Finished Rogue Trader on the weekend and got... an actually okay ending, I guess? Which would be a first for an Owlcat game (I didn't walk out of it feeling like I'd wasted the last 80 hours, at least).
It's probably the least "Owlcatty" of the Owlcat games, which is a good thing; it feels shorter and a bit tighter than Kingmaker and WotR, though the space exploration stuff still drags (fly to a planet, click scan, click to mine a resource, rinse, repeat).
Main gripes are:
1. I know everyone gave Bioware shit for this, but I need CRPGs to bring back big obvious "[Flirt]" tags for romance dialogue. I keep triggering romances with characters I'm just trying to not be an asshole to which is, like... no. Particularly if it's locking me out of romances I actually want to do.
2. Kinda disappointed how little impact being a psyker, particularly a Telepath, has in dialogue. I guess it's a balance thing, but asides from a bit of throwaway flavor text I really feel like I should've been able to read minds and/or been tormented by daemons more.
3. Not enough Tyranids.
But those relatively minor gripes aside... yeah this one was pretty fun. (And also please please please more 40k RPGs please.)
I did like that you could basically say "fuck you" to the Imperium, and solve most conflicts sort-of peacefully, particularly with the Aeldari.
40k in general has always sat in that uncomfortable space of being a British satire of the British Empire that got, uh. Americanized and taken more and more seriously over the years? (Ref. also Judge Dredd, for e.g.) I have the 8th edition of the core rule and it's like... guys, this is so obviously taking the piss, like it is total "are we the baddies" material my god.
Rogue Trader is more po-faced, and I wouldn't say it engages comfortably with its themes of empire, exploitation, religion and xenophobia but it also doesn't present them as uncritically "good," either (probably most obviously reflected through whenever Marazhai approves of anything human). I think it also treads a pretty reasonably line between "the Imperial Cult provides ordinary people with a unifying positive force in a hostile universe" and "the Imperial Cult provides the worst people in the universe the means to indulge in their base excesses... and do the ends justify the means, really?" (Disclaimer: Yes I am a "the Emperor is a Chaos God" truther.)
And you can be the one person who says "fuck that shit" and the game mostly respects that, even gives you a literal deus ex machina ending to stop the Imperium invading and obliterating all your planets post-game. Being nice to people does work, in other words, which in something as cynical and, uh. Shall we say... misappropriated as 40k, is probably the biggest subversion of all.
So my friend was obsessed with this song in high school, and I've had the MP3 in my library for all that time and never before now have I thought to go looking for the music video... and yet somehow it is exactly what I expected it would be?
So I've really, really wanted to like Maestral, a third-party macOS client for Dropbox, because Dropbox's native client is an egregious piece of shit.
But I think it just... doesn't work with Scrivener syncing? And after losing yet another 10k words in this project due to documents suddenly appearing as empty I'm just... I think I have to switch back.
(I've been taking obsessive snapshots and backups so have been able to recover most of what was lost, but it's still just... not a problem I want to deal with, and it's not a problem I've ever had to deal with previously. So something is obviously fucking up, and sadly Maestral is the most obvious culprit.)
Huge shout-out the terrifying vacuum elevator at my in-laws' beach house which is like... you know one of those old vacuum tubes they used to send mail around in in offices back in the olden dayes? Like that. But for people. And sounds like forty vacuums running all at once.
Reading a lot of "no, guys, Meta's Threads team are really nice! they have super-great intentions! this time will be totally different!" takes from tech pundits and the sorts of people who call themselves things like "fediverse entrepreneurs" and it's like... guys.
Initial indicators of “was that worth it?” are “hell yes!”
There’s also a recipe for crispy chilli oil I want to try, but the recipe wants you to have a thermometer to check the oil temperature and I do not, so… another time.
So it might take a little while for all the various CDNs and object caches to expire but, thanks to my new exciting CSS skills, alis.me should now have a dark mode.
Hey infosec nerds: A couple years ago I went all-in on the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve been content with Safari as my default browser since then. Everybody is pushing Firefox as the best alternative to Chrome’s growing enshittification, but is Safari an adequate choice if you’re already elbow-deep in Mac?
@trixter Yes, it’s perfectly fine. It does a bunch of tracking minimisation out of the box and also supports additional ad blockers and privacy extensions in the App Store (I use 1Blocker and Magic Lasso, at least on iOS, FWIW). And while Apple aren’t perfect, they use privacy as a market differentiator compared to Google and Microsoft, so don’t do so much of the aggressive user data harvesting stuff.
@MarineHaddock It's also a bit disingenuous to compare Tumblr to OpenAI, of all companies, which is currently getting propped up by Microsoft to the tune of billions of dollars and also, quite frankly, has no pathway to becoming profitable given how computationally intensive it is.