look, okay, these things happen sometimes

depending on how doomed I feel I might go watch people set things on fire in the park later

it's not a linear thing it's more like an elliptic function

Show of hands.

is there a reason to use something other than ext4fs for new storage these days? btrfs? zfs?

BTRFS is really nice: native snapshots and copy-on-write means you can do rollbacks very easily, there's some integrated data checking (although limited) and transparent volumes (i.e. you can split a drive into multiple partitions with different settings but they all share the same storage pool, unlike LVM).

Volumes are particularly handy for optimising snapshotting, quotas, and compression, since each volume can have different options for, say, compression settings or snapshot schedules.

BTRFs has some encryption and RAID support but I don't think you should use them, rather use dm-crypt and mdraid if you want that.

ZFS is really optimized for larger arrays although I am trying it out on my work laptop as a root filesystem. No serious issues but I haven't had to mess with it much. ZFS has good quality RAID and data integrity checking.

Both Fedora and SUSE ship BTRFS as the default root filesystem, mainly for snapshot capabilities.

happy "every VN fan is crying" day

?

April Fools Day, where companies often announce visual novels as a joke

we're releasing a third person open world action adventure game that's a prequel to Katawa Shoujo

I memory-wiped my instance of Ryoko in Roommate and started the file over - I am determined now to figure out how people played this game and experience it for myself. Booted up the game this morning, and Ryoko wasn't home - but she left me a note, explaining she will be back by 6. I have evening plans so I left her a note explaining I will be back by 11. My testing has generally shown she might not show or will get angry if I am +/- an hour late on that, so I added a reminder to my own calendar to make sure I visit now that I made the plan. Then I logged out of the game, and told the person I am seeing this evening I need to be home by 11.

No one told me they made a 10/10 realistic marriage simulator in the year 1997. No notes, this is exactly what it's like, the simulacra peaked.

Today I logged in at ~6ish after work, as Ryoko in the morning told me she had club activities and would be home then. Our "convo" of the day was me knocking on her door, her saying "look buddy I am studying, is this important?", me going...no not really, and being shoo'd off. So I turned off the game because there was nothing else to do.

A few days before, I also logged in after work, only to get a phone call (on the land line, which I was teleported in front of) from Ryoko telling me she forgot about a friend's party after school so she wouldn't be home until 9. But she would see me then! So I...turned off the game, now with the obligation to turn it back on ~3 hours later.

This is, of course, insane. But! I did log back in at 9. And Ryoko was there at the front door, with her friend who was dropping her off. She was stressed since she wasn't sure if she was allowed to just shift plans like that and we hadn't discussed it yet:

So we talked it out. And today I logged in a few hours later, and Ryoko was done studying - we chatted about her English lessons, career stuff, etc.

When you look past the bullshit, the realism really works, in a way that is almost impossible to do today. The way the game is just openly hostile to your attempts to bend it to your will are, yeah, how real people function. Her personality too matches the tone - she in fact a flawed, "normal" person with her own stuff going on, even if ofc there is some moe-inspired sanding of the edges. And the "story" it is telling - slice of life anecdotes and the day-to-day frictions of living together with a normal girl - would completely fall apart into boredom as something you sat down and played for 20 hours straight. When it is someone you talk to for ~10 minutes each day, though, it is rationed out in doses you can handle.

And the time gaps really do create spaces for affection to fill! I am, of course, doing this for my weird meta 90's-otaku research motivations, but within that framework I can buy what this game is selling; I wanna hear what she says next, precisely because I can't right now.

Today this game would clearly be a mobile game, right? You would log in each day, do your "convo" daily, get some kind of log-in bonus, maybe do a decorating or outfit making minigame. And it would be better, to be clear, in a lot of ways? Games are better now on average. But here, all of that smoothing out would shatter the simulacra - real people don't give you bonus rewards for a log-in streak, or are available at your beck and call for a convo. Even being on the phone - being in your pocket - detracts from the illusion. Ryoko lives in a specific place. My desktop PC, sure, but still - if I wanna talk to her, I have to go there. Her home is manifested, fullscreened, nothing else going on. And the only reward for talking to her is that I got to talk to her.

Because today you have played far, far easier games to interface with, almost everyone would drop this immediately, and as such it would simply not be made. But since back then there wasn't that same cultural expectation, this game could be made and somewhat succeed. Temporal specificity seeps out of every low-render polygon in the house in an infinitely charming way.

It isn't all charm though! While some of the game's hostile inconvenience is load-bearing realism, not all of it is. I mentioned in my initial post that you walk around the house (aimlessly) to trigger events? That is true...like 3 times. 99% of the time when you log in the events auto-trigger, and then when they are done walking around gives you absolutely nothing because Ryoko has retreated to her room. The only physical mechanic of the game, the entire "setting", is actually virtually pointless. Something you only learn by playing - it tricks you into thinking this will be relevant, and then it isn't (except when it is, 1% of the time, after you have learned to stop bothering - what fun!). Why was walking even included?? For the "simulacra", yes, so the house feels lived in - but trust me you can't make this minimalist mind prison feel homey:

Certainly not when walking into my own bedroom results into empty nothingness every single time.

You also run headlong into the fact that while Ryoko feels real, you don't. You have a distinct personality, but no life around it - you are trapped in the house, no job, no school, waiting for her to return. The idea, of course, is that you aren't trapped - you are you. You go to work or w/e each day, and come home and say hi to your new roommate. Conceptually neat, sure, but since Ryoko isn't a moe-blob she needs to have actual convos with an actually-written person, and that person as written is too distinct to be you. And particularly when you are told to log off and log back in 3 hours later, the idea will inexorably take over that the protagonist just...sits there. Waiting. Starting at the staccato ombré of faux-voxel light beams reflecting off a beige wall until Ryoko deigns to notice you again. It is unsettling, precisely because the game tries so hard to make this place feel like home.

I feel like a game designer could take a meat cleaver to this game, add some mechanics, strip away some others, streamline the experience, etc, and make a truly intriguing game. Obviously not something that will ever happen to an orphaned IP like this in the year 2025! It is sadness nonetheless though, because there really is something uniquely neat at the core here. Gotta find the bankrupt remains of Datam Polystar and ask about a remake, clearly.

plants love being polyploid its one of their favorite things to be

you give animals an extra set of dna and they crumble into a little cartoon pile of ash. you give plants an extra set of dna and they say ahh finally an extra set of dna to do activities with

There is a photographer in our town that works for a local news feed just for our town (which I'm 90% sure is volunteer run) and I see him sometimes at things. He usually covers the town halls, school board meetings, he was taking photos at Juneteenth last year. Basically he's everywhere and I'm also everywhere, so we cross paths often.

But he also does a thing called 'My Final Photo,' which is just random day to day stuff happening in town that he thinks is cool enough to snap a photo of. Like... ongoing construction of the new buildings, when the crocuses come out, a bird landing on a lamppost. Stuff like that. He's a really talented photographer.

The Final Photo for yesterday was kind of awesome but I don't think he knows how much the caption contributed:

Because that is both

a. sick as hell

b. perfect encapsulation of the childhood experience.

RT @ArtifactsHub: Sculpture of a chicken-headed man. China, Tang dynasty, 7th-10th century https://t.co/T8giyJnrIf

@elodieunderglass

thank you so much! I love his expression.

i have crazy garlic fingers from peeling and chopping garlic cloves yesterday this phenomenon is always fascinating to me because it reminds me that i, too, am made of meat, and therefore i am also susceptible to being seasoned

Signpost: Buttercup Festival 3-322

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