In Magic: the Gathering people are discussing “universe beyond” sets. Those are foreign IPs like Doctor Who, LoTR, Marvel, Fallout, Sonic etc injected into magic, which already had fucking good setting and lore.
It brings them lots of money, at least short term, while destroying the game we love.
How does it “destroy” the game? Aren’t they effectively existing cards with tie-in art/names? Pardon the lack of familiarity, I only played Magic for about a year with a friend group half a decade or so ago.
Or are they introducing entirely new carda/mechanics now? Or saying that these are somehow involved with the canon setting?
They aren’t involved in canon setting, at least yet. But there was a period of “hat set” in-universe sets when quality of art and lore of main sets dropped. Although last few were very decent.
Yes, they aren’t just reprints under new names now. They are full sets of some IP without in-universe cards to match them. They are cards that likely won’t be reprinted ever (because due to IP they don’t even own them, can’t reprint on-whim). Which means those “The One Ring” and the likes are only gonna grow in price. Heck, even playable commons like “Loriel Revealed”.
They also aren’t owning rights for digital distribution on some of those IP even and in Magic Arena those cards are replaced with something else in-universe-ish which doesn’t exist in paper.
Yuck, just what Magic needs, more mechanically unique limited release cards.
And if they can make “lore friendly” versions for digital, just publicly commit to releasing those some number of months/years after the tie in set. Make it part of the contract when initially making the tie in. This shouldn’t be difficult.
No, they are mechanically unique cards. There’s a handful of cards from past Secret Lairs that received Universes Within variants, but now they’re making whole Universes Beyond sets that are unlikely to ever receive those variants. Those sets are also Standard legal, and have resulted in the largest and most bloated Standard pool of all time. Thankfully, that hasn’t even mattered because Wizards balancing is still awful, so even with such a large cardpool Standard only has two competitive decks.
My biggest issue is just that all of these Universes Beyond sets are advertisements. It really sucks that in our capitalist hellscape, I can’t even escape from ads in a cardgame.
LEGO enthusiasts ( !lego@piefed.social ) are usually split on the “non-LEGO” compatible sets, especially since the basic LEGO patent went to the free domain. Some people think they’re “fake”, some other people think it’s a way to still afford the hobby when the prices have skyrocketed
My personal opinion is that if another brand can match LEGO’s consistent quality I’d be open to it but as long as the quality of the individual pieces remains so freaking low it’s not worth it (looking at you Mega Blocks!)
From what I heard there are quite a few brands now that reached Lego’s quality (indeed, definitely not Mega Blocks)
Okay that’s really cool actually! I remember back when I actually built with Legos there were some specialized pieces made by enthusiasts since Lego didn’t have a good equivalent yet, such as steam locomotive wheels for example, or replacement 9V Lego Trains tracks, but those were all different than full on Lego competitors
Mine is interest in retro gaming which oh boy, there’s a lot:
- CRT vs Line-doubler device like OSSC and RetroTINK
- HDMI Mods/Adapters
- Native hardware vs Emulation
- Grading mint game and the price for it (I still see it as snake-oils)
- If [Insert old game] hasn’t aged well or is that person simply not good at it.
Bonus points if that person happens to be Gen-Z and comments selection bitching about Gen-Z. I hate the weird elitism retro-gaming community have which as a Zoomer, it does put me off wanting to play older games if I be judge for being too stupid to not get it straight away.
Older millennial, grew up playing NES and after. Emulation is fine and allows everyone to play titles they otherwise might have missed. With you on the sbdke oil.
I mostly play emulation as it just good enough. I would only play on native if I really love the game or saw a game at a game shop that’s cheap and want to give it a try. Otherwise, I find if I play games on emulation, is often that I know or heard of a game that suppose to be good but want to try it for first time.
If it has PC Port and isn’t too bad (unless there’s mod to fix it), I would rather play that, especially if it’s a shooter games as I’m not too fond aiming on stick without gyro controls. Even if it natively doesn’t support it, I would try create controller layout via Steam Input which is super hacky
Okay, I personally don’t like the sound of a line doubler compared to just using a plain CRT. Had to look up what a line doubler is, and it feels like it kinda defeates the purpose of playing retro games, IMO, especially stylistically. Why would I want seemingly better graphics on a retro game?
Will absolutely agree that grading games, just like trading cards, is a cult adjacent scam, if not an outright cult.
Also, screw people that get uber defensive if you aren’t immediately a pro the first time you ever boot up a retro game. They can absolutely suck a lime for all I care.
Is a tab four spaces or two?
Let’s all compromise on three spaces
recordscratch.wav
Can we make it π spaces? It’s such a nice number.
Ouch. This hurts. This hurts so much.
Which IDE is best?
IDEs are for script kiddies, real programmers use vim.
Nah, real programmers use echo, cat, and pipes
Vim is ok, useful when you don’t have an ide handy, but making a complex multiplatform distributed system across multiple teams and repos in such a limited application is just bonkers. Downright lunacy.
Behold: HUML, a markup language so opinionated that it forces its users to use an indentation of exactly 2 spaces https://huml.io/specifications/v0-1-0/#indentation
Honestly I like the rest of the specification and being opinionated definitely has its advantages, but I hate using 2 spaces for indentation. Maybe the people who were using tabs for indentation were actually on to something …
Hot take: it depends on the language.
- Markup? 2 spaces
- Procedural? 4 spaces
- Natural? 8 spaces
One of my hobbies is the sport of weightlifting (the snatch and the clean & jerk). There is a rule called the Pressout Rule that keeps lifters from pressing the weight out overhead - basically you can’t catch a weight overhead and then muscle it out to full extension. This rule is pretty unpopular with a lot of folks because the judges judging the lift may see your arm shake a bit and decide it was a pressout. I’m not a big fan of the rule.
After diving in and learning it this year, I fully believe learning Vim makes you a better developer and it should be commonly taught to developers. It has done far more for my dev skills than any single AI tool ever has, and I dont have to worry about it hallucinating.
Personally, I think Vim should be made into standard knowledge for anyone who consistently uses a keyboard for their work. A lot more software than I expected supports it, and it makes any form of text editting tremendously better.
I’d be curious to know why. I know just enough about vim that I can use it if I’m forced to (perhaps a barebones Linux system) but usually my default text editor is nano - what makes vim that much better for development?
For me, its the massive range of editting manipulation it provides, and the reduction of dependence on using a mouse. For context, I have some level of wrist injury, so my complaints around mouse usage mostly stem from that.
I would love to explain in detail what makes Vim great, but I think noboilerplate on youtube did it best with this video: https://youtu.be/sqm4-B07LsE
But if I had to explain one of my favorite parts of vim, its the fact that I keep finding new solutions to improve my ability to edit code with an ease I had never felt before. Using ‘vf’ in order to easily highlight from where my cursor is to whatever character I want to get to has saved me so much time when rewriting variables or cleaning up code. Ive barely learned about what EX mode can do, but being a lot of work involves correcting other code or duplicating it for use with a different part of the code base, being able to use the substring command is drastically more helpful than your standard ctrl+H will do. Easy example :.,+5s/foo/bar/g Colon is what puts you in EX mode. Period is the current line, comma indicates this is a range, +5 means the next five lines, s means substring which is the command that we are using. “foo” is the word to search for, “bar” is what “foo” will be replaced with, and g means to replace all instances. Drastically more robust and useful than what ctrl+H does.
Vim just makes it easier to manipulate text. Its drastically reduced strain on my wrists, and puts me in a flow state far more often than I ever experienced before I used it. Its kind of like aiming in a first person shooter with a mouse instead of an analog stick. Both will get the job done, but a mouse is drastically more capable at being accurate. Thats what vim feels like for coding for me.
RAW or RAI?
Rule of cool
Hottest take, whichever I’d more beneficial to the players if it’s a player vs monster encounter. When I DM I truly want them to “win” and if they read something in a way that makes sense I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for that instance then set in stone how it will be going forward.
I follow football ( !football@sopuli.xyz )
Every year the best player wins the “Ballon d’Or”, based on votes from journalists from all over the world.
Criteria tend to change from year to year, and you usually see a lot of fans pushing for their candidate a few months before the award. Ask any football fan and they can always tell you which Ballon d’Or they think got “robbed”, usually using their own metrics to justify that choice.
It always seemed a bit weird to me how important the whole thing is when that game is mostly collective.
Who’s the GOAT of F1, some say Schumacher, some say Verstappen but the real debate is if it’s Latifi or Maldonado
Whether a ball hitting the line should be in or out. You’d think it would be simple, like tennis, but nooooo. Pickleball authorities want to have every line be ‘in’ except for the kitchen line… but hitting/touching the line does mean it’s in, as in ‘in the kitchen,’ which means you’re out.
Then there was the whole rule change about ‘let’ serves, and the pros straight up ignoring the rules and playing the old way.
:/ ugh. Playing a relatively recent sport can be frustrating, because they’re still trying to change rules to make the game better, compared to older sports where things have been set in stone.
I’m into bicycles and there are plenty. This one seems mostly settled now but “disc brakes vs rim brakes” gets some people worked up. Rim brake fans see disc brakes as needlessly expensive and complex. Disc brake fans will point out the better stopping power, especially in wet weather. And it doesn’t slowly wear out your wheel rim.
Even a lot of the disc brake fans get heated at the mention of hydraulic disc brakes compared to cable-actuated. They see hydraulic brake-bleeding as the pinnacle of complexity. I used to do my own car maintenance. In that world, bleeding your brakes is considered a very beginner-friendly maintenance activity. I think cyclists are way too resistant to change.
This one is starting to sway one direction more than the other but: Using AI for indie game development. (For music, voice work, art, code, writing, gameplay, etc)
You’ve probably seen many arguments for and against AI at this point so I won’t harp on that too much. It is interesting/frustrating to see where some devs focuses are, and why this has contributed to an insane amount of AI art in games lately.
How to best learn from AI in the game of Go.
AI is an extraordinary tool for game analysis because you can set it to analyze every move in ever game you play, and it’s stronger than any human teacher. It also overturned a lot of old school opening sequences and ushered in a new meta.
But there are limitations to it. AI can tell you that a move is bad and where it should be played, but it can’t explain why. AI plays on a razor’s edge, if it can find one specific line of play that works to live in an area, then it won’t bother trying to strengthen it, while a human player couldn’t read that far ahead. Human play depends on heuristics, like, “It’s generally a good idea to place your stones into this shape” but the AI doesn’t think in those terms at all, it tirelessly reads out a ton of variations every time.
Once, I was in a room at an event where a professional had flown in from Asia (I forget which country) to give reviews. One of the players getting a review started arguing about something he said, saying, “I ran this through AI and it said my move was good.” People have a lot of opinions on that sort of thing, some people would say that the AI is the ultimate judge of whether a move is good or not and that the student was in the right to challenge the pro saying something wrong, while others might say that student should be more respectful and consider multiple perspectives, like, “If you just want to go off AI, then why even bring it to the pro?”
Some people try to focus on playing the “top engine move,” seeing that as the best practice to reach optimal play. But others feel like that makes games too “same-y,” and leaves gaps in your knowledge against unconventional play, along with the problem that humans can’t match it’s computational power which that style of play depends on. But, everyone uses it to some degree, it’s just too useful.
Also, different online servers have implemented AI tools. The most controversial is Tygem, which introduced a feature where you can pay money to use AI analysis during a game, below a certain (relatively high) rank. Pretty much everyone hates this. Like, you could just run an AI locally, but that’s called “cheating” and it doesn’t stop being cheating just because you decided to pay microtransactions in a 4000 year old game.
Honestly, I could go on longer than anyone’s interested in talking about go controversies, like not too long ago there was a controversy between a Chinese and Korean player where the Chinese player was penalized for not keeping his captures visible, which was a new and kind of obscure rule.
