Minecraft.

I played Terraria for a bit and I kept getting into the headspace of wtf am I even doing playing the game?

Anytime I touched Minecraft it felt the same.

I’ve played other, similar builder/mining games, most notably satisfactory and DRG, both of which feel like they have more direction than Minecraft or Terraria.

I don’t need much of a push to care enough to progress through a game; an interesting mechanic, a fun playstyle, interesting things to do and achieve… For the most part I’m really laid back when gaming. I don’t really get involved in PvP at all, so anything cod/modern warfare/fortnite/whatever, I’m not interested in. I’d rather work cooperatively with people to achieve a goal. Even something like left4dead or counterstrike is pretty decent in my mind. Some competition is fine, but free for all and/or small teams in large battles (like with many Battle Royale games), when it’s almost entirely PvP, no thanks. There’s always trolls and people who take the game far too seriously, and those are the kinds of people I don’t want anything to do with.

I struggled with Terraria because a lot of the mechanics were not obvious. There was a logical progression to get more powerful stuff, and even some fairly good quests and bosses to fight, but you either happen across them and you’re wholly unprepared for the encounter, or you have to follow a guide to get the event started. It was a bit convoluted, and the game didn’t really explain anything about what you needed to do to move forward. Minecraft feels like the same stuff. It’s all exploration and discovery based, basically at random. I know there’s some “end game” type stuff in the game, which implies there’s progression, but idk, it’s all kinds of obfuscated.

Compare with satisfactory, which is largely open, but has a pretty clear set of skill trees and progression. There’s no “end” to the game, just endlessly creating items.

There’s direction there. It’s not a lot, and nobody is going to tell you how to get to the next thing, just that it exists and this is what you need to get to it. There’s a hundred different ways to get to that objective, and you have to find your own way.

DRG is basically an endless grind of matches. Procedurally generated, which keeps things lively, but an endless set of essentially the same thing every time. You can get upgrades and cosmetics the more you play, but it’s the same gameplay every time you get into a round.

DRG still has a better plotline than twilight… I mean, Minecraft.

Just getting dumped into an open world with no idea what you can do, or what you should do, isn’t really my jam. I tried with Terraria. No thanks.

I just want to be clear, this was like highschool cs classes. I took things a bit more seriously in college.

I never wrote messy code or illogical code, or any code that didn’t work. We were learning C++ in those days and if you know anything about C++, you can basically cram an entire program into a single line. You can also do some shorthand stuff for calculations and updates to variables… So while the class was instructed to use whitespace and comments and update variables like “var = var + #” I would do var += #… I wouldn’t comment it, mainly out of hubris.

I was pretty good at it but I was lazy as all hell with it.

I don’t code, at best I script. I’m a sysadmin, not a dev, so I play around in PowerShell mostly.

I just started to naturally do all of this. Not because I was taught to, but because I’ve written too many scripts that I later looked at, and thought, WTF is going on here… Who tf wrote this? (Of course it was me)…

So instead of confusing my future self, I started putting in comments. One at the beginning to describe what the file name can’t, and inline comments to step me through what’s happening, and more importantly why I did what I did.

The sheer number of comments can sometimes double the number of lines in my script, but later when I’m staring into the abyss of what I wrote, I appreciate me.

I loved doing this is school, just trying to mess up my teachers.

The only part of this I didn’t immediately realize is the wifi pineapples default IP range.

From now on, I’m going to set that as my clients default public IP range to troll anyone who knows.

I don’t, but I’m sure other people are completely mystified.

Renewed scrutiny huh?

I want to know why the scrutiny needed to be renewed. Why did scrutiny diminish under these kinds of allegations?

I can see from the comments something about this being affected by him becoming president, and I’m left here thinking, shouldn’t the FBI/CIA/enforcement agencies, be able to operate without the president getting all up in their business?

That’s just sad, honestly. I won’t assume Trump is guilty until he is convicted of the crime, but there should be nothing that can prevent law enforcement from fully investigating what happened and providing justice for that girl.

The fact that this is a headline at all is pretty dark.

It seems to me that mental health issues, including, but not limited to, ADHD, are being taken more seriously.

Previously, the lazy, slacker, troublemaker kids were just beaten until they did what they were told.

Yeah, I’d say the threat of violence is a pretty good motivator to overcome the symptoms of mental conditions, and at least mask so hard that people can’t tell that you’re a complete fucking mess, right up until the day that your mental health degrades so much that you off yourself.

Thanks.

Personally, steam reviews don’t make me want, or not want to play games. That being said, if I saw these reviews on a game that I had any interest in acquiring, I would consider it a selling point.

Normally I judge stuff for myself. I’ll watch reviews, and gameplay footage, etc before making any kind of purchasing decision. Steam reviews are usually checked, but they don’t weigh into the decision strongly enough for me to care.

With all that being said, intentionally bombing a games score en masse with either bot/alt/spam accounts just because you personally don’t like them, is seriously uncool.

I think we need a community just for this guys work. He’s brilliant.

Welcome to the internet.

Have a look around.

This has never been forbidden.

Hey, could you kindly shut the hell up?

I already feel old. You don’t have to rub salt in the wound.

Can we talk about the willenium now?

No apology needed. No offense taken.

I know that text replies, especially terse ones can be interpreted in many ways. Often I tend to be rather verbose to get my point across accurately. Some then complain about the verbosity of my replies.

It’s a struggle to find the right amount of terse while being verbose enough to not be misunderstood.

I usually want whatever is best for the majority. I’m done college, and I paid my student loans, I’ll vote for student loan forgiveness and a restructuring of that system so others don’t have to go through what I did.

I’m pretty healthy and rarely need hospitals but universal healthcare is something that everyone should have.

I would also vote for UBI, though I would get no benefit from it, as I’ve been employed pretty much non-stop since I left college.

I would also vote to raise the minimum wage, though my salary is significantly amount the minimums.

My principles are in line with what most people would consider to be the greater good for all people. I believe in true equality, and I don’t feel like that’s what we have, some people just aren’t given the same basic rights, especially in America with roe v. Wade being overturned. Bodily autonomy and the right to love, and marry whomever you want. I don’t believe in lowering the bar to give the illusion of things being “fair”, eg, allowing people who are otherwise mentally or physically incapable of doing a job, to do the job just because they’re a particular race, gender, or something else (making it more about who they are than whether they’re the best fit for a job).

I don’t think I need any convincing to vote for what’s good for someone else.

I think it was a bug or some kind of resource saving technique. The original did all online servers, AFAIK they were hosted by Rockstar. So I would be in a new game I started as “friends only” and after a while (I imagine, alternatively, if their servers got busy, IDK), it would just transparently merge your current session into another session. Suddenly I would live join a populated public server.

IMO, it was an effort to limit their resource use. When someone was solo in a game, it would just merge your online session into another one that’s populated to consolidate resources. Ignoring any game settings for friends/invite only or whatever.

I gave up on it quickly afterwards, because people insisted on being trolls and griefing anyone they could. Not everyone, I’m sure, but they’re was plenty of it going around.

They may have changed away from a server/client model, to a more peer-to-peer model, I don’t know. I lost interest in everything GTA after I finished the GTA5 campaign and tried to play online.

I don’t know if I’ll return to GTA when 6 comes out. At this point, I’m leaning towards not doing that. I might just wait for a sale and pick it up to play the campaign, but I’m done with their online gameplay.

I get a stipend every month for home office costs, it’s a modest amount, IMO, but it’s to partially cover everything I need to pay for to work from home, electricity, internet, even my cellphone, since I occasionally will need to use my personal phone while working (no company issued phones at this place). So if I need to tether to my cell to work because my ISP is down, the stipend covers any costs associated with doing so.

The expectations are significant because of that stipend, but not unreasonable IMO.

The amount is separate from my pay, and untaxed. It’s basically a reimbursement for expenses.

Vehicle costs are separate, if I need to drive anywhere for my job, I can submit the distance driven and I’m reimbursed separately, a set amount per unit of distance.

It hasn’t happened for me yet but there’s a nontrivial chance I may get deployed to another area of the country, in that case, I get airfare, hotel and a meal allotment daily, as well as a rental car to travel to customers sites for the duration I’m there, all at the company’s cost. I’m reimbursed 100% for travel in those cases. Anything local is just by distance travelled.

About 80% of our client base is local enough that I can drive myself to their location when needed. It’s rare that it is needed. I have not needed to go to a customer’s location in the 6-7 months I’ve been at the job. Others have, and for the most part, they’re closer to the customers that they traveled to, compared to me, but I should be ready in case I’m ever needed to travel, whether local or nationally.

Due to the work we do, and our relative size, we’re only (currently) servicing clients in our country, nothing international right now, as far as I know. Our business model allows for it, but our specialty, which is our main marketing point, is pretty specialized to our country, so I don’t think that will change anytime soon.

The last couple of jobs I held, had similar, but not as generous rules. Talking to the management, they’re primarily interested in ensuring that we, the workers, are happy and healthy so we can work efficiently. IMO, it’s the best management team that I’ve worked under so far. If things continue the way they have been so far, I don’t see myself leaving anytime soon.

Honestly, I’m still a bit surprised that anyone still plays it.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s really never been good.

My favorite feature of the game was when you went into a friend’s only game, just so that you can get a handle on mp before subjecting yourself to actual mp, and halfway through driving through the city, you would merge into a public game and get shot to hell with no warning, and when you let out an exasperated “awww come on” the game triggers voice chat, which you never set up and didn’t know the game had it, and only realized when the 10 year old kid that just fragged you comes on the mic with a “cry more noob” or some similar retort.

Oh yeah, super fun game.