ylai

ylai, 9 months ago

Over at Reddit, summary from /u/Honeydewmoney7761:

He praised the graphics and the ships, saying they were incredible.

He also praised the performance, he played it on the xbox series x and according to him, the performance was way above average compared to other recently released games.

Although the game is running at 30 fps, he pointed out that the game camouflages this very well and even at 30 fps, it is an extremely fluid experience with a few drops that are not occasional.

The npcs are interesting, in the Bethesda standard, but the facial expressions are really disappointing and although they have improved compared to previous titles, they are not revolutionary and are somewhere between average and below average.

Another very relevant thing was the AI, he played in normal mode and according to him, the AI is very dumb. he pointed out that there were many other difficulties above normal but he didn’t test to see if the AI improved on higher difficulties. He judged the game to be easy.

On gameplay and animations: simply very enjoyable, everything has weight, the animation of the doors opening is very fluid and he described it as one of the strongest parts of the game. Combat is walking forward and shooting, mainly because of the AI, but he said it’s still very enjoyable and that despite being relatively linear, it’s still very enjoyable combat.

Now, the quests. in his words, they have a similar basic structure, but even so, they are very captivating and hold the player. he claims to have spent many late nights trying to finish specific quests because they hold him so much and excite him so much. He didn’t say much about the main campaign so as not to give away spoilers, but according to him, it’s extremely good and certainly Bethesda’s best campaign.

One of his criticisms of exploration was the lack of a mini-map and a guidebook. It’s extremely difficult to find your way around and the player often finds himself lost in a gigantic city and has no idea what to do. According to him, the game will get much better when the guidebooks start coming out, since the game itself doesn’t present most of its mechanics to the player, leaving him lost and forcing him to figure it out on the fly.

Another criticism was the inventory management, which he says is very limiting, his ship only carries 400 kilos and he said that the inventory is always full and he is always too heavy to run, making it very difficult to focus on looting something because his character carries so little weight and so does the ship. A problem that could easily be fixed with mods and future balancing.

I’m too lazy to write more, so I’ll summarize the other points; the ship combat isn’t a high point of the game, something that improves a lot when you get a better ship, but it still wasn’t something to get too excited about.

Its overall score was 8.5 points, a very good game, with incredible graphics and atmosphere, huge cities with lots to explore, captivating missions, interesting characters and enjoyable gameplay.

ylai, 9 months ago

You know, there are several built-in functions in phones, that are already viable methods to communicate remotely?

ylai, 9 months ago

And a decade ago, Google itself sabotaged XMPP in their version of embrace, extend, and extinguish: eff.org/…/google-abandons-open-standards-instant-…

ylai, 10 months ago

Germany traditionally is quite shocking in their practice of segregating children with disabilities into special Förderschulen. Whereas the U.S. has the Individual’s with Disabilities Education Act since the 1970s, Germany was basically forced into integration recently after the country signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009. And even then, they are taking their sweet time to integrate. See e.g. aktion-mensch.de/…/inklusionsquoten-in-deutschlan… as how currently, slightly less than half of German students with disabilities go to a regular school (the Inklusionsanteil).

ylai, 10 months ago

Just see time.com/5791028/how-to-pronounce-gif/ and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_GIF#Analys…

ylai, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Nearly every single word in English that starts with a g followed by a soft ih/eh vowel is pronounced as a soft g, just a few:

That is patently not true and blatant cherry picking, e.g. already contradicted by the lexically matching word “gift” (and there are “giggle”, “gild”, “girl”, “git”, “give”, “gizmo”, etc.). See Wikipedia, which referenced linguists studying this:

An analysis of 269 words by linguist Michael Dow found near-tied results on whether a hard or soft g was more appropriate based on other English words; the results varied somewhat depending on what parameters were used.[11] Of the 105 words that contained gi somewhere in the word, 68 used the soft g while only 37 employed its counterpart. However, the hard g words were found to be significantly more common in everyday English; […]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_GIF#Cause

Michael Dow is an associate professor in linguistics with specialization in phonology, by the way.

and if you’re confused why others pronounce it with a soft G, they would seem to be simply more familiar with the English language 🤷‍♂️

Well, clearly you are already not as “familiar with the English language” as you might think.

ylai, 10 months ago

See: en.wikipedia.org/…/English-language_spelling_refo…

English has been the total outlier among (originally) European language with no body of authority over its spelling. Even the “reform” by Noah Webster never really caught on outside North America, nearly 100 years later. And even more curious, the somewhat authoritative Oxford English Dictionary disagrees in their spelling with everybody (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling).