I took his criticisms of the combat as basically saying “this system is not interesting enough to form a satisfying gameplay loop”. That’s a critical statement which I actually agree with, though from my perspective that’s a key part of Persona’s core design: neither the combat system nor the social link system are endlessly enjoyable, so the player is intrinsically motivated to avoid lingering for too long and properly close the core gameplay loop by advancing the calendar. It’s that sort of pendulum-like cadence which gives the series its unique sense of momentum.

I do think that it’s a shame RPS’s Matt was unable to find joy in P3R’s gameplay loop due to disliking the social-link system… but I also see it as an opportunity to better understand the game as a holistic package in a way that can’t be achieved through a more carefully measured, quantitative analysis. The way I see things, the game is the game – I’m much more interested in understanding what’s in the game rather than what’s not, if that makes any sense.

I tend to prefer clicking through the unscored reviews first since I find that it’s generally a mark of a quality outlet. Rock Paper Shotgun in particular is an old favorite of mine, so their’s is the first review that I clicked on and let me tell you guys: it’s a real firecracker!

Matt clearly didn’t have a good time and I had to respectfully disagree with a lot of the points he’s made, but even so… his points are well-articulated and sensible. I’m rather glad for his uncommon perspective on the topic and I do think that RPS ultimately picked the right writer for the job. He hasn’t particularly changed my mind about a day-one purchase, of course – the main difference is now I’ll have a more nuanced and realistic expectation for what’s inside.

It’s a pretty different situation under closer examination. The DnD developers are ex-Nexon employees and they (allegedly) pitched the idea internally before deciding to leave and take the idea with them.

Nexon thought that they had a legal leg to stand on because of how IP laws work (i.e.: employee ideas on company time are company IP). Perhaps more importantly; they probably felt a need to retaliate in order to send a message to other employees who might want to try something similar.

Palworld, on the other hand, is made by a team with no ties whatsoever to GameFreak. If Pokemon were a younger franchise they might possibly have a patent case of some kind, but even the 3D games go back almost 24 years now.

History Youtube gets pretty whack about this because Google’s adsense algorithm freaks out when words like “Nazi” and “Stalin” appear. To name a few examples:

• “The Famine” in place of “Holodomor”
• Jo. [CENSORED] in place of “Stalin”, “The Patsies” in place of “The Nazis”

The second example is particularly amusing, being a video about how Shostakovich circumvented soviet censorship while self-censoring all instances of “Stalin” within the script.

You may be interested in reading this post about the process of packaging Steam.

tl;dr: It’s mostly an annoyance reserved for packagers to deal with. Dynamically linked executables can be patched in a fairly universal fashion to work without FHS, so that’s the go-to approach. If the executable is statically linked, the package may have to ship a source patch instead. If the executable is statically linked & close-source, the packagers are forced to resort to simulating an FHS environment via chroot.

Yes, exactly. The fans have spoken and we want the real Vaporeon!

I’d rather not defederate. Why? Because the fediverse is open by default and so far we haven’t really limit-tested that philosophy. In my opinion, it is better to push the envelope sooner rather than later, if only so that we can learn from the experience.

If it doesn’t work out, then so be it. We have the tools to fight back against culture-death – this will not be Eternal September 2.0

I don’t say this as a disagreement, but rather just a factchecking exercise: “white phosphorus” isn’t synonymous with “war crime” in the way that weapons like cluster bombs are. This is to say that it’s possible to use in ways that are compliant with the international rules of war, unlike a many chemical weapons and the aforementioned cluster bombs.

Again, to be crystal clear: I am not on team human immolation. We all know that it is strategically impossible to deploy phosphorus in one of the most densely populated regions on Earth without deliberately choosing to immolate civilians. My hangup here is that the gravity of the situation will not be conveyed to a skeptic if you don’t spell out the facts in exacting detail: on October 11th, Israel deployed an airburst of white phosphorus over Gaza city. White phosphorus deployed on a city with a population density of 21,000/sq. mile. Big time classic warcrime.

WINE: Wine Is Not an Emulator

API call translation is often very inexpensive and, particularly in the case of DXVK for graphics calls, sometimes actually results in faster code if the underlying API implementation is more performant than the original Win32 equivalent – see Elden Ring launch day performance on Linux vs. Windows for an example of this.

You’re confusing Proton with community efforts like Lutris. Proton is a package of technologies (Wine, DXVK, Vessel), not a configuration manager. Each individual game gets an identical, isolated runtime environment without any bespoke modifications except for downloading precompiled shaders (if available).

It’s certainly true that Proton has hardcoded quirk flags for specific applications, but these are exceptions which prove the rule – there are <200 of these compared with thousands of Verified status games. Almost always, Valve prefers to fix the upstream Wine/DXVK bug rather than hacking around it. Any hacks which Valve does ship are in the Proton source code, not per-game environment scripts.

Pi is a geometric constant, so obviously we’re redefining the decimal numbering system to make “1” anchored to a fixed value of π/5 (or simply 1 in our superior new decimal representation).

Don’t believe the haters who’ll complain about “needing integer number representations”. Literally anyone with a basic grasp of fractions will be perfectly fine! Let’s illustrate with a few simple examples:

• “I’ll take three-fifths pi gallons of blue slushie, please”
• “No thanks, I don’t need any cups because I actually brought two-fifths pi containers of my own each with three-tenths pi gallons of individual capacity specifically for this purpose”.

As you can see, there is no reason to be concerned whatsoever. The system works. It is mathematically elegant.

Oh, “just stand up” you say? Wow, after that I could “just get everything important done” and “just make everyone happy”.

I have a better idea: I’m gonna go back to sleep.

[…] but that’s more of a commercial benefit I think

For me, this is the primary benefit of a rice cooker. Having warm, cheap, filling food on demand at any time is fantastic. I am so lazy and my little rice buddies are always ready to go when I can’t be bothered.

I’m particularly amused by the pro-NVIDIA “it just works” comments. Compared to what exactly? With AMD, the 3D acceleration driver is bundled directly into VESA, so it’s already ready & working before even the first-boot of almost all desktop distros. That’s how drivers are supposed to work on Linux and it has taken NVIDIA 10+ years (and counting…) to get with the basic program.

I applaud the long overdue decision to move their proprietary firmware directly onto the card and making the rest of the kernel driver open-source, but I’ll remind you folks of a few things:

• The open source driver is still in an alpha with no timeline for a stable release
• NVIDIA has so far elected to control their own driver releases instead of incorporating 3D acceleration support into VESA

NVIDIA had to be dragged screaming to go this far and they’re still not up to scratch. There’s still plenty of fuel left in the “Fuck NVIDIA” gastank.

For anyone interested, here’s the Lemmy markdown configuration. As you can see, Lemmy’s website UI supports the full commonmark spec (tutorial / official spec), plus a bunch of extensions. I don’t think anyone’s fully documented these yet, so I’ll try doing so below. Apologies in advance to mobile users, this is probably gonna get ugly (see included image links for how it should look):

• URL autolinking (plaintext URLs automatically turn into links)
• Lemmy autolinking:
  • NOTE: No link will be inserted if the viewer is browsing an instance where the resource is not yet known/blocked
  • Communities: !fediverse@lemmy.ml→[email protected] (link ref: /c/fediverse@lemmy.ml)
    • Kbin-style is also supported: /m/fediverse@lemmy.ml→/m/[email protected]
  • Users: /u/chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org→ /u/[email protected] (link ref: /u/chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org)
• Typography substitutions:
  • (c)→©
  • (tm)→™
  • (r)→®
  • +-→±
  • ...→…
  • ---→—
  • --→–
  • ???? (>= 4x)→???
  • !!!! (>= 4x)→!!!
• Github-flavor Markdown extensions:
  • Tables
  • Strikethrough: ~~example~~→example (image)
• Subscript/Superscript:
  • Sub: example~sub~→example_sub (image)
  • Super: example^super^→example^super (image)
• Footnotes:
  • Inline part: example[^notename]→example^[1] (image)
  • Bottom part: [^notename]: Note text→(see bottom of post) (image)
    • Important: the bottom part must be at the very end of the post, otherwise both halves of the footnote will break!
• Ruby Text: {example base text|example ruby text}→example base textexample ruby text (image)
  • “Ruby” is an html-ism for special pronunciation aids which frequently appear within young person’s media where the language includes non-phonetic characters (e.g.: Chinese characters)
  • Japanese Furigana example: {凄|すご}い！→凄すごい！(image)
• Spoilers:

  ::: spoiler visible part example
  hidden part example
  :::
  

  • See below ⤵️ (collapsed image) (expanded image)
    visible part example

    hidden part example

• Image/Video embedding: ![accessibility alt-text example](https://i.imgur.com/9nVMRqa.jpeg) => (image)

Unfortunately, kbin instances are unavailable via Lemmy right now due to hosting problems on kbin’s side of the equation (see Kbin Codeberg #101). This will probably be fixed soon, so keep an eye on that issue for progress.

Even if it were working, however, there’s actually something of a required ritual that you’ll need to go through when subscribing to an external community which your instance is not already federated to (i.e.: communities where nobody on SDF is currently subscribed). Here are the steps you’ll need to follow:

1. In the community search, paste in the following pattern: !community@instance.domain (e.g.: !technology@beehaw.org)
2. Press [Enter], wait for the search to finish (it’s normal to see no results)
3. Wait a few minutes
4. Refresh the search page and search for the common name this time (e.g.: “Technology”)
5. The community should appear and be available for subscription now

FWIW: There are plans to improve this unintuitive workflow in the future (see Lemmy Backend Github #2951).

If these steps don’t work, it’s possible that the community may simply be too new. You’ll sometimes need to wait an hour or so after a community has been created for it to start being available on external instances.