chameleon @ chameleon @fedia.io

i'm lizard

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1 yr. ago

The whole "don't look anything up before playing it" genre of cryptic puzzle-ish games where saying nearly anything about it is a spoiler. There's not all that many of them, but somehow they're all games where people go in with no expectations and either love it or bounce off of it really fast. The entire internet can scream at you to play Outer Wilds, but nobody wants to tell you why.

Out of the ones I played, I had the lowest expectations/highest payoff for Void Stranger; on the surface it looks just like a pretty average sokoban with gameboy-styled graphics and a surprisingly good soundtrack. And that's pretty much what it is, except the sokoban isn't really why you play it, even though you're gonna be playing a lot of it.

Steam changed it so that popularity metrics are mostly ignored during the first couple days of Next Fest. This started with the October 2024 run, and it's a big part of why you no longer have the good demos popping up quickly at the start. To my knowledge, they never published details on it, but there was a short blurb in the developer Q&A. Things should get better starting sometime tomorrow (tends to be day 3 or day 4).

The idea is that it gives games that don't have pre-existing marketing a way better chance of success, instead of the really massive snowball effect that used to exist where devs lost out for the entire thing if they weren't popular within the first couple of hours, but it has made it a hell of a job to look for new games.

Mother/"EarthBound Beginnings" definitively has the late 80s/early 90s RPG smell with its grindiness and rocky difficulty curve, but is still pretty damn good if that's not a dealbreaker. The official translation came out in 2014, but is reasonably accurate.

Gradius and especially Gradius 2 are classic shmups for a reason, but the much bigger hitboxes take some real adjusting if you're used to modern bullet hell ones.

For anything public, it's anything varying from trivial to hard/annoying depending on your client settings, but never quite impossible. Even in the best-case scenario where you have DHT turned off and all the trackers in the torrent are using HTTPS, man-in-the-middle attacks are fairly doable for anything popular.

The PS2 Ace Combat games (4/5/Zero) are still best-in-genre as far as I'm concerned, and have held up exceedingly well in general. Aerial dogfighting with good controls, good mission design and interesting story.

Sky Odyssey is a more "relaxed" little flight game that I also like, still got game-like controls but no combat, just missions where you fly through hard situations.

I've also been playing this, even though it's well out of what I normally play. I'd describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There's okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.

Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it's too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a "main" in a genre that's more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.

There's some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you're playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend's RTX 4080, and that's a pretty universal complaint), there's some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it's been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don't really detract from what I'm getting out of it.

I've seen the claim around but I'm highly skeptical of it. DDR5 is far too slow for anything where memory bandwidth really matters, any newly produced chip that's gonna be used for AI is on HBM3 or HBM3e, or possibly GDDR6/GDDR7 if it's a GPU pulled from the consumer segment. HBM5 is still a very, very early research project and is certainly not being produced yet.

The idea is interesting, but $13/month for one 'mystery' album from an artist you (most likely) don't know feels rather up there.

root= isn't correct for booting a live image like this. You need to use some specific parameters to guide the initramfs to where it can find the /boot/x86_64/airootfs.sfs file, and in general, something like that will be the case for most distros but there are lots of unique mechanisms. Looking at the grub.cfg, /loader/entries or similar files will usually get you some things you can put into your favorite search engine to hopefully find some documentation. For Arch it's part of mkinitcpio-archiso: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/mkinitcpio/mkinitcpio-archiso/-/blob/master/docs/README.bootparams?ref_type=heads

I don't have a setup to test it but if If I'm not mistaken something like this should work:

        options  "archisosearchuuid=2025-08-01-13-39-26-00"
  

These containers are/were for self-hosting. VMWare previously owned Bitnami, it was their attempt to make it easier to self-host rather than paying a cloud provider, which should directly benefit them because VMWare got its money from businesses that self-host + self-host people growing up learning free homelab ESXi and wanting to apply that at work. It helps a lot if there's well-maintained solutions for deploying popular stuff.

Then Broadcom bought VMWare for a ridiculous price and is doing none of that.

Tends to change by playthrough but 50% water scale/150% water coverage/~200% resource frequency+size+richness is my go-to. Creates lots of natural chokepoints, available resources end up feeling like they're similar to default map settings, gives you enough area to build a reasonable bus starter base at the start but eventually pushes towards a more train spaghetti playstyle.

scripts mix configuration with logic and this was a big reason why a lot of distributions switched to systemd in the first place

What was really wrong with the old BSD-style rc/init systems is that they mixed configuration with the logic required to start/stop the service at all, and that that logic was running in the same session it was being executed from (inheriting the environment, FDs and the like). These daemontools-style supervisors don't have that problem, the run script is essentially just systemd's ExecStart= and it gets forked off from the supervisor itself and is then managed by it. Lots of them are just #!/bin/sh \n exec coolservice.

There's plenty more things that systemd does pretty well that this doesn't do (dependency management seems to be sorely lacking here in particular), but this kind of approach is much closer to it than the old rc scripts.

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge is also free for the week. Decent slow-burn game for a particular type of frog enthusiast.

Even with the current thumbs up/down people get it wrong. Give it a thumbs up but write a scathing review.

I've done that and it's a result of not having more options than good/bad. Always the same cause: I really wanted to write a 3 review for a game that has a lot to praise but its core is fundamentally flawed, but Steam doesn't let me give a 3, so I try to correct for the review score bracket I think the game should be in.

For the benefit of people that can't watch this horrible video:

This is really about them being able to change the already extremely vague terms of service and you having no recourse other than voiding your purchase if you don't like it. There is some focus on a gun thing early on, but it's just an example where they flip-flopped multiple times over the years based on vague wording in the ToS that was changed after the fact. Commercial modded server owners were the main ones that had to make changes because of that rule, often taking guns away from players that had them, but it's generally enforced very inconsistently.

But the main thing they're focusing on in the lawsuit is the mass deletion of legitimately bought Minecraft copies when they stopped Mojang account migration in 2023 (everyone that didn't migrate then no longer owns Minecraft according to Microsoft; no refunds). That, too, was effectively a one-sided ToS change. And to make matters worse, the old ToS had an explicit clause that you could keep playing the game in singleplayer even without agreeing to any new ToS.

This lawsuit is being done in Sweden. I don't know if this kind of ToS/contract validity has actually been tested there before.

I think this is the first time I ever watched a video at 0.5 speed. "this was done due to retention purposes for the video to maximize spread potential". Yeeeaaaah. No. Checked reddit, it's downvoted to the negatives over form. Checked a different place that would be all over this, entire topic is discussing the form and there's not one mention of what it's about because nobody got that far. The exact kind of person that might take time out of their day to join a class action is not going to watch this garbage. I think it's good to have this tested, but I straight up don't trust this guy. Supposedly maximizing views while getting zero information through to anyone is not going to help the cause.

They already implement instant bank payments in a lot of countries where there's a reasonable consumer-to-business solution for it. I know at least Sofort/iDEAL/Bancontact are supported just fine in their respective countries.

All true, wanted to add on to this:

Note that smart peeps say that the docker socket is not safe as read-only.

That's true, and it's not just something mildly imperfect, read-only straight up does nothing. For connecting to a socket, Linux ignores read-only mount state and only checks write permission on the socket itself. Read-only would only make it impossible to make a new socket there. Once you do have a connection, that connection can write anything it wants to it. Traefik and other "read-only" uses still have to send GET queries for the data they need, so that's happening for legitimate use cases too.

If you really need a "GET-only" Docker socket, it has to be done with some other kind of mechanism, and frankly the options aren't very good. Docker has authorization plugins that seem like too much of a headache to set up, and proxies don't seem very good to me either.

Or TLDR: :ro or stripping off permission bits doesn't do anything aside from potentially break all uses for the socket. If it can connect at all, it's root-equivalent or has all privileges of your rootless user, unless you took other steps. That might or might not be a massive problem for your setup, but it is something you should know when doing it.

Yep. It would be incredibly bad if they did automatic bans for any key they don't recognize, but it's technically possible.

Edit: from what I'm reading it apparently just refuses to let you in with unrecognized/non-MS keys. Yeah that makes a lot more sense.

You can, but most everything that would let you run your own boot-time code is supposed to end up in the TPM event log, which the TPM is happy to attest to with its unique/uniquely bannable attestation key. Not too difficult to set it up so that no attestation = no access.

This type of attestation is far from perfect for a lot of different reasons, and it would be really impractical to automate bans with it, but I guess it's a tool they see value in.

Another World/Out of This World. Short game, but also a 1991 game made by one dev and one composer in two years, and artistically it still holds up fairly well even today.