems to stop supporting genocide, especially with so much at stake.
There’s this huge narrative that’s been consistently pushed that the actions of politicians are beyond accountability, sent down from on high like acts of god, and that moral responsibility lies only with the voters; that it’s meaningless even imagine any obligation for the ruling class to try and be good enough to vote for.
You know, the way the fossil fuel lobby found ways to shift the blame onto the consumer instead of themselves. The way the opioid manufacturers did the same. The way the gun manufacturers did the same. The way plastic manufacturers did the same fucking thing as well. We’ll act however we fucking well want to, and if you don’t like it, that’s literally your problem.
Oh no, you can’t hold us accountable now, it’s the worst possible time. It’s too soon to have this conversation, how can you be so insensitive, can’t you see there’s a highschool full of dead kids?
Somewhere, sometime, people have to say enough. And they did.
- Comment on Houses in my area increases 82% in just 4 years 3 months ago:
:laughs in Australian:
- Submitted 3 months ago to [deleted] | 2 comments
- Comment on No-grounds eviction banned in NSW and rent increases capped at once a year 3 months ago:
If rent-increase caps aren’t part of it, it’s all hilariously worthless.
Want your tenant gone, just put the rent up $10,000 a week, then when they can’t pay, you have grounds to evict. Simples.
- Comment on Should I or should I not use/bother with using Linux? (READ THE WHOLE POST) 3 months ago:
Okay:
You don’t have to deal with scripting and command-line stuff, but all the major tinkering under the hood depends on it. The amount of customisation and tinkering is fairly infinite, so past a certain point you just can’t build graphical stuff to cover every single possible choice - and that’s where the gibberish comes in.
Baseline concepts:
‘Operating system’ means different things in different contexts, and this can be confusing.
Context 1: technically correct
Your computer has a big chip that runs programs, and a bunch of hardware that actually-does-stuff: network card, graphics card, disk drive, mouse, keyboard etc. Programs need to talk to the hardware and make it do stuff, or else they don’t actually… do… anything.
There’s two problems with that:
There’s a gazillion kinds of hardware out there, that all has its own language for talking to it, and your program would either only run on one EXACT set of hardware, or it would have to speak all gazillion languages and be too big to fit on your machine.
The second problem is that in order to do more than one thing at a time, you need a bunch of programs all running at once, and they all need to use the hardware, and without something to coordinate the sharing, they’ll all just fight over it and everything falls down in a tangled heap.
A good analogy for this is a restaurant. They aren’t just public kitchens where you can just wander in and start preparing your own meal, taking ingredients/equipment/space however you want, then just carry it to whatever table takes your fancy - and you definitely can’t have all the customers doing it at once. Especially if they don’t know how all the equipment works, where the different ingredients are kept, etc - it would be an absolute disaster, and there would be fights, injuries, fire and food poisoning.
So instead there’s an agreed-upon system with rules, and people that do the cooking for you. You make a reservation or queue at the desk, you are told which table you can have, you go sit there and a waiter brings you a menu. You pick the food - and depending on the place, maybe ask for customisation - then wait and they bring it out to you, then you sit there, eat it, then leave.
That system-with-rules is the operating system, or more specifically the operating system kernel. Any time a program wants to do more than think to itself, it has to asks the OS to do it, and bring it the results.
In this analogy, fundamentally different operating systems (windows / linux / OSX / android / etc) would be like different kinds of (5-star / sushi-train / pizza place / burger joint / etc) that have different rules and expectations and social-scripts to interact with them. A program written for one OS would have no idea how to ask a different OS for what it wanted, and wouldn’t be able to run there.
Context 2: what people usually mean
It’s all well and good to have a machine that can run programs and do things, but the human sitting in front of it needs to be able to interact with the thing, so you can poke buttons and move files around and move windows and stuff.
And so there needs to be a crapton of programs all working with each other on the thing to provide all this functionality, and the whole user experience - preferably with a consistent design language and general expectation of how everything should work: you need a desktop environment.
In restaruant terms, this would be the specific brand/franchise/corporate-culture that runs the place. Yes, the general idea is that it’s a burger joint, but specifically it’s a mcdonalds, or a wendy’s, or whatever that homophobic chickenburger place is called - it’s got the decor, it’s got the layout, it’s got the specific combo meals, etc etc, the same uniforms, the same staff policy, etc.
Now here’s the thing:
Let’s say there’s only one sushi franchise in the world. That’s like Windows - there’s updates new versions and some slight variations (server versions aside), but you walk into one, you’ve walked into them all. There’s one Windows kernel, and one windows desktop environment that goes with it.
And say there’s only one pizza-place franchise in the world, and they all look the same, have the same menu. That’s like OSX: there’s one kernel, and similarly one OSX desktop enviroment to go with it. A mac is a mac, and it does mac things.
But linux… linux is different. With Linux, it’s there’s 900 different burger-joint franchises in the world, and literally anyone can go start a new one if they want to put the time into designing one from the ground up. The paradigm is the same - order at the counter at the back, menus on the wall overhead, grab bench seating wherever or get it to go - but every place can design the look and feel, the menu, the deals, the other amenities, the staffing structure, etc.
And the different franchises - that’s what distros are.
It’s the set of programs all working together that create a whole working enviroment, but everything uses the standard kernel to actually get stuff done. If your program can run in one linux distro, then it should be able to run in a different one, because your program uses the same standard set of requests in order to do things.
The windows and the menus and the desktop apps and the way the interface behaves and how you configure everything can be different, but the core functionality that the software uses, is the same.
Now, for the most part, Windows is like NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE, all the fiddly internal bits are carefully hidden away and made deliberately opaque. You don’t need to know, we don’t want to tell you, we’ll let you change the wallpaper, but for everything else, we decide how it’s wired up. If you want it to do things slightly differently to suit your own workflow, tough.
Macs are kind of the same deal: for the most part it’s no-touchee, you’ll break stuff. Just push the very shiny buttons and be happy that everything Just Works ™.
But Linux… doesn’t seal anything in plastic. All the gubbins are not only there on display, they’re mostly all human-readable and human-tinkerable with. Instead of mysterious monolithic chunks of software communicating with each other via hidden channels, with configuration in databases you don’t get to see… it’s mostly scripts you can read and tinker with, and plain-text config files you can edit, all writing useful details in highly-visible log files that you can read through when things don’t do what they’re supposed to.
Now with a lot of distros, you absolutely can just push buttons and treat the thing like a Windows box, and never have to tinker with the fiddly bits. You’ve got a browser, you’ve got apps, you’ve got games, it just does the thing. But if you want to start getting technical, you absolutely can - unlike windows or mac.
But this very ability to configure and tinker and patch bits on - and the fact that most distros don’t have a gigantic microsoft-sized coordinated team all following one shared vision, but are wired together like a kind of junkyard frankenstein from thousands of separate teams as a labour of love - means that occasionally you will need to get technical to deal with small annoyances or use-cases they didn’t think of.
- Comment on I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. 4 months ago:
Obviously ideas of fun vary; people are allowed to enjoy things I don’t like :)
Also I’m not rampantly disagreeing with you here, just picking at the edges for discussion because it still doesn’t sit quite right in my head.
It’s just… sometimes I feel like the implementation of complexity in these things is just kind of lazy, comparable to adding difficulty by making enemy bullet-sponges. It’s certainly more work to defeat them, but is that work rewarding?
Consider the annoyance that triggered this whole post.
In grim dawn, mid way through elite. I had some gloves with fairly miserable specs for my level, but they were providing most of my vitality res. Can I change them out?
Well there’s some with better overall specs but no vitality but they do have a lot of fire res, so I could swap those in, then the ring I was getting lots of fire res from could go, and there’s one with some vitality but unfortunately no poison, so let’s see, I do have a helmet that …
spongebob_three_hours_later.jpg
… but now my vitality is three points too low to equip the pants, oh fuck off. How is this fun?
Finding a reasonable solution doesn’t make you feel clever, and making an awkward compromise doesn’t feel like a justifiable sacrifice, it feels like you finally got too exhausted to search through more combinations and gave up. You can’t really look forward to getting better gear to fill a gap, because you’re going to have to go round and round in circles again trying to build a whole new set around the deficiencies that come with it.
It’s like debating against a Gish Gallop - taxing to keep up with but without any real sense of achievement.
And honestly it doesn’t feel like that’s really intended to be the real gameplay. If the genre is really a build-planning-combinatorics game with a bit of monster-bashing on the side, where’s the quality-of-life UX to go with it? Where’s management tools to bring the actual problem-domain to the fore? Where’s the sort-rank-and-filter, where’s the multi-axis comparisons? Where’s the saved equipment sets? Why is the whole game environment and all the interface based around the monster-bashing, if that’s just the testing phase? And if navigating hostile UX is part of the the challenge, then again I say that challenge is bad game design.
And all the layered mechanics across the genre feel like that: bolted on and just kind of half-assed, keeping the problem-domain too hard to work on because of externalities rather than the innate qualities of the problem itself. I know, let’s make the fonts really squirly and flickery so you can only peer at the stats for five minutes before you get a headache, that’ll give people a challenging time constraint to work with.
Did you ever play mass-effect: Andromeda, with the shitty sudoku minigame bolted on to the area unlocks? You know how that just… didn’t make the game fun?
That.
Also it seems to me that if the prep-work was really the majority drawcard, we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for. Build your character, let it bot through the map (or just do an action montage), then come back with a bunch of loot and XP to play with before sending it out again.
I think an ideal game would hit all three kinds of satisfaction: tactics/graaagh, exploration/harvesting and mastery/optimisation. And ideally, each of those three targets would be free of external complications and left to focus on their own innate challenge and rewards.
I know that’s easy to say and hard to do… I’m just surprised that we haven’t got signficantly better at it in the last couple of decades.
- Comment on I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. 4 months ago:
I’ve played the crap out of both; they’re really good.
- Comment on I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. 4 months ago:
And that’s entirely valid; like I say, stardew gameplay is immensely satisfying in and of itself.
I just feel like all these other mechanisms in arpgs are thrown on top to try and disguise the nature of the thing, and it’s that disparity that leaves people jaded.
Stardew doesn’t have an endless progression of increasingly fell and eldritch vegetables that need you to constantly grind for upgrades just to tend to them. You water things in one click all the way through, and that feels good; you don’t need to chase a sawtooth pseudo-progression in order to be satisfied.
Stardew doesn’t make you do NP-complete multi-knapsack-problems in order to even have a viable character, or drown you in overly complex interactions so you can’t usefully plan in your head; there’s complexity there, but of the kind that opens up more options.
It manages to be fun without those things, but ARPGs seem to overwhelmingly rely on them in order to be engaging at all.
Why is that?
Why does gory-stardew need all those external obfuscations, when the normal kind doesn’t?
How could you make a gory-stardew that’s comfortable in its own skin?
- Comment on I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. 4 months ago:
I have absolutely no wish to dumb them down.
As I said, if you just took away all those mechanics, you’d be left with a boring empty game.
What I said was that it would be nice if you could make the combat feel more like hunting than gathering, so you wouldn’t have to make up for it with a:) number-go-up and b:) np-hard - then you could then go for much more enriching forms of complexity.
For instance, making mobs fight a lot more tactically as their level increases instead of just stacking on the HP and damage - and instead of your perks just driving stat inflation, they unlocked new tactical options on your part, giving you a series of new stops to pull out as the battles got more fraught.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
I someone came into my home and started making derogatory racist remarks about me, I’d say that response would be entirely appropriate.
- Comment on I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. 4 months ago:
I dunno if it even needs to be difficult; even a bit tactical would change the nature of the thing. As it is the mobs in these things tend to be mindless converging waves; what if they set up set pieces, ran for help, dived for cover, used supporting fire etc etc?
Also perhaps overambitious, but what if the difference between low and high level enemies wasn’t their HP or damage, but how tricky and organised they were? What if leveling up didn’t make number get big, but instead gave you more options in a fight?
- Submitted 4 months ago to games@lemmy.world | 54 comments
- Comment on Would you consider making a sandwich to be "cooking?" 4 months ago:
Entirely context dependent.
Who’s cooking tonight? Me, and if it’s sandwiches, salad, etc - still counts.
No cooking in the room. Combining sliced bread with sliced cheese out of the bag - doesn’t count.
- Comment on Is this a triangle? 5 months ago:
Two things I need to ask:
- What inspired this question, exactly, and
- Can I have some, please?
- Comment on Is this a triangle? 5 months ago:
Congratulations you just invented magenta
- Comment on How is it possible for the IT experts to recover data that was erased from a hard drive when the storage of said hard drive appears empty? 5 months ago:
If you actually fill the drive with zeroes, the chances of anyone getting anything back are somewhere between fuck and all.
Old MFM drives (tech likely as old as your parents) had a theoretical exploit for recovering erased data.
With modern tech, that loophole was firmly closed; even state-level actors would be shit outta luck.
- Comment on How is it possible for the IT experts to recover data that was erased from a hard drive when the storage of said hard drive appears empty? 5 months ago:
A file comes in two parts: the actual blocks of data that hold the file itself, and a directory entry with the name of the file, and the location of the first block.
When you delete a file, it only scrubs out the directory entry, and re-lists the data blocks as available for use.