Hi, I’m Cleo! (they/them) I talk mostly about games and politics. My DMs are always open to chat! :)

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • I can’t say I share those feelings. While I think the 2D sections are just okay, they’re very short. I also think as far as pacing and traveling between fights, they did about all they could without distracting from the point of the game in my eyes.

    Like yes you can make better platforming or exploration, but that’s not what the overall level is there for. It’s there for scale, setting, NPC conversations, etc. Add too much and you distract from the next fight, add too little and you might as well have a boss rush type game. Fine balance here and this is honestly the best I’ve ever seen a game like this pull off filler time.

    That’s a whole conversation about filler in games but I think it’s harder than people realize to get this right.








  • Okay so in plain terms (from what I can tell) they’re arguing that Spotify isn’t paying them enough because they have product A and product B. A bundle of A and B has their prices raised but only costs a dollar more than product A with its costs raised. So they’re arguing that they deserve a larger part of product A since B clearly isn’t adding much value to their platform.

    Then additionally they claim that by offering product B as a standalone subscription, the price they’re setting for product B only serves to allow Spotify to pay them less for A in those bundles.

    This makes sense because it’s a good way to reduce the money paid to the music side of the business by inserting new things into their services and then claiming that the new rate increases are due to that new service (that they don’t have to pay out as much to audio book companies for).






  • I bet they’re thinking about covering up a big political scandal before an election with an illegal hush money payment. Or maybe they’ll scheme to use fake electors to prevent the verification of the election. Maybe target the vice president to use political power incorrectly. Or maybe they’ll break into our capital building to stop the election from being verified. Or maybe they’ll promote Russian misinformation campaigns.

    Anyone who thinks they won’t be interfering in the election is bananas. They’ll start declaring it fake and rigged a full 2-3 months before it even takes place and the Russian bots will help them do it.


  • Wouldn’t say completely. The notice of intent to sell is not there to prevent CEOs from selling when they want to, it’s to notify you that they could sell this much if they wanted to.

    The purpose is just to say that you need to be prepared for a potential sale. If the CEO keeps backing out of a sale, that does hurt your ability to predict when they will but not how much they could sell and therefore how much those sales could potentially affect your investment.

    All of that is strategic because otherwise investors could conceivably do the opposite and sell before the CEO is forced to sell and then buy his shares at a lower price. That would mean the stock would tank every time the CEO went to sell. The problem exists because most of the solutions are even worse



  • Most people may have just wanted a less crap version of Reddit, but how you make Reddit less crap is that you spread out the moderation and also don’t grow power in admins. That’s what federation (mostly) does. I just think we need a way to transfer a user and also to load multiple profiles.

    I also don’t understand why federation needs to be the way it is. I feel like instances could present a “read-only” version of themselves to defederated instances so that users could at least read the posts but not interact.


  • Really good points here but also I just want to add that Skyrim is very unlike any other game I’ve ever played. Whereas Fallout is shooting, which I’ve played a million times in other games. When I look at the other factors, Fallout has them in spades. Great enemy designs, good locations, great story depth, and the world and themes are phenomenal.

    But at the end of the day you’re right, your interaction with the world is mostly just guns. That’s why people find such enjoyment with melee runs in Fallout I think. Guns just aren’t as engaging but also they kind of encourage you keep your distance from the enemies. Whereas in Skyrim, unless you’re playing with a bow, you’re directly interacting with the enemies up close and personal.

    My advice is basically just to go play fallout and try it with a melee build and maybe ditch the companions. Or maybe find mods that try to add things to the playstyles.


  • This is probably partially true but just to note that there’s a lot of factors at play here. Since prices have risen on all items, what is more likely is that the prices are due to manufacturing companies raising them.

    We know that’s true from the government reports, so what target is doing here makes sense. Their volume has become low enough that their margin isn’t making them money. Which is why they increased prices in the first place to try and maintain that margin. Now they want to increase volume on their own products which have higher margin (they don’t have to share) so the prices are guaranteed to be lower.

    This is what we expect of late stage capitalism where most of the grocery store is effectively owned by a small handful of companies (J&J,P&G,General Mills, Tyson, etc.) and the only people able to compete with them are the grocery stores themselves.

    The budget options still aren’t there to help you, but these options will represent the bottom of the market. And since they rely on the consumer choosing the value brand instead, they need to have volume of sales to work. And as we know, that means these products will always be nearer to the cheapest possible price.

    Last note is important: if you observe that even the discount brand prices are beginning to become unaffordable for you and you represent an average consumer, your economy is already failing


  • I think the high jump could’ve been handled by either holding the jump button down to control the height like most platformers do or by having a system to time the jump in a multi-jump sequence to gain height like Mario 64 used. I also don’t see why a double jump wouldn’t suffice as an unlock in its place.

    This is a key example of what I mean by the nostalgia is holding them back. The moves are mostly copies of BK and it didn’t need to be that way.





  • Oh absolutely, I was going to reference the Gameboy Advance that I grew up on as a part of this phase. Unfortunately, I don’t think those handhelds even got their time in the light that they could’ve had. It seems like they’ve had a long legacy but the DS and GameBoy came and went in but two generations of consoles.

    I mean imagine what we could do with a gameboy today. Or imagine how we could easily transform a modern phone into a DS form factor. We’re talking now about running a modern resident evil game in the palm of your hand. Insane power really.

    All this is largely due to the mobile play stores having no competition or curation. Our mobile games absolutely suck now. There are gems, sure, but otherwise I hate phone gaming despite my phone being my most used device.

    I think you’re absolutely correct though, the DS is the best handheld. Slim, powerful enough, very interactive, and a great game library. I highly recommend buying one and modding it, you won’t regret it.


  • I loved the PS2 era of gaming a lot. This may be a controversial take, but the PS2 era did not last long enough.

    Everything about the aesthetics of the games that the PS2 produced were excellent. In my opinion, this is the point when low fidelity and high quality assets overlapped just enough to make games more comprehensible to their players. That enabled a lot of innovation that the PS3/360 era handled entirely differently. Forget an era, the PS2 is the last part of an entire age of gaming that delineates what I’m referring to.

    The PS2 was a huge turning point in what games were and could be in 3D. Prior to this, many games were abstract and the characters were a lump of polygons. With the PS2, this began to change. So we began to get games that our minds had to do a lot of interpreting but could see reality through. Nowadays, I’d argue that your mind does less interpreting and so the resulting picture has glaring inaccuracies.

    It also helped that ps2 was primarily played on CRTs or at least plasma which helped the picture look better in plenty of scenes than a PS3. Not to mention the color palette of games after the PS2 turned to muck.


  • I think this is the biggest myth of conversation. People always tell you to search for people whom you share something in common with, but the reality is that nearly everyone shares something in common and there’s no reason to go searching for it.

    The key to a good conversation with a stranger is to initially do two things: 1. Ask details about the stranger and 2. Intertwine that with yourself in some way. You don’t even need to share this part.

    Good conversations have these things I’ll call “footholds” where you intentionally give each other details shortly after meeting in order to create those ties in conversation. If you ask where someone is from, you should shortly offer up where you are from as well. Or if you ask about a hobby, offer a light comparison to your own.

    Once you have enough of these footholds, the conversation should flow freely. If it ever doesn’t, ask the stranger more about themselves. And trust me, just be interested in what they say.