I hadn’t played it until pretty recently, but I didn’t realize part of it is just the Wii Sports Resort free fly mode! I loved that!!

I’ve hear a lot of people talk about it, but usually in “best 3ds games” articles. Maybe it’s a bit of a hidden gem, since it wasn’t a big franchise?

I bought a Japanese “new 3ds” system about 2 years ago off of eBay and I’ve been using it a lot! I’ve been loving the Ace Attorney Trilogy lately, but I also played

• SM64 via a homebrew 3ds port
• NSMB2
• SM 3D Land
• Shantae 1 & 2 (gbc and dsiware, but I wanna play the 3rd, which is a native 3ds game)
• Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition (dsiware, originally gba)
• Pilotwings Resort
• CTGP-7 (great mk7 modpack)
• So, so much Picross

My favorite 3ds game is Pushmo! I played it when I was younger, but it’s still fantastic.

I also loved the 3ds ecosystem outside of strictly games. Mii maker, Streetpass and Nintendo Video were all really fun extras.

Also the VB emulator Red Viper just recently released, so if there’s ever a time to try virtual boy games, it’s now! 3D baybeeee!!

I don’t anticipate it, most consumers don’t take the time to be critical or try alternatives. :(

domineering women with whips

I cleared my schedule. I’ll be playing this asap.

I loved, though never finished, Create: Above and Beyond. How’s Astral, would you recommend it?

Ayy, I just played the first game for the time recently! I really enjoyed it. I’ve been meaning to continue, but I’ve been pretty busy. Would you say it’s worth playing more?

Clickbaity, biased and misleading title.

The article actually claims that, on average, e-bikers have a higher volume of exercise per week compared to cyclists. (This includes both METs, a measure of metabolism, and duration.) Even this claim seems a bit shaky, though.

It wasn’t clear in the article how the studies categorized cyclists and e-bike users. I took a look at one of the linked studies and found that they categorized them like so:

The distinction of e-bikers vs. cyclists was based on the following question at the baseline: “What type of bicycle do you use?”. Respondents stating that they used an e-bike were categorized as e-bikers, independent of whether they also used a conventional bicycle. Using this classification around the half of e-bikers only use e-bike while the other half use additionally a different type of bicycle. Users who reported any use of non-electric bicycle (including city bike, mountain bike or bike-sharing) but not e-bike were categorized as cyclists, those who did not report any bicycle use, as non-cyclists.

A few issues I see:

• Cyclists who also own an e-bike are only counted as e-bikers, which is a potential bias, since any and all exercise they do is being included.
• Other types of biking can (and often are) more strenuous, therefore recovery time may be higher.
• E-bikes are relatively new, so many e-bikers likely purchased them more recently. People tend to use recent purchases more.

Luckily, the study didn’t base it solely on “ownership”, so the many people with old bikes sitting dormant in their garage don’t count.

Also, in this study, cycling was given a constant 6.8 METs and e-biking, 5 METs. These are not constant activities; cyclists going uphill are likely going to be > 8 METS (the threshold for vigorous activity), and e-bikers using throttle-enabled bikes are likely far below 5 METs.

In fact, according to the other study, pedal assisted e-bikes don’t always break the threshold for moderate activity under low and moderate assist levels:

Further, while the cardiometabolic responses (e.g., HR and V̇O2) were lower for the e-bike, they were indicative of being at or near “moderate intensity[…]”

The first study assumes 4 METs as moderate activity and 8 METs as vigorous. 5 seems like a high estimate, then, since the second study showed that e-bikes with assist aren’t always at moderate intensity, let alone throttle.

Aside from the studies, the article itself mentioned that many cyclists take a lift to the top of trails. I enjoy mountain biking, and none of the trail systems near me have a lift. And a big reason I ride is for exercise, strength and endurance. Just me? Also, throttle e-bikes can damage dirt trails, they are completely banned at one of my local trail systems.

Anyways, this article comes from a website all about EVs and similar. And there’s an affiliate link at the bottom to buy e-bikes. It’s not a secret that they’re biased.

All of that said, e-bikes are a really great tool. I’m not against them at all! They make biking far more accessible to people who would otherwise have a hard time doing so. And they’re a great method of transportation, since they make it easier to travel farther than on regular bicycles and are more eco-friendly than cars and motorcycles.

I think this article just perpetrates the divide between cyclists and e-bikers. They’re both forms of exercise and transportation, and someone using pedal assist for themselves doesn’t change what the cyclist is doing. Do what’s best for you, for you.

The difficulty seemed absurd to me, too, the first time I played the game. This time I began seeing the fun once I began discovering a few things the other day, TL;DR at the end:

• Keeping your cloak stained seems key; blood is good and gives you increased crit chance, but water is usually easier to keep soaked. As long as you have that, you won’t go up in flames in fire or explosions. And water/blood can also wash off toxic sludge, oil, etc. so it’s really important to have a bottle of it on hand to shower yourself with.
• Adding onto that, if you have a bottle that has empty space and you are holding it in a pool of a liquid, it will fill up with that liquid.
• Kick everything! It’s super fun to kick explosive barrels or lanterns all over. I bound ‘ctrl’ to kick so I can more reliably kick.
• Drink everything! You can right click on bottles in your hot bar to drink them, or you can press “s” to drink the liquid you are standing in. There’s some fun reactions, though most just make you vomit.
• Tapping space to keep upward momentum > holding space.
• I had the best luck sticking in the first area and getting familiar with those enemies. I like to have 3-4 wands before I go to the holy mountain and as much gold as possible (my best run I had like 600 by the first, bought lots of spells). To the left there are the mines. They have more gold, but stronger enemies.
• The chainsaw spell is great, you can emulsify enemy corpses for their blood.
• Chain bolt is really good if you can get it, that carried me in my best run so far.
• Oh, also read the spells a wand has before using it. Some spells will hurt/kill you if they’re not matched with something that casts them away from you.
• There’s tons of enemies, loot and areas to discover. The coolest part for me was finding a way to return back to previous layers once I had better spells.

Anyways, it’s still masochistic in nature. My best run came to an end abruptly and unfairly.

TL;DR: Be slow and cautious, play around in the first area to get better gear and understanding of the mechanics.

I jumped into Noita this past week. I had put about 5 hours in over a year ago, but I was intimidated by the systems and the initial difficulty. But I get it now 😭 The wandcrafting and fluid reactions are so fun now that I am more familiar with it all. I had a good run and I love the game now.

Played a few rounds of gunfight in Modern Warfare 2019. The official game has a ring 0 anticheat so Linux support with proton/wine is out of the equation. But there is a way (old dev build, offline-only and most maps don’t work).

Also played some Minecraft with a ship building mod. Here’s what I got so far, I’m going to sail the seven seas!

Great book. Very dystopian.

Interesting read— basically all games boiled down to running at “720p with 50% internal resolution”; that’s 360p internal resolution, less than the GameCube from 2001.

But, that’s paired with Lumen GI, high resolution textures, FSR2 or Epic’s TSR upscaling and a huge shift in how we render games (deferred rendering, temporal effects, normal mapping, etc). And on a Linux handheld. We came full circle in a way, but what a time to be a gamer!

If any of you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I’d like [Elon Musk], my boss, right here tonight. I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there on Melody Lane with all the other rich people, and I want him brought right here! With a big ribbon on his head! And I want to look him straight in the eye, and I want to tell him what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is! Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where’s the Tylenol?

Beeper was pretty dang hyped for its universal chat, I kept seeing it mentioned a while ago while it was in a closed beta.

Agreed, but unfortunately too many creators rely on it and can’t uproot and leave. That’s my biggest loss, moving to other platforms, was specific creators who didn’t.

That’s a damn bummer. Game plays great, and with the microtransactions they’re gonna make bank. I’m curious where the decision came from to do this, rather than hiring voice talent.

I can’t believe how hard it is to avoid drawn or generated cp on there— and you can only ignore one tag without premium, so it’s not viable to manually make a blocklist :(

On the flip side, studies haven’t come to a single consensus of viewing cp leading to reduced violence by individuals either.

While a full-ban infringes upon individual rights of expression and speech, and may impede in previous victims viewing it as an alternative, I’m not sure if a laissez faire approach is the best option, either.

Especially for material that A) depicts abuse and B) is harder to distinguish between fiction and reality (AI generated content), the risk of psychological harm to individuals without existing trauma or fetishes is very real. I stand by this fact for violent/unethical media as well.

My bigger concern is the normalization of and exposure to those ideas and concepts (sexualization of children). That’s also why I dislike loli/shota media, despite it being fictional.

That said, I still think it’s a much better alternative to CSAM and especially to actually harming a child for those who have those desires due to trauma or mental illness. Though I’m not sure if easy, open access is entirely safe, either.

Music publishers have historically been a serious force in copyright protection, so it’ll be interesting to see where this goes. They’d put in far more of a legal battle than artists, writers, coders or other people whose work has been used in training models.