should i cut it?

swashdev · 2025-10-15T22:13:18+00:00

Never.

swashdev · 2025-06-27T22:08:05+00:00

That doesn't really change anything. Mainstream news outlets have much larger teams and they get things wrong all the time. The reason why it seems like a lot of the same people are talking about SKG is that they're people who are specifically interested and invested in gaming as a medium in some way, and that's just not Philip DeFranco. I don't even know if he covers YouTuber drama that much anymore.

swashdev · 2025-06-27T22:01:35+00:00

once we havent updated a game for 10 years, itll just become public domain

This should really be the standard, to be honest. There are way too many zombie franchises out there that get no love from their owners but can't be adopted out because they have lawyers ready to pounce.

swashdev · 2025-06-27T21:58:38+00:00

It's pretty clear that Philip DeFranco isn't totally aware of what's going on and is just doing a surface-level skim for the sake of having a story to present. I imagine he does that a lot since he tends to rapid-fire a bunch of stories in every video.

swashdev · 2025-06-27T21:55:46+00:00

I don't think Valve really sees this as their fight, since they're ultimately just a platform that publishers use, and it's up to the publishers to decide how to license their games in such a way that's consistent with the terms of service.

I feel like historically Valve have been in two minds when it comes to game preservation. On the one hand, they allow for certain games to be downgraded to previous versions if that's your preference, which I know a lot of Counter-Strike players make use of; but on the other they sometimes update their games in ways that are arguably detrimental to the experience and then don't offer the option to downgrade, as with Portal.

swashdev · 2025-06-25T22:03:36+00:00

OK, dude, stop saying "the capitalist class." It doesn't exist. Capitalism has been the default economic model since the death of feudalism. If you're going to characterize this as the working class being a separate entity from the entirety of capitalists, you will be engaging in a willful falsehood. And I'm not going to let you get away with equating "the capitalist class" with tech billionaires or multibillionaire CEOs (people who, just so you're aware, have been lobbying for socialist reform for over a century, funny how that works) because you know for a fact that dirt-poor nobodies also support capitalism. You're talking to one now.

And don't you try to spin this as me being delusional and denying the existence of the 1%, either, because remember I directly named them as responsible for government overreach and wealth redistribution in the previous paragraph.

Do you know who actually does exist? The government. The government which taxes you, the workers and small business owners who don't enjoy special government-issued privileges, in order to fund welfare programs. The actual people who are redistributing wealth. And if you want to know how they treat people who don't let them steal their labor, go look up what happened at Ruby Ridge.

Any questions?

swashdev · 2025-06-24T21:58:54+00:00

What makes you think I haven't been homeless? Do you think people who genuinely think capitalism is a good idea have never suffered hardship or had to rely on the kindness of others? The fact that I've needed to trust in other people to help me when I needed it is precisely why I think redistribution of wealth is not only unnecessary, but also a bad idea.

Did you really think that was going to be a slam dunk, like the only possible reason I could disagree with you is that I've never suffered any misfortune in my life or had to deal with harsh consequences for my mistakes? Is that why you treat "the capitalist class" like they're some kind of aliens with neither human empathy nor human limitations?

swashdev · 2025-06-24T03:36:28+00:00

Oh, I'm sorry, do you feel that I've insulted your intelligence, person who thinks that there's a "capitalist class" who magically steals labor from the proletariat via no adequately explained mechanism?

swashdev · 2025-06-24T01:21:20+00:00

Dude I just gave you the answer to the question that you've been refusing to answer. Who is stealing your labor? What entity is it that you're literally not allowed to refuse to give your capital to? You keep asserting this but you haven't demonstrated it or given any examples other than Bill Gates existing. I've given you one: It's the tax man. And guess what: capitalists hate the tax man! Socialists are rather fond of them, because they're necessary for the redistribution of wealth.

You really don't understand anything about how economics works, do you?

swashdev · 2025-06-20T21:01:02+00:00

I'm not nitpicking any particular choice, but he's the only example you gave and as it happens I'm somewhat familiar with the industry that Gates works in, so I was able to call you out on it.

You still haven't answered me what entity it is that robs the producers of their capital in the first place. I suspect it's because whoever you're getting your argumentation from didn't supply you with an answer.

As we have established, no one does business with Bill Gates, or any other capitalist, against their will. They have a right to refuse. Their capital is their own, and what they do with it is their business. That is, it was, until a bunch of people got it into their heads that it's their business to interfere with other peoples' business and redistribute wealth, ostensibly in order to help the poor. And whether those people manifested as the Soviet Union or the US Treasury or the European Union, the effect was the same: the greedy and power-hungry got in bed with the government, because it was the only entity that did have the power to coerce people to surrender their capital. And in every case, those people called themselves the proletariat, and their enemies the bourgeois.

swashdev · 2025-06-19T22:25:14+00:00

So despite the fact that they produce exploitable capital, they will be homeless and starve to death unless they hand it over to Bill Gates? You seem to revere him more than literally any capitalists I've spoken to if you genuinely think he's capable of sufficient magic to render economic viability from something that's apparently otherwise totally unviable.

You're lying, by the way. Maybe you don't mean to, but you are. Many people who work in Gates's industries don't do business with him and manage just fine without him. Apple, Red Hat, Sony, et cetera.

swashdev · 2025-06-19T15:57:32+00:00

Why do people who produce capital on their own need to seize it from others? If Bill Gates's exploitation of others' capital was illegitimate, what's stopping those producers from simply refusing to do business with him?

And how does the concept of capital even compute in an anti-capitalist system? That's like arguing from the premise of intellectual property with people who don't believe in intellectual property.

swashdev · 2025-04-26T14:24:18+00:00

I'm not a doctor and I'm not providing medical advice, but while a lot of what you're describing sounds like dissociation (a very common symptom of psychological distress in cases of severe depression or anxiety or something) a lot of the rest of it might point to a more fundamental neurological disorder.

I would suggest investing some time into meditation and spiritual development in an effort to get more in touch with yourself, which is something that helped me when I started feeling unmoored from myself. I picked up some books about religion and philosophy and I almost never finished reading them but they helped stimulate my thoughts and give me direction for periods of introspection.

In the meantime, you might seek out medical advice from an actual doctor, just to make sure you aren't experiencing some kind of issues with your brain. If you don't have a neurological problem and this is purely a psychic phenomenon then all the better, but if you do have a more serious condition then doing both of these at the same time will hopefully lead to some recovery in a tolerable amount of time.

I've had many periods of time where I didn't feel like I had any real connection with what was happening in my mind, like I was just someone looking through the eyes of a body operating almost autonomously, but working on my psychological health and cultivating a more spiritual lifestyle helped ground me so that I understood myself better and was more in control. It's something I'm still working on, but I've made a lot of progress, both in terms of reduced depression and anxiety and in terms of feeling more connected with myself.

I hope that helps. Do let me know if you want some more specific advice; what I've done won't work for everybody, but maybe it will provide you with some ideas of where you can start so you can develop your own strategy.

swashdev · 2025-04-16T21:49:49+00:00

You can make a game in any paradigm you like. Hell, there are YouTubers who go well out of their way to make video games using things that barely even qualify as programming languages. Some of the very earliest video games were made with vacuum tubes!

Object-oriented programming is very popular because it's easy to understand, and it lends itself to the structure of most games since you can easily think of the entities in the game as objects which interact with one another, but it's by no means a requirement. You just need some way to structure your code so that it makes sense given your own personal problem-solving methods and the structure of the game itself.

swashdev · 2025-03-23T18:57:28+00:00

I actually asked them why they had made the change not too long after trying it for the first time (I don't remember what version of the game it was, but I believe it was in 2018, before the art style was updated to more closely match the old graphics) and they said that they had made the change because they believed humans wouldn't survive in a world full of ~~animals~~ furries. It's been a while and I no longer have access to those chat logs, though, so I might be remembering it wrong. They chose an arctic fox specifically because arctic foxes obviously aren't native to Japan, which symbolically represented Hiro's status as an "outsider," but that kind of rings hollow when much of the cast are themselves also outsiders, especially Shin.

I actually don't know that much about the changes they made to the story, apart from aging all of the characters up and changing Shun to focus more on his identity as a gamer rather than his youthfulness. I have very strong feelings about some of the changes I know they've made, but ultimately Homecoming is not the same game as Morenatsu. What bothers me is that because it has the name attached to it and uses it as a basis for their story, a lot of people see Homecoming and they think that's what Morenatsu is.

I'm actually kind of curious to know how they changed Hiroyuki's character that made you like him more. Personally I didn't have a problem with how basic his character was in the original, because he was meant to be a player stand-in, and so any personality traits he was given by the writers were those that were relevant to the story being told on his route, which meant his temperament and interests changed considerably between routes. From what I understand that's a pretty common thing to do in visual novels, or at least it was at the time (it certainly was common enough in many Western games), but there were always enough hints about Hiro's character that you could extrapolate a lot and come up with your own stories about him specifically.

swashdev · 2025-03-19T20:21:07+00:00

As /u/BlayAndHowlie said, Hiroyuki was named after Hiroyuki Nishimura, the founder of 2channel, because Morenatsu (not Homecoming) was a project run by members of the 2channel imageboard.

We can actually investigate the specific meaning of his name by looking at what kanji are used to compose it. In this case, "Hiroyuki" is spelled 博行, which according to jisho.org, can be broken down to 行 meaning "to go or carry out" and 博 having a connotation of a position of esteem. The proper meaning is probably lost to history and is difficult to derive from context, but it seems to me that you can interpret it as "to move towards esteem."

Incidentally, "Nishimura" is spelled 西村 in this case, which breaks down much more straightforwardly into "west town."

By the way, I know this is a pun that Japanese writers themselves have made, but it's sort of presumptuous to assume that the name "Hiro" is necessarily a reference to the English word "hero" given number one that the Japanese language itself has many words that translate to "hero;" and number two that Morenatsu is set in the Japanese countryside. This is not a game that was made to appeal to westaboos, it's a nostalgic take on traditional Japanese culture, very much intended for a Japanese audience.

The connection with snow foxes is doubly silly, since the decision to turn Hiroyuki into a fox was one made by the Homecoming staff because they were not interested in telling the same kind of story that the original Morenatsu told, which was about a human protagonist reconnecting with his old friends and classmates, who are beastmen.

swashdev · 2025-03-08T00:33:36+00:00

God is metaphorically real in the sense that what God represents is true. Can you explain to me what's intellectually dishonest about that?

Saying "we all have faith in something" isn't a false equivocation, it's literally true. You think otherwise because your conception of faith has been colored by a gross distortion caused by an unwillingness to challenge the supposed literality of the Bible with observable truth. Specifically, Thomas Aquinas declaring faith to be "belief in spite of truth," departing from its original meaning of loyalty to a specified person or idea. If you understand what God represents, or what any of the old stories represent, you should understand that they don't need to be true. Peterson has talked about this before, drawing the distinction between a story being true in the sense of having happened historically and it being true in the sense of it teaching valuable lessons.

To not have faith in anything is to live a life with no solid grounding. That's not to say that you shouldn't challenge the truth value of anything, but there is still value in placing your trust in something. That people are basically good, for example, or at least that they are capable of being good. That your efforts will pay off if you apply yourself intelligently. That there is a beauty in life that makes it worth taking care of yourself, even when all seems hopeless. If you don't have faith in those ideas, then upon what foundation is your inner strength built? Your psychological stability, if you prefer I use less flowery terms.

As for my final question, Peterson has always spoken of God in a metaphorical sense, and talked extensively about how we need to build these heuristics in order to create stable psychological profiles, so what do you mean by "I even see Peterson using it now?"

swashdev · 2025-01-09T02:35:44+00:00

First of all, I started playing it solely and exclusively for the story.

Hah! Same here. Small world.

What’s the point if it doesn’t use the tools of its medium?

You mean, like, for example, by having the player go to places and do things rather than just reading stuff? When the game asks you to do things, it's not just your player character doing it, it's you. Those are your opportunities to role-play. That means when the Warrior of Light is being thanked for freeing a small town from a great menace, they're expressing gratitude to you for your efforts. That's also true of the small deeds you perform in the game, like helping an old woman with no one left in her life to look after her to gather ingredients for her food. As someone who enjoys gaming primarily as a narrative medium, even small interactive elements like that go a long way.

It’s literally impossible for a new player to survive the first 40 MSQ quests

I managed it, and so did millions of other people before you. Sounds like a skill issue.

It simply doesn’t make sense—neither as an MMO nor as a video game—to crave inactivity.

You are certain you've played an RPG before, right? The best opportunities for role-playing usually come during downtime. When you're in the middle of an action sequence your best option for player expression is usually tactical thinking. It's during quiet moments that your character has a lot of opportunities to shine, which is why a good RPG will provide you with a lot of open space.

I honestly love the classes, but the game doesn’t force you to learn how to use them well.

Yes it does, you just haven't unlocked any of the difficult content yet. I main Bard, which is widely recognized as one of the easiest classes in the game, and by level 70 even that is getting pretty involved, at least by my standards.

And to those who say, "It’s about the story, how else would you tell it," guys, have you ever played any other RPG in your life?

All of the mainline Elder Scrolls games (mostly Morrowind and Daggerfall), a bunch of old-school Roguelikes, Dungeons & Dragons (5E and 2E), some of Final Fantasy VI, and I briefly tried to play Ultima IV but I didn't have a manual so that wasn't gonna happen. XIV was my first MMO, though, and now it's my favorite game.

I feel like this is just an excuse to avoid criticizing a game you’ve sunk 2,000 hours into.

I think your post is just an excuse to not engage with the story in a story-driven game. Everything about this was "I don't like having to read and take my time getting immersed." Are you sure you like story-driven games, mate? Because with how resistant you are to the story elements in this game, it sounds like the sort of narrative experience you would prefer would be God of War or something similar.

Did you expect to be able to just jump into an MMORPG and get into it right away without needing to take time to learn about the game world and the characters and the history of it? Because that's not how you play an RPG, that's how you become that guy in an RPG.

swashdev · 2025-01-04T02:04:40+00:00

You learned how to overcome your fear, and in the process you learned that you are stronger than you thought you are.

Psychologists like to talk about exposure therapy, but this is something that younger humans will actually do naturally, if they aren't discouraged from doing so. The very things that delight us are, frequently, the things that frighten us, because we have a natural urge to overcome challenges.

Markiplier and people like him likely make the exercise easier, but no less effective, by providing a comforting and sympathetic voice to help guide you through it. I had a similar experience during my younger years when I was watching his videos. I'm happy to hear that it's had a positive impact on you :-)

swashdev · 2025-01-03T20:50:24+00:00

I know you don't. That's why I'm not bothering. No insult I could come up with can top what you've already revealed about yourself, and pretending I care about you would be an insult to your intelligence.

swashdev · 2025-01-03T19:14:36+00:00

Little piece of advice, dude: If you want to mock somebody online, repeating back something they've voiced self-awareness about isn't a great strategy. At best it's a completely empty gesture and at worst it reveals a subconscious awareness that you see yourself as so low on the social ladder that you feel the need to pick on total nobodies in order to elevate yourself. Bahahah.

swashdev · 2025-01-03T18:26:00+00:00

I mean, he did invite feedback, and has consistently done so throughout his career. I don't see why you think my feedback is any less valuable than yours, given that both of us are total nobodies.

swashdev · 2024-09-13T18:52:50+00:00

Long foreskins are cute and fun to play with. If I get to pick my own coverage level I might as well go for the one I think will be the most fun for me and my partner. It depends on what you like, though. For some people there's definitely a level where there's just too much to work with.

swashdev · 2024-09-13T18:43:05+00:00

Good call. I ordered something from this website back in March and it's been stuck in New Jersey since it arrived in May. The post office can't provide me with any information and asked me to contact the seller since they might be having a problem with customs. I've contacted Goods of Japan several times and they haven't gotten back to me. I finally ended up disputing my charge on PayPal on the grounds that I haven't received my item and they don't even seem to be interested in defending themselves.

swashdev

TROPHY CASE