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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2024

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  • sufficient performance > sufficient beauty > power usage > max beauty > max performance

    This is basically alien to me. I think it has to be game specific.

    Euro Truck Simulator? Beauty is more important than performance, unless playing it on my handheld, in which case I can knock the FPS limiter down to 40 and crank the settings down

    Satisfactory? Performance over everything.

    Granted most of the games I play are older (so I don’t need to choose) or CPU-bound simulation games (Raising the graphics doesn’t make it run meaningfully slower if your CPU is the bottleneck).

    Although I must also point out that I think the current trend of “fidelity=beauty” is ridiculous. I recently played INFRA, a game built in Source, and while the fidelity was clearly “outdated”, the game looked fantastic.

    Plugging my system into a Kill A Watt was enlightening.

    Laptop gaming is a harsh but educational mistress re: power consumption (even when it’s plugged in), I’ll tell you that. All the heat you generate is right in front of your face, as is all the airflow (and noise) needed to wick it away.



  • Honestly I’d love to see more of this. Wheels and panels as well, not just gamepads. I’ve always wished for fully assignable controller support where the icon and HUDs etc change, ETS2 is looks so much better now that the icons don’t flicker twice per second because of my hodgepodge DS4Windows control scheme anymore. And with multi-button combinations and stuff making more things doable from the controller.

    I do kind of wish Steam Input was a separate piece of software though, sort of like Xpadder back in the day. Some kind of open button-mapping standard with an API and everything.


  • The standard resistor values are a bit weird at first but when you’re in the zone and you start getting used to what they usually are you start becoming relatively decent at making an educated guess for what the values should be. The actual IRL values are predictably defined and you start remembering the possible options over time.

    Someone’s probably made a program that can do it for you though. My own shitty circuits are all built from standard example circuits so I haven’t had to think about this stuff often. Or like I’ll mix and match them illogically in a pinch (on the breadboard) and figure it out later (I don’t build the final circuit lol). Or of course, the venerable using-a-potentiometer-exactly-where-you-shouldn’t technique, which is one of the pillars of modern engineering.







  • In no particular order, here are some games I’ve enjoyed most in the past decade or so (and found most interesting to shill to my friends):

    • The Roottrees are Dead (online sleuthing game, with a cool but slightly campy story, wears its Obra Dinn influence on its sleeve a bit too obviously for some people)
    • Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (Cities Skylines for people who understand economics are more than just dollar signs and tweets, it’s more like Factorio than SimCity)
    • Hacknet (Learn basic command line stuff in a game about hacking)
    • Duskers (atmospherically amazing game about controlling distant drones in hostile environments. Genuinely chilling)
    • Chants of Senaar (language deciphering game)
    • Outer Wilds (le le le dae hidden gem for a reason)
    • Dyson Sphere Project (more Factorio)
    • Satisfactory (you guessed it, more Factorio, but very different environment than most of these games)
    • Factorio
    • Shapez (minimalistic Factorio, with a less minimalistic sequel)
    • Nomifactory (Minecraft modpack that was formerly known as Omnifactory. It’s more Factorio.)
    • Curse of the Golden Idol (finally a good retro adventure mystery thing)
    • Return of the Obra Dinn (immaculate game.)
    • CHR$143 (Zachlike-ish)
    • Kerbal Space Program (my next obsession)
    • INFRA (one of my favorite games of all time, I’ve written about this extensively, a sort of urbex walking simulator with incredible atmosphere, deep deep lore, amazing world building, and light puzzles, that goes on for about 40 more hours than you expect it to)
    • Hexcells Trilogy (puzzles)
    • Hexologic (similar puzzles)
    • Baba Is You (puzzles that make you think you’re an idiot)
    • NaissancE (I don’t know how to describe this, I think it’s free)
    • Manifold Garden (you dreamed about this game when you were 8 years old, decades before it existed)
    • The Big Con (be gay do crime 90s)
    • Death Stranding (this game is so boring, I played it for 200 hours and got every achievement, I love it, it sucks)
    • The Forgotten City (this started its life as a Skyrim mod and still has that baggage)
    • Mostly Intense Monster Defense (PvZ homage)
    • The Witcher (1) (CRPG with a cool world. Needs a few mods to cut down on tedium. Pretty different from its sequels but it has a special place in my heart)
    • Binary Domain (absolute schlock, but from a previous era of gaming. Not necessarily a good game, but cool to see from a historical perspective.)
    • Cultist Simulator (needs an eternity of patience but I promise there is something in there)
    • SLUDGE LIFE (SLUDGE LIFE)
    • What Remains of Edith Finch (I fucking love walking simulators with good writing and cool art)
    • Promesa (obscure walking simulator, it’s barely a game, I love it)
    • CUCCCHI (check above description, same guy. Artistic showcase of a painter called Enzo Cuccchi. I’m not a modern art guy, but seeing these works contorted into worlds to walk through… a unique and interesting experience. Soundtrack is someone’s once-lost old experimental tracks and it absolutely slaps)
    • Please Touch the Artwork 1 and 2 (one of them is free, funded by the Belgian public art fund. Weird and cool)
    • Betrayal at Club Low (part of a series of games by Cosmo D, this one is different from the previous few. The first, Off Peak, is free, but it’s also the least polished. Astonishingly excellent music, there’s some cool lore in this series. The art style is a bit out there but this guy’s stuff is gold)
    • Engare and Tandis (mathematical patterns puzzlers, I promise they’re so cool)
    • What the Golf? (An actually good mobile game. I mostly played it with a controller on my TV lol)
    • Cities Skylines (my beloved)


  • I have watched a fair few nigh incoherent French movies with a plot that is simultaneously either the most complex or most banal story ever written (that doesn’t get resolved at the end). You could find me at the one specialty cinema in Beirut every other weekend before it completely collapsed financially in 2020 back when our economy did the funni

    I get that a lot of this is turning people off but this is shockingly accurate of a lot of mid arthouse stuff. It’s like trash TV but for movie tryhards. I love it. For the French ones, I almost feel like the experience is worsened by my grasp of the language.

    Since then I’ve all but stopped watching movies and even series and have moved to games full time. There’s so much more genuinely fun weird interesting shit.


  • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoScience Memes@mander.xyzNightmare fuel
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    7 days ago

    Horrifying. Thanks for the link, although to be honest I probably could have googled “fish tongue parasite isopod” at some point in the past decade+.

    Interesting that the Wikipedia page has photos that wouldn’t have rang the bell for me, the one I remember was exactly like the one in the post.

    Edit: the article describes a habitat that is pretty far from me, this was in Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean over a decade ago. Could be a similar species.


  • A foundational memory for me was a fish dissection in middle school in which we respectfully sliced the innards of one of these bad boys only to find this exact parasite inside. All the other groups just had a fish to dissect, but we also took a supercurricular lab detour to dissect that other thing too, as my classmates from other groups gathered around with real curiosity.

    Frankly haven’t thought much of it in years. Would be cool to know what this is actually called.





  • Here they are against Lazio, a club nicknamed “Nazio” for reasons you can guess.

    I know sports can be seen as dumb, I looked down on that whole scene for years and years, but even if the games themselves don’t mean much to you, it’s powerful to recognize how it moves people. Yes it’s historically led to hooliganism, but honestly, tens of thousands of fans go to games every other week, chanting in unison, it’s practically religion. Sport is part of life for a very sizable portion of the global population.

    A lot of good politics online is unfortunately represented by people who don’t go outside much. You want to mobilize people? The ultras know how. The far right has effectively exploited sports fans - why can’t we?