yukichigai

If you want to bypass grinding entirely then you’d need something like that, but it might trivialize certain parts of the game. Won’t trivialize all of it though since several of the key fights rely on strategy.

That was someone’s insane interpretation of the ending of the first Mother game (a.k.a. Earthbound Beginnings). It’s not as out there as the guy who filled the Silent Hill wiki with claims that it was all symbolism for circumcision trauma (yes, really), but it’s still kinda nutters.

Yeah, you do have to grind a bit. Nowhere near as much as some games (looking at you, basically every Final Fantasy game) but the leveling is designed around you doing some extra fights for XP. Every new area generally has a “grind spot” that is moderately to incredibly obvious, typically some grouping of enemies that are enough to fight but not enough to overwhelm you, placed within reasonable walking distance of a bed, hotel, or other way to refill your HP/MP for cheap/free.

For the first town, before you take on the punks roaming the streets you should get some levels fighting crows, dogs, and snakes up near your house. Once you can kill them in two turns or less head into town and try taking on a single punk. If you survive that fight without being nearly dead, keep fighting punks. If you almost die, go heal up and farm a little more. And if you DO die… well you only lose half the money you have on you, so as long as you keep most of it in the ATM you haven’t lost much of anything.

EarthBound was the first JRPG I ever completed and the first JRPG I ever enjoyed. Before it I’d never been able to get into JRPGs: there was just too much complexity while also having too little going on. Wandering an overworld only to be randomly pulled out of it for no apparent reason was maddening. As a kid, trying to piece together the backstory of some undefined thoroughly detailed fantasy world while also taking in the emerging plot in the opening sequence wasn’t anywhere near as appealing as firing up Mario or Mega Man and getting straight to the action.

EarthBound neatly sidestepped all of the things that had stopped me from liking JRPGs. The equipment system was simple without being braindead. The setting was a pastiche of suburban life that I could easily understand. The stakes were high but the tone was still whimsical and amusing. And above all I knew why I was suddenly getting dragged into battle with a snake or a crow or a dog instead of just being clotheslined by combat.

EarthBound still is my go-to recommendation in the (increasingly unlikely) event that someone says “I’ve always wanted to get into JRPGs, what should I start with?” It is the perfect “intro to JRPG” game without feeling trivial or like it cannot stand on its own. It singlehandedly made me love the JRPG genre, and I probably would not have played literally every other JRPG I’ve ever played if it wasn’t for EarthBound.

If you’re going to have a shitty anticheat at least give people the option to play in anticheat disabled lobbies.

This, a thousand times. I can understand requiring anti-cheat for Ranked matches, but some of us just wanna screw around. If there’s no progression tied to the match why should they care?

(Microtransactions, if I had to guess)

The “distributions” argument always smells like bullshit. Developers actually interested on supporting Linux usually stick to one or two distros of their choice. (Typically Ubuntu.)

My thoughts exactly. It is not unheard of at all for Linux ports to only be guaranteed to function on specific distros. It’s well within the realm of possibility and this is not a real stumbling block at all.

Try to see if there are any that do that little Javascript-evaluation-to-render-the-client-side-site thing, and if there are, have them mine cryptocurrency for you.

Using your evil powers for good I see.

YMMV wildly. Walmart of all places generally has a good ratio of self checkout to actual cashiers, but there’s this annoying trend with a lot of the local stores where they have only 4 self checkouts period but will only ever have one, maybe two other checkout lanes operating. Doesn’t matter if there’s a line stretching the full length of one of the grocery aisles, 2 non-self checkout lanes and that’s it.

I think the analysis is correct in that the implementation will die in committee before ever making it to effect, not to mention the practical considerations of implementing this in the lighting-fast timeframe of 3 years. However, I cannot help but point out this part:

So far, not a kill switch, but some kind of technology to detect if you’re driving like a drunk person and disable the vehicle.

“Disable the vehicle” is literally what people mean when they talk about a “kill switch”. At best that’s an argument over semantics. The law mandates a thing that deliberately stop your car from functioning. That’s a kill switch.

They’re more like AndroidTV boxes with a full menu and HDMI-CEC support, only they came out back in the day when Chromecasts were just for casting. They were also dirt cheap; unfortunately that’s because they were made with bargain-basement parts which often failed or started to overheat easily a few months in.

Funnily enough I think the percentage use of adblockers is going to go up a fair bit thanks to what Google is doing. My amazingly sweet “just go along with anything” MIL actually complained to me about YouTube ads the other day, then ads on websites in general. She jumped at my offer to install a different YouTube client and a good adblocker once I explained that it was a possibility for her tablet.

If they wanted to pull this off they needed to do it quietly, not draw attention to the fact that adblockers exist and are apparently so effective they need to do something very public about them.

You would think, but the number of people I’ve met who surf the web without any adblockers at all and just seem fine with it is alarming. I think Google is counting on a lot of people just not knowing any better.

Won’t stop me from informing them otherwise though.

if it’s not a thing now could it become a thing a decade from now?

Nope. “MAPS” is in the same vein as “attack helicopter” and “bathroom rapists”: it’s just another attempt by bigots to invent some “evidence” that the LGBTQ+ community is actually deluded/dangerous/evil/etc.

There was a post yesterday saying that the price of YT Premium Family in Australia is almost literally doubling next month (+88% IIRC). People from a few other regions reported similar. Completely insane.

I commented elsewhere, but the headline was referencing an 80% rise in uninstalls during the month, but the article itself revealed that there was a matching rise in installs during that same month. In other words it was people uninstalling their old adblockers and installing a new one, cycling through them to find one that worked.

The content creators get paid the exact same whether I skip the sponsor segment or not. YouTube doesn’t track that, or not in a way they share with anyone else at any rate. Sponsors aren’t going to pay the content creators less due to skips since they literally cannot see who skips the segment.

In other words, it doesn’t hurt the content creator in the slightest.

Sponsors don’t pay the creator less if you skip the sponsor segment. That’s not tracked, at least not in a way that google will share with the creator or anyone else. If that changes someday, sure, you have a point. For now skipping the sponsor segment is as harmless as skipping through the commercials on TV.

That article was full of such blatantly misleading crap. Headline talks about record number of adblocker uninstalls, but the actual data says it was an uptick in both installs and uninstalls. In other words it was people cycling through different adblockers trying to find one that still worked.

Various state and federal accessibility laws would’ve made that a very questionable decision for a lot of industries. Given that it would cost money simply to get programmers to implement and might lead to more costs from legal challenges I suspect a lot of sites like banks and the like would’ve avoided it.

Now when it comes to basically any news site, entertainment service, social media, online store, or anything else that makes extra money on ads and harvesting user data? Oh yeah, they’d implement it in a heartbeat.

Because this isn’t just about “making anything in return” any more than neo-Nazis are booted from platforms “just for having different opinions.” More people are using adblockers on YouTube because YouTube isn’t simply displaying commercial advertisements, they’re pushing “ads” for scams, malware, and all manner of heinous and/or sketchy content. Even separate of that, the frequency of ads and the presence of minutes-long ads you need to manually skip have made watching content difficult and unpleasant, if not unworkable. Adblocker usage is as much about restoring functionality to the site as anything.

All of these issues have been raised with YouTube, but rather than address the complaints by adjusting how ads are selected and served they’ve decided the only solution is for you to pay them monthly, not just a few bucks but as much as (or more than) the major video streaming services. All of this for content they do not make, at a price point far beyond what they need to be profitable. It’s greed for the sake of greed, pure and simple.