I took his criticisms of the combat as basically saying “this system is not interesting enough to form a satisfying gameplay loop”. That’s a critical statement which I actually agree with, though from my perspective that’s a key part of Persona’s core design: neither the combat system nor the social link system are endlessly enjoyable, so the player is intrinsically motivated to avoid lingering for too long and properly close the core gameplay loop by advancing the calendar. It’s that sort of pendulum-like cadence which gives the series its unique sense of momentum.

I do think that it’s a shame RPS’s Matt was unable to find joy in P3R’s gameplay loop due to disliking the social-link system… but I also see it as an opportunity to better understand the game as a holistic package in a way that can’t be achieved through a more carefully measured, quantitative analysis. The way I see things, the game is the game – I’m much more interested in understanding what’s in the game rather than what’s not, if that makes any sense.

I tend to prefer clicking through the unscored reviews first since I find that it’s generally a mark of a quality outlet. Rock Paper Shotgun in particular is an old favorite of mine, so their’s is the first review that I clicked on and let me tell you guys: it’s a real firecracker!

Matt clearly didn’t have a good time and I had to respectfully disagree with a lot of the points he’s made, but even so… his points are well-articulated and sensible. I’m rather glad for his uncommon perspective on the topic and I do think that RPS ultimately picked the right writer for the job. He hasn’t particularly changed my mind about a day-one purchase, of course – the main difference is now I’ll have a more nuanced and realistic expectation for what’s inside.

It’s a pretty different situation under closer examination. The DnD developers are ex-Nexon employees and they (allegedly) pitched the idea internally before deciding to leave and take the idea with them.

Nexon thought that they had a legal leg to stand on because of how IP laws work (i.e.: employee ideas on company time are company IP). Perhaps more importantly; they probably felt a need to retaliate in order to send a message to other employees who might want to try something similar.

Palworld, on the other hand, is made by a team with no ties whatsoever to GameFreak. If Pokemon were a younger franchise they might possibly have a patent case of some kind, but even the 3D games go back almost 24 years now.

I’ve been collecting these, super hyped for February 🗣️🗣️🗣️💨💨💨🔥🔥🔥

• WE MAKING IT OUT OF TARTARUS WITH THIS ONE
• WE LANDING MARIN KARIN WITH THIS ONE
• WE DISTURBING THE PEACE WITH THIS ONE
• WE ENDING THE DARK HOUR WITH THIS ONE
• WE MEMENTO MORI WITH THIS ONE
• WE BURNING OUR DREAD WITH THIS ONE

Rocket Jump Waltz – TF2

If it’s not fun, why bother?

Another reason is that “CP” got jokingly coopted by abusers in the form of various dogwhistles (e.g.: “cheese pizza”). It made more sense to adopt a new acronym rather than try to uphold any sense of decorum while sharing ownership of the term w/ edgelords & predators.

Communism with western characteristics?

Terrorists Win (the drip competition)

Heys guys, look! We’ve finally found him. The world’s most well-informed gamer!

O’ great Gamer, hallowed be thy name… please bless us peasants with yet another nugget of your immaculate gaming wisdom!

I find it interesting how common it is to blame executive greed/stupidity, as if we all merely got super unlucky when companies were picking their CEOs. Every CEO is different, yet the outcome is almost universally the same: when company longevity and quarterly profits come into conflict, profits win.

The CEO of the modern public corporation embodies that conflict of interest, which is perhaps why they are so hateable – the job is inherently two-faced – but at the end of the day they’re just a face, a name, and a bundle of core competencies. No matter how many CEOs we go through, there will never be one who could satisfy the unending hunger of the public stock market. You will never find one who is not ultimately enthralled. The fundamental concept of know-nothings owning everything is just outright broken.

I don’t know if I think we should burn it all down, but one thing I’m sure of is that the problems won’t stop until we bring the people with investment money into close alignment with the long-term interests of the corporations they own (and/or oust/eat them)

In theory, yes. Of course, the same holds true for a lot of things which we currently use clean water for! The water needs of agriculture, toilets, carwashes, and many more could be addressed through so-called graywater (e.g.: pumped lakewater, rooftop rainwater) if we really sat down and wanted to make it happen.

The reason that we don’t do these things is rather mundane: it’s cheaper and easier to tap into the shared drinking water infrastructure than it is to collect your own water and roll your own silos/filtration tech. That might change as the world changes – something has to give eventually if we use more groundwater than we replenish, but much like clean drinking water, I don’t think it’s a problem we should ask individual entities to solve. Governments would generally be much more suited to efficiently collecting drainwater, scrubbing it, distributing it, and mandating usage in wasteful commercial applications.

Uncaught TypeError: fetch(...).json is not a function

… or I could just use dmenu on an OS that I don’t have to “debloat” to make useable?

You can disable searching as a fall-through, but you cannot disable web results appearing inside of the menu itself, which is what slows it down. At least, that was the case for the first 4 years or so before I stopped using Windows 10 and switched to Linux.

You know how when you press the Windows key and are able to type into the searchbar? Prior to 10, this bar did an instant local-only search of your desktop applications and (if you enabled it) select cached documents. Imagine building up the muscle memory of using this to launch applications for a decade or two to the point where you don’t even look at the screen anymore when launching apps. Now imagine that Windows 10 comes along and introduces a mandatory internet search that has to complete before it lets you see the local results that you were actually looking for.

Now imagine not being able to forget how snappy it used to be every single time you launch an application. Imagine the annoyance of being punished for a typo by having Edge open up a Bing search instead of the application you were trying to launch. Imagine not noticing the error and waiting 5 seconds for Bing to boot up, only to be confusedly greeted by a search you didn’t ask for in a browser you wish you could uninstall. Imagine installing third-party applications to try and restore the old search experience only for it to get regularly broken by OS updates you cannot opt out of and are only sometimes notified of in advance (another “feature” that Windows 10 brought).

IMO Windows 7 was the last “pure” Windows before the power balance at Microsoft tipped in favor of the cloud & sales people.

Character building exercise and/or tragic backstory

I see! Thank you for clarifying. I am very sorry for inventing premises and arriving at illogical conclusions.

What’s your point, exactly? Let’s say we accept your premise that this is an unfair double-standard that Microsoft shouldn’t have to respect… have you considered the logical conclusion that this creates? That the public should just… blithely accept Google-style nag prompts baked into literally any piece of software or hardware, even when they hold a paid license? I don’t think a reasonable person would intentionally advocate for such a thing, so please help me understand what you really meant.

Meh, it’s a losing battle try to establish what’s actually going on mechanically. It’s best to just stick to the rules we can prove and leave the underlying “how” as an implementation detail.

What we know is that it is possible for distant particles to become entangled without respect for relativistic limits. There’s effectively no difference between saying that the entanglement propagates regardless of distance (simultaneously FTL) or that the entanglement propagates regardless of time (sub-FTL regardless of simultaneity).

The issue is that an observer must at some point have observed both particles to know that they’ve become entangled. This is already a problem at any scale, but it gets much worse at relativistic distances because you can no longer even be certain when the two tangles are entangled, including and up to whether or not the particle you are locally observing is currently entangled. You’re stuck playing relativistic Two Generals’ Problem in such a way that if there was an FTL transmission, any useful information from it is rendered inaccessible without first receiving additional sub-FTL information.

This is the fundamentally frustrating thing about quantum mechanics. As far as we currently understand physics, any experiment which would reveal the actual underlying physical nature of the quantum world would itself be physically impossible (e.g.: FTL travel, time travel, violating the uncertainty principle).