Original release was fantastic - super-smooth, high resolution, “how I remember it on the N64”, ie. not true to the original at all, but like the impression it made on me as a youngster. Super-dark storyline and minimal hand-holding makes it very unusual for a Zelda game, absolutely stunning bit of porting work. Everything you could possibly want in 2024.

And then I got to the down-the-well bit, and that can just fuck off. New release needs a dedicated keybinding to skip that time-wasting shit, could bind it to a mouse button just so that there’s no difficulty finding it when the time comes.

More testosterone gives male cats rounder faces, and Big G has a very round face indeed. I reckon he’s still packing the pom-poms.

Just sing it! Couple of extra syllables in fee-ee-ling, you’re right back on the beat.

Absolutely no regard for the thoughts or desires of anyone other than WASPs? This is a picture from the 50s, right enough.

By the time you’ve paid for the game, a headset, a suitable graphics card, and about two dozen pairs of trousers to ruin for every hour of gameplay, then that sounds a pretty expensive hobby.

IVEBEENUSINGTHISKEYBORDFORWHOLEMONTHNDMMOREEFFICIENTTHNIVEEVERBEENBEFORE

No ‘a’, so it’s perfect for ordering some piss.

Clicking the ‘Activate’ link prompts you to enter your shoe size and postal address, so that you may receive a shark plush toy and your own pair of The Socks.

Amanda canonically gets back to earth to die of cancer as an older woman, so she does manage to return from the “floating in space” ending of Isolation, too.

Creative Assembly have confirmed Isolation 2, as well. Hype!

Impressive, since “network effects” are what keeps people on a platform. Why move off Xitter or FB when everyone’s on there, and not on the new place? Keep moving a significant fraction of a million people every week, and pretty soon, it’ll be where everyone is.

My partner, who is very non-technical, signed up for a BlueSky as well this week: “all the teacher blogs have declared that they are moving over”. Looks like everyone has had enough.

Most of the laptops I’ve had open lately have had about the top third be the motherboard and the bottom two-thirds be battery, with maybe some ports and speakers tucked down the side. So I’d expect that last of replacements to include the battery, too.

I might check whether the hard drive survived - a decent M.2 is small, expensive and reusable - and maybe the RAM if it’s not soldered in.

Writing this on a Tuxedo Pulse 14 gen 3 - great laptop, flawless Linux support and a coding workstation. Perfect for a bit of eg. Disco Elysium or Crusader Kings 3 on the go, but it’s no gaming machine; it has a lot of pixels for a Radeon 780M to push. They do have a list of gaming laptops, though, if you wanted a speciality machine?

I’d imagine that they’re unproductive because of the long hours that they spend in the office. It’s been a source of mystery to me (European) how our offices in America manage to put in 60 hour weeks every week, often with a crazy commute before and after, and yet never seem to make fuck all progress on anything. Better to concentrate on how to be as productive as possible for time that you are there, than to fetishise the total amount of time?

Having had one of the old Windows phones with a keyboard dumped on me at an old workplace, can confirm it’s completely possible for a phone to have a keyboard and be a complete piece of shit.

A good phone with a good keyboard may have some use cases. If you do a lot of writing but not any more computing power or screen space than a phone has, plus you want to be doing that on the move, then yeah. For me, can shitpost on forums using my phone in my spare time, and dealing with on-call work issues - having multiple tabs of Jira and Slack open, for instance - just isn’t really practical on a small screen.

If your job is very email-centric, then yeah, sure. Blackberry were very good for just having the stuff you need - email, vpn, ‘corporate’ office documents - in a form that worked.

Also interesting is the notion of ‘Kolmogorov Complexity’ - what is the shortest programme that could produce a given output? Worst case for a truly random sequence would just be to copy it out, but a programme that outputs eg. a million digits of pi can actually be quite short. As can a programme that outputs a particular block cypher for an empty input. In general, it is very difficult to decide how long a programme is needed to produce a given output, and what the upper limit of compression could be.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

True. Although Calvin looks to be only rotating the paper by 90°, which would work as long as the original line is continuously increasing on both axes. Not so much “upside down” as “right-side up”, tho.

Mona Lisa is, alas, a terrible example. It’s a (small) painting famous for its very finely blended brush strokes, and yet it’s behind two layers of protective glass, a barrier about five metres away, and there’s generally about ten thousand tourists queuing up to see it. It’s something you go to have seen, rather than to see.

Unless you wanted an example of a retro game that you play to have said you’ve played it, not too actually play, in which case it’s a superb example. Plenty of games that were legendary at the time but who’s gameplay doesn’t hold up any more.

The Louvre has some massive rooms full of Raphael masterpieces and Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” just down from the Lisa - those are well worth seeing in the flesh, big pictures that reproduction doesn’t do justice to.

Nice art, too. I think that scrolling down might ruin the pacing? but that’s some beautiful spacing and colouring.

But does that make the game more fun, or does it lower the barrier of entry for smaller studios to make high-quality games?

Arguably, ray-tracing does lower the barrier to entry. You place lights where they really are in a scene, boom, everything is light perfectly. Art assets and tuning up lighting are a huge time cost in current AAA games; making that much easier might benefit gaming in general.

Having improved physics modelling might improve physics-based games, but something like Angry Birds doesn’t need a supercomputer anyway, and for most games it’s just added prettiness that greatly increases the production cost

Assuming that these have fairly impressive 100 MB/s sustained write speed, then it’s going to take about 93 hours to write the whole contents of the disk - basically four days. That’s a long time to replace a failed drive in a RAID array; you’d need to consider multiple disks of redundancy just in case another one fails while you’re resilvering the first.