Computerchairgeneral

I don’t have much faith in advertisers starving Zuckerberg of cash. Unless there’s an exodus of users from Facebook, Instagram, and whatever else Zuckerberg owns then there’s not going to be any pressure on advertisers to abandon those sites.

“You’re trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen!” -OpenAI 2025.

Photos taken moments before TPKs.

Been playing through Tunic this last week and I don’t think I’ve had a game leave me this conflicted in a while. I picked Tunic up on all the recommendations of it being classic Zelda with elements from Dark Souls and that’s definitely what I got, for most of the game at least. I also enjoyed the puzzle elements with the manual, trying to decipher what it was telling me based on the images and the odd English word. If there’s one thing the game does well it’s capturing that feeling of playing a game as a kid and not really knowing what’s possible. I had quite a few “Ah-ha!” moments where the game hinted at something just enough to let me figure it out on my own. But then you get to the end-game, the game takes away all your upgrades, and makes you go through a gauntlet of enemies to get them back. I get what they were going for here, but playing through it was just a slog. In theory, I like the idea of being powerless again and having to treat every enemy with caution, but in practice this segment just dragged on for too long,

Another mechanic that overstays it’s welcome is the “Holy Cross” mechanic. It’s neat the first time you use it and figuring out how to use it on all the sealed doors and golden statues I had seen was fun. But the issue is this is where the game completely changes genres on you, at least if you want to see the true ending. The Zelda/Dark Souls elements are now completely secondary to deciphering the manual and completing the Holy Cross puzzles. Enemies are just obstacles between you and where you have to go to solve the next puzzle, culminating in the Golden Path puzzle, which the true ending is gated behind.

I did enjoy everything up until that point, but once it became about this meta-puzzle and flipping through the manual to solve it I just lost interest. Yeah, I was stuck with the “Bad Ending”, but the amount of effort the game wanted me to put in for a cut-scene just didn’t seem worth it.

No, vampires usually leave that sort of “exact words” trickery to faeries and genies.

Focus on what you can control is pretty cliche advice, but it really is all you can do in situations like this. Something I’ve started doing is a “news diet” where I sit down on Monday and basically skim through the last week of political news. Then I just try and ignore political news as much as possible until the next Monday. It’s not a perfect system, but it helps deal with the fire hose style news coverage the media gives to Trump.

I wonder how Twitter came to be such a negative place? Who could be responsible for such a thing?

Curious what industry standard Senator Warner is judging Valve against because a social media site, which Warner is comparing Valve to, being filled with Nazis and the far right feels like the standard, even if some sites at better at quarantining them than others. Also, “intense scrutiny” from Congress is kind of an empty threat at the best of times, but especially when Congress is about to be run by the sort of people who aren’t going to see this as a problem.

Good. Still not completely sure about moving from one corporate site to another, but good to see more and more people are moving away from Twitter.

Doing things and not spiraling is about all we can do at this point. I suppose it depends on the things you care about or want to prioritize The massive cuts to government spending Trump has talked about are inevitably going to impact services like Social Security and Medicare so mutual aid resources are going to be important for a lot of people:

Mutual Aid Hub-Resources Food Not Bombs FAQ

If you’re concerned about what will happen in places like Gaza and Ukraine there are charities that are helping those affected by those conflicts:

Charity Navigator Gaza UNITED24-Offical Ukranian Fundraising Platform

Finally, if you are not in a position to donate money then there are ongoing election efforts that need volunteers. At this point that’s mostly ballot curing, helping voters sort out issues with their absentee or mail in ballot. Some of these ongoing elections are incredibly tight and making sure those ballots are accepted could make a difference, especially in low profile races:

Mobilize.us Ballot Curing

At this point we can only really guess. It’ll probably be days or weeks before people can dig through the voting data and do substantive post-mortems on the 2024 campaign. Th economy seems to have played a big part. People are angry at high prices and they naturally punish the incumbent party even if the President doesn’t realistically control how much eggs and gas cost. Along with that it’s looking like there was a collapse in Democratic turnout in the Rust Belt while Republican turnout stayed steady, handing Trump narrow wins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. It also looks like the Harris campaign’s bet on Republicans who didn’t vote for Trump in the primary breaking for her failed to pay off.

Thanks Youtube, I hate it. Like I can see some arguments for taking away the view counter, even if I think it’s a bad decision. But the date the video was uploaded? Who does that even help? I guess Youtubers will either need to start properly dating their videos or we’ll just have to use context clues to figure out when a video was uploaded.

This actually isn’t a terrible use of an LLM. It’s actually kind of refreshing to see a news story about a beneficial use of it in a very specific context.

Considering I would have never heard of this otherwise, yeah I think it’s the Streisand Effect at work. But what a bizarre thing to want scrubbed from the Internet. Like it’s not a particularly hard-hitting question and the CEO clearly had a prepared, corporate-speak answer ready. It feels like something that wouldn’t have attracted any attention if they hadn’t called attention to it. So, classic Streisand Effect I guess.

Ridiculous, but depressingly unsurprising.

Pretty sure that is your cat now. Sorry, we don’t make the rules, the cats do.

Well, the leopards are eating good again.

This actually doesn’t sound terrible? I mean I’m sure people will find ways to abuse it, but the concept seems pretty good. There are plenty of tiny channels that could use something like this to get more attention when they put out a video.

Been bouncing between Wizordum and Void Stranger over the last few days. Wizordum is a fun “boomer shooter” that takes a lot of inspiration from games like Hexen and I’ve been enjoying mowing down monsters with fireballs and a magical shotgun. Void Stranger I’m still not sure how I feel about. Heard it mentioned a few times as a very meta game with a lot of layers. In theory I like games like that. Figuring out the core puzzle gameplay of moving blocks around has been fun, even if I don’t consider myself that great at puzzles, but the meta stuff is riding that fine line between being just cryptic enough to be intriguing to being so cryptic that I’m not sure how I’m supposed to figure this out without a guide.

Glad to see the campaign still going strong. Almost being past the minimum threshold requirement for seven countries is impressive. Hopefully it can reach one million signatures, even if I’m a little skeptical about the EU taking this seriously and passing a decent law. Still, anything that keeps the topic on peoples minds is a good thing.