I’m more impressed by his ability to get players to like Raiden later on. He’s still a massive cringy dork in MGS4, but now he’s an edgy Gray Fox expy and that was apparently enough to change player’s minds about him. He’s gone from the most hated to one of the most popular characters in the entire series.

Kpjima later did something similar with Otacon using a completely different approach. Otacon was introduced as a coward and a naïve fool, though he improved with every game, and many players didn’t like him due to that poor first impression.

The prequels featured Otacon’s father, who all we knew about beforehand was that he committed suicide years before MGS1 because he found out Otacon was sleeping with his stepmother, and managed to make him a more hateable character than most of the actual villains. He has the exact same voice and appearance along with all the same personality flaws as his son, but those flaws were all turned up to eleven and he lacked any of Otacon’s virtues to counter them.

And his character spiraled downwards from there - it was basically Kojima rubbing into your face how much worse Otacon could have been and shining a spotlight on the importance of character development.

in a largely unjustified war

You’ve mentioned the importance to the Romans of having a legitimate (or at least legitimate-sounding) casus belli before. I’m guessing the sacking of Carthage got a pass due to their ancient enmity?

It definitely looks interesting! I’ll star and follow it later, though I don’t personally know any teams that could make use of it (they all either started migrating to Kotlin years ago, or their manager got so sick of them asking that they’re stuck with Java for the foreseeable future).

The last console I owned was the Xbox 360. Once I started seeing non-gaming advertisements on my home screen, I lost all interest in the product line.

Sometimes I think internet connectivity was a mistake.

My main concern with using something like this in a business is whether it will still be maintained a decade or two from now. Kotlin has the support of several major players in the Java ecosystem and is virtually guaranteed to stick around. If JADEx is abandoned, it becomes an additional maintenance burden on the team.

(Though point in your favor, they can maintain it since it’s open-source. Greybeards have nightmares about updating critical projects reliant on old, long-abandoned C/C++ dependencies.)

Unlike a Kotlin migration, there’s no new language for the whole team to learn, no need to flip the entire codebase at once.

Kotlin is designed for trivial bidirectional Java interop. Mixed-language projects are explicitly supported as a basic feature, so you don’t have to convert the entire codebase at once. You can go through file-by-file, rewriting a single class in Kotlin at a time, same as in JADEx.

I’ll admit null safety in a mixed codebase can be a pain* - though I’m guessing JADEx doesn’t escape that pain point either. Edit: the same issues Kotlin has are mentioned in the article, though both languages provide tools to find and fix them.

* Also needing to spam @JvmName and @JvmStatic everywhere to make everything compile into the proper Java equivalent. Moving statics to an auto-generated ClassNameKt.class by default and the whole companion object model are the two things I hate most about Kotlin.

That’s good to hear. I haven’t looked into MicroG in several years since I always root my phone, but in the past I’d always heard it was a nightmare to install alongside Google Play Services (something about signature verification) and required flashing a zip in recovery mode or using something like the xposed framework that opened up gaping security holes in your system. Glad it’s more user-friendly these days - anything that makes degoogling easier gets my support.

Yeah, they’ve been working on a major update/overhaul for like a year or two now. In addition to the metalworking and a few other crafting types, it also properly adds hunting and animal husbandry. Also basements and real 3D lighting (shit’s dark at night, but light sources are way better since light bounces around corners now), but I think that might have snuck into the main branch since the feature was fully finished ages ago. Either way the game’s future looks amazing.

The one thing I don’t like is how they’re making it even harder for solo players since metalworking, clay, wood working, liquids/chemistry etc are each full-time jobs with many steps and - just like electricity - are a pain to pick up and train if you didn’t start with proficiency in them. Luckily the sandbox settings have us solo players (mostly) covered.

Don’t forget the current beta build expands crafting and adds primitive metalworking. Those spikes won’t forge themselves!

That would be awesome, though on the other hand Zomboid is absolutely the kind of game that would force you to regularly clean and maintain your death contraptions, which kind of sucks the joy out of it.

Emulsified cheese sauce that’s semi-liquid at room temperature and used as a dip, usually with a few chili peppers or some salsa mixed in. Basically nacho cheese sauce but slightly spicy.

Finally, it’s time for that Project Zomboid x Factorio crossover the fanbase has(n’t) been demanding.

YouTube ReVanced is the official YouTube app, just with some code patches applied. They avoid being taken down (RIP original Vanced) by only releasing a patcher app and a bunch of lists of patches for various apps.

It’s dead simple (if you’re rooted; unrooted requires jumping through extra hoops). You install the patcher app, a specific version of YouTube (which can be done within said app), select from a looong list of patches (everything from removing ads to integrating SponsorBlock and DeArrow [which changes clickbait titles and thumbnails to something neutral] to restoring the video quality menu to re-enabling background play and picture-in-picture mode to hiding shorts and all those react buttons under vids to blocking videos based on keywords), and the app creates a custom YouTube APK with all those patches applied.

It’s impossible to go back to stock after using ReVanced. I have over fifty patches applied and without them the app is a web of dark patterns and enshittification. With them I have a simple app with a few buttons per page (just the ones I use) that opens directly to a feed containing only the videos I want to watch.

The downside is it’s a pain to setup without root since YouTube is usually a system app, but with root you can even mount ReVanced over the base app so it’s completely undetectable by the system (though there’s always a chance Google will add something within the app to catch users that the RV team might not catch due to YouTube’s infamously convoluted design and server-side A/B testing).

There aren’t any repercussions for submitting a false DMCA claim. There are for pushing the claim after the target files a counterclaim, but it’d require an uphill legal battle that most people aren’t able to fight so they simply give in and pull their video even if it falls under fair use.

Then to add to that, YouTube’s own policy will suspend your account after a few copyright claims regardless of their merits, and getting strikes removed is nearly impossible.

Basically if you’re not a major corporation with a legal team on standby, you’re getting screwed by both sides.

I’d argue for the existence of a third stat, Reflection. This would be the ability to meta-analyze acquired information and create elastic principles out of it, allowing knowledge to be used in novel ways.

Someone can acquire all the book knowledge in the world, or learn at the feet of the wisest elders, but many otherwise brilliant people can’t apply what they’ve learned outside of the context they learned it in. Reflection turns brittle knowledge into flexible systems and concepts that can be applied elsewhere.

The downside is that reflection takes time - many times more than rote learning - and free time is the ultimate luxury in modern civilization. Our education systems try to cram as much knowledge into students’ heads as quickly as possible, then wonders why graduates are so inept when they encounter anything unfamiliar.

(And maybe that’s the real reason so many cultures venerate elders: it’s not just that they carry the accumulated experience of several decades, but that once retired they finally had the time to look back and reflect on their life.)

Ah, never mind. I assumed adoptionism was referring to that fringe practice some offshoots do where they “baptize” long-dead people they deem worthy and was comparing it to claiming pre-Christianity figures as Christian, but now I see it means something completely different.

Unf. Unf. Unfunfunfunf.

So Abraham was a Christian, so was Moses, Elijah, etc

the heresy of adoptionism

There seems to be some slight double standards here.

Most historical figures would be short by our standards. Modern diets and easy availability of cheap nutrition have added multiple inches to the average height - several when compared to civilizations where famines were common (see pictures of the Korean DMZ with North Korean soldiers next to South Korean ones).

This is a different OP. The user who seems to be having a crashout over attribution and trying to annoy as many others as they can is Beep. Mickey’s more known for posting boomer humor.

Swearing and praising Allah are two things that might upset his base more than the pedophilia and warmongering ever did.