I’m sick of this lie that the internet isn’t real.

Have you ever heard it said that character is who you are in the dark? Kind of a Jungian take, the whole “you change your persona depending on environment and company, you’re only ever your true self when you think nobody’s watching.”

Well, I think the internet is “in the dark.” It brings out the actual in people.

I don’t. In fact I don’t have two devices running the same distro at the moment.

My desktop is running Fedora KDE, which offered solid Wayland performance with my hardware.

My laptop is running Mint Cinnamon. Fedora would work on it, but it’s funny how often I have to dig out the laptop to do something because the software doesn’t work on Fedora.

My tablet is running Fedora GNOME because for a touch UI it’s the least worst. It’s fuckpuke, but it’s not boiling caustic fuckpuke.

My HTPC is running Bazzite. Mostly in desktop mode because most of what I do with it is watch Youtube and there isn’t a good solution to do that in Steam Big Picture mode.

I have a couple Pis running PiOS because there’s basically not a better solution.

Confirmed.

Debating letter vs spirit of law is a symptom of a shittily written law.

The fairies in A Link to the Past were on a spectrum between Tinkerbell gossamer wings and a tiny dress, to angelic bird winged and long gowns. When a fairy appeared on screen, there would be soothing harp music.

On the N64, fairies were either firefly like glow balls with insect wings, or…pointy, head-tentacled, vine clad women that screech like a witch when they emerge or retire?

I forgot Eve Online existed. I got a free trial to it once, tried installing it on my Pentium III desktop, it booted but had this weird pink cast to it, so I installed it on my dad’s Pentium 4 desktop, got through the tutorial, like shot some asteroids, encountered another player in game, asked what the point of the game was, the other player responded “Whatever you want it to be.” and I quit the game and never looked back.

Factorio is the least pointful game I’ll accept: Here is a hammer, a pistol with 100 shots, 10 iron plates, a furnace and a drill. Build and launch a rocket.

Okay, where’d you get only 500 meters of solid rock?

Chicks going to cons cosplaying as Lara Croft with half a shoebox up her shirt will never stop being funny.

Let me tell you about some fun I’ve had twice now:

Some of a tooth snaps off. You go to the dentist, “Yep, that needs to come out.” You schedule an appointment with a dental surgeon. On that day, what’s left of the tooth is torn out of your face, and a titanium drywall anchor dusted with cadaver bone is forced into the hole. You spend a couple months with a titanium cap sticking out of where your tooth used to be. Once it’s healed enough, you go back to the dentist and the titanium cap comes out and they bolt a fake tooth to the implanted anchor, which hurts a part of your body that has never felt sensation before so it feels like it’s 3 feet behind your head. And now one of your teeth is ceramic, weirdly numb, and food can get stuck under it.

Others in here have said “brush your teeth” but one of mine broke because resorption. The tooth hollowed itself out from the inside, for no apparent reason. So, don’t randomly lose the tooth lottery either.

My first thought was “dude, where’d you get 500 meters of solid rock?”

It does remind me strongly of the people I’ve cut off, yes.

It’s not so bad when it’s your first time through the game and you’ve never seen any of it before, when you’re taking in the scenes for the first time. It’s a bigger issue on the second playthrough, which…this game isn’t designed for a second playthrough. The fun isn’t in the mechanics and it isn’t exactly a feast for the eyes (the monochrome dithered retro styling is interesting in full 3D and I understand it was a pain in the dick to get the Unity engine to do that, but it’s still a bit…harsh), so most of the fun is learning what happened, and if you’ve been through it before, well.

Talking to NPCs to find out things about the immediate area is a major part of the game.

If you do what the King says, you’ll encounter NPCs that have some early world building dialog, an easily climbed tower to start filling in the map and get the shrine sensor, four convenient shrines, one of which has the climbing bandana in it, great time to get that because you don’t have a hat at all yet so the extra armor plus the climbing speed buff is excellent to have, there’s a stable with a sidequest that teaches you how to catch horses, you’ll find Hestu along the path up to Kakariko and likely increase your inventory (or learn that koroks exist), and then in Kakariko the shrine there is a combat tutorial, there’s a fairy fountain nearby, plus Impa sets you on the main quest of the game. Having done four shrines, you can add a heart or stamina wheel sector. Pikango is here, and there are several sidequests in Kakariko to get stuck into.

Impa sends you to Hateno to get the memories sidequest going. Major location in the game with some adventuring and side questing to do, more expository dialog and world building, you get the camera and shiekah sensor, get sent back to Impa, and then you’re kicking around in Kakariko with no immediate goal. You look out one of the exits of town you haven’t taken yet and you see a wide open area with two visible shrines and a tower. Course charted, you get sucked into the Zora plot. Once that’s done, you’ll have Mipha’s Grace, an additional heart, some more armor, and then the training wheels are off and now it’s up to you to pick a direction to explore.

“I didn’t do what the NPC said and didn’t find something important the whole game” gives big “why don’t my kids ever call” energy.

Granted, Obra Dinn’s pacing problem wasn’t about dialog. It was…You find a corpse, click, a musical sting plays, you get a few seconds of audio play, and then you see in glorious monochrome dithering the aftermath, and then you’re stuck there for the exact amount of time that some music plays. If you immediately learned something, you can’t do anything about it. If you learn a piece of information that puts something you saw earlier in a new context and you want to go back and look at it, you can’t do anything about it. If you’re not done looking when the music is over, you’ll clunkily have to come back in here. And woe betide you if there’s another corpse in that scene and you end up doing like five of them in a row.

I discovered it through its soundtrack. I was listening to West of Loathing’s soundtrack on Youtube, which was partially or entirely done by the same artist who did WTWTLW’s, so I got recommended some videos, looked up what it was, decided to give it a try, and…maybe if someone implements it for Apple II or some other machine that physically cannot support voice acting so we can dispense with the pretentiousness.

I bounced off of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. I didn’t really even get into the gameplay because the narration in the intro just wouldn’t shut up. You’d click an option, the caption would pop up, and then it would mail a request for the audio file to the developer. I’d have the caption read by the time the narrator started to speak, and the narrator talked the way old people fuck. I went “I don’t have the patience for this right now, I’ll come back to it later” I chose the Exit option from the menu, and the narrator started delivering a multi-line “everyone gets a break but you’ll come back” dialog, which I ALT+F4’d out of the software and uninstalled it on the spot. Dim Bulb Games is one of many studios on my black list.

In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you “Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village.” Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.

Well remember when turn-by-turn GPS driver guidance was new, and it would say “Turn right now” and people didn’t interpret that as “make a right turn at the next intersection” they interpreted it as “hard a’starboard!” and drove into buildings and lakes? There’s gonna be a lot of that.

People are going to get sold regular cab headliners for their extended cab pickups because the computer said it would fit. That’s gonna happen a lot.

The specialized rendering processors of the NES and SNES and Sega Genesis could push pixels without all the distractions a CPU has, in away they were the first GPUs (although modern GPUs do a much more generalized job).

…What?

The NES had a 6502, the SNES had what amounts to a 16-bit version of the 6502, the Genesis had two CPUs, a Zilog Z80 and a Motorola 68000. I will grant you, their video chips were a bit more specialized for playing games, with sprite generators and such, lacking text or bitmap modes. Consoles mostly dominated arcade action, PC games were often slower paced but in many ways technically superior. True 3D graphics happened on PC earlier, hardware 3D acceleration happened on PC earlier, it wasn’t until the Xbox One/PS4 era that game consoles pretty much became entry level worsened gaming PCs.

Consoles were cheaper, specialized computers made specifically for games, PCs were far more expensive but significantly more powerful. No console in 1995 would run Descent or Mechwarrior 2.

That stopped being the case some time around the Xbox 360 era; By then, it was fairly common to see console ports of PC games or vice versa; console versions might lack multiplayer or have reduced graphics or something, the PC has pretty much always been the home of nerdier shit like flight simulators, but by the PS3 and PS4 era consoles basically became entry level gaming PCs. Console prices increased to the point that, for the cost of a PS5 Pro, you could put together a reasonable gaming PC…then ChatGPT ate all the world’s semiconductors and the child rapist in chief bombed Iran apparently on a whim and that brings us to the present moment.

Oh man I miss old flash-based escape the room games. Remember the Crimson Room?