Khrux

Subnautica is the perfect mesh of several things that work fantastically. It is a good survival game but with it’s upgrade and discovery based exploration limitations, it’s closer to a metroidvania than it is to Minecraft. The thing it does so well is sneak this past you, it’s a mystery driven metroidvania where the downtime is a resource gathering, based building game.

The closest game I can think of of that tried the same mystery metroidvania approach is The Forest, but this feels like one of the many many games from the post Minecraft and DayZ boom that has a certain scrappiness to it that somehow Subnautica absolutely sidesteps, and it’s all from just being a really well made game. The vibrant and often tranquil art style that lends itself to awe inspiring locations, and the level design and overall plot support eachother so well.

That said, I’m not in love with the amount of resources. A 4*8 gridded inventory puts me off a game from a worry of it to getting too grindy, and subnautica is a “I need to build another storeroom” kind of game. With a full survival game like Minecraft, which is endless and about exploration and progress alone, I know my storage will be unweildy and I can forgive it, but I’d have appreciated Subnautica finding a way to require less mindless resource hunting / busywork unless itnwas optional base cosmetics or the like.

My big three are Outer Wilds which at this point barely needs mentioning, Disco Elysium which seems to be getting more famous by the day, and Hollow Knight.

Outer wilds is an exploration game, and if the other comments haven’t been clear, that’s all I’m saying.

Disco Elysium is an unbelievably dense police procedural set in a unique setting, it can also be fantastic to explore without hearing much beforehand but unlike outer wilds, you don’t really need to beat yourself up for looking up the occasional piece of lore.

Hollow Knight is a souls-like metroidvania, so it’s ticking the Sekiro / Dark Souls box well.

I got about 90% through the game with only a rough understanding of the lore before ending up watching video essays about it and I was absolutely blown away. I don’t think the lore is overly difficult to find, and isn’t that complicated, but like FromSoft’s games, it’s not always delivered in a way that you naturally pick it up.

I play a lot of games with the “media literacy” part of my brain firmly switched off, because often games handhold you through the storytelling. With Disco Elysium, you know from the getgo that it’s a pay attention kind of game, but Hollow Knight, it sort of feels like a storyless flash game, and sometimes key lore is delivered in a beautiful set piece or creature design, so I only realised I should have been paying attention when it was too late to catch up.

I got no less enjoyment from it by catching up on the lore later though, these three games are absolutely my top three.

My final bonus suggestion is to bash out all the supergiant games in order, Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades all hit the marks for me to sometimes just stop in awe and let myself get chills, although less tban the three above. I also think Pyre is one of the most overlooked games of all time.

I remember doing this on Reddit Sync years ago by combining this option,

Settings shortcut: History > Mark posts as read on scroll

With something like this option,

Settings shortcut: General > FAB action

Set the FAB to hide read posts. The main difference to how I had it working in the past is that with this, you must use the floating action button to periodically purge this content, where as I’m sure I had it working automatically before.

I have a PC I built that was absolutely top of the line 9½ years ago, that still plays most games in high to max settings. It’s a little powerhouse for its age, I often use it for rendering video and it still smokes everybody I know 's devices.

Windows 11 is too powerful for my PC according to Microsoft and I’ve been so pleased about that. If it wasn’t for the fact that I have no issues with my current windows 10 setup, I’d put in some time to jump to Linux. I’m just too lazy to give it the weekend it would take to learn, set up and move my content over properly.

I occasionally get pulled into the YouTube shorts and hate howuch time I lose to them. Worse was that although I barely use Instagram beyond keeping in contact with friends who only use it, I happened to watch the reels for a little yesterday and they were really entertaining.

A lot of amateur video creators don’t have the experience to keep their work engaging for long periods of time, half the internet feels like SNL sketches that make their best punchline in the first 20 seconds and then milk the same joke for the next 3 minutes. The way short form content cuts through the crap is actually quite nice. It obviously has a whole bunch of its own issues but that’s mostly due to chasing the algorithms favour, not the short form nature of the content.

One of the issues here is that there is likely considerable overlap between people who are competent enough to circumvent the block with a VPN or the like, and people who’d be seeking out AI deepfake porn, just because the latter likely appeals to socially outcast (and unfortunately therefore often more tech savvy) people.

I’m in the UK and glad this has been blocked but I also absolutely don’t trust the weird internet puritanism of the UK government, for at least the time I’ve been following politics as a you g teenager, there have been many attempts to block various aspects of porn on the internet, normally from a point of protecting children but the whole thing has always reeked of the government testing public outcry on blocking parts of the internet to later re-attempt to censor on their interests.

I have no sympathy for the people who are being scammed here, I hope they lose hundreds to it. Making fake porn of somebody else without their consent, particularly that which could be mistaken for real if it were to be seen by others, is awful.

I wish everyone involved in this use of AI a very awful day.

They are specifically claiming that they were unaware and it happened due to the artist using the built-in AI aids in Photoshop, which is against their policy.

I actually trust WotC on this depite despising basically every other decision over the past year that they have made. They have repeatedly made their stance on not wanting AI content clear but individual designers and artists are easily equipped to just ignore that and only get caught when they don’t clean up the obvious AI errors afterwards. WotC need to be fair better at internally vetting their art and I recon they are with card art or art that is making its way to books, but art from marketing and other adjacent areas is slipping through the cracks.

Initially denying the art being AI generated is actually probably the biggest tell that they didn’t intend it. If they make a policy against it and get obviously caught, it’s totally illogical to deny it and damage their reputation further, but if they trust the artist initially, then they have grounds to deny it until they vet it or the artist owns up, which is probably what happened here.

Hasbro on the other hand only care about one thing, the line going up to their investors can cum. Currently the only reason that WotC has such a strong anti AI content policy is because the heart of their content is about design, from their artists to game designer, and many of the people who hold these roles are beloved voices in the community and if their jobs are at risk, they’ll be loud and clear about it, and we need to hear them and support them when Hasbro try to encoach on this policy, and make it clear that any cost-cutting from AI generated content will cause enough outcry and boycotting that their stock price goes down.

I’ve noticed this too, I can manage it but I am definitely holding my phone much closer to my face than the rest of the time on the app. It’s the same size as the rest of the comment text but feels smaller, maybe because I can compare it to the keyboard size?

It absolutely wasn’t an opportunity but I respect it none the less.

It’s pretty hypocritical but at least it’s closeable with a continue reading button.

I should say I’m actively opposed to anyone gaining control of the fediverse but when I started using Lemmy, Masterdon and Peertube, (until about an hour ago) I was unaware that it would be this easy for a big company to just engulf it if they wished to.

If I knew that the fediverse could be controlled and then drained like every other internet community, I would have approached it differently.

I’m don’t totally understand the fediverse and how it works. How does meta making one of their options federated harm the rest of the fediverse?

YouTube became weirdly positive and fake a while ago, I actually think the mega cesspit of YouTube comments hasn’t been reality for a few years now.

I can’t tell if that’s because the Gen Z online communication style is to celebrate everything, which is nice, or because there’s an algorithm in place somewhere to make the comments more marketable, which is lame.

The biggest thing I’m looking forward to in the fediverse is integration like this, I’m not tech savvy enough to know if it’s viable but open source software that’s designed to communicate with other instances feels like a perfect place for things like this to develop.

Ikeeo seeing things on Peertube, Lemmy and Masterdon that would suit integration with eachother, particularly when it comes to showing the Lemmy comment system under other parts of the fediverse.

All of my friends who listen to sad lesbian music got Burlington or Berkley.

He still has more decision making power than anyone I’ve ever met and probably ever will meet.

I played it back when it first released and loved the graphics, I think it’s still generally agreed to be a beautiful game to my knowledge.

The only bit I was underwealmed by was the ending, but they’d also write something with grounded intrigue, which is a difficult thing to pull off without having a cynical ending of “of you thought this was gonna be exciting? This is real buddy”, which wasn’t really what firewatch was evoking.

A soon as I started typing I realised it’s probably not too exciting. I think it’s always had that mythic element growing up near it of imagining the amount of work needed for lots of cups of tea to be made at the same time.

There’s a power station in snowdonia, Wales nicknamed Electric Mountain, that just pumps water up the mountain all year round to drop it at optimum times. The cliche examples given are the world cup final half time and after a Dr Who finale. At that point they just drop all the stored water over their turbines to counter the massive surge. I’m sure equivalents of this are common all over the world but it feels so uniquely British.