A person interested in nature, science, sustainability, music, and videogames. I’m also on Mastodon: @[email protected] and @[email protected]
My avatar is a snapping turtle swimming in the water.
I’ve generally found that avoiding the biggest crowds seems to also avoid some (though not all) of the worst behavior. More specialized subreddits, communities, and magazines tend to be more chill, and also more focused on their topics.
Can someone provide or point me to a quick rundown of how Misskey and Calckey/Firefish differ?
So it seems their reasoning is as follows:
I doubt that they will readily consider the following information with a level head, but if they are willing to listen, you may want to cite the following:
Tangential sidenote: I find the Lemmy easier to understand than Reddit.
Seconding basically all the (mainline) Metroid games.
I’m usually playing older games of some sort. There’s retro games, like those from the 32-bit era and before, but I also play…old-ish games, ones that were released within the last decade or two. Just last year I began playing Tokyo Xanadu eX+, which was released in 2017 (albeit as the definitive version of a 2015 game).
I think a number of the indie games I play are generally newer. Though, given my tastes, many of them tend to be games designed to evoke some sort of similarity to those older styles of games. So I guess it’s an interesting question whether they count as “retro” or not.
That said, given that I pretty much only use store-bought laptops (and not of the “gaming” variety), my hardware means that I’m much better off playing older games anyway. “Newer old” games can probably still run, depending on the game, but some may be choppy and I can probably wait on those.
I knew of the stellar reputation the old Thief games have, so I bought them a while back, but have yet to play them. And I have yet to play basically any of the modern games shown. However, this video make a surprising lot of sense.
For instance, I’ve had experiences in games where I can tell that the game is visually pretty but I’m just not paying attention to it – and ironically missing out on some neat visual features – because it’s just not important to the gameplay. This may be more appropriate when I’m revisiting game areas I’ve already been to, but it can be a problem when I’m missing the awe of my surroundings because I’m too focused on making my way through the obvious walkable area and clearing out generic mooks.
Maps in games are an interesting thing. I play a lot of so-called “metroidvania” games and their ilk (heck, most of my gaming is 2D), and I don’t really like it if I’m frequently consulting my map to find my way from place to place. The best level designs in such games, in my opinion, are the cases where I end up learning to navigate the world without (or with minimal) consultation of my map. I think this generally means having sufficiently varied level design that there are memorable visual cues for where I am. A “maze of twisty passages, all alike” can be appropriate in some situations, but I find that it’s often more “organic” – especially when it comes to things like the interiors of buildings – to have recognizable details differentiating things like different hallways that would otherwise look similar. While the game might still effectively be a bunch of corridors to run through, anything from more varied theming (even just different paint colors and lighting on walls in similar parts of the same area) to architectural details that directly affect gameplay (a broken stairwell that must be jumped across vs. an intact stairwell that can just be walked up). People in real life design buildings to be easily navigable (usually) and leave environmental markers in natural spaces because this makes navigation smoother in real life.
And yes, there’s so much to be said about the value of integrating story into gameplay. In general, I feel that there’s something to be said about how videogames shouldn’t (in general) aim to be “cinematic”. A film is a medium of passive experience, but a game is a medium of active experience. Cutscenes aren’t bad per se, and even cinematic cutscenes aren’t bad per se, but care should be taken in their use. Sometimes, a fight scene rendered in-engine – even if this means 2D pixel art sprites beating each other up – can be much more immersive than a high-quality video with panning shots of the characters as they’re throwing punches and wrestling. The latter takes the player’s consciousness out of the game world, reminding them that they are merely the audience, while the former can be presented seamlessly without changing the player’s perspective (as surely the player has already gotten used to mentally processing the game world in a way that feels comfortable to them).
Thanks for sharing this video! I boosted it over on Mastodon too.
Does kbin standardly use “@[email protected]” instead of “[email protected]”? (asking this as a Lemmy user)
Hey, welcome to the threadiverse! I’m also a newbie, whose only prior experience with this sort of site has been Reddit (as well as internet forums but they’re not quite the same type of thing), so here’s what I’ve figured out so far. (The “threadiverse” is the informal name for the realm of Reddit-like websites linked by federation.)
Apologies for another long post for you to read, but I’ll try to make this an easy read. (Feel free to tell me I suck in if you think I wrote this badly or if it was stuff you already knew.)
On Reddit, you have one site, which has a ton of subreddits, each of which is like a little forum and is independently moderated (within the limits of the larger site’s policies, of course). Lemmy and /kbin are, basically, like many little “reddits”, with a twist: they can talk to each other and so you can be a member of one “reddit” and post/comment on another. Also, subreddits are called “communities” on Lemmy and “magazines” on /kbin but they basically work the same way. You can subscribe to them and see posts from them and post to them, even if they’re on other “reddits”.
So, yes, you can have your account on lemmy.world, but also subscribe to (for example) /c/patientgamers at sh.itjust.works (which is sometimes written as [email protected]). Meanwhile, what if you’re also interested in the content at /c/patientgamers on lemmy.ml? Well, you can subscribe to that too! (Think of it like being subscribed to two slightly-differently-named subreddits.)
While there’s only one actual Reddit which has all the many many subreddits, in the threadiverse there are many “reddits”, each of which has some “subreddits”. There may be some duplication of more general topics, like memes, but you’ll also often find that more specialized “subreddits” are only on certain “reddits” – for example, my instance, mander.xyz, has a lot of nature and science related communities, not found on other instances. And each of those “reddits” has its own rules, and each of those “subreddits” has its own rules within the instance that hosts it. You’ll want to check each out to get a feel for the vibes in each place.
And now for the nitty gritty.
The way this all works is that you basically have two ways to see everything on the threadiverse: (1) on the site where the thing is, and (2) on your home instance. For example, you posted your message on lemmy.world. I can go to lemmy.world to read your post, but I can’t reply there, unless I have a lemmy.world account. So how am I commenting? I’m typing this reply to you on mander.xyz. That’s because I’m viewing your post on my home instance. I saw your post on the feed of another instance (acutally a /kbin instance, located at fedia.io), and I wanted to reply, so on that page, I got the link to your post ( https://lemmy.world/post/928037 ), copied it and pasted it into my own instance’s search bar, and pulled it up on my instance (Mander), and here I am, typing my reply.
Now, I did this only because my instance doesn’t already know about your post. I’m not subscribed to [email protected], which is where you posted this. If I were subscribed, then your post would have appeared in my subscribed feed, on my instance, already. And I’d just view your post and type my reply just like it were a post on my own instance. I’m subscribed to [email protected], so new posts there will show up on my subscribed feed.
The first thing I did when I wanted to join Lemmy was that I needed to pick an instance to join. But the second thing I did, almost concurrently, was that I started noticing all the different places that had content I wanted to see. I made a quick list of all those different communities/magazines. So once I joined, I just went and subscribed to all of them.
You can see what communities are on a given instance by clicking “communities” at the top of the page. (Or “Magazines” if you’re on a /kbin site.) So I basically just went through the communities lists of a bunch of instances, and checked out what people were posting about, and asked myself, “hey, do I wanna hang out here?”.
How do I subscribe? I go to the webpage for the community, like going to the subreddit, and I hit subscribe. What if it’s on another instance? I just take its URL, copy it, and paste it in my instance’s search bar. Wait a few seconds, then there’s a link to the community via my instance. Click subscribe. (Sometimes it’s a little buggy and have to go into a post to subscribe. Or it says “subscribe pending” after I click. But, really, I actually am subscribed, and I can tell because those posts start showing up on my subscribed feed.)
Where are my subscribed posts? I just go to my instance’s home page (mander.xyz for me, lemmy.world for you) and I can click “Subscribed”. Or “Local”, which shows posts on my instance. Or “All”, which is a feed of all the posts my instance knows about (local and remote). And I can sort them in different ways too.
The search box is surprisingly useful on fediverse platforms, I’ve found. On Lemmy and /kbin, I can copy the address of any community/magazine or post or comment and stick it in my instance’s search box. Wait a few seconds, and it’ll find it, and I click on it and do my thing. Sometimes I find posts that my instance didn’t know about at all before I pulled them up, so they’re “missing” comments that I can see on the post’s actual address, but I don’t need to see them all on my instance, I just need to pull up the one I want to reply to and post my reply. By the way, these links are that colorful little fediverse star you see beneath your posts. (On /kbin it’s in “more” -> “copy URL to fediverse”.) Everything has an address and every address is searchable, it seems.
So here’s basically how I’m using Lemmy now:
Hope this helps!
You’re welcome!
You might already know this, but I just wanted to mention (for anyone curious) that one neat thing about what NYC did is that it’s actually one of the more famous textbook examples of ecosystem services.
Basically, at some point they actually calculated how much it’d cost to build a water filtration plant vs. how much it’d cost to maintain the Catskills watershed, and found that the latter was significantly cheaper, proving the notion that well-functioning natural systems can do things that are worth huge amounts of money, seemingly for “free”, so they’re well worth the effort to understand and safeguard such resources.
Here’s an article about it: https://blogs.edf.org/markets/2017/11/07/how-and-why-farmers-in-the-catskills-protect-new-york-citys-drinking-water/
And here’s an article about how policy approaches have changed over time. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2015/11/30/the-catskill-watershed-a-story-of-sacrifice-and-cooperation/
Thanks for the encouragement to just jump in and do stuff, gaming and otherwise.
I’ve found myself having a hard time finding dedicated time to play games (i.e. without worrying about something else “over my shoulder”) and I’ve also found myself seemingly unable to “learn” new genres of games despite my wanting to get into them (so I often end up playing genres I’m already familiar with). I suspect these are related, and I also suspect that just jumping in and doing stuff more spontaneously will probably help improve things.