sailsperson

Starfield is a classic case of some misleading marketing on purpose, and, well, it just falls into the perpetually doomed category of games/media that will always suffer from extremely high expectations: sci-fi/space/cyberpunk. The imagination wanders especially far with games like these, and there’s little to none us, the consumers, and they, the devs and publishers, can ever do about it.

That being said, you’re right in not praising the game. It’s a niche fun in my opinion, and only shines if you take it for what it is, but not for what it seemed to have been marketed as.

TL;DR Stafield is a Bethesda game through and through, but with a coating some Microsoft PG-13 “play it safe” attitude.

That’s what I was going to suggest as well. Basically, the planets and whatever is on the could benefit from a greater degree of procedural generation, even if as trivial as variable room layouts, but a deeper system (variable objects, contents, colors, designs based on the module manufacturer like with ship habs, etc.) would greatly remedy the repetitiveness, as with the current system, you’ve basically seen all the POIs or the type once you’ve seen one of them.

Planet surface is nice, though, because I agree with Bethesda’s idea of barren and deserted planets being much more prevalent than those that support any kind of life or even atmosphere. Elevation and scenery changes are also fine by me.

But still, POIs are oddly repetitive, even if somewhat numerous. They definitely should’ve gone for the more roguelike approach or something and use more proc gen with these.

Microsoft will likely do fuck all and have us all rely on third-party solutions.

Sometimes you also think that you’re the one who’s got it all figured and can provide something so insightful, so powerful, so eye-opening that you’re going to change someone’s life, and consequently, the world, for the better - we like to feel special and big, but we’re not.

People who dislike these videos and comment on them to say that the perpetrators are morons also contribute to the tractiosn it gains because algorithms love engagement, corporatations love engament, so they’ll happily show the videos to more people in the vicious cycle of engagement.

I think it’s more of an ego thing. The people with healthy egos probably never end up as execs in companies as big as Reddit, and the people that do are likely driven by something else other than the desire to actually build a platform that respects its users and works well in cooperation with them - “I’m smart, I’m sexy, I know better than these plebs making us money”.

I wouldn’t count on big companies ever going that route, to be honest. The decision-making people there will likely never trust Lemmy or similar software enough because it’s not like them - not proprietary, not closed source, so they’ll keep wasting money on making their own shitty websites with their own shitty forums if they ever want to give their communities an official place to hang out.

Next we need politicians and policy makers putting their fists to work instead of sending others, preferably in taxable ways, too.

One could dream.

YMusic is great Android app, too. It’s mostly intended for being able to properly use your phone when you want to focus on the audio, i.e. you can freely disable the screen, browse other apps, set timers, tweak the built-in equalizer, that kinda stuff, but it is perfectly functional and complete video player for YouTube as well.

And it doesn’t roll YouTube ads.

As far as I know, it’s not entirely about some purism ideal they have in mind - the difference between the two nvidia camps on Linux is the functionality you gain with both drivers, and the proprietary driver is simply more restrictive, so, yeah, I agree that they have a point.

This is the reason I know very well that my next GPU is going to be an AMD one (given that their hardware has proper open source source by that time, that is). I bought by GPU back in 2017 or 2018, I think, a couple of years before using Linux and even considering it - had I known that today’s me was going to run LInux, I would’ve gone for an AMD GPU right away.

Even skipping the Nvidia driver debates, the AMD hardware has been a much more consistent and pleasant experience for me on Linux overall across several AMD-based laptops that I have installed Linux on. While I did manage to get things going on my desktop that has an Nvidia GPU, it definitely caused me more headache than I expected.

Here’s my config (no hardware):

• OS: Arch
• Kernel: linux-zen
• Window Manager: i3-gaps
• Compositor: picom

I’ve been running this for several years now across multiple PCs, all with different hardware, including Nvidia and AMD for graphics, and Intel and AMD for CPU - and it’s been working really well for me right up until recently.

After this paragraph, I will talk about the issues I’ve exeprienced as a gamer using my particular config. Please note that it’s just a couple of minor issues, and the rest of the experience has been more than wonderful, convenient, functional, and beloved, and I do recommed Arch as a gaming setup as someone who’s been running it to play games for several years in a row.

The most recent Steam Next Fest (June 2023) has revealed several demos that behaved like they launched, i.e. Steam changed my status to “in-game”, changed the Start button in library, updated the playtime properly, etc., yet the game did not, in fact launch at all. I managed to play the affected demos when I switched to the KDE Plasma desktop environment on the same PC… and back on the same config after that as well.

I would consider that a one-time error that was gone by, essentially, reloading the X server, but there’s been another consistent issue that I have only managed to observe in this i3+picom config. Ever since Steam’s most recent UI beta, the floating elements, such as the buttons that let you install the game’s demo, wishlist it, or navigate the store by the tags applied to the same game, all of which appear when you’re hovering your mouse pointer over the game’s thumbnail in Steam, are basically ignored; when clicking any of them, the click registers on the element that is supposed to be underneath the element you’re actually trying to click: for example, if you’re hovering your mouse pointer over a game and want to click the green wide “Install Demo” button, which is floating over another game’s thumbnail, you’ll click that thumbnail instead and open its Steam page. This particular issue persists between full PC reboots, X server restarts, i3/picom restarts, etc., and never occured in XFCE or KDE Plasma.

As I haven’t been using any of the store features in Steam prior to the June’s Steam Next Fest, I failed to notice any of the above, but now, I can’t deny that it’s been annoying. I really like my current configuration for everything I’m doing at my PCs: it’s great for my work, it’s even great for my gaming, it’s great for my leasure, and I don’t want to ditch it, because I have already tried many other tiling window managers, and i3-gaps is the one that stuck with me the most.

Now, I know there’s sway, which is supposed to be a drop-in alternative, i.e. I can use my i3 config with it no problem, but sway uses the Wayland compositor, so I can’t run it as easily: I’ll have to set up the SDDM display manager instead of the dead-simple lightdm in order to keep the convenient multi-user setup I have, and probably sacrifice some of the performance my GTX 1080 has been giving with the proprietary drivers (I know, disgusting, but it has worked the best for my hardware as compared to the nouveau, unfortunately). I guess it’s just time for me to tinker again.

It’s not some exclusively Reddit behaviour - it’s just that much common, unfortunately.

Because people like to act shallow and just put other people into grouos they hate regardless of actually knowing anyone form that group?

Gee, that’s always works well for everyone.

Hopefully my experience can help some people see the bright side of going off Reddit.

To me, Reddit has been a great platform in almost every possible way - except meaningful engagement. At some point, I realized that any somewhat big subreddit that I frequented for news and discussions of topic I’m interested in is plagued by dead-end threads: karma farms through reposts, lame jokes and similarly low-effort content that’s breeds equally low-effort comments, and things that don’t provoke any sort of discussion in general.

Joining the protest made me go to difference places, especially forums big and small, where the only real way to engage with the community was to actually reply to what they said. I quickly realized that Reddit has long turned into another brainless scroller akin to Instagram or Twitter, which all may have their place, but that’s just not what I joined Reddit for back in the day.

Now that I’ve basically kicked the Reddit habit, I’m finally enjoying the Internet again - it’s not the same as it was in the 00s, and it will never be, but it’s much, much better than going to a single website, owned by a single company, for nearly everything I want to do online.

Today, I finally have a proper choice for the first time in years. A lot of that choice consists of the fediverse, with different scopes and goals, but some is just basic and mainstream places I’d forgotten because of the convenience that Reddit seemed to bring.

Today, I’m finally having actual conversations with people in the communities I choose to interact with, rather than just reading through the witty chains of comments.

I know that Reddit means different things to different people, but to me, it has lost its meaning long ago, and it’s only with the protest that I managed to kick the habit of going there for basically nothing. As surprising as it is, the whole thing lead me to enjoy my online life much more, and actually engage with the topics on the old, deeper level of fun, rather than just being exposed to an absurd amount of things, each pretty shallow and uninspired.

This wad made me feel like it was going to be a great Spooktober material, but now that’s so many people played it, commented on it, and loved it, and now John himself is playing it, I really wanna play it myself and join the still fresh talks.

On Doom, no less, the game that breathed in so much life into the FPS genere and thus modern gaming as a whole, released back in 1993, and yet still active and alive thanks to its community! I love modding!

I think it’s good that they went for a seemingly small period, at least at first. This is a great way to convince the users to join the protest, which is the fuel of it, as asking so many people to forget about Reddit for longer easily could result in more people ignoring the actual boycott because of the scale of the change to their internet habits.

Having many services welcoming redditors is a great help, of course, but it’s much easier to convince a large number of people to keep the protest going now that many have found alternatives they like - perhaps some won’t migrate completely, but they may use Reddit less as a result. The amount of these people could have been significantly lower had the people had to consider going off Reddit for a similarly significant longer period of time.

The 48 hours of boycott may seem like a small step, but this step is a stepping stone to huge impacts later on, as we’re already seeing by the attention the whole situation is picking up.

We’re far from the credits roll in this movie.

You think you choose the distro, but distrohopping clearly shows that it’s the distro that chooses you when you finally stumble upon the right one.

Arch here. I heard it’s like Manjaro without the headache!

I kinda owe this whole protest the fact that my most recent complaints about the internet have finally found an answer in the shape of many place I have discovered, like Lemmy and its instances, Kbin and its instances, Matrix and its instances…

I am finally feeling a little more like I used to when I browsed the internet in the 00s, when I just had so many different places to go for different things, rather than just being actively manipulated into staying in one play that “has it all”. Sure, the fediverse, too, may have the same effect, but its instance actually feel different, and I think I’m seeing different kind of content as well.

There are things that I consider dear to me about Reddit and the communities I discovered there, but if its decline means that I stop mindlessly scrolling it trying to find that “final” stimulation for my brain, and instead start interacting with actually interesting, human-like, and though-out content, then the sacrifice is well worth it. Life changes, and the good changes should be welcome, even if they result from something less than pleasant like this.

I have always played RPGs from the good guy perspective - responding to the calls for help to actually help, risking my life for the strangers’ wellbeing, having a rigid and perfectly calibrated moral compass, all while being an emotionally complex and multi-layered individual…

Not in Starfield. Once I learned that it is possible to join the pirates, The Crimson Fleet, I knew that this is going to be my first time being an absolute scumbag. I’ll pick a backstory, traits, and skills all based around criminal way of life for one, and one purpose - for my own good.

I’m going to be a steel rat of the settled systems, and I salute your devotion to plunder.