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Latest Comments by Philadelphus
Check out the demo for ColdRidge a Wild West turn-based exploration game
24 Jul 2024 at 6:38 pm UTC

That final "The guild always wants more" line crystallized what the rest of the trailer had been hinting at: this is basically single-player Lethal Company in the Wild West. :grin:

Team Fortress 2 gets a Summer Event Update, new comic on the way
19 Jul 2024 at 6:46 pm UTC

Quoting: scaineHow are 100K people still playing this? Or are the numbers actually a true-er reflection of just bad the bot problem has actually become?
After Valve did their big bot purge earlier this month multiple people have been reporting playing for hours without a single bot in sight since then, so this seems like actual human numbers (probably with a bump from the summer event; I might hop back in myself). :smile:

As to how, well, it's a great game with staying power (so you've got the people who've been playing for a decade or more) and it's been around long enough to have new gamers get older and discover it for the first time.

Popular multiplayer code editor Zed gets a Linux release
11 Jul 2024 at 7:05 pm UTC Likes: 2

"Multiplayer" and "code editor" are two terms I admittedly would not have associated on my own, as a programmer for over a decade. :unsure: Not saying it can't work, and I'd even be interested in trying it, but:

Quoting: akselmoEdit: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589 [External Link] oh no
Oh, yikes. That's just asking for a supply chain attack.

Quoting: wvstolzingThere's this new latex alternative markup language for scientific papers: https://typst.app/ [External Link] -- it also comes with a collaborative web app, etc. The demo video on the webpage is absolutely hilarious IMHO. It supposedly shows a bunch of people 'collaborating' on a document. Though all I see is people editing out their peer's words in real time in a way that resembles the 'DUCK SEASON / RABBIT SEASON' bit from Bugs Bunny.
I keep meaning to check out Typst and haven't gotten around to it. Will be interesting to see how well it can actually replace LaTeX. There's a similar platform called Overleaf [External Link] that allows collaboration on LaTeX documents which I used to write my thesis. The issue with such collaborative editing, in my experience, is that for any piece of writing there's always one person who does at least 90% of the work of actually getting words out, and the collaboration is limited to every other co-author doing minor edits or making suggestions. It's hard for me to imagine a scenario where multiple people get together to actually write something at the same time, other than, like, a brainstorming session.

Sea Sniffers is a cozy fishing RPG from the dev of Mighty Goose
10 Jul 2024 at 6:49 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Purple Library GuyIt looks nice, but I'm feeling this weird disconnect in those screenshots. On one hand, there's this journal page talking about what good eatin' this kind of fish's tail is. The description talks about catching and selling fish, although it's unclear what gets done to them after they're sold. On the other, there's a shot where your seal is chatting with a fish. So, you're talking to fish, but you're also eating them and selling them into slavery and/or to be eaten? I always kind of feel like it's not nice to do that stuff to people who talk.
I believe the trope for that is Carnivore Confusion [External Link].

Cattle Country is Red Dead Redemption meets Stardew Valley
8 Jul 2024 at 8:59 am UTC

Quoting: Purple Library Guy. . . The whole thing? We're welcoming (if you're worth it), our souls are clean (presumably unlike you city slickers), we have more community, we apparently invented hard work, it just goes on and on. The whole trailer sounds to me like an extended summation of the American wonderful-frontiersman mythology, the kind of stuff Texan and Albertan oil men never shut up about.
Interesting, thanks. I definitely got a completely different feel from it, probably due to one side of my family being frontier farmers and having done quite a bit of farm work growing up.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAs to the "hardy bunch" thing . . . poor people moved to the frontier because it was easier than city life. Fewer amenities, but much more food and shelter and less sweatshop labour. Frontier life involved hard work . . . but not a 12 hour day, 6 days a week PLUS whatever you had to do at home. And the frontier was dangerous . . . but factories had no safety standards and disease spread like crazy in the cities. So, sure, hardy, but only hardier than hardscrabble city people because they got to eat enough food to support hardiness . . .
I do have a few quibbles with this, though:
  • While some people did move from city to country (some of my ancestors came over from Europe as bakers and become frontier farmers in Nebraska!), the overwhelming migration patterns throughout history have been from country to city (stretching back through pre-history to when there was first a distinction between the two). Cities were mostly population-negative prior to modern medical care and antibiotics (due to the diseases you mentioned), while family farms naturally grow over time to outstrip what the land can support, with people heading into cities hoping to make their fortune (and, much more likely, becoming the kind of laborer that ended up in factories).
  • Outdoor farm work is typically done "sun-up to sun-down", which can be a lot longer than 12 hours during the summer. (Possibly shorter during the winter; to be fair, I've never lived where it snowed in winter so I don't have first-hand experience, but from what I've read the winter was spent doing indoor work in preparation for spring.) The vital importance of every single family member pitching in around the farm during summer is why public schools are off during those months; if they weren't, kids from rural populations (~80% of the population in 1800, and it's only in 2007 that the world's urban and rural populations balanced) just wouldn't come because their labor was needed to ensure their families didn't starve over the winter.
  • Unlike factory workers, farmer don't get to clock off; if the animals escape in the night after a full day's work, well, better go round 'em up, because who else is going to do it?* If a storm's threatening the harvest, you do whatever it takes to get it in because the alternative is likely starvation over the winter (or at least, higher risk of dying to illness from a weakened immune system due to malnutrition). Factory workers at least got government-mandated holidays; farm animals don't care what the government says, they still need to be fed and milked same as every other day.
  • Frontier farms also had no safety standards, and serious accidents were certainly far from uncommon (as accounts from frontier people recount, and even today agriculture ranks up there pretty highly in terms of most dangerous industries for both injuries and deaths).
  • Disease kills as quickly in the country as in the city, and diseases like dysentery can come from the environment rather than other people…plus, the nearest medical help might be a day or two away rather than a few streets over. Though certainly disease was (and remains) easier to spread in cities.

I'm not disagreeing that the kind of laborers you've described had it rough – life was pretty hard back then for everyone compared to today – but the period of time during which such long hours were permitted is a relatively small portion of time in the grand scheme of history, and things got better with labor regulations over time; farmers were working sun-up to sun-down long before the first factory was a twinkle in a capitalist's eye, and even today if you're a self-employed farmer nobody's paying you overtime if Mother Nature's threatening the harvest with a storm.

Whether or not frontier life was physically harder than that of a blue collar city laborer**, it certainly had its own privations: isolation, food insecurity, and the constant threat of any one of numerous dangers hanging overhead like the sword of Damocles which could spell disaster.

*Speaking from personal experience, at least the part about the pigs escaping (AGAIN :angry:) on a rainy winter night. To be fair I don't remember if it was after a full day of work or not.

**And not every city worker is working a physical job; lots of skilled labor positions exist in cities that don't on the frontier.

Will anything dethrone the Steam Deck? Probably not
3 Jul 2024 at 6:50 pm UTC Likes: 4

The Steam Deck is the device I wish I could go back in time and give my younger self, back when I was a kid and had to endure (literal) days of flying or driving when visiting relatives. I never had any sort of console or handheld device growing up, so being able to play the computer games I already had on the go would've been incredible.

As an adult, I'm still glad I have mine, but with less forced abstinence from my desktop I don't tend to use it all that much; like sonic2kk, I found I'd rather game on my desktop with mouse, keyboard, and large monitors than awkwardly through joysticks on a small screen (most of the kinds of games I like, perhaps unsurprisingly, work better with M+KB). I'm definitely keeping my Deck for long airplane flights, though*, and it's nice to take in to the office to play on my lunch break sometimes**.

*I used it just last week, in fact.

**Which actually led to one of my co-workers who hadn't heard about Steam getting one.

Cattle Country is Red Dead Redemption meets Stardew Valley
2 Jul 2024 at 6:39 pm UTC

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe intro makes me think--is it something specific to American as opposed to other sorts of frontiersman that they seem to spend half their time yacking about how awesome they are?
I'm curious, were you talking about the trailer? I rewatched it out of curiosity wondering if I'd missed something (since I didn't remember anything like that from watching it yesterday), and the only thing I could see that might be seen as boasting was the line "People here are a hardy bunch – have to be, to survive here," which, for real frontier communities, was less a boast than a simple statement of fact. But maybe being American (and growing up on a small farm) I don't have the right perspective to see what you're describing.

Cattle Country is Red Dead Redemption meets Stardew Valley
1 Jul 2024 at 6:30 pm UTC

And, like so many other promising Stardew Valley-likes…it's singleplayer only. Yes, I know SV itself didn't have multiplayer at launch, but I only got it after it was added and I've had so many fun hours playing it with friends that a similar game without multiplayer is a tough sell. Still, the trailer was interesting enough to get it on my Wishlist, I'll keep an eye on it when it releases.

Proton Experimental has fixes for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Noita mods, MultiVersus and more
29 Jun 2024 at 6:20 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: dziadulewicz
Noita mods no longer fail to update.
This the most important! :heart:
As a Noita modder, that is a very strange and specific regression. :unsure: Glad it's fixed.

Steam Game Recording Beta announced - works on Linux and Steam Deck too
26 Jun 2024 at 11:24 pm UTC Likes: 5

Oooh, nice! The game Noita [External Link] comes with a built-in clip capturing ability (as GIFs), and I've used that many a time to capture its chaotic hilarity. I'd love to have that ability easily available in any game (I know other solutions exist, but I'm lazy :tongue:).

Also, Valve, this shows you know how to record video with sound on Linux, so you have no excuse for Steam's game streaming feature only working on Windows anymore! :grin: