Victoria 3 Dev Diary - Post-Release Plans
All music to my ears! Everything I’m wanting to hear!
I’m loving it! I definitely understand now where they’re coming from with the Factorio comparison. The appeal is pretty different from what typically is involved in grand strategy. This isn’t a game of conquest or necessarily even of alt history (the national flavor here is lacking on launch, though I suspect this will be addressed over time), it’s very squarely a game about keeping a well-oiled economic machine running as efficiently as you can manage, with world events being interesting wrenches thrown in that plan you have to work around via managing different interest groups and the political coalitions they form. Like Vicky 2, the game is very concerned about pops and keeping them well cared for and happy. This is a game that wants you to do the best you can for many different people with many different interests, and I love it for that.
I’d like to play harder difficulties, though, because my main complaint so far is that it hasn’t really forced me to engage with the more involved systems as much as I’d like. A lot of the negative reaction aside from the typical concerns about Paradox’s business model and “grr sjws grr no war micro” comes down to the fact that in many nations you can bypass a lot of the more complex stuff and just build things the game says will be profitable. With more aggressive AI settings and playing more difficult nations, I think I’ll get into that more.
PlaceholderMC is now PrismLauncher.
The kicked devs are moving to the PlaceholderMC fork. ATLauncher is an existing option disconnected from this mess.
I don’t know why these projects keep blowing up. The original situation with MultiMC was fucked up and weird enough and this is just outright evil.
My favorite part is this hilarious bug:
Not all issues need to be game-breaking in order to be notable, though, and Splatoon 3 brought us a rather interesting if not amusing bug this month. Some LDN users quickly noticed how the scoring system seemed to be awarding certain teams with some frankly outrageous scores.
It turned out that due to the unique way points are scored in Splatoon (how much map coverage you have), resolution scaling values above native were actually causing the game to believe there were more pixels covered in paint than there were. This quickly turned into a GPU arms-race on the LDN server to see who could get the all-time world-record before a “fix” dropped. Funnier still was scaling in the opposite direction, to resolutions lower than native, which made it impossible to actually swim in any ink, thus completely breaking a large portion of gameplay for many users. By scaling the SamplesPassed counter in accordance with the resolution, both of these quirks were resolved!
yt-dlp would be how I’d accomplish this, as it supports Apple Podcasts and is something I keep around anyway. For someone not tech savvy and probably not familiar with the terminal, there are several GUIs for youtube-dl out there. I can’t tell you which is the best one, but Open Video Downloader seems decent enough.
How exactly would that be different with nonfree licenses though? If each person retained control of their contributions like is typical for other user-submitted content, moving to a new one would be an absolute nightmare and basically impossible unless you got everyone who ever made a contribution on board to revoke the fandom wiki’s right to use it and then moved that onto the new one. That seems like an even worse situation which puts anyone who wants to move at a disadvantage in content.
It’s worth mentioning that content on fandom wikis is usually CC BY-SA and use a fork of MediaWiki which is under GPLv2.
I’m not really arguing with your point or anything, free culture just doesn’t really save us here.
Keep in mind that this doesn’t stop you from easily making a fully free system and debian still has a clear separation between free and non-free components, the difference is just collapsing the confusing installer situation into one and what that offers you by default.
I understand if you’d prefer a more pure approach and I respect that, but it doesn’t seem that impactful to an existing debian user unless you’re against the idea of your distro more clearly offering non-free firmware options. For many users, this isn’t even a matter of a performance hit…it’s being able to boot into debian and use it for anything in the first place.
It’s a nice enough place. I’ve had posting privileges since July but honestly I don’t use it that much. Early on it was mostly playing around with CSS which was fun and all but I didn’t really have the skills to participate in. Lately it’s settled into a more casual groove which is nice but doesn’t really provide me with much I don’t get elsewhere.
I dunno, I’ll be keeping an eye on it and checking in every now and then, but as far as the various “old web revival” / ethically-driven projects around go, it’s not my favorite. I’d still love to see it stay around and grow a bit, though.
To be fair to the hoppers, though, I think “I don’t want a distro so bound to US law” is a perfectly good reason to hop and isn’t something I thought about much before. It’ll be interesting seeing how this impacts other distros and what it says about their legal situations. Once that and the plan for workarounds are clear, I’ll maybe then consider it. But those are mostly ideological concerns…I dealt with the codec situation on late 2000s Linux, I can deal with this, lol.
I’m curious what other distros will do in the near future. Some say that those not US-based won’t have to care, while others say it’ll likely spread far and wide. I’ve no idea, I just hope the alternative solutions come quickly. Installing custom-built mesa will be good enough for now but it appears that Fedora developers are not satisfied with leaving it at this and returning to the awful patent situations Linux had to deal with in the past, so I’m sure there will be something like separating it out from mesa to make it easier to distribute for RPMfusion or the like. I don’t know, but I trust it’ll be okay.
Portions of the userbase are absolutely panicking and hopping to other distros. I certainly think this is going to be a problem for accessibility in the short term and that the extra setup step this’ll add will be a damn shame, but it’s probably more work to hop than to just use mesa as provided by others.
This page updates with different ad blocking solutions popping up and their benefits and drawbacks:
I don’t think they totally are, it really depends on usage. Someone using a RIPBOZO gif to react to the queen’s death or a sped up anime catgirl zipping around the screen still comes off as being young…it’s mostly the kinds of facepalms and eye rolls (usually from The Office) that older millennials use which are “cringe,” and have been seen that way for years now.
I don’t think the title is particularly great and I probably should’ve changed it for this post. I think the issue that they’re addressing here is that the task of addressing disinformation and framing it as the primary problem behind modern issues plays into the hands of different groups of powerful people. The liberal cry that everything they don’t like is Russian interference, that every bit of political activism or deviation from the norm in any direction is the result of a proxy war between Russia and/or China and the rest of us. People desperately looking for tech CEOs to address disinformation by embracing centralized arbiters of truth. That kind of thing that you hear a lot from (often older) American liberals who reject progressives and the left about as much as they do the far right. That attitude can be harmful and lead to a kind of thinking where no one who deviates from the center actually means what they say and that they’re just trying to spread information on the behalf of some Evil party like Russia:
There has been an attempt to understand every instantiation of populism and social tumult as a question of disinformation. Just how far this goes was made clear when Susan Rice invoked Russian meddling in the context of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest movement. The resulting vision of the world is one in which movements are seen as pseudo-actors subservient to an underlying system of information war. By the same token, the disinfo technocrats can imagine themselves as an indispensable corps of experts who “promote objective fact as the basis for democratic governance worldwide”
The article could’ve gone further to specify what they’re addressing though. I don’t think they’re trying to get into the stuff that you’re talking about.
I’m a ways off from actually reading this because upon seeing this post, I instead started with their posts on EU4, but I just wanted to thank you for posting this. The work here is exceptional and provides a much more thorough and academic backing to my conflicted thoughts about these games. I truly adore Paradox’s GSGs but I’m also deeply uncomfortable with many of the implications of their historical models and where they nudge players. I’ve got plenty of criticisms I can make from my background, but of course the perspective of a proper historian can really tease out every little facet of these games and what they all mean.
It’s also just refreshing seeing such deep games literacy meet deep knowledge in the subject matter in this kind of analysis. The author’s self-labeling as a pedant really undersells what’s happening here…it makes me think I’m about to read a million "um, actually"s correcting minor inaccuracies rather than the deep dive into the mechanics behind these games and how they map onto various ways of thinking about history that this actually is.
Vegans tend to eat too much carbs, and not aware they are defficient in vitamins B12, D, omega 3…
I doubt the “not aware” bit, every vegetarian or vegan is blasted with this the second their diet comes up in conversation regardless of how diligent they are about it. It’s inescapable.
When you go vegetarian or vegan, suddenly your possible nutrient deficiencies that you could maybe have become the concern of everyone you meet.
It’s funny how little it takes, how statements this weak and indecisive can create such fury.
Worth a read: What Was the Point of Joe Biden’s MAGA Speech?
It could impact a ton of activists doing work they may be jailed or killed for where they’re from and queer people in unsafe environments. Victims of stalking, too.
I’m not really sure whose location and real identity could be revealed that would make anything better apart from being able to egg some racist shitposter’s house lol
Here is episode 2. Won’t be posting beyond that unless there’s an absurdly good one or something, but I’ll definitely be keeping up with this.
Soulseek