Pxtl

Pxtl, 9 months ago

I feel obliged to mention in case any poor bastard misreads your post:

which they cut the corner off of and place in a pitcher.

Not in that order.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Coherent Android back-action behavior is apparently lower priority.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

I don’t mind the idea of an encumbrance system where it makes sense. Like, the idea of being able to carry whatever you want into combat feels obviously wrong to me, since you can just overwhelm any challenge with endless inventory - like you just grinded an endless supply of healing potions and smart-bombs. Encumbrance caused by your combat-relevant inventory creates the idea of a “build” of your character, it creates interesting decisions about which combat gear you’re going to keep available to roll with (or non-combat gear if your game’s core loop isn’t combat-driven).

Although I do see the argument that it shouldn’t be coupled to a weapon-durability system. I like weapon-durability as a way to make players fully explore all of the gear available instead of just getting “The Good One” and then never ever switching and making the optimal strategy super boring (yes, Steph Sterling, I’m That Guy) but it means working on the “build” of your character is constant fiddling and decision fatigue.

Either way, all that falls apart when it’s stuff you’re only carrying for saleable loot or for crafting materials. Unless you have an interesting and fun gameplay mechanic to provide supply-lines, that’s just adding tedium for the sake of realism. Yes, it’s not realistic that you can carry unlimited bricks, but taking that away doesn’t add anything interesting to the game, it just adds tedium.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Honestly, realism justifications for encumbrance outside of survival-type games where basic biological needs are the core gameplay loop have always been silly to me… but the latter one about wheels of cheese rings true.

To me the argument is “what does optimal play look like”? Without encumbrance, there’s no reason not to pick up every wheel of cheese, so optimal play is to pick up every wheel of cheese, which is tedious and dumb. But with encumbrance, every wheel of cheese becomes a tedious decision, and completionist-optimal play is to burn endless time ferrying stuff to the shops or storage or whatever. But as you said, making every wheel of cheese not something you can pick up breaks immersion.

So what’s the compromise that actually makes sense for the “wheel of cheese” problem? A realistic setting is cluttered with “slightly-useful” items. Don’t put so many “slightly-useful” items outside of settings with NPCs that will have realistic reactions to you stealing their stuff? But coding those realistic reactions (“uh, you’re The Savior, I guess you can steal all my food… a bit… okay that tears it call the guards!”) would be some more dev-work in these already-bloated projects.

But the problem still exists in hostile locales. A lived-in enemy camp is going to have store-rooms of “slightly useful” stuff. If the hero stops to raid the larder while massacring nameless Stormtroopers, is that a problem? I can see the immersion argument that “well, if you can, you probably should since you might need it and that breaks immersion” and therefore that justifies the encumbrance idea, but I also see Steph Sterling’s argument “this is just a game and I wanna!” And I have trouble defending realism in these games about butchering your way across the landscape without ever stopping to poop.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

If you’re trying to do it legally, you can easily to rip your own ps1 games with a drive bay. Haven’t tried it on PS2 or ps3 games. And ps1 emulation runs amazing on phones and raspberry pis.

So my ps1 emulation collection is pretty legit.

We shall not speak of the other consoles.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

I’m curious, can a standard Blu-ray drive on a PC rip PS3 games? Or do you need special hardware? I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to rip PS1 games.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Battlezone '98: One of the first notable RTS/FPS hybrids. You drive hovertanks and you build bases and you command other tanks. Set in a secret live war on the Moon, Mars, and Venus between the USSR and the USA during the cold war.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Honestly I think this about most things. Federalism is a good idea in principle but I think the Canadian media landscape is just not mentally capable of handling it.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

That’s a myth. What it actually means is they have no regular occupant, which means for example they’re student houses full of students with a home address elsewhere.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

I honestly didn’t know they still had Google Play Movies and TV still, I’d assumed they’d folded it completely into the YouTube movies brand already.

As a Google Play Music user, I’m retroactively angry. I would’ve loved that many years of GPM while they worked a couple (not enough) of the kinks out of YTM. And I wish I still had access to Google’s music store, since Amazon doesn’t sell in Canada and I hate having to install a desktop application to shop at Apple.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

I just tossed my fancy Logitech headset after only 3 years. My kid’s mouse was double clicking after less. And G Hub makes Razer’s software look like poetry.

I was a die hard Logitech fan since I was a kid. I bought shares.

Done with them.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Don’t think Razer software will be that much better. After trying razor I am now on a g502 x lightspeed. I really hope these new switches address the double-clicking issues for good.

Lol the g502x lightspeed is the last piece of Logitech hardware I own. About half the time on wake it gets stuck at 0.5fps. The other day a software/firmware bug made it stop reporting clicks and I had to reboot my PC. It’s good hardware but something is very wrong with either the firmware or G-Hub.

Why is all gamer equipment garbage?

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Im about your age and am not the “hyperactive” type of ADHD. I’m on a stimulant and have been for a month or so now.

Do it.

But don’t make any plans for your first day of meds, Holy crap.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

That makes me really depressed about the world

Pxtl, 9 months ago

I know. Back in the mid-80s a house cost almost $60,000! They had it so hard!

Pxtl, 9 months ago

I don’t know, I think the price hikes have stopped, but the sticker shock from the past price hikes remains. That by definition is the end of de jure inflation.

The real scary problem that smart economists are pointing at is that now the prevailing rent for available units is horrifying – not the rent most people are paying, but the rent they’d pay if they moved today. Most people who are in rent-controlled units or just have friendly landlords don’t know how bad it will be if they have to start looking again. That’s a ticking time-bomb, one that a landlord can detonate prematurely with a renoviction.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Buggywhip salesman demands accomodation from the horseless carriage industry.

Yes, I’m upset at the licenseification of the gaming industry as much as the next guy but that died long before physical media did. As long as a game can die without its first-party servers, games are leased and not owned.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

I’ve always thought the hard “full rent control no hikes above inflation” “no rent control do whatever” dichotomy was stupid.

Why not compromise? Like 5% above inflation (or $50, whichever is higher) on all properties, regardless of how old or new they are. Allows a landlord to adapt to a shifting market, and gives a renter plenty of time to adapt and adjust as a landlord is changing rent yearly.

Then get rid of all the silly “year constructed” exceptions.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

It shows that “no rent control” basically means “your landlord can throw you out at any time without notice” by raising rent to a ludicrous amount. It completely undermines all other tenant protections. Even conservatives should be supporting at least modest rent controls to prevent cases like this.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

They’re not generally cartoonish evil, I’m sure they agree that some tenant protections against sudden eviction are a good thing, and allowing unlimited rent hikes completely obliterates all that.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

This is Canada do people even get that network here?

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Jesus, I’m getting it from both ends here, somebody else is dumping on me for suggesting that a rent-control system that’s a few points above inflation so that landlords could adapt to the market without abruptly bankrupting their tenants was somehow a reasonable compromise.

I’m not arguing for extreme rent-control policies, just that no rent control is bad because it lets landlords write their own eviction laws.

Peg it at like 2.5% or 5% per year above inflation and you can’t use it as a sudden backdoor eviction but you also let landlords adapt to market reality over time.

Capping rents might be stupid for all the reasons economists say, but putting a damper on sudden price shifts is just being humane.

Pxtl, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I think last year’s inflation spike demonstrates that “2.5% per year regardless of your carrying costs or maintenance costs changing due to interest rates and inflation” is not modest. A reasonable rent control policy would let landlords gradually adapt to market realities without giving them the power to gouge or de-facto evict tenants with sudden rent spikes.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

God damn, no sympathy at all eh? Yes they’re yuppies, but you’re going to bat for a punitive rent hike because “they probably deserved it” or something like that? That’s cold.

These women are losing their home because they argued with a landlord over raising rent. That’s some Dickensian shit right there.

Pxtl, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I disagree with you strongly but props for a clear policy and honesty. Too many centre-left liberals show up to scream “decommodify housing” but with no follow-through about what that means besides handwaving about the evils of moneyed interests. Imho, communists are wrong, but at least they’re consistent and coherent and unambiguous.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Uh, part of the point of the greenbelt is to stop building detached houses because they’re actually environmentally quite bad. I mean maybe individuals could work together to put together a co-op but Housing Now TO says that municipal governments generally block any of those that would pencil out.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Wow. You can take the Redditor out of Reddit but you can’t take the Reddit out of the Redditor.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

So wait where do college students live in your world?

Pxtl, 9 months ago

And what if we grind out all those numbers and there’s nothing magical? What if it really is just supply and demand?

Pxtl, 9 months ago

So the golden goose is just “have something people need and there’s not enough of it”?

Pxtl, 9 months ago

My kid has a Galaxy Tab FE with the stylus and does amazing stuff in Krita on it, and that was pretty cheap.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

I always hate how we conflate developers and speculators when we talk about real-estate companies. Like, if somebody supports the automobile industry, you’d assume they mean factories and not dealerships.

Hearing Poilievre has support from builders would be good news in a housing crisis. Hearing Poilievre has support from investors and speculators who are gouging people and exploiting the housing crisis, not so much.

Pxtl, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Canada is a two-party system, we just happen to have more than two parties in that system.

Edit: downvotes? Really? 2016 and the broken Electoral Reform promise was not that long ago do we have to explain proportional and ranked voting systems and the flaws of first-past-the-post again?

Pxtl, 9 months ago

It occurred to me the other day that the people who are Very Angry About Pronouns are literally Grammar Nazis.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Yes. Shout it louder for those in the back!

But not too loud or the wrong Google Assistant will hear it and you’ll get an incoherent answer muttered from the other room about not being able to do that instead of being answered by the phone in your hand.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Refined form of Betteridge’s law of headlines: if any headline asks “can Toronto” anything, the answer is definitely very no.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Homeworld. I know that’s blasphemy. I love RTS games and the game is cool and beautiful but so slow and boring and tedious.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

I used to bike commute every day before we went remote at the start of the pandemic. I did not find that it helped much. Maybe a little. But I’ve never found cycling gets my heart going the way running or a rowing machine does.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

The problem is we’re facing a crisis where once in the entire stupid goddamned history of economic crises, this the one time where small-government libertarianism actually really would help. Municipal government overrestriction of housing-construction (also a few federal housing regs like single-stair construction) is a massive chunk of the problem. And both the Liberal and NDP parties have a very tight relationship with municipal governments and so they want to keep their friends there. Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre isn’t a “friends” type of person, so he’s able to call out the “let them eat cake” politics of municipal governments.

Of course, (a) there’s a substantial chance that PP is lying about his plans to strongarm municipal governments, and (b) while he may help solve the crisis with that action, he will also likely help exacerbate it on the other hand by slashing supports for the poorest Canadians, and he’ll also create a few new crises related to climate change and LGBTQ rights, and possibly vaccines.

So yeah, no love for him.

But I’m not looking forward to the day when a Conservative federal government is kicking municipal asses and I have to go to bat for an absolute shitheel like Poilievre on the principle that he is right exclusively on this one very specific issue.

Pxtl, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

He might go through with it, but he specifically targets “cities of over a half-million people”. Here in Hamilton, most suburbs have fantasies about de-amalgamation, and with Conservative provincial governments in charge I could see that happening to pander to them. I mean, while it’s not directly applicable here, note how Ford is accommodating Mississauga’s exit of the Peel region – not directly comparable because it’s above the limit and the members of Peel that are below the limit are already their own cities and towns since it’s just a regional government and not a municipality. But still, it shows how the door is open for this conversation.

Basically, PP will pander to his base by making urban intensification something he does to the cities on behalf of his suburban supporters. I mean, his biggist threat against these cities is to cut transit funding… do most crappy stand-alone exurbs even have transit?

And as grotesque and craven as that is, it’s somehow still a better plan than anything his opponents have offered.

He will never get my vote. I can hear the transphobic dog-whistles and have people I need to protect. But I won’t blame others for choosing differently, and I do blame the entire political centre and left for carving out the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to decorate the top when it comes to housing, which created the policy vacuum that PP stepped into.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

The problem is, as I said, this is one of the few times where “letting dead-eyed mobbed up property developers make a goddamned mountain of money” will actually help everyone. I mean, even the abominable and corrupt crap Ford is doing to the greenbelt will help - every house, even million-dollar mcmansions, helps fight the crisis.

It’s a game of musical chairs where the chairs are allocated by money instead of by speed. Adding more chairs to the game helps more people win regardless. Even if you’re adding more thrones, that means there’s more milking-stools left-over for the poor instead of those milking-stools getting flipped and upgraded into artisanal urban kneeling seats to sell to the people who have the money for thrones.

And not only that, but PP’s stated plan: kick municipal asses until they start hitting housing targets? That would force municipalities to allow more housing. And assuming greenbelts remain in place (fingers-crossed), that would mean that cities would by necessity have to upzone and implement better, more urbanist, more intesification-friendly planning policies. That’s way better than Ford’s greenbelt crap, but then Ford didn’t campaign on the greenbelt crap.

But yes, assuming PP is being honest about his plan: It’s sneaky and yet still far better than not doing it and I’m mostly angry at his opponents for getting us to this point.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

We don’t really know what they’d build given the choice since one of those options is generally illegal (you can get special executive permission that makes it legal, but you could say the same about murdering people in countries that have a pardoning system).

Pxtl, 9 months ago

prices have increased for me

The price jump has nothing to do with the carbon tax. The carbon tax is $0.14 per litre, so it’s only about 10% of the price of gas. That means it can only be blamed for 10% of the price-jump at an absolute upper limit, and that’s only if your diet consists of chugging gasoline (hey, I don’t judge).

If prices were only up 10% since last year I’d be goddamned ecstatic.

It’s not. It’s supply-chains, shockwaves from covid-shutdowns, pandemic-spending, a massive war in Asia between the world’s biggest gas and grain providers, and anti-globalist on-shoring driving up prices. The last one of those isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it has a cost just like carbon pricing has a cost.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Right but I’m talking about federal and that’s provincial. In fact, Ford put together a Housing Affordability Task Force a few years back and that’s exactly what they recommended! He just… y’know… didn’t do any of it. Not sure why he even asked them in the first place.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

That would only make sense if 100% of company 1’s costs were gasoline. Also, the carbon tax has been going up every year since it first appeared in 2019. The price spike started last year. And the same price spikes are happening in every country, and most countries don’t have carbon taxes.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

The fact that American sprawl cities have affordable housing shows that sprawl does help. Yes, sprawl is bad economics and worse environmentalism, but it does control housing prices.

For example, Zillow pegs the median home price in Houston, TX at $260k USD. It’s a suburban hellscape, but a reasonably-priced one.

Pxtl, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

The trick is the “half million population limit” he promised, which will make densification something he does to the Liberal cities on behalf of his exurban voter-base. And this is a specific, quantifiable promise he has mentioned repeatedly with hard numbers.

I don’t discount the possibility he could half-ass it and let it die in consultation the way the Liberals did with electoral reform… but on the other hand, when have Conservatives ever given a shit about consultation?

Edit: either way, I’m not saying “conservatives are good”. I hate them for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is they represent an active threat to trans friends and family.

All I’m saying is “using the threat of municipal funding cuts to force cities to fix their planning departments and rapidly greenlight large infill developments is a good idea and the Liberals+NDP should steal it”.

Pxtl, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

looks.

Ooh, that’s neat! My only complaint looking at it is that they didn’t figure out some place to put a right-side thumbpad for a better mouse-mode. Joystick mouse emulation is a miserable solution, and the central thumbpad is too far for gaming (ask anybody who played Mario 64 or Metroid Hunters on the DS). My dream machine would be to use the old Blackberry trick of making the right-side of the keyboard able to masquerade as a touchpad (you literally run your thumb along the keyboard and it’s a pointing device), add a face-toggle-button to switch between mouse-mode and keyboard mode, and then add a scrollwheel shoulder-button.