reddit: nico_is_not_a_god pokemon romhacks: Dio Vento

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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Well, there’s an oddly existential argument to be made that “funny” AI answers like this or adding a pot of Elmer’s Glue to pizza sauce to get the cheese to stick are valued. Simply because those are the posts I’ve seen from Google AI, and I’ve never touched the feature myself.

    By letting a language “speaker” learn from Reddit and forums, we created an approximation of “that guy who thinks he’s a comedian” because that guy is always there and always drowns in upvotes. Clearly, he’s a valuable part of the discourse!










  • Most "retro" games have been backed up but the definition of retro shifts all the time. You don't even need to go that far forward: the PS3 and X360 have a ton of missing stuff - games yes but especially DLCs and update versions.

    The pre-online era was "easier" - find each revision of a Donkey Kong Country cart and your job's done. Now, every game has 12 versions and casual pirates that "just want to play the game" only bother sharing the oldest and newest ones. There's content locked behind promotions and account bonuses. There's patches that alter or remove content (or patch important speedrun tech out of games). And the presence of online in otherwise single-player games is always going to be something inherently opposing preservation of the original experience - you're not going to ever get the same experience playing Wind Waker HD with Tingle bottles that I did because either the feature is dead or it's been reimplemented through something like Pretendo. And with a reimplementation, the source for the community posts is no longer casual fans taking selfies with bosses but instead comprised exclusively of tech savvy users who bothered to install a fake Miiverse on their hacked Wii U / emulator. You can emulate Demon's Souls (PS3), but you're not going to get the messages or phantasms from the original.






  • Their plan for when Fortnite stopped pulling in money was for their Epic Games Store (that they propped up by paying devs lump sums just to not launch their games on Steam) to actually make Steam levels of money because surely exclusives and freebies will make people spend money on their store. Turns out there's a lot of people that will never spend a dime on EGS, either because they won't install it or only use it for the free games.

    So all that Fortnite money they used to pay devs to not release their games on Steam ended up being a failed investment, and they've had to change their incentives from "we'll give you a huge lump sum that's about equal to what you'd have made with a successful Steam launch" to "well we'll give you a better revenue split if you launch exclusively on our store that guarantees you get 10% of sales volume compared to Steam". Turns out 60% of 1m sales is better than 80% of 100k sales.




  • The part that makes it confusing is that all of that also applies to a stiffer open-world western RPG like Fallout or Elder Scrolls. Nobody's calling Skyrim (or more recently Starfield) an immersive sim. Half-Life often gets included and that game is completely linear and your three interaction choices for combat are "shoot with gun (including wacky woohoo gravity gun)", "whack with crowbar", or "sneak/run past".

    Is Elden Ring an immersive sim?

    Honestly, the defining thing that modern "immersive sims" have that "rpg shooters" don't is usually just "physics gun". Gravity gun from HL, goo gun from prey, telekinesis in Dishonored. Sure it lets you "use the environment" instead of just shooting the zombie with a bullet, but you're often just using the environment as a bullet.



  • I don't run anything on the server because I don't need to. I have my home server mounted as a network drive in Windows, so I just point Kopia's database at a folder in there. It's stored as an encrypted backup, and I've got the config for Kopia backed up in a few places (and the encryption key as well) so if the worst case scenario happens to my PC I'll just reinstall Kopia on a fresh windows install + HDD, restore the config from the backup, then restore the backup.

    I also have a backup target to an older 8TB drive that I leave with a friend and update whenever he visits for extra safety, if my whole apartment with my PC and server burns down I'll at least be able to have an outdated snapshot and lose only a month or so instead of decades.