I’m your average nerd. You can feed me sci-fi/fantasy book recommendations and I won’t hate you for it.
In return, I can post some music recommendations (mostly synthwave, dreamwave, ambient and some avant-garde type post-everything metal).
Occasionally I’ll write something about music, Linux, gaming or all three.
I tried this right after Baby Steps (which I enjoyed a lot), because DS was one of the inspirations for Baby Steps. I did get some of the same vibes from DS and the areas I visited were beautiful. The atmosphere is great and all. But even without 100% it just feels like a slog in every other way. I think I didn’t even hit the 10 hour mark.
For a second I wanted to defend myself by saying “that’s just what I was told”, but I think that’s not even necessary, it seems it really is objectively a very odd game then, even for people who know the rules.
I can understand getting fun out of a bad game, I had fun in Two Worlds and other janky titles. And I see some “famous” streamers like Sseth just enjoy completely breaking all the systems in a bad game. My trouble is that I can’t recognize those systems in enough depth to start abusing them, that’s probably one reason EU4 didn’t click for me. I tried to just play it straight, and then you run into all those problems you mentioned. From what I casually observed in EU4 forums and the like, people really tear apart the systems to find anything that can be abused to their advantage.
I’m guilty too and I let (mostly local or hydro/solar-powered) LLMs write utility scripts for me, but I’m fully aware of the illegal way they’ve been put together and I wouldn’t use them to make a product I sell, that would feel unethical.
I hope one day someone makes a model that is trained on e.g. only GPL, MIT or BSD-licensed code that gives full attribution to the generated output, and one that uses only Creative Commons art that is cleared for remixing, for example. And then there’s the huge corpus of public domain texts you can use for general text analysis. It’s not that these things aren’t available, just that the commercial incentive (those billionaires, eh) is stronger to simply steal everything and ignore any licensing or laws.
All this can be done ethically and with small environmental impact, the fact that they choose not to do it in order to chase power and profit is the most offensive part.
Europa Universalis IV, 244 hours. I don’t think I understood a single thing of what was happening. And with every free update, some of the rules changed, sometimes in unpredictable ways.
I was told “don’t worry, even the big-brains who plan out their entire campaign with spreadsheets don’t really understand the mechanics”. But that’s no consolation, I felt stressed and confused for every single one of those hours.
May I just say that it’s so nice and refreshing to see lots of people mention these supposedly amazing 10/10 games in this thread and hate them, I largely feel the same about all those titles. I used to think my taste was just broken.
Absolutely, it’s also an accessibility and UX problem.
The fonts they use are too thin and frequently semitransparent (!) over a blurred and/or gradient background. So you end up with a thin light grey font on a darker grey, visually cluttered background. Unreadable if you have the slightest sight issues or if you’re out in sunlight.
I was an early adopter (first batch of their first phone) and posted issues to their tracker about their font problems already 12 years ago. They never acknowledged this.
We can’t fix the proprietary UI even if we knew how. The best you can do is splice your own font into the system, but that broke a bunch of UI elements when I tried. The video doesn’t show it clearly, but from what I saw it looks like the situation is still as bad as it was. Back then I ended up mostly using Android apps because they didn’t have that problem, they rendered with some halfway decent Roboto. If I’m just using Android apps, I don’t need to buy a Jolla phone.
For a mobile phone in 2026, you need someone doing proper UX and you should have the bare minimum of accessibility features. Other systems have screen readers and voice navigation built in, etc. Sorry for the rant, it pisses me off to no end that we can’t have a decent European phone and Jolla is our best chance. Maybe one day Plasma Mobile will run on more things…
No, in Go.
I can’t speak for everyone who downvoted, but maybe allow me to share a viewpoint.
Some see the use of generative AI as simply stealing other people’s hard-earned craft and talent (for the generated art) and programming skills, without even so much as credit or visibility. Plus setting the planet on fire for it, using up precious non-renewable resources, draining aquifers, endangering jobs etc. while making billionaires richer and more powerful and taking away the means of production from the common folk. Who will have to pay the powerful for compute time because they’ve deskilled so much they can’t put together a gallery shooter game themselves anymore.
Not trying to troll or flame or anything, but what’s a good tool for some is all those bad things for others. That’s why any use of it gets such a negative reaction, especially in the fediverse.
Lemmings don’t do mass suicide, by the way, that is a complete fake by Disney that got widely repeated. The lemmings they show in those scenes aren’t even native to that region. Source, for example: https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=56
Pretty much the same, I went DS2, then DS1R, then DS2:SotFS and then DS3. I don’t normally enjoy replaying games but SotFS was fine because enough had changed.
Still can’t get into Sekiro or Elden Ring, but I did finish Nioh and I’m sure Nioh 3 will be nice in a year or so when all the expansions have dropped.