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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Except you also fell for the trap of pretending to be educated. The entire “how to use ‘octopus’ as a plural noun” is an internet clickbait phenomenon, and both linguists and communications experts have chimed in to say that language is not prescriptive based on supposed origins of words/phrases, but rather it is labile and the most correct form of communication is that which is most readily understood – therefore, they agree, saying simply ‘octopus’ or ‘octopuses’ is correct in English, as that is what English speakers already use.

    A word becomes distinct from its origins based on the context it is used in - i.e. we’re speaking English in the modern era, derived from generations of English speakers, and we are so far detached from any Greek origins in our language that it may as well not exist; these words have become English words through common use, and thus are subject to the grammatical rules of English. In the future, other words of varying origins with their ‘appropriate’ pluralizations and conjugations may be slowly overwritten by casual or undereducated use, adopting English grammar instead, and as long as that becomes the most common use, it is then the correct one.

    After all, language is for communication, and communication requires common understanding, so language is naturally defined by that which facilitates communication - not notions of history or propriety.


  • MantidSys@kbin.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldditch discord!
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    5 months ago

    Normally I’d say that reddit/lemmy are poor choices for a community - but if the competitor is a live-chat like discord? Yeah. Lemmy is better.

    Project leads would just need to make sure to direct users straight to a specific instance that allows instant/unmoderated sign-ups, or else that element of friction will occur – and certainly not start the whole “there’s many instances, pick the one that’s right for you!” spiel, or users will give up immediately. I thought similarly about matrix - on-boarding users to a matrix community would be helped by explicitly writing a guide for them to do so, but then we’re back to step 1, where making a discord channel is quicker than writing instructions.


  • MantidSys@kbin.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldditch discord!
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    5 months ago

    Everyone in this comment section is yelling about how bad discord is, telling people to use forums or matrix instead. No one is asking “why?”. Why aren’t people using forums or matrix? Because the path to user growth isn’t guilting people into the ‘morally correct’ choice, it’s making a product they want to use.

    Why are small communities using discord over forums? Well, we’re talking about small projects, hobbies, and volunteer work. Hosting a forum costs both time and money - renting server space and configuring/managing both the forum and the server. Making a discord channel is instant and free. You want your favorite project to have a forum? Then take up the mantle of hosting and maintaining it yourself. You want all projects to use a forum? Develop a forum system that you absorb the hosting costs for. Neither of these exist, so communities use discord.

    Why are small communities using discord over matrix? I’m in my 30s, I spend all day on my PC, I’ve taken a couple years of college courses in programming. Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program’s features and how to use it. It wasn’t impossible, but it took effort. Discord doesn’t. For every step of friction, a product will bleed users. Matrix is cumbersome to set up and use, and it’s copying something that already exists and does it better for the end-user experience. It shouldn’t be surprising that people prefer discord. Want that to change? Start contributing code to matrix and refine the user on-boarding process.

    Instead of stating opinions, ask questions. That’s how things get changed. No amount of moral grandstanding will change end-users, no matter how correct you might be.


  • Maybe. But multiplayer games exist. And people have a very high standard for what population a game must have for it to be worth playing. People will consolidate into singular pre-made titles, compromising on their desires like they do now, in order to have many other humans to play with.

    Maybe AI can be convincing NPCs eventually, but people will want to play games with their friends. They’ll find out eventually if another character is an NPC or human, and they will care.

    Even singleplayer games will be subject to this, to a degree. People enjoy playing what their friends play - they like having the same experiences, they like having something in common to discuss, they like the shared experience that brings a sense of community to the fans of a single title or series.

    Sure, people could make any game they desire, but it will be isolating. You’re underselling the social desires and needs we all have. Maybe we’ll end up with something similar to Garry’s Mod and Roblox: connected gaming hubs where people can load up any number of experiences - but still being able to include their friends somehow. I think that is much more likely than the concept of a person sitting in the corner of a room with their VR headset, wilting away in a world of their own creation, having lost all connections that would otherwise surround them. Humans naturally fight against that. We’ll experience things we’re not familiar with, as long as we’re experiencing them with other people.





  • Nah. I played before DPS/speed-clear meta and all the powercreep. When you actually fought the enemies, took damage, and didn’t die to one-shots. I enjoyed that, and the game has always been downhill. After 1,400 hours of playtime, I realized I was only playing hoping for it to feel like it used to, but it never came.


  • Most of what I see as ‘issues’ are personal preferences. Stuff like railroaded dialog choices even worse than Fallout 4, or stiff/awkward voice acting, or landing on planets being randomly generated despite claims otherwise. But as for actual issues, two things stood out to me: spaceship flight is very dangerous because bumping into things has a good chance of bugging the physics engine and killing you instantly (but other times, barely even registering damage). And seeing a player get stuck because they got a bounty without even knowing it, and then the bounty was making them shoot-on-sight by guards and them having no clue how to deal with the bounty. I’m sure there’s a perfectly simple way out of the situation, but without any communication to the player, that’s nothing but frustration. Add in broken NPC pathing/animations (people getting stuck inside objects like bar counters), making it all-too-easy to fall down ladder holes in ships, and horrible performance optimization (with Todd Howard being quoted telling people to just buy better computers), and I think it’ll need a bit of polish before really considering giving it a shot.


  • Well, sure. And Starfield follows in the wake of Fallout 4’s lackluster RPG experience, offering shallow conversations and the illusion of choice. After Fallout 4, I’m not sure I can get myself to play another game modeled after the same system of “Would you like a quest? [Yes/Yes but sarcastic/One question first then yes/Maybe later]”. If the story is railroaded, Starfield and NMS aren’t too different then - there’s a main quest line, with things to learn and people to meet, and you check off the boxes until it’s done.

    But as to whether they should be compared, I think it’s unavoidable. There’s too much overlap, and no other games like it. Games in which you can customize a space ship, explore thousands of planets, make a home base on any planet you want, and are incentivized to explore and find new places and meet new people? NMS, Starfield, Elite Dangerous, maybe Star Citizen. With some similar gameplay elements and a small pool of games, comparison is natural and expected. Nothing wrong with that.


  • Fair enough, but there’s a difference between reading headlines/articles to make a judgement, and watching actual real-time gameplay for several hours to make a judgement. The only difference was that I wasn’t the one holding the controller. If several hours of uninterrupted unedited gameplay isn’t enough to make a surface-level observation, I’m not sure what is.

    Plus, I was just saying how what I saw made me feel, and I said I’d rather play one game over another. If we want to talk about unnecessarily strong opinions, let’s start with you attempting to shut down my honest two cents to reinforce your negative worldview. Let’s all be kind to each other, okay? :)


  • I haven’t bought Starfield, and I don’t plan to, but I watched some gameplay and… Well, the game is a pile of issues. And the few bits that are acceptable are bits I’ve already seen from NMS - and their implementation is usually better than Starfield. So as I’m watching Starfield footage, all I can feel is a desire to reinstall NMS and play that instead… And I’m not even a big NMS fan. It’s not a good sign if your ‘revolutionary’ game already feels beat out by competition that had existed before your game was even halfway in development. Bethesda had all the time and manpower in the world to compete with NMS, and still fell short.


  • That was a >100gb download that took the moderators time to download and test. And the admins weren’t involved. All the claims of admins backing the torrent or deleting comments has had zero proof, as it was all hysteria drummed up by the psychotic cracker called Empress, who has had a long standing imaginary feud with 1337x.

    1337x can have malware in anything, as anyone can upload. The volunteer moderators downloaded and tested it as soon as they could. I’m sorry some people downloaded it faster, but there’s no conspiracy here.


  • /r/Place has always had massive country flags whenever it ran. But the way I see it, the largest murals need the most people working on it, and getting many people involved means having them all be connected in some way, and country-of-origin is the easiest way to do that. Combine that with the fact that the biggest non-English communities on western social media like Reddit (and Lemmy too, now) tend to be German or French, and it’s no surprise that the two largest murals are those flags.
    You’d wish people would find something else to represent them and have fun with things like this, but people gravitate towards the largest groups they feel a part of. Low hanging fruit, I suppose.