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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • On the other side of the same coin: When I mass edited my comments before quitting Reddit, I got site-banned. Basically, my first account’s automated edit got me auto-banned from several subs with pro-spez mods. Some subs had set their automod to detect when people were using the more popular methods of auto-editing, and set the automod to ban for using them. Then when I did the same with my second (and third, and fourth, and fifth, etc…) account, it almost immediately got site-banned for ban evasion.

    Basically, account 1 was banned from a sub, so when account 2 started doing the same thing on the same IP address, it was flagged as ban evasion. And ban evasion is one of the few things that will get you banned site-wide instead of just from a specific sub.

    I went back and checked a few months ago, and all of those site bans were lifted and the edits were undone. Likely because a site ban prevents the comments from showing up (which hurts Reddit’s bottom line, because they show up as a bunch of [removed] comments instead,) but also prevented any of the edits from actually being published. So when they lifted the site ban (to get those old comments to show back up again) it was as if I had never edited them at all. I had probably a million karma spread across my various accounts. I was extremely active at one point, so Reddit had a direct incentive to unban those accounts with literal thousands of comments.




  • There’s a huge difference between a game featuring politics as a sandbox for players to play around with, and featuring political themes as a main story driver.

    Civ is a good example of the former; It has politics present in the game, but the politics aren’t presented in a hero/villain way. They’re presented as potential advantages for the player, potential disadvantages for opponents, etc, but the actual policies themselves aren’t central to the system.

    The game pulls from historical political systems as a way to present them to the player, but it could just as easily forego that and call the system some made up word besides “political systems”. Because the politics and policies aren’t actually important to the gameplay; All that matters to the player is what potential benefits and drawbacks they provide. You don’t actually care if a particular civ is “democratic” or “totalitarian”, because those titles could just as easily be replaced with “A” and “B”. The only thing that matters to the player is how that particular civ’s political affiliation will affect their actions.

    But if a game heavily features political themes and messages as part of a plot line, then it’s not something the player can avoid or ignore. If it’s central to the story, one side (likely the side helping the player) is inevitably going to be presented as the hero, and another side (likely the side working against the player) is going to be presented as a villain. Final Fantasy X, for instance, is a good example of the latter. It heavily features anti-religion themes and messages. It’s impossible to play through the game without receiving “religion bad” messaging, because they’re central to the game’s plot line, with religious leaders as the main villains. We can draw direct parallels to real-world examples. And if you’re someone who is religious, those parallels may make you deeply uncomfortable, because religion is being portrayed negatively no matter how you play the game.



  • Honestly, Andromeda didn’t deserve the hate it got. It wasn’t awful. It had some issues, sure. But many of the complaints about the story basically boiled down to “it wasn’t larger than the entire first three games combined.” It was trying to start a new story, but instead of being seen as a new start it was compared to the entirety of the original trilogy.

    It completely misses that the entire first Mass Effect game was basically just an intro to the Reapers. Like the entire first Mass Effect game is basically just “oh hey here’s a new villain.” And by that metric, Andromeda did a lot more than the first Mass Effect did. But it wasn’t larger than the entire trilogy, so it got panned by the players who were too impatient to wait for a sequel.


  • Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.


  • Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.comtoScience Memes@mander.xyz))<>((
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    7 months ago

    For real though, I have written some truly monstrous operations in Excel.

    What do you mean you want to use Excel to manage everyone’s calendars? And now you want to export that horribly built calendar management spreadsheet to Google Calendar? What do you mean you want the Google Calendar entries automatically formatted based on who is working on a particular day? I mean yes it’s possible but-…





  • I actually enjoyed the story. Some of the themes and motifs were heavy handed, but that’s par for the course. Honestly, the biggest issue with the story is that players have come to expect a big plot twist. Bioshock 1’s twist hit first-time players hard, so later games have tried to replicate that. But the issue is that it only hit players hard because they never knew it was coming. They only remember it because it was truly shocking the first time you played through it.

    So now players have come to expect that from the series, which means the series can’t replicate it; When players are looking for a big plot twist, you can’t really hide it anymore. Because as soon as you start foreshadowing it, players catch on. And if you’re too subtle with your signals, then players who have been looking for it will say that doesn’t make any sense.



  • Typically speaking, you’d want to cut instead of boost. Cutting is easy; You just reduce the volume. Boosting is much more complicated, because you need to “add” signal where none exists. So boosts tend to be noisy and/or outright distorted, while cuts will maintain a clean audio signal.

    Need to boost around 2KHz? Try cutting everything else instead.


  • That copyright thing was never actually tested in court though, because they settled before the trial began. The “copyrighted keys” argument was what Nintendo originally used to bring the lawsuit, but it was never actually tested because it never went to trial. In fact, many legal experts say it likely would have been thrown out in Yuzu’s favor. But Yuzu didn’t have a legal fund, so they couldn’t afford to actually take it to court and fight it.