They say the road to atheism is littered with Bibles read cover-to-cover, so I guess now that saying will need to be amended to include Bibles where all of the endings are unlocked.

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I'm reminded, at least conceptually, of Starbound, which took a one-world sandbox game aesthetic and took it into a larger universe where you could do the same thing on multiple planets, with new story elements, NPCs and such.

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Quoting: denyasisSo, uhh getting back to the topic at hand...

How do you guys using Mastodon feel about it? Likes? Dislikes?

I'm very torn about having social media (I don't really have/maintain any), but I looked around Matadon a bit. It seems interesting, but navigating is a little confusing for me. It seems like a chunk of what I saw was, umm headlines? Like people just yelling things into the void but not a lot of discussion? Or maybe I couldn't see the conversations as I wasn't logged in?

I feel more biased toward Discord at the moment. I get they are different, but as a chat room, for some reason, it feels more, I dunno, real?

Thoughts?

I've been on Mastodon for years, and it's a very comfortable place. A lot more low-key than Twitter, a lot less interaction with brands and celebrities (although Liam and Cheeseness are there, so maybe there is star power!). However, I find that the amount and quality of interactions is much, much higher. There was a post the other day by the curator of the Mastodon dot Art instance where they explain that they have more engagement, and more sales, off Mastodon than Twitter, Facebook and Instagram combined, even with a much lower follower count.

There really are a lot of interesting people, although it may take some digging to find the ones you're interested in.

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Here's what I think is most likely:

Over the next year, monetization of the platform will go absolutely batshit. Musk has roughly a billion per year to service the loans he took out for the purchase, and currently Twitter doesn't make anywhere near that. And other than selling more stock, it's unclear where else he'd get it from.

Expect foreign governments to be all over this. China has wanted to make serious inroads on Twitter for a while, and they have leverage over Musk due to him wanting to manufacture and sell Teslas there. They're already publicly asking to stop having their government news services tagged as such. Apply the same to other countries where Tesla or Starlink operate.

There's going to be a very delicate dance between making the "Freeze Peach" crowd happy and able to say awful shit without consequence, and keeping brands and celebrities from feeling like the place is too hostile and bailing. And remember, their presence is one of the big draws of the platform. And Musk is NOT a delicate dancer.

Musk also has to navigate a lot of contractual and international law stuff which he normally likes to pretend doesn't exist. Which is one reason his wave of firings is going to net him (as sole CEO) a hell of a lot of lawsuits, which, well....we saw how he handled himself when he tried to back out of the deal. And he, like Trump, is supremely bad at damage control or keeping his damn mouth shut, even when it's definitely not in his own best interest.

Musk and his friends, as we saw in the texts released during the legal proceedings, have a lot of really dumb ideas on how to run the place. They are going to try to implement those ideas. Probably all at once. It'll be a confusing mess.

Going back to the monetization thing, experience tells us that when a company (we see it a lot with game companies) either fail at monetization, or worse, succeed at monetization, they will in both cases double down on that monetization. The only difference really is that in the former case, it'll tend to be more gimmicky and slapped together in a hurry.

None of this even gets into the misinformation, harassment, slur-throwing, conspiracy theorizing, and all the other ills that are already there but about to get worse. This is only based on the capabilities, or more notably the lack of same, of Musk himself, amply demonstrated in public many times.

tl;dr Start looking for alternative social networks/advertising platforms/announcement spaces, because this one's gonna get self-sabotaged by an idiot who bought his own "genius" marketing.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: psyminEveryone should get on Mastodon or another federated social media system :)

Well, except for those of us curmudgeons who don't do social media at all.

And yet, here you are in a comment section.

I am very intelligent.

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Games I just tried:

A Castle Full of Cats: Charming little hidden object game, but a bit on the easy side. Probably aimed at a younger age group than I'm in. Could use more interactive elements, and the style of character dialogue boxes clashes badly with the style of everything else.

Protocorgi: Cute SHMUP featuring a cybernetic corgi. All the stuff you'd expect, missiles and weird enemies. Controls very smoothly. A bit hard on the eyes though, but that's normal for SHMUPs for me.

The Palace on the Hill: Point and click life sim, set in what seems to be India I think, about a young painter whose family farm is failing and he takes on odd jobs including at a tea house. On paper it sounds great, but the mechanics don't grab me at all. Controls feel awkward too, with the character not moving in a really smooth fashion.

Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum Demo: Low-graphics hacking/espionage game where you're a robot deep in debt after being damaged, and required to work it off. Doesn't seem too in-depth, but hard to tell since I only played the tutorial. Does have a certain charm though.

Quadrata Demo: Minimalist sliding box puzzle, where you're moving the box on two different grids at the same time. You get a very limited number of moves to hit one target on each grid. Gets tricky very fast, but controls well and seems like a good challenge for those into puzzlers.

Verses of Enchantment: Deckbuilder with Romantic era artwork and a poetry-based system where the cards you play are used to generate Romantic poetry, and the types of keywords can affect the effects of cards you play. It works very well, although the battles can be kind of long, and I'm not quite sure what the overarching goal is.

Diluvian Winds: 2D town builder with mechanics similar to Spiritfarer, with cartoon animals building a place to survive a world in ecological catastrophe. Takes a little bit to get the idea of it down, but the turn-based gameplay allows you to take some time making decisions. My big complaints are that you don't really get any lore about how the place got this way, not being able to undo a misclicked command and thus can waste precious time and get fewer resources, and it opens fullscreen on the wrong monitor and there seems to be no way to change that (running on Unity). Generally good though.

Pretty certain all except Diluvian Winds are native Linux. And that one is listed as supporting Linux for the full game, so we'll see about that.

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Quoting: tgurrAnd meanwhile there's a fork for Python 3 compatibility at https://github.com/Ryochan7/sc-controller [External Link] as upstream still requires obsolete end-of-life legacy Python 2 in 2022.

Oh right, the developer got all testy when told that he'd had loads of warning that Python 2 was end of life, and even though he was told just fix it up to work on 3 he had this whole thing about how he was going to rewrite the entire thing in C.

That was in 2019.

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Quoting: iiari

Quoting: Boldos

Quoting: iiariAnd regarding the top 10 list, still very impressed NMS is still there. What a comeback story.

NMS? Is it still the beautiful, yet stinking pile or crap, full of flawed game mechanics it used to be?
(Honest question).

This is off topic, and I haven't played it in quite some time, but apparently it has duel mindshare as one of the games that promised the most and didn't deliver in history, but one which the devs stuck with to create one of the most compelling games in history as well. They've apparently really fleshed it out and the ongoing additions to the gameworld and function have been terrific. Lots of written and TY video content about it out there if you're interested...

I play it and like most of it. The devs have, bit by bit, been overhauling most of the major parts of the game. Ground combat, space combat, base building, planetary vehicles, and how freighters work so far, plus adding a lot more to do around the Anomaly hub and getting multiplayer worked out. I'm hoping at some point they re-do the main storyline, which to me is one of the primary weaknesses of the game at this point, incentivizing just hopping from system to system without exploring them in order to get to the center faster. I expect that settlements and space stations will get re-done first though.

Not sure what "stinking pile of crap" is defined as here, or what game mechanics in particular, so it's hard to address whether they've been dealt with or not.

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If Linux isn't gonna be a second-class citizen, I guess somebody's gotta be. :tongue:

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: JacksonI have faith that Disney won't let their IP go down with microtransactions.

That's a bet I won't take. Disney is in the business to make as much money as possible, and the "pay to win" market has proven to be highly profitable.

I've heard people say "but they're only going to sell cosmetics" and I'm like my dude, the game is cosmetics. That's the whole point.

But there's no way they'll leave it at that once it's in full release and they've got a fat stack of reviews saying there aren't bad mtx.

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