Lenore from the Castlevania Netflix series.

Tons of consent issues for sure, but she’s gorgeous and smart as hell.

I knew I was going to like this when it was announced, and the demo did not disappoint. There’s a fine line between being too easy and getting too puzzly for me with these games, but seeing the Confidence system is a really good sign that the full game won’t get to the latter. The default setting was too easy for sure, though; the boss fight was almost trivial.

Love the writing, love the absurd concepts at play. This one’s an insta-buy when it comes out.

Welcome! Hopefully you know about Lemmy Explorer, I’ve found it very useful in finding communities of interest to me.

Having grown up on Sierra adventure games, I still have a part of my brain thinking about saving and loading in bad situations from time to time.

The first Witcher encapsulates Geralt’s (many) sexual conquests in collectible cards. And almost none of the encounters have any bearing on the plot. Having a hard time not calling that exploitative.

Much of what’s going on, especially lately, is simple xenophobia. There are arbitrary restrictions on what can be sexualized when Asian character designs are used.

I didn’t see that coming, and it’s a welcome development. If it warps the general PC hardware market enough that devs start optimizing for a standard platform, it’ll result in less buggy products at launch. And maybe orienting development towards a relatively underpowered platform will make it easier for those of us dumb enough to that like to spend more on a desktop to hit those 60 FPS targets.

I can’t speak to Helldivers, but pinning Baldur’s Gate 3’s success on the recent growing popularity of the D&D franchise is beyond reductive. There’s no huge publisher for Baldur’s Gate 3; Larian’s a licensee and an independent studio to boot, and Hasbro’s not running massive marketing campaigns for them any more than Disney is for the typical licensed Star Wars game. There’s also the game’s pay-once sales model, which is something else you get when you’re not beholden to publishers or public shareholders.

BG3 was the culmination of decades of iteration by Larian and was the studio’s first attempt with a AAA budget. The game has more in common with Divinity: Original Sin 2 than it does Baldur’s Gate 2, as the Baldur’s Gate die-hards would be happy to tell you.

Calling CRPGs a popular genre is also going to get some laughs. Sure, we might be able to look on this point now in a few years as when CRPGs went mainstream (or maybe not, as the insane amount of choice built into the game set the bar so high that it’s possible no one’s going to bother with that kind of risky content-making). But by the time Larian started development on BG3, the genre had just risen from the dead after some successful Kickstarter campaigns and was still very niche.

Sometimes we get immediate benefits. It took a while for capitalism to take over the Internet.

Went back to college last year and Joplin’s been amazing. More off-topic, but the only thing I wish it had was better search result organization.

High-end office chairs (Steelcase is another popular brand) can be found used for $500ish. Been thinking about making the jump myself lately but I’m insanely picky and I don’t think I’d know for at least a week if I’ve found a good match (dunno about returns at that point).

Went back to college and I’ve had a 4.0 GPA through two semesters. It feels weird because I was never this kind of student before. I always did the minimum and that was usually enough for B’s. Now I’m actually showing up.

The “keep warm” function on a typical rice cooker isn’t 100° warm, it’s a food safe temperature like 140+.

As long as the cooker is working properly, it’s fine to eat hours later. I wouldn’t go overnight or anything.

Anything literally printed on paper. If you’re in PDFs and you know your audience is going to be reading it on a small screen, I’d say stay away from the serif fonts. Especially since you mentioned elsewhere that you’re concerned about document length; you can get away with smaller letter tracking size on sans.

I write mostly for web, so I don’t use serif a lot. I think it’s still fine for use with headings.

If your reports are destined for print, it still belongs, imo.

Family Guy - Indian Food

Casual xenophobia/racism. Much like the whole MSG thing here.

Fried rice at a greasy spoon diner chain restaurant in the Osaka area.

Probably the equivalent of someone saying the best food they’ve ever had was a Moons Over My Hammy, but it is what it is 🤷

Discord hasn’t ever been trying to do what forums do; it’s an evolution of text and voice chat rooms. Discord is for synchronous, live communication, while forums are asynchronous. Information gets lost in synchronous platforms because there’s an inherent assumption that the value of that information is highest in the moment when people are communicating real-time. Getting the 50 message chat history isn’t supposed to be about catching up on what everyone was talking about last week, it’s intended to get you caught up in the conversation that’s happening now. Twitter is the same way. It’s not particularly easy to browse older conversations by design.

It’s possible the format just isn’t for you, but there are a couple things that could help. I think the most important part is finding the right size of community. I personally prefer servers in the range of 50-100 active people. I joined up with one as a part of the Reddit exodus and it quickly grew to 1,000+. Too chaotic for my taste, but I know people who love very active servers like that. Threads are designed to help with the reply problem. A large server that doesn’t permit threads is probably not one you want to be a part of unless it has a mod team that’s very on top of things.

Good channel and role organization is also important, but unfortunately a lot of the good tools are third-party. Because not everyone has the same tools, it can be challenging to find a server that’s well-organized. For example, there a tool that allows people to highlight a specific message, listing a history of selected messages in a non-chat channel. If a server is good at using it, that sort of thing might help you catch up. Another thing we could see soon (if it’s not happening already) is generative AI posting daily summaries of conversations.

It took me a while to get comfortable enough to contribute at will in my favorite Discord servers and not feel like I was interrupting. Cultures vary greatly by server, but no matter the server, there has to be some degree of willingness to jump in.

Something like Retro Game Challenge, but for Western games. The idea behind Retro Game Challenge is that you play clones of NES games with achievement challenges to “advance” the story, as clones of games in the style of later NES games would come out. It had clones of games like Ninja Gaiden, Galaga, Dragon Quest. It also had game magazines written much like those of the time. The whole thing is a nostalgia trip.

In this case, it probably would have to be PC games. It could even have a cute minigame where you unbox and drop in your first 3D card.

Closest thing I’ve seen to it has been Arcade Paradise, but the games (along with the rest of the gameplay) weren’t as good in that one. They also weren’t all retro-inspired, as there’s clones of match-3 games and Vampire Survivors.

I use the Great Meditation Youtube channel.

For this topic, it’s far from what I would call an easy skill; I’m going on six years and it still feels like a weak muscle. But it can be really helpful.