i’m lizard
The good stuff is usually hidden in low view hell (or in text form, stuck on personal blogs nobody reads). Getting an audience is mostly a property of marketing, not quality. There’s not a lot of natural overlap between those that can teach well and those that can market well.
For what it’s worth, this game was formerly “Monolith”. Fantastic twinstick bullet hell shmup roguelite. Difficulty is somewhat on the hard side but it’s learnable.
Powered through Beastieball over the past week, a creature collector/“sports” game from the devs of Chicory and Wandersong. I had fairly high expectations because I enjoyed the devs previous work, but it turned out even better than expected. Lots of cool creature designs, music is Lena Raine’s usual standout stuff, story kept my attention.
The sportsball system is surprisingly complex, if a little hard to learn. I went through multiple types of team setup and felt like a lot of different setups were viable in the end. Every match is a 2v2, every offensive turn is 3 actions worth, and you get a defensive turn too. You really have to build a team with good synergy between them and be smart about swapping in and out.
Only real downside is it’s still early access and a decent chunk of creatures have placeholder art or don’t have the full set of animation frames yet. Most are reasonably finished but there’s a couple that are a little jarring.
For current exports, it’s some custom .csm/.csd file combo. Not sure if there’s any tools for working with it, seems like it’d be more annoying than just using a normal archive format either way.
It technically still exists in the game properties -> installed files tab, but it doesn’t really work. The backup files you get require you to be online to meaningfully restore and will trigger a patch to the latest game version.
Practically speaking it’s better to just make a copy of the game install directory manually, gives you a better chance of things working (even though most games require some kind of external tooling for that).
I’ll freely admit I don’t use that thing and was under the assumption it was feature complete. Regardless, the Android and iOS clients are also open, and I’ve found absolutely no indications that there’s any blobs in the repo or the like.
It’s not and I’m not sure how that article arrived at that conclusion. Their E2EE crypto is problematic homebrew crypto, but that’s very, very different from being closed. The whole desktop client including the implementation of that crypto is fully open source and lives right on GitHub. Plenty of people have independently reviewed it and came back with a very iffy impression of the whole thing.
Really the only difference is that Telegram doesn’t publish their backend, but the one Signal publishes is missing a couple of bits related to their “spam filter”, which happens to take in the source & destination of messages and do anything it wants with them. That doesn’t matter for either platform’s E2EE properties in any case, since distrusting the server is the whole point of E2EE.
Moderation is handled by each instance’s version of that community separately.
Reddit/Lemmy/etc communities differ from something like Tumblr/Cohost by also having per-community rules, and nobody has the time to moderate hundreds of communities according to their per-community rules.
It’s relatively easy to keep an instance free of spam/overly blatant hate/etc, since that is a fairly common set of rules. But it’s much harder to keep a “world news” style community being overran with US-centric posts, or a discussion community on a specific subject from being filled to the brim with memes, or posts that are only very vaguely adjacent. Without centralized per-community moderators, it would fall on general instance moderation to make decisions about whether a post about an Undertale hack fits in the Undertale community. That’s probably going to go wrong more often than not.
You can have a website that is only moderated according to global rules with tags being a free-for-all, but you fundamentally end up building something along the lines of Tumblr or Cohost, which attracts a different audience, including those that know how to rules lawyer their way in such an environment; tagging 20 mediocre photos a day with #photography instead of just a good one, for example. With the end of Cohost approaching, I wouldn’t be surprised if some tried to build that kinda thing, but it’d likely end up having a very different vibe.
I don’t know if the Atari Lynx counts as non-major. Anything from Atari should probably count as major, the thing supposedly sold 2 million units, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen anyone mention it and that’s still less than 2% of the Game Boy’s 110m+.
I got the original model as a hand-me-down towards the end of the 90s and I wasn’t super fond of it. The thing looks and feels like a brick and ate batteries for breakfast, the internet says 5 hour battery life but I remember getting like 2. The “left-hand mode” is a cool concept but putting two pairs of A/B buttons on the device feels like something they could’ve done better. It had color, a couple of arcade ports were really great games and there was Chip’s Challenge, but younger me got exhausted just using the damn thing.
Basically yes. Rancher Desktop sets up K3s in a VM and gives you a kubectl, docker and a few other binaries preconfigured to talk to that VM. K3s is just a lightweight all-in-one Kubernetes distro that’s relatively easy to set up (of course, you still have to learn Kubernetes so it’s not really easy, just skips the cluster setup).
Crimzon Clover, any version’s good but World EXplosion is the most recent. It’s a fairly difficult and chaotic bullet hell, but the novice mode should be reasonably approachable as long as you’re willing to learn, and the design is superb.
Similarly, the whole CAVE backlog. Not all of them have novice modes or the like, and there’s quite a few games not really available outside of MAME. The original DoDonPachi is/was considered the best starter bullet hell for a long, long time and still holds up pretty well, but is more difficult than a lot of modern games on their respective novice modes.
On the indie side of things: Star of Providence (formerly Monolith) is an indie roguelite bullet hell twin-stick-ish shmup with a pretty good amount of depth. ZeroRanger is a much more story-based game that I really enjoyed.
NieR Automata, for basically the same reasons. Hard mode is filled with instakills everywhere and is really just a damage multiplier, so you have to be the right kind of person for that. If you’re not, Normal is probably already fairly easy because of all the auto-heals, but the pacing can be a bit slow for something where most enemies aren’t dangerous. Might as well play Easy and play for the story.
Most paid certs aren’t worth much anyway. Payment and delivery info for DV certs isn’t validated by anyone, it’s literally the same concept as Let’s Encrypt. OV and EV are the only ones that theoretically have any value, but nobody is using those ever since they got rid of the URL bar labeling; even Amazon is on DV nowadays.
Or 800€…
This whole thing is shaping up to be the PS3’s “five hundred and ninety nine us dollars” version 2.
Aside from all of the problems with the game itself, I think they must’ve had one of the most unfortunate launch moments. Hero shooters had been pretty much on the downturn and then just before they launched, Deadlock went public and suckered quite a lot of the hero shooter audience into playing a full-on MOBA/FPS hybrid. And Deadlock is very quietly breaking all kinds of silly records for what’s technically an invite-only alpha (currently #8 on Steam’s most played with 137k concurrent players).
The main reason many sub-communities are stuck on Telegram (and Discord) are the public group chat/broadcast channel related features. Signal still has a 1000 member group size limit, which is more than enough for a “group DM” but mostly useless for groups with publicly posted invite links. Those same groups would also much rather have functional scrollback/search on join instead of encryption.
Gonna add a dissenting “maybe but not really”. YT is really aggressive on this kinda stuff lately and the situation is changing month by month. YT has multiple ways of flagging your IP as potentially problematic and as soon as you get flagged you’re going to end up having to run quite an annoying mess of scripts that may or may not last in the long term. There’s some instructions in a stickied issue on the Invidious repo.
You can’t pretend an open port is closed, because an open port is really just a service that’s listening. You can’t pretend-close it and still have that service work. The only thing you can do is firewalling off the entire service, but presumably, any competent distro will firewall off all services by default and any service listening publicly is doing so for a good reason.
I guess it comes down to whether they feel like it’s worth obfuscating port scan data. If you deploy that across all of your network then you make things just a little bit more annoying for attackers. It’s a tiny bit of obfuscation that doesn’t really matter, but I guess plenty of security teams need every win they can get, as management is always demanding that you do more even after you’ve done everything that’s actually useful.
Looking at the slides in the original Japanese source, this tooling also has a whole lot of analysis options and can pull/push game data/positioning both to and from a real Switch or something along those lines. Integrating that much custom features into an off-the-shelf tool would probably take just as long.
I’m particularly worried about all the historical records. Summoning Salt & similar channels are gonna have problems after this, especially after the policy has been in place for several years and stuff made in this very era expires.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Archive Team tries their best at archiving the current situation (difficult as it is) but nobody is going to bother doing it on-going and a WR obsoleted for months is interesting material only when edited into a documentary.