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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Auto scaling feels good IF it encourages you to play smarter or adapt.

    Rimworld’s model encourages you to build the same death funnels/mazes on every single colony.

    Which I think is my biggest complaint. Okay, no, the edgelord bullshit is my biggest. My SECOND biggest is that Rimworld is just so clearly designed around an optimum path. Whereas games like Dwarf Fortress or Oxygen Not Included very much are about actually running a colony. Making sure needs are satisfied and prioritizing them. Not “oh. Okay. The game decided I had too much food stockpiled so five meteors just hit my solar farm”.


  • I want to like Rimworld but every time I even think of giving it another go it is like a massive wave of fans come out of the woodwork to scream about how they are all cannibals with slaves locked up to make pleasure farms and just… yeah.

    Also I am not a fan of the storyteller system. It is nice that you get some variety but it mostly just boils down to tedium (and I think most players just switch to Random Ricky or whatever so it won’t actively destroy their colonies?). And, overall, I don’t like that you can go from success to wipe in like ten days. I am not saying everything needs to be Dwarf Fortress “Oh… we have been in a fail state for ten years…” but I do prefer there to be a long enough time period to actually realize I done fucked up.






  • Financing can actually be an incredibly good idea if you expect inflation to increase at a greater rate than the interest. It literally saves you effective money.

    That said, it also tends to involve a credit pull (which hurts said interest rates) and becomes a monthly bill.

    So if you can afford the monthly bill AND it is a meaningfully large purchase AND you have every reason to expect inflation to increase more than the interest rate? It is actually a pretty good idea.

    For even a 200 dollar battle pass: no, it is not.



  • Understand the Steam Controller came out 10 years ago and was meant to be used in the decade or two prior to that when “real PC games” didn’t support gamepads. Contrast that with today where CRPGs and RTSes often have official bindings.

    There are two ways to use a trackpad. The first is to swipe (like a laptop trackpad) and the second is press and hold. For the former, the delta between where your thumb is and where it was is used to translate to cursor movement. For the latter, think of it like an analog stick. The center of the trackpad is 0 and your input is the delta between 0 and the location of your thumb at this moment.

    So press and hold lets it emulate an analog stick and swiping is very useful for moving a cursor on the screen. And there are/were plenty of ways to switch between the modes on the fly.


  • The bottle of water actually has real reasons behind it.

    For the scanners the TSA (used to?) uses, it is REALLY hard to distinguish between liquids. Water looks like shampoo looks like hot sauce looks like the magic binary liquid that Bruce Willies had to solve riddles to save Hey Zeus from. So a bottle of “water” actually is a big safety concern… yet apparently a quart of miscellaneous liquids totally isn’t and I won’t expand on that because I am already on too many watchlists.

    Which makes it kind of unique in that it is (was?) a very valid safety concern AND extra hilarious in that it highlights the theatre of it all because of that. It also gets MUCH MUCH funnier when international flights pretend it is about protecting ecosystems even though everyone just chugs their water or empties it into a bin.

    For funsies, the shoes thing will probably end up being a huge headache but has different rationales. Back in the before times, everyone had metal buckles and eyelets and so forth on their shoes. That… really hasn’t been true for over 30 years where shoes are almost all rubber and plastics. But the former would trigger the metal detector.

    That said? People who wear nicer boots still tend to have enough metal to trigger it (the bane of the pre-check line). So either they turn off the metal detector below the knee or EVERY queue is going to be the pre-check line at seatac.



  • Yeah…

    I liked the concept of GK and the core loop (particularly corpse handling) was great for plate spinning. But they just kept adding more and more and more. And it didn’t help that buying one “wrong” tech could mean you have to spend four or five weeks grinding enough research points of one color. Like, it is very much designed in the Call of Duty “number go up, bells and whistles” mindset.

    But I think my biggest issue was that it is… it isn’t an edgelord game but it definitely feels like it REALLY loves Family Guy if you catch my drift. So whereas a Stardew or even a Kynseed has a world that you care about enough to put the time in, Graveyard Keeper actively makes me want to just walk away from everything. And apparently there isn’t even any closure on the core story since they wanted to leave it open for a sequel.


    I think Dave the Diver did a much better job of just endless plate spinning. But I also noped out of that once I was up to like four different daily tasks, and three or four opportunity tasks, all while the story was being randomly padded out for no apparent reason.


  • I mean… if you look at what I bought in the past five years you would think everyone was obsessed with spreadsheets and 100 hour CRPGs. That doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of games are made with cross platform in mind and many historically “M+KB only” games have excellent gamepad support. Sometimes, annoyingly, only in the console build but…

    Yes. I do think Steam Input is awesome (even if it was basically just a cleaner interface to xpadder/joy2key). That isn’t the Steam Controller. The Steam Controller is what Valve was using to promote The Steam Machines which was their failed attempt at a console.

    Again, just to make this clear: I am not saying the Steam Controller was bad. I am not saying Valve is bad. I AM saying it was not “forward thinking” and was very much rooted in a PC gaming era that was ending as orders were being shipped out.


  • “ahead of its time” to let people play a game from 1999 is kind of my point.

    The Steam Controller was very much designed with 90s/VERY early 00s gaming in mind where you might have a closet full of controllers for every game you like. A wheel for racing, a HOTAS for flight sims, a different HOTAS for mech sims, a gamepad, a guitar controller, a spinning knob, etc.

    But it came out at almost the exact same time that the entire industry standardized on xinput with different face button labels. AND when xinput was making it trivial to just use that xbox controller on your PC.


  • Strong disagree. If anything, it was the opposite.

    The Steam Controller was AMAZING for playing games that did not have gamepad support. And I still think it is the best way to play Stardew Valley. But it also came out at a time when PC ports to console were more or less expected and even RTSes had gamepad support out of the box.

    At which point you have a controller that only makes sense for a very limited subset of games.

    That said, a Steam Controller 2 that is basically the deck minus the display would be amazing.






  • If trump/the fbi gave him a sufficiently exhaustive list of all of his children, I could see it. musk needs to get clean piss and spare organs from SOMEWHERE and it hurts his (father’s) life goal of single handedly making the (white) human race significantly balder in future generations.

    In all seriousness, the “noveau rich” (of which the child of an emerald mine owner considers himself to be part) tend to be obsessed with their children. They think they are feudal lords who are going to use their children as bargaining pieces. So they might openly hate their families even more than the “old money” families, but they consider them their strongest bargaining pieces. And since musk is both…