skulblaka

Personally I feel that YouTube’s data centers need to be a public resource. Nationalize them, pay out Google appropriately for their value, and then turn it into public property. YouTube can remain just the way they are and will undoubtedly retain market share because they’re recognizable and everyone already has a YT account, but other people can spin up their own video front-end services to compete, while drawing from the same leviathan-sized backend data store which would now be publically owned.

There is just too much general knowledge available through YouTube for me to say it’s a good idea to let it all rot behind a corporate firewall. I would love to force YouTube to shut down to then in turn force the availability of third party options. But if we shut it down without a plan to recover their server data then we’ve just lost a massive international educational platform. Just think of how many people you know personally who learned to fix their car or write code via YouTube University, then expand that to encompass the entire internet-connected world.

I don’t think there’s a chance in hell this would ever happen, because Google would never open its datacenter to become a public resource no matter how many infinites of dollars you paid them to do so, and the American government (where Google is based) would never legally force them to do so. But I really don’t see any other viable path forward to dethrone YouTube and de-monopolize the video sharing industry.

Sting Shard trap also works great, I just threw one of those at every minion spawn and then they die in one Needle hit after. If you stack poison on it then you probably don’t even need the follow up hit but I don’t remember if you can have the Pollip Pouch before this fight or not.

Sting Shard is great in general though. Does 2x Needle damage in a trap you can place in midair, can be poisoned with Pollip Pouch for even more extended DPS, is AoE-capable and can hit multiple enemies, and is cheap enough to refill at 7 shell shards. It’s been my primary red tool so far all game, though I just got to Act 2 recently and I’m hoping to find something better here.

Go west and south when you find the rain

Last Judge was the only boss so far that almost completely filtered me from the game and I think the reason why was because of how very little warning you get before the big spin. I think like an extra quarter of a second on that startup animation would go a huge way toward making her way less annoying. Took me two days to complete the fight because I kept getting so tilted by getting hit with the spin.

The runback wasn’t difficult at all but it was very annoying. You can avoid all enemies on the route except for a single drill fly, but it takes a whole 30 seconds or more to make the run back to the boss fight. Don’t fuck up your platforming though, the sand worms do two damage, so missing a landing means you’re stuck spending the first 10 seconds of the fight trying to Bind with your cocoon silk if you want to survive more than one single hit (two, if you found all the act 1 mask shards).

To be honest I ended up finally defeating Judge by strapping on the Pollip Pouch and sticking her full of poison straight pins. I regret nothing and I do not consider this to be dishonorable.

Come to my house and I’ll play you some of my CDs

If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer

I am firmly convinced that we will continue to receive sporadic Terraria updates until Red literally dies

Yep. I didn’t have a huge issue with them charging for new DLC. If the DLC is good then fine, devs gotta eat.

When they sunset content that I paid for and tell me it’s no longer accessible, that’s when I dropped the game like a hot potato. Should have requested a refund, actually.

Paradox DLCs also classically add a ton of content every single time. Sure Stellaris kind of sucks as a new player because there’s $260 of content, but it’s perfectly playable and even good with only the base version and then you pick whatever new content you like as you want more of it. Rimworld has the exact same strategy and I don’t see people complain about that. They release a complete game without any obviously missing parts and then keep bolting on cool new extra parts for the next 10 years.

All that to say, yeah this is kind of out of character for Paradox. Which does have me concerned about this.

I fix cars for a living every day.

reliable

Maybe, compared to a BMW or other “luxury” car marketed to rubes. But a Honda or a Toyota would totally eat VW’s lunch in regards to reliability, at half the purchase price.

relatively easy to repair

The VW Beetle is famously easy to repair, basically every modern VW model sucks ass. It needs some proprietary tool to access half the vehicle on more than half the models. I do not like working on them. We also get wonderful examples of German Manufacturing Precision™️ where you have a half a millimeter clearance to remove a part. This was worse in older VW’s in my experience (the Germans really took to AUTOCAD like fish to water when that became common, methinks) but it still happens.

comfortable interiors

Actually totally agree here, the interior of most modern VW’s is pretty nice. Shame that doesn’t extend under the hood.

VW also got caught straight up lying about their emissions testing a few years ago so that also destroyed basically all trust that I had in their brand. They’ll sell you a car that runs, but there’s really no knowing if the numbers that it reports are actually accurate.

A complete lack of all moderation, an owner / management team who studiously ignores all the child abuse on their platform because it is profitable to them to ignore it, and a legislative and judicial system that is unwilling to prosecute businesses for anything in general and child abuse in particular.

It’s a perfect microcosm of the American condition, really.

You’d be surprised, this isn’t nearly the first one of its kind.

Special shoutout to the Deep Rock Galactic board game which is genuinely pretty awesome.

When people complain that their parents were able to afford an education and a home off the back of a single part-time income… yeah that isn’t exaggeration. You really could do that in the 70’s-80’s. Now it takes 4 full-time employed unrelated roommates sharing an apartment to make rent every month.

I don’t know if you were present in the “millennials just need to stop eating avocado toast and pull themselves up by their bootstraps” conversations, but all the rampant hate for the Baby Boomers didn’t come from nowhere. This is why it exists. Our parents (and their parents, depending how old you are) had the easiest and most luxurious existence that has ever been possible in American history, ever, and then pulled up the ladder behind them. When faced with the fact that they’ve made the life they lived impossible for following generations, the popular response is to blame the children and call them lazy.

“When I was your age, I walked into a car dealership with a smile and a firm handshake right after high school graduation and that’s all it took to get a job. A year later I owned a home and was married expecting a child. It’s easy, you just don’t want to work.”

No grandpa, because you and your buddies decided the purpose of your life was to extract all possible value out of everything and leave behind a shriveled up husk of a country, not one single independent detail of that story is still possible.

Kids these days don’t even know the future that was stolen away from them by their own parents or grandparents.

I’ve never met this man in my life and I am 100% confident it was the latter.

[…] because they don’t allow you to run older versions of games.

They do if the dev makes it available, I’m looking at four different versions of Terraria in the beta menu right now that stretch back four major versions. I’m pretty sure a couple games in my library somewhere have their entire update history in there, though I can’t think of one to name off the top of my head right now, that’s not a feature I use very often. [Edit: Rift Wizard is one that does precisely this, I knew I had at least one in here]

This is not true of all games, but it could be, either directly by game devs without Valve even having to care, or via pressure by Valve by just making older versions available whether the devs want it or not. I think the latter option is probably the better move, but there’s technically nothing stopping the former other than the game devs themselves.

There’s also a valid argument that making downpatching very easy would be a huge boon to piracy. This is a reasonable talking point no matter which side of that fence you sit on. It would also probably benefit modding as well, which I think is a more objective good but some game developers or more likely publishers would probably disagree.

Family share is actually great for this now.

It used to be that if anyone in the group was playing any game it would lock you out of playing anything else on the main account without kicking them off.

But they eased up on it now so you can both play at the same time as long as you aren’t playing the same game at the same time.

So just make a burner account for you or for your kids and family share the library to it and now you don’t even have to go offline unless everyone in the house wants to play BG3 simultaneously.

Regular enemies fall over like wet tissue, yeah.

Big boss fights in particular (and some of those in particular, in particular, looking at you Maris and/or Gnoster) often have either a gigantic AoE attack that is very difficult to dodge when you’re the only source of aggro, or else charge across the entire arena after every attack and have you spend half an hour in the fight, 27 minutes of which was spent just chasing the guy across the map. Not impossible, but very annoying.

But 90% of what makes coop easier in my opinion is just having a spare body around that can pull aggro so you can heal. Elden Ring base bosses were designed around being able to be beaten solo so they usually have big wide windows where you can get a breather if you need it. Nightreign bosses have much less of that because they expect you to be running 3 deep. Nerfing their defenses helps with the solo DPS race but it doesn’t really solve the problem that these fights were designed from the ground up for a team who is able to rotate aggro. Nightreign bosses were designed with a sort of raid-boss mentality.

I think if this game were going to be appropriately balanced for single player they would need to go in and edit a lot of the main bosses’ movesets. But that was never part of Nightreign’s design philosophy and trying to shoehorn it in now isn’t doing them any favors in my opinion. This is the equivalent of a World of Warcraft player complaining that they can’t solo all the endgame raid bosses. Sure, you can’t. They weren’t designed to be fought solo. We could try to nerf them down to the point that you can fight them solo, but then it’s no longer a raid boss, you’ve lost the essence of why people wanted to come to this fight in the first place.

Also, are the enemies designed for multiplayer, except in scaling? Everything I’ve seen looks like standard Fromsoft stuff, no weird abilities that just fuck over solo players.

Compare base game Morgott and Nightreign Morgott and I think you’ll see what I mean here. Boss enemies are much more cracked out with longer combos and shorter downtime than in Elden Ring proper, because the developers expect you to be trading aggro with your teammates to give yourself a heal break.

I’ve played quite a lot of Nightreign.

In co-op you have fully infinite lives, your teammates can pick you up at any time and even if they fail to do so you’ll respawn back at a grace. If you fall over in a boss fight you have an unlimited timer to be picked back up and automatically rez at the end of the fight even if they don’t do it.

In solo you’re fighting a boss intended for 3 players and if you die twice the game is over completely.

Co-op, even with randoms, is much much easier by an order of magnitude. I’m usually a solo player in most games and thought this would be awful for me, it isn’t at all. Map pings are plenty of communication for most matches. It is, however, definitely better with friends on a voice call.

You’d think so, right?

Receipts you say?

We’re at 56 pages of this now for a nice round count of 1400 charges

So far as I am aware all of these are publicly searchable court cases