dreadgoat avatar

dreadgoat

@dreadgoat@kbin.social
dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

Xfce is a great example of how solving a problem in the best way results in low adoption.

People tend toward extremes. There is something in particular they really want, and they will gravitate toward the product that gives them the most of that thing.
I want total control over configuration: KDE Plasma
I want maximum performance: LXDE
I want something that looks good and I don't want to think about it: GNOME/Cinnamon

Xfce isn't on this list! It's not the best at anything. But it's pretty good at everything. It's an overall best (in my opinion) but because it's not beautiful, nor lightning fast, nor incredibly flexible, nobody will ever take it as their first choice. And the majority of people make a first choice and then never change, as whatever they start with is probably good enough for them. I've tried all of the DE's listed above, but I'm the crazy guy: that's a lot of work and churn! Any and all of them work well enough, why bother installing 5 separate environments?

If you want to develop something and have people adopt it, then your goal is to have a killer sexy feature at the expense of all else, rather than to be satisfactory in every metric.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

This particular version is more about the characters depicted (Denji and Power from Chainsaw Man), who are famous for being endearingly stupid.

The more earnest versions you tend to see on TikTok are mostly posted by, or at least targeted at, actual kids who don't yet understand how vision works. Nobody on Lemmy is under the age of 30.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

I'm with you on the hyperbole. BG3 has been a massive success, but it's not really innovative or unique. In fact it's terribly buggy and is missing several features the community has been begging for over years of early access. It suffers all of the same problems other RPGs suffer from.

It's overall very high quality (other than the bugs), it serves a niche that is perpetually starving for content, and it encourages enthusiastic fans to buy copies for their friends. It has the names of Baldur's Gate, DnD, and Faerun all going for it. It landed smoothly in between the release windows of FFXVI and Starfield so it has no major competition. That's why it's blown up the way it has.

It's really good, I'm very happy everyone's loving it, but it's just... a good game that released with providential circumstance. Why can't it just be that simple?

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

It reeks of immaturity in general, or maybe more cynically, the perception of a bunch of nerds that have never had a sex life. There are so few games that handle sexual and romantic relationships realistically, and now that we have one nobody knows what to make of it.

Some characters take things slow. Opening up gradually, sharing some wine, holding hands and enjoying a single kiss on a night alone together. Eventually this ramps up naturally.

Some characters on the other hand are like, "you ready to fuck? I'm ready. Love? Never heard of it."

Both of these are normal and it's cool to see both represented in the same world.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

Everybody's a little ADHD, and everybody's a little crazy. You have to reach a particular threshold before you qualify as "clinical."

If you are able to function independently, then you probably won't be clinically diagnosed even if you have some struggles here and there.

Consider the difference between a person with OCD who feels really uncomfortable when they aren't able to perform their compulsions vs. a person who suffers a complete mental breakdown and loses all ability to self-regulate for hours or days.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

Your basic gripe has been answered (and I'm really sorry if you're still struggling to skip the animation, it IS long), but just want to throw out here that "without any idea of the DC of the check" is an intended gameplay element.

You are supposed to look at the situation and try to guess how hard you think a thing would be. This is a hotly debated subject in tabletop, but Larian's position is clear - you don't get to know the DC until you're committed. Figuring out that intimidating the cave troll is a high DC is on you to infer from the situation. Some DMs don't tell players the DC at all, even after the roll. Some DMs don't even tell players whether or not they succeeded (which I think is really fun for things like Insight checks)

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

He's really the same as he's always been, just the more you watch and listen the more you find out about his questionable views.

I disagree with him on most things, but I respect him as a pundit because you can really tell that he's providing opinions that are truly his own. He's a conservative democrat that everybody hates, and he ignores the pressure to fall in line with either side. He's pro-military, pro-gun, pro-surveillance, but also all for drug legalization, medicare for all, and vehemently supports separation of church and state. It's a weird mix and even inconsistent at times (he loves individual freedom but hates women so abortion is tricky for him!) but you at least have to admit he's one of the last remaining pundits that isn't a mouthpiece for politicians.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

I think it's that the world has changed and left him behind. He was a racist misogynist 30 years ago, but back then the system enforced those things to his satisfaction. The systemic oppression of people he doesn't like has been challenged more and more over the past few decades, and he takes issue with that.

It makes sense for him to be the angriest "progressive" in the world if you think about it. All the progress we've made has been the things he DOESN'T want (metoo, BLM, etc) and none of the things he does want (healthcare, secularism)

This is why a lot of old people "become more conservative." No they don't. They just stew in their shitty comfort zones while the world around them moves forward.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

I find it strange that so many people hate on Astarion, clearly a product of 200 years of torment, and adore Karlach, clearly a product of 20 years of torment. Why is it endearing for a former slave-knight to have anger issues and a lust for killing, but it's unacceptable for a vampire thrall to be jaded and hungry? I see them both as victims expressing their damage in different ways. I wonder if Astarion were a female character if people would take more of a "i can fix her" attitude? Or maybe it's just that people are more comfortable with violent streaks that are more in-your-face.

I think if you perceive Astarion as evil after getting to know him a bit, it says more about your lack of empathy than his. He's pretty neutral, he's just been through a lot of shit and gets hangry.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

used for things it wasn’t created for

I think Python gets a point here, as it is very good at doing what it was created for.
Javascript even sucks at its stated goal.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

It was very much like the difference between seeing a video of VR gameplay and experiencing VR yourself.

I remember seeing the screenshots in magazines (we used to update ourselves on the state of the industry with monthly or biweekly physical print media) and thinking "oh neat, but whatever..." and then I saw Battle Arena Toshinden being played at Toys'R'Us and that "oh neat" turned into "okay satan, you can have my soul for this"

We weren't blind, we knew the polygons were ugly as hell standing still, but seeing them move at 30 fps on a 25-inch CRT was downright sorcerous

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

Yes, but then you don't call it "marijuana addiction" because that implies that consuming the substance creates a chemical dependency.

You can get addicted to anything. Porn. Games. Gambling. Exercise. Self-harm. Knitting. The only times people label these as anything other than "behavioral/psychological" is when they want to demonize the activity. Hence why you hear a lot about gambling addiction (very obviously bad to get addicted to a destructive behavior) but not exercise addiction (you should be happy to be psychologically destroying yourself in such a healthy way!)

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

Instead of removing two instances of S and replacing both with an X, you could simply remove the first S and replace it with a K. This would provide a functionally identical output with less code changes, and would preserve arity. Provide comments explaining the reason for the unintuitive implementation of the "fixes" interface so that future maintainers don't mistakenly rewrite it. Pull request rejected.

An interesting case of moderation in the fediverse (blog.ownlifeful.com)

A small group of people were offended by a joke that unintentionally came across transphobic, and as a result this persons account was blacklisted. Even after getting the account reinstated, there were lasting complications with the state of the account (these probably technical issues) and the account was basically lost for...

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

This is a tale as old as time. Oppressed groups are naturally conditioned to be hyper-defensive per the oppression they face, which results in lashing out against neutral parties, which comes back to haunt the oppressed group as oppressors can now point as their "inherent evil" and sometimes even the neutral parties will say "hmm maybe they ARE all crazy" and become oppressors themselves. In this case it's not even a neutral party, but someone who is part of the oppressed group theirself, being ostracized by their own community.

I'm reminded of the time that Contrapoints (Natalie Wynn, a veritable transgender icon) got cannibalized by the very community she seeks to advocate for because she confessed that the pronoun dance that happens in inclusive spaces can feel like a step backward for a newly passing trans person who wants nothing more than to be supportive of others, but simultaneously wants nothing more than to naturally and intuitively be referred to by their preferred pronoun without needing the dance. If even the champions of the community are going to be eviscerated for not treading lightly enough, what hope is there of recruiting allies from normie-space?

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

I think this one is pretty confined to my region (southwestern USA) but we use Otto as the moniker of a generic stupid person too, but probably for a different reason: Otto is Oblivious to the Obvious

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar
  1. Area 51 - a real USAF research facility where cutting edge aircraft were tested in the mid 20th century. People in the area truly did see Unidentified Flying Objects, in the sense that they saw aircraft the likes of which they had until then believed were impossible.
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar who single-handedly reinvigorated the UFO conspiracy theories long after Area 51 had concluded most of its Cold War era secret tests.
dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

Oh no, one of our states is unilaterally performing acts of war, but pOSsE cOmITatUS, guess our hands are tied, aw shucks

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

Gandalf isn't a superhero because he's more like an angel. He played a part in the creation of the world, and is entirely inhuman. He's a primordial spirit masquerading in a corporeal form.

Luke Skywalker is much closer to a superhero because he's a mortal man who was inadvertently blessed with incredibly rare powers and chooses to use them for good.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

The Johnston & Murphy XC4 line has become my go-to. They are not cheap, and the selection is limited, but the construction and versatility can't be beat.

I've had my oldest pair for over 4 years, with no functional degradation at all, and minimal signs of wear (minor creasing in the leather, hardly worth mentioning). They're casual and comfortable enough for everyday wear, and stylish enough for business events. Easily the best value in a shoe I've ever gotten.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

Ada has been fairly aggressive in shaping her community on blahaj, so I think we'll see some splintering soon.

Logically there are two positions one can hold as a public LGBT (or any marginalized group) community:
Either we are first and foremost a safe space for our members, and will moderate aggressively to keep it that way
or
We are first and foremost the public face of this community, serving as a place for us to stage the culture war for our own safety and acceptance

Both of these are cool and make sense, but blahaj kind of fell accidentally into the second role due to the massive popularity of 196, while Ada really seems to want to cultivate the safe space instead. I'm sure the community is split, but time will tell just how deeply.

My unqualified prediction is that blahaj will intentionally obscure itself, get out of the limelight and try to focus itself more as a community of internal discussion and camaraderie for LGBT folks, and those who are unhappy with that will attempt to build a new 196 on an instance that is less curated.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

It's legal and really a non-story. There's plenty of shit to be angry at GOPers about without writing misleading headlines.

Rich guy wants to run a political campaign, so he takes out loans to pay for it. At the same time, he asks for donations to support the campaign. Afterwards, he may use those donations to pay back the loans which were taken out to fund the campaign. What is the problem here? This is just how funding works.

The story is written as though he is being deceptive, when in reality all he is saying is that he doesn't expect the donations he receives to line up with the amount of money he took out in loans to fund the campaign. That's fine, he's just paying for it out of his own pocket.

What WOULD be an issue is if these loans that he took out specifically for campaigning were misappropriated and allocated for personal use. THAT is illegal. But as of yet there is no proof of that, just whining that he's rich enough to pull a bunch of money out the bank for a campaign (which is a problem with the system, but not really with him as an individual)

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

AKA Absurdism

The world is less frightening if it makes sense, even if the ways it makes sense don't make sense.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

I initially assumed this was from feddit.de

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

It can be dehumanizing since "female" could refer to any sexual creature, not necessarily a human being.

So in the context of biology, female is appropriate. We may be talking about the properties of ovaries, the effects of high estrogen, the process of pregnancy and childbirth. We may be talking about human females, but potentially also just females in general.

But in the context of people, female is inappropriate, and it is better to use terms that affirm the subject is human: woman; girl; lady. A woman is (usually) a female, but a female isn't always a woman, isn't always a human, and so by referring to women as "female" you subtly suggest that their humanity is absent or unimportant.

dreadgoat,
dreadgoat avatar

Not really, topic markers are... uh... and case endings... analytical instead of... wait a minute
Der Hund ist rot; 犬は赤いです
Ich esse den Hund; 犬を食べる
no it can't be
Der Knochen des Hundes; 犬の骨
fuck
Ich gebe dem Hund einen Knochen; 犬に骨をあげます

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