Oblivion is the go-to example of how not to do level scaling. It’s impressive how badly they fucked it up. Like, they managed to make exploring pointless and unexciting.

You find a tomb, but you know that whatever’s inside will be “level appropriate”. If you’re low level it’ll be steel weapons, and if you’re high level it’ll be daedric. There’s not really any point in going in at low level. Might as well level up some other way and come back when the loot will be good.

On top of that, the gameplay is so bland and unresponsive that you can’t really punch above your weight class. The game is very much a levels game. It’s not like Dark Souls where someone can get really good and beat the whole thing while naked (and in the game, too). There’s a lot of “well, this guard is level 30 and you’re 10, so no matter how many times you hit him with your hammer he’s not going to flinch.” Knowing you’re always going to get kind of bland treasure wouldn’t be so bad if the act of getting it was fun. Like, sometimes a tomb or whatever in Elden Ring will have crap loot, but it’s still a solid core gameplay.

Morrowind had a lot of these problems, but it was also kind of wacky and heartfelt.

Looks pretty typical to me (longtime nyc resident). It’s rare to see trash, and graffiti is pretty uncommon. People sometimes think the subway is still like The Warriors where it’s just a wall of spraypaint, but not so much.

Yeah, I think there’s a big difference between “I thought they were going to investigate the smith, but they’re really suspicious of the wizard now and want to check her out first” and “they decided to forget about the whole civil war for the throne thing and open a BBQ joint for the local goblins”

Nowadays I’d probably just explicitly be like “Hey, so, when we started this game we agreed on a certain tone and direction. Specifically, it was going to be about a power struggle for the throne. Running a restaurant business in D&D sounds wild, but that is really a different kind of story and a different game. If you want to do that, let’s talk about it. Otherwise, I’m asking you to stay more on theme.”

Though I say that and my best game had plenty of “beach episodes”. One time literally, after they saved some sahaugin from being subjugated by a siren.

Owning or renting a home has the same requirements of dependency on multiple companies

Are you suggesting people go without homes? And that’s analogous to going without a car?

Maybe you’re really radical and want free public housing like people want free public transit, but that’s far outside the overton window.

I imagine there are some “written in blood” laws and regulations that apply to hotels that airbnb is ignoring, too. That should also be addressed.

I read that airbnb lead to rents rise, because it made it so easy for landlords to run their property like hotels. I don’t use them, and kind of think lowly of people that are like “well it’s convenient so i don’t care”.

Feels like they should be able to view the software and hardware controlling the odometer, and if it’s doing anything suspicious.

I wonder if they’ll actually do anything if they find Tesla is doing fraud. Feel like everyone who OK’d the decision should be barred from working in the industry for life, and made to forfeit everything they gained while doing the fraud.

While I’m making magical wishes, I’d also like Musk and all of his followers to choke to death.

I was hoping you had some insight and revelations about how to use Finder.

I ran a game in near future New York and used Google maps and street view for guidance. Worked well. None of the other players lived here, so I think the visuals helped them.

I had one really good game of Vampire. Lasted a couple years. We still talk about it sometimes, and its best scenes. Like how one PC saved an NPC by jumping out a 10th story window with her. Or the time they had a huge in character fight because the job they’d tried to do went sideways.

But I’ve also had a couple really bad games. There was one where they just didn’t read and retain anything from the books. One of the players on like session 4 was like “wait. How do I get more blood? Do I like… Bite people?”. My friend what do you think was happening in the other scenes when people were hunting for blood? They also didn’t retain anything about the different factions, so they didn’t really understand anyone’s motivation. It was bad. Still feel bad about it.

Please. Elaborate.

People that work at microsoft could stop this. With means gentler than “Crack open the CEO’s skull with a hammer”, too.

Yeah this feels like another thing that’s downstream from low wages.

Movies are a luxury. If most people are struggling to get by in debt, they’re less likely to splurge.

Zuckerberg put in his will “Anyone who kills me gets a billion dollars”. Bold move, but apparently legal!

If those two shitheads said we should drink more water I’d check with other sources first.

Fuck them. I hope they both die for what they’ve done

I’ve been saying similarly for ages. We’re all emotional to some degree, but the right wing often turns it up to 11. Facts don’t matter. In-group belonging matters.

I don’t know a better word for it than “Stupid”, but it is deeply what I’d call stupid. Doesn’t care about facts, consistency, outcomes. Just feeling good about being a member of the group.

The oatmeal did a comic about this: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

A friend of mine had a similar thought. He was sitting down to do some work on an open source game, and then was like “Wait. What am I doing?” and he made his own game from scratch. ( This one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1271280/Rift_Wizard/ - It’s good, but kind of too hard for my brain )

It helped that he a had a lot of xp in game development. I imagine some of the boring, difficult, stuff doesn’t have as many people readily available. There’s a lot of “Why does the game crash if I push the up arrow key when I’m in my inventory, sometimes?” stuff you have to worry about when you’re doing the whole thing.

Everyone involved in this decision should be shot.

What happened to all the republicans crying about “government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers”? Oh right, they’re hypocritical little shits that should be in the ground.

So tired of everything trash because like a third of the country has less emotional maturity than a toddler.

Fuck her. Sheepshead Bay has pretty good subway access, too. You don’t really need a car there, I don’t think.

Sidebar defaults are bad. There’s no home directory. How do you get to your home directory? Cmd+shift+H, but can you get there without that special shortcut? You can’t see the file system’s structure in Finder. The GUI doesn’t have a way to go “up” in the directory structure. I don’t think you can do it in the GUI alone.

It won’t let you see stuff in like \tmp\ without a fight, too. I don’t know how to open stuff in places like that without cd’ing to the location in the terminal, and doing open . in the desired directory.

The list view is the least bad, but it gets unwieldy if your directories are deeply nested. It’s also bad if you started in the middle of the tree and want to go up. Gallery and column view are really bad for anything non trivial.

I often want to see the entire file path, and it really doesn’t want to cooperate. If I do find the file I’m looking for, and want the full path, it doesn’t want to give it. I don’t even know if there is a way to get it. Other than like cmd+clicking -> “new iterm2 tab here” -> pwd, which is not really that helpful of Finder.

Contrast with windows’ default explorer. It’s not perfect and I think windows11 made it worse, but still. Open it up, there’s the “my pc”, click through to my user directory, music, some album, then i can click the top thing and get the path. I can also see the whole tree on the left.

Whatever I was using in Mint was similar to windows’ Explorer. Had no complaints about it.