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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 25th, 2023

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  • Donkey Kong 64 is excellent, with amazing personality, great music, and great playable characters, but the minigames are sometimes a little janky and you have to love the characters, music, levels and aesthetics if you’re gonna be happy with all the backtracking.

    So @CleoTheWizard as a “before you play” tip for Donkey Kong 64, know that there are five playable characters and you can switch at “tag barrels” and basically every collectible, item and action in a level only works for the right character. This keeps you engaged with all characters and the different ways they move but plenty of people understandably dislike the backtracking that comes with it. Most of all remember that less than half the collectibles are required to beat the game so don’t backtrack too much unless you want to, and consider playing the latest version of the "change kongs anywhere " romhack which lets you change characters with a button instead of a trip back to a tag barrel, it’s a very very well done romhack now.


  • Yooka-Laylee is clearly a spiritual successor but also clearly not as good as Banjo Kazooie. In many aspects it’s just slightly worse: There’s less personality, clunkier movement, less good music, the humour is less funny. Perhaps the largest downgrades are the collectibles placement and the world size. The positioning of collectibles is not so much beckoning you towards exploration and platforming challenges, as it was in BK, but instead it’s just putting things in arbitrary places. The world size is a downgrade in the sense that the worlds are larger, yes, MUCH larger, but also more empty and it simply means you spend more time holding forward on the stick waiting for the next bit of gameplay. Banjo Kazooie beats the other 3D platformers by this team because it’s comparatively fast-paced (not as in adrenaline but as in giving you lots of new things to do every minute and has very little backtracking), and it has the strongest music, theming and humour. As an N64 game, the controller had four directional buttons and most modern takes map these to an analogue stick which works very badly, but that’s not the game’s fault. I bought a controller for emulating N64 games that has enough buttons to avoid this. Yooka-Laylee wins on graphics. If anyone prefers YL to BK I’d love to hear why you feel that way.




  • TL;DW: In which Moonie considers 1) actual California legal definitions, 2) exactly what was said in Jobst’s, SomeOrdinaryGamer’s and The Completionist’s videos, and 3) innocence until proven guilty, and importantly points out that tax filings can and often are inaccurate (due partly to the law being extremely complex) and are corrected/settled afterwards (possibly with a simple small fine), and concludes that:

    1. charity fraud is plausible but is only a midemeanour

    2. embezzlement is not substantiated by publicly available information - saying you don’t spend the funds on expenses and then spending funds on expenses would probably be charity fraud rather than embezzlement

    3. missing funds is not substantiated by publicly available information - most of the publicly available information is the tax returns but tax returns are not really evidence of your accounts because they might be wrong, that would be quite common and would not be serious legal trouble.

    and that Jobst and SomeOrdinaryGamer are comically lacking in legal understanding and knowledge when you look at the seriousness of the accusations they make.






  • The event costs is embezzlement -the donations were taken with a promise they wouldn’t be spent on that, and paying for the event means paying for content for his channel, paying to promote his channel, paying to expand his subscriber base, etc.

    Compare it to a non-charity event on his channel. He makes content, he takes the money from subscriptions. A “charity event” would then be when he makes content and instead of taking money from subscriptions, he donates it. If the “charity event” is still him making content, and him still taking money from subscriptions, then that’s more like a non-charity event. Even if a donation is made with some of the money then the event is still a non-charity event in the sense that he said he was donating the event itself, i.e. not being compensated for it - if he’s being compensated for the event then he didn’t donate “the event”, he was employed for the event.




  • My parents can’t use windows but they can use Linux - their windows was covered in “you need to update” and OEM thingies asking them to consider the premium package and shutting down against the user’s will and adverts for onedrive and that ridiculous universal search feature that can find things on Bing but not your My Documents folder and the antivirus showing distressing messages about how your PC is dangerous unless you pay for the deluxe service. Not all of that is “Windows” it’s true but it’s partially Windows fault that uninstalling things is so difficult - some things are on the “add and remove software”, some aren’t. All of that is standard part of the Windows experience on the Windows ecosystem, even if it’s not all intrinsically Windows. So I put Linux on their laptop and GNOME just lets them easily use their browser, email and files without needing to dig through settings to disable tracking, without shutting down against your will, without saying you have to buy new hardware to update versions.

    So there are points on both sides but don’t say that Windows is unarguably easier.

    Edit: not to mention that using a package manger’s GUI is clearly easier - and easier to do safely - than getting software by surfing the internet for MSIs and EXEs.


  • I found the gameplay of GTA 4 and 5 to be “drive across town to watch a custscene” at their core, but GTA4 is very enjoyable if you a) relax into it, stop trying to take control and just accept that you’re kind of playing a movie, and b) get good at the driving, which has a surprisingly high skill ceiling. The feeling of just running errands won’t fully go away but the story builds and the missions get more exciting.



  • I would hate it if games changed based on what they thought I wanted - I want to choose my content but if the content morphs underneath my hands according to a marketing algorithm then it’s not respecting my choice. There seems to be some assumption that each person enjoys exactly one emotion.

    I’m pretty sure people can like more than one thing. Like if I’m playing Resident Evil and some algo decides that because I watched When Harry Met Sally last week, it should replace the zombies with awkward dates 🤣.