I feel like wayyy too many engineer minds lean back on “too vague” without understanding how many judgment calls judges make in cases every day. It’s not uncommon for them to have to decide what someone’s intent or knowledge was when taking a certain action.
I enjoyed my Vita for its portability, and I didn’t even jailbreak it to emulate games. For a long time, any indie dev releasing on PS3 would put their game on Vita as well.
There’s a bit like this in Daredevil. They’ve been tracing some shadowy acts back to Wilson Fisk, a horrible rich man nobody’s heard of. A top journalist is preparing an article on his actions based on circumstantial evidence.
Fisk, reading the situation and retaliating, opens a press conference introducing himself and voluntarily makes his name known to get on people’s good side.
I’ve learned my lesson. I bought a graphics card and a monitor a few weeks ago. They were the kinds of desirable purchases that were never going to get discounted on Black Friday.
Continue, or Continue Avatar?
Silly, but sitcom silly:
All week, Hank had been receiving hints from his wife that he was going to get “the roast of his life”. Finally, at the end of the week, he’s attending a community gala with all their neighbors and friends. Hank, worried that all his darkest secrets are going to be exposed, decides to take the chance to get ahead of his wife’s belittling, and takes the stage to mock her for her terrible spending habits and overpoweringly obnoxious perfume.
His wife, mortified, leaves the room in tears and the room turns against him; but he simply deflects the hecklers by stating she was going to do the same to him - that she’d give him the roast of his life. Finally, he gets an inkling of what he’s done wrong. While his wife goes out for drinks with her friends to console her, he and his friend rush to his home. There, this scene plays.
We’re talking about TV shows and movies.
There’s normally one unrealistic conceit, eg aliens existing, that the audience believes. But then, the regular conceits like “The scientists studying the aliens speak like a bunch of robots and act like total idiots” become harder to believe.
I’ve heard this said, can you verify for me where the lawyer stands?
If his position is truly still behind his table, what if the witness/jurors are hard of hearing?
There’s a trillion ones around unrealism, so I may as well pick something that would be more enjoyable if fixed.
Professional chatter. Let’s say a team of 30 scientists have been trying to communicate with a dimensional portal for 5 years. They wouldn’t be using speech like “Identity verified. Doctor Faris, you are clear to approach the anomaly.” Often, they’d have extremely abbreviated lingo for everything they need to express that happens on a daily basis, and otherwise are chatting about other stuff.
“Ok, approach endorsed. Bob wasn’t so chatty yesterday from what I heard, we’ll just aim for 2 logic points for this cycle.”
“Ryan was suggesting we spread the cycles. Bob has to sleep sometime.”
“Yeah, 90% of us would rather listen to Ryan than Mick, but Mick signs the checks.”
So the only actual order comes from some obscure phrase like “Approach endorsed”, which they may only say verbatim for safety reasons. The rest is just workplace banter about how best to accomplish their task, none of it being essential. EDIT: And, to make clear, in the above quote, Bob is the portal/anomaly.
One plot point I liked of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The Tolmekians are growing a Warrior. Enemies are on the way. Their princess orders them to unleash the Warrior. Her second says it’s not ready. She ignores him, it’s sent out. It’s not ready, and melts almost immediately.
The version of Lutris I installed used a file opening GUI to select the exact EXE to run. I was using simple unzipped folders, not installers.
Even if the fault of the game in question ends up being simple:
I am fine with one-time setup configuration for my OS to get preferences right, devices working, and settle myself to my steady workflow. I am not okay with doing laborious one-time setup for every single game I ever try.
I get that, and I like it. When it works. (Hitman 3, which I know works under certain distros/Linux hardware, did not load levels for me on Linux Mint 22) Even on Bazzite, Helldivers 2 needed command line args to avoid a white border around the game in fullscreen.
Plus, much as I like Steam, I like competition, and I buy games off of other stores pretty often. Some of those stores just give you a zip file to download in your web browser.
I knew I had whole folders of indie games that are just a folder with an executable, so I trialed those with Lutris. It needed a huge setup form just to run one of them, and when I finished, it wouldn’t run and gave no errors.
Having that as my experience for, as I said, a whole folder of games, wasn’t really in my interest. It takes too long for the community to say “Hey, I got Assassin’s Creed running! Just use Proton 8.13 beta, and add these 8 command line options”
It’s not just learning curve. It’s feature set, compatibility, and user experience.
Certain distros’ window managers may work just the way you like, or they might not and it may not be so simple to change it. The preferences menu on some of them is tiny.
That’s before getting into just how perfectly it will work on your hardware. I tried Mint 21 first on my machine, and even though my hardware is ancient, it didn’t support the wi-fi card at all. That stuff is kernel level. I even looked up version numbers and it was supposed to work.
(Mint 22 worked but that’s ridiculously late to finally start supporting this hardware. And, it could not run games as well as Steam Deck)
In the last month, I made a genuine effort to switch to Linux Mint, then Bazzite, as my daily driver. Mint could not run Hitman 3 for unexplained reasons. Bazzite frequently got graphical corruption issues when returning from sleep. Neither could run niche indie games and gave no error codes.
I knew I’d be doing some tweaking to get Linux working how I wanted, but it was missing configuration as well as being unreliable by default. I like the principle of using a non-MS OS, but I need it to work.
Not for the Dead by Daylight survivors, who path like mad parkour masters!
Of course, it could be because they’ve already died hundreds of times.
I’m sometimes annoyed at the trend of celebrating a dev when a game turns out well, but blaming the publisher each time it’s bad. It’s quite often a two way street…
I’ve had a few sites ask me to set up a passkey, only for it to immediately break and fail to log in. For now, I’m giving up in the technology until it matures. They need to move beyond “It’s easy - just click once and you’re all set, nothing to configure” to acknowledging many of us use different browsers and devices by different manufacturers. I don’t want login locked to one device.
I’ve had this issue in a story I’m writing, because one faction in this story is fighting for a cause that’s essentially good, but they’ve become extremely jaded by lack of change and have resorted to extremely violent measures. So it’s obvious the government they’re fighting would call them terrorists, but a hundred years later, history should view them with reserved optimism. It’s hard to categorize how the narrator and heroes should view them though, since the heroes don’t necessarily directly cooperate.