• 8 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • a valid opinion. but i think sometimes unpopular policies can still be financially successful. increase in youtube ads could be an example.
    or, people will put up with a lot if they don’t want to move onto something else (twitter is run very poorly these days, but people aren’t leaving because there’s no compelling alternative for them, or because of the network effect). companies i want to fail due to their ethics or bad business practices continue to do fine, or take a much longer time to fail than i expect.

    but personally, i want them to add features in a way that’s less cluttery. so my gripe is how the UI friction and complexity of the game is increasing over time rather than the power creep / F2P-friendliness perspective. adding yet another tab in the menu or another bar in the battle screen ruins the elegance or simplicity of some of the UI designs. i kind of ignore the meta as long as i have powerful enough characters to clear content.

    if they can keep writing some compelling stories once in a while, then it’ll be worth it for me to keep playing. i thought wanderer in the binding night (conclusion to wanderer in the vortex) was surprisingly good. the rest can be pretty hit-or-miss though.

















  • thanks for the heads up!

    I randomly got an achievement for Reclaiming the Painting Trial (Purgatory’s Pilgrimage) on logging in.

    this is the best kind of achievement, imo. a pleasant surprise!

    i once gave a thank you gift to my department professor.

    (hands gift) thank you for writing a recommendation for me! (you did agree to after all)

    I did?

    Achievement unlocked: wrote recommendation for student!


  • New encounter: Crimson Reaper Ilulu, and her sidekick Limil! (Such good kitty .

    the logical and inevitable outcome of a feature like sidekicks: CATS!

    bummer to hear about dropping ios 12 support (im not that familiar with ios), but i guess from a practical perspective ios 12 is 5 years now and it gets harder and more expensive to support older OS’s as time goes by. apple also isn’t exactly famous for being developer friendly when it comes to backwards compatibility.



  • here is a very interesting video talking about how the USA (along with the global trend at the time) switched to this current economic style, and the effects it had

    although i was familiar with some US history and the influence of trade, there were some new insights there i didn’t know about. it’s interesting that these changes in the US to trade and free markets probably brought about changes in Japan during this time period (19th century). Japan was forced opened to US trade by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853. That was followed by the Meiji Restoration (1868), which changed the country from a feudal political system to a centralized political government in order to resist colonialization and influence of western countries. This brought about a rapid industrialization of the country, modernizing industries like cotton and silk where women (and other types of workers) worked long hours in factories, changing daily life and the nature of work. global trade has had a huge ripple effect over the entire world, which doesn’t allow you to simply ignore it.

    TLDR: we switched from “everyone” wanting to be farmers and crafts/tradesmen and thus grow things that at the end of the day made people feel a certain sense of personal satisfaction at having PRODUCED SOMETHING, to then helping a machine make a cog, which by itself sorta felt so useless

    I am not sure that farm work was that great either, because sometimes the outcome of crops meant life or death. I saw this quote in regard to women in Japan during that time:

    Yet still, most women preferred the factory to the farm. Farm labor was far more demanding than the factory work. Also, the diet offered at the factory was far better to the girls as compared to a life of malnourishment and starvation with their families on the farm. (source)

    That’s not to say that working life in factories were good (they were very bad in fact). But it says a lot if people preferred that over life on the farms.

    However, I do agree with your general sentiment. industrialization brought about a loss of personal meaning to the average person in various ways:

    • loss of agency (long work hours dictated less by day/night and more by market demands and the use of indoor lighting) - livelihood dictated by employers
    • loss of community relationships (life organized around factories rather than villages)
    • disruption of the nuclear family (kids or parents working in factories)
    • loss of personal meaning (work becoming menial or disconnected from its final outcome)

    anyway, i think since then labor conditions have improved comparatively and we’ve had more time to try to grapple and struggle to find an answer to find meaning in the modern age. in exchange for efficiency, it helps to revisit what was lost to question what is truly valuable.

    changing topics… i was curious, you mentioned that this was your favorite chapter in the “wanderer in the vortex” apocrypha. what makes this your favorite chapter? (edit: did i remember that incorrectly? maybe you didn’t say that now that i look back on earlier posts.)



  • Speaking of, like art, which means both what the originator intended as well as what the recipient receives, whether it applies to a more senior player vs. lurkers is a question best pondered by each recipient individually, aka if you feel like it applies to you, then it probably does? :-D

    Ahahaha, ok very good then. Anyone can answer.

    It is super-annoying when people create new wiki accounts purely for the purpose of trolling me - as usual, vomiting their emotions at me upon seeing that I said something, without bothering to understand that thing first (in the latest instance, I said that we should not call P/P “guaranteed” anymore, since barriers exist such that a “guaranteed” skill can fail to inflict, …

    that’s terrible. sometimes it’s better not to engage trolls because those types of folks crave a response, good or bad. but, you’re doing good work!


  • WFS would be proud of your work. You should send them a fraction of what you’ve done :)

    maybe you too would like to share your unique perspective on this game, to help get this community started? We do not have a post every day - and that is okay:-)
    The Kbin interface is buggy, the Federiverse is confusing, but we at least are here, so what shall we decide to do with it? :-D

    hmm, i think you have 2 good questions, but when soliciting a “call to action” or response from the reader, it helps to make clear a) who it is addressed to and 2) what you would like them to do.

    for 1), maybe this is just me, but reading your question, it felt a little unclear… are you addressing this question to newcomers and lurkers? or everyone? i first thought of answering the question, but then i was hesitant to answer if it was directed mainly to lurkers due to the followup statements you had.

    for 2), although the 2 questions are kind of related, I think the second question is worth it’s own discussion thread, or the existing pinned thread State of the magazine - July 2023 fits this question better.

    in that thread, notice that beithioth asks multiple questions for discussion, so i am not suggesting you can’t ask multiple questions in a thread. but bethioth’s questions all fall under the main topic of the state/direction of the kbin magazine, and there is a clear call to action for more moderators.

    i think an effective call to action is focused, simple and clear, and is usually the last thing to say in your closing statements.

    in this thread, although your second question is a good one (direction of the magazine), it kind of detracts away from or disrupts the momentum of your first question. this thread has spent most of it’s time discussing how you like to experience the game at your own pace, and the best buildup to a call to action would be to end on your first question: now what about you? it is best to let your post linger on that question. it would have been better if any followup statements serve to clarify your first call to action, such as, what do you mean by unique perspective? do you mean perspective as in approach to playing the game, or as in what the game means to you? by moving onto a new topic before the reader has had a chance to answer the first one, i feel that the second question has made it harder for the reader to answer the first question. or at least, it has made the discussion less focused. i think it’s fine if a conversation has gone onto different topics in the replies, but when kicking off a discussion, i find it helpful for the initial call to action to be more focused.

    i hope it doesn’t sound like i’m trying to impose some kind of “correct” way to do things, but i hope this clarifies why i had difficulty finding a way to respond to your post, and how it could be adjusted to better encourage a response.

    to respond to your first question, i don’t place as much value on completing extra content and only bother to complete the main content and episodes, etc. i think i spend more time doing fanart than playing the game itself. the story and characters have more draw to me than the gameplay after it went off the rails with power creep starting with grastas.

    for the second question, i think content will be slow here for a while due to a few factors. kbin is in its beta stages, so we only have early adopters here. others wont consider using it until there’s more feature parity with their existing platform. for example, multi-image uploads, tags, and spoilers are features missing from kbin. you need to reach a certain critical mass before you get a steady flow of activity. we have 32 subscribers, and about 5 people who participate in threads. that’s already a 15% participation rate! don’t get greedy now ;) personally speaking, i think a slower pace is fine for now to match what we can handle with the existing mod tools and am glad to be spending less time on social media since quitting reddit. and i suspect there might be more punctuated waves of people joining kbin/lemmy over time, such as when old.reddit.com gets removed.

    that being said, the first thing i would like to see on kbin is multi image uploads, then spoilers. i think the lack of those feature hinder promotion of the types of activities we’d like to do on kbin a little bit. im not making any promises of any kind, but since it seems no one is looking into multi-image uploads, ive been looking into the kbin codebase and have gotten the app running on a local setup. however, all of this takes time so it’s not going to happen soon and I still have yet to see if i can actually do it.

    in the meantime, i think we need to make do with what we have. i think when creating discussions inviting people to participate, it helps when the call to actions are clear and easy to take action on.