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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • From seeing discussions among those Zelda fans (which to be clear I am not one), the issue is that the mainline games are now a completely different genre, but treated as though it’s the natural progression of the series.

    The classic zelda games are primarily puzzle games, with a little bit of combat and intricate hand-crafted exploration to spice it up a bit. The modern zelda games (BOTW & TOTK) are exploration games with puzzles to spice it up. If you were a classic zelda fan, the niche genre you loved used to have regular releases by a major developer and now doesn’t.

    Plus, there’s a “all my homies hate skrillex” effect here; the series is massively more popular now, but the newcomers have a different idea of what makes a zelda game a zelda game. By sheer numbers they dominate a community that is now reshaped by their presence. In other words the zelda fan community is itself a different genre.

    For what it’s worth, I haven’t played that much of the series. Link to the Past I didn’t care much for, Links Awakening (new one) I honestly hated, and BOTW I liked but had a couple issues with. All I’ve written above is based on passively seeing a bunch of discussion.


  • A bunch of my friends from college kept telling me I’ve gotta play it, espectially because among them the only other game they all played was R6 Siege. I wasn’t too enthused considering all the discussion I can find of the game says it sucks now. When they eventually got me to play it I found it… ok.

    Based on the demographics of those friends, I’d say it’s mostly popular among people who, if you asked them if they were really into games would say yes, but if you asked them for any “hidden gems” they’ve come across would give suggest highly recognizeable non-AAA games like Helldivers 2 or Balatro. Partly because their definition of “really into games” is that they play games that have an esports scene (even if their competitiveness goes only as far as playing in ranked matchmaking).

    Sound pretentious for me to put it that way but I find that to be the pattern.


  • I believe the reason it happened, in short, is that Take2 (the publisher) were really obsessed with the release being a surprise, at the cost of far too much.

    For one, this meant that basically every job listing for the game never described what the game you’d even work on was. Most of the devs they got were juniors who:

    1. were willing to sign more restrictive contracts without the confidence to push back
    2. did not necessarily know much about the game, or even the genre (supposedly, besides Nate, only 1 dev was an active KSP1 player and another was aware of the game but never really played)
    3. this game was their first sizeable project

    For two, it meant that a lot of management roles were taken up by people from Take2 to enforce the secrecy (who also saw KSP as having franchise potential, but that’s a rant for another day). Few of them intimately understood what makes us dorky nerds enthusiastic about KSP.

    This is also part of the reason they avoided talking to the KSP1 devs; they were afraid of some of them even hinting that a sequel was in the works. As to why they continued to not talk to them after announcing the game I’m not sure. Perhaps they were afraid they’d tell the uncomfortable truth that the game was making the same development mistakes as KSP1 and more.





  • Gnocchi I wouldn’t personally call a noodle but if someone did I wouldn’t call them out on it. Hell, I probably wouldn’t even notice.

    Ravioli is definitely a noodle. Not the stuff inside, though.

    Pierogi is a similar story to ravioli, even if it feels less "noodle"y to me.

    Other dumplings it depends. Chicken & dumplings’ dumplings for example definitely aren’t, as that’s usually leavened (and even when the aren’t they’re still quite bread-like). Bao isn’t for similar reasons. Gyoza if steamed/boiled is again like ravioli, and I’d still describe it that way if pan-fried but only because of it’s resemblance to boiling it.

    Point is, the american english definition of noodle, or at least how I use it as an american, is boiled, unleavened dough. When you see americans refer to some food as a noodle it’s more often a textural distinction, not a shape one (even if most would consider noodles to have a canonical shape, which is why the OP feels the need to clarify sheets).


  • I wouldn’t say that it’d be strictly impossible, however if it can be done then it would come at a considerable cost to useability, versatility, etc.

    One adjacent concept that comes to mind is the use of the :visited CSS tag to extract a user’s browsing habits. I remember seeing a demonstration of this where an “are you human” captcha was shown but the choice of image in each box was controlled by the :visited tag. I can’t find that post, but this medium article demonstrates a similer concept. There are mitigations to this luckily, but a fullproof solution would be to remove the tag’s functionality altogether, which would make certain websites (like the one we’re on right now!) much more inconvenient to use.

    It seems trivial to me for a website to detect user behaviors that indicate the use of an adblocker. For example, if a request for a page is immediately followed by a request for a video on that page, rather than after 5-60 seconds, then they’re likey using an adblocker. If there is an ad placed between two paragaphs in an article, but two distant paragraphs are visible at the same time, it is more likely (although not guaranteed) that they are using an adblocker. If a user triggers an abnormal amount of those heuristics then they get flagged as an adblocking user.


  • The thing that finally got businesses to finally get off IE wasn’t from the browser being worse than every other option. Heck, it wasn’t even because it was a decrepit piece of software that lost it’s former market dominance (and if anything businesses see that as a positive, not a negative).

    What finally did that was microsoft saying there won’t be any security updates. That’s what finally got them off their ass; subtly threatening them with data breaches, exploits, etc. if they continue to use it. I don’t see google doing this anytime soon, at least not without a “sequel” like microsoft had with edge.