Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

COLOSSAL GAME ADVENTURES PRESENTS: 🕹️🔥⚔️ Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals

Hi everyone, zod000 here! Unlike many of our previous CGA hosts, I'm not much of a writer so this "insert cartridge" will likely feel a bit brief. Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals is hands down one of my favorite SNES games, and in fact possibly my favorite RPGs of all time. I'll do my best to prevent spoiling anything in the game, but I'll give you a quick rundown of the game itself, what to expect, and what to look out for to (hopefully) enjoy. This game is a proper 90s turn based jRPG, so I realize this game has a longer official runtime than we are used to, but I still feel that it is more than doable in a month of casual play as this was before the days of role playing games inflating their play times (I mostly blame Final Fantasy 7 on the PS1 for that trend).

Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals

Now despite the name, Lufia II is a prequel and is canonically the first game as far as the story goes, so don't worry about thinking that you should play Lufia 1 first. If anything, that would spoil some of it, ironically. As I said, I don't want to spoil any story, but will say that the story starts as trope-y as it gets, but soon gets far more interesting so please don't drop off after an hour or so.

So what sets Lufia II apart from the many other fantastic jRPGs of its time? Well, I'll give you some highlights:

• Monster sidekicks! You get pet-like monster companions that fight with your party during battles referred to as "capsule monsters". They all start as essentially babies and they "grow" by you feeding them items. They are NPC sidekicks that you do not directly control, but they are always beneficial in some ways. Some are better than others, and there are ways to game the cryptic items they prefer and want to be fed, but unless you feel like going down that rabbit hole you can just passively feed them items you don't want/need and build up your little buddy. I don't feel like this is spoiler territory, but if anyone disagrees let me know and I'll hide away.

• Puzzles! Lufia II has a strong leaning towards puzzles, I don't know that any dungeons in the game lack a puzzle. Some feel inspired by games like Zelda, but some of the later puzzles can be fairly challenging. There are also some optional later puzzles which stumped me as a kid. You'll know which they are if you stumble upon then; feel free to skip those or use some sort of guide online.

• Optional Content! I know you're thinking "hey, stop using exclamation points, optional content isn't that exciting". And while you are probably right, the optional dungeon known as the Ancient Cave does get me excited. While not technically the only optional content (there are the puzzles and such I previously mentioned as well as a casino area that could be worth your time for some prizes), the Ancient Cave is almost a game in itself.

Anyway, I think that is enough, please enjoy Lufia II with me for this months Colossal Game Adventure!

Mods

There aren't any mods that I am aware of; however, there are some special modes that unlock after beating the game a few times and there are save game files around that have them enabled. One of the modes is called "Gift Mode" and starts you directly on an island with the Ancient Cave with the option to switch your party to any combination of characters you ever play with in the game. It is fun to either build an "all star team" or a "no star team" and either give you a better chance at it if you had a hard time normally or to give you a challenge if you're just that awesome.

As always, mark your spoilers as such with the following text block:

<details>
<summary>Spoilers</summary>

Spoiler text goes here.
</details>

Game Setup

Here is the rough news, to my knowledge Lufia II was never included in any sort of "virtual console" or retro console release. Pretty much the only way to legally play this game is to have a working Super Nintendo and the game cart (humble brag, I do). That being said, the game works perfectly in emulation and a simple search in basically any search engine of "play lufia 2" will let you play it directly online, though I am not sure how saves are handled, if they are handled, with these online emulators. I am sure any enterprising tilderino (did we ever actually decide on what to call ourselves?) should be able to run a rom file to play as well.

The main purpose of this topic is to get people up and running with the game. As such, it's recommended that you:

• Share which version of the game you're playing
• Share what hardware you're playing it on
• Share if there are any tools/mods that you recommend
• Share anything you think is important for people to know before they start the game
• Share if you ever cosplay as Soma Cruz
• Ask questions if you need help

Another purpose of this topic is to revisit the game and its time period:

Do you have any memories or associations with this game itself?
What about its system or era?
What aspects of retro gaming were common at the time?
What other games from the same time period are you familiar with?
What are you expecting from this game in particular?
Which Castlevania game has the best Death fight? 

FAQ

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

Not the worst. Not outright criminal, maybe small time stuff. But I mean in terms of moral ethics, is a bad person who's hurt people in the past. And hurts people right now. There might be extenuating circumstances why they grew up like this, but nevertheless the person is a bad person who hurts people. They are a decent parent who I believe do really love me and my sibling, but not selflessly and they don't trust us siblings and is suspicious of us because they project that we must also be terrible people after their money.

I am certain that they grossly misrepresented their age when they met my other parent. I am certain that they had been unfaithful. There are many lies and I do not feel like us siblings or anyone have ever successfully been able to engage with them honestly. They have many facades. My other parent was an honest and good person who deserved much better than how they were treated.

Advice not unwanted, but I'm not really sure what I expect, just airing out a sentiment I do not feel okay to express to any of my friends, and I am trying not to wear out my partner from having to hear it over and over as well. Yes I have an appointment to talk to a therapist

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What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Complete off the top of my head thing, no source/research, just anecdotes and pontificating.

As i've been doing some heavy editing today of a 300+ line SQL query, one thing I'm wondering about with these AI usage stats are how much of the "adoption" falls into things like intellisense suggestions.

There's two parts to this, with the first being just bad suggestions.

I've found them to be "okay" for something like F#, but for SQL, which has always required me to knife fight for an alias to begin with, they're just utter garbage.

I normally don't blow through my free github copilot suggestions in my month (I'm not in the code mines as much anyways), but I blew through it in a day of shitty SQL suggestions (and then just turned it off). This was last month, so not even while dealing with the current monster, and I'm left wondering how many people just have it vomit out useless stuff they change anyways.

The second part, is just the usual "you don't really know your tools".

While doing this query I considered turning it back on or using it. I have several CTE's for readability as this is a prototype but it necessitates an annoying pattern of taking the names of your columns, uplifting them to the next query select, and then summing and renaming them AGAIN such as SUM(COALESCE(a.example,0)) AS [example]

When you have 84 columns to do this with, it can be tempting to let AI notice the pattern and just do it. However it's not actually necessary, and now that they're clocking the tokens as we knew they would, I'm back to just using my multi line editor skills. Middle click select, some home/end to get a starting point, then ctrl+shift+arrows mixed with Alt+arrows and some copy paste and I'm mostly done. Few Ctrl + D's or straight up find and replaces and I'd edited 80 lines in maybe 30 seconds?

AI would've been a bit easier, and from what i've seen of MANY coders, something I suspect they only think is doable through AI. However much like how AI is getting people to use features they never even knew existed in their business tools, I wonder how much adoption on the coder side is the same. All these text editor helper tools many coders don't use (please keep all VIM manifestos under 400 pages) suddenly being automated out by the VASTLY more expensive AI.

And like some of the other AI solutions, as the money starts to hit the budgets, I think we'll see a lot more "Look you need to learn how to do this normally" (or "hey guess what we're removing from VS code!").

Not sure I have an overall point to this, but I'd be curious to hear what other people are seeing in their environments.

The eclipse is over! Dracula is sealed. Again. Kinda? Who knows, man, this was a weird bout for him. Nostradamus has gotta have some more stuff in the tank for another Belmont, but for now let's just enjoy all the Axe Armor souls we farmed.

I hope you enjoyed Aria of Sorrow! Playing it again, I've found this game is comfort food - simple and straightforward, but clicky and fun. How does it match up to the rest of the genre, or series, for you? Did you try any mods? HOW DO YOU GET PAST THE WATERFALL?!

Join us in July when u/zod000 presents Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals!

Important: This will be a noisy topic. If you do not wish to see it in your feed, please use the Ignore feature to hide it!

Tip: If the large number of comments are cluttering up the topic and you just want to see the main giveaway posts, click Collapse Replies at the top of the comments.

It’s time for annother edition of our biannual Game Giveaway topics! Share games with the community and get rid of those extra bundle keys you have lying around.

Before you participate, please make sure you read the rules below.

Rules

-Gifters

Post your available games, the platform and method of delivery, rules for your giveaways (e.g. first-come first-serve, random draw, etc.), and any additional info or requirements. Feel free to get creative!

-Giftees

Request giveaways. Please make sure you follow the gifter's posted guidelines.

-Guidelines

Anyone can choose to be a gifter, giftee, or both! Giveaway rules are set by individual gifters, but there are handful of guidelines everyone should follow:

1. No grey market keys! Only give away games from reputable sources. If you're not sure what this means, please ask.
2. Requests for games should be done in this topic, but if the gift is a key, those should be delivered by PMs only. Please don't post keys publicly in this topic, even obfuscated ones.

If you're new to these, check out previous giveaway threads to see how these usually go.

My wife and I had a baby a few months ago and we learned that you can put a carseat in the front of a front load cargo bike starting at 3 months. I was already keen for a cargo bike, as was my wife, so we're taking the dive. There are a few common brands available in the USA, namely Urban Arrow, Omnium, and Harry vs Larry's Bullit Bike, and while those are still in contention we're currently in Munich and considering buying one and getting it home. Lots context on what we're thinking and doing and then to questions.

I was able to test drive the Muli Classic and the Carrie from Riese and Muller as representatives of shorter bikes, and we're considering the Load from Riese and Muller, the Loven's s75, the Urban Arrow Family, and the Bakfietz.nl Cruiser. We also rented the Lovens for the month we're here and pick it up today.

Ok, so we have a few questions on our plate. Do we go compact cargobike - like a Muli - or do we go for the full family van - like a Lovens or Urban Arrow? Within those categories are there any considerations we need to be mindful of like repairability? Our concern is that the Bafang engine is loved by all but seemingly hard to get parts for stateside. Whereas Bosch or Shimano would be easier. Could we rock a non-electric version like the Muli Muscle, or is that impractical?

I've been able to talk to a few owners and everyone loves the bike they have. The Muli guys love the Muli. The Lovens moms love the Lovens. It's great signal that cargobikes generally work well for the people interested in them, but not much as to which way we should go.

Last is context on what we hope to do and what we want to use it for. I'd love to go down to a 1 car family. We live within 6 blocks of all our core needs - grocery store, hardware store, pharmacy, repair places - and within .5 miles of our main recreation areas - the forest and the beach - so largely we're set walking. But there are so many great things that are just outside that area, within about 10 miles, that a cargobike would be great to have - parks, larger stores, everything really. And our Costco is about 500 feet off the main municipal bike trail so I would Looooooove to do my Costco runs on the bike. We also have one kiddo and there will likely be a second. I'm going to be getting a shotgun seat for my normal townie and mountain bikes for when the kids are old enough, but I'd also really love to be able to ferry them to school, have their friends join us, and make it the primary transport until for the family. Our friends in town have a street legal golf cart and I'd love to do something similar with the cargo bike. There is some possibility that we end up with 2, like a Muli and a Lovens, but with storage space that is currently very impractical. Also we live up a hill - about 150ft elevation gain over 5 blocks - from the main trail that connects us to the surrounding towns. We live a weird place where our pennisula is bisected by a military base and golf course so that is literally the only way to access any of the other surrounding towns. Also I'm currently a deep memeber of the Surly gang and am finding myself drawn to bikes like that - probably why the Muli keeps coming up on here - but realize that may be a foolish way to choose a family cargo bike. Also the price range is fairly steep $5-10k, so I'm trying to be level headed about it.

I'd love to hear about your experiences with cargobikes: what you rode, what you loved, what you'd skip. If you have friends or family who have indulged. Or just any thoughts really! I realize it's a small group that owns them so any info helps!

I currently work in an organization that is very AI forward. It is common for individuals to forward AI generated documents, meeting notes, or etc, with no critical thinking or review, in lieu of actual work.

This practice is insanely counter-productive, as it means that any good-faith attempt to interact with the individual pushing such documentation, really just pushes the burden of putting together said documentation onto the receiver, except now they also need to edit and verify the document they were forwarded.

I need a shorthand way to refer to this practice, that calls it out as a bad practice.

A few months ago I found an article that explained that it was bad manners to reply into a conversation anything akin to the phrase "I asked ChatGPT and it said X", for exactly the reason mentioned above. Can anyone find a link? I can't seem to find it.

This article (https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/) seems to hit the nail on the head, though it does so so succintly and at such a surface level, I don't think it really gets the point across. The reason we use books as reference points for knowledge, is because they are difficult to make, and therefore we trust that the author put real work into ensuring their work was credible. If we knew they did not, their work would not be credit worthy. Neither is an unreviewed AI generated message. By this rule, the more obviously something is AI generated, the less likely it is worth reading.

I would love a law (like Conway's law is a law), that said something like: "It is never worthwhile to spend more time reading a document, than it took to write." that I could point people at when they send me AI slop, with explanations of the above.

Is anyone aware of such a thing or website?

Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

• What are some lesser-known or overlooked Steam games that you recommend?

• Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

If you're interested in previous Hidden Gem topics, you can find them here.

For popular recommendations and general purpose sale discussion, please use the main Steam sale topic.

Optional: Feel free to categorize your recommendations by number of reviews (as a proxy for popularity)

Note to future kfwyre: please see this comment about changes to the Hidden Gems topic when you come back to this one in six months.

It's been annoying me lately how often I see people declare that certain blog posts or articles are AI-generated due to the presence of certain "tell-tale signs," (emdashes being the #1 example). It annoys me even if I agree that the thing in question is probably is AI-generated—mainly because I really like emdashes and I use them in my own writing all the time, and it grinds my gears knowing that some percentage of the population will assume I used AI because "hurr durr emdash == AI."

I'm not necessarily talking about Tildes. I'm sure I've seen it on here, but the worst offender by far is Hacker News where often one of the top comments on a linked article that has an emdash somewhere in the body will be a snarky comment about how it's clearly AI generated.

Anyway, I blew off some steam this weekend by making this silly satirical website/art project called GENIUS AI Detector that makes me giggle, so I'm sharing it in the hopes that it brings a bit of joy to any fellow emdash users who are likewise depressed about the shadow that has been cast over one of my favorite punctuation marks.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.