he/him

Materials Science PhD candidate in Pittsburgh, PA, USA

My profile picture is the cover art from Not A Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough, and was drawn by Casper Pham (recolor by me).

  • 3 Posts
  • 51 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I don’t have hundreds of hours

    Don’t start with XIV then!

    So what is the most recent game in the series that I can start with that is worth it to play and wouldn’t confuse a newcomer?

    All of the FF games – baring the ones that are explicitly sequels, like X2 – are totally separate from each other, you can jump in anywhere. At most you might miss some references or easter eggs.

    If you want the most recent then, that’d be XVI, although I’d personally recommend looking up what the gameplay is like in the different games and starting wherever you feel you’ll have the most fun! There are some weirder ones out there, like crystal chronicles (my own first final fantasy game) and tactics, so you have a lot of options!





  • I’ve been working my way through Cross Code in the evenings after I get back home, and it’s as excellent as everyone says it is! I keep trying to decide what other games it reminds me of the most, and surprisingly I think I’m starting to settle on Legend of Zelda (the older ones, not BotW/TotK).

    The way it gates progress, the level & dungeon design, etc just really seems to be a part of that tradition. The moment to moment gameplay is pretty different though, and pretty unique at that!

    Really though it’s just been a nice escape in the evenings. It’s challenging enough that sometimes I decide to leave a tough fight or puzzle to pick up the next night, but it’s not punishingly hard and I feel like it respects my time.


  • Really interesting writeup, thank you for sharing! Many of the technical details go well over my head but nonetheless it’s very interesting to hear some of these success stories, and it also sheds light on how much work running an instance with a lot of users actually is. Here’s hoping that future versions of lemmy with (eg) more optimized database code will make life easier for all the folks in the operations team!


  • #notallgames

    Seriously though, I know you said “for the most part,” but I just want to emphasize that there are absolutely story-focused games out there. Games I’d even describe as downright literary, where the entire point is to tell a compelling story and explore some heady themes. One recent one I played like this was Pentiment, which explores some really interesting history and has a lot to say about religion, community, fallibility, family, etc…

    And, I mean, lots of other people have already mentioned Disco Elysium and I could write an essay about it but anyone who hasn’t played it should just watch this Jacob Geller video instead.





  • realChem@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.orgGithub is down!
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    1 year ago

    I’ll hop on just to add: the little plate that says “mod” can’t be turned off, but for us community moderators we can toggle a little shield icon when we’re trying to speak with the “mod voice.” We can only do it in our communities, but (I think) the admin team is by default modded in every community and should be able to toggle that shield wherever they are.

    So if you see the shield icon next to the name, that was intentionally toggled on to show they’re trying to speak as a mod and not just a community member. If you only see the little “mod” nameplate you can probably assume they’re just talking as a member of the community (unless context makes it obvious that they just forgot to turn on the shield).

    Edit: Here’s an example of how the shield icon looks to me from one of my posts; I’m on mobile with the darkly theme so it probably looks different to you unless you’re also on mobile, but hopefully still a useful example:

    a screenshot showing the mod shield next to my username



  • My two cents:

    The news outlets are only putting out what their audience wants to see.

    I don’t think this is entirely true. Yes they’ll run with stories that get lots of engagement, but news agencies still have, well, agency. They can choose what to focus coverage on, even if it’s not the most lucrative story. They also have lots of room for how they want to cover a story, what angles they want to take.

    While I agree that to an extent there’s a relationship from views to money to coverage, saying they’re “only putting out what their audiences want to see” is kinda reductive. They also play an important role in shaping what their audiences want to see. I’d say it’s important to be critical of what we’re being shown and what we’re not, and how different stories get spun.

    One point I think we might agree on is that this also means that we should think critically about ourselves and our own reactions to the stories we’re presented with. For example, I know I have a tendency to get interested in these kinds of stories from the perspective of wanting to learn safety lessons for the future (same reason I keep up to date on US CSB reports). At some point, though, it became apparent that there were no (or not many) interesting safety lessons to learn here and I continued following the developments anyway. It’s worthwhile for me to consider why I did that, and taking that time to consider my own reactions here is a part of this same process of thinking critically about the news we’re shown.