GlennMagusHarvey

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to showerthoughts in I feel like Fediverse users are nicer to each other and more generous with upvotes than reddit.

On one hand downvotes are an expression of negativity, but on the other hand downvotes are an outlet for negativity.

Meanwhile, I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why a bunch of the top comments here got like one downvote each, lol.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to showerthoughts in I feel like Fediverse users are nicer to each other and more generous with upvotes than reddit.

Honestly I don’t think an algorithm needs to work very hard to “be mean” like that. Sure, you can purposely put people with clashing views in each other sight on a place where people go to hang out and have fun. But you don’t even need to go do that on purpose. To some extent, people naturally produce more “engagement” with stuff that’s controversial/argumentative.

Imagine if I were to walk past you and say some completely innocent comment. Now imagine I were to walk past you and insult your favorite movie/show/song/game/whatever. You’d be far more likely to respond in the latter case.

So, as people respond, more activity is generated, and that makes the post “hotter”. Simply boost what’s hot, and you have a veritable litany of controversy.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to workreform in Pettiness as its peak. Trimmed trees at universal studios picket lines.

Well, $250, but yeah. The law wasn’t prepared for people being this obnoxious.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to workreform in Pettiness as its peak. Trimmed trees at universal studios picket lines.

nods Fair enough.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to workreform in Pettiness as its peak. Trimmed trees at universal studios picket lines.

Yeah I saw this and while I’m not a tree management expert I’m like “they basically left no leaves on these poor things”. With the insane heat we’ve been seeing, this can’t be good.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to workreform in Pettiness as its peak. Trimmed trees at universal studios picket lines.

Wasn’t done by the city. Universal is getting fined for this.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to workreform in Pettiness as its peak. Trimmed trees at universal studios picket lines.

This is horrible and obnoxious tree trimming. Bad for the trees, bad for urban tree canopy, bad for urban heat management, bad for carbon sequestration, and done as an insult to labor.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to workreform in Pettiness as its peak. Trimmed trees at universal studios picket lines.

Yep. I heard they’re actually being fined, sadly only for $250 because old city laws limit how much they can be fined.

If any of these trees dies, I hope Universal is on the hook for replacing it.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to retrogaming in Another NES fan art 😺

Wait…is this Felix the Cat??

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to programmerhumor in I told ChatGPT to code hello world in rust and comment in pirate slang 😂

So that means that programmers are being replaced with debuggers. Human debuggers.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to programmerhumor in Shakespeare quotes

Egads! An error SSL occurred. Secure connect to server be not here.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to retrogaming in Hey, you, what controller do you use for emulation?

A keyboard. Any standard computer keyboard.

This post was originally written as a reply to a comment by @redsol2. But it got kinda long and it’s basically my answer to the thread topic. So yeah, lemme tell y’all a story.

I started out playing 2D platformers for DOS, where the default – or more like, only – control scheme was arrow keys to move and Ctrl and Alt to do things (commonly Ctrl to jump and Alt to shoot). I also grew up on NES, GB, and SNES games, and a handful of PC games. Notably, though, I never picked up FPS games as a child, and also never really got anything from the 32-bit era and beyond until much later in life.

With emulators being more integrated into Windows (meaning Ctrl and Alt do important things), I shifted the action buttons to the lower left corner of the keyboard. Emulating an SNES gamepad, for example, I generally map the action buttons in a mirror-image fashion to ZXCS (respectively, ABYX). (A friend of mine maps them in a similar fashion, using ZXAS instead.) This then lets me map the L and R buttons to A and D respectively. And I move this whole ensemble of six buttons up a row if I have ghosting issues. (The Sega Genesis gamepad can be mapped similarly easily.)

This works brilliantly well (at least for me) for 2D platformers, top-down action games, JRPGs, and more. Notably, though, this excludes pretty much anything that requires analog controls of some sort, e.g. FPS games, N64 games, etc… But between a lack of hardware capable of playing 3D stuff (whether natively or by emulation), a lack of a familiar control scheme, and a lack of personal interest (due to just not having ever gotten into them), I pretty much just stuck with emulating up through the 16-bit era, with a little PS1 emulation thrown in. It’s not like I ever had a shortage of excellent games.

And curiously, it turns out my control scheme (arrow keys + ZXC(V)ASD(F)) is the favored scheme for a number of Japanese indie developers who made things like action games and RPGs using 2D sidescrolling and top-down views. So I ended up having even more to play! In contrast, it seems western devs often prefer WASD, even for stuff like 2D platformer Flash games (to my chagrin). And I see (English-speaking) PC gamers these days regarding my sort of control scheme as a “left-handed” setup (which is amusing since I’m not left-handed).

I only learned to WASD as an adult. At first I even tried to use the mouse with my left hand, and tried putting my left hand on the arrow keys, but eventually I gave in and learned to WASD. I still only use this when I need to use mouse aim though, e.g. Terraria (which I played a lot).

For games that actually require console-style analog controls, though, I nowadays have a wired XB360 gamepad that connects via USB. I’ve tried mapping things like the N64 gamepad to a keyboard before but with no success. But now that I have this, funny thing is this means I’m only recently getting into a number of classics from that era.

I’ve considered getting an 8BitDo SN30 or SN30 Pro(?)…whichever basically looks like an SNES pad with added analog sticks. I specifically want a gamepad without “legs” – the two stubs that seem to be meant as palm grips on each side of the gamepad. That’s because I held my SNES pad from the side so that I could press A, B, and Y at the same time with my right thumb. (This was highly useful when playing Mega Man X.) Controllers with “legs” basically make it way harder for me to do this, as I found out when I tried to play MMX4 on my PS1. It felt so awkward, I just went straight back to emulating it, despite having the disc and hardware.

But, for now, I only pull out my XB360 gamepad for stuff that needs analog stick functionality. Everything else is keyboard. (And mouse, if needed.)

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to retrogaming in Any games you wish you grew up with?

I wish someone had shown me the ropes to get into WRPGs (and other genres that I have yet to really familiarize myself with) back in the day.

There’s a lot of really neat stuff in the genre that seems hard to get into without taking the time to learn how to make the most of it. Maybe it’s that I’m now an adult and I know a bit too much, but I’ve had problems like sitting down with Neverwinter Nights 2 and then realizing that I should go research character builds before I start playing the game. And then, of course, that just means I forget about playing the game for another year or two.

And this isn’t even anywhere near the most obtuse game to learn. There are very complex games (particularly some sim games) that really seem like they’d be great fun if only I actually knew how to play them, but I don’t.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to retrogaming in Any games you wish you grew up with?

My friend lent me his copy of FF7 PC, and I tried playing it – albeit after I played earlier FF games.

There were two problems. First, it was…kinda weird compared to earlier games. Sure, the steampunk vibes began in FF6, but we didn’t have Literally An Evil Megacorp and Literally Eco-Terrorists fighting over Something That Feels A Lot Like An Analogy For Nuclear Power. That was a whole nother level. Nothing wrong with this per se, but it just felt like something quite different. Neat, but just not the same FF I was used to.

But, perhaps more importantly, the game just kept crashing. I kept going as far as I could, but the game just wouldn’t progress past the introduction to the Gold Saucer.

GlennMagusHarvey , 1 year ago to retrogaming in Any games you wish you grew up with?

The first time played Super Metroid, it was after I played Fusion and Zero Mission, and I was actually rather unimpressed by it, despite it being basically a platinum standard for 2D metroidvanias.

It was only later, after playing various romhacks including randomizers and getting much more accustomed to the game engine and the sheer number of possibilities afforded by various speed tricks and sequence-breaking techniques, that I gradually realized why it’s held in such high regard. The game is…neat, if you simply play through it once. But the more you learn about it the more you can do with it and the more fascinating it becomes. There is a seemingly infinite depth to it, which is not at all obvious on a first playthrough.