• 12 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • In rare (usually politically charged) cases? Sure

    Mostly what happens is the owner pays back a fraction (if that) before telling the former employees to fuck off. Said former employees then need to decide if it is worth finding a lawyer to pursue this. And the margins for small businesses are often small enough that it is pretty easy to shuffle off any assets and then declare bankruptcy before doing it all over again later.

    Everyone loves the news story where an asshole has been ordered to pay a massive fine. Very few people pay attention to what happens after the local DA takes a campaign photo.


  • If you JUST want to read pirated ebooks? Kobo is probably the best bang for your buck. But you can also pretty easily sideload ebooks to any kindle via the email interface (which I believe Calibre can utilize).

    That said? I have a mix of ebooks I got from legal and less than legal sources. And some of those legal sources include amazon kindle because the prices are REALLY good.

    So I like my Onyx Boox. Yeah… it is jank as hell and it allegedly comes with a free 5g modem so be wary of what personal info you put on there. But it works well as I can use the kindle app (which also syncs with my phone) for amazon stuff and the native ereader for any epub files. And because I use a webdav to sync my notes, grabbing new books is as simple as remembering to scp a folder to my nextcloud periodically.




  • Skimmed through a few of these earlier and REALLY excited for later today (pre-ordered on Steam for the bonuses, will refund if it is a total trainwreck)

    The scores are all over the place because this is a B-A game so it has to actually technically perform well (unlike AA-AAA games like Jedi Survivor that get a pass…), But the actual text is fairly consistent:

    The world is amazing. The early-mid game balance is brutal and unforgiving and you will spend a LOT of time using AKs so degraded that they WILL jam. The emergent behavior from the storms and enemy placements lead to frantic struggles to reach cover. And the performance and bugs are all over the place and we all REALLY hope the day-one patch fixes things but nobody is that optimitsic.

    And… as a STALKER fan who loved SoC and CoP (and didn’t hate CS…):


    Just to add on a bit for people thinking “I’ll wait ten years for the community patches”. Yeah, that will be a less painful experience. But it is well worth looking back at how modders have handled the STALKERs over the years. Even as early as year one there were people who insisted on changing the game balance heavily and EVERYONE wanted to re-enable the cut repair features at merchants. Which made the game a lot less frustrating but also kind of defeated the purpose of the game.

    Because the experience of stocking up on ALL the good 9x39 ammo in The Zone to take your VSS up against the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant? That involved using AKs and ARs to go from point A to point B because you wanted to save up that durability for when it mattered. And when it did matter? The fighting was so intense that you burned through ALL that ammo AND your gun was busted and there was the experience of basically throwing away a perfectly good gun that you spent your entire net worth on to sprint out from the cover of a burned out bus (that looked suspiciously like the same asset pack Metro and Fallout 3 used…) to grab an AK off a dead zombie to return fire before the RPG soldiers got a good shot.

    Also… this is a Ukrainian as fuck game made by Ukrainians during a war for their very survival. Decide how much slack you are gonna cut for that and how much long term support you expect with the upcoming “wrinkle” of 2025.



  • I’ve definitely noticed that my favorite takeout place’s POS makes giving no tip as hard as possible (Other->No Tip->Yes). “Fortunately” that is also a place where the owner is a prick and doesn’t share tips with the staff so they encourage you to leave no tip.

    And the really funny thing? If it wasn’t about the same number of presses to leave a custom tip, I would generally round up at most POSes. Which isn’t a lot, but it does tend to cover credit card fees on the average and makes card statements easier to skim. Of course, I have also noticed a rise in “Regular” and “Cash” pricing where those fees are explicitly passed on to the customers to begin with so…

    I’ll tip quite generously for a sit down meal or something like a haircut. For calling me up to the counter when my takeout is ready? Fuck off.









  • They worked great for 4x games and even slower paced real time strategy games or grand strategies. And they are an excellent shim for more action oriented games that are built around M+KB and don’t support a gamepad.

    The problem is that this came out at the time when EVERY PC game was rapidly getting gamepad support. And with very few exceptions (Terraria and Stardew come to mind), it was a worse experience to set up your own mess rather than just use the bindings that let you play civ on an xbox controller anyway.

    But yeah. If we can get both this time? That would be perfect AND encourage people to really dig deep on their setups for steam deck games. I know I would use the trackpads and even back buttons more if it wasn’t learning a completely different scheme for a game I also want to play at my desk or in front of my TV.

    That said, I am also very wary of fitting all those controls on a single controller. Most of the mock-ups people make have HORRIBLE ergonomics. But… Valve knocked the Steam Deck out of the park so day one.


  • God… remember the new Wolfenstein duology? Machine Games had zero problems outright getting on stage and saying “fuck Nazis” and they were some of the most glorious and satisfying glory kills in all of gaming.

    Then comes the sequel and it was clear Microsoft had given them a talking to and they had to do a MUCH more muted presentation. And chuds were freaking out and insisting that the KKK would NEVER have allied with the Nazis because they… love america too much?

    And then the third game never materialized and we instead got a really mediocre action game that alludes to what would have happened in the third. And I suspect THAT only came out to help promote gamepass.



  • The reason those problems are centralized is BECAUSE they are so complex. And because they are so high risk. Bad actors will GLADLY spend a year or two sneaking in various MRs to compromise a browser because it can potentially pay enough to never have to hack again.

    Maybe that’s for the best. Some frugality with using standards. Web is a planetary library more than it is a platform for applications.

    I love it. We take away their de facto standards. We increase their day job workload exponentially. And then we expect them to put in the after hours efforts to optimize page loading.