• 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
  • BellyPurpledGerbil@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What was a profound moment that a video game caused you to experience, and why?
    432·
    11 months ago

    Disco Elysium is so fucking wild. It’s the most empathetic game I’ve ever played. I am someone who has an easy time putting myself in other people’s shoes. The character is an alcoholic mess, on the brink of a depression so deep he has totally fractured his own memory and sense of self. He’s a genius. He’s also an idiot. And he’s a cop/detective in a world that really despises cops. It’s what I would call the idealistic cop: the one that would put themself between a group of armed men and a group of innocent people with nothing but a dinky pistol and say stand down.

    Anyway, I love how it makes me feel about everything in its place. The ideologies that drive us. The youth we waste on fooling around. The insanity and, somehow, the humor of racism. The mistakes that make us who we are. The idealistic pursuits that are so high they can never be achieved. How heartbreak never goes away.

    Most importantly, I played a game with an internal monologue built-in as the RPG system, and it nearly exactly matches how I think and feel. My mind is also fractured as identifiable pieces of myself. I gave some parts of them names because it made it easier to separate the thoughts from how I truly felt. I have nearly all the same psyches just with different names from Volition, Half-light, etc. And it floored me. I have never played a game that was as introspective as I was. Right down to the simultaneously protective and self destructive thoughts clashing within and one winning out. It gave me a third person perspective of my own self destructive and unhealthy thought processes. And it helped me love myself a little bit more. I feel like I’ll never be able to play anything like it again for the rest of my life.

  • BellyPurpledGerbil@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•[Serious] What kind of scenes, themes, etc. do not exist in movies that you sorely wish did?
    432·
    1 year ago

    Dialogue and movement in films and shows is so damn well rehearsed that I can never truly get immersed. Real conversations are awkward. We stutter. We fumble words. We forget people’s names, or what we were just talking about. Never for dramatic reasons. Just because we’re human. Script writers are hyper focused on fitting as much wit and humor as they can jam in there. I think some authors of books fall into the same trap. A 16 year old character somehow has the wit and wisdom of someone twice their age. I want more scenes made with genuine stumbling embarrassing awkwardness.

    You know those moments where later people learn that the actor improvised the line? Or the movements? Best one I ever saw was Heath Ledger’s Joker failing to blow up the hospital.

    [ He turns around. Well shit. Looks back at the device and mashes the button a few more times. Hospital finally blows up and he gets startled. ]

    THAT’S THE SHIT. Give me more of that. Let me see the characters fuck up. Get uncomfortable. Make genuinely minor mistakes. Give me flaws. Give me something that isn’t witty. I’m tired of getting bashed over the head with polished scripts.

    Animated movies tend to do this better to be fair. Lots to appreciate from the recent animated Spiderman movies for example.

  • BellyPurpledGerbil@sh.itjust.workstoCloud@programming.dev•Death by a thousand microservices
    2·
    1 year ago

    In any discussion or critique of microservices, some people very clearly have never worked on monoliths (or haven’t worked at enough companies to see the bad ones) and it shows. A poorly designed monolithic codebase is just as bad as a poorly designed microservice one. The problem isn’t the ideology.

    I began my career in the times when monoliths were king but virtualization was just around the corner. For sufficiently complex software systems, monoliths were such a nightmare. Merging new code into a monolith is like trying to merge lanes in a 16 wheeler. You’re not merging until everyone is out of the way or you accidentally knock other people off the road. Testing took forever because who knows how many places one code change affected, or how many teams have collectively merged conflicting code changes one after the other. Heaven forbid trying to snapshot the database. Or backing it up. The codebase was often so large that regression testing and deployments took 6 - 8 hours, which had to be done overnight because you can’t have the software go down during business hours. None of that is fixed decades later. It has the same problems. In fact the problems are worse in the modern age of reliability engineering. Nothing can ever go down.

    For single purpose apps like Instagram, I would be surprised if a monolithic structure was big enough to fail. It makes sense for smaller designs. For larger stuff, with multiple data sets and purposes like Amazon, it doesn’t make sense at all. Every company expects to grow as big as the top dogs, and so they do microservice architecture from the start to prevent the headaches of future migration work. But if they never get there it’s just service bloat.

    This whole architectural war is idiotic. Do what makes sense.