Hail Satan.

Kbin
Sharkey

Using Mbin as a backup to my main Kbin account due to tech issues on Kbin.social. May either switch to this one permanently or abandon it, depending on how Kbin’s development goes. All my active fedi accounts are linked.

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • For me, I was enamored with the simplicity of it. You click Start and the Start menu just appears, without having to spend 10 seconds connecting to the internet to refresh a bunch of tiles that I never wanted in the first place. There wasn’t any half-baked “assistant” trying to suggest new spyware for me to install. It didn’t try making me sign into a Microsoft account just to open the photo gallery. The only “bloatware” it came preinstalled with was Outlook Express. The whole experience just made the computer feel like a tool to use for a purpose again.

    It’s funny, because I remember thinking when Vista and subsequent versions of Windows came out, that it was amazing we ever survived with something as primitive as XP. But these days, all I want is to go back to that.






  • I mean… A hurricane hit, and it damaged power equipment along several major cities. Some parts of Houston saw flooding, and a lot of roads are still inaccessible right now which further delays repair efforts. Not sure what else you’d expect to happen.

    This isn’t like the previous failures of Texas’s busted-ass power grid in recent years; those previous outages weren’t from weather damage, but from being unable to keep up with demand due to our government’s stubborn refusal to make use of the national grids. Those outages could’ve been largely mitigated if not for bureaucratic bullshit, but there’s little you can do to prevent a hurricane from doing hurricane things. The article goes into pretty great length to detail the damage the hurricane left behind, yet doesn’t seem to link the cause to the effect.

    I’ll happily shit on our medieval government 7 days a week, but this feels like a stretch.



  • A lot of it is going to be game-specific, and spending time tweaking the control settings until you find what feels responsive to you.

    The rest of it is going to be technique, and a lot of trial and error to find out what works best for your play style. For instance, I can’t do fast-paced, twitchy movements on a controller (even things that are technically possible to do on a controller; I just don’t have the dexterity anymore), so I have to adopt a different play style when using a controller. I usually will go for a more support-based role, if possible; opting for long-range weapons/abilities, and playing a more patient, campy game. I play slower and more methodically this way, and try to position myself so that I don’t ever get into the situations where I need to react to somebody closing the gap on me in the first place.

    For me, it’s an entire mindset shift. If I play the same game on M/K, I’ll be playing with a much faster, reaction-centric style instead of one where my movements are more premeditated.

    Some other tips will be learning to do things like using your left stick for fine-tuning your aim (you can get very precise horizontal micro-adjustments by leveraging your player’s position, which can be useful for getting your shot off before the other guy does), experimenting with gyro controls if that’s an option for you, or trying joystick extenders (small gadgets that clip onto your sticks to extend their effective length, which may make aiming easier).

    As far as what to practice in, I don’t know of any aim trainers that are designed for controller, so I’d say you should just practice with a game that you either don’t care about or where it doesn’t matter if you lose a bunch. I’d recommend The Finals; it’s free to play, the default quickplay mode is active and puts you into a match quickly, and it’s super low-stakes so you don’t have to feel bad about experimenting during a live match. Your teammates don’t have loot drops or anything hinging on your success, so if you play badly, nobody cares. And it’s got pretty robust customization options for the controller settings (dead zones, acceleration curves, etc), which can help you figure out what settings you respond best to and what to look out for in the settings of other games. It has a huge variety in movement/weapon options, so you’ll end up developing skills/habits that will transfer over to other games quite easily.

    I didn’t mean to weirdly steer this into becoming an ad for The Finals. But it’s a very controller-friendly FPS that I think will be beneficial to practice with. I think it’s also pretty fun, but that’s subjective.