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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.

  • You know it in your heart to be true
  • That's always the trade-off. Square ones fit better. Round ones are easier to wash (the corners non-round ones are slightly annoying to deal with depending on what was on the tupper)

  • 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.

  • Best games that can be completed in under ten hours?
  • Games of about 10hs from before 2019?

    • King of Dragon Pass: Tribe management game/text adventure with illustrations. Felt it was interesting in both mechanics and vibes
    • Plants vs Zombies: Addictive comedy-themed tower defense
    • Alundra: PS1's Zelda
    • Gris: Atmospheric 2D puzzle platformer
    • Celeste: Rewarding 2D platformer with nice music
    • The Lion's Song: Graphic aventure light on gameplay and heavy on story and atmosphere. 4 chapters about early 20th century Austrian artists and scientists with themes like art, gender, identity, memory, society, etc.
    • Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You: You play as a government employee tasked with finding people deemed as terrorists by the gov by scouring their social networks. There's different ways to play it
    • Papers, Please: Similar to above but as a border control agent
    • The Banner Saga: Tactical RPG bases on viking mythology
    • Rebuild: Gangs of Deadville: Management of a group/colony of customizable survivors in a zombie apocalypse. Web game

    These are more recent but they should require very low specs:

    • Roadwarden: Very well written and immersive text adventure with RPG elements. Low fantasy world, you're assigned as a roadwarden by a far away nation to a dangerous and sparsely populated wildland.
    • Landnama: Viking tribes settling Iceland. Plays like a well designed board game in video game form. Real time with pause.
    • Citizen Sleeper: Incredible cyberpunk text-heavy adventure with RPG elements and a narrative focused on being humane in a not so humane world with a not quite humane body
  • 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.

    2
    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.

    2
    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).

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