MudMan

I am genuinely considering moving away from English language social media altogether. I find my native language media… kind of exhausting, honestly, but it’s still better than what the last Trump term triggered, so… maybe? It has the side advantage of countering some of the whole cultural imperialism, because hey, I’ll suffer it from US coastal elites, but I desperately need an alternative if it’s going to be coming form Elon Musk and Donald Trump, so…

Right. So Trump and Musk actively advocating for eradicating income tax and dismantling the government is the same thing as Harris winning and not doing that because the framework of the system is capitalistic and them not blowing up the US economy enables rich people to keep being rich.

That’s the argument.

That is the least serious argument I believe I’ve ever heard. It is a magnificent crystal of disingenuousness. If you could compress unserious, fallacious political arguments into diamonds, they would be that train of thought.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is absurd whenever it pops up. Like, it was absurd on the spectrum of relative centrist Obama against relative centrist McCain. But Trump vs Harris? The degree of detachment is cosmic.

Anyway, adults have an actual real political system to worry about, so you do you. We can always pick this one up after the election if some semblance of liberal democracy remains to worry about.

I mean, one of the two sides is putting forward the poster boy for rich people as a candidate and is largely bankrolled by the richest person on Earth.

So… “vote for whoever” seems like it implies forgetting who the real enemy is by definition.

I moved to a snow city for the first time well into adulthood.

The big thing I have for you is that walking on snow is awesome for like two hours and then it’s constantly threatening to kill you. Slippery sludge or ice is the worst feeling in the universe and all the locals will just strut right over it like it’s nothing while you’re fighting for your life.

Just buy good shoes and plant your feet vertically, no sliding motions.

I genuinely stopped to think whether “next door” would prompt somebody to get pedantic about this and decided to keep it for expediency and to make the sentence flow better.

I’m not even mad about it, honestly.

I feel like we’d all be much more on board with this if Poland wasn’t in the shadow of Hungary right next door looking like somebody’s cat had a serious episode on top of a keyboard.

That’s fair. I do see how it being nominally a new IP instead of a numbered sequel the ways it overlaps with Persona feel like a bit of treading water.

For me there is way more than enough to separate it, though. The bonkers story alone and the super political spin on it are crazy, plus the gameplay ends up being different enough.

But yeah, it’s pretty much one of those. Still better than going full action RPG like Square has done with its franchises, though.

Ah, yeah, but the fun bit is that there are a ton of builds that let you get there. HP-based skills are powerful in this, and you can heal for cheap, so you can get there that way, and once you get a bit overlevelled and can kill mobs out of turn-based combat you’re just cruising.

I may see what happens on harder difficulties, but I genuinely don’t care too much, because just the mechanics of figuring out the sequence for each dungeon and enemy type is so fun to do with the brilliant UI that I just… enjoy doing it, kinda like you enjoy clicking things on Diablo or something. Truly smooth design.

I just wish they had figured out antialiasing better, because woof. I ended up injecting better AA through ReShade and never looked back.

Just because you can grind money easily or some other reason?

In any case on Normal I haven’t felt it at all, mostly because I’ve been single-day completing most dungeons and that gets you a bit overleveled.

But it’s still a lot faster and tighter than Persona on that front. And more flexible and nonlinear, too. For what looks like a long game, this thing moves. Much fewer, shorter stretches of just visual novelling with friends (although there’s plenty of that, too).

Metaphor ReFantazio is amazing.

I doesn’t look like it needs my help, because it’s doing pretty well, but damn, it’s good.

Maybe too much anxiety to play a game in which you’re running for office in a fantasy land, at least until November, but… yeah, it’s bonkers and it’s well written and it’s by far the most political game the Persona-adjacent studios have ever done in some really fun ways.

Also a triumph of UI. Not only does it look great, it’s so frictionless. It’s a turn-based JRPG and it plays faster and more smoothly than that abomination of an action game Square tried to pass as a Final Fantasy VII remake by orders of magnitude. Seriously, go play it if you’re at all interested in that corner of gaming.

Yes. I used both and I just didn’t stick around in Masto.

Honestly, Masto is fine but the firehose is too fast for a system without good filtering tools. I ened up on a multicolumn layout where one of the columns was frequently NSFW and at least a couple of others were entirely dominated by insular “why is Mastodon so cool and everything else so crap” weird sunk cost propaganda.

And to be clear, I did keep a BS account to follow a bunch of celebrities from old Twitter, but I actually hang out more here than I do in BS. It’s just I do both far more than Masto.

Social media killed online aliases and I have a hard time deciding if we’re all worse for it.

Instinctively I still stick by that, though, as you can tell by my anonymous profile with no bio, but when I volunteer any amount of personal info these days people are often confused that I’m not sharing openly who I am or where I’m from. Every time someone does that it weirds me out because in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.

I had never heard that before. Is that a region or country-specific thing?

Alright, I normally show up to these to be the voice of reason and moderation…

…but no, this one kinda tracks, actually. Carry on.

He shipped enough clunkers (and terrible design decisions) that I never bought the mythification of Jobs.

In any case, the Deck is a different beast. For one, it’s the second attempt. Remember Steam Machines? But also, it’s very much an iteration on pre-existing products where its biggest asset is pushing having an endless budget and first party control of the platform to use scale for a pricing advantage.

It does prove that the system itself is not the problem, in case we hadn’t picked up on that with Android and ChromeOS. The issue is having a do-everything free system where some of the do-everything requires you to intervene. That’s not how most people use Windows (or Android, or ChromeOS), and it’s definitely not how you use any part of SteamOS unless you want to tinker past the official support, either. That’s the big lesson, I think. Valve isn’t even trying to push Linux, beyond their Microsoft blood feud. As with Google, it’s just a convenient stepping stone in their product design.

What the mainline Linux developer community can learn from it, IMO, is that for onboarding coupling the software and hardware very closely is important and Linux should find a way to do that on more product categories, even if it is by partnering with manufacturers that won’t do it themselves.

You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you’ve missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.

I don’t know that it’s an eyesight issue. I mean, if you have good enough eyesight to read stuff on your phone screen you have good enough eyesight to see the difference.

It may be an awareness thing, where the more you care about photography the more the limitations of the bad cameras stand out. And hey, that’s fine, if the phone makes good enough pictures for you that’s great. Plus, yeah, you can get phones with the exact same lens and sensor where one of them has a big fat bump that is deliberately blown up to make the cameras “feel” premium. There’s been a fair amount of marketing around this.

But if you compare A to B it’s very obvious. Camera bumps became a marker of premium phones for a reason.

Yep. That sample above is from a review, but digging into my own archived photos at the time it’s crazy to see how much blur picutres taken from moving vehicles have, even in direct daylyght, and how grainy indoors images are, even when well lit. That thing was genuinely just opening itself up for a while and hoping for the best.

I am annoyed by most phone trends of the past decade, but… yeah, if you go back to a 2014 phone today there is some readjustment between what you remember phone photo and video looking like versus what they actually look like. That was the Galaxy S5 year. That thing had a single camera you would consider unacceptable as your selfie shooter today.

EDIT: This thread made me go look up reviews, and man, yeah, I remember every single indoors photo on my own S5 looking just like this. What a blast of nostalgia. I didn’t realize there is a digital equivalent to 80s pictures having gone all sepia and magenta-y, but here it is.

Oh, that works for me, definitely. It just takes maybe two hours, instead of 20 minutes. Same principle, though.