chameleon

That’s what I’ve been trying, yesterday ended up being a little more fruitful (internet complaining trick worked!) and luckily gave me more interesting rooms, though I’m not convinced it was any action on my part that did it.

Started Blue Prince, but to be honest I haven’t gotten past the initial “RNG wall” and I’m sorta over it. I’m 5 hours in and continue to get the same rooms I’ve documented in detail in my notes with little new to show for it, and while I have some leads and puzzle pieces, nothing fits. Not particularly excited about a lot of the small repeat puzzles anymore either. I get the impression that I just need one or two pieces of knowledge that the game is refusing to provide to me. Kinda hoping that the good old trick of complaining on the internet will make things work out.

That’s about right. That said, we also don’t know how long regular Switch/Switch 2 carts are going to last. The MaskROM used in the N64/DS and earlier eras is significantly more reliable when stored for a long time than the modern NAND Flash memory as used in the 3DS/Switch+. I suspect key carts won’t have any NAND Flash inside (they don’t need gigabytes of capacity just to store a game name + icon) and might physically last longer.

Of course, key carts are all going to drop to zero value practically overnight when Nintendo eventually pulls the plug, while real carts will die one by one.

We won’t know for sure what’s actually going on under the hood until the console is cracked wide open or there’s a devkit leak, but my speculative guess is that some details of the GPU are ‘emulated’/recompiled. PC AAA games tend to include lengthy shader pre-compilation wait times, console games don’t have that wait time because the shaders are pre-compiled by the developers when building the game, specifically for one piece of hardware. The games themselves then fully rely on those pre-compiled shaders. They’re going to need shaders that work with the Switch 2’s GPU, which is going to involve some kind of imperfect translation process.

AMD was able to design better hardware that works with older compiled shaders, as done in the PS5/Xbox Series (and Pro consoles). That’s not a super common feature, but I imagine that AMD is more motivated to keep Microsoft/Sony happy than Nvidia is to keep Nintendo happy. AMD’s graphics division might as well shut their doors if it wasn’t for the consoles, meanwhile Nvidia is raking in trillions from the AI boom and would rather forget about gaming.

It was just a two question + your name form: type-in your #1 pick but also why. Full-on first past the post, single vote only, no option to name other games. Pretty flawed methodology overall.

That said, I will admit that I did put in Shenmue and while I didn’t expect it to get #1, I hoped it’d be top 3 at the very least. I really do trace more or less every successful strongly story based open world game of the 2000s back to a combination of Shenmue and Half-Life. Shenmue’s story didn’t have a super wide appeal and would be completely uninteresting to most teenagers at the time (which was still the main gaming audience), but the method of storytelling is top-notch, and its open world just felt far more genuine than anything predating it. Meanwhile, Half-Life did an excellent job at telling a story that looks boring but is actually very interesting, and did so in an engaging, if not particularly open world way.

Windows prefers to deactivate or minimize the write cache on removable devices, most of the common Linux distros generally don’t make such changes. Microsoft has a very good reason for that default: not a lot of people actually use the “safely remove hardware” option and if the cache is enabled, using and waiting for that is a hard requirement for the data to have actually made its way onto the drive.

Github: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs

Self-hostable, but it seems like an absolute behemoth of an application if their “non-production-use-only” docker-compose file is to be believed, and I couldn’t find any production-ready deployment instructions on a quick skim. No obvious signs of federation and I didn’t see anything on their roadmap, not sure it would make a lot of sense for this though.

Borg or the like with ‘hardcoded’ plaintext/regularly full-disk-encrypted key is acceptable. Someone that has your unencrypted private key sitting on your server has almost certainly already obtained access to the entire set of data you’re backing up, with the backup key itself only meaningfully guarding access to older backups.

The more important thing is to securely keep extra copies in case the server fails. I keep mine in a group in my password manager, one per repo.

I’m particularly worried about all the historical records. Summoning Salt & similar channels are gonna have problems after this, especially after the policy has been in place for several years and stuff made in this very era expires.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Archive Team tries their best at archiving the current situation (difficult as it is) but nobody is going to bother doing it on-going and a WR obsoleted for months is interesting material only when edited into a documentary.

The good stuff is usually hidden in low view hell (or in text form, stuck on personal blogs nobody reads). Getting an audience is mostly a property of marketing, not quality. There’s not a lot of natural overlap between those that can teach well and those that can market well.

For what it’s worth, this game was formerly “Monolith”. Fantastic twinstick bullet hell shmup roguelite. Difficulty is somewhat on the hard side but it’s learnable.

(It’s a joke/reference, I guess it’s not 100% known though. My bad.)

I really do hate “I know what I have so you are going to pay whatever number I set” capitalism though, which is what they do here. These registrars figured out a loophole around the redemption grace period and are, from the start, set up to make you lose the domain and then spend significant money on a completely unfair auction where they have the power to plant fake bids, rather than paying the usual static redemption fees that aren’t that excessive.

Heartbreaking: The Worst Capitalist Practice You Know Just Accidentally Picked A Funny Target

Powered through Beastieball over the past week, a creature collector/“sports” game from the devs of Chicory and Wandersong. I had fairly high expectations because I enjoyed the devs previous work, but it turned out even better than expected. Lots of cool creature designs, music is Lena Raine’s usual standout stuff, story kept my attention.

The sportsball system is surprisingly complex, if a little hard to learn. I went through multiple types of team setup and felt like a lot of different setups were viable in the end. Every match is a 2v2, every offensive turn is 3 actions worth, and you get a defensive turn too. You really have to build a team with good synergy between them and be smart about swapping in and out.

Only real downside is it’s still early access and a decent chunk of creatures have placeholder art or don’t have the full set of animation frames yet. Most are reasonably finished but there’s a couple that are a little jarring.

You go to the settings and verify it. You don’t have to host anything, just verify that you own the domain via text file or DNS record and choose to set it as your handle. Bluesky’s ATProto has a couple extra layers of indirection and it’s very easy to get a custom handle as a result.

The downside of this setup is that running your own complete network is completely impossible. If you want to follow theonion.com, anyone can find did:plc:a4pqq234yw7fqbddawjo7y35 in the DNS without too much work. That’s the identifier for The Onion’s Bluesky account, and even if they swapped back to .bsky.social, that ID number would stay. But that DID tells you absolutely nothing about where the data is currently hosted.

So how do you figure that out? Well, you register it with https://plc.directory/ which is ran by Bluesky and cannot currently be replaced. There’s fancy cryptography involved that makes it hard for them to spoof data, but they are perfectly capable of simply not giving any data out for any given DID.

I don’t have Obsidian around, but this has been happening elsewhere lately too, almost certainly because of this underlying Electron issue: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/43819

Unfortunately there’s not much you can do about it. Electron decided to depend on functionality not yet in a released version, and that very interesting choice flows down to everything that updates their Electron on the regular.

Sorry, I’ve had a (self-imposed) busy week, but I have to admit, that also has me rather stumped. As far as I can tell, your second entry should work. If the device is visible in /dev/mapper under a name, it should be able to mount under that name.

The only thing I can think of is that some important module like the ext4 module might be missing somehow? You can get pretty confusing errors when that happens. Dracut is supposed to parse /etc/fstab for everything needed to boot, and maybe that’s not recognizing your root for some reason. dmesg might have some useful info at the end after you try to mount it. If that’s what’s happening, you could try to add add_drivers+=" ext4 " in your dracut.conf and regenerate it (the spaces are important!). But if that’s not it, then I’m probably out of ideas now.

I think you should check your root= line and add a rd.luks.uuid= to make it open it. Dracut will by default open the root FS as /dev/mapper/luks-abcdef... based on the LUKS container UUID. You can get that with cryptsetup luksUUID. /dev/mapper/root is just never going to show up unless you’ve assigned a custom name to that with the barely documented rd.luks.name, and I don’t see that in your setup. The cryptroot and cryptdm parameters aren’t used by Dracut either.

With all of that missing it’s just gonna wait for that /dev/mapper/root to magically show up out of nowhere, without ever trying to open it.

A correct cmdline will probably look something along the lines of root=/dev/mapper/luks-<uuid> modules=sd-mod,usb-storage,ext4 rootfstype=ext4 rootflags=rw,relatime rd.luks.uuid=<uuid> and once opening with passphrase works, you can start to mess with rd.luks.key=/awesome.key (and readd quiet when done debugging, if you want it that way).

ldconfig errors and the missing modules should be fine. musl’s ldconfig is just a bit different but also isn’t required in quite the same way. I don’t think you should need to mess with modules manually. I don’t think you’re using LVM’s userland for your setup, just all the device-mapper kernel modules. Dracut will pull all the necessary bits in for you if you’re setting it up for LUKS.

For current exports, it’s some custom .csm/.csd file combo. Not sure if there’s any tools for working with it, seems like it’d be more annoying than just using a normal archive format either way.

It technically still exists in the game properties -> installed files tab, but it doesn’t really work. The backup files you get require you to be online to meaningfully restore and will trigger a patch to the latest game version.

Practically speaking it’s better to just make a copy of the game install directory manually, gives you a better chance of things working (even though most games require some kind of external tooling for that).