I’m pretty sure the price of the other From Software games (Dark Souls titles especially) went up after Elden Ring got super popular. And I know my interest in them did as well (I’d only played DS1 prior). Seems like a reasonable market reaction to demand, but damn there went my hopes of getting them cheap for my patience lol
On the opposite end there are games like Terraria which was inexpensive from the start and in bundles and everything but grew to like 10x it’s original scope, I think somehow without a major price bump.
As the title said, I’m looking for good videos to learn astronomy, cosmology and astrophysics (really, anything related to space is fine, such as rocket science).
No way, Space Time isn’t good. It’s fantastic! Probably my favorite non-comedy channel. I genuinely understand concepts like the Uncertainty principle much better because of the show than I did from university QM.
My favorites (Space Time and Anton and Dr. Becky) were already highlighted so here are more.
I wish they would bring back SciShow Space, but the occasional space or physics content on regular SciShow is still good for a general audience.
Scott Manley got known for teaching folks to play Kerbal Space Program but he’s turned to great coverage of aerospace engineering and who is launching what major rocket missions this month.
Astrum is pleasant and relaxing with nice images.
Sabine Hossenfelder always has opinions on GR and QM that are somehow both spicy and super practical.
Fermilab has an official channel with good educational videos.
MinuteEarth / Minute Physics is great when you’re in a hurry.
Yeah I don’t always watch her non-physics coverage since I tend to get that elsewhere. But she’s obviously well versed in reviewing the published literature and has a team of folks helping with that, which is more than can be said for many science journalists sadly. So even when I’m skeptical of her conclusions I’m at least confident she’s not just a talking head but actually checked the core papers on the topic.
FYI there’s SponsorBlock if you want to skip the NordVPN stuff. I don’t begrudge any channel for needing to make a buck though.
How would you rate the OLED deck? Did you keep your LCD deck? Have you noticed any of the smaller improvements like a more responsive touch screen? Has the battery life improvement been noticable?
I’ll go first. Mine is that I can’t stand the Deadpool movies. They are self aware and self referential to an obnoxious degree. It’s like being continually reminded that I am in a movie. I swear the success of that movie has directly lead to every blockbuster having to have a joke every 30 seconds
I respect this opinion. I just read the original Dune a few years ago. I heard there was a new film coming, so in preparation I watched the Lynch extended cut. It wasn’t bad, in fact it followed the plot better than I expected, and the Gob Jabbar scene was amazing. The shields had such a cool effect too. But I didn’t totally love it. Maybe this cut was too long and stiff. I do kinda like Lynch in general, I’ve seen Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet and all of Twin Peaks. His Dune was overall good in his unique bizarre way. I’ll probably watch it again someday.
But then, the Villeneuve film. Damn, that one nailed it. The characters, set design, the sandworms, even the ornithopters looked almost exactly like I had imagined when reading the book. I’ve never had that happen, most films look so ‘wrong’ after a book. But IMO Denis nailed it, except the Gom Jabbar that Lynch already perfected. It was otherwise so true to the source material. Well ok, Frank Herbert’s novel had an excessive use of the word presently, so honestly, good riddance to that. Anyway, I can’t wait for part 2 of the new film and beyond! Guess I better pick up the other books though.
It’s part of an ‘extended cinematic universe’ which is apparently a thing these days. So it counts?
Anyway, I love westerns and space fantasy, and The Mandalorian kinda combined them in an episodic way that I could basically watch forever. Although it did fall apart in season 3, despite the well-intentioned efforts to tie back to the larger Clone Wars arc.
Ok, I admit it soon got outmanoeuvred by Andor, which was damn good even if you’re not a Star Wars fan. But Mandalorian paved the way IMO for a good pulpy episodic series with no bloody Skywalkers or Jedi Council BS. So that’s a win, right?
Unless they’ve fired the absolute moron(s) who designed the crafting and alien language system in NMS, I say stay far away.
I mean, combining dihydrogen and oxygen yields… NaCl? And you learn alien words literally one at a time? Oh but they have procedural generation! Except every single space station looks identical.
IMO This is a developer who does not respect their players. And somehow they’ve convinced a lot of people that periodically adding more shallow grindy fetch quests means the core gameplay isn’t garbage.
What are you talking about? The player literally learns nothing about the alien languages. All you do is walk up to a NPC, button mash through absolutely inconsequential filler text, and pick the option that says “teach me a word”. Then a popup says “You now know the Korvax word for ‘THE’”, except it doesn’t even tell you which alien word was translated or explain any grammar or context or conjugation or anything. Your character just does a magical substitution from that point forward.
Or you can do the same thing by walking up to the black pillars if you’d rather trudge around a planet surface for macguffins.
How in any way is that a good system? There’s zero skill or challenge or reward or even real gameplay here. A word search puzzle would have 100x more depth.
I really wanted to like NMS. The core concept is 100% up my alley, it looks pretty good, and it’s a neat sandbox. I suppose it’s not bad if you’re the kind of player who is happy mindlessly gathering resources so you can craft an ornate base. Hell, I played quite a bit because I was determined to collect one of every type of spaceship.
But I really do think the gameplay is objectively bad by almost any possible measure. The on-foot traversal is terrible, waiting around for refiners sucks (though at least they had the sense to give a backpack refiner), trying to get the actual spaceship you want is awful, flying towards the galactic center is a chore, and I could go on. I guess the gunplay is serviceable, but the enemies aren’t the least bit interesting aside from maybe the largest walker bots.
Playing the game felt like satire. Basic questions I would expect other devs of sci-fi games to ask themselves seemingly either went unanswered or got super lazy answers.
e.g. “Should we let players customize their spaceships?” to which HG apparently thinks their system of solely generating ships from a random permutation of parts is plenty. Or “Do you think different planets and galaxies would have different hostile flora?”, to which they decided “nah, the same 3 are fine everywhere”. “Should planets have biomes of any kind, at least ice caps maybe?”… “nah, players don’t care if planets are basically uniform.”
Yeah I like the “go anywhere” feel and was happy when I found a dinosaur planet too. But it still all feels 2 inches deep in so many ways.
I’ve come back to it a bunch of times because people keep insisting it’s good or “no you just need to try X” or “but the latest update added so much”. Steam says over 300 hours now but a decent portion of that was standing around trade hubs waiting for ships I wanted in S or A class, or literally just walking away from my PC while refiners ran.
I’m not usually the type of player to use cheats/exploits but I actually had more fun when I started using a duplication glitch. No more limited inventory, money, or resources, I could just pick one ship and one multitool and max them out with all the storage and weapons and whatnot. I don’t enjoy grinding so this was a relief. But it still didn’t make up for all the bad underlying mechanics.
EA, Activision, Ubisoft… their BS is on another level entirely and I generally don’t play their games because if it.
For NMS / Hello Games it’s more that I really want to like the game but find it immensely frustrating that after years and years of updates, they still haven’t fixed some of the most basic elements.
Like when your character sprints, the tiniest bump in terrain cancels the sprinting. This even happens in the Nexus where it looks like flat ground. Why?
Again for the alien languages… there’s no dictionary in this universe? I’m supposed to believe interstellar travel is commonplace, but they don’t have an app to translate the 3 ubiquitous languages? I have a device in my hand right now that can do that.
Space combat still isn’t balanced. If you alternate between the phase beam with the shield absorb upgrade and any other weapon, you can basically wear down any threat and win.
What has actually been improved about the core game of NMS? People keep telling me that in vague terms without saying what specifically was improved. I know the inventory system is better (but still kind of a mess IMO), but what else? Don’t say multiplayer because they promised that at the beginning.
Need some wisdom from y’all about deciding to upgrade or not. Not sure if it is worth or not. Waiting 2-3 years for a SD2 is pretty far away, right? This is my only gaming rig.
If it’s mostly lighter colorful indie adventures or emulated classics, the improved battery life at low TDPs is pretty crazy, pushing 8-12 hours. Together with the pretty screen and 90 Hz refresh it’s a big quality bump.
If you mostly play heavy gray AAA competitive shooters, the experience will mostly be the same. The black levels on the screen will be much better and you might get another 30-45 mins of playtime but honestly you’re probably better off saving money toward the Deck 2 when Valve improves the CPU/GPU performance.
corn.com is supposedly for sale. My partner thought I was crazy for submitting an inquiry to buy it, but GoDaddy never responded :( There went my dreams of being [email protected] or maybe cornman@corn.com.
Oh well, they probably wanted thousands of dollars anyway. All the 4-character .coms likely got squatted ages ago.
I’m back! This is a continuation of my series on platform-specific hidden gem apps that you have discovered that are the best in their class for your usecase....
To me it looks like the kind of game with risks and innovations and gameplay you’d never see in a Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed or Wolfenstein franchise. Is that totally negated by having a large publisher?
Hello! I’m currently very very dependent on TickTick (not tiktok) because of a single simple feature: persistent notification alerts. I can set events and tasks as in many other similar apps, but once the reminder is triggered, a persistent notification is showed, until I manually say “mark as completed” or “remind me...
It’s not FOSS, but Buzzkill can give you all kinds of control over notifications, including making them sticky/persistent or giving reminders. I’d love a FOSS equivalent but honestly the $4 price is way beyond fair. play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samrust…
“Players who download the free version on its release, meanwhile, will instead have access to a single fighter, who will rotate among the cast weekly.”
Genuine questions: What does Starfield do to innovate? Are there mechanics, narrative twists (no spoilers), or features moving the industry forward in a new direction? What’s here that I haven’t played before?
Supposedly No Man’s Sky was the vanguard of procgen but I wasn’t impressed. I get the impression that Starfield uses it very similarly.
For characters and ships, all NMS seems to do is combine permutations of prebuilt parts, not create any actual unique parts. Spore was way more impressive a decade and a half earlier because it tried to animate whatever wacky creature the player designed.
For terrain, NMS doesn’t even create biomes. You won’t find a river, glacier, waterfall, or oasis anywhere. They didn’t even apply the system to space stations, those are identical everywhere in the universe. Valheim and even Minecraft did better.
Personally I really hate when you fight the same generic enemies but they just get bigger numbers to become bullet sponges. A lot of games that want to be “endless” do this, e.g. Warframe. At least make the tougher baddies bigger? Give them cooler armor or something? Don’t make them look identical to the level 1 grunt.
It’s best described as an ocean of content but only 1” deep.
Ok, that right there is taking Starfield off my wishlist. I don’t enjoy games with this sort of super wide but shallow design at all. Thanks for the heads up!
I dunno about cheating exactly, as it makes business sense and plenty of fans love it.
But it should be two mutually exclusive categories: Best New Game vs. Best Remake/Remaster.
Then Game of the Year could be a wider no-limits category where the winner hopefully reflects the truly best gaming experience, whatever it is. No need to exclude remasters because that’s always going to be a steep hill for them IMO.
25 years ago we had to memorize conversions and use a calculator (some calculators included a “cheat sheet”). It was 2 extra steps (convert to metric, do any needed math, convert back) but pretty routine once you got the hang of it.
Since then we’ve had Wolfram Alpha and a ton of unit converter smartphone apps. Even a basic Google query can convert most units.
I’m not disagreeing at all, I would totally back a nationwide switch to 100% metric. But I’m also trained in science where it’s the standard, and don’t really do any carpentry or auto repair where US units are still (I think) the norm.
This was more of a community service, but when I worked for a university office I ran a TOR node on one of my PCs. After a while though, IT sent someone to ask me kindly not to make it an exit node. Other than that they didn’t seem to mind. It was nice having excess bandwidth.
I also ran some distributed computing apps like folding@home.
When doing a search for Star Trek memes up until a few years ago, it was pretty fun. Now the internet is just filled with all kinds of freakish images that it feels like someone’s lost their minds or in the process of losing their mind.
alt text(parodical) YouTube popup: Going to pee during the ad break violates YouTube’s Terms of Service - It looks like you selfishly left the room while our ads were playing. Don’t you know that by watching youtube you entered a CONTRACT?! - We killed the competition by operating at a loss for a decade. We paid good money...
Yeah for sure, except the one I set up won’t seem to pass verification because every answer might happen to sound exactly like “fuck you” (to Sony) 100,000 times in a row.
I was wondering how many of you out there who ordered the OLED model on release already got their Deck? Mine is stuck at “packaged items” for a couple of days and I am starting to get anxious when I get it.
Meh. I’m seeing a lot of prices that aren’t even that close to historical lows. e.g. Mass Effect Legendary was $10 somewhere recently but now it’s $12 on Steam (though I’m not giving EA any money for it until they fix the stupid launcher for good on Steam Deck).
Prototype is like $4 though, might snag that if I don’t already own a copy elsewhere.
Dev Behind Highly Regarded PC Game Explains Why He Raised The Price: "Go Pirate It, I Don't Care" (www.gamespot.com)
summary:...
18+ ["oh you! Kotaku" article] "Pornhub's Most Popular Video Game Character In 2023 Was Chun-Li From... Fortnite?" (kotaku.com)
There’s no NSFW in the article, but putting the flag anyway.
Which Youtubers (or on online video sharing platform) have good astronomy/cosmology/astrophysic content
As the title said, I’m looking for good videos to learn astronomy, cosmology and astrophysics (really, anything related to space is fine, such as rocket science).
[Discussion] People who upgraded from a LCD Deck to an OLED Deck, was it worth it?
How would you rate the OLED deck? Did you keep your LCD deck? Have you noticed any of the smaller improvements like a more responsive touch screen? Has the battery life improvement been noticable?
Dear Lemmy, **why** Star Trek??
Every single large server in this federation has at least one Star Trek community. There is even an entire server dedicated to Star Trek....
What's something you're oddly obsessed about? (SFW)
What is your unpopular flim opinion
I’ll go first. Mine is that I can’t stand the Deadpool movies. They are self aware and self referential to an obnoxious degree. It’s like being continually reminded that I am in a movie. I swear the success of that movie has directly lead to every blockbuster having to have a joke every 30 seconds
New single planet fantasy game from Hello Games (www.youtube.com)
I have an LCD 512GB, should I get the OLED?
Need some wisdom from y’all about deciding to upgrade or not. Not sure if it is worth or not. Waiting 2-3 years for a SD2 is pretty far away, right? This is my only gaming rig.
Do you ever come up with genius ("genius") ideas for joke domains to unsettle/embarrass people when you tell them your email?
like, GiantHairyNipplemonsters.com…...
[Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your deck? - December 2023
Between the recent Steam sale and all the good bundles lately, I’m interested to see what everyone’s playing.
What are your Android hidden gem apps
I’m back! This is a continuation of my series on platform-specific hidden gem apps that you have discovered that are the best in their class for your usecase....
What fruit is better than mangoes?
So what the heck is an 'indie game' nowadays anyway? (www.gamingonlinux.com)
What's a piece of classical music that everyone knows but most people don't know they know?
FOSS reminder app recommendations with persistent notification
Hello! I’m currently very very dependent on TickTick (not tiktok) because of a single simple feature: persistent notification alerts. I can set events and tasks as in many other similar apps, but once the reminder is triggered, a persistent notification is showed, until I manually say “mark as completed” or “remind me...
Killer Instinct free to play on Steam (can only use one given fighter per week) (store.steampowered.com)
Bethesda are individually rebutting Starfield Steam reviewers, defending the loading breaks and "empty" worlds (web.archive.org)
What is the weirdest thing you were under an NDA for?
The Game Awards has considered adding Best Remake and Best Supporting Actor awards (www.videogameschronicle.com)
In the store, I sometimes encounter containers (e.g., beer, water, shampoo) with a volume of 618ml. Why exactly this number?
Have you ever done something for yourself on your (job) company's infrastructure?
Like hosted a website or a server for your personal needs, or taken a smartphone given to you for work or something like that.
AI memes are probably the freakiest thing I've seen .... so far (lemmy.ca)
When doing a search for Star Trek memes up until a few years ago, it was pretty fun. Now the internet is just filled with all kinds of freakish images that it feels like someone’s lost their minds or in the process of losing their mind.
Terms of Service (media.kbin.social)
alt text(parodical) YouTube popup: Going to pee during the ad break violates YouTube’s Terms of Service - It looks like you selfishly left the room while our ads were playing. Don’t you know that by watching youtube you entered a CONTRACT?! - We killed the competition by operating at a loss for a decade. We paid good money...
'Code My Hair' Guide Gives Developers No Excuse for a Lack of Black Hair Options (www.themarysue.com)
Dove partnered with Open Source Afro Hair Library to release the ultimate, free resource to modeling Black hair in games, tv, and film
Did you receive your Deck OLED?
I was wondering how many of you out there who ordered the OLED model on release already got their Deck? Mine is stuck at “packaged items” for a couple of days and I am starting to get anxious when I get it.
You're just not yourself when you're experiencing the end of humanity, Rule (slrpnk.net)
Steam Sale Games
What are people excited about for with the steam sale? Any hidden gems you’d like to share with the class?