Excrubulent @ Excrubulent @slrpnk.net

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17

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2,701

Joined

2 yr. ago

Faster to apply and much harder to remove.

Your funeral, don't say I didn't warn you.

Your gnomes shouldn't be dead, they're technically immortal and a stint in the dishwasher is their ticket out of the salt mines. If you've got dead gnomes the last thing you want is to keep their bodies on the premises. If you leave them in the cartridge they can be revived when you exchange it for the new cartridge. If you put them in the ground they will find... other ways back to their realm, and they will remember what you did.

And please remember to buy gnomane dishwashing tablets, I cannot stress enough how much they should not be dead.

Also don't ask me why the gnome salt mine slavery exists, I didn't create it, I just benefit from it.

You can get anti fungal liquid that you add to one of the secondary dispensers which should keep that at bay while also keeping mould off your clothes, and also you can leave the door open between cycles to dry it out. I've been told it's important to leave the door open when it's not in use.

You don't replace your dish gnome cartridge every 3 years? I was told it was a feature. They get tired.

In my experience that is not a true defence against disappointment.

My expectations weren't low enough to guard against my boss's husband getting drunk, shoving his kid around in front of me then driving like a lunatic with us both in the car. When I quit over it I didn't get my last paycheck or even an email back.

There had been red flags in the hiring process which these days I would absolutely bounce over, especially since they'd taken so long to get my contract in order, but you just don't expect people to be complete monsters.

When I emailed again a week later to ask what was taking so long the second business partner's email bounced. Apparently she'd left in that time. The business is still somehow running because you don't need to be competent to get startup capital and run a business, you just need to talk fast enough to get the bag.

I tried to get a refund on WRC after they added anti-cheat that stopped it running on linux even though it did previously. Anti-cheat on a primarily single player game.

Steam rejected it because it "didn't count as non-functional under consumer protection laws".

I mean they deliberately rendered it non-functional for certain users.

Anyway, the dirt series will be mourned but I'm excited to see if anyone else will take up the mantle. BeamNG's rally mode is getting really good and they have a very detailed simulation, and VR. In fact a detailed damage model is key to a realistic rally simulation, and obviously theirs is second to none.

...well my biggest question now is why I didn't even notice that.

Well sure, psychos with nukes are scary and there may be an element of the US losing control of their attack dog, but the idea that the Israelis are calling the shots is not really accurate. It cuts dangerously close to the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Israel through AIPAC controls the US government, which also conveniently lets the US off the hook for sponsoring them.

I just think it's important to remember that for all their brutality, Israel is not charge, and they are not the military superpower that has dominated much of global politics for the past century. They are a vassal state and they would listen if anyone in power had the will to tell them no, they are far too dependent on US support.

It's probably more like institutional inertia. It takes a long time to stop a ship that big.

Israel is of strategic importance to project US power in the middle east to secure oil.

That's also the reason they were allowed to continue with their nuclear program.

It's not fear, it's power politics. Western powers actively support them. They are not uniquely evil, they are just what happens when fascism is sponsored and allowed to run unchecked.

This is Joe Biden making it perfectly clear: https://youtu.be/A-Ky3dPEnOE

Everyone should read the words of one of Nixon's top aides regarding why they started the war on drugs:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Source

And yet the wikipedia entry for the war on drugs starts like this:

The war on drugs is a global anti-narcotics campaign led by the United States federal government, including drug prohibition, foreign assistance, military intervention, and counterterrorism, with the aim of reducing the illegal drug trade in the US.

Emphasis added. I would say that is flat out false. It may be the openly stated aim, but it is not the true aim, and they've admitted it. Just another reminder that these fascists know exactly what the fuck they're doing and that wikipedia is subject to propaganda influences.

Got them working, and was pleasantly surprised to find most of them had flatpak installers! Manual saving is still a pain but the engines running smoothly does make a big difference.

Although the dark forces installer doesn't work with the steam install so you have to copy the game data to the data folder to make it work.

Honestly anything to deal with the horrendous friction and instability of the original would be welcome. Even modded I think I had to stick with 4:3 which even with black bars was still not quite right on my modern system. It would have to be a better experience, even if I have to re-learn manual quicksaves.

And I'll keep saying this: you can't teach a neural network to understand context without creating a generalised context engine, another word for which is AGI.

Fidelity is impossible to automate.

I just found Shockolate, a GPL-3 source port of system shock:

https://github.com/Interrupt/systemshock

Yeah, I think we more or less agree, and I'm not trying to say it's a bad game or even a bad story, just that there's not a lot I need closure on. I think the only thing that could be done to "ruin" it would be to pile on a bunch of unsatisfying answers to the open questions about the world. I'd definitely play HL3 just to experience more of the world, I just don't care that much about where the story goes and I don't think that's ever been the main draw.

It would be nice to get some explanations of the world that would extend it and allow people to tell more interesting stories within it, but I honestly doubt that those answers exist. It really feels like they're kind of just riffing and they don't have a bigger vision for where it all goes, if I had to guess.

I actually really appreciate someone clarifying the chronology of these games, I've got them all in my steam library and can never remember the order they go in.

Do the OS remakes have any QoL improvements? I tried playing through them recently and had a very hard time with the manual save system since I'm used to autosave points in linear games like that.

I'm working up the courage to try those for the first time, but as very old games now, I'm a little apprehensive about all the friction they're likely to have.

I agree the diegetic storytelling is very well done and that did push the craft of game storytelling forwards, but the actual world itself is a lot of texture with very little substance. Loads of cool ideas, but almost no decisions, like they want the freedom to add anything at any time without ever restricting themselves by saying "here is how this concept actually works", or even "this is who this person is".

We never really meet the aliens or the antagonists, ever. The gman is an alien in a skin-suit, and Breen is just a collaborator. They are both essentially puppets.

Like, what was the nihilanth? We killed it, then... what? I guess the vortigaunts were freed, but how does that tie into the slug beings, the human cyborg slavery, any of it? The vortigaunts could easily explain at least some of the world, What does any of it mean?

I get the idea of being deep in and unable to see the forest for the trees, and that is definitely a style of story that you can do, but it's unsatisfying long term. Eventually you have to get at least a glimpse of the broader picture or nothing has any meaning. The world has no rules, which doesn't make good science fiction.

I say this as someone who regularly replays HL2 because I enjoy the texture so much, I just acknowledge it's very limited.