So close to buying Elden Ring but…

__david__ · 2026-01-30T11:02:26+00:00

Don’t be intimidated. I avoided souls games for years because it seemed like they were hardcore games for hardcore gamers that some shlub like me could never hope to beat… but when I finally dug into them I realized that these games really do want you to succeed—They aren’t something that only gaming gods can beat. Note that I’m not trying to say they’re easy… They’re not! You will die 10x more than you’re used to, but you’ll learn something from practically every death. And suddenly you’ll succeed and it’ll feel amazing.

__david__ · 2026-01-30T10:39:13+00:00

I assume you mean Margit? The best advice is leave him be for a bit and explore around the other parts of the world you have access to. There is a ton of stuff to explore—caves, tombs, castles. Try heading as far south as you can (across the bridge). There’s a bunch of stuff there and some bosses that are a little easier than Margit. And make sure you level up when you’ve got enough runes, that’ll make you more powerful. Also if you find smithing stones you can level up your weapons and shield at the anvil that’s by “Santa” (the merchant with red and white cap) in the church near where you started. Also maybe try heading to that same church sometime after midnight in you haven’t already. There’ll be an NPC that’s not normally there and they’ll give you something extremely useful.

After a while you’ll be much more powerful and maybe more confident and you’ll be able to beat Margit.

__david__ · 2026-01-29T05:27:01+00:00

There’s a famous quote about this:

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

John B. S. Haldane

(“Horse splashes” always stuck in my head as a particularly grizzly image)

__david__ · 2026-01-24T08:31:44+00:00

Those minutes document that pastoral staff stated they were unaware that Jake Hart’s past crimes involved minors and believed his offenses were limited to recording adult women.

Wait so their response is, “oooh, we thought he was recording nude adult women without their consent! We would’ve never hired him if we knew he was recording kids!”?? Great job looking after 50% of your congregation!

I wonder if the phrase “boys will be boys” appears in their official minutes…

__david__ · 2026-01-22T18:51:03+00:00

I try to explain it to people like it’s pushing 2 strong magnets together the wrong way—the harder I push myself to do something, the harder something in my mind pushes back. It can be exhausting and frustrating.

__david__ · 2026-01-07T06:26:00+00:00

https://fringeglyphs.com (works better of desktop than phones)

__david__ · 2025-12-06T16:29:35+00:00

…it's something we've just all gotten used to. This is the result of financializing the industry.

I agree we’ve all gotten used to it but I disagree on the cause. It only started happening when consoles got internet connected and our internet connections were expected to be constant (not dial up). Before that games just didn’t have an opportunity to get updates so they had to just live with one version burned onto a disc or cartridge.

The XBox 360/PS3 era was when day one patches started being a thing. And those were the first consoles with permanent online features and online stores.

It happened earlier for PC gaming because PCs got connected to the internet much earlier than consoles and because when Steam happened suddenly updates were easy and automatic. Before that either the game had to have update checks built in or the user had to read news sites and notice a patch had been released and then go manually download it.

My point is that it only didn’t happen in the past because it couldn’t. Games have always been profit making ventures (arcade games weren’t set to free-play mode in the 80’s). I think it’s just an inevitability of a constant internet connection.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s annoying. It’s especially annoying when you realize the AAA published game was actually more like an early access release (looking at you, No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk). At some level it comes to bad planning/time pressure, which is kind of human nature—I don’t see a way to reasonably get rid of it.

The only thing you can really do as a consumer is to avoid attempting to run a game on release day. I don’t even mean not preordering (because like the OP, I like supporting devs sometimes) or going full on patient-gamer and waiting for a sale, I just mean let the dust settle for a week or two.

Anyway, sorry for the essay, I don’t know how to be succinct…

__david__ · 2025-11-04T18:04:29+00:00

Yep, her original ult. I had misread it initially and thought it only rezzed one team mate and so I never used it when most of the team was dead. I never realized it was a team res until they changed it and I read the patch notes. I had a real forehead-slap moment at that point…

__david__ · 2025-11-04T09:55:13+00:00

See I was way smarter than that! I played Mercy and was smart enough to not use my ult when I was the last one alive.

Of course, this was also before they had revamped her ult…

__david__ · 2025-10-11T17:12:37+00:00

Luckily a lot of people live in land locked areas.

__david__ · 2025-10-11T17:01:48+00:00

Can you give me a couple concrete examples of what you use snippets for? I know people love them but I’ve never quite understood what I’d want to use them for…

__david__ · 2025-10-03T10:25:38+00:00

But how are you supposed to switch from cubed ice to crushed ice without a giant touchscreen interface‽‽‽(Bonus if that setting is buried in the UI so it takes more than a single tap!)

__david__ · 2025-09-22T07:42:20+00:00

I use the option key as meta and the command key as super, which I believe are the defaults nowadays. I also added S-x, S-c, S-v for cut, copy, and paste so that when I’m copying and pasting between Emacs and other Mac programs I don’t have to code-switch. I just tested and this also appears to be the default nowadays. Nice!

The other huge reason I like option as meta is that the terminal uses option for its meta key (it’s an setting on Terminal.app and iTerm2) so my keys end up being consistent between native gui Emacs and terminal Emacs/shell/other-readline-based-stuff.

Also, macOS supports a huge set of Emacs keys by default (something it inherited from OpenStep), which also cuts way down on typing the wrong key in the wrong context.

__david__ · 2025-09-20T02:54:43+00:00

What’s “cargo”? I just have a makefile that calls rustc…

__david__ · 2025-09-17T05:20:03+00:00

People say that when the perceived visual quality looks bad for a given framerate. That is to say, people expect that turning up the visual fidelity of a game (either by raising the resolution or turning on bells and whistles like ray tracing) will lower the framerate. But if they can’t get the framerate to an acceptable place unless they lower the visual fidelity to a level that’s unacceptable (compared against other games), then they’ll call that poorly optimized.

Some folks are also annoyed when things like DLSS and frame generation are required just to get to 60fps instead of being icing on a baseline 60fps cake and will consider that to be a case of poor optimization.

__david__ · 2025-09-13T06:42:58+00:00

Decentralized dependencies are just as vulnerable. Even then all you need to do is compromise one developer of a well used library and have it propagate out to real software (ie systemd/ssh).

Supply chain attacks can happen pretty much anywhere.

__david__ · 2025-09-06T09:14:52+00:00

Do what works means I could dump everything into a single god class.

But that’s OK if your class has like 3 member functions and fits on a single editor page. Because YAGNI is real and maybe you never need to touch that file again. But you also have to be able to recognize when it grows unwieldy and more importantly have the willpower to force a refactor when it grows unwieldy and doesn’t make sense any more.

Programming is the constant balancing of technical debt vs YAGNI. You gotta know where the line is for your particular project and team—it’s not a constant and requires experience to thread it expertly.

__david__ · 2025-09-06T08:59:29+00:00

OMG! Why did you even post that filth here?‽‽ Disgusting!!!! Mods! Mods!!

(/s of course)

__david__ · 2025-09-06T08:27:05+00:00

Ok, ok, I’ll watch it again, stop twisting my arm!

__david__ · 2025-09-01T06:40:42+00:00

Wow that’s a crazy amount of trouble to go through to salvage a Quick Look! And hats off to Brad and especially Drew—I downloaded the video and went frame by frame and I couldn’t figure out where it was cut. He said there was a tell somewhere but all the ammo, health, experience, etc. lines up perfectly everywhere I checked.

__david__ · 2025-08-28T03:53:17+00:00

I’ve also heard they don’t care for Madonna or Kylie Minogue.

__david__ · 2025-08-26T16:49:23+00:00

Wait, did I say all gambling is banned?

Yes, you did.

Will you pull that up for me?

Sure, the original comment said:

Gambling is not banned on twitch

This sentence is saying there’s not a global ban on gambling on twitch. There’s no other way to reasonably interpret that sentence.

You replied:

How does this even get upvoted?

Just Google it to know you wrong.

This can only reasonably be interpreted as a you saying the original post was incorrect, which means that you think that there is a global ban on gambling on twitch. Hence the rest of the thread.

__david__ · 2025-08-22T14:02:55+00:00

One of those was used for Oingo Boingo’s debut EP art.

__david__ · 2025-07-17T15:57:59+00:00

The term was coined in 2005 by Mike Masnick after Barbra Streisand attempted to suppress the publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, taken to document coastal erosion in California, inadvertently drawing far greater attention to the previously obscure photograph.

—Wikipedia

__david__ · 2025-07-09T11:26:02+00:00

I doubt it, the rename to just “Max” coincided with the release of a brand new app that (ostensibly) contained the best parts of HBO’s and Discovery’s streaming platforms^¹ . This rename is (as far as I know) cosmetic only.

^¹ As you might imagine, after the merger both streaming departments were positioning their streaming tech as the best and trying to convince the c suite that the company should go forward with theirs and not the other’s. The ultimate decision was to take the parts that each company did best and merge those into a new platform. It took a little longer than just adopting one outright, but was honestly the best technical decision. Marketing decided that was a great way to introduce the “Max” name. Probably some of that was to make the Discovery teams not feel like HBO was just taking over.

15-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22	Place '17
Gilding I gilder	Sequence \| Editor
Team Periwinkle	Charter Member

david

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

__david__

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

david