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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • terraria for minecraft + metroidvania

    This…shines a totally new light on a bunch of decisions that originally made me fairly upset and caused me to quit playing the game.

    I played the game with nearly every free moment I had between the time I bought it in 2012 and the 1.2 release in October of 2013. Multiple worlds. Multiplayer sessions with players in several countries possibly requiring port forwarding and VPN tunnels if I remember correctly, and all of it stopped dead for me when I had to quit focusing on creating and exploring and was instead spending most of my time struggling to survive.

    There were enemies before, and you could find one of the three bosses and just… Not go there, but 1.2 really made combat the forefront of the game and killed it for me entirely.

    In the intervening 12 years. I’d be surprised if had more than a couple of hours into the game.

    Viewing it through the lens of a metroidvania where you craft your own progression is not something I’d considered before.

    I might actually go back to the game on the rare occasion I’m in the mood for something like that.

    Thank you for the insight, while it probably sounds silly, it gives me some perspective into something that was so jarring it still causes me to panic when a game announces combat where combat was not previously the focus (I’m looking at you, Dyson Sphere Program 😄) and I really appreciate that.


  • Do some of the same shit the Republicans have been doing for ages any time THEY are in the minority.

    There should be a daily press briefing with Pete B, Bernie S., or Alexandria O.C. that’s covered by every journalist who’s been kicked out of the white house. Call that shit “The American Way” briefing and compare the events of the last 24 hours of trump BS to the constitution and the declaration of independence.

    Obstruct every last piece of illegal garbage the Republican Nazis are trying to get away with loudly and publicly.

    Put themselves OUT THERE in the public eye as AGAINST FACISM and go full-on captain America on those Nazi Republicans.



  • Find an open source project that’s coded in your language of choice that you both care about (edit – or that looks interesting to you, at least) and want to add functionality to.

    Download a working copy, then, since you’re learning with this, pretend the repo doesn’t exist anymore and you’re on your on with your self-imposed assignment.

    Figure out what functionality you want to add, start with changing or augmenting something simple, and figure out where that would go in the existing code, and make it happen.

    See if you can manage to Google search your way past any errors you run into, preferably alternating between ai answers and things like stack overflow posts, only instead of copy-pasting the code that errors out (or the solution code you get from ai or posts) actually step through things and figure out what the “solution” code is doing differently and ask yourself why and how that makes a difference or has a different effect from the code that generated the error in the first place. Then decide whether it’s actually likely to fix the error or not. If you think it’s going to? Try using it.

    If it works, make sure you understand why.

    If it doesn’t, try to figure out why not.

    Keep going until you have a working new feature.

    Then try a more complicated feature.

    After a few of those, try tackling some of the bugs in the repo.




  • I personally feel like anyone who’s not a bigot IS by nature a feminist at least in a solidarity for the ENTIRE human race sense, but keep in mind, this is coming from my perspective as a male, so I might be missing something by virtue of it not regularly impacting me personally.

    I’d love a less-abused word, personally.

    As a guy, I don’t think I’d WANT to call myself a feminist, lest I be incorrectly associated with the likes of Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, or a whole host of other clearly NON-feminists who hid behind the word to cover their actions.




  • Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

    Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

    You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

    Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.






  • the brutal trolling in Ultima Online made me quit

    I’m sitting here thinking “I don’t remember it being TOO bad…”

    and 4 or 5 guys on horseback come and fuck your shit up for an hour or two

    Oh. Yeah.

    There’s a reason someone (Midas?) once parodied the entire steppenwolf song…

    Well

    You don’t know what

    We can find

    Why don’t you die for me little n00b

    On a magic Corp Por ride


  • For gaming and everything else I couldn’t easily do on Linux back when mandriva and Gentoo were still considered fairly new distros? And because I didn’t know Linux well yet?

    Linux has come a LONG way, but back as much as 20 years ago, doing something as simple as installing suse8 could see you with a fat string of error -3’s just because you had a slightly less common model of hard drive. Forget trying to play one of the few MMOs that existed back then.

    Production mac’s were still running os8 back then.

    It was a different world and gaming meant windows for almost all major titles because there were only so many WINE contributors.


  • So, I kinda had this problem myself at one point a decade and a half ago, only it was booze and serviio.

    I ended up taking an old tower I had, installing Ubuntu on it with no Xwindows or GUI of any kind, set up ssh, and unplugged the monitor, keyboard, and mouse and accessed the Ubuntu box only from a putty session on my windows box.

    Then, when I wanted to do anything on the Linux box I’d ssh in and command line it. And Google and try again until I got it right.

    I turned it into a domain controller for the windows boxes (well, login server via ldap) and had an irc bouncer and a bot on it, among other things.

    All while still drinking and streaming video.

    I can’t say what the magic bullet will be for anyone else, but I was able to learn by removing my “crutches” until it just… Clicked for me. YMMV but don’t stop trying.