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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2024

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  • An underrated place to start is with Doom modding. The various ports of Doom engines have grown to have surprizingly rich feature sets these days, and a lot of indie games have been getting made in these engines. It’s easy to get into because you can get started pretty much right away by making mods for existing games.

    So for example, you could download the free game FreeDoom, get the UZDoom engine to play it on, the map maker Ultimate Doom Builder to make maps for FreeDoom, SLADE for the other aspects of editing, and then finally the ZDoom wiki should be able to point you toward everything you’ll want to learn to be able to make whatever you’d like.

    So you can start learning and producing content very quickly by making maps, learn and develop those maps into more extensive mods, eventually learn and develop those mods so far they become “total conversions” - meaning that it’s still technically a mod, and still would depend on the Freedoom game you’re building on, but has grown extensively enough to replace all assets; and then finally it is possible to convert that total conversion into a full fledged standalone game.

    And of course once you have enough experience with this, you can develop standalone games right from the start of a project.









  • I’m so tired of this whack-a-mole game of one unfounded, usually dangerous and usually corporate-backed, dietary fad after another.

    From a purely scientific and public health standpoint, the Mediterranean dietary pattern - as defined by Ancel Keys - has been the gold standard for decades, and will continue to be so unless something fundamentally changes about the human condition. Every well studied, consensus-backed reference diet from every leading nutritional authority around the world promotes some variation of that diet. If there are better diets, or diets with optimizations for specific conditions, they are still built on that foundation.

    And while I tend to prefer to err on the side of no oil, if I’m going to use any added fats, it’s going to be olive oil or canola oil.

    And also, there are more things to consider in diet than personal health. Go vegan.






  • A large part of it is the obnoxious monetization and general enshittification and privacy violations, but that’s not all. There are a number of usability annoyances. If I’ve been away from Discord for a little while and try to continue where I left off in a thread on a server, it never properly preserves where I last stopped reading. There are often times when I get notifications but it won’t actually take me to the relevant message, and that can even result in situations where the ping just gets lost entirely.

    Then there’s things inherent in Discord’s design and how people use it. It’s become a tool that people have decided is a convenient replacement for chats, wikis, and forums - but it’s a shittier version of all of those things. Pinned messages are such a tucked away and half-baked feature. The fact that people are using Discord both to organize and discuss projects - as well as using that same space to host documentation or other critical knowledge-bases has made information significantly less accessible. I don’t want to join someone’s niche club just to “learn more.” If I want to read something I would rather just go to a wiki on the actual open web.

    Discord is hot garbage ultimately for the same reasons as Facebook. It’s trying to be everything to everyone, and dropping a black box on the open web by doing so. It’s just another example of people trading convenience for actually using the appropriate tools for the kind of job they’re trying to do.