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xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
  • Wait, Verlan is l'envers, stromae is maestro... Is this Verlan thing just like Rioplatense Spanish's Vesre? (Vesre basically means revés i.e. inverse)

    EDIT: Just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out this phenomenon happens in a number of languages: Riocontra in Italian (riocontra -> contrario), Podaná in Greek, Šatrovački in Serbia, Totoiana in Romanian.

  • We have to stop ignoring AI’s hallucination problem
  • Maybe on Lemmy and in some pockets of social media. Elsewhere it definitely doesn't.

    EDIT: Also I usually talk with IRL non-tech people about AI, just to check what they feel about it. Absolutely no one so far knew what hallucinations were.

  • Man who revealed what it was like 'being ugly' on YouTube finds love with woman who commented
  • It’s one of the ugly truths of human existence, that most people won’t admit.

    I don't know, whatever social media I go this kind of comment tends to be one of me most upvoted/liked/shared ones, always. Don't think it's an unpopular statement at all. In my IRL country it's also an understood truth, there's many common sayings that allude to it. Maybe it's different in some countries like the US (maybe its puritan roots lead to a more euphemistic approach? I don't know).

  • Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability.
  • I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice.

    Absolutely. I enjoyed and played a lot out of King of Dragon Pass back in the day. Yesterday I sat down to finally play its spiritual successor Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind. From what I remember from KoDP it plays exactly the same (at least during the first hour). Yet I couldn't force myself to keep playing it. Same way nowadays I can't seem to get hooked with genres I used to play a ton as a kid: RTS games like Age of Empires II and Warcraft 3, life sims like The Sims, point & click graphic adventures like Monkey Island, traditional roguelikes, city builders, etc. Other genres I try to get back into and I do manage to play a ton of hours of but I'm never able to finish like when I was young (e.g. JRPGs)

    When I try to play many of those games I tend to feel kinda impatient and wanting to use my limited time to play something else that I feel I might enjoy better. A good modern 4X game with lots of mod support like Stellaris or Civ6 instead of RTS games which have always felt a bit clunky to me. Short narrative games like Citizen Sleeper or Roadwarden instead of longer ones I'm not able to finish. Any addictive modern roguelite, especially if it features mechanics I particularly like (like deckbuilding and turn-based combat). If I ever feel interested to play a life sim or a city builder nowadays it has to feature more RPG elements and/or iterative elements and/or deckbuilding and a very compelling setting to me. And so on.

    It feels like many of the newer genres (or the updated versions of old genres) are just more polished and fine-tuned than genres that used to be popular in the 90s and the 2000s. They just feel better to play. And to be fair in some cases they might be engineered to be more addicting, too. Like, I did finish Thimbleweed Park some years ago but I feel like nowadays no one is going to play witty point & click graphic adventure games with obscure puzzles if they can play a nice-looking adventure game filled with gacha waifus.

  • Like surely you must have acquired a clue by now.
  • cultural marxism

    As someone who lost a friend to that rabbit hole, I really think we should put that far right conspiracy theory between quotation marks when named alongside things that actually exist. Communism and feminism are real (even if they are perceived as demonic by these people, they still at least exist). "Cultural marxism" doesn't even have entity, it's just bullshit entirely made up by the usual grifters

  • I'm a US citizen, people in other countries, what do you think when you read stories like these about the US health care system?
  • From LATAM too and the main thing i think is: fuck. USA has always been very influential towards us. A lot of people want to imitate it because they only know it from the movies and shows or from what famous Americans share about their livestyles. And the right wings leaders over here are eager to play by their playbook. Trump got elected and now the more fringe right wing candidates are being elected here and while their eccentricities dominate the headlines the people under them work to undermine our free healthcare and public education. Some Latín Americans think it can't happen in their country... until it happens.

  • Now that you have settled here on Lemmy. What is your impression of it?
  • As someone who spent around half my life in IT and half in humanities, there's a lot less humanities content here than in Reddit or old Twitter. You might not notice it because you might have gravitated towards the IT side of those sites but it's noticeable here

  • Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media
  • When Twitter was bought by Musk I rushed to create myself a Mastodon. My hope was that most of the interesting, thoughtful people I followed on Twitter would eventually end up on Mastodon as Musk slowly ruined the platform. I kept my Twitter up just to keep tabs on them and grab their Mastodon handles as they shared them.

    In the end, around half of them created Mastodon accounts that I follow to this day. All of them are inactive now.

    At the same time I noticed more and more of them creating BS accounts. I think around 80% of them ended up in it. They're still quite active in BS to this day.

    I open Mastodon and BS once daily. Former rarely has new posts, latter always has.

    I really wanted all of them on Mastodon. I don't trust a corpo like BS. But the particular type of crowd I followed on Twitter (progressive essayists/humanities people, game journalists, artists, non-dev hobbyists, etc) seems to have mostly gone to BS, stayed on Twitter, gone to Cohost or back to Tumblr, or abandoned social media. I did find some interesting people active on Mastodon, mostly accesibility advocates, a couple of devs of games I loved and a few non brainrotten IT people. But the level of activity from my spheres of interest seems much higher on BS right now sadly.

  • Here are the winners for the steam awards 2023
  • Yeah. It's weird, almost all of these have some level of controversy. Starfield. Hogwarts Legacy and Rowling's transphobia controversies. There were attempted boycotts of Atomic Heart by Ukraine sympathizers for a variety of alleged reasons. Some lifelong fans of The Last of Us were reneging of the franchise after learning that its creator Neil Druckmann was inspired by Israel-Palestina to create TLOU and recently posted an Israel flag in his Instagram. There was controversy about Dave the Diver being considered an indie game by most casual people (and being nominated as such for awards) and further discussion about what's an indie. SIFU was criticized by journalists for negative portrayal of a foreign culture and briefly became a bit of a darling for online right-wingers that hate video game journalists. Even Baldur's Gate 3 was milked a bit as a darling by people that generally dislike current video game devs and accuse them of being lazy. I also even saw someone using solo-developed Lethal Company as a bludgeon against other developers. Only ones I don't remember seeing controversies about are Labyrinthine and Red Dead Redemption 2.

    It almost feels like the classic coordinated troll-voting campaign by 4chan or whatever but those tend to have a right-wing bend and I don't know if they would've voted for Atomic Heart (I don't know if the would have voted BG3 either but I assume that one's kinda unstoppable). It's kind of weird because a couple years ago when Trump was praising Russia right-wing gamers might have voted for the Russia game to piss off liberals. But with the current wars there's a lot of right-wingers supporting Ukraine and Israel. So I don't know.

  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • We humans just do a bad job explaining evolution to the general public, be it at schools, by science communicators, etc. Most laypeople want to believe in evolution so in the end they just kinda think it works like magic or that it's guided by some kind of intelligence (whatever that means for them: divinity, we live in a simulation, an invisible natural algorithm that governs everything, the Universe itself as a sleeping deity, etc).

    When I was explained evolution as a kid (granted, around the year 2000) they made it seem evolution was an intelligent mechanism that somehow chose the best traits for the survival of a species based on its environment, as if this invisible mechanism had somehow the ability to analyze its environment, reason creatively and predict future scenarios. It was only on my mid 20s when I happened to read an article out of curiosity that I got a bit of a more clear picture. There's gotta be a better way to explain it to laypeople: maybe that it's more of a massive, long, non-directed trial-and-error process where there's not an actual intention or intelligence, it just happens. Individuals with critically bad traits die because of those traits and the ones with better or non-harmful traits live and get to have descendants. But there's not an intelligence guiding this, it just looks like an intelligence to some of us because we humans tend to apply personification to everything.

  • What are some active game journalists/critics/industry commentators on Mastodon?

    Just looking for interesting and meaningful game-related content to add to my Mastodon feed. It can be accounts from individuals or from orgs.

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    Peertube @lemmy.ml Teodomo @lemmy.world
    Are PeerTube videos watchable from Piped? + recs asked

    I'm new at both PeerTube and at Piped/NewPipe frontends. I've always wanted to support PeerTube but every time I browse instances I see very little content and it's especially barren for the type of stuff I like. Not really a tech guy, even though I'm learning some programming my background is that of a Literature teacher that likes gaming (especially indie gaming, but some AAA RPG/JRPG/narrative/strategy gaming is cool too) and video essays about anything that have at least a bit of humanities bend.

    I've started using Piped to watch YT videos (I don't use NewPipe since I rarely use my phone, more of a desktop guy). I've heard you can watch both YT and PeerTube videos on NewPipe. Can you do the same at Piped? And if so, what would be the best way to find channels with the aforementioned characteristics?

    Stuff in Spanish is fine too since that's my actual language but I assume there's not much stuff in Spanish in PeerTube and therefore even less quality content and even less quality content that caters to my specific likes. So I foresee it'll mostly be in English like in YouTube.

    11
    How do you rank the JRPGs you have played writing-wise?

    There's a lot to writing in JRPGs (story, plot, pacing, characters, narration, worldbuilding, etc.) and some games excel at some of those aspects and not so much at others. It's also a subjective topic.

    So, I'd like to know. How do you rank JRPGs looking foremost at writing over other aspects like gameplay, visuals, music and so on? You can talk about your top JRPGs, or maybe highlight some high and low points writing-wise or hell if you want to rank every single JRPG you have played in regards to its writing I'll read ya! I did find this massive JRPG Tiermaker for those of you that want to rank a couple (or hundreds) of JRPGs in a more graphic form.

    Or if you don't care about ranking but want to share some insights about this topic I'm all ears.

    3
    What's a good Mastodon instance focused on videogames? (meaningful discussion & news, not memes)

    The way I used Twitter was by aggresively muting, blocking & managing the interests functionality through the years until I pruned my home page to mostly show me meaningful discussion about videogames (and a bit of other media), some relevant news, including a good balance of AAA and indie stuff as well as a a balance of mainstream (mostly from US and Japan videogame industries) and diverse stuff (ie from other countries). I had industry people, interesting youtubers (more essay-types than gameplay-types), socially progressive viewpoints, diversity, a bit of art, a bit of lore, etc.

    Are there good instances focused on that? I know I can see stuff from any instance but AFAIK some are better to set up camp because of their admins, their defederations and also because it's a bit easier to find new interesting accounts to follow from within the instance.

    Which do you recommend?

    EDIT: I do know there's no algorithm in Mastodon like in Twitter so I'll only see whoever I follow. Just wanted to clarify before someone took the work to explain all that. I just want to replicate the kind of feed I had on Twitter, just that this time it'll be 100% from following accounts rather than a mix.

    1
    What are some video games that had remarkably hectic public reaction at physical stores during release day?

    I was reading how Dragon Quest III's release in Japan in 1988 led to almost 300 arrests for truancy among students absent from school to purchase the game.

    I also vaguely remember reading about Western games that had very big queues at physical stores during their release. I assume these can only be heavily anticipated old games before online distribution took off. I checked up the wiki articles of Super Mario Bros 3., Super Mario World, Sonic 2, Sonic CD and Mortal Kombat II but saw no direct mention of queues or otherwise remarkable physical activity at stores on release.

    What do y'all know about this?

    12
    What are some alternative to soulless videogame franchises?

    What I mean is... sometimes people are very loyal to a videogame franchise or a company because they loved a game they released years ago (Silent Hill/Konami with Silent Hill 2, Blizzard/Bethesda with their respective golden eras, some could argue this happens too with Pokémon and Final Fantasy, etc). Ethical/consumer reasons aside to stop supporting certain companies, sometimes some franchises/companies aren't necessarily creating the best examples of games of those specific genres anymore, yet many fans are loyal to them (and a chunk of them also seem to suffer/complain with every new release).

    Meanwhile some people that explore less known titles and different niches occasionally pop-up and say stuff like "the last Pokémon games are formulaic and uninspired, there's actually this and that incredible examples of somewhat recent monster collecting games" or "the last FF wasn't actually bad but if you want turn-based RPGs that'll remind you of your old favorite FFs then check Chained Echoes or whatever" or "don't look for something like Silent Hill 2 with Konami, instead I recommend these survival horror games".

    So the idea of this thread is for people to recommend alternatives to franchises. Especially if they're standalone instead of other alternative franchises and especially if they're indie (since most of my enjoyment these last few years has been from indies like Roadwarden, Citizen Sleeper, Darkest Dungeon, Celeste, Slay the Spire, Tacoma, Hellblade).

    106
    What is the best overall party roster of characters in a JRPG?

    In my life I've seen interesting discussions about which JRPGs have the best protagonists and which ones have the best non-protagonist party members but I don't think I've seen this one.

    Since "best" can mean anything subjective let us know what it means in your case! i.e some might choose a party based on the writing+design of the characters, others might focus on their character arcs and themes, or on the overall diversity of the party (full human teens party vs diverse ages or diverse species vs whatever Chrono Cross has going on, etc).

    5
    Displaying an image when hovering over a particular cell? (or if that's not possible, when clicking it)

    Hey! I'm new to LibreOffice and I was wondering if this is possible. I have a big spreadsheet where each line refers to an object for which I actually have a corresponding .webp image, and it would really help me for visual reference if such a hover tooltip (or click tooltip) would be possible in LibreOffice. Does anyone know?

    0
    Strictly writing-wise, what are in your opinion the best JRPGs?

    Writing can refer to story, worldbuilding, character writing, etc.

    4
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TE
    Teodomo @lemmy.world
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