disco elysium is mostly driven by character and theme rather than plot. you’re not expected to solve the mystery, the game is more interested in which sidequests you engage with, how you treat the other characters, and how you choose to interpret the story. the choices you make don’t influence the mystery but they do influence the events of the mercenary tribunal, phasmid encounter and the final scene quite a lot. the tribunal is mostly about how well you did at the detective work and your relationship with Kim, whereas the phasmid encounter is about Harry’s inner journey, then the results of both of these scenes filter through to the confrontation with the other cops.

I also think the game does a pretty good job of setting these expectations, because for most of the game you just think the hardy boys did it, instead the game works pretty hard to make you curious about other things and you end up just going through the motions of the actual investigation

the deserter is probably one of the weaker characters, he does feel like a plot device, but he’s there to let the story connect the events of the game and harry’s own personal journey directly and literally to the history and politics of revachol, i think that’s probably why they decided to make him the killer in the first place

my understanding is that Mozilla paid good money for pocket and never made much from it

PewDiePie is the most basic kind of cryptofascist hiding behind a veil of edgy humour and he should not be welcome in the open source community

I know this is a meme but historians like Livy never used to let facts get in the way of a compelling historical narrative. obviously these sources provide a lot of useful information but taking them at their word is the equivalent of historians in the year 4000 trying to recreate 21st century life out of nothing but Joe Rogan podcasts

it is 2019, the 2060ti has 8gb of vram. it is 2020, the 3060ti has 8gb of vram. it is 2023, the 4060ti has 8gb of vram. it is 2025, the 5060ti has 8gb of vram.

I built my own nas back in the day and it is not worth it. trying to remember an the mdadm commands, setting up Cron jobs for scrubbing and smart tests, setting up email notifications if the tests fail, flashing the firmware on my hba, setting up dynamic DNS, fail2ban (later a private key whitelist), borg etc etc. it’s not too bad if you’re an experienced Linux user but it’s still a lot of time out of your day, meanwhile if you’re a new Linux user then you’re basically just playing russian roulette with your data. building a jellyfin server is a good learning experience but for a nas I would pick an off the shelf appliance every time

never had a Seagate drive last more than two years

the browser itself doesn’t matter. Google have had 10 years to do what they want with the specs for html, CSS and JavaScript, to define everything from browser extension APIs to the http protocol itself. they have won. not only have they spent a decade architecting the web in a way that mostly benefits them, they have made those specifications so bloated and complicated that nobody can develop a competitor from scratch. it took years to undo the damage wrought by ie6’s stagnation but this is different. this shit can’t be undone. it’s fucked forever

in my opinion the market is too segmented. Facebook took Oculus and refocused them onto standalone vr instead of pcvr, and secluded away a bunch of releases as Oculus exclusives. psvr is in a similar state. there isn’t enough vr software being made to support two separate walled gardens plus steamvr. in their rush to establish a vr monopoly, Facebook killed it. that’s my opinion

I’ll be hanging onto my vive cosmos for occasional games of beat saber but I think vr at this point has become an expensive novelty

pisses me off that they call it an image editor

Kath & Kim is one of Australia’s finest cultural exports

just a few years away bro just a few more years just give us £500k for a new quantum computer bro just a few more years

the timeline in the pic is a bit off, but macos is definitely getting worse. I think mavericks was the last version that let you turn off mouse acceleration.

insightful comment. just one small criticism: there are a lot of artists out there who happen to exist within this capitalist economic system, who need to sell their art for money so that they don’t starve or become homeless. and these people probably don’t want their art and their style to be reproducible by ai because that would threaten their ability to house and feed themselves.

I’m all in favour of abolishing intellectual property, but only as part of a broader change to our economic system that would allow artists to support themselves without having to worry about ownership. besides, these ai tools aren’t really ‘sharing’ art, they’re just allowing big tech companies to consolidate wealth and power

finally, your point about art rarity is not really relevant to the discussion, these tools are intended for people distributing digital art, not people speculating on physical art

object orientated programming is the wrong idiom for almost all problems, and even in the few cases where it makes sense, you have to be very careful or it’ll hurt you

alphafold had set the field of protein folding back a decade

I love retro gaming on real hardware, but the prices for turn-of-the-millenium software are outrageous. whatever was popular 20 years ago tends to suddenly become very expensive, but after a certain point the price does go down again. I used to collect NES games, when they got too expensive I moved to big box pc games, and now I’m building a Wii and Atari 2600 collection. The 2600 is so old that most of the people who are nostalgic for it aren’t actively collecting it. meanwhile, the Wii is still comparatively new (though that will likely change in a few years).

so, I guess my advice is: buy whatever’s cheap. I had never played the 2600 before but I ended up developing a genuine appreciation for the console. similarly, I’m picking up Wii games because I love the Wii and I want to make sure I have all the essentials before they get really expensive.

Another alternative is to just buy a console and then use a flashcart/softmod. or use an FPGA system, which will get you a native-like experience.

it sucks that a thing I like so much has become a festival of unrestricted capitalism, but I think it’s still possible to carve out a niche and enjoy yourself.

I’m probably not going to pay $10 a year with additional fees to have my music on a website unless a lot of people are already using it

I love this book! it’s long but dense, it’s trashy but it’s also high art, it’s tragic but it’s also inspirational. I’m glad Dumas was paid by the word, because it means he wrote as much. You should check out the musketeers books if you haven’t already, I think Count is a stronger book but they’re all written in the same engrossing style.

this pretty much sums it up. I thought trump would be incoherent, but some of the stuff out of his mouth was borderline surreal. Harris had completely tuned herself to ‘beat’ trump, and while it worked, it’s painfully clear that she doesn’t have a single original thought - nothing but platitudes, the same canned phrases about working families and small businesses, same tired defence of Israel.