I could find a pixel art tutorial but that sounds like work and this was supposed to be fun. fuck art tbh

I’m trying to make a pixel art version of a P90 next but aaaa shading is so hard T_T I’m inventing art techniques from first principles and I don’t think I’m enjoying it lol

i don't care if em-dashes are "characteristic of AI," that's not gonna make me stop using them. i've used them since high school, when i first had a computer that could easily type them. i'm not gonna stop just cause some folks make stupid assumptions based on windows not having an easy way to type them

now just imagine if the game could dynamically raise or lower your level based on your performance to find the ideal difficulty to challenge you at every point in the game. and de-emphasize level in the UI so you don’t feel like you’re being punished by having it lowered. I think that would be perfect

one of the things that I think RPGs flounder at is making the player feel as if they’re more powerful at level 20 than they were at level 1. if at first they were fighting level 1 tavern rats, but now they’re fighting identical-looking level 20 sewer rats, then are they really getting stronger? and why can’t they fight the identical sewer rats at level 1?

World of Warcraft avoids this entire problem and I think that’s a very good idea

World of Warcraft doesn’t treat the player character’s level as how strong or experienced they are. instead, it treats it as “where in the difficulty curve of the game is the player right now? how much should I challenge them?”. that means that characters actually get weaker the more they level up. when fighting the same enemies, the player character will have more trouble if they’re a higher level. PCs also unlock more abilities by leveling up, which makes them more complex and difficult to play

and I think that that’s a very interesting approach, and actually a very good one. and it’s strongly influenced my perspective on other RPGs because WoW is the RPG that I’ve connected most with out of anything (except maybe Skyrim, which does roughly the same thing). genuinely, I want to see more RPGs take this approach

I have a draft of a whole like 7-paragraph essay on this but I’m starting to think it’s not worth it lol so just have the 2-paragraph version instead

solarpunk is a valid aesthetic, and I’m just happy that some kind of utopian scifi still exists on the margins of 2025 pop culture, but it never felt quite right to me because of its emphasis on nature and plants. keep those things away from me

it seems like a lot of people equate nature with mental health, as if being near plants can cure depression or something

but just to be clear, I don’t want nature anywhere near me. nature is gross, full of parasites and other horrible things, and oh yeah it was created by a ruthless amoral survive-at-any-cost process known as evolution. it presents serious dangers to me everywhere I encounter it and I also just don’t like it

my ideal living environment is a massive neon-lit Eclipse-Phase-esque cyberpunk city built on (or inside of) an asteroid. that looks like Mirror’s Edge during the day and Blade Runner at night

(actually, I hope that eventually we can even save every animal on Earth from nature. and instead just upload their minds into simulations designed to meet all of their needs perfectly and always give them something new/fun to do. even animals don’t deserve nature)

I feel like we need some sort of explicit distinguisher between types of FOSS:

1. Corporate FOSS: projects that directly serve the interests of a single corporation and is governed by that corporation, but the source code is freely available
2. Public/Community FOSS: projects that are intended to be both governed and used by a wide variety of different people. Usually characterized by actively trying to promote the project to potential users in some way (including 'community evangelism'), and by actively trying to attract contributors of some kind.
3. Personal FOSS: people's own projects that are essentially fully controlled by them personally, and written for their personal use, just the source code is shared freely for others to use if they want to. Usually few contributors, or may not even accept contributors at all.

All of these have wildly different characteristics and governance structures, and users should have different expectations of them, so it seems reasonable that we should be treating them as different things, even if they are all nominally "FOSS"? And it would probably be helpful for projects to explicitly declare which of these they are, too, to set the right expectations.

#FOSS #OpenSource

Is a device that performs some computation, but that is limited to sub–Turing complete computation (e.g.: a four-function calculator, or a "pepper grinder" kind of adding machine) a computer?

@konstruct yeah tbh there’s something calming about holding a hot thing in my hands but in order to drink it I have to wait for it to cool down to the point that it’s just tepid, which makes it grosser for me I think

@codingcoyote chamomile is one of the ones that I’ve tried but I’ve been thinking that there might be others out there that I’ll like more. like I have a ginger and turmeric one that I haven’t decided if I like or not. it’s very strange-tasting but I think I kinda like it? I think I also want to try anise or fennel because I like their flavor in other things

@tempest hm that’s fair! it definitely makes sense that the corporate UI churn is because of marketability instead of aesthetics

I do think that, at least for me, I get used to any UI that I use for too long - no matter how much I like it at first. for example I used to love Akkoma’s UI so much that I gushed about it for several days in a row lol. but now since I’ve been using it every day for a few months, it just seems normal to me and I don’t really get any joy out of it visually

but with that said, I do still like other UIs that are designed in a similar way to how Akkoma looks (boxy Windows 98/95 looking UIs) - it’s really just Akkoma itself that I’m used to now

now that it’s seen how much Creeper World 4 and Creeper World IXE I play, Steam is convinced that I’m going to love RTSes, grand strategy games, and generic-looking tower defense games lol

Valve is already raking in so much money but they could make even more if they built a half-decent recommendation system

herbal tea is fucking gross

unsweetened, it’s marginally better than just drinking hot water but it just kinda tastes like plant juice

and it’s somehow so much worse when you sweeten it. I can’t explain why but something about adding sugar flips it in my head from “someone put random weird plants in my hot water” to “this is definitely some kind of poison”