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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age. However, I don’t think she finished it either.

    Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!

    I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.

    Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.

    I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.

    Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.

    My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.



  • I thought the game was pretty okay. The romance with the detective lady was a little disappointing. The difficulty fell off a cliff pretty early on as a mage with life drain.

    The arc with whatstheirface and their mother not accepting them seemed pretty plausible to me. I’ve got a friend going through something like that now. Seeing something like that in media is meaningful to people.

    The loyalty mission prompt was kind of meh. I can see that they wanted loyalty missions, but it felt like they struggled to fit them in.

    Overall it wasn’t quite the game I wanted, but it wasn’t bad.




  • I feel like how big I want the game to be is a weird quantum unstable value. When I’m interested in the game I want it to keep going. But at some point I lose interest, and I want it to wrap up. But usually I don’t want to skip content that’s at least okay, especially if it affects endings and other choices.

    Like I enjoyed Veilguard, but there were bits near the end where I was losing focus and kind of wanted it to pick up the pace. There have been other games where I finished all the side quests but was like “that’s it? I want more”

    Not sure how to square this circle. I don’t think procedural generated or AI content is quite up to the task yet.

    I do think we’ll see a game that has AI content in the critical path in the next couple years though. You’ll go to camp and talk to Shadowheart, and it’ll try to just make up new dialogue. I don’t know if it’ll be good. There will probably be at some weird ass hallucinations that’ll become memes.





  • I think people over value emotions, but I realize I’m part of people too and it happens to me. Emotions are a fast heuristic but they’re not very inaccurate. They’re good for when speed is important, or when more information isn’t available. Neither is true on an async post about Linux. But yes, I can be dismissive of emotions but it’s something I’m working on.

    I’ve seen too many people make strange, unhelpful, decisions because like “someone told me to do something and now I won’t” or “that guy was rude so I’m not going to listen”. That’s what your post felt like to me. (Note the emotional dimension there, heh)

    Like, imagine a friend who always forgets their plans, is late, and double books themselves. You probably can’t just be like “use a calendar, dude”. You probably have to gently massage them and incept the idea. If you just tell them, they’ll feel bad, reject the idea, and continue having problems. (In real life, some months later the friend did come around to using a calendar, but only after uselessly wrestling with feeling bad)


  • So far this has been the smoothest installation of a Linux OS I have ever done.

    Envy. I tried to install mint last night on a new computer, and it was a shit show.

    • Ethernet and WiFi wouldn’t work.
    • Bluetooth wouldn’t work
    • the HDMI out stopped working at some point

    I did learn you can tether your phone via USB, so I got Internet that way. That was cool.

    But after I got Internet working, with help from discord, elden ring and Baldur’s gate 3 both failed to launch in different ways.

    I gave up. Windows11 is horrible.





  • Depends on how strange and impactful their choice is.

    If it’s something that I think should be in the style guide, I’d promise try to achieve consensus. I’d prefer not merging in the dubious code because then other people may take it as precedent.

    One guy really wanted to write his code differently than the existing code and how others were doing it. It kind of sucked. Not that his way was bad, but no one else on the team subjectively liked it. I relented and let it go, and then had to deal with that unpleasant code for months. Eventually he moved on and a lot of that code got replaced. I retrospect I would have preferred if we had somehow convinced him to keep in the style we preferred. I’m sure he wasn’t happy that the rest of the team wasn’t keen on his style choices.

    If it’s just a little weird, mention it as a non blocking comment. Like one guy would have weird line breaks in his longer comments. It technically followed the guide (under max line length) but it was weird. We asked him to stop, he said ok, no problem. But I didn’t block a merge over it.