I’m sure the second Grok in the human centipede will find that very nutritious.

If you use that Grok, you’ll be third in the centipede. Enjoy.

The weapon: 💣

This is how we get Dalamain.

By the time you finish the game, whatever you’ve seen so far will seem like the most normal thing in the world.

Definitely a lot of standard Kojima gameplay in there, among the apocalyptic Deliveroo simulator and bonkers 4th wall breaking.

a.k.a. how to own a social media platform without having to buy it.

Art of the deal.

They’re polished, but nearly all of them are too safe.

The ones that subvert things a little are always best for me, and these always get mixed reactions from people who went in with a set idea of what they wanted from it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 being a slow paced wild west simulator rather than Grand Theft Horse is a prime example. It didn’t play by safety and doing popular things. It did what they wanted it to be, and it’s all the better for it.

It is mental, but I also kind of wish he’d hire somebody else to write dialogue for him.

And maybe somebody to check all the women characters, and make sure he’s not coming across as being a little bit odd.

And to add to that, it also gives you the tools for discovery. It’s not just “Ubisoft, but they hide the icons”.

The shrine detector (which can become an anything detector), the ability to look through binoculars or whatever it is and stamp a limited number of visible waypoints onto the map. Tears of the Kingdom gives you a slightly obscure ability to highlight all the cave entrances nearby, which you can then try to mark up and see if you’ve been there.

Other games have started trying to do some of this, but I think a lot of it is added late on in development and doesn’t really work well. Like Jedi Survivor gives you the ability to mark things with icons, but what for? You can’t see the markers when you’re walking around. There’s not really much to discover from a distance, and it’s pretty far from being a vast open world.

Is it perfect? No. The last few shrines are often a complete ball-ache to find, although a lot of them are just a generic fight and they’re pretty optional, it feels like you should do them.

Is it better than a world as a menu screen as offered by Ubisoft and those that copy them? Yes.

I think in general a lot of developers should take a long look at what they’re actually trying to make before going with the open world approach. It’s getting tired, and they’re mostly doing it badly.

Yeah, I removed Snap mpv and reinstalled with apt.

Lo and behold, it works perfectly all of a sudden.

Firefox looks like more effort, and apt will install the snap version. Even if you uninstall snap. Fun. If I could enable what is missing I’d be OK, but I’ve no idea what it is…

Well, shit…

I went with Ubuntu because the N150 is fairly new (even if it’s just a slightly faster N100) and the 25.04 Ubuntu kernel supports it out of the box.

Yeah, tried all that, and not having much luck in Firefox and MPV. VLC fine. Replied to the other post, and it might be Snap blocking it. I dunno though, because I know basically fuck all about snap other than a lot of Linux people don’t like it.

Yeah, I thought I’d ticked something similar during setup, but maybe it wasn’t for that. I installed them and it hasn’t really changed anything in either mpv or Firefox.

The compositing in Firefox is webrender (software) and appears to be using llvmpipe as the GPU. There’s a 2nd “GPU” listed, but doesn’t seem to use it All the codecs say hardware is disabled…

Installed VLC and that seems to use the hardware renderer. MPV and Firefox are both installed with Snap. I’m seeing a pattern that might not be there, but I’m already hating Snap. This is day two of my rebooted Linux experience…

It’s like chewing gum. You just keep going as it gets blander with no end in sight.

But instead of playing the map as a menu screen, you actually play in the world and discover things.

That was the crucial difference for me.

I got a cheap mini pc. It had W11 on it which I promptly broke (I think it was when it insisted on me putting in a PIN but I closed the window). It also ran at 100% for no reason trying to do updates, but then refused to do any updates.

So I put the latest Ubuntu Linux on it. Seems OK, but I can’t get anything to recognise the video codex stuff in the N150 CPU. It seems to know it’s there, but Firefox and MPV won’t use it…

Oh, did you not pay for YouTube Extra Premium Plus for the enhanced bit rate?

Bloody peasant…

Do you know how many ads are on Jellyfin?

I watched just the one episode of Wednesday and came to the conclusion that whoever wrote it had never seen The Addams Family at any point.

It was painful to watch.

Teams is just an incomprehensible version of Discord. What’s the open source version of that? Matrix?

I was enjoying right up to the point where I stopped making progress and started getting frustrated at the random aspects of it. Even some of the self contained puzzles were taking a bit of trial and error.

The last puzzles are likely going to take a lot more hours than I’m willing to give it, not because they’re hard but because they require the stars to align before it’ll let you even try them. I stopped playing a while ago now, and I haven’t felt the urge to go back.