What a great article!!

So, I’m a huge Game Boy fan. I’d heard about how good Puyo Puyo is, so I got a Japanese copy of Puyo Puyo Tsu. From what I can tell it’s a great port. But I struggled so much getting into it! And then I read your comment…

Puyo Puyo Tsu is hard. It’s really damn hard. I’ve witnessed many new players struggle with even basic 3- and 4-chains, nevermind making the real big chains the game mode demands of you. And unlike Tetris where casual players do not need to know fancy T-Spin setups just to get started and play, you really can’t get far at all in Puyo Puyo Tsu without at least some understanding of chaining fundamentals.

…and I feel justified. 😅 What do you recommend is a good way for a new player to get into the game? Something to read, a video, or something else?

😄 The phone call was just to get some simple bonus tips, nothing really necessary.

What killed me was, to swap items, you hold Select and use the arrow keys. It’s soooo unintuitive!

Richard Dawkins has an entire chapter on this exact topic in his book “The Greatest Show on Earth”. I highly recommend reading it, even just that one chapter! It doesn’t feel like a text book, and his writing is very easy to follow in my opinion.

It’s chapter 8, “You did it yourself in 9 months”. To summarize, many people mistakenly think of genes as a “blueprint”, but he suggests it’s better to think of genes as instructions for origami paper folding. Genes don’t know the whole creature, they just know what to fold next, what to duplicate, what to bend, and so on, kind of like that. It’s been a while since I read it. 😅

But I do remember, humans are so complex, we may never fully understand the complete embryo-to-adult growth process, BUT the author points out that there IS a creature, a very small worm, that we are able to understand everything.

That may not seem like a big deal at first, but think about it. Scientists understand the complete growth process of a living creature, from a single cell, every gene, every cell, everything, up to when it’s fully formed. So cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

Today I learned! :)

I honestly don’t really use it, but I am excited about it in the future. :)

I installed it because of OSNews, my favorite tech news website. But the Gemini page seems to be down?

https://www.osnews.com/story/136770/osnews-launches-gemini-capsule/

Yes! I use the Buran app (open source on Android) to browse it. :)

Big willpower. Driven. Uncompromising. That kind of thing.

I think that is the answer. :)

I’m trying to think of examples from famous recent movies with women who have that description…

From Disney:

• Moana from Moana
• Joy from Inside Out
• Anna and Elsa from Frozen and the sequel
• Mirabel from Encanto

Have you seen any of those movies? If not, what movies have you seen?

Ohhhhh I thought you meant the phrase was “growing up r*****”. Took me five minutes to figure out what you meant. It’s just the one word, not the whole phrase. 😆

For anyone else confused like me, it’s the pejorative word for a person with a mental disability.

Doom, or, gzdoom! You can use it to play the original Doom 1 and 2 games with modern mouse and keyboard controls on HD displays. And there’s an endless number of fan made level packs to try.

As for open source AND free / open resources, there’s Freedoom 1 and 2. I occasionally play them, they’re fun, but a little lacking in stage design.

I don’t have a static IP address. I use a free dynamic DNS service.

Is each instance like another person with a server?

I just wanted to add, any computer with an internet connection can host a web page! A desktop, a laptop, anything. That’s how the internet all started, as a collection on interconnected computers sharing data. I think many people nowadays forget this or even never knew about it (including me), since we live in a world where people spend all their time at like only a dozen websites. (Google, Instagram, Wikipedia…)

I have a public “webserver” in my basement. It’s just some random computer hosting some photos for family members. And it’s all completely free, I don’t pay anything to do it. I could easily pop an instance of Lemmy on it too.

The biggest hurdles in setting up a server from home are needing some technical knowledge, and a free domain name / URL usually looks a little silly (unless you pay for one), and getting hacked is a very real threat unless you pay close attention to security.

Thanks for following up! 🙂

Yes! I’ve played through all of the DLC many times. Here’s some details:

• There’s “only” six new stages… but these stages are MASSIVE. It did not feel short to me.

• When it was first released, the difficulty was insane. But the developers realized this and shortly released a patch to remove or tone down many of the ridiculous parts. For reference, I don’t consider myself a particularly good player (for example, I can’t do the quick swap move between two weapons) but I can beat the DLC on the hardest difficulty, Nightmare Mode.

• The arenas / fights are the reason I play Doom Eternal, and the DLC gave me exactly what I wanted, more fights! Some of the fights feel like “throw more enemies at the player”, which is what I wanted. Some of the fights feel veeeery gimmicky, but even those grew on me. For example, a room where like 20 Pinky Demons spawn in. It’s surprisingly fun, challenging, and a nice change of pace.

• There’s two new boss fights. The first one is VERY HARD, but I enjoy the concept. It’s very video gamey, and provides some clever new challenges. The second, final boss fight… I was dreading it on Nightmare, but not only was it not too challenging for me, I actually kind of enjoyed it! Many people whine about the final boss fight. To me, it seems obvious the developers were going for a “Super Marauder” type of fight. Like, the regular Marauder battles but MORE. I thought it was clever!

• There’s new suit upgrades. I don’t really use them, but they’re fun to collect.

• The one new weapon, the Hammer, is SO MUCH FUN.

• The new enemies… I love to hate them. Once again, they’re pretty gimmicky, but I enjoy the new challenge. My biggest complaint is any enemies that make you wait to attack them. Like, I’ve got these amazing weapons but the game won’t let me use them on this enemy. 😒😒😒

• I love the new music! I love the music in the main game too, but I find myself humming the music from the DLC more.

• THE ENVIRONMENTS. So, I got the DLC on sale for $10 each, and I was worried about wasting my money. UNTIL I STARTED STAGE ONE, took one look (I hadn’t even moved yet) and immediately thought, this was worth it. Love the new stage themes / environments.

…I think that’s everything. Let me know if you have any more questions! Yes, the DLC was well worth it to me, and I still enjoy replaying it.

Doom Eternal

I played on easy mode, over the course of months slogged my way through over half the game getting wrecked and HATING it. And then one day…

Everything clicked. I got into the Fun Zone or Flow State or whatever it’s called. And I have been obsessed ever since. I play at least a few minutes almost every night for years now. I can now comfortably beat it in the hardest difficulty, including the DLC. And it never stops being so much fun and satisfying!

I don’t have an answer to your exact question but I want to emphasize…

NOTHING in the history of humankind has ever existed like computer data. A 100% identical copy of videos, pictures, and music can be made almost instantly at what is essentially zero cost to the original holder of the data. Any comparison to “stealing” or to a physical object (a car lol) just falls flat because the situation is just so different.

Practically speaking, the world we live in, with computers everywhere, cheap storage, and easy fast internet access for so much of the world, has only been around for about two decades, maybe three. NOTHING like this has ever existed before, and businesses, culture, and laws have been very slow to catch up.

I’m not saying pirating is right or wrong, just that the whole idea is still so new that society hasn’t caught up to it yet.

OMG I’m on a technical Discord server where some brilliant people spend all day responding to technical questions on a niche subject and it makes me SO ANGRY that all that knowledge is tucked away inside Discord, non searchable, and going to disappear some day.

So now I use the Discord Chat Exporter CLI program every couple of months to save all of that knowledge into text files on my computer.

https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter