shadower @shadower@mastodon.technology

Great summary of the two dominant RPG dialog approaches ("every word" / "summary").

I grew up on and <3 the former, but this brings up great points on both sides. Especially around exposition and not having to do the old amnesiac/foreigner workaround.

https://www.tripthearkfantastic.com/ark-blog-thursday/whats-in-a-dialogue-choice-anyway/

Hey instead of the winter games sales, could Steam & co sell us some time to play the ones we own already?

I'd pay money for that.

Huh, someone put my blog post on Hacker News and it hit the frontpage.

I don't collect metrics and the webserver logs rotate fast (less than a day, got to investigate journald), but it got at least 10k GET requests.

No Hug o' Death, the server chugged along nicely \o/.

I did no optimisations, no CDN, serving everything locally, uncompressed images even (not in that post tho!).

But it's a static site, obviously.

Shoulda put on a "buy muh game plz" ad and rake in the millions tho

Put up my thoughts on the Disco Elysium game: https://aimlesslygoingforward.com/blog/2019/12/11/disco-elysium/

It's everything I hoped for, but didn't even dare to dream. Because no one makes games like this any more.

The Paleblood Hunt by Redgrave as an excellent analysis of the Bloodborne lore:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JL5acskAT_2t062HILImBkV8eXAwaqOj611mSjK-vZ8/edit

107 pages, incomprehensible to those who didn't play it and massive spoilers for the players who didn't finish.

But Oh My God it is amazing. I've missed a ton of connections on my first play through and this puts everything nicely together.

And the last section dedicated to the final-final ending blew my mind completely.

Play the game, then read The Paleblood Hunt.

One of the underrated benefits on working with CoreOS:

To do the initial configuration (think cloud-init) it uses a tool called Ignition.

Which means every time a server doesn't boot I'm like:

"♪ Check Ignition and may God's love be with you♫"

Yep, this is another Bowie toot.

Cool video on talking your way out of combat in games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9TzqNQBmr0

Agreed with the broader point, but as someone who really dislikes combat in pretty much any game*, the skipping it IS the better gameplay option. Lets you go back to the actual game you want to play.

* Dark Souls and Bloodborne's relentless defiance to this remains a mystery. Maybe the combat in literally every other game is just crap and DS/BB's one is the only one that's any good?

Here are some thoughts on Bloodborne (and a little bit of PS4) in blog form:

https://aimlesslygoingforward.com/blog/2019/07/28/bloodborne/

I've finished #Bloodborne yesterday (by defeating the second of the three final bosses). It is an absolutely wonderful game.

Everything I loved about Dark Souls was there.

This coming from someone who generally dislikes combat, repetition and bosses. And in the game.

I've miscalculated and my supply of meds-in-syringes will not be enough for the next resupply.

I've still got the old injector to carry me over.

But: the injector cartridges expire at the end of this moth.

It'll *just* about work out. But how am I even still alive. #idiot

"Kid just rages for a while."

My favourite line from the game Bastion. Gets a completely new dimension with the Orphan of Kos boss in #Bloodborne. That kid does know how to rage.

Sigh.

David Bowie's appearance in the Under Pressure song is my favourite cameo of all time.

I first listened to Queen & the song when I was ~13 and Bowie took another 10 years.

Putting Queen on recently, I was stunned to recognise his voice. The song keeps bringing tearing me up.

Are there any video games where the boss is your boss?

That is, the final challenging enemy your character needs to defeat is their manager or supervisor?

"Tomas doesn't pay attention to lyrics and then gets confused":

Queen's song Delilah is not about a woman as I originally assumed, but a cat.

Suddenly the "When you pee all over my suite" line makes a lot more sense.

How come you didn't tell me about Theremin? You know me! You know tech, music and sci-fi are my favourite things!

There's literally a Star Trek episode where an alien plays an instrument by waving hands in the air and such a thing actually exists?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6KbEnGnymk

(or is everyone like "yea we had that in the kindergarten, what are you on about?")