Sometimes I make video games

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • Frickin Dead Space remake. I’m playing through it now and even on the lowest settings it was pretty bad. My computer crashed while the shuttle was crashing, which honestly felt kind of apt

    I’ve never beat the original, but my wife wanted to see the game and has never played it. Even after tweaking things to get them running on my computer it’s still not super stable. We might have to switch to 2008

    The game looks super tense, gross, and scary. Personally, I think it’d be scarier if it was buttery smooth, but I guess there’s a certain amount of anxiety to be had wondering if walking through a door is going to freeze the game while I’m being chased by xeno horrors




  • I don’t like it very much, but the price is right.

    I used to play Overwatch, and abandoned it shortly after the Overwatch 2 debacle. A bunch of my friends kept up with OW2, and when Rivals came out they made the switch so I figured I’d give it a go.

    Season 0 was rough. It’s on Season 1 now and things are a bit better.

    Hitboxes are bad. Maps seem confusing, although that might be that my game sense hasn’t figured them out yet. Lag is an issue a lot of the time, and the game crashes more than I feel it ought to - but I’m on Linux which I feel isn’t officially supported.

    I saw an article the other day criticizing that you can’t type “Free Taiwan” into the chat. I guess I haven’t actually tested it to confirm, but gosh that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

    I don’t go in for the battlepass, but my friends usually do when they play a game and they say it’s fair. They do have a model that allows you to purchase the battlepass and then continue to fill it out even after it’s no longer the current season. So if it takes you a long time to finish content, you’re not forced into playing more games for fear of missing out.

    When it’s fun, it’s a lot of fun. When it’s bad, my goodness, it’s bad. I guess it depends on how willing you are to gamble with your feelings. But hey, I guess you’re coming from League, so you might be ;)



  • I would love to be able to gift my unplayed games to others.

    I guess you do get into a problem where a group of people might swap the game back and forth to avoid ever having to pay for the game. But people will abuse any system, so I guess that would just be a cost of it

    If a game is still within the refund window, then maybe it should have an option to gift it. The devs / publishers could keep their money and Steam doesn’t have to process a refund. Seems like a win-win





  • Honestly, that’s tough, but fair. No therapeutic tool is going to be a magic bullet solution for everyone.

    My wife struggles with something similar. When we try to walk through an exercise together she thinks it’s about saying that her problems are “all in her head.” For my own outlook, I liken it to thinking that although my thoughts might be faulty, my feelings are valid. But hey, I’m not an authority, I’m just another struggling human trying to make sense of it all.

    For what it’s worth, one stranger to another, I think that whatever you’re going through you’re totally valid. I hope you find or have found some relief - goodness knows we’re still looking


  • I highly recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is the best medicine I can afford, because all you need is pen and paper.

    If you don’t think you can change your circumstance, then you can try to change how you react to it. The core model of the therapy is to analyze your thoughts and look for patterns in which your brain tries to fuck with you. Identifying distortions and fallacies helps to replace your automatic thoughts with more positive ones.

    Example:

    Thought: I hate my job, everything about it sucks

    Distortions: Overgeneralization, All-or-Nothing Thinking, Feelings as Facts

    New Thought: I hate certain parts of my job, but I like X part of it

    The whole thing only works if you believe in it, and the important thing is that you’re not just putting a sunny face on things that make you feel terrible. You’re working to restructure your thought based on objective truth.


    I’ve struggled for a long time with the Sunday Scaries. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to get easier, and I’m going through it right now, but I know if I take the time to untangle my feelings then things end up easier in the long run.

    Good luck out there, partner





  • I’m not in healthcare, so I’m not sure how valuable my opinion is

    If I had to guess, I’d say that there’s a cost associated with a patient refusing care, particularly if the condition is going to be aggravated.

    This cost might be financial. It might also mean that the patient returns to the healthcare system and requires more intense care. It probably also means that the patient will suffer more while outside the system.

    I don’t know what your healthcare system looks like, but mine is stretched to the breaking point. If someone discharged themselves against the advice of doctors and then later worsened and returned to the hospital, they might die waiting for triage. It’s an extremely bad look for the hospital and erodes the public’s opinion of healthcare. And while the hospital is being raked over the coals for allowing someone to die in the waiting room, the media will conveniently ignore that the patient previously discharged themselves against the advice of their doctor.

    Another scenario to think about: just because a patient is cognizant doesn’t mean they’re behaving rationally. While the patient is in care they could be heavily medicated and not realize how bad their situation would be without care: until the meds wear off and their suffering returns. If they got a particularly bad prognosis, then the panicky ape brain could take over and they just want to get out of their, damn the consequences.

    Does all that add up to being more important than the patient’s autonomy? Opinions will probably be divided. I don’t personally think so, if I was restrained against my will I’d be pretty angry about it. But I understand the rationale behind the people who want to keep their patient in the system.

    Does that mean YOU have to care? Probably not. People should be free to make their own decisions, and you can’t and shouldn’t take responsibility for the decisions that they make.



  • angry upvote

    But honestly, fair. Alien is a 50-year-old movie, so when viewed with a modern lens it might not seem to be anything special.

    Part of the legendary status of Alien is just how influential it has been. Before Alien, a horror-scifi movie would be some schlock about flying saucers piloted by men in gorilla masks terrorizing Hollywood. Audiences certainly weren’t expecting a psychosexual thriller about forced oral insemination and mpreg.

    And the android! Robots in movies were walking vending machines, and yet the robot in Alien is just some guy until he starts to malfunction. Plus in the context of the franchise, it makes you distrust every single android in each subsequent movie, and might even leave you guessing who else in the cast could be a robot in disguise.

    Other movies have done it better since then. We all stand on the shoulders of giants after all. And the funny thing is, a lot of the time when you look back at the movies that spawn the tropes, they don’t seem that impressive because they haven’t been totally refined yet.

    I have a soft spot for Alien, it’s my favorite in the franchise. It relies so heavily on practical effects, it’s got those retro-futuristic computers which I adore, and the smart woman saves the day (sort of) after all the dumb men tell her she’s wrong. And yet despite what I just said, I don’t think anyone is actually very dumb, the characters are all quite human and I understand and relate to their motivations.

    It’s a movie that feels far more modern than it is. You might even forget that it’s fifty years old until you see that explosive finale in gloriously bad 70’s CGI


    I also liked Prometheus. It’s not the best in the franchise but it’s certainly not the worst, and it doesn’t deserve as much hate as it gets in the community


  • Personally, I like to supplement my knowledge with the occasional book. Like shit, that’s sort of the whole point of books.

    I don’t think a book has ever got me started on something new while programming. Like if I want to pick up a new language or framework, I have better luck going directly to the documentation. If I have a specific problem, then I can search online or find a tutorial or something.

    Another risk of using a book as the entry point is when those books go out of date and no longer become relevant. Always make sure they’re using the right version of whatever tool you’re using, lest you pick up a book vaguely titled “Learn Python” and discover it’s for 2.7 when you’ve installed 3.11

    But as you’ve kind of surmised here, books are great for filling in the gaps in knowledge. They’re also generally speaking written by authors with tons of experience (and perhaps biases) which might tell you why things are done a certain way.

    Of particular interest - and caution - are opinion-based books. For example, Clean Code is full of examples that sound good on paper, and then when taken to their extreme are shown to be brittle and cumbersome. I still think the book has some good points, but at the end of the day it’s opinion, and opposing opinions exist for a reason.

    So I guess what I’m saying there is books are great, but you shouldn’t follow them dogmatically