WhiningCoil's profile

WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 2d ago

I'm doing some research on my paternity leave. Pardon me for not getting into details, but I need to vent somewhere.

Manager wanted me to look into a particular data source. Turns out this data source actually has two formats. We want the more compressed format. Turns out nearly all solutions for parsing and displaying this data are cloud/server based and we, for reasons, need to stay on the desktop. Local data only. Closed network most likely.

Maybe my google-fu is weak. Maybe LLMs have ruined everything. Even manually searching package managers for anything promising just turned up the same 5 year old, unmaintained project, and multitudes of abandoned forks, for working with this preferred format on desktop.

So anyways, I set to work. Converting the project to a modern dotnet format, importing the correct nuget packages versus manually linking random DLLs, updating packages often at least 5 major versions. Many packages I had to find replacements for entirely, they'd long since been abandoned and hadn't kept up with changes in the data format.

I think the thing that gets me most, is how many times this project converts data from A to B to Z to X and then finally back to B for the final user display?! Fucking WHY?

You know another thing that gets my goat? All the double precision drawing primitives in dotnet are in the windows only WPF presentation library. Makes no damned sense. Another thing I want to replace at some point with platform agnostic bits.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 3d ago

Ultimately it makes me do some self-assessment: "Do I want to walk down a path that could end up being THAT type of person?" And often has me actively deciding to limit my intake of the media in question. Kinda like seeing an alcoholic passed out on a bench, his pants soaked with urine, and deciding "I'll just skip the bar tonight."

Back when I was going to anime conventions in my 20's, a friend of mine was super into Anime more than all the rest of us. Worked his ass off bussing tables all summer to save up as much money as he could to buy shit at that years Otakon we were all planning on going to. He gets there, sees some morbidly obese 40 year old anime fan, nobody to talk to, suspenders covered in pins of cute anime girls, and he decides "You know what... maybe I should take up drinking instead".

Man, I think that was the same year most of decided we needed to tone down our anime enthusiasm. I recall sitting in one panel for a publisher that happened after ADV's panel. ADV had announced licenses for nearly everything, then the room changed hands. People circulated. Some people stayed. So next panel starts, might have been Media Vision or whatever. So people are asking, as they do "Have you licensed X anime yet?" And some guy in the front seat who'd spend the last two hours rocking back and forth aggressively in his chair just kept interrupting the panel shouting "ADV ALREADY HAS IT! ADV ALREADY HAS IT!"

I just... like going through some of the twitter threads links in the OP, I hear it. Don't deprive your child of their special obsession. Let them spend their years where their time is cheap going deep on something that strikes their fancy. I'd be a much worse person if my parents cracked down on my love of computers as a kid. Certainly wouldn't be bringing home mid 6 figures like I am now.

But, all the same, maybe try to make sure your kid's special obsession isn't toaster fucking. Even in the unlikely event fucking toasters somehow brings in 7 figures for the top toaster fucker.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 3d ago

Man, that reminds me when I went to a west coast anime convention while visiting friends circa 2003. Man Faye was there and the (a?) Yaoi Paddle. Walking along we saw Man Faye going one direction, a little while later we saw the Yaoi Paddle going the other. Then a sound like a thunder rumbled through the hall as the two met. Man Faye might have gotten more than he asked for in that exchange from the sound of it.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 3d ago

I think Akira and Serial Experiments Lain are far, far less cringe than Twilight or Cops.

Yeah, but those series were from back when the line between Anime and fetish porn still existed.

Fetish content is so central to modern anime, and so normal and ubiquitous to the gooners that watch it, that they barely even realize how bad it is. I think the last series I made an honest attempt at following, which seemed popular and people said was good, was Goblin Slayer. It was fine, I enjoyed it, the monthly chapters were fun. I never watched the anime, but the manga was fun. It's central bit of world building is that goblins are rape monsters then endlessly impregnate the women they capture. And naturally this is explored ad nauseam and in great detail by fans drawing doujins for it. It feels like every anime I've watched from the last 10 years (which has been fewer and fewer) is just a prompt for fetish artist to have a field day. If the original artist doesn't beat them to it.

I fucking love old school anime. I managed to successfully drag my poor wife through Berserk, Last Exile, Akira and a handful of others. But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there. The sexposition in Game of Thrones was gratuitous (and kind of fun sometimes), but at least they were adults. Also you kind of knew what you were getting into with an HBO show at the time.

It actually reminds me of how increasingly raunchy going to Otakon in Baltimore was near the turn of the century. I think the first year I went was 2000 ish, and it was fine. A year or two later, you saw some girls with "Free Hugs" signs. A few years later it was 14 year olds in thongs, loudly shouting "Don't tell my parents I'm here!" with signs that read "Slap my ass, don't be shy".

That was the last year I went. I was definitely aging out of the cohort that can be around that without ending up on a government list. And I was still in my early twenties!

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 5d ago

Great list. Surprised not to see Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999) on the list, given that you've listed a lot of strategy and some other Sid Meier.

SMAC is a funny game to me. Very much a direct sequel to Civilization II specifically. So much so that, IMHO, you almost need to have played Civilization II first to have gotten you feet wet with the mechanics, before SMAC turns them up to 11. It's also from that era where you really probably should read the manual. Preferably all 200 pages of it. You could probably get by with wiki articles or modern strategy guides, or even watching youtubers tell you how to play. But that just all feels suboptimal to me.

I also haven't played it in forever, so it's just not really top of mind for me.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 5d ago

Buddy, you are in for such a treat. If you are serious about anything from the last 30 years, you are in for a firehose of fun you can scarcely imagine.

But first, install Linux Mint, or CachyOS, or whatever your preferred form of Linux is. Microsoft Windows is over, and your computing experience will be much more pleasant (not to mention faster and more responsive) with any of the popular Linux distros. They all run windows games virtually out of the box these days.

Since everyone else is focusing on new trash from the last 10 years, let me offer a broader prespective.

StarCraft (1998) - I still think this might have one of the most finely honed RTS campaigns of all time. Just flawless.
Quake 2 (1997) - I consider this the peak of a form of shooter that died for a long time post Half-Life. It's all about rule of cool in the level design, and enemy attack patterns you can actually anticipate and dodge. Fun weapons too.
Might & Magic VI (1998) - Possibly the best Might & Magic ever. First one that didn't constrain movement to a grid, massive open world, tons of quests and loot, so many fun ways you can upgrade your characters, including quests for advanced classes. Might & Magic VII is better in some ways, some people liked that you got a castle. I never cared for the fact that the story put you on a deadline.
Half-Life (1998) - The FPS that completely redefined how FPS were made. Environmental story telling at it's best, and IMHO better than it's sequel.
Baldur's Gate (1998) - I replayed this a few years ago and absolutely adored it. A relatively low power AD&D powered RPG. It's a tight 10-20 hour experience with a little bit of everything you could possibly want in an RPG. See Icewind Dale if you want more of a dungeon crawl experience, and Planescape Torment if you lean more story and role play heavy.
Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns (2001) - My love for this game is inexplicable. Just a very unique take on an RTS. Kind of a left field pick I will admit.
Max Payne (2001) - The game that invented bullet time! And more or less set in stone the way Remedy Entertainment made games and told stories from this point on. If you like it, you'll probably like everything else Remedy made (Max Payne 2, Alan Wake, Control, etc)
Morrowind (2002) - Another possible high water mark for the Elder Scrolls games. Massive, and alien, open world. No level scaling in the world. Hits are determined by stats and not timing or player skill like later games. Probably the last pure RPG in the series before Oblivion moved it more in an action direction.
Arx Fatalis (2002) - A dungeon crawl RPG in the spirit of Ultima Underworld. Just you, an underground labyrinth, and whatever you can scrounge along the way. I never actually beat it now that I think about it.
Tron 2.0 (2003) - Probably a better sequel to the original movie than what we actually got. I remember really enjoying it, but it's been forever since I last played it. Another left field pick.
Painkiller (2004) - The first FPS where bunny hopping wasn't just a thing you could do, but actively required to handle the raw quantity of enemies, as well as get to certain areas. Fucking love it. Can't speak to the sequels though.
Darwinia (2005) - An indie game before indie games were really a thing. It changed a lot over the years. I still have an old CD-ROM copy with gesture controls and all sorts of nonsense, since that was hip at the time. I think if you get it now of GOG or something it has more traditional controls. Sort of an RTS? Sort of a god game? You'll see.
Titan Quest (2006) - Do you like action RPGs? Probably one of the last best ones. Then THQ went out of business and they all formed a new game studio and made Grim Dawn, which is also pretty damned good.
Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War (2004) - I always found the campaigns for this game underwhelming, but the Dark Crusade expansion had a really fun campaign mode for all the playable factions. Something like 8 of them I think? It got a little out of control.
Sid Meier's Railroad (2006) - I never liked train games. Maybe this isn't even a very good train game for the people that really love train games. But it worked for me.
Legend of Grimrock (2012) - An old school grid based, real time dungeon crawler RPG, in the style of Dungeon Master. Strongly recommend.

That's probably enough for now. Have fun.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 6d ago

I mean, I'm not touching it. All the promotional material looks awful, and the interviews I hear about are all the usual subversive plattitudes about undermining the original meaning of the work. I know there probably aren't many Odyssey stans since schools no longer teach western civilization, but I doubt there are enough anti-fans either who are willing to pay to see the original story ruined/subverted.

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