Sometimes I make video games

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • Frickin Dead Space remake. I’m playing through it now and even on the lowest settings it was pretty bad. My computer crashed while the shuttle was crashing, which honestly felt kind of apt

    I’ve never beat the original, but my wife wanted to see the game and has never played it. Even after tweaking things to get them running on my computer it’s still not super stable. We might have to switch to 2008

    The game looks super tense, gross, and scary. Personally, I think it’d be scarier if it was buttery smooth, but I guess there’s a certain amount of anxiety to be had wondering if walking through a door is going to freeze the game while I’m being chased by xeno horrors



  • I would love to be able to gift my unplayed games to others.

    I guess you do get into a problem where a group of people might swap the game back and forth to avoid ever having to pay for the game. But people will abuse any system, so I guess that would just be a cost of it

    If a game is still within the refund window, then maybe it should have an option to gift it. The devs / publishers could keep their money and Steam doesn’t have to process a refund. Seems like a win-win




  • I’m not in healthcare, so I’m not sure how valuable my opinion is

    If I had to guess, I’d say that there’s a cost associated with a patient refusing care, particularly if the condition is going to be aggravated.

    This cost might be financial. It might also mean that the patient returns to the healthcare system and requires more intense care. It probably also means that the patient will suffer more while outside the system.

    I don’t know what your healthcare system looks like, but mine is stretched to the breaking point. If someone discharged themselves against the advice of doctors and then later worsened and returned to the hospital, they might die waiting for triage. It’s an extremely bad look for the hospital and erodes the public’s opinion of healthcare. And while the hospital is being raked over the coals for allowing someone to die in the waiting room, the media will conveniently ignore that the patient previously discharged themselves against the advice of their doctor.

    Another scenario to think about: just because a patient is cognizant doesn’t mean they’re behaving rationally. While the patient is in care they could be heavily medicated and not realize how bad their situation would be without care: until the meds wear off and their suffering returns. If they got a particularly bad prognosis, then the panicky ape brain could take over and they just want to get out of their, damn the consequences.

    Does all that add up to being more important than the patient’s autonomy? Opinions will probably be divided. I don’t personally think so, if I was restrained against my will I’d be pretty angry about it. But I understand the rationale behind the people who want to keep their patient in the system.

    Does that mean YOU have to care? Probably not. People should be free to make their own decisions, and you can’t and shouldn’t take responsibility for the decisions that they make.







  • I haven’t played Stalker 2 so I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but it’s very politically charged and has Russian state sponsored disinformation campaigns running against it. I’m not sure that you can get a truly accurate read of it online.

    The developers are Ukrainian, and development had to be paused because their office literally turned into a warzone. The fact that the game came out at all is extremely based, and that certainly adds to the mythology around the game. But again, I haven’t played it, and gameplay-wise that doesn’t actually indicate anything about the game.

    I want the game to succeed because of the developers’ existential struggle. The people causing that existential struggle want the game to fail. Neither of us have actually played the game, so again, there’s all this bias around it and we haven’t even looked at gameplay yet.

    Be skeptical of anything you read online


  • Spotify has vaguely attributed the need for the API changes to improving security:

    • In its blog post, Spotify says that it rolled out the changes with “the aim of creating a more secure platform.”
    • In a community forum post, a Spotify employee says that “we want to reiterate the main message from the blog that we’re committed to providing a safe and secure environment for all Spotify stakeholders.” The post has many pages of replies from frustrated developers.
    • In a statement to The Verge, Spotify spokesperson Brittney Le Roy says that “as part of our ongoing work to address the security challenges that many companies navigate today, we’re making changes to our public APIs.”

    This is fairly disingenuous. The affected endpoints are all GET requests, which are read-only requests that provide some data about the track/artist/playlist/etc. There isn’t really very much potential to do anything insecure here.

    The only thing they’re securing is their hegemony.