I believe the claim that Windows search is “indeterminate”, and won’t give the same answer each time. I’ve had things I’ve tried that turned out like that.

I could be wrong, I think it’s a rare case of a game releasing with zero levels. The idea there was to let people take it and make their own levels for it (which, I’m sure, many did)

Tunic is hard, and uses the Estus system, but it doesn’t take much on death.

Another Crab’s Treasure has an accessibility menu that lets you choose to return currency, make Kril invincible, or even give him a gun.

Stellar Blade has an easy mode you can choose, and no death penalties or retrieval. Although, even then, it can be a tough game.

I kinda like and appreciate the theme that:

• We should try talking things out with people
• some people will never accept any negotiation
• People (or demons) that don’t negotiate are the ideal candidate for violence

Doom feels so much more cathartic if you can gather a setup where all the demons deserve each ounce of pain.

Don’t forget their secret power; by their powers combined, they unlock the secret power of government tax breaks.

And, we can see a huge set of third party fromsoft games that are generally doing well, even after removing the bad parts. I wonder what that says.

I feel like another option for horror is to spam the effort. Literally have 5 to 10 studios all making horror games, with a fraction of the budget. One of the big successes in horror is that some of the best ones were made with large restrictions on technology, effects, budget, etc. If you search the “Survival horror” tag on Steam, there’s a pretty large wash of games succeeding in the space now.

You could also note how many “horror-focused” Resident Evil games go through some form of reset where you lose your buildup of equipment, or change pace. They recognize that the genre isn’t well-suited for a constant escalation of power until you fight god, the way JRPGs do. Thus, people who enjoy those games are more likely to munch through them like doritos. Many streamers even have nights where they will buy some half-dozen of the games on Steam and just keep going through them.

I remember back when I was more excited about getting into gamedev, learning C and C++ were some significant obstacles. Even understanding that I had to be responsible and direct about memory, the way they flub through so many template interfaces and spew out paragraph-sized errors made it impossible to contend with. I haven’t followed Rust, but I hope for a time that low-level code modernizes just a bit so we can stop abstracting our calculator apps with 4 GB of Electron framework.

If I roll 80 times on the latest gacha, I can pretend they’re real, and then they’ll immediately beg for my self-insert character to date them.

Or the org “No one should shoot anyone in the back”, every so often making a statement to gangsters, but having to spend most of its time pursuing cops.

Makes sense why the phrase is instead “ACAB”.

Been meaning to ask, I’m on a shitty Wordpress host that just lets me upload PHP; but what’s the cheapest kind of host that would actually let me do something like run a docker container?

Hm. This guy might have trouble against a higher-level homeless like Nanba-san.

No it’s not. Even animals fight over territory and property. There are cases of them sharing, yes, but they’re not the absolute norm.

I’d definitely claim exception there in cases when someone travels often. Picture a guy who’s going to study at the nearby university for one year, but isn’t going to put down any roots in the city.

But yes, I acknowledge that’s a comparatively uncommon case to most renters.

I feel like this is a time to vouch for an element of a story I’m writing.

In this world, there’s an Adventurer’s Guild. It’s named, and oriented, very much like the generic guild that appears in so many generic Anime-MMO medieval fantasy worlds. In it, travelers with weapons, be they swords or bows, complete missions for money.

As one would expect from that setup, the only people with money who ever hire the Adventurer’s Guild are wealthy merchants with cargo to protect, or land developers with an excuse to enact aggression on innocent people, or anyone who can veil their murderous intent with some legal excuse. The first way the story introduces them is that a city has contracted with the Guild to use them as extra peacekeepers, and it’s a horrible setup because they have no deescalation training. The guild itself lures in members with ideas that they’ll “take down troublesome animals for troubled townfolk” and maybe even sometimes have those quests, but primarily, most of the other characters in the story just refer to it as “The Mercenary’s Guild. Oh, I guess they call themselves Adventurers’ Guild now.”

It’s my way of getting people to analyze their desire to kill things for rewards, which is fine for a simple game made for children, but shouldn’t be part of your fantasies as you grow up.

Yes, but as it exists that distro is very dedicated to the task of supporting Valve hardware, and has done very little to generalize support to other generic hardware.

I imagine it would make a huge bump if Valve were to announce “Wait no longer, SteamOS is here!!”, even if their release is just an overnight reskin-fork of (Bazzite/CachyOS/PopOS).

I say this as someone who tries to tell people, stop waiting on Valve, and try out a few of the options. I’m glad I found a distro that works for me, but I didn’t enjoy the original search. I certainly got pressured into it as Microsoft really put as much effort as they could into making Windows as terrible as possible; and it was not “Everything works 100% out of box!” But the move was worthwhile.

It’s always “one little thing”, and often an OS-local feature that many wouldn’t be aware of.

eg, You go to your grandma’s to help with her computer. She mostly uses her web browser to check on news. BUT, she has one specific home-network file operation she performs regularly, using an old network drive that got set up decades ago by who-knows.

That’s one tiny example, but there’s hundreds of others around, and not from tech nuts. Someone has one specific VPN app they must use, on their personal device, infrequently, for work. Someone runs one app that still mentions Windows 95 compatibility. Someone with learning disabilities is very very used to the pattern of logging in, so much so that they’re confused and ready to call IT when they don’t get a Ctrl+Alt+Delete prompt.

Thankfully, those are often exaggerations, and it’s good that most people’s use cases for niche stuff has migrated to web apps. You’re right that a lot of people really do only rely on their web browser. These days, even Edge is “sorta” available on Linux if someone is that dedicated to their list of bookmarks. Just don’t expect it’s always as simple as people not finding the start-menu-equivalent.

Yup. I’m using my terminal every day, but I program for work and don’t mind a keyboard-friendly interface for a few forms of tinkering and program updates I’m doing. But even I wanted to prefer the GUI for common actions.

The stupidest reason I started going back to my terminal was, my GUI package manager didn’t have a “Select All / Select None” button for package updates, so if I only wanted to update one app at a time, I had to do it from the terminal. That’s not “terminal being awesome”, or “terminal being my preference”, that’s just lazy UI design.

YouTube has done a lot of malicious removal, but I’d be surprised if Windows 11 was one of those intentional targets. YT is run by Google, purveyors of Chromebooks; I’d think they’d generally benefit from a move off of MS/Windows.