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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The reason I think stalemate makes the game more interesting is it gives an out to the losing player.

    Suppose a game where black just lost their last piece (outside of the king). With the stalemate rule, white still needs to be careful and skillful in executing their checkmate to actually win the game. Giving black some way even in a losing situation to get theirself into a better outcome than a flat out loss. It allows more opportunities for games to reach their natural conclusion in a way that still allows both players to do something to get a better outcome.

    And I don’t know about you, but I think a game that could end up as a draw right up until the end is a more interesting game to play and much more entertaining to watch than watching 30 turns of white maintaining an early all the way to the midgame when black decides it’s just a waste of time at this point and resigns.


  • Without the stalemate rule then there’s not much any point in continuing to play once you’re in a poor enough position. You’d literally be wasting both players times waiting in vain for your opponent to irrecoverably blunder hard enough to turn the match, which may be impossible if you’re out of enough pieces.

    With the stalemate rule although you may no longer be able to win, you can still do something so your final outcome is better than a loss. The losing player still has a reason to keep playing. The game is overall more interesting to play and watch by having the stalemate rule than it would be without.


  • I saw a post about how some female model apparently knew a lot of programming languages (I think it was around 60?) and left a comment about how I’d wager they only knew how to make the computer say “hello world” in most of them.

    What I was intending was more that if much anyone told me they knew a ton of different programming languages (regardless of their jobs or side hustles) then that’s what I would expect. Don’t blame the downvoters for reading that as misogynistic and demeaning to models, but that’s not what I was intending. Just that much anyone claiming they can program in that many languages reads to me like they’re really inflating their numbers to brag.

    Though in retrospect I can see how a magazine (or another similar group) may want to pull that number out of her in an interview (so she wouldn’t necessarily be bragging about it) and may not care about exactly how accurate or misleading the number could be compared to what they actually said.



  • If you compare it to Nintendo’s handheld line then it makes a lot more sense, especially considering the Switch Lite, and OLED Switch.

    Gameboy, Gameboy Pocket, Gameboy Light, Gameboy Color

    Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Advance SP, Gameboy Advance Micro

    DS, DS Lite, DSi/XL

    3DS/XL, 2DS, N3DS/XL, N2DS/XL

    and now the Switch, Switch Lite, OLED Switch, and now the incremental hardware upgrade with the Switch 2

    The Gameboy color, arguably the whole Advance line, DSi, arguably the whole 3DS line, and absolutely the N3DS/N2DS ones were definitely incremental upgrades.

    Color obviously brought color and better hardware. Advance brought shoulder buttons and better hardware though no hardware changes within the advance line. DSi introduced the home screen and the online store to the DS line along with better hardware. 3DS brought better hardware and many advancements to the OS experience of the DSi. N3DS brought better hardware and a second joystick.

    To me how Nintendo is treating the Switch 2 makes a lot more sense in comparison to the handheld consoles instead of home consoles.












  • Native speakers often don’t actively pay attention to grammar rules to the extent that non-native speakers do because native speakers often mostly rely on what intuitively makes sense to them. Non-native speakers, on the other hand, usually first learn the language through a set of rules and exceptions then afterwards develop an intuition for the target language.

    For a non-native speaker, some mistakes can be hard to make because you’ve been studying for years to not make it. For a native speaker those mistakes may be easy to make because they got a gut feeling of what was right then didn’t pay attention, care, or remember when it was corrected assuming it was corrected at all.

    Hopefully this helps a bit. This is largely what I learned from studying German from a professor with a PhD in linguistics who loved to go on little linguistics rants and tangents. But it also comes from what I’ve observed in my efforts trying to learn German and Japanese. Hope I’m able to get my skill in either language to where you’re currently at in English.


  • While this could technically work to keep games playable, for a lot of games where the point was to play it online (not games that were forced to be online for arbitrary reasons like Sim City) then it doesn’t make much sense to do. If I had an offline version of Overwatch 1 then yeah I could still look at the characters, skins, and do practice, but that’s not really the point of the game. Games like OW1 are part of the reason people are calling for being able to set up their own community servers so the game could still be playable by dedicated fans without requiring the developers to support it forever.



  • To me, it’s less about the time since the console and more about what the average game on the console looked like. While I personally range from “don’t mind” to “quite enjoy” older graphics including pixel art and low poly 3D, the average N64 honestly looked pretty awful in comparison to modern 3D graphics. In Super Mario 64, Bob Omb Battlefield was 2,352 polygons total, compared to an average of 60,000 per level in Super Mario Sunshine. Not to mention all of the additional effects that the GC was able to pull off on top of just raw polygon counts.

    The PS1 to PS2 transition had a similar leap in graphical fidelity, though the last major PS1 titles certainly looked a lot closer to what the early PS2 titles did at the time. While I think Final Fantasy 9 looks amazing and it sometimes surprises me that it’s a PS1 title, I think Final Fantasy 7 looked closer (than at least 9 does) to what the average PS1 title looked like graphic wise and the difference in quality between it and Final Fantasy 10 is an incredible leap.

    I guess you could also make the argument that retro games are the ones that were primarily designed for being played on a CRT in which the sixth generation of consoles (GameCube, PS2, original Xbox) all would fall under compared to the next generation that at least with the PS3 and Xbox 360 both largely tried to push a new “HD era”. But personally I still see the leap between 5th and 6th generation to be probably the biggest leap in graphical fidelity we’ve ever had and to me that makes it the end cap for the retro console.

    Though I do know a bit of that is because of the jump to 3D did kinda take us back a few steps in graphics…