Before I played any of the witchers, I thought I’d REALLY like them, as the concepts and theme are right up my alley. But ultimately, I came away from the series with… it’s just alright.

The first game I bounced off many times due to how slow the start is, and it didn’t help that I installed a combat overhaul mod which makes the game WAY too hard. Once I got into the city or chapter 2, I started to enjoy it, but ultimately gave up on it in the second city due to the combat (moral here, play with vanilla combat! Probably would’ve had more fun). The story was alright, but didn’t grip me too much.

Witcher 2 I managed to beat. The combat was fairly decent, and I thought the story and pace were a good improvement, with a beginning that was interesting in its own right. I was quite impressed with how much your choices could change things, and really got into the dice poker. I don’t have too much bad to say about it, other than being disappointed that so many of the choices didn’t matter in the 3rd game.

3rd game I bounced off similar to the first. I completely cleared out the first area, which left a bad taste in my mouth. I felt the game had unfortunately inherited that sorta directionless feeling so many open world games have, and found a lot of the side content to feel like filler, while the main story was utterly failing to grab me, and I bailed only a few hours in with the baron that has a problem with the baby. I utterly hated that POS but was forced to help him to continue the story, only for him to give a breadcrumb at the end, sending me onto the next breadcrumb. Progress in the main story just wasn’t feeling meaningful, and ultimately I just didn’t care about any of the characters, and gave up to play something else.

I may have enjoyed the 3rd had I given it more time, and I may have gotten further in the 1st had I not modded it, but with the 2nd game just being ‘good’ but not blowing my socks off, I figured I’d experienced enough to not really have much desire to go back to it.

Shareholder Blight?

What term would you prefer?

We’re getting closer every day.

What thing are you referring to?

Yes, it’s unfortunate it didn’t have a positive effect long term due to being coopted. :(

As people are going to continue to use twitter style websites until they fall out of fashion, I figure its best if that twitter-like is at least not controlled by people who can go rogue and do severe damage to society, such as what happened with twitter.

We realistically can’t ban them, we can only mitigate the bad. Personally I don’t use twitter style social media, only Lemmy.

Enshittification is specifically how something inevitably gets worse and more anti-user due to pressures from capitalism/shareholders/profit incentive.

Rot, at least in my mind, is not that specific. It could mean the codebase is not well maintained and slowly failing, as an example.

It’s unlikely it’ll go back in the bottle, and that style of social media is capable of facilitating positive social change (Arab spring as one example) that may not have been possible without it.

There’s a quote from Eric S. Raymond about the issue of getting people to switch to something better (in this case the OS Plan 9) if there’s already something that’s fulfilling the need just enough that it becomes difficult to get anyone to move.

it looks like Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.

The fear now is that people will just switch to Bluesky until it becomes like Twitter, and it’s not a guarantee that Mastodon will be next in line. It could be another closed service that’s primed to take its place, and thus, the cycle continues.

The letter is suggesting that the vote counting machines were compromised, adding fake digital votes to the total after it had counted all of the real physicsl ballot votes. The letter suggests that a hand count of the physical voted would show the manipulation, because the extra digital votes would not show up in the physical ballots.

I’m not experienced enough to know for sure if those claims would truly hold water, but to my layman mind, it sure does sound like a compelling case to at least do a hand count.

Python Crash Course by Eric Matthes is a supremely good book to start with for an absolute beginner, and I would recommend it over Automate the boring stuff (that would be a great followup though!).

It assumes absolutely no prior knowledge, explains concepts extremely clearly, never presents too much to overwhelm and frustrate beginners, and includes a good range of projects that should interest any perspective programmer.

Have they tried raise VAT and kill all the poor?

Glad you found it helpful! It’s a shame that PFAS isn’t going to be banned for general purpose uses anytime soon, it’s so damn dangerous for the benefits it brings.

Reminder to sign Ross Scott’s StopKillingGames EU Citizens Intitiative (which carries legal weight if it reaches 1 million) if you’re an EU Citizen! Ubisoft killing The Crew is what kicked the whole thing off.

To someone politically literate, that much is clear as day.

For the average person, they are easily tricked by false promises that the right will do the opposite. :(

Neoliberalism utterly failing to staunch the ransacking of the working class due to capitalism

”Why is the right gaining momentum???"

Smoothbore musket was the standard issue firearm during that period, with a smattering of rifled muzzleloaders as well.

Just to clarify, I did not post this as an allegory for the election loss, we don’t need any myths to soothe our conscience. It just popped up in my subscriptions and thought it was interesting enough to post.

If anything, I think its conclusion about feelings and beliefs ultimately trumping objective truth is quite applicable to MAGA.

Maybe I misinterpreted what Feral was getting at, but at least from my reading of it, he’s saying the myth was ‘half-true’ in the sense that that propaganda was effectively sold to the lowly enlisted/conscripted men to give them self-justification to fight. Whereas the truth was indeed that the whole thing was just for slavery. The myth then became even more useful after defeat to help them accept it ‘honorably’. His conclusion about what people believe and feel ultimately having a larger impact than the actual truth seems to confirm that reading, but I could be wrong.