You know it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, right?

In the early design phase, for example, quick placeholder objects are invaluable for composing a scene. Say you want a dozen different effigies built from wood and straw – you let the clanker churn them out. If you like them, an environment artist can replace them with bespoke models, as detailed and as optimized as the scene needs it. If you don’t like them, you can just chuck them in the trash and you won’t have wasted the work of an artist, who can work on artwork that will actually appear in the released product.

Larian haven’t done anything to make me question their credibility in this matter.

Most of those games are no longer being sold outside secondary markets (used games, collectibles, that sort). Neither the publisher nor the developers will ever profit from a “legitimate” sale.

For other games that are still being sold on first-party marketplaces, which is more or less limited to Switch 1 games, you tell me why Nintendo deserves to be treated charitably.

This year I unsubscribed from FFXIV. Speaking only for myself, Dawntrail was a massive drop in nearly all aspects after Endwalker. The music and environment were great, I was positively giddy when I reached Solution Nine… but the characters are unlikable, the antagonist is boring and one-dimensional, there is hardly any payoff for setups, one of the most significant conflicts gets resolved with a fucking pep talk, most of the first half of the main story only exists to extol about how much of a chad the current monarch is. Somehow the second half gets even worse with multiple contrived plot points relying on characters being idiots and the player being a passive observer, including the reintroduction of a high profile issue that had been present for the entire DECADE of the game’s existence and resolved in a high profile way in Shadowbringers. Wuk Lamat was fine. Overused and dumb as a pair of boots, but fine.

I got to the final region, got the “I will now genocide the multiverse because my obviously unsustainable economy is running out of resources” monologue, and just stopped playing. Unless 8.0 sees some massive improvements, I have no plans to finish Dawntrail.

On the completely different end of the spectrum, Warframe is in the best place it’s ever been. The last four major updates (1999, Isleweaver, Vallis Undermind, and The Old Peace) have been fucking phenomenal, both in terms of story and gameplay. The Old Peace (released literally a few days ago) also contains the most valid crashout in history. Rap tap tap, little piggy. The new gamemodes are fun, fast-paced, and so far haven’t outstayed their welcome, although like always, I’m worried about their longevity since they’re essentially content islands.

Warframe’s music is exceptional. I’ll always appreciate the works of Keith Power (he gave us We All Lift Together and This Is What You Are), but the current composer Matt Chalmers has elevated the game’s music both in quality and variety. Starting with 1999, there are no songs that I ever want to skip, and that includes the virtual boy band. Even if you have no interest in the game, you shouldn’t skip the music: TennoConcert 2025 (Matt is the eternally chilled out dude who sings From The Stars), Tethra Jahrak, Lullaby of the Manifold, and (potential spoilers) Roses from the Abyss.

In terms of smaller games, I fell off the wagon and had several all-night benders in Factorio. If you’re anywhere near the spectrum, that game is like crack cocaine. I had a lot of fun in Project Wingman and the biggest furball in history, I replayed Star Wars: Republic Commando, and rediscovered my appreciation for games where the player is not the Chosen One. Against all wisdom, I finally played The Mystery Of The Droods. Even knowing what awaited me, I was unprepared for the absolute jank.

Drill holes in your CPU for better cooling!

(I’m not a lawyer, this comment should not be viewed as a credible source)

They probably mean professionals that are hired by clients on a retainer agreement as opposed to working for an employer on a permanent or semi-permanent basis. Legal advice, legal representation, financial advice, personal assistants, individual contractors, and so on.

One could make the argument that since the retainer is not an employment contract, and the retained professional is not one of many employees (instead usually individuals or small teams), then collective bargaining doesn’t make sense. The difference is that the retainer agreement is much more specific and favors the person whose services are retained, compared to employment contracts and labour laws in the USA. It’s also a legally binding contract and the client can be taken to court if it is breached (e.g. by withholding payment).

On the other hand, if those people are also employed by a company (e.g. a non-partner associate in a law firm) or employ other people in turn, then those people can (and should) also benefit from collective bargaining.

The problem is that syncing between devices is not implemented in KeePass itself but through an external tool (Nextcloud, Syncthing, or whatever else). The sync client will only see the ciphertext and won’t be able to tell which records have been changed, only that two different binary files have a common ancestor and are in conflict.

The most obvious solution is to lock and close the database when it’s not in use (which is a good practice from a security perspective too), and to sync immediately when it is changed.

ZSH still needs the completion data files to be installed. It won’t just magically know the completions.

Chemistry. Gets really dull without ions.

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tl;dr: yes, credentials are cached locally. https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/discussions/4676

The major downside to the single file storage used by Keepass is that it’s easy to accidentally create a conflict between files on different devices if they’re not synced immediately. Conflicting files have to be merged manually or data might be lost. I’ve run into this several times with Keepass + Nextcloud. In comparison, a central master database with local cache can resolve conflicts between individual records.

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Megaman hasn’t even done anything wrong (yet)… but we HATES IT!

!clem

Half-Life Alyx 2

losing integration because “containerized”

Bollocks. I’ve seen that many times with Flatpak (can’t speak for Snap), and every single time it was either because the packager failed to set up permissions or because the user messed with permissions that the application needed. Break off the tip of a screwdriver and it will no longer function as a screwdriver.

And I know you’re talking out of your ass because AppImage isn’t even sandboxed.

taking GBs of space

That part is true and accurate, and for a very good reason: dependency pinning. System packages can break if they don’t have the correct versions of shared libraries. If a package requires a very old version of a library, and doesn’t link it statically or supply it with the package, it can misbehave, have missing features, or refuse to even start. Flatpak (and probably Snap too, can’t speak for it) solves that by letting the packager specify (pin) the exact version of a dependency. If five separate packages require five different versions of the GNOME application framework, then they will download five separate packages of the correct version. AppImage solves it by being monolithic: everything is packaged together into a single executable.

Tailscale should work. It uses Wireguard and does some UDP fuckery to get around the firewall and NAT (including CGNAT). I can stream Jellyfin through it at 1080p native with no significant buffering, it’ll work for music.

Is this what normies feel like when Linux users tell them to just use Linux? I have some apologies to make.

My opinion is the exact opposite. Narrative games, even action shooters, need to have high action and low action parts in balance. If high action segments are excessive, it can lead to combat fatigue. If low action parts are excessive, the player gets bored and the pacing dies.

Half-Life 2 E1, the “Low Lives” chapter, has probably the most stressful combat in the game because the player has to balance so many things. Shooting the zombies attacking Gordon versus helping Alyx fight. Helping Alyx versus keeping the flashlight charged. Firearms versus explosive props. All of that in oppressive darkness. Combat fatigue sets in. The short puzzle segments, even as simple as crawling through a vent to flip a switch, are opportunities to take a breath, absorb the environment, and prepare for the next segment – especially at the end of that particular chapter, when the player escapes the zombies and has a chance to wind down.

At the same time, puzzles, by their slower nature, are excellent for delivering narrative and player training, and to let the player absorb the atmosphere. Alyx’s first encounter with the stalkers in “Undue Alarm” wouldn’t have had the same emotional impact if the player could just pop them in the head and move on.

In contrast, most of “Highway 17” is just a prolonged vehicle-based puzzle. By the time the player reaches the large railway bridge, they might be sick of driving. I know I was. It’s a relief to finally engage in some platforming and long-range combat while traversing the bridge.

So what are the narrative values of my two examples? The cinderblock seesaw in “Route Kanal” is just player training. A show, don’t tell method to let the player know that physics puzzles will be a factor. It’s also a short break after the on-foot chase, before the encounter with the hunter chopper. In “Water Hazard”, the contraptions serve a larger narrative purpose: they’re the tools of the rebels’ refugee evacuation effort. The player utilizes them like one of the refugees would have.

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It’s called lexical analysis or lexical tokenization. It existed long before LLMs (as long as high-level programming languages have, since lexical analysis of the source is the first step of compilation), it doesn’t rely on stolen code, and doesn’t consume a small village’s worth of electricity. Superficial parallels with chatbots do not make it AI – it’s a fucking algorithm.

Besides, there is a world of difference between asking a clanker to spit out a Python function that multiplies two matrices, and putting the knock-off Shadowheart from TEMU in a million-dollar game.