kbal

joined 11 months ago
[–] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 8 hours ago

That it's not a video game means also that you can't so easily refute the entire thesis and approach of the linked article by appealing to some kind of simplistic ideal model of warfare where morale and recruitment do not matter at all to an army. Conscripting the unwilling has its costs, and here we have one attempt to describe how some of it is playing out on the Ukrainian side.

Don't judge things just from the headlines, lemmy. It's a bad habit. This reporting is credible enough, and El País a sufficiently respectable publication, that it deserves better than that.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 20 points 19 hours ago (6 children)

It's amazing how many big obviously consequential decisions around the world come down to a 50/50 vote lately. Have they perfected propaganda techniques that 49% of people are genetically susceptible to? Or is just that nobody knows what the hell is going on so we all decide completely at random what to believe?

[–] kbal@fedia.io 111 points 1 day ago (6 children)

This airport tried to be cutesy and put up a sign limiting "hug time" instead of a more generic time limit. Have you ever heard of a "full English breakfast"? We'll tell you all about it. There's a café in Tokyo which discourages socializing. Find out why! People in China have pets. Isn't that cute! Here's a great tourist attraction in Turkey! Not into that? How about a video game museum in Kyoto instead? Or a theme park in Orlando? But why stop there? Here are some other links to random news tidbits.

It's like one of those daytime TV talk shows in text form.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The various image hosting sites that people choose being down or otherwise dysfunctional seems more common than you'd think. One that's quite popular lately just flatly blocks all VPN and Tor users, leading to many broken images for some of us.

It's too bad that the image cache you have stores things permanently. Having them expire after six hours or something would seem like a better option. Maybe somehow route it through a normal caching proxy instead of the built-in lemmy one?

[–] kbal@fedia.io 5 points 2 days ago

Athena, goddess of wisdom, olives, and weaving.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 3 days ago

At this point all that remains to be said on the topic is: Don't feed the trolls. Not even if have recognizable names like Drew Devault.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's find -L if you want it to follow symlinks.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 4 days ago

When it's apartheid and genocide (something on the order of 10% of the people of Gaza have been killed so far including reasonable estimates of deaths from starvation and disease) I'm not really too concerned about whether or not they call it "colonialism."

[–] kbal@fedia.io 22 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Too long to read? I get it. Here’s the summary. Download Firefox.

Yes. One option is to download it from here: https://librewolf.net/

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 4 days ago

I had that problem when I used whatsapp five years ago. Amazing that they still haven't fixed it.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 10 points 4 days ago (3 children)

cat `find /sys -name pp_power_profile_mode`

[–] kbal@fedia.io 5 points 5 days ago

Non-google android is the way to go unless you're looking to be even more adventurous. Which phone you should look for depends which of the OS options you prefer. No pixel means no grapheneOS. LineageOS is the one I chose, runs on quite a few mostly older phones. There are many others.

 

As opposed to Bill C-63, which pushes [age verification bullshit] far into the future and behind closed doors through an opaque regulatory process, our new Conservative legislation will directly legislate [age verification bullshit] that online operators must adhere to.

 

If you routinely start #steam in offline mode and it suddenly stopped working in the past few days (first time I ever saw such a thing), you may be able to fix it by temporarily taking it out of offline mode as described on github.

 

phase 1: Don't care about diet. phase 2: Try to lose weight. phase 3: Don't care at all about diet. phase 4: Ascetic diet of mostly rice and peanuts. phase 5: Vitamin A deficiency. phase 6 (current): Carefully fine-tuned diet designed with nutrition calculator.

I can't explain it, that's just how it went.

 

Act 1: It started with some fun little quests to introduce you to the narrative style. The fights were too hard, so I improved my character stats until I could handle them. It's not easy to know when there's no choice but to go along with whatever is suggested, and when you can do something else, but I guess I got it more or less right.

Act 2: A nice meaty dungeon crawl. My efforts to make my character stronger paid off, the difficulty was just right.

Act 3: Holy shit it's too hard suddenly. One does not level up quickly in my version of Skyrim, maybe that's why. At one point there's an option that suggests you can skip the whole thing, but I didn't take it and would guess it probably isn't so easy. I had to resort to stealth archery and I didn't bring a lot of arrows. Some horror game stuff of a kind I don't normally enjoy, but it was well-executed. It was a pretty long slog.

Act 4: Okay we're in Dark Souls now. Except the boss fights are even longer. I had a legendary weapon, shiny superhero armour, lots of magic resistance, a good healing spell, all the equipment a skyrim paladin could want, and yet even some of the non-boss fights took a lot of time and effort. Hit, dodge, run, heal, repeat. Forever. To be fair I do have the difficulty settings turned up pretty high. I wandered around lost for a very long time. Some of the battles were epic. There was only one area I had a really hard time with: There doesn't seem to be any resisting the tentacle attacks so they were pretty much instant death.

The ending was quite good and made it all seem worthwhile.

 

Today is the 97th anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.

 

If anyone has a debian/windows dual-boot laptop and has been waiting until Microsoft's secureboot surprise is defused before booting into Windows, and you don't want to wait any longer, what you need is shim-signed_1.39+15.7-1_amd64.deb from bookworm-proposed-updates.

 

Well here's a linux modding tip: Turn off ESYNC and FSYNC when running DynDOLOD. If it randomly goes wrong in the middle of its hour-long run, that could be the problem.

 

First time since March 2023!

 

Here are some mods I can recommend that directly affect game balance, feel free to suggest more. For the most part I've listed only things that directly affect the basic variables in simple ways, not including survival mode stuff, combat overhauls, perk tree changes, the paraglider, and many other things that obviously do also affect game balance but aren't only about that.

*Skyrim Skill Uncapper for SE and AE - Adjust rate of level up for each skill individually. I like level-ups to be way slower than the base game, like 10 times slower, but with skills where tedious grinding is already the only way to train them left closer to normal but contributing less to character level advancement. Enjoy being level 1 for a meaningful amount of time.

*Armor Rating Overhaul - Makes early-game armour not completely useless. Getting some should be the priority it normally is in such games. The base game armor rating algorithm seems weirdly broken, any of this mod's options is better.

*Yet Another Difficulty Mod - Adjust damage dealt/damage taken, optionally changing it automatically as you advance. In my current game it's set to start with 1.0/2.0 at level 1 and smoothly progress to 0.5/5.0 at level 30 (compared to 0.25/3.0 for default legendary mode) and so far that seems good.

*Extra Encounters Reborn - Encounter more problems when wandering around the world.

*High Level Enemies - Make those you encounter more dangerous. Many of the people and animals who live only to murder passing strangers scale to higher levels than previously possible.

*NPC Regen Nerfed - Taking away their infinite magicka supply makes things a little easier.

*Simple No Health Regen - If you don't go full survival mode, maybe at least have no health regen.

*Smart NPC Potions - They might use two or three healing potions during a fight. Also they might poison you.

*Maxsu Combat Escape - When fights are actually difficult you might want to be able to run away without that stupid ogre continuing to be angry at you forever from the far side of a mountain.

*Simply Better Movement Speeds - My current choice of movement speed mod.

*Encounter Zones Unlocked - Probably helps if you're going to have a playthrough that goes on for a while.

 

Squardle is the best one. There's something of a learning curve. It looks intimidating at first. Once you get the hang of it though, it's just right.

It's given me a few minutes of word game entertainment every morning for the past year. I may not know much, but I know all the five-letter words now.

 

Why didn't anyone tell me that Papyrus Tweaks NG is mandatory once you have too many other mods?

Too many being probably about four hundred in my case. Script lag was getting ridiculous and then it started locking up, and now suddenly with that one addition, it's smooth and solid again. With that I guess my personal version of Skyrim is pretty much done, or at least ready for play testing.

 

Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been directed by completely different interests. Now comes the next attempt.

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