I like the extra challenges. Some of the achievements for The Legend of Zelda are hard, and I got all of them. It's one of the few games where I got all of the achievements. "Mastered it" in RA's lingo. And I did so in Hardcore Mode where you can't use save states or rewinding.
Achievements like "Get to Ganon without having a sword." That's an old school challenge that existed way before RA did, and the existence of the achievement in the list motivated me to actually try it. Not because I'm an achievement hunter normally, but because the achievement reminded me it was possible.
The achievement is a badge of honor. It represents an extreme struggle where I suceeded. It's an artificial struggle, to be sure, but so is most of gaming. Except for cozy games and story games, games are an artificial struggle to feed your need to challenge yourself, to get better, and to win. Games that are obscenely hard are just not fun. There's this sweet spot where a game is challenging, but you are up to the challenge, and that makes the game fun.
Getting an achievement for beating the game is not the point. It's just a record that you did so. A reminder of the struggle. It feels good to look at my profile on RA and see the four games I've mastered. I remember how hard they were, and yet I succeeded.
Here's the list. It's only 4 games. Four of my all-time favorite games. Games I adore.
The hardest one in the list was Solomon's Key. It's an action puzzle game and it gets very difficult later in the game. I had been trying to beat it off and on since 1986. There are no saves or passwords. You have to beat the game in one sitting or else leave your console powered on while you're away.
There are continues, but they're secret. There are 50 levels, and if you continue past level 41, you restart at level 41, and the rooms past 41 are haaaaaard. It's pretty grindy to get to the end, and you end up getting so good at levels 41 and up, that it's like you become a speedrunner. You just want to try to beat level 46 again or whatever, so you speed your way through 41-45.
Simply beating the game is such a major achievement, but there's also a secret ending! I didn't even know there was one until I saw the achievement for it. I'd been playing the game for 40 years, and I didn't even know it existed until RA told me.
So, when I finally beat the game, for the very first time in my life, I did so while getting every achievement and the good ending. It felt great! I will always remember that moment. And if I forget, I have the badge on my RA profile to remind me.
I think you're better off just learning the Krita hotkeys and such. Otherwise, what are you going to do if you have to use it on a friend's computer or library something? You'll be totally lost.
It's not hard to relearn keyboard shortcuts. I'm speaking as a user of Photoshop for 20 years who switched to GIMP (as an example) a year ago and had to learn all the differences. If you use crutches right at the start you'll, never learn to walk.
I will say, if you have a book with glossy pages, or glossy print, having the light directly above your eyes can cause glare. You end up having to hold the book or magazine at a slight angle. That's an issue a book light doesn't have as much.
If you do buy it and don't like it, send me a DM and I'll see about buying it from you. I could always use a spare. But it has to be the Nichia warm white version.
There is such a thing as "intelligent defaults", though. I can't be the only one carrying around 10 GB of music on my phone. This will affect anyone in my shoes, and it was super annoying until I found the setting. Luckily that setting exists, but where's the setting to disable pull to refresh?
I'm allowed to be surprised, since this is the only media app for android but I've ever seen that refreshes the entire library every time you open it, or with pull to refresh. It's completely unheard of. Totally surprising.
That's the beauty of this one. It has like 8 brightness levels and the first one is so dim it's too dark to read by. The highest will light up your entire yard in a 100' radius. (It's nuts, but it can't do that for more than 60 sec before it turns itself down.)
You never have to worry about what brightness level you left it at when you last turned it off (although it does remember it). You can instead long press the power button while it's off, and it will start stepping up through the first seven brightnesses startling with that "firefly" mode that wouldn't bother your eyes even in the middle of the night. And then it stays at the level where you release the button.
It's by far the best headlamp I've ever owned. Budget be damned, just buy it. You won't regret it. 😂
Oh, it also comes with a handlebar mount. It makes an excellent bicycle light.
I've been using this for a few days and it's pretty good, but not perfect as a music player. It sometimes forgets what I was playing when not in use, and I have to re-pick a playlist, and of course it loses my position in it when that happens.
I also tried it as a video player when tapping a video in my gallery app (Fossify Gallery) after I had recently used VLC for music, and it resumed the music instead of playing the video! Twice! I had to explicitly exit the app before it would play the video. (I realize Fossify Gallery has a built-in video player, but it's not very feature rich, and I was simply trying out VLC.)
I also had to turn off the feature for rescanning my library every time the app opens because that's on by default, and with my large music library and dozens of playlists, it would take literally 25 seconds to open every time. No idea why that's on by default when "Refresh" is one of only two options in the three-dot menu, easily accessible on-demand.
I also just learned, much to my chagrin, that you can accidentally pull down from the top to refresh. Another feature no one needs. Not for something that can take 25 seconds, and is right there in the menu besides. I can't find any way to turn that off.
Have you considered using a headlamp? I find they make better book lights than anything that clips to a book. It doesn't get in the way of turning pages or weigh the book down. Plus the light is more even, and it's generically more useful since it's a headlamp.
I have a good rechargable one with several brightness settings and a beautiful warm white LED. It lasts a very long time on the lower settings that are good for reading. Read on if you want to know why I chose the specific one I did, buy honestly, and headlamp will work. The one I have is not cheap.
On the other hand, some book lights have multiple color temperatures, and using one that limits the blue light can help with sleep when used near bed time.
Armytek Wizard C2 Pro Nichia warm white headlamp.
Price: $99
The battery is an easily swappable, super common 18650 Li-ion. If it stops holding a charge, you can easily replace it very cheaply, but it should be good for years. Plus you can swap it out for a freshly charged one if you have spares and a secondary charger.
It has a custom, durable magnetic USB charging cable, not some tiny USB port that'll just break. It literally plugs itself in. You just hold the headlamp base near the cable and it jumps on. (After twisting the base CCW 1/4 turn.)
The color temperature is a warm white with 95% color rendering index. (That's really good.) If you read a magazine or comic with it, the colors really pop! Seriously, I was blown away when I first looked at something colorful with this headlamp. Cheap headlamps often have a blueish tint which is terrible. Same with cheap booklights, too.
The lamp pops off and you can use it as a flashlight, plus the base is magnetic so you can stick it onto things.
It's a flood light, not a spot light, and has a wide beam with very even illumination.
It makes a superb book light while also being an excellent all-around headlamp.
I just thought I'd mention a headlamp as a choice, and a good one is worth the money, IMO.
The biggest downside is it's not super comfortable for more than an hour of use. I took off the top strap, and that makes it even worse I imagine. If I really needed to use it for a long time, I would wear it over a bandana or something.
Yup. Switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I bought a new NVMe to install Linux on, and a USB enclosure to stick the Windows NVMe in, so I can run Autodesk Fusion and VCarve occasionally. (It boots fine off of USB.)
I write code and browse the web, mostly. Linux is fine for that. I wish more commercial software supported Linux.
I haven't run a single game on it, or even installed Steam, because I have a Steam deck. But I guess you could say I game Linux, too.
Yes, I used it to vibe code a JavaScript single-page application using the Scyfall API to get Magic: The Gathering card set data. The app makes printable inserts for card binder sleeves so you know what cards go in the holes. I made it for my friend who owns a game store.
It knew everything about the Scryfall API. I never had to read the docs. I'm also not very good with JavaScript, CSS, or HTML5. It used elements I had never even heard of in the HTML. Data like the set list and individual card lists are cached and DOM storage to avoid repeat hits to the API. I had to know to ask for such things, but when I did, it gave me all the code I needed
It even generated an SVG logo based on my description, although that took a lot of back and forth, and I recently ended up installing inkscape and fixing it myself to make it look better, but it really wasn't a bad start.
The page has advanced auto-complete stuff that I never would have programmed myself (out of lazziness). You can start typing the name of a set and it will automatically pick the set from a list box if it matches the set code or the set's name.
I had to do all the card grid layout math myself, though, for the printable inserts, because the math was pretty specific. I wanted to make sure the printed "cards" made a perfect grid, even if the printer's margins were not equal on all four sides. I mean, it definitely helped, but it kept getting it wrong, and I had to explain it in detail how to do it, and then it would do it ok. I really wanted to see if I could write none of the code, but I ended up having to write a tiny amount.
Was it perfect? Hell no. I had to hold it's hand a lot and tell it to stop being dumb. I also had to make a custom agent in VS Code to give the AI a back story. I had to tell it things like, "you don't just put new code at the top of the file willy-nilly, you put the code in the section where it belongs in the file."
If I weren't a professional programmer, I think it would have been a bad time, but as it was, it was great. I definitely would have been too lazy to make this website if I didn't have the AI to do it for me, since I wasn't being paid for it. Or I would have made it, but it would have been a really meager, featureless Python script that just spits out basic HTML for printing.
Thing is, I kept adding features and it kept doing it well. Like towards the end, I wanted it to add URL hashes to keep track of where you were in the application so you could bookmark specific pages or email them to people. (Plus it would enable the back button to leave "print mode" that hides the whole UI.) It's successfully added that feature the first try.
It's open source and the website is hosted on GitHub pages. You can take a look and tell me how bad the code is. 😂 It's definitely not optimized for mobile, but it's "usable". Try it on desktop. It's specifically made for printing, anyways, and I don't know many people who print from mobile phones.
Everyone thinks that's how it works, but you have to call them your lawyer, and they have to call you their client. You both have to behave like you're in that level of relationship. It's not automatic or forced just because you live together and have sex.
The way college works is a scam in itself. You don't need that much liberal art education. Four years and tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) just to see if you can hack it in a job in your field? That's insane.
Most jobs should be accessible right after high school in the form of paid internships. Programming is a trade, and most of the skills should be taught in high school. Not everyone needs to be a "computer scientist", just like not every plumber needs to be a hydraulic engineer.
I've worked in a lot of programming jobs and zero of the people were what I would have called computer scientists. They were just coders who could write a conditional statement and a for loop. That gets the job done 99% of the time. (Obviously I'm greatly oversimplifying. My point is there's no "computer science" involved.)
After a job in programming for a couple years, if you want to start working on the Linux kernel and write compilers, go ahead and go to school then and become a computer scientist. That's so few people.
And then when there are no jobs hiring internships and computer science, you know not to focus on that. Do something else.
But big business hates this. They want everyone to prove in a gauntlet that you can work under super high pressure and tight deadlines that are totally arbitrary.
I like the extra challenges. Some of the achievements for The Legend of Zelda are hard, and I got all of them. It's one of the few games where I got all of the achievements. "Mastered it" in RA's lingo. And I did so in Hardcore Mode where you can't use save states or rewinding.
Achievements like "Get to Ganon without having a sword." That's an old school challenge that existed way before RA did, and the existence of the achievement in the list motivated me to actually try it. Not because I'm an achievement hunter normally, but because the achievement reminded me it was possible.
The achievement is a badge of honor. It represents an extreme struggle where I suceeded. It's an artificial struggle, to be sure, but so is most of gaming. Except for cozy games and story games, games are an artificial struggle to feed your need to challenge yourself, to get better, and to win. Games that are obscenely hard are just not fun. There's this sweet spot where a game is challenging, but you are up to the challenge, and that makes the game fun.
Getting an achievement for beating the game is not the point. It's just a record that you did so. A reminder of the struggle. It feels good to look at my profile on RA and see the four games I've mastered. I remember how hard they were, and yet I succeeded.
Here's the list. It's only 4 games. Four of my all-time favorite games. Games I adore.
The hardest one in the list was Solomon's Key. It's an action puzzle game and it gets very difficult later in the game. I had been trying to beat it off and on since 1986. There are no saves or passwords. You have to beat the game in one sitting or else leave your console powered on while you're away.
There are continues, but they're secret. There are 50 levels, and if you continue past level 41, you restart at level 41, and the rooms past 41 are haaaaaard. It's pretty grindy to get to the end, and you end up getting so good at levels 41 and up, that it's like you become a speedrunner. You just want to try to beat level 46 again or whatever, so you speed your way through 41-45.
Simply beating the game is such a major achievement, but there's also a secret ending! I didn't even know there was one until I saw the achievement for it. I'd been playing the game for 40 years, and I didn't even know it existed until RA told me.
So, when I finally beat the game, for the very first time in my life, I did so while getting every achievement and the good ending. It felt great! I will always remember that moment. And if I forget, I have the badge on my RA profile to remind me.
Success?
Why not Stoat? It's much more like Discord.
Same!
This might change next year, though... I see a Steam Machine in my future.
Excellent reasoning! Let me know what you think of it.
I think you're better off just learning the Krita hotkeys and such. Otherwise, what are you going to do if you have to use it on a friend's computer or library something? You'll be totally lost.
It's not hard to relearn keyboard shortcuts. I'm speaking as a user of Photoshop for 20 years who switched to GIMP (as an example) a year ago and had to learn all the differences. If you use crutches right at the start you'll, never learn to walk.
I will say, if you have a book with glossy pages, or glossy print, having the light directly above your eyes can cause glare. You end up having to hold the book or magazine at a slight angle. That's an issue a book light doesn't have as much.
If you do buy it and don't like it, send me a DM and I'll see about buying it from you. I could always use a spare. But it has to be the Nichia warm white version.
Let's start with ranked choice voting. Let third parties have a chance.
There is such a thing as "intelligent defaults", though. I can't be the only one carrying around 10 GB of music on my phone. This will affect anyone in my shoes, and it was super annoying until I found the setting. Luckily that setting exists, but where's the setting to disable pull to refresh?
I'm allowed to be surprised, since this is the only media app for android but I've ever seen that refreshes the entire library every time you open it, or with pull to refresh. It's completely unheard of. Totally surprising.
That's the beauty of this one. It has like 8 brightness levels and the first one is so dim it's too dark to read by. The highest will light up your entire yard in a 100' radius. (It's nuts, but it can't do that for more than 60 sec before it turns itself down.)
You never have to worry about what brightness level you left it at when you last turned it off (although it does remember it). You can instead long press the power button while it's off, and it will start stepping up through the first seven brightnesses startling with that "firefly" mode that wouldn't bother your eyes even in the middle of the night. And then it stays at the level where you release the button.
It's by far the best headlamp I've ever owned. Budget be damned, just buy it. You won't regret it. 😂
Oh, it also comes with a handlebar mount. It makes an excellent bicycle light.
I've been using this for a few days and it's pretty good, but not perfect as a music player. It sometimes forgets what I was playing when not in use, and I have to re-pick a playlist, and of course it loses my position in it when that happens.
I also tried it as a video player when tapping a video in my gallery app (Fossify Gallery) after I had recently used VLC for music, and it resumed the music instead of playing the video! Twice! I had to explicitly exit the app before it would play the video. (I realize Fossify Gallery has a built-in video player, but it's not very feature rich, and I was simply trying out VLC.)
I also had to turn off the feature for rescanning my library every time the app opens because that's on by default, and with my large music library and dozens of playlists, it would take literally 25 seconds to open every time. No idea why that's on by default when "Refresh" is one of only two options in the three-dot menu, easily accessible on-demand.
I also just learned, much to my chagrin, that you can accidentally pull down from the top to refresh. Another feature no one needs. Not for something that can take 25 seconds, and is right there in the menu besides. I can't find any way to turn that off.
Have you considered using a headlamp? I find they make better book lights than anything that clips to a book. It doesn't get in the way of turning pages or weigh the book down. Plus the light is more even, and it's generically more useful since it's a headlamp.
I have a good rechargable one with several brightness settings and a beautiful warm white LED. It lasts a very long time on the lower settings that are good for reading. Read on if you want to know why I chose the specific one I did, buy honestly, and headlamp will work. The one I have is not cheap.
On the other hand, some book lights have multiple color temperatures, and using one that limits the blue light can help with sleep when used near bed time.
Armytek Wizard C2 Pro Nichia warm white headlamp.
Price: $99
It makes a superb book light while also being an excellent all-around headlamp.
I just thought I'd mention a headlamp as a choice, and a good one is worth the money, IMO.
The biggest downside is it's not super comfortable for more than an hour of use. I took off the top strap, and that makes it even worse I imagine. If I really needed to use it for a long time, I would wear it over a bandana or something.
Thanks, but that doesn't appear to be open source. I'm only interested in open source software that can be installed from F-Droid.
Ok, so you know how Github works. So why didn't you post this as an issue on Github?
Thus proving that Mortal Kombat is an easy game made for babies.
Yup. Switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I bought a new NVMe to install Linux on, and a USB enclosure to stick the Windows NVMe in, so I can run Autodesk Fusion and VCarve occasionally. (It boots fine off of USB.)
I write code and browse the web, mostly. Linux is fine for that. I wish more commercial software supported Linux.
I haven't run a single game on it, or even installed Steam, because I have a Steam deck. But I guess you could say I game Linux, too.
Yes, I used it to vibe code a JavaScript single-page application using the Scyfall API to get Magic: The Gathering card set data. The app makes printable inserts for card binder sleeves so you know what cards go in the holes. I made it for my friend who owns a game store.
It knew everything about the Scryfall API. I never had to read the docs. I'm also not very good with JavaScript, CSS, or HTML5. It used elements I had never even heard of in the HTML. Data like the set list and individual card lists are cached and DOM storage to avoid repeat hits to the API. I had to know to ask for such things, but when I did, it gave me all the code I needed
It even generated an SVG logo based on my description, although that took a lot of back and forth, and I recently ended up installing inkscape and fixing it myself to make it look better, but it really wasn't a bad start.
The page has advanced auto-complete stuff that I never would have programmed myself (out of lazziness). You can start typing the name of a set and it will automatically pick the set from a list box if it matches the set code or the set's name.
I had to do all the card grid layout math myself, though, for the printable inserts, because the math was pretty specific. I wanted to make sure the printed "cards" made a perfect grid, even if the printer's margins were not equal on all four sides. I mean, it definitely helped, but it kept getting it wrong, and I had to explain it in detail how to do it, and then it would do it ok. I really wanted to see if I could write none of the code, but I ended up having to write a tiny amount.
Was it perfect? Hell no. I had to hold it's hand a lot and tell it to stop being dumb. I also had to make a custom agent in VS Code to give the AI a back story. I had to tell it things like, "you don't just put new code at the top of the file willy-nilly, you put the code in the section where it belongs in the file."
If I weren't a professional programmer, I think it would have been a bad time, but as it was, it was great. I definitely would have been too lazy to make this website if I didn't have the AI to do it for me, since I wasn't being paid for it. Or I would have made it, but it would have been a really meager, featureless Python script that just spits out basic HTML for printing.
Thing is, I kept adding features and it kept doing it well. Like towards the end, I wanted it to add URL hashes to keep track of where you were in the application so you could bookmark specific pages or email them to people. (Plus it would enable the back button to leave "print mode" that hides the whole UI.) It's successfully added that feature the first try.
It's open source and the website is hosted on GitHub pages. You can take a look and tell me how bad the code is. 😂 It's definitely not optimized for mobile, but it's "usable". Try it on desktop. It's specifically made for printing, anyways, and I don't know many people who print from mobile phones.
https://github.com/CamelCityCalamity/magic-binder-placeholders
(A link to the page is in the readme.)
The friend I made it for loves it and has used it several times, and will likely keep doing so in the future.
Everyone thinks that's how it works, but you have to call them your lawyer, and they have to call you their client. You both have to behave like you're in that level of relationship. It's not automatic or forced just because you live together and have sex.
The way college works is a scam in itself. You don't need that much liberal art education. Four years and tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) just to see if you can hack it in a job in your field? That's insane.
Most jobs should be accessible right after high school in the form of paid internships. Programming is a trade, and most of the skills should be taught in high school. Not everyone needs to be a "computer scientist", just like not every plumber needs to be a hydraulic engineer.
I've worked in a lot of programming jobs and zero of the people were what I would have called computer scientists. They were just coders who could write a conditional statement and a
forloop. That gets the job done 99% of the time. (Obviously I'm greatly oversimplifying. My point is there's no "computer science" involved.)After a job in programming for a couple years, if you want to start working on the Linux kernel and write compilers, go ahead and go to school then and become a computer scientist. That's so few people.
And then when there are no jobs hiring internships and computer science, you know not to focus on that. Do something else.
But big business hates this. They want everyone to prove in a gauntlet that you can work under super high pressure and tight deadlines that are totally arbitrary.