Deimos's recent activity

  2. Comment on Bomb Rush Cyberfunk - Official trailer in ~games

    Deimos
    Link Parent
    The soundtrack is by Hideki Naganuma, the main composer from the Jet Set Radio games!

    The soundtrack is by Hideki Naganuma, the main composer from the Jet Set Radio games!

    3 votes

  4. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Deimos
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I recently decided I was going to get into fighting games, and have been playing a lot for the last few weeks. If you're willing to try another game in the search of a less-overwhelming one to get...

    I recently decided I was going to get into fighting games, and have been playing a lot for the last few weeks. If you're willing to try another game in the search of a less-overwhelming one to get into, I'd highly recommend Granblue Fantasy Versus. It's the most recent Arcsys game (same dev as GG Strive), and they've done an amazing job of making an accessible game that still has most of the depth of the major ones (e.g. the ones you listed).

    About the only complaints I have about it are:

    • The online player population is quite low, and the netcode isn't great (delay-based). I'm assuming you have a PS4 since you're playing P5R, and I have no idea how many people are still playing it on there, but the PC version is pretty dead. Even so, I've still always been able to find a reasonable number of matches for my (low) skill level anyway, between the Ranked matchmaking and the online lobbies that usually have a small group of people hanging around in the evenings. I just tend to end up playing against the same people a lot more than I would in a more active game, but that's still fun.
    • It's expensive, especially if you want DLC characters.

    I've been playing it a lot and really enjoying it. I think it's probably the best option as a "starter" fighting game right now as long as you don't mind those downsides. Combos are mostly straightforward, the special moves for almost all characters use the same set of motions, and it has an interesting "cooldown-based" system for specials that gives you the option to do any of them with a simpler input (like Special Button + a direction) at the cost of being able to use the move less often than if you do it "properly".

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Reddit has raised $368 million in Series E funding, at a $6 billion valuation in ~tech

    Deimos
    Link
    Reddit made an SEC filing today showing that they've added another $118 million to this round, making it a $368M round now, and almost $900M total raised in the last 3.5 years. From the form, it...

    Reddit made an SEC filing today showing that they've added another $118 million to this round, making it a $368M round now, and almost $900M total raised in the last 3.5 years. From the form, it looks like they were offering up to $500M, so could potentially still raise even more.

    TechCrunch has a statement:

    A Reddit spokesperson confirmed the news, saying that the new capital is from ”new and existing investors.” They offered no specifics on names. The spokesperson did confirm that the new capital did not come with a new valuation, keeping the platform at its previously-announced valuation of $6 billion pre-money.

    5 votes

  11. Comment on Tildes is pushing out the minority voice in ~talk

    Deimos
    Link Parent
    The site you're thinking of is probably Kialo: https://www.kialo.com/tour Mention for @vektor to make sure you see this so you can check it out, since I think it's very similar to the idea you...

    The site you're thinking of is probably Kialo: https://www.kialo.com/tour

    Mention for @vektor to make sure you see this so you can check it out, since I think it's very similar to the idea you were describing.

    6 votes

  12. Comment on Tildes is pushing out the minority voice in ~talk

    Deimos
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Matthew Yglesias's post about the NYT / Slate Star Codex situation ended with a good section about this (kind of a long quote, but I don't think it shortens well): Like I said in my own top-level...

    Matthew Yglesias's post about the NYT / Slate Star Codex situation ended with a good section about this (kind of a long quote, but I don't think it shortens well):

    Long story short, I am neither a fully on-board rationalist nor Slate Star Codex diehard, but I liked the blog and I enjoy its successor blog, too. I highly recommend it to you.

    And critically, by “highly recommend it to you” I do not mean “I agree with all the takes.” I think contemporary society is willing itself into a state of incredible stupidity by wanting to evaluate the worthwhileness of reading something purely on the basis of whether or not it’s correct. When I was in high school, I used to like to peruse issues of National Review, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The Nation, and Mother Jones at the library. I would learn new things in every issue. And it was a good habit to get a wide range of takes on politics.

    Now in the internet era, we have too much content to be completists like that.

    But even more so, social media incentivizes the wrong kind of reading. Today you read someone from a rival school of thought in order to find the paragraph or sentence that, when pulled out of context and paired with a witty Twitter quip, will garner you lots of little hearts. I’m as guilty of doing this as anyone. A lot of very smart people have poured a lot of time and energy into making you want to collect those little hearts.

    That said, the way you learn things and get smarter is to read strong writers and try to understand what they’re saying — not by trying to pick it apart for clout or finding ways to caricature and snark about it. Instead, try to understand what it is the writer is saying and why people believe that. A really good recent-ish example of this was Cory Robin’s “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas,” which tries to really engage with and explain the content of Thomas’ judicial and political thought, not to “debunk” it but to elucidate how a certain style of racial pessimism can be leveraged to support very right-wing views.

    The other day I wrote something critical about Ibram Kendi’s take on the achievement gap, but I sandwiched it with overall praise for his book. Some people in the comments took me to be deflecting or protesting too much, but I really think everyone should read it. It’s important to read strong writers with big, influential ideas and understand what they’re saying. I learned an incredible amount from Robert Nozick as a professor because he was a brilliant man with unusual ideas, and the value of the experience is not summed up by the fact that I still think libertarianism is kind of ridiculous.

    I have never in my life identified as a “free speech absolutist” and I hope I never will. But something about the internet is making people into infantile conformists with no taste or appreciation for the life of the mind, and frankly, I’m sick of it.

    Like I said in my own top-level comment as well, lately I've been feeling exhausted by the relentless cynicism on the internet. Even here, it's common for most of the comments on an article (or replies to a comment) to be pedantic complaints about minor details in an otherwise interesting piece of writing. It makes me not want to post things when I think it'll most likely just get dismissive responses.

    Some people don't even read further than the title before rushing to the comments to be contrarian. Tildes certainly isn't the worst; I've described the commenting culture of Hacker News before as, "I've read the title of your article, and now I will tell you why the whole thing is completely wrong." We're not anywhere near HN-level yet, but there's definitely some of that same feeling sometimes, especially on particular topics.

    I don't really know what to do about it. I've been thinking that a large part of the cause might be because sites encourage (or even force) people that are strongly pro-X and anti-X to occupy the same spaces. This is obviously more of a problem when it's a serious topic, but it works poorly even for relatively trivial things. As a recent example, pretty much every discussion about Cyberpunk 2077 on the internet was completely unusable for the people that actually enjoyed the game, because they were all flooded by people that weren't even playing it and just wanted to be cynical. Any kind of positive comment ended up with the person needing to defend themself against a barrage of people that were only there to be negative with each other.

    I've said before that even though people often use it as an insulting way of describing a community, there are a lot of aspects in common between an "echo chamber" and a community that people enjoy being a part of. There isn't a clear line between them. It's exhausting to need to be on the defensive and debate constantly, so while "all opinions are welcome" might seem desirable from a purely intellectual standpoint it's not necessarily a great goal in practice. Like I said, I don't know what the answer is. But maybe something worth exploring is whether there's a reasonable way to separate cynical and supportive groups.

    24 votes

  14. Comment on Tildes is pushing out the minority voice in ~talk

    Deimos
    Link
    Thanks for posting this. I know it's a subject you've thought about for a long time, and that we've even talked about occasionally. There's a lot that I could say, but I'll try to be brief (and...
    • Exemplary

    Thanks for posting this. I know it's a subject you've thought about for a long time, and that we've even talked about occasionally. There's a lot that I could say, but I'll try to be brief (and probably a little more candid than usual):

    Some of the main causes of this are due to Tildes's structure, which is my fault. The site's current structure does not make it possible for any kind of sub-communities to form or exist on any level of separation from "all Tildes users". All topics are basically placed in front of all users, which means there's no practical ability to have any space or discussions that won't end up dominated by "the general population". This has let us build "a Tildes community", but it can't really support anything more specific than that.

    I have various ideas for how to improve this, but I haven't been actually implementing them. Part of this is complacency, part of it is a general feeling of exhaustion lately towards the prevalent cynicism and antagonism of the internet that's been reducing my level of engagement here and elsewhere—Tildes is better than most sites, but still not great overall—and part of it is honestly from a level of fear. I'm afraid that making major changes to the site's structure or mechanics (especially ones that are intended to fragment the community) will end up killing the already-low level of activity here or driving away people who feel that it's "not what I thought Tildes was".

    But I need to get past that, because it's not going to improve on its own. @kfwyre made an excellent comment the other day that I've been thinking about a lot, because I really like the idea of looking at your impact as a vector. If we truly want Tildes to be able to be a better online community, then we—and specifically I—need to be willing to push the direction of that vector more boldly. So far it's not tilted much away from how other sites work, so naturally we're running into many of the same issues.

    So I think we need to make some of those larger changes, even if it ends up hurting the site in the short term. I don't have any specific changes I want to mention right now (and this isn't really the place for it anyway), but we should talk more about it very soon.

    59 votes

  15. Comment on 🤷🤷♂️🤷♀️🤷🏻🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♂️🤷🏼🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♂️🤷🏽🤷🏽♀️🤷🏽♂️🤷🏾🤷🏾♀️🤷🏾♂️🤷🏿🤷🏿♀️🤷🏿♂️ in ~tildes

    Deimos
    (edited )
    Link
    This thread is just devolving into pointless bickering now. Thanks for the bug report.

    This thread is just devolving into pointless bickering now. Thanks for the bug report.

    12 votes

  16. Comment on Host of ‘Reply All’ Podcast Takes Leave of Absence After Accusations of Toxic Culture in ~news

    Deimos
    Link
    Duplicate of the post from a couple of days ago: https://tildes.net/~news/v86/reply_all_is_having_its_own_reckoning_now (You can link to this article in a comment there if you think it adds...

    Duplicate of the post from a couple of days ago: https://tildes.net/~news/v86/reply_all_is_having_its_own_reckoning_now

    (You can link to this article in a comment there if you think it adds something significant to the story)

    1 vote

  17. BlizzCon 2021 announcements/trailers/etc

    ~games Text 170 words
    Figured I'd start putting together a thread as the flood of announcements and articles start coming out from this year's BlizzCon. The site, where you can pick which streaming "channel" to watch:...

    Figured I'd start putting together a thread as the flood of announcements and articles start coming out from this year's BlizzCon.

    The site, where you can pick which streaming "channel" to watch: https://blizzcon.com/

    Full schedule: https://blizzcon.com/en-us/schedule

    Opening ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyApQc-ZmSA

    Diablo IV

    Diablo II: Resurrected

    World of Warcraft

    Overwatch 2

    18 votes

  19. Comment on ‘Roaring Kitty’ sued for securities fraud over GameStop rise in ~finance