not sure if this will be an unpopular opinion but:

the fun of a roguelike/roguelite comes from being given a weird, randomized toolset and trying to improvise around that. part of the fun is also trying to build off of that toolset to create an overpowered combination of abilities

in some runs you get completely overpowered without even trying, and with others your luck is so bad that you can barely accomplish anything. but the more you play and start to see patterns in how to become powerful, the better you get at using the strangest things to your advantage. in order for this to work, items need to be able to strongly synergize: they need to interact with each other in intricate ways that affect your playstyle a lot

and the problem that I have with modern roguelites is that they just don’t seem to remember this? with the exception of Balatro which completely nails it. but like try creating an overpowered combo in Hades 1 or Cult of the Lamb or Severed Steel’s Rogue Steel mode. you basically just can’t. all of the upgrades are super bland and don’t really have any potential for interesting synergies

I feel like a lot of indie games are being shoehorned into the roguelite mold, instead of being created from the ground up in order to be an interesting roguelite

(this post inspired by me replaying a game with a lot of potential but which fell flat in just enough areas to kinda ruin its own gameplay: Teleglitch. one of its biggest mistakes was that it Should Not Have Been A Roguelite)

holy fuck

https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/issues/30760

they're finally changing the message sound

after 8 years

Dear website designers,

Please stop disabling text selection (highlight) on your websites.

First, it isn't exactly rocket science to bypass;

second, there are people who highlight the paragraphs they are reading.

More of this and I will copy and paste them somewhere else out of spite.

#UX

@gwynnion As an example by way of agreement, meme culture is culture. I don't get why literary genre seems to think it's cringe-y to reference or incorporate specific memes, but making references to specific things that happened on 1980s TV shows isn't.

I bet Fennel code (especially my Fennel code) looks extremely cursed to experienced Lisp devs lol

my brain is completely fried after doing a DailyProgrammer in Fennel @_@

https://pastebin.com/i1cbWYXD

I think I’m getting the hang of Lisp’s weirdness though – a little bit. Fennel is definitely the perfect gateway into Lisp for me:

• it’s easy to write imperative code
• it’s very small and simple
• under the surface it’s basically just Lua, and I know Lua decently well

I’m using fennel-ls as my LSP and it’s… workable. it definitely helps a lot more than having no LSP

I think my ideal language, though, would probably be Lua with its quirks ironed out (0-indexed tables, !=, variables are local by default, etc.) and Rust’s macro system added on top

one of the reasons why I’m interested in Lisps is that in theory they don’t need to have this problem. they could have an extremely simplistic Lua-like core language with a minimal amount of ideas needed to conceptualize how the language works, and then have a modular standard library on top of that for extending it and making it really nice to use and full of modern features like classes, list comprehensions, etc.

and then when newer, better ideas are invented, those modular systems could be swapped out for new ones, while still keeping the core language compatible with The Old Ways

obviously Lua can kinda do this already, but the advantage that Lisp-like languages have is that they have macros, letting them do all kinds of weird shit

so anyway that’s why I’m so interested in Fennel - because it seems like the best of both worlds: the core language is as simple and easy-to-learn as Lua (because it basically is Lua) but on top of that, just enough Lisp has been added to allow macros to be created, theoretically letting it become just as expressive and nice-to-use as Python (minus the Lisp syntax)

I really really wish that programming languages could just change their entire design with each major version whenever it’s possible to make things more elegant - instead of adding features on top and supporting bad legacy decisions

but… that’s how you get the Python 2 → Python 3 transition problem. so I guess at a certain point, elegance has to take a back seat to practicality

I still don’t like it though lol

the only thing worse than supporting legacy software, is not supporting legacy software

new pronoun notation: appending a number to be used as a weight for random pronoun selection

it/its:10 she/her:5 they/them:1

10/16 it/its, 5/16 she/her, 1/16 they/them

maybe include 0 as a "i won't get mad at you for using this but avoid it"

it/its in a she/her:0 way

Congratulations to all, on the release of Unicode 17.0. The "distorted face" is now officially standardized as \u1FAEA

y'all, my husband (not a tech guy) just managed to stumble innocently into Windows' biggest, deepest, darkest black hole of legacy hacks:

"I was making textfiles with explanations of different D&D stats, str, dex, etc, but it wouldn't let me name a file con..."

this is the energy i bring to software development

Just ate some cheese

the USA is such a beautiful country

@pharmafemboy answering E activates the trap door to the piranha pit