I’ve tried both. I think part of it is friction from little behaviors that I expect to be like Google sheets but aren’t. I don’t even know what they are until I hit some keys and excel does the “wrong” (but probably reasonable) thing.

I feel like Google sheets is a better experience than Excel, at least for my personal usage. I’m not enterprise though, and not trying to run it like a database or anything crazy.

It can get pretty crowded in some places at some times. Major transit hubs like Penn station, herald square, times square, all get pretty dense.

I’ve been working from home so I don’t need to go to the busier parts at often.

Do I just get one shot or can I keep trying until I get it right?

Basically anything that reduces Republican power in the US is probably a win overall.

There might be meetups near you doing games. There’s one here in NYC that’s very friendly I’ve been to.

There are dozens of us reading rock paper shotgun!

But yeah, the modern web sucks. It’s all soulless algorithms and profit/rent seeking.

Even if someone tried to make forums again, they’d probably fill up with AI slop.

Weird that it’s unsupported on steam deck. Doesn’t look that demanding technically.

I really liked CrossCode’s art and vibe and everything. The puzzles are good, too. But the puzzles are kind of hard in a way that tires me out.

I guess that’s how some people feel about dark souls. “Oh, I’m glad that’s over”. That’s not quite the vibe I’m aiming for.

Maybe I’ll play it with a friend who’s good at puzzles so I can just do the fighty parts.

I think the “they think they’re a hero but they’re just level 1” trope goes in the same bucket as “let’s make characters based on ourselves!”. Everyone comes up with it but it’s rarely as good as imagined.

This has negative appeal for me. I don’t want to buy slop in games. I don’t even want to use discord. It’s the children who are out of touch.

Now excuse me, I have to go yell at some clouds.

Yep. Feel like we just had some posts about this. People who write that kind of backstory should just write a book. It’s especially bad in games like D&D where you’re starting out as a level 1 nobody. Some games, even some games of D&D, start at higher power levels, so the story is at least mechanically plausible.

I’ve been pushing to add some basic checks on PR, and people are reluctant. There’s one repo that I’m code owner on so I spent the like 15 minutes to apply a code formatter and add a GitHub action to check. But on the main repo people are dragging their heels. I’m like just pick ruff or black and do it. It’s going to take like 10 minutes. I’m not asking for us to go crazy and add automated tests right now, but can we at least get something to verify the python code is syntactically correct?

The other day something went through code review until I looked at it and saw there was an extra (, and that shit wouldn’t even run. I’m like please please add an automated check. I’ll do it. Please.

I think a lot of people just aren’t familiar with how other places do software. This is the same place that was ssh’ing into prod and making changes right on the machine until like this month.

I’m kind of bummed no one at my job really does code reviews seriously. I don’t really get any feedback, so it’s hard to improve.

That’s also probably why the older code is an idiosyncratic mess of mutations and "oh yeah you need this config file that’s not in source control " and “oh sorry I guess I hard coded that file path, huh?”

I like a short backstory that provides hooks. “Disgraced son of a noble family that became a warlock when everyone expected a sorcerer” is fine.

12 pages where all the cool stuff already happened is bad. Write that as a book.

Difficulty settings are, first and foremost, accessibility settings.

I’m not opposed to more options but I think this tactic is distracting and generates more pushback than it wins converts.

Are games art? I’d say so, usually. Some are more like toys than art, but many have creative expression

If they are are, must all art be accessible to all people? Well, what does accessible mean exactly? To understand it completely? Then I’d say trivially no, because there are many books that are incomprehensible to many people. No one is going to say “House of Leaves” is inaccessible and the author did a gatekeeping by writing it as such. No one is going to say Finnegans Wake is ableist because it’s hard to understand.

Must all aspects of all art be completable by all people? I’d also say trivially no. You might have a segment in French that doesn’t translate well. You can dub it or subtitle it, but the original experience will remain inaccessible unless the audience spends years mastering French.

I bring that up because some games will have within the game, not a metagame menu setting, easier or harder routes. For example, Elden Ring with a big shield and spirit ashes is significantly easier than a naked parry build. Is the expectation that everyone should be able to finish in both styles? If there’s a hard mode, must everyone be able to finish it?

Should everyone be able to trivially 100% every game?

Personally I think the floor is everyone should be able to interface with the game. Change inputs. Add subtitles.

I don’t really think “I can’t party this spear guy” is an accessibility problem the same way “I’m color blind and can’t read the text” is.

But again, I don’t care if someone wants a god-mode with auto-parry. It just feels like it’s bundling some unrelated ideas together. You’re not necessarily disabled if you’re bad at parrying in dark souls.

I get my clothes from the thrift store. Sadly, even that’s getting more expensive. Used to be could get jeans for $5 and now it’s more like $20

There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

Buying power is down. If they want me to spend more, capital has to pay me more.

This is very heteronormative and gender binaried. Queer people exist and date.

That said, anecdotally, from the handful of women I’ve talked about this with: many don’t like making first moves on these apps.

Using dating apps is a skill, and if you haven’t been practicing sending messages you’re going to be bad at it. The vast majority of first messages I got from women were “hey”. Trash tier. Probably because they just haven’t done it very often.

Any time I realize the optimal path is really boring or tedious.

Like, imagine you could sell junk to vendors for money, but for some reason you get more money if you sell them one at a time. Spending five minutes splitting inventory stacks sucks, but it’s 30% more gold and that’s the difference between the cool sword or the basic sword.

A made up example, but hopefully gets the point across.

Related: long travel times with nothing interesting or challenging happening. I remember playing some shitty MMO and you had to like run through a building, go up an elevator, and down a long hallway every time you wanted to learn skills. Just five minutes of nothing. Gotta juice those playtime stats, I guess.

It’s different if there’s stuff to do en route. Monsters to fight or whatever. But when it’s just jogging? Very disappointing.