rodneylives
@rodneylives@lemmy.world
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 4 days ago:
Nethack is very different, I expect, but great. You can even play it on public servers like alt.org and Hardfought
- Comment on 1 week ago:
I verify this, some years ago when my laptop’s hard drive died, I installed Ubuntu Linux from a USB drive (with a live image on it) to a USB drive. It took a while for it to boot but it worked and I used it as my main machine for a couple of months.
But beyond that, there are Linux distros made specifically for running off of external media, Puppy Linux is an example.
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
That is strange. Which version are you playing? 5.0 was recently released, it may have bugs but I don’t think that’s one of them?
What platform are you playing on? At the moment the main way to play it on Linux distributions is to compile it yourself.
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
(sits in the corner wearing a sign that reads “Ask me about Nethack”)
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
I used to like Monopoly, before its many problems became evident to me. I notice that even in the official excessively mythologizing biography of supposed-creator Charles Darrow, it notes that Parker Brothers didn’t believe the game would sell well, and it had to be proven to them from the sales of 5,000 units of the game through department store Wanamakers.
The reasons Monopoly is popular are several, most of them pretty dumb. At this point Monopoly is a part of the culture and lots of people buy it because they don’t know there are many much-better games out there. Hasbro merchandises the hell out of it, there’s over 4,000 themed versions of Monopoly now. It pushes a pleasing narrative that people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become successful (ignoring that all but one of the players will go bankrupt during the game).
What positive attributes does Monopoly have? Well it’s ultimately a game about trade, what causes someone to win at Monopoly, in ideal situations, isn’t how they move but what trades they make. In nearly every game of Monopoly I’ve ever played few people ever traded, causing games to run long and winners ultimately decided by whoever managed to make a natural color group, but in principle it’s an interesting idea. And it’s open-ended, as that mythologizing document I mentioned notes at the time of its origin you couldn’t get a game published unless it adhered to certain dogmatic rules, one of which being that it had to have a clear ending. Open-endedness is interesting in a board game, even if, as in Monopoly’s case, it can make a game excessively long.
I sometimes muse about how Monopoly could be improved. I think it’d be interesting to make the trading less ad-hoc and random. Maybe only allow trades at certain times, so players would have to think more about when to make them or else lose the chance, and make trades more formalized, maybe with a randomized element? Maybe fewer properties, reduce all color groups to two, make railroads and utilities a bigger part of the game. Maybe an explicit mechanism by which a player can resign from the game. Definitely make bankrupting a player less of a windfall for the person causing it. Definitely increase the costs of owning lots of properties. Definitely set an end point rather than just meander on until all players lose. Maybe add additional reasons to play than just winning; at their best board games tell these little stories about how the game progresses. Maybe have awards for players who circle the board the most times, who spend the least time in Jail, etc. Maybe one or more of these could be a “bar goal,” by which I mean, if the players agree ahead of time the players might have to buy the player who wins/gets a specific award a drink or some other minor forfeit.
- Comment on Larry Page, still a board member of Google's parent company Alphabet, had ties to Epstein. He successfully hid from subpoenas to testify about it. 2 weeks ago:
Long ago he worked with Sergey Brin to develop PageRank, the revolutionary web search engine, all so someday his life would put him in contact with Jeffery Epstein.
- Comment on The secret to happiness is living in the moment and not fearing the future 2 weeks ago:
And when you starve to death in agony without being able to do anything about it, go with a smile and a laugh? MEH.
Bilionaires are obscene, but the rest of us still need some money to live, not worry about dying constantly, and to simply participate in culture instead of living in a cave never communicating with anyone.
- Comment on Why do we eat dessert? 2 months ago:
Because it’s nice, and if you ate it first you wouldn’t want to have as much of the healthy stuff that came before. Not everything has to have an objective purpose. Nice things are nice.
- Comment on When people recommend Brave browser. 2 months ago:
Do we really want to go into this? Can’t you do your own research? Okay.
Brave has been known to rewrite ad links so they get the revenue from them. In addition to its AI features (which Firefox is also doing right now and is a point against them too) It has a built-in cryptocurrency wallet. Its dashboard has its own ads; sure they can be turned off, but you can also change Firefox’s search engine away from Google. Or here, how about, instead of just reiterating easily discovered facts, I could just link you to this article on the crappiness of Brave: ZDNet And, of course, there’s the issues with Brendan Eich.
Firefox definitely has problems, like those AI features and putting sponsored links in among the items on its home screen, but it never rewrote links to its own benefit, and it doesn’t support cryptocurrency.
- Comment on When people recommend Brave browser. 2 months ago:
This is true. Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics used to run and maintain a good sort of ad service called Project Wonderful, that catered to webcomics and blogs and didn’t track users. Sadly he shut it down in 2018.
Currently I know of Comicad Network that’s trying a similar kind of thing.
- Comment on When people recommend Brave browser. 2 months ago:
I use Vivaldi as a secondary browser, it’s not been too bad. Firefox is my primary, but I might go to a fork soon.
- Comment on When people recommend Brave browser. 2 months ago:
I’m sorry, it’s funny to me that you stopped using Firefox because it “went down a dark path,” which is in some ways true, but went to Brave, which is like strolling through the deep wood at midnight.
- Comment on Why are people so rude on Reddit compared to the Fediverse? 2 months ago:
I’d say part of it is likely raw userbase size. Like how even the most positive, well-meaning fandoms turn toxic at the edges when they get large enough.
- Comment on Cursed image thread 2 months ago:
(Earthbound battle music begins)
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 6 months ago:
Thank you for your service!
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 6 months ago:
By some reports it’s over 5%, statcounter may be undercounting Linux.
- Comment on Why can't we have a static vintage web? 7 months ago:
Demand? What?
You can just have a site that says things. You might just get a trickle of readers, and that’s okay. Not everything has to try to rule the world. You can contribute this little part of it, that might amuse or inform some people, and not pile up yet more value to a terrible corporation like Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or (while I’m ranting) Fandom.
Plain HTML doesn’t break. You don’t need to update frameworks. It won’t make the user’s browser consume a ton of their RAM. Even if your image hosting goes down, the text will still be there. The biggest problems with HTML are external. Google giving attention to Reddit over your site, or de-prioritizing it if it’s not “responsive to mobile,” and web browsers choosing not to reveal by default what terrible resource hogs big sites can be. Check about:processes (on Firefox at least) some time, I’ve seen Youtube, Facebook and Twitter consume over a gigabyte of memory by themselves, apiece. (Nota bene, Mastodon consumes a lot too.)
It’s okay to be small. That was what the World Wide Web was envisioned as, its motto: Let’s Share What We Know.
- Comment on Why can't we have a static vintage web? 7 months ago:
I’m an old E2 member!
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 1 year ago:
Slant’s one of my favorites too, I also play a lot of Loopy, Dominosa and Bridges.
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 1 year ago:
I’ve heard of them, I might consider trying one someday, but the research and effort to set it up is an obstacle. Plus I don’t run Windows any more, and I don’t even know what Linux support for it is like.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 1 year ago:
I’m sorry but… 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 1 year ago:
I haven’t checked to see if someone’s mentioned it yet (it’s a long thread!) but I want to put in a word for a piece of software I’m always touting: Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection!
It’s a wonder! 40 different kinds of randomly-generated puzzles, all free, all open source, and available for practically every platform. You can play it on Windows, Mac (if you compile it), Linux, iOS, Android, Java and Javascript in a web browser. It should rightfully be high up on the iOS and Android stores, but it’s completely free, has no ads, doesn’t track you and has no one paying to promote it. No one has a financial incentive to show it to you, so they don’t. But you should know about it.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 1 year ago:
I think you’re overstating things a bit, but it’s true that I keep getting caught up by weird behaviors.
I paste image data into a layer. I drag the layer a bit to get it where I want it. I try drawing on that layer: nothing happens. Turns out, when I pasted the image, it created a layer the size of the current image with all the extra space filled with transparent pixels. When I dragged it, the transparent part of the layer that had been off the image’s borders was actually dead space, and it won’t accept drawing into it until I go under layers and choose to expand the layer to the dimensions of the image. Once you realize what’s happening it’s not so bad, but until that point it’s the software working how you don’t expect it, and some people are going to drive themselves batty trying to figure it out.
And just now in 3.0 I’ve discovered, if I copy a rectangular part of an image using the Rectangle Select tool, then paste that data into another program, what gets pasted is a transparent box the size of the original image full of transparent pixels, with the copied part opaque in the middle of it in its former position inside the image.
It seems like it’s purposely trying to come up with an unintuitive way to implement my actions. I don’t remember it being like this in the past. What happened?
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 1 year ago:
City of Heroes, everything by Atari Games, the Wizardry series, the Ultima series, many others. I’m old, and I remember some of the games, and developers, we’ve lost.
- Comment on Nintendo Switch 2 Launches on June 5th Worldwide; 1080p Screen With 120 FPS and HDR Support, Docked Mode 4K Resolution Support Confirmed 1 year ago:
Something I’ve seen far less reaction to than I expected? While the Switch 2 looks like it takes standard MicroSD cards, it DOESN’T. It takes the fairly obscure MicroSD Express standard! I can’t even BUY an SD Express card locally right now! It seems likely, at launch, that Nintendo’s branded cards will be the only ones people can get that will work with it!
The Switch 2 has 256GB of onboard storage, much more than the Switch, it is true. But it’s also backwards compatible with the Switch, and lets users bring their old digital library over with them. I have a 256GB card in my Switch, it’s nearly full, and it doesn’t have my whole library on it! If I got a Switch 2, I’d have it filled up on day 1!
And the MicroSD card issue won’t be obvious to most buyers. Parents will get their kids Switch 2s, and wonder why their old card won’t work with it. It’ll look to them like the Switch 2 or the card is broken, unless they implement a physical lock against incompatible cards, and I don’t know if SD cards even support those. Also, SD Express cards are more expensive than standard ones.
This could end up being a debacle almost on the scale of the price (which, as others have noted, isn’t even Nintendo’s fault entirely).
- Comment on What happened to FlyingSquid? 1 year ago:
I know FlyingSquid from another community, and sent them a private message just a few days ago saying hello. (I didn’t know they had been missing at the time.) FS is awesome, and I really hope they’re okay.
- Comment on Believe and be saved! 1 year ago:
Recently, McDonalds announced an initiative to remove all instances of Ronald McDonald from their stores.
So, Ronald McDonald removed all instances of McDonalds from around him.
- Comment on What are some game series you would like to see revived? And if possible, which entry should the new game follow from? 1 year ago:
Strange Adventures in Infinite Space
- Comment on What are some game series you would like to see revived? And if possible, which entry should the new game follow from? 1 year ago:
Zork
- Comment on What are some game series you would like to see revived? And if possible, which entry should the new game follow from? 1 year ago:
Ultima
