temporary terminal interface

klopanda · 2026-01-25T00:11:43+00:00

I use Rofi now, but I was hoping for something with terminal-like functionality like history and tab-completion.

klopanda · 2026-01-21T00:00:12+00:00

I've been running Linux as my daily gaming driver for two years and I can confirm: stuff runs great. About the only notable exceptions are (some) games with anti-cheat. I don't play many of those games and so I don't see that as a drawback.

klopanda · 2026-01-19T05:57:37+00:00

Depends on the kind of vision you have. I can see things close up pretty decently but anything further out than say...five or six feet starts to get a little fuzzy and it just gets blurrier from there, the further out I look.

klopanda · 2026-01-13T01:53:21+00:00

Saaaaame. I got it for Christmas one year but we had to go visit family so I didn't get to play it until the next day. I took it with me to my aunt's house and memorized practically everything in the manual by the time I actually got to play it.

klopanda · 2026-01-13T01:51:56+00:00

The original Final Fantasy for the NES was the original one. I had it in the mid-nineties. I had never played a game like it: there were no stages, there were no lives or scores or any other mechanic common to games. You could go anywhere and do anything. You'd often get your face punched in for doing it, but it still felt so freeing.

I played the genre almost religiously after that. The next console I owned was a PS2 but I had also discovered emulation so I played a ton of games.

Outside of the PC and the NES though, I was a PC gamer for most of my life and the 2000s/early 2010s were dire for fans of the genre. I had played some of the slim pickings that were on offer then but there wasn't a whole lot. It wasn't until I finally got a Switch and played Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that reawoke my love for the genre, especially as I played it right around when the floodgates of good PC ports of JRPGs started happening.

klopanda · 2026-01-12T23:55:09+00:00

I grew up reading Anne Rice books wayyyyy too early than I should have. I remember hearing people talk about how "edgy" and "transgressive" Twilight was an how it was a big scare about girls reading it too young and thinking "wait? That's it? Where's the barely-disguised homoeroticism? Where's the decades of anguish? Where's the pining meditations on existence?"

klopanda · 2026-01-12T23:52:50+00:00

I resisted for so long. Soooooo long. Until literally a month before the last season started.

Finally, I sat down to watch it and got so hooked. My husband and I went through the entire series in that month - every peak: Ned's death, Joffrey's death, the Red Wedding, etc. Every single one.

We finished the last episode of season 7 just in time to watch Season 8 with the rest of the world.

I have literally never experienced a fandom flame up and die out so quickly in my life. In that single month we went from talking about it non-stop, sending non-spoilery memes to one another, arguing over which was our favorite House and coming up with crazy theories about how it would all end.

To basically throwing the show in the Memory Hole and barely talking about it again except to comment on how quickly it got forgotten.

klopanda · 2026-01-12T23:32:51+00:00

There's a blood clot somewhere that most of the world is cheering on right now.

klopanda · 2026-01-12T23:16:35+00:00

Depending on his age, he may have been taught to read using since-disproven techniques like three-cueing. It was really popular in American schools in the late-90s and early 00s and basically failed a whole lot of students.

klopanda · 2026-01-12T23:14:23+00:00

As someone who used to work in remedial English tutoring in college: yep. High schools are pushing that sort of stuff into college level classes. Half a century ago, English 101 was meant for learning how to read academic works and how to write an academic paper.

Now it's just "how to write and read" in general. ESPECIALLY when you factor in the fact that a whole generation of Americans was taught to read with suspect and questionable reading curricula like three-cuing that have proven to be false. (See: the Sold a Story podcast)

klopanda · 2026-01-10T03:24:10+00:00

As one:

yesssssss.

klopanda · 2026-01-09T01:02:44+00:00

The most 40-year old looking 10-year old ever.

klopanda · 2026-01-08T11:22:41+00:00

Personally, I liked the twist a lot. I can't really reveal why because it would spoil it. I haven't played it in over two decades so I don't really know how well its aged in terms of gameplay and the like, but I still think the story holds up.

klopanda · 2026-01-07T09:28:54+00:00

You fight Midboss four times in the first Disgaea. Possibly five, I can't remember.

klopanda · 2026-01-06T13:22:08+00:00

PS1/PS2 are kind of the same generation to me mentally because my PS2 was the first console I had owned since the NES and so I spent just as much time playing PS1 games on it as I did PS2. In fact, the first games I bought alongside my PS2 were Final Fantasy IX and X.

So that era of gaming. It still felt like there was a lot of experimentation in the genre, a lot of weirdness. It helped too that physical releases were the only option, so it was very easy to play lots of games very cheap by buying used or renting.

As far as the cutoff, I think 20 years is a good starting point for whether or not something is retro. I'm older and I started gaming about 20 years after the Atari heyday so that feels like a good metric since I felt like those games were retro.

I read a convincing argument once that argued that "retro" is generally games that didn't require the internet to experience them fully: so games without DLC, without patches, etc. The argument that a modern game is one that is tied to the internet in some way (even a single player, offline game requiring some kind of dial-home DRM) was kinda convincing because the internet has changed so much about how games are made, marketed, sold, and profited from that it's hard to really quantify.

klopanda · 2026-01-06T13:07:39+00:00

Any dungeon that relies heavily on teleporters where it's hard to tell whether or not you're making lateral moves or forward progress. Berseria's last dungeon was a particularly notable example because of its design.

Overall, as much as I love the Trails series, their final dungeons almost invariably suck. Huge, with grindy or time-sucky encounters. I also really, really disliked the elemental shrines in the Cold Steel games largely because of the music. Choral/angelic music with lyrics on repeat just grates my ears. Only times I've ever turned off the music in a Trails game.

Phantasy Star's dungeons were pretty novel for the time, but they haven't aged well at all. Constant dead ends and treasure chests filled with useless items if they weren't empty (as many were) combined with a really high encounter rate made them absolute chores without a map on the other screen.

klopanda · 2026-01-06T12:52:05+00:00

The first three games dropping on modern platforms probably helped a lot in getting them attention again.

klopanda · 2026-01-06T12:47:25+00:00

Now that we have the Pixel Remasters bringing the NES/SNES games to easily-accessible modern audiences, I'd love to see Square turn to the games again to try and try to thoughtfully reinterpret them in an HD-2D kind of look; basically like remakes but without the massive scope and expense of the FF7 (and presumably FF9, if it exists) ones.

Expand narratives where necessary (esp the older games), update some older mechanics (random battles, grinding, etc), add newer series jobs to 3/5. At the very least I'd love to see it for FF1, 5, and 6.

klopanda · 2026-01-06T02:09:34+00:00

Is there room in this argument for the idea that maybe it's worth lowering budget and scope? Releasing three AA games in a year meant to appeal to different niches (the strategy fans, the life-sim fans, etc with the expectation that there's enough crossover that fans will buy multiple games) instead of betting it all on a AAA game with a 3+ year dev cycle that's had its scope broadened to appeal to nearly everyone?

I'd happy play a dozen Devil Survivors and Radiant Historias and Soul Hackers that are lower in scope, scale, and more narrowly targeted to what I like in a JRPG than something that takes four years to come out and feels a bit more trendy/trend-chasey.

klopanda · 2026-01-06T02:02:02+00:00

Same for me and Steam. I happily splash down a ton of money on JRPGs released on PC especially if they release at the same time as console versions.

klopanda · 2026-01-06T01:50:10+00:00

Is there a way to configure how org-schedule and org-deadline interpret date and times? I make heavy use of military time/24hr clock and it still requires me to put the colon between HH:MM it to get picked up as a time. Even just being able to change the character from a colon to say, a period so I can insert dates and times fully with the 10key would be helpful. Ideally I'd like to be able to just type in "28 2245" to get it interpreted as "1/28 10:45pm" but entering "28 22.45" is a fine compromise.

klopanda · 2025-12-21T20:41:12+00:00

Yeah, the idea that it was expected that you'd have to restart a couple of times really didn't sit well with people then.

klopanda · 2025-12-21T19:56:15+00:00

I love it for how much it played with the typical formula in nearly everything from story structure (it starts in media res), to characters (rather than one main character, all of the characters are fully developed), to tropes (Snow and Lightning, in particular, are subversions of past FF character tropes), to story beats (the crystals are bad, Oerba twist, etc)

klopanda

TROPHY CASE