• 16 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Wait, do digital cameras not do the red eye effect? Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve seen a photo with red eye in it in a long time, but I had always assumed that was a consequence of the camera flash, not the film…

    Edit: TIL that camera redeye does come from the flash, but it hasn’t been much of a thing these days because today’s phones/cameras adjust the flash timing to compensate. Thanks for the replies!


  • It’s important to remember that Jones is a grifter first and foremost. He has never sincerely cared about anything in his life beyond his own enrichment, and I don’t think this is a sign of him starting now. That said, I think it may still be significant that even hardcore grifters like Jones and Fuentes are starting to publicly speak against Trump. Grifters are always going to follow the money, so if Trump’s ship is sinking so fast that even Alex Jones sees it to be more profitable to start to move away from him, maybe the MAGA cult of personality really is starting to finally fall apart…

    Granted, that’s all speculation, and Trump has managed to defy every previous prediction of the fall of his influence, so I don’t want to jump to any conclusions here, but after the Canadian elections, I feel like I have a bit more reason to afford myself a little optimism for the future…










  • The spread of “skill-based” matchmaking and ranked competitive ladders largely took away a valuable communal aspect of online multiplayer games, IMO. Getting dropped into a match with a bunch of random people you’ll probably never see again just makes things so impersonal, which can cultivate a lot of toxicity.

    Some of the best times I’ve ever had with online gaming were from finding a dedicated server with settings I liked, hanging out there often, gradually getting to know the regulars, and becoming part of a community. I’ve never had that kind of feeling from a game with automated matchmaking.




  • Yeah, I’m… skeptical, to say the least. I don’t think any of these sprawling, massively-scoped “everything games” have ever actually lived up to the hype. It’s a problem of pure logistics. Making a game with so many different segments each with entirely unique gameplay loops is essentially like developing more than half a dozen games at once. It’s the problem Spore had - the scope was just too broad, and even with EA and Will Wright behind it, it eventually released as a pretty decent creature creator stapled to four shallow, rushed game stages.

    No studio has the resources or inclination to commit to the 10-15+ year development cycle for a single game needed to fit that much scope, and even if they did, the entire game design landscape would have changed between the beginning and the end of the project, which would make major technical and design components of the game obsolete before it was even finished.

    I’d put money on this game either becoming vaporware or releasing as a chaotic, disjointed mess with the depth of a puddle. I’d love to see them prove me wrong, but I just don’t see how anyone could overcome those kinds of logistical hurdles.













  • Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.

    “We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted.

    We’ll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather… makeshift, so I’m curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress’ engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I’m fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.