Wait, Verlan is l’envers, stromae is maestro… Is this Verlan thing just like Rioplatense Spanish’s Vesre? (Vesre basically means revés i.e. inverse)

EDIT: Just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out this phenomenon happens in a number of languages: Riocontra in Italian (riocontra -> contrario), Podaná in Greek, Šatrovački in Serbia, Totoiana in Romanian.

How does Premiere Pro do?

Nothing like the good old magical-thinking-from-guys-who-love-logic.

Believing oneself to be the rational one in life continues to sadly be the origin of so many blind spots in people’s thinking.

Maybe on Lemmy and in some pockets of social media. Elsewhere it definitely doesn’t.

EDIT: Also I usually talk with IRL non-tech people about AI, just to check what they feel about it. Absolutely no one so far knew what hallucinations were.

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I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice.

Absolutely. I enjoyed and played a lot out of King of Dragon Pass back in the day. Yesterday I sat down to finally play its spiritual successor Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind. From what I remember from KoDP it plays exactly the same (at least during the first hour). Yet I couldn’t force myself to keep playing it. Same way nowadays I can’t seem to get hooked with genres I used to play a ton as a kid: RTS games like Age of Empires II and Warcraft 3, life sims like The Sims, point & click graphic adventures like Monkey Island, traditional roguelikes, city builders, etc. Other genres I try to get back into and I do manage to play a ton of hours of but I’m never able to finish like when I was young (e.g. JRPGs)

When I try to play many of those games I tend to feel kinda impatient and wanting to use my limited time to play something else that I feel I might enjoy better. A good modern 4X game with lots of mod support like Stellaris or Civ6 instead of RTS games which have always felt a bit clunky to me. Short narrative games like Citizen Sleeper or Roadwarden instead of longer ones I’m not able to finish. Any addictive modern roguelite, especially if it features mechanics I particularly like (like deckbuilding and turn-based combat). If I ever feel interested to play a life sim or a city builder nowadays it has to feature more RPG elements and/or iterative elements and/or deckbuilding and a very compelling setting to me. And so on.

It feels like many of the newer genres (or the updated versions of old genres) are just more polished and fine-tuned than genres that used to be popular in the 90s and the 2000s. They just feel better to play. And to be fair in some cases they might be engineered to be more addicting, too. Like, I did finish Thimbleweed Park some years ago but I feel like nowadays no one is going to play witty point & click graphic adventure games with obscure puzzles if they can play a nice-looking adventure game filled with gacha waifus.

English is not my main language but wouldn’t it be “knowledgeable” [about the specific topic] rather than “smart” here?

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From LATAM too and the main thing i think is: fuck. USA has always been very influential towards us. A lot of people want to imitate it because they only know it from the movies and shows or from what famous Americans share about their livestyles. And the right wings leaders over here are eager to play by their playbook. Trump got elected and now the more fringe right wing candidates are being elected here and while their eccentricities dominate the headlines the people under them work to undermine our free healthcare and public education. Some Latín Americans think it can’t happen in their country… until it happens.

When Twitter was bought by Musk I rushed to create myself a Mastodon. My hope was that most of the interesting, thoughtful people I followed on Twitter would eventually end up on Mastodon as Musk slowly ruined the platform. I kept my Twitter up just to keep tabs on them and grab their Mastodon handles as they shared them.

In the end, around half of them created Mastodon accounts that I follow to this day. All of them are inactive now.

At the same time I noticed more and more of them creating BS accounts. I think around 80% of them ended up in it. They’re still quite active in BS to this day.

I open Mastodon and BS once daily. Former rarely has new posts, latter always has.

I really wanted all of them on Mastodon. I don’t trust a corpo like BS. But the particular type of crowd I followed on Twitter (progressive essayists/humanities people, game journalists, artists, non-dev hobbyists, etc) seems to have mostly gone to BS, stayed on Twitter, gone to Cohost or back to Tumblr, or abandoned social media. I did find some interesting people active on Mastodon, mostly accesibility advocates, a couple of devs of games I loved and a few non brainrotten IT people. But the level of activity from my spheres of interest seems much higher on BS right now sadly.

I change the font and size, it snaps my brain out of “I already know this text has no errors, I’ve been looking at it while writing it” mode and allows it to more easily read it anew

I’ve never had this problem in English nor Spanish but you made me realize those two words are very similar in Spanish too (reenumerar, remunerar)

We humans just do a bad job explaining evolution to the general public, be it at schools, by science communicators, etc. Most laypeople want to believe in evolution so in the end they just kinda think it works like magic or that it’s guided by some kind of intelligence (whatever that means for them: divinity, we live in a simulation, an invisible natural algorithm that governs everything, the Universe itself as a sleeping deity, etc).

When I was explained evolution as a kid (granted, around the year 2000) they made it seem evolution was an intelligent mechanism that somehow chose the best traits for the survival of a species based on its environment, as if this invisible mechanism had somehow the ability to analyze its environment, reason creatively and predict future scenarios. It was only on my mid 20s when I happened to read an article out of curiosity that I got a bit of a more clear picture. There’s gotta be a better way to explain it to laypeople: maybe that it’s more of a massive, long, non-directed trial-and-error process where there’s not an actual intention or intelligence, it just happens. Individuals with critically bad traits die because of those traits and the ones with better or non-harmful traits live and get to have descendants. But there’s not an intelligence guiding this, it just looks like an intelligence to some of us because we humans tend to apply personification to everything.

starts*, but yeah

1) Hybrid visual novels (ie visual novels with some gameplay element, be it some basic adventure/exploration/mystery mechanics like the Ace Attorney series, RPG or Tactical RPG elements, management, deckbuilding or whatever) that have very good writing (think something like Roadwarden or Citizen Sleeper) and/or a loveable cast of characters (like Ace Attorney).

2) Sci-fi and/or fantasy books that have good writing (by which I mean not that hollow, mass-produced, repetitive, overly simple YA-style prose —don’t want to offend YA lovers, I’m just tired of it). Bonus points if they have some elements of social criticism, and even more bonus points if they have very compelling worldbuilding and characters. I’m thinking of stuff like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness and Rocannon’s World, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life”, most of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories, Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, Dino Buzzati’s short story “The Seven Messengers”, Ursula Vernon’s webcomic Digger, Winston Rowntree’s webcomic Watching, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, etc.

3) Logical puzzle games that have the same quality of atmosphere and setting as Return of the Obra Dinn.

4) Turn-based videogames (they can be RPGs, roguelites, management games, visual novels, text adventures or whatever else as long as it’s not action-focused, based on reflexes or time-sensitive without pause) that have very strong setting, atmosphere and writing (if they don’t have a traditional story, at least good writing in the occasional dialogue lines). Some preferred settings are:

• Decadent worlds (like Darkest Dungeon, Dredge, Fallen London, Sunless Sea, Cultist Simulator, Book of Hours, The Shrouded Isle)

• 18th to 20th century history/alternate history (like The Great Ace Attorney, The Lion’s Song, The Last Door, Amnesia: Rebirth, Return of the Obra Dinn)

• Sci-fi in general —can be cyberpunk but not necessary— (like Citizen Sleeper, Tacoma, Soma, The Talos Principle, The Red Strings Club, Chrono Trigger, 2064: Read Only Memories, Subnautica, Stellaris)

• Very current (as in 2020s or close) focused settings (like Unpacking, Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You, one night hot springs, missed messages., What Remains of Edith Finch)

• Traditional and/or generic fantasy but well written (like Roadwarden, Wildermyth, Final Fantasy Tactics, Legend of Mana, The Banner Saga, Suikoden II, Terranigma, Grandia, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Alundra… many of these I played young so their writing might not be as good as I remember)

• Other historical/alternate history settings previous to 18th century as long as they’re well written (like King of Dragon Pass, Landnama)

But I’m also open to anything I’m not used to in videogames as long as it has those elements (strong writing, setting, atmosphere), like urban fantasy/new weird/fantastic realism type of stuff like Disco Elysium, whimsical settings a la Undertale/Deltarune or ambiguous mindscapes like in Celeste and Gris.

5) Mechanically speaking, something that reaches the same heights as Slay the Spire. I don’t know what it is, I’ve played many other deckbuilding roguelites and/or roguelites with a tree-style map chasing that same high. And some were better than others (I guess shout-out to Monster Train, FTL, Pirates Outlaws, Griftlands, Roguebook, Iris and the Giant, Dicey Dungeons, Star Renegades). But none have absorbed me like it did despite it having uninteresting (to me) writing and visuals. Maybe it was just because it was my first with those ideas.

6) I was exposed to a lot of anime/manga when I was a teen and even if I never feel like I want to watch/read most of them these years, I still have some lingering weakness for some of its tropes and aesthetics when applied to videogames. I’m talking about trainwreck-style games that are awful and strangely compelling at the same time, like Danganronpa and Zero Escape. Or, to speak of one that feels much higher quality while still having some puzzling choices, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. It’s hard to describe this vibe (maybe “anime aesthetics, very ambitious in some ways but messy and still beholden to certain clichés, occasionally managing to be deep but usually just coasting on pseudo-philosophical anime bullshit”) and I really never feel like actually playing these games but once a year or so when there comes a day I just don’t feel like doing anything I don’t mind laying in my bed watching full no-commentary gameplays of these kinds of games. So if you know of something similar to those I’d like to bookmark that for the future.

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I already checked the list someone shared in some other thread, but many of the accounts that cover games there are inactive.

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Yep, I know antisemitism has a long long story, my great grandparents came to my country running away from it at the start of the last century. And islamophobia is going really strong right now too. But I do think there’s higher chances of things like that happening between the years 2000-2500 than between 1000-2000. If the recent pattern with Christianity also happens to Islam and Judaism, fervent religious feeling might diminish in the long term (even if there’s occasional flare-ups here and there) and that coupled with sheer time/centuries might help ease the tensions.