no other MMO I’ve tried has even come close to capturing everything that WoW did right. I took WoW for granted for a long time but trying other MMOs like Guild Wars 2 has shown me how incredibly well-designed so many different parts of WoW are by comparison (especially the combat system and the theming of every individual ability and how they all combine together in a way that’s mechanically and thematically satisfying)

someone should force Blizzard to make WoW free for everyone so that I can play it without supporting Blizzard

(I know private servers exist and I like Tauri but it’s not the same idk)

Big Hitters that aren't Square! Pick one

If you are in the US and have a post-2010 laptop that works* but which you're not using, please DM me with some info about it. There's a trans person in my network who needs a laptop and can do their own linux install.

* Short battery life or some broken USB ports are ok. Major dead components (or no USB at all) are too complicated to sort.

Fedi bots at night

just to clarify, here are some examples of what I mean when I talk about strong synergies:

• every time you deal damage to an enemy, you give them 1 combo point. when they reach 5 combo points, all 5 are removed and they lose 10% of their health
• you attack 3x as often as usual, but deal 10% of your usual damage

normally that second passive would be worse than useless, but here it lets you completely melt high-health enemies because you deal damage based on a percentage instead of a fixed damage number

• every time you attack an enemy, you have a 10% chance to remove all of their burn and inflict that many stacks of poison on all enemies
• every time you attack an enemy, you have a 10% chance to remove all of their poison and inflict that many stacks of burn on all enemies

now you have a strong incentive to spec into items that inflict as much poison and/or burn as possible, as well as an incentive to make sure that each attack hits as many enemies as possible (damage doesn’t even matter anymore - just number of enemies hit), so that you can keep scaling poison and burn exponentially

I guess I really like when a game’s upgrades/passives become a puzzle of “how can I play into this ability to make it extremely overpowered?”

@shijikori ooh omg interesting! I did try Dome Keeper in the past but I didn’t like it for some reason - I can’t remember what that reason was though. maybe it had a time limit that stressed me out?

I actually haven’t heard of these others though! Roboquest actually looks like it might be pretty fun - I’m tempted to try the demo

PlateUp! also seems pretty fun to be honest. maybe a little too hectic for me but idk - I might give it a try too

in the past I listened to a lot of story podcasts (audio dramas? idk the term) and they often started off nice and spooky and horror-y, but frequently they would just devolve into this kind of stuff which I couldn’t follow at all

admittedly, I am very very bad with names and I think that was a lot of the problem

this is how I feel listening to basically any plot involving intrigue

That Scene in a Christopher Nolan Film When You Give Up Trying to Follow the Story

@minmi aw thank you! to be honest I am curious about a few things if you don’t mind:

do you think it would be doable for me to get a data science / data engineering job as someone without a degree, but with a decent number of programming projects in my portfolio? one of them is actually a naive Bayes classifier that I wrote from scratch which I’m pretty proud of, and I think that is at least data science adjacent, right?

are there data science training programs that I could go through?

I guess I’m trying to figure out what I would need to do in order to be hireable in data science

@desea woahh omg I’ve never even heard of this game before but it’s so cute! I love it aesthetically

it’s also really innovative, as far as I can tell. bullet hells are not my genre at all but from what I understand they’re usually top-down shooters, instead of giving you more in-depth abilities like this. I briefly tried a bullet hell in the past and didn’t really like it at all, but I love managing my abilities in this game. it kinda feels like a simplified version of WoW combat

I played one game of the demo and died relatively early on. I had a hard time figuring out which areas I was supposed to avoid, which areas I was supposed to stay inside of, etc. - especially when they all started overlapping lol. but I definitely still had fun

in what I’ve seen of the demo so far though, none of the passives or upgrades seem to interact with each other - so I wouldn’t say that it’s doing the things that I like to see roguelites doing. but I wonder if I might start to see more strange and interesting passives/upgrades later in the game

also, I love that this game has co-op! I’ve been looking for a co-op game to play with friends

I think that I could really get into this game! I’m definitely going to keep my eye on it and I’ll probably get it once it goes on sale or once I have more money for games hehe. thanks for the recommendation!

@tempest ohh interesting! that explains why I didn’t encounter options that felt impactful - because I didn’t play for all that long and never really got into the social stuff, so I hadn’t unlocked them yet. I’m glad that the game does eventually give you interesting options though

@SeaDonut omg did something happen to Risk of Rain?

Fascinating blog that reveals a worrying practice: https://jviide.iki.fi/http-redirects.
Many sites exposing a service with an HTTP API can be accessed on HTTP. Sure, the server will redirect to HTTPS, but the client has already sent credentials over the HTTP connection, basically sending password-equivalent data in clear text! Consequences are easy to guess. The blog lists dozens of servers doing that, some small, several quite big!

@wyatt oohh that art style 💙

@calcifer @hjhornbeck I don't think the switch to PQC is premature, no, but nor do I think (based on 20 years of experience in the field!) that we're anywhere near practical quantum attacks.

I don't think QC is a hoax or just hype, but also the thing to count is the number of logical qubits that are of sufficient quality to implement Shor's algorithm or similar hidden subgroup attacks. For most intents and purposes, that number has been stuck at "one" for years.

some examples of roguelites that (IMO) understand how to be good roguelites and give you lots of interesting options:

• Binding of Isaac (and its sequel)
• BPM: Bullets Per Minute
• Rogue Adventure
• Slice and Dice
• Probably Noita from what I’ve seen, but I haven’t played it