I know it would be radical, but you could require that they release the server code open source. So it’s not their responsibility to run it, but if the community wants to run it, they can.
Or, if that’s complicated due to licensing etc, they could release a minimal server implementation that maybe doesn’t scale the same way, but at least has the interfaces covered so the community can take it from there. The game could at least still be played.
To be fair, we don’t see like reverse engineered printing. Printing is reverse engineered seeing. If we saw like this post is claiming shrimp see, and blue was blue and green was green and yellow was yellow, we wouldn’t be able to print by mixing three colours. We’d need one pigment per photoreceptor, same as we do now.
Small extra rant:
And just to be clear, ten thousand years is a long time. Ancient Egypt was, like 5 - 6 thousand years ago. So almost double that. The last ice age was about 12 thousand years ago. 10 thousand years ago was, like, the invention of farming as a concept. No culture on Earth has history that far back.
So to be making references to today’s pop culture that far in the future just feels nuts. I mean, sure, it’s the same one guy. And I know he’s not supposed to feel like God. But still, when humans as a species first planted seeds in the ground you heard a song, and now today you’re going to casually bring it up to a room full of babies? Whatever.
But it just so happens that it’s a reference that’s relevant to us the reader in my personal nostalgia? My eyes rolled so hard I fell straight out of the narrative…
I read it a while ago, let’s see if I remember…
Hopefully I’ve hidden this behind a spoiler tag properly, but if not, please don’t read this unless you’ve read the books!
I liked the mystery of what truly happened, and I liked the alternative memory around the time in the first house. Seeing that alternative and opposite version of events was neat, and then having that actually be even more impactful when it become clear what’s going on was great. The bits with True Ortis being actually really emotional at the end were good. I was onboard up until that.
I was quite happy until we all confront John at the end, because this is where it’s going to coming together. There’s a few things I remember disliking here. The first thing, and most trivial, is that John says a few things here that feel like very now memes, and that took me way out of the tone the chapters otherwise were in. I think one was a “hi blank I’m dad” line or something. I get it, he’s not very Godly, and later it seems like he’s even alive during our present day. But I still feel like that format is a bit tired already, and this is ten thousand years from now. I think the other was a reference to a song that was all the rage in, like, 2005 or something. Which again, I don’t feel like even the youth of today would pull that reference, so John is I guess exactly my age. And ten thousand years from now is quoting a thing that no one else in the room would get; that’s meaningless to the person he’s talking to, but also his other lyctors. I dunno, it just felt like John was talking to me, the reader, and it felt very cheap. So that kinda put me in a mood already.
The second thing that bothered me is the revelations at that point are all a bunch of things all the lyctors think are big news, but that our protagonist, and thus we, don’t know anything about. Like being a kid at a family reunion and listening to the adults talk, they’re having their minds blown talking about schemes and plans and shit that we don’t know anything about. I’m not saying the answers had to be handed to me necessarily, but it just felt like all the meat was coming fully out of left field, and there’s no way any of the things I’ve learned so far this book could possibly have lead me to these discoveries. Isn’t this, like, a mystery book? You don’t want to find out at the end that the murder was actually committed by Richard the repairman we didn’t introduce to you, but anyway let me tell you how this guy you’ve never heard of did the thing you’ve been wondering about.
Which leads me into the third and biggest thing I didn’t like, which was that throughout the entire climax of the story, our protagonist is passive bordering on insignificant. Gideon wakes up and fights her way to the exposition room, Harrow (our protagonist up until this) is obviously gone. So that’s a bit weird, but we love Gideon so it’s okay. So what does our protagonist do? They hide behind a door and listen to the grown ups talk at each other. Just spilling answers and tying up ends, and having revelations. And our protagonist isn’t even in the room, they’re not talking to her. They’re just chatting amongst themselves, unaware we’re even listening, while they wrap everything up for us. Then even when our protagonist does enter the room, she still just stands there while people talk around her and about her, but she does nothing.
And then finally Mercy puts her plan into action, John responds, Augustine responds, River, etc. But here’s the thing; this plan is, like, a hundred years old or whatever. The plan was hatched before either of our protagonists were born, and doesn’t involve them at all. Nothing we’re been party to in either book has anything to do with Mercy’s plan, John’s response, Augustine, etc. None of it. It happens around Gideon, but if Gideon and Harrow had never gone to the first house, and none of these books had happened, the plan would have gone exactly the same way. Mercy would have taken her shot. John would have survived. Augustine would have taken his shot. Ianthe changed history by saving John, but Gideon watched that part while being trapped a long way away behind glass, and neither John nor Ianthe knew or cared we were even there. And Ianthe is close to us, but is not our protagonist. So basically nothing in either this book nor the first mattered at all to the big climax. Gideon was just confused, ineffectual, and out of the way for all of it. So that was kind of a let down.
The closest thing we had to being involved in the climax was that Gideon has John’s eyes. Mercy seems to say something that makes it seem like she was pretty sure anyway, so she was probably going to do her plan that she started before Gideon was conceived in either case, but it did give her confidence. But she even says something like “damn, if only I’d looked at the body’s eyes earlier” or something, making it clear that if she’d done that one thing, even Gideon’s eyes at the end wouldn’t have been a surprise or relevant.
So that was the biggest sin, in my opinion. But one more thing that annoyed me while I was annoyed anyway, was the stack of twists. Mercy kills God, holy shit! Nevermind, no she didn’t. He’s back. They’re talking. Now Mercy is dead. John wants Augustine to pledge to him. He seems like he might. Now Augustine tries to kill God. Oh, he seems like he’s going to do it. Nope, that didn’t happen either. Augustine is dead. In the end none of their long plan mattered in the slightest, and if they’d been killed by a beast a hundred years ago we’d be in nearly the same place. But the whiplash of attempts and failure back to back to back was just tiring when all my suspension of disbelief had already been spent by the last three issues. I was just like “please let someone kill God so we can move on”
So at this point I just felt like: given this outcome, what was the point of any of this? There was a plan constructed long before our protagonist was born that did not involve her at all. And we had various struggles. But then the culmination of this plan we didn’t know about has arrived, and it has nothing to do with us or our struggles we’ve just spent hours and hours reading about. And on top of that the plan doesn’t even work or accomplish much of anything. So this big long plan that we didn’t know about and doesn’t involve us also didn’t change the status quo from where it would have been had it not been hatched and executed.
Cool…that was… fulfilling…
I loved the first one. I liked 7/8th of the second one. It was a tricky puzzle, trying to figure out what is real and what isn’t, and what’s truly going on. But I trusted the author because of how much I liked the first one.
Then the ending of the book was terrible and made me angry at the entire second book as a result.
But I read the third anyway, just in case. I didn’t much care for it. It was okay enough to keep reading. But it was very different in tone from the first two, for plot reasons. I dunno, maybe 6 out of 10?
I know I have to read the 4th for sunk cost reasons, but I’m not excited about it…
I agree with OP. If there’s a puzzle in a game that’s clearly some kind of water puzzle, but I can make a boat to solve it in 15 seconds and bypass the obvious intent of the puzzle, maybe I feel a bit clever. But if I can solve every puzzle with effectively the same boat… what’s the point of doing the puzzles? I guess because I wanted puzzles? But on the other hand, if I know I can solve every puzzle with a 15 second boat, it feels kinda weird to pretend I don’t have an answer and struggle through anyway. Like, the victory is hollow when I know I could have solved it faster the dumb way.
The number of times in that game I thought “oh, maybe I have to jump up through the floor here to get through this door” and then I peeked through the floor and was like “oh, nope. It’s the damn final boss room again. Not supposed to be here yet, better go back through the floor and try another way to open this door” felt like I was babysitting the game so as to not entirely ruin the experience… and it kinda ruined the experience…
Similar to other people, I think you should own it. Try to think of it not as “I betrayed my character” but rather “my character gave in to temptation and regrets it but has to live with the consequences”, then use that. Play the character as though they are unhappy with the changes, they regret it, but they must soldier on.
People aren’t all perfect archetypes, and characters can have flaws and nuances. And the best part is, if your character up until now had no reason to make the choice you made, maybe it’s time for an out of game flashback. Work backwards… what thing could have happened in their backstory that would explain why they made this seemingly incongruous choice? Why did this tempt them when so many other things did not, and why does this cause them so much shame now. That kind of stuff.
Or don’t! Just some suggestions, since it sounds like you’ve got nothing to lose, may as well try some character development!
Well… That’s actually probably fair as stated.
BestBuy etc don’t sell Apple’s products on commission, they bought them from Apple for a wholesale price, they’ve got them in a warehouse and on shelves right now on their dime, and the only way they make that money back is by selling them.
And the only way Apple makes money from a product being sold at Best Buy is that Best Buy will likely buy more stock to replace the stuff they sold, and they’ll buy that from Apple.
So if it was banned everywhere it would be unfair to the retailers that already paid Apple for a product they now can’t recoup, and it wouldn’t impact Apple at all because they already made their money from Best Buy.
This way the retailers can get their money back, but can’t get any more, which means only Apple is impacted.
The only other way that’s semi-fair (but would be extreme) would be for Apple to be forced to do a recall or something and reimburse all the retailers the money they had already spent. Doable, and definitely more of a punishment for Apple, but a lot of extra work for everyone if the outcome of this is that Apple settles and then everyone can just go back to ordering more again.
Yeah, I’m willing to assume the best for W4 at this time. The whole console SDK scene is a legal mess, and keeping the Open Source parts away from it, while making enough dangling hooks to be able to jump in later, sounds ideal.
I think the real test of their resolve would come if they tried to use the foundation to shut down or sabotage a competitor that was in the same “port to console” space. That would be a no no for me, but so long as that doesn’t happen I feel like they’ve got a good balance going.
Right, yeah… It was definitely reminiscent of Magicka. Maybe even a little too reminiscent, since I feel Magicka was a much stronger game.
OK, interesting! It’s nice to know the game wasn’t objectively bad, and was only just “not for me”, since I like the devs!
Huh. My siblings and I love the Trine games, and wanted to like Nine Parchments, but found it to be one of the worst games we’ve ever played. I don’t think we could find a single redeeming quality, and it just seemed like a total misstep.
So seeing it here on this list makes me think maybe there’s something that was okay about it? I’m curious what people liked…
(all the rest of these seem like good games, though, which honestly makes me even more confused about Nine Parchments’ inclusion…)
100% you can do it with some good instructional content and a smidge of patience!
A standard lock is disturbingly easy to pick… We used to run a booth at a maker event where we taught members of the public passing by including, like, 5 year olds to pick padlocks.
Unrelated, but BTW there are some jurisdictions if I’m not mistaken where having lock picking tools found on you is considered “criminal intent” or something, but on the other hand if you’re already at the point where your bag is being searched you may already be boned…
I’ve never been a Twitter/microblog user, but here’s how I gather it worked, presented in the order in which it was developed.
Do you ever think “oh, that’s a funny/interesting thought I had”, but there’s no one around to tell? Or not enough people and you think it had more potential than that? Microblog. Unlike a forum, you just dump in out into the void as-is. It’s a broadcast. Like if every account was a personal /r/showerthoughts.
From there we make it so I can subscribe to my friends. Now when they post their funny thoughts, or even just being like “I feel like tacos tonight, anyone in SF down?” I’ll get their post. Now it’s kinda like open group texting. Except I don’t choose who sees my random thoughts, they self-select. I just broadcast things out there and whoever might be interested might be interested.
That was basically all that microblogs were, at the beginning. A stream of non-topic’d stuff I said, and you can follow me if you want to hear more like it.
But sometimes I’m surrounded by strangers, like at a conference. At these points I want to know what random people I don’t follow are all saying about FooCamp. Search already exists so I can see all tweets with the word “cat” in it, but I can’t find a way to fit FooCamp organically into every post, so hashtags get invented as a social convention to say “that was my message, but here are some other keywords for search purposes”. Later they got linkified and so people started putting them inline, but originally they were just at the end and just for extra categorization.
So now the tool does two things. I can just broadcast out any thought I have without having to care about where to put it, etc. It all goes on my feed and anyone who has chosen to care about me will see it. And I choose who I care to receive broadcasts from because they’re cool, and it doesn’t matter what they’re talking about. But also I can tag a particular message with some categories, and that will allow strangers to see my messages if they happen to be looking for messages in that category, but obviously a single message can be in multiple categories.
Then later famous people and governments showed up, and people followed them because they love go hear what famous people talk about. But if you don’t follow them, then you don’t hear from them.
That’s basically it! So it’s kinda like the opposite of a reddit/lemmy/forum/usenet model. Rather than topics that have content posted by people, it’s people who post content that sometimes has a topic. Like a large group-chat (among friends or colleagues) where you’re not really sure who is in the chat, but you don’t have to care. You can prefer one over the other (I know I do), but fundamentally they’re not trying to solve the same problem as lemmy, they’re just a totally different model for communication. More like a friend group than a discussion group.
This isn’t surefire, but sometimes I’ll double tap to zoom way too far in, but it’ll put me in zooming mode and then I can zoom back out from there.
Ok, let me rephrase your rephrase to be what question I think you’re trying to ask.
At some point we had decided on a seven day week with week names. That’s fine. But we must also have decided at some point that today was Wednesday in this system.
So I think you’re asking “what is the first day we all agree was definitely a Sunday, such that all Sundays after were based on that”. Or put another way, at what point did the days of the week get locked to the days of our year.
I don’t have that answer, but your question confused me, so I’ve reworded it.
No, you got that backwards. If it’s a long distance: km. But small distances for work is feet and inches.
I don’t know the answer to the title, so I’ll answer the body. The answer is “it depends”.
If you’re talking to someone in a technical setting, then servers are the physical machines. The computers themselves, sitting in a room somewhere. Or maybe a virtual server that pretends to be a physical machine, but runs on a real server that sits in a room somewhere. Whereas a website is some location you can put into a web browser and get content that “feels” like it’s all one thing.
The reason this distinction matters is because you can host multiple small websites on a single server. For example there’s no reason a particular machine couldn’t host 10 different lemmy instances, if it’s got enough processing power.
But on the other hand a popular website may have its work spread across multiple servers. Maybe I’ve got a database server, which is a machine that only runs the database. And then maybe I have a few different web servers that actually serve “the webpage”, but I’ve also got a cache server that stores part of the webpage and serves that when it can, etc. Websites like Facebook or Twitter are considered one website but have thousands and thousands of servers.
But if you’re talking to someone in a non-technical setting, yeah they’re basically the same.
I have two criticisms of this view.
The first is the distinction between “replacing humans” and “making humans more productive”. I feel like there’s a misunderstanding on why companies hire people. I don’t hire 15 people to do one job because 15 is a magic number of people I have to hit. I hire 15 people because 14 people weren’t keeping up and it was worth more to my business to hire another expensive human to get more work done. So if suddenly 5 people could do the work of 15, because people became 3x more efficient, I’d probably fire 10 people. I no longer need them, because these 5 get the job done. I made the humans more effective, but given that humans are a replacement for humans, I now don’t need as many of those because I’ve replaced them with superhumans instead.
If I’m lucky as a company I could possibly keep the same number of people and do 3x as much business overall, but this assumes all parts of my business, or at least the core part, increases at the same time. If my accounting department becomes 3x as efficient but I still have the same amount of work for them to do because accounting isn’t the purpose of my business, then I’m probably going to let go some accountants because they’re all sitting around idle most of the time.
It used to be that a gang of 20 people would dig up a hold in the road, but now it’s one dude with an excavator.
The second thing is the assumption that AI art is being evaluated as art. We have this notion in our culture that artists all produce only the best novels and screenplays, and all art hangs in a gallery and people look at it and think about what the artist could have meant by this expression, etc. But that’s virtually no one in the grand scheme of things. The fact that most people know the names of a handful of “the most famous artists of all time”, and it’s like 30 people on the whole earth and some of them are dead should mean something.
Most writers write stuff like the text on an ad in a fishing magazine. Or fully internal corporate documents that are only seen by employees of that one company. Most visual artists draw icons for apps that never launch. Or the swoopy background for an article. Or did the book jacket for a book that sells 8 copies at a local tradeshow. If there’s a commercial for chips, someone had to write it, someone had to direct it, someone had to storyboard it. And no one put it in a museum and pondered its expression of the human experience. Some people make their whole living on those terrible stock photographs of a diverse set of people all laughing and putting their hands into the middle to show they’re a team.
Even if every artist with a name that anyone knows is unaffected by this, that can still represent a massive loss of work for basically all creative professionals.
You touched on some of these things but I think glossed over them too much. AI art may not replace “Art”, but virtually no one makes money from “Art”, and so it doesn’t have to replace it for people to have no job left.
Depends on what you want. I’ve been liking Godot, but I’m an “Open Source” person. There’s definitely more of a community around Unity or Unreal.
But Godot is free in both ways and relatively user friendly, and since you’re uninterested in hiring a hundred people, using a tool that you like is fine, even if it’s not the most popular.
There’s a course I’ve never used called Learn GDscript which teaches the inbuilt language for Godot (GDScript) in the browser with fun interactive tasks. It looks neat, but I’ve never tried it myself. You can use other languages with Godot, but I recommend the GDScript. It’s very similar to Python and is well integrated into the engine.
So from there it’s about screwing around! Like other people have said, you’re not going to whip up the game that’s in your head in anything like the time frame you probably think. Even if you think you’re being realistic, it’s probably even worse than that. But I don’t say this to discourage you, I say this to prevent you from discouraging yourself!
If you can get a game where a green circle goes through a maze and then text shows up on the screen that says “you did it”, that should be viewed as an accomplishment! It’s simple, sure, but it’s something you did. Try to break your game’s features up into micro chunks that are playable. It’s easy to spend 6 months working on something and making progress, but not in any way you can show friends or whoever, and can’t even really “play” yourself. That can be demotivating. Try as much as you can to have something playable as often as possible. It will feel much more like real progress if you constantly have something you can demo.
And also don’t underestimate how much a bit of art and sound effects can change an experience. Silent 2D boxes is fine to test things out, but even a free art and sound effects pack makes a huge difference in how fun a game can feel. It can make even a simple premise suddenly feel like a game.
Good luck, have fun! Oh, also once you’re done tripping over your feet, maybe try a game jam! They’re good exercise.
Groceries, in particular, are more of an effect than a cause. Lots of people live without cars in New York City, or London, or Paris, or Toronto, or Tokyo, and they manage to eat. The reason you need to buy 7 days worth of food for two people all at once is because you live in a field far away from everything. “Getting Groceries” becomes a special trip, because, while driving, leaving the highway, stopping and parking are inconvenient.
As a pedestrian in a city, I was going to walk past 5 food stores on my way between work and home anyway, and it’s really not problem to walk in and buy only what I ran out of yesterday, or some special item I wanted for tonight’s dinner. It’s simple to shop for 5 or 10 minutes, five times a week, rather than one hour once a week, and never need more than a single bag of groceries at a time. And rather than being inconvenient, it’s actually great because I’m only buying what I need right now, the things I’m going to use as soon as I get home, so it’s very simple.
Allergies could be tricky, yeah. If you’re lucky the local shop, by nature of being smaller and more local, actually knows you and knows you need this stuff and stocks it because they know you’ll buy it from them. But that’s not a guarantee, for sure. That having been said, if the only people driving were people with corn allergies, the roads would be a much safer place!