Lowbird

@Lowbird@beehaw.org

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Lowbird,

You can multi-select items and mark them all as wares at once, just only for one character at a time. I agree all wares should be pooled between characters though, or we should have the option at least.

Recommendations for short, dialogue-heavy/description-light audiobooks with lively narrators?

I have a lot of time to fill with audio, but audiobooks are challenging for me because I have trouble paying attention consistently enough and processing physical descriptions fast enough to keep up with the narrator. I end up losing my place or having to rewind a lot. Slowing down playback doesn’t help/introduces other...

Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun? (kbin.cafe)

Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.

Lowbird,

Trying to get into those as a newbie is miserable dor all those reasons and also because, unless maybe if you get in right when the game first comes out, your competitors will be far more comfortable with the mechanics and have memorized the maps and so on. It’s especially bad if you’re a newbie to multiplayer shooters a whole, even if you’re good at single player shooters. It becomes and exercise in: spawn, die, respawn, die… Super frustrating to begin with. And then people insult you. Noooot something I find worth bothering with for a thing that’s supposed to be enjoyable in my free time.

Why do I only see 19 posts in this community?

Eternity says that there are 569 posts in this community. When I access it through my sh.itjust.works account I see so much more posts (only old ones though). I don’t even see the admin’s post! I also see much less comments on those 19 posts than how many Eternity is saying there are. Just in general, I feel like I see so...

Lowbird,

THANK YOU. I thought lemmy had just lost a shitload of users! I’ve been missing so many posts and I had no idea. >.<

For others who use apps: check your profile settings on the website, not only in your app of choice.

Lowbird,

Voice actors are among “those who actually make the games.” Voice acting in particular also is strenuous work that can and does cause physical injury when workers are compelled to work long hours doing rough voices and so on. People end up having to have surgery on their vocal cords.

We don’t need to devalue voice actors to value other game industry workers. The only difference is the voice actors organized first, probably because of the injury risk, and when you form a union you have to define a group that you can reach and coordinate. It shouldn’t be an us vs them among works.

Lowbird,

They could easily all be giving their honest opinion at IGN: if the reviewers who tend to like everything are the ones who don’t get fired, the output of mostly positive (or sometimes groupthink negative) reviews would be the same, even if individual reviewers never lied.

Lowbird,

Exactly this. 50/100 looks like an F, because that’s what it would be on a school paper. Often we’d even be given points out of a hundred just like that. So giving a 50 to a middling/okay game feels really harsh, vs 70 (aka a C) or 80 (B).

Scientologists Ask Federal Government to Restrict Right to Repair (www.404media.co)

The organization that represents Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s works has petitioned the U.S. government to restrict the right to repair a religious artifact called an E-Meter. This device is core to Scientology practices but the group argues exemptions allowing device hacking should not apply to equipment restricted to...

Lowbird,

You make a good point in general, but this particular case is about preventing non-scientologists from treating the ‘religious object’ devices how they will, not about the scientologists being at all restricted in their own handling of the objects (as would be comparable to illegal drugs or animal sacrifice used in religious rituals).

This case in particular is comparable to requesting that the government outlaw the modification or destruction of the Bible or Qoran, even by people who own their own copy of a religious text. It would require non-adherants to a religion to treat that religion’s objects as sacred and to do so in the specific manner prescribed by that religion. This is contrary to precedent and law established by cases against people who’ve burnt their own personal copies of the bible, or created derivative works making fun of the bible, and so on.

Lowbird,

There isn’t an unbiased metric in existance, not when intelligence is itself so ill-defined and nebulous.

You can’t reduce it down to a number or set of numbers without making judgements about what intelligence is and isn’t, or what the numbers represent specifically, or without making judgements about how to take the measurements. These judgements cannot be made but through the lens of the culture and individual life experience of judge(s). And when it comes to research on topics like this there is simply no way to truly isolate any measurable quantity out as being inherently caused by biology vs external factors. Humans are messy and hard to sort neatly.

If anything, the comic more-so reflects what happens to kids who grow up getting told they’re gifted and praised for being inherently smart rather than for working hard or other such things that they can actually exert any control over, thus producing kids who are terrified of not being as smart as they’re told they are or as “successful” as they’ve been expected to be, who grow up to fret about their failures or perceived failures. Or to kids who have or believe themselves a great deal of potential but cannot realize it for other reasons, be they economic, geopolitical, familial or whatever.

Valve's compatibility rating for Steam Deck doesn't even try to be accurate anymore... Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't run well on the Steam Deck, it's okay... you can't support every devices but be honest!

If a game hypes a lot of people up, it will be verified. That’s like, the most important factor… not even the performance, the controls, etc…...

Lowbird,

I think difficulty setting, how often you get into combat, and how far you are into the game might affect it. In my playthrough it was fine for a long time but now every now and then it hangs a bit when it’s calculating enemy turns, even with my good CPU.

Lowbird,

Absolutely. Particularly since “does this work with the steam decks controls and screen size” is part of it.

I’ve never found it to be a reliable rating, tbh.

Lowbird,

As opposed to… ?

I genuinely couldn’t find a better option when I looked.

Lowbird,

Do you have an alternative that isn’t google? Because google’s DNS privacy policy is much worse.

I don’t like cloudflare, but their DNS terms are relatively good, and they have my info anyway because as you say, they’re everywhere. I don’t think my not using their DNS will make any appreciable mark on their business, either.

Does the threadiverse (Lemmy + Kbin) seem ruder the last few weeks?

I dunno. I just feel less like I’m experiencing a fun new tool for communication the last few weeks. The communities here on Beehaw are still great and fantastic and aren’t what I’m bothered by. It’s just when I venture out in the world (which I often do) that I notice conversations are much more argumentative than I...

Lowbird,

That’s been me, too. I’ll pop in here sometimes, but overall the whole thing has ended up making me realize that social media as a whole just… Isn’t that great, actually. It’s a constant stream of little things, many of them things to be upset about that I can’t do anything about.

I’ve been spending more time instead on things like reading, that require prolonged focus on one thing, and damn if I don’t feel better this way.

Also… Beehaw and lemmy in general seems to have gotten even more tilted into hardcore FOSS/privacy/Linux culture, which is the opposite of what I hoped would happen. Privacy is important to me but I dislike Linux and I just don’t prioritize it in the way that a lot of people here do, such that they’re talking about it what feels like all the time to the exclusion of other topics.

Still, I remain here enough to type this comment. shrug

I want to try Tildes instead maybe but I think that’s still invite-only.

Lowbird,

What happened in lemmy.world?

Lowbird,

I understand this take. For me, though, I wasn’t willing to let reddit to continue to make ad revenue from my posts/comments (e.g. from their turning up in google search results) or sell them for LLM-shenanigans (of course, my comments can be scraped off lemmy just the same, but at least a megacorp isn’t claiming ownership over them).

I don’t regret it at all, either. It feels rather refreshing to not have that trail floating around on the internet anymore (well, mostly. I’m sure I didn’t catch everything.)

Lowbird,

Sometimes I wonder whether an online community made of anonymous individuals who don’t and won’t ever know each other, nor even recognize each other, isn’t a fool’s errand. People are all-too willing to shout carelessly into the mist, as if their words can’t affect real people. At least with irl communities, there is a pressure not to insult each other to one another’s faces.

This isn’t to say social media is all bad, not at all. But I wonder if “community” is really possible in any kind of meaningful way, or in the long term.

All my favorite internet forums held on by being small and having solid rules and moderation, and then as they grow, and more and more strangers join the mix, it slowly falls apart.

Lowbird,

Even if the “be nice” moderation method flops in the long run, it is nice to see something different tried, at the least.

Lowbird,

Fuzzy Nations is a retelling of Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. Having read both, I can report that I liked Fuzzy Nation 300% more. But if someone likes one they may as well try the other.

Little Fuzzy is kind of hilariously western, with everyone smoking and gun-toting :P it’s also decidedly more sexist and less interesting in the way it handles the aliens and the legal fight around them. Very dated. But it can be fun anyways.

Lowbird,

If you are willing to venture into fanfiction, there are some tags on archiveofourown.org - like “humans are space orcs”, " earth is a deathworld", “earth is space australia” - for fics that feature overpowered humans relative to the aliens. Most of these are so AU that you don’t need any knowledge of the ostensible source material. The trope seems popular particularly with My Hero Academia and Minecraft youtuber fandoms, for whatever reason.

Generally, the scifi worldbuilding is usually really light, including names “made alien” by adding apostrophes and that kind of thing - but they scratch and itch that almost nothing else does. And they’re free! So maybe worth a try at least. Just make sure to filter by kudos.

Lowbird,

The Young Wizards series by Diane Duane if middle grade is okay.

Spellwright also seems promising but I haven’t finished it myself.

Lowbird, (edited )

Mother of Learning by Nobody103 - free webnovel, complete now I think. Wizard student gets stuck in a time loop and uses this opportunity to become OP and solve the mystery.

Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, if middle grade is okay.

I second Earthsea.

Spellwright seems like it might be good but I haven’t got far in it yet.

The Black Magician trilogy by Trudi Canavan. It’s been a long time since I read this, but Canavan is one of those authors who’s popular and has a lot of books out but is weirdly never mentioned online.

Also try L.E. Modesitt Jr. If you haven’t. Either the order mage series, or Imager maybe. Most anything by him will have a lot of studying. They’re very good if you like his specific flavor of writing.

Edit: Vita Nostra being described as just “magic school” is very funny to me, although I do see where it comes from lol.

Edit 2: I remember the Charlie Bone books being good, but again those are middle grade and it’s been ages since I read them. No idea if they hold up.

Lowbird,

I recommend Ken Liu’s translated Chinese scifi short story anthologies, which include some stori3s by Liu Cixin. The books are called “Invisible Planets” and “Broken Stars”.

Lowbird,

Primarily, library receipts!

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