Moonside

Moonside wrote

I think that interfaces can be many and that's perhaps not the issue, even if the command line interface is clunky and more tuned to the particularities of Linus brain folds than anything else. Magit in Emacs is pretty great and I like it and there's no shortage of other GUIs for Git. But I feel like the basic model could be more, say, principled or elegant. I find it somewhat ludicrous that this book is 456 pages long.

This isn't just Git either, I really feel that a lot of utility software for coding has tons of usability issues and quite often it's not like the innards are any better.

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Moonside wrote

After I had read this piece, I clicked on the author's name and was sorely disappointed that this was his only piece on Kotaku. Honestly I'll agree with a fellow commenter over at Polygon comment section: the best piece I've ever read on Polygon and basically set all the noodling around I've done in video games in a new perspective.

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Moonside OP wrote

Reply to comment by neku in Dear Stephenie Meyer by Moonside

I read the first 50 pages of Twilight once upon a time and while I found the prose grating and awfully dry actually, it was absolutely nothing in badness compared to Ready Player One. There's no amount of dunking on RPO that would make Twilight's treatment proportional.

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Moonside wrote

Reply to comment by toasthaste in Re: toasthaste by cute_spider_ni_srsly

Look up shaping. Here's a simple video, but as its been studied by psychologists there tons of information about shaping.

You could try to teach her to swallow on cue if a pill is present, but I have no idea how'd you make safe practice pills.

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Moonside OP wrote

This list of SNES extra chips on Wikipedia makes no mention of any sound chips on cartridges, but apparently some Famicom cartidges had ones.

I had a Sega Megadrive growing up, but I think the stock SNES sound chip was better than what the Sega had. I have a vague memory too that some SNES games had a sound chip on their cartridges, but the purpose of which was to enable the abuse of the original sound chip for non-audio processing.

I think in the end it might be that the Sega soundchip was more limited that what SNES had and thus the good songs had to be more carefully written and arranged to fit the limitations. I think one reason why Sonic 1 OST is so good it was made by a bassist as I think it's the bass that is most lacking on Sega games. But bassists tend to be quite sensitive to tone so I'm sure that helped.

Example: compare the hospital theme of EarthBound to the Star Light Zone theme, which seems to be Genesis chip bass at its most mellow and even then the bass line consists of pretty detached notes, I think in order to work around limitations. It works here because the music demands it, but I think SNES is the general winner here as it could support a bass and drum propelled track like the above.

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