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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I said Noita is my favourite roguelite, but actually Heat Signature is probably tied with it. It has a completely different philosophy of soft failure.

    If your character dies in space, they’re dead, but they can also be captured, then another character can rescue them. And if a mission is going sideways, you can huck a wrench through a window and fling yourself into space, as long as you’re confident you can pick yourself up with your space pod before you pass out.

    It’s very fast-paced with quick runs. Each character that comes along has different traits, and you can have 4 different people on the go at once. Each character has their individual quest - which can be rescuing another character - and when that’s done you can retire them or keep them going.

    It’s very open to how you want to play.

    Oh! Also, if you’re trying to do your character’s big final mission and it goes wrong, usually you can bail and try again. I lost quite a few characters before I realised that.


  • I mean, I don’t know how much they anticipated. There are a lot of projectile path modifications that are clearly meant for tinkering, but the idea that they knew their players would do this is hard to tease out. It’s a simulation game built very much on “Things are what they are,” and they know this has deep implications.

    Like when I was turned into a sheep, I wasn’t “noita (sheep)”, I was just “sheep”. The noita I had been playing as was effectively stored in a state of nonexistence until the transmogrification wore off, then the sheep was replaced with the noita. So transforming yourself - or simply causing yourself to temporarily cease to exist - can be a way to eliminate side effects of certain things.

    If there is one thing that it might be worth spoiling yourself on, if you’re struggling to finish a run, is in the next spoiler.

    Tap for spoiler

    Learn to escape the Holy Mountain without collapsing it. Being able to return to edit wands, go back up in the world, and access health is a game-changer. Finishing the game without that trick is something I don’t think I’ve ever done.

    All the big lore stuff is discovered after finishing your first run anyway as far as I can tell.

    Other than that, I would look up how to design good wands. This can be a good thing to learn by doing for a while, but there are deep interactions that you could soend a thousand runs not learning. I think the shared science is a big part of what makes this game great.



  • My absolute favourite roguelite is Noita.

    Beware though, it’s quite different to other roguelites in that the world it creates is suprisingly expansive. You can get lost in it, mentally. There are quests that can take you dozens of hours to complete, all on the same run, and even if you become so absurdly overpowered that nothing can threaten you directly, till you can fly inside the sun, you can still get turned into a sheep and die in a single hit.

    Also the wand-building is complex, it’s like a programming language. People have built wands that can teleport you to parallel worlds, and the developers did not intend for that to be possible. And in a way I’ve never seen magic be done before, you can screw up and kill yourself with your wands, just like a discworld wizard. It’s so easy to do, it’s a rite of passage for any new player.

    Some people don’t like spoilers on this game so here you go, but honestly getting just a little spoiled made me get properly into it to understand what the hell people were talking about.

    Tap for spoiler

    I was maybe 8 or 9 hours into reaching the hardest boss in the game, up to NG+24 or so, just a couple of hours away from my destination. I was teleporting, had hundreds of thousands of hit points, had immunity to every kind of damage, could tear through the terrain like it wasn’t there, had weapons that would evaporate any enemy in the blink of an eye even as they became exponentially more powerful with each NG+ level, and I was being careful. I had even pacified the world so nobody would attack. Then some asshole dropped in from off-screen with a wand of transmogrification, got hit by the chainsaw on my tele wand and retaliated while something exploded nearby throwing fire over us, and I, now a sheep, flopped around impotently for a few seconds on fire then just fucking died.

    I… stopped playing after that one, I’ll be honest. But I will return.

    And rather than simply being repetitive, the way the world loops creates an ennui that’s kind of haunting to me. The whole game is littered with versions of people trying to achieve immortality, and if you manage to reach a point where you actually can’t die, you feel like you’ve soft-locked yourself, because dying is how you get to the end-screen. You can just end the run from the menu, but it feels fake somehow.

    10/10 would try to kill god and confront my mortality again.



  • These people just want to talk about gadgets and none of the political implications, even though those implications are unavoidable. They are the classic centrist “apolitical” people who don’t realise they have politics, but they’re just default status quo acceptance and ignorance of oppression.

    This is just an old man yelling at clouds. If the mods of this sub wanted to change the topics, they could, but it would probably tank the sub. The people complaining could start their own sub with their own rules, but I’ll bet it’s not nearly as popular. Plus it takes work, and people who think it’s a good use of their time to passive-aggressively whine about a sub they don’t maintain aren’t going to do that much work. They’re not cut out for it.


  • What if I told you that television shows were dangerous? It’s true. In the year 2000, four out of every five injuries occurred in a home that owned a VHS copy of Robocop III. Someone might say, “That’s compelling Robocorrelation, but that data alone does not suggest Robocausation.” Fine. But maybe your first instinct was to say, “Robocop III is a movie, not a TV show, you fucking dumbass.” If so, then congratulations, idiot, you’re a Technical Genius. You’re smart enough to spot a technicality, but too dumb to know everyone else did too and it was light years away from the point. You’re the kind of person who tells your doctor, “Um, it’s Chief Chirpa?” when he tells you that getting the Wicket doll out of your asshole will require surgery. “And, um,” you’ll add, “it’s an action figure? Maybe you should have gone to a non-stupid medical school.”

    The nice thing about being a Technical Genius is that it feels like proof you’re smarter than everyone. They can say you don’t “get it” all day, but they’re the imbeciles who think Robocop III is a TV show. Look at it like this: You are the only one in the history of Koala Times Bus Tours to contract syphilis from a koala bite. You might be embarrassed, but at least you aren’t like those other fools screaming “Don’t touch the koala bears!” when they are in fact marsupials. I mean, if koalas were actual bears, your whole face would be missing, not still here and covered in pulsing chancres.

    Technical Geniuses reach maximum annoying when they decide that pointing out technicalities is a sense of humor. For instance, if you announced, “My wife is pregnant and we’re having a boy,” a Technical Genius might quip, “Well, technically only women can have babies. Unless you count the Chief Chirpa action figure currently breaching my anus – um, which you should, since it is the dictionary definition. Heard of it? Hey, everyone! This idiot with no dictionary is watching me shit out a Chief Chirpa, and he doesn’t even know which gender gives birth!”



  • You know why villagers cause so much lag if there’s too many and they’re allowed to roam free? Well, rather than optimise their pathfinding logic they just… recalculate their paths every goddamn frame. They also take shortcuts in calculating their paths to reduce this overhead, so their movement is derpy and frequently kills them.

    You could make the path then record all the blocks they will interact with, and only recalculate if one of those blocks changes. Boom, millions of operations eliminated, and you’ve got some spare time to make sure the paths will actually work. You could also stagger pathfinding so if a bunch of villagers need a path all at once - like you just blocked a path to where they were all going - you could spread out that load, and prevent lag spikes.

    But they don’t do that, so people end up sticking them in tiny boxes on top of carpets so they stop trying to pathfind. Just absurd stuff.


  • Honestly the big mistake Starship Troopers made was making them win the fight. The only thing a fascist understands as a repudiation of their worldview is if it is shown to be weak, but beware, that will piss them off.

    And funnily enough, most corporate movie studios aren’t going to take a risk like that. Having a movie where we follow human protagonists to their defeat at the hands of aliens is not ever going to fly in most of the conservative US, so the studio will play it safe and pander to the fascists.

    Almost like fascists’ entire thing is just to worm their way into influence within a liberal capitalist democracy, and their actions are tuned very well to that end.



  • The definition of “mental health” involves a determination about whether a person is capable of carrying on normal day to day functioning, which is very much up to the person in question to define.

    Someone like Musk is rich enough that virtually no amount of inconvenience could stop him from carrying on as he wished.

    So basically, people who have more money have less mental health problems by definition, and the notion of mental health has been used to imprison inconvenient poor people without trial since its inception.

    Billionaires? Forget about it. They can surround themselves with sycophants and remove anyone they don’t like from their presence. They can have people killed if they feel like it, and there’s not a police body in the world who’s going to touch them.

    You need to forget the notion that they face any kind of accountability, from “friends” or otherwise.



  • I maintain that it would be relatively simple to create an open source version of an app/protocol like this that serves people’s needs for this exact use case, and if it were designed for any community to use, it could be essentially free as you say and high quality, and be a single point of service for everyone.

    If this were done right it could put all these thin platforms out of business and allow delivery drivers to establish fair terms for themselves.

    This would be a really good fit for federation I think.





  • Okay, I see. I’d say they might be obligated to behave that way to maintain plausible deniability. Like, if they admit they were selling a piracy service and users are entitled to a refund when the piracy gets stopped, then they become more culpable. It was always based on a thinly veiled deniability. They had to comply with occasional takedown requests for this reason.

    I don’t know what the laws are like in France but they may have been worried about jail time or extra fines, and the state would want them to not issue refunds because that would punish the pirates.

    Plus if you tried to sue them for it… what are the courts going to say? “You’re all pirates, get lost” is the best outcome you could hope for. I hate to say it but the de jure reality is that you were purchasing a grey-market product and the law won’t protect you in that case, and you quite literally were not purchasing a piracy service. You were purchasing hosting of torrents of an unspecified nature. That’s the risk you take on when you engage in what you have admitted is piracy. It’s very naive to expect you’re getting any kind of consumer guarantee in that case.

    I say that as someone who uses these services. I’m not saying this is right, I think copyright should be abolished, but we need to understand the reality of the system we’re under.


  • Yeah, I don’t think that person realises that regardless of how cold and impersonal the resources are, you still need people to get the resources, and those people need to live, and that requires infrastructure, and that requires an occupation, that requires a functioning society.

    If they go scorched earth, they get exactly that - scorched earth.

    Honestly though I think the goal is not really resources but, as all fascists require, to have a perpetual enemy and a war to fight. Without that the fascists’ obsession with a plot turns inwards and they eat themselves.