_NetNomad

forums face a lot of the same issues federated platforms do, chiefly- why the hell would the proverbial i join it when reddit and discord already exist? i already have an account there, there’s already a community there… i think for some people that’s just never gonna change. there’s no closing pandora’s box. i run an online community with a small but fairly active discord and we have a forum as well in anticipation of discord going full enshittification, but it’s just impossible to get younger people onto it. the fedi at least has the advantage of looking like the monolithic platforms people are leaving, but forums are such a foreign concept

getting a community going is a bit of a catch 22. the best way to get users is to already have users and appear active. if i recall correctly, early on reddit had a ton of staff sock puppet accounts to do just that. i’m certainly not advocating for it but it goes to show how tricky the problem is. the only real answer on an individual level is to pick a platform and stick with it through the thin years and try to recruit a few friends- after that MAYBE hopefully it eventually gets some momentum

i’m gonna level with you, i completely forgot IBM cloud was a thing and just thought this was MS pointing fingers at system Z or system . thanks for catching that!

so Delta’s non-Windows machines were the ones that suffered the most from a Windows software malfunction? that makes sense

it must have been weird for Hayden to return to a role he’s synonymous with to put a capstone on a long and emotional story arc that he had nothing to do with, but you never would have been able to tell by the way he sold it

kinda funny that they’re doing this while still selling the remake for 50 bucks new. still, more mystery dungeon is always a good thing!

This pattern is driven by an increase in unhappiness among young people both in absolute terms and relative to older people.

also look at the graph in the article, the yellow line representing 2024 is signifigantly lower before 35 than any point on the blue line representing 2005-2018

as someone approaching my 30s in america this sounds consistent with both my experience and many of my peers. our education system is more or less a trauma machine, and couple that with the demise of “third places” (places that aren’t school or home for kids to hang out in without having to spend money) and the general state of the world being hard for even adult minds fo wrap around… our world is a difficult and unpleasant place to be a kid. it ain’t a cakewalk being an adult either but it is relatively better with a relative increase in agency and more experience dealing with everything

i see comparisons of switch games on hardware and in emulators all the time and can never tell the difference, and same for all these recent 4k remasters. i am glad that there are options for people who can tell and do care but it’s nowhere near as noticable to your average joe compared to the jump from snes to n64 or n64 to gamecube. or perhaps i am just a spectacularly below average joe haha

i know conventional gamer wisdom says otherwise but i think this just goes to show how more horsepower just leads to diminishing returns at this point. people call the switch underpowered but it’s best selling game is a wii u port! gone are the days of each generation looking infinitely better than the last

of course the movie franchise about killing space nazis famously had no woke agenda whatsoever until they gave a woman a laser sword

does that have a free tier or only paid plans

what antivirus are the cool kids using these days? i feel like whenever i finally settle on one it ends up embroiled in this or that scandal

NOT TIMMY

that’s just me playing Zork

i’m kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i’d wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it’s just “i’m gonna skip this last encounter because we’re already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow” or even just “wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace” but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that’s part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i’m ok with them using fudging when they feel it’s warranted so long as they’re not abusing it to the point where there’s no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we’re all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they’re doing, and if we’re not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue

he was doing his civic duty

i’ve always believed, i just couldn’t get a damn word in edgewise!

Tales of the Jedi did a really good job fleshing Dooku out. many star wars villains are unambigiously evil- that’s what happens when dark wizardry is very real and a viable career path i guess- but Dooku really thought he was doing the right thing at first, like a more selfless Anakin. a lot of Star Wars media does a great job illustrating that the Republic and the Jedi were deeply flawed, but don’t make the jump to saying that many if not most planets joined the CIS in good faith for that reason- i guess because the new non-droids we see in the CIS are all asshats or aforementioned evil wizards, but still! the fight against the republic and the rebellion against the empire were essentially the same conflict from a certain point of view…

i mean these days you don’t really need to buy the books to play- you can learn how to play from an Actual Play, reference the rules in a VTT, and have your DM learn from a youtuber. that really leaves WotC either in the business of making solid modules and supplements, or just making knick knacks- and they’ve clearly chosen the latter, at least until they can force whatever subscription model they can on the exclusive VTT they’ll have for 6e

many retro systems have implementations of a language called BASIC, which is about as easy as it sounds. it has some quirks that aren’t transferable to newer languages and you won’t be able to make anything nearly as sophisticated as retail games for the same hardware but if you find modern engines intimidating, it can be a good place to start

that said, +1 for godot if you want to learn a more modern tool. it’s way simpler than it may seem at first and there is a huge wealth of beginner-friendly tutorials available online