Liam: Hey did you hear what I said? I said all hands on deck
me: ...
Liam: ...
me: ...
Liam: Because of the steam deck.
me: BWAAAAAAA:woot:

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just putting in a word for Midboss, it's a fun roguelike with a great hook - you possess the bodies of enemies and absorb their powers Kirby-style. Classic roguelike style but not insanely difficult.

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I think I was 14 or so when it came out, and have a distinct memory of making all the enemies surrender by shooting the guns our of their hands, then going back through the level and gleefully murdering them all in cold blood. I suppose if I'd turned out to be a psycho it would have been a grim warning sign.

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I gave up on Valheim. I really enjoyed some parts of it but I feel like it's two games rolled into one. The first game is an introspective crafting and exploration game with a beautiful, dreamlike visual aesthetic.

The second game is an action RPG with a death mechanic more punishing than Dark Souls. When you die you lose your gear and you lose experience, and there are enemies that will appear and oneshot you with very little warning in midgame (Deathsquito vs bronze armour, anyone?). Enemies that kill you will then stay aggro and camp your corpse.

Why make such brutal death mechanics in a game where exploration is so fun? You want to hop on a boat and sail out on an adventure, but if you die (which again, you can die randomly) then you're all the way back home without your boat and without any gear. So you have to build another boat (the second time making the same journey to collect your body the sea isn't as majestic) and take a back-up set of gear (double the grind) to collect your body. God help you if you die the second time.

The better way to explore is to stop every five minutes to build a teleport or a bed so you're never too far from your body. But that kind of ruins the experience and feels very gamey. Don't get me wrong I love the combat when I was prepared for it, and I like tough games, but getting completely screwed over again and again when I wanted to explore rather than fight was too much for me.

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yeah echoing the rest of the comments, XCOM2 is easily a must-buy and War of the Chosen is the best DLC I can think of for any game off the top of my head.

Even if War of the Chosen were terrible I'd recommend it because then you can make use of the incredible offerings of the modding community. Huge number of fantastic mods.

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My read is that the game was a bit of a flop, so they're moving on. Maybe if the game did better they would follow through, but the reviews are pretty terrible. It sucks for the kickstarter backers, but honestly if this is the case then it's hard to blame them.

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perhaps unpopular opinion: Heroic is currently the best of the Linux community game managers. It did it for me in a way that Lutris has not. I've been using Heroic for a few freebie games from EGS and the experience has been as smooth as with Steam+Proton, with a cleaner UI.

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been playing through OpenMW (slowly) since the last GOL post about it. Can't decide what I like best about the experience: the work OpenMW has done to restore this classic, the vibrant modding scene, or the memes [External Link]

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: anewsonAcemoglu is the world's greatest political economist (among other things).

Heh. Well, if he has an ideology different from mine, he can't be the world's greatest! :grin:

The Guns, Germs and Steel geographic interpretation is not a hill I'm gonna die on, although I'd want to see the actual arguments for what's wrong with it. Certainly I've seen some more specific things Diamond was seriously wrong about. And I'm definitely seeing many modern Western institutions becoming dysfunctional in ways they weren't so much 50 years ago, and making the society work poorly, so I'm not going to claim there's no such thing as a cultural or institutional factor.

But it's all very vague at best. Western Europe suddenly became the big enchilada a few hundred years ago; does that mean Western European institutions were the best? Well . . . except Western Europe was a cultural and technological backwater for hundreds of years before that; does that mean Western European institutions were the worst? Somebody flipped a switch somewhere in the 1400s or so and Europe went from having an ineffective culture and lousy institutions to suddenly having really good ones? Colonizing the heck out of various places was all about institutional superiority and had nothing to do with having developed one or two particular technologies, such as gunpowder?

And it's going to be a massive pain teasing out the reality, in part because of human psychology. I'm thinking of the experiment these guys ran with Monopoly, where they would have two people play and they'd give one guy three times as much money to start, give them extra money when they passed Go, and let them roll three dice while the other guy rolled one. Obviously, the one with the advantage would win. But two things showed up: First, the one with the advantage would become more aggressive, ruder, change their body language to take up more space and such. Second, they would generally tell themselves that they won because of skill, superior play, not because they were given an advantage. Even though objectively, that was obviously rubbish. So I don't have a ton of expectations of objectivity from scholars figuring out the cultural factors that lead to victory. It'll be "The Mismeasure of Man" all over again, except at a cultural rather than individual level.

I didn't know that experiment but it sounds great, I'm going to take a look for it. Another example along the same lines is the "Dictator game" - there are two players, one player is given X dollars and asked to propose a share (aX, (1-a)X) to give to the second player; if the second player rejects the offer then both players get nothing, if the second player accepts then the money is split and the game ends. "Rationally," the second player should accept any amount of money because any strictly positive amount is better than getting nothing, but of course that's not what happens; there are strong cultural norms of fairness. Anyway it's wrong to dismiss all the good work that goes into figuring out how culture matters, but I'm just very cautious about leaning on it.

As for evidence on institutions vs geography, it's really quite a long literature in development. I'll reveal my bias here and link an article that my academic supervisor coauthored: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=m9VHPscAAAAJ&citation_for_view=m9VHPscAAAAJ:hFOr9nPyWt4C [External Link]

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I took this opportunity to finally try out Pop_OS and I have to say I was extremely impressed. My framerates went way up for games I play! (coming from Arch + i3, so this really was a surprise) I also noticed that shader caching times went way down for Vulkan games.

One thing is that I use an eGPU and it was a pain to get working; for whatever reason there's no implementation in Pop_OS for eGPU, you can't use their 'switchable graphics' interface, so I had to dig into the X11 files.

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