Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I say we have laws against retroactive laws. The same laws that protect you from being thrown in jail for getting an abortion or something under Roe v Wade are the same laws that protect these states and/or corporations (I don’t know how their agreement works).

    If the government wants to make a law, they can make it penalize actions that happen after the law takes effect, but they cannot make it penalize actions that happened before the law takes effect. Allowing ex post facto laws is tyrannical, and nobody should stand for it, even if allowing it in one case would benefit you in the moment. That’s short sighted, and should not be tolerated in a free society.


  • I mean, that’s one way you could take what I said. It’s incorrect, but it’s certainly one interpretation.

    My point is the law can merely impact things going forward. They can set whatever stringent requirements they want on pollution, but having the law take effect on things that happened in the past is obscene. I can’t read the full text of the article, otherwise I’d quote more sections, so I’ll quote the US constitution instead, where it bans ex post facto laws (laws that are retroactive):

    Article 1, Section 9 (related to federal government):

    No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

    Article 1, Section 10 (related to state governments):

    No State shall… pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

    I don’t know the specifics of the case or the specifics of the law, but my understanding is this is a direct violation of Article 1, Section 10 of the US Constitution, and therefore illegal, and since those states are directly impacted by that law, they have standing to sue.




  • Same… would be nice for them to lean into those storytelling chops they demonstrated with RDR2, they could blow a lot of contemporaries out of the water if they really gave it an honest try. And I, too, fear that online monetisation will, yet again, take priority…

    Yup, that’s where I’m at and why I’m going to be a lot more hesitant about trying GTA VI. If they launch with the online component, I guess I have my answer.






  • I use BTRFS w/ RAID 1 (mirror) with two drives (both 8TB), because that’s all I’ve needed so far. If I had four, I’d probably do to separate RAID 1 pairs and combine them into a logical volume, instead of the typical RAID 10 setup where blocks are striped across mirrored sets.

    RAID 5 makes sense if you really want the extra capacity and are willing to take on a little more risk of cascading failure when resilvering a new drive.

    ZFS is also a great choice, I just went w/ BTRFS because it’s natively supported by my OS (openSUSE Leap) with snapshots and rollbacks. I technically only need that for my root FS (SSD), but I figured I might as well use the same filesystem for the RAID array as well.

    Here’s what I’d do:

    1. 4x 16TB HDDs either in a RAID 10 or two RAID 1 pairs in one logical volume - total space is 32TB
    2. 500GB SSD -> boot drive and maybe disk cache
    3. 8TB HDD - load w/ critical data and store at work as an off-site backup, and do this a few times/year; the 4x HDDs are for bulk, recoverable data

    That said, RAID 5 is a great option as well, as long as you’re comfortable with the (relatively unlikely) risk of losing the whole array. If you have decent backups, having an extra 16TB could be worth the risk.



  • the characters do have depth

    Some, but each is a massive disappointment:

    • Trevor - most interesting IMO (esp. w/ end of game “mission”), but surely he’s interested in ruling the Los Santos drug trade, so why don’t we get any missions doing that?
    • Franklin - most promising since he claimed to want to start his own business at the start, but once he gets money, he just chills at his house and doesn’t do any more missions? The closest we get to ambition is trying to work with the Grove Street gang, but that’s a handful of missions that go nowhere.
    • Michael - the most developed, but also the least interesting; he’s just a cuck whose wife is cheating on him and whose kids don’t respect him, and his life’s dream is to succeed at something he failed at years ago (massive mid-life crisis energy)

    I guess there’s a message there, but every other game had driven characters with clear goals that the player could relate with. In GTA V, the entire point of the game is just to get rich by doing heists, yet you only do five, and you can’t even repeat them.

    sort of succeeded in creating a game about nothing much as far as the themes are concerned

    And that’s probably my problem with it. Every other game had a point, which was steeped in satire at every turn. GTA V seemed simultaneously too serious (not nearly enough satire) and unfocused. Here are the previous games in the series (starting w/ III, I didn’t play I or II):

    1. GTA III - Claude gets shot by his GF during a heist, and is befriended by someone in a mafia family. Plot happens, he’s passed between various criminal organizations, and eventually deals with all opposition. In the final scene, his new “gf” whines, and he’s the one to shoot her, wrapping up his arc.
    2. GTA VC - Tommy is released from prison and goes back to work for his boss. Plot happens, he sets up his own crime family, finds out his boss was the one to put him in prison, and he kills his former boss, wrapping up his arc.
    3. GTA SA - CJ returns to Los Santos from Liberty City to find his childhood gang having lost most of its power. He helps them reestablish themselves, is betrayed, leaves Los Santos, and then returns later to reestablish the gang and deal with his betrayer, which ends his arc.
    4. GTA IV - Niko arrives in Liberty City with a friend promising a new life, but is quickly dragged back into crime. He deals with various criminal orgs, and eventually either his best friend or girlfriend gets killed, after which he takes revenge. Having dealt with his problems, he finds out Roman’s fiance is pregnant, implying he has new meaning to his life.
    5. GTA V - Michael and Trevor fail at “the big heist,” Michael thinks Trevor died, and both go on with their lives. Michael gets Franklin to help, Trevor arrives in Los Santos and finds Michael, and together they plan to have another crack at the big heist they failed. Plot happens, they succeed, and Franklin is given the choice to kill Michael, Trevor, or try to save them both. Michael’s arc is largely completed, but Franklin and Trevor don’t really get closure on their goals in life.

    Each story was more complex and interesting than the past, but GTA V ended that trend.

    Online component, which seems to be the second half of the story

    Never tried it. Maybe that’s why I dislike the game so much.

    RDO

    Also never played. I’m just not interested in any online component whatsoever, so I evaluate the games based on their SP experience.

    Here is my list of Rockstar games that I’ve played by quality of story and character development:

    1. RDR2
    2. GTA IV
    3. RDR1
    4. GTA SA
    5. Bully
    6. GTA VC
    7. most other rockstar games
    8. GTA V
    9. GTA III

    I actually stopped and started GTA V a few times before deciding to force myself to finish it, because I kept coming back (people kept saying I should give it another shot) and re-downloading it just to be disappointed again was getting old. The game really fell flat for me, but at least I finished it and have no more desire to give it another shot. In fact, I played GTA IV after GTA V and had a much better experience (had started it on my Xbox, which died, so I re-purchased it on PC after playing GTA V). In fact, I thought Saints Row The Third had a better story than GTA V, and it’s certainly nothing to write home about.

    I hope GTA VI is better because I love the rest of the series, but there’s no way I’m getting it anywhere near launch because I’m expecting it to be more like GTA V than previous entries.




  • And then cheating rises again.

    So whatever caused cheating to decrease relative to the population (assuming that’s what’s being measured) is probably to blame.

    Here’s a different explanation:

    1. EA announces new update, so users flock back before it goes live (first major dip)
    2. Update goes live (steeper dip) and more users return to try it out; some cheat engines don’t work on the update, which adds to the dip
    3. Cheat engines start getting patched, hence the rise after bottoming out; number is still lower due to larger population (same number of cheaters)

    A better test is to keep support for Linux for the launch, then drop it in a minor patch update a few days later.



  • I’m guessing Canada. We get similar temp range in north central and north eastern US.

    I’m in the Rocky Mountains, and our range is -15C to 40C (5F to 105F), and I wear my steel toe boots to shovel snow in the winter and garden in the summer. Oh, and I wear the same wool socks in both seasons, which keep my feet warm in the winter and dry in the summer.

    Parts of the US (and probably Canada) get to -40.