I am glad someone else noticed the painting! I had a good laugh when I saw it.

I’m almost positive the painting is supposed to be the count himself, painted either before he became a vampire or just made to look like he wasn’t a vampire.

If you’re interested in paintings, there’s a cool sidequest in Cheydinhal worth checking out.

From my understanding of how they operate, it’s less “Everybody is lying except this one source” and more “Everybody in my bubble appears to be saying these things, so it must be true.”

The strategy utilizes armies of bots and bad actors whose purpose is to infiltrate and influence specific demographics on social media into accepting the Russia-supported narrative. The people who buy the narrative will then in turn parrot it to other members of their social circles to legitimize it. So when the western media outlets and elected officials who took Russia’s money repeat these same ideas, they are more easily accepted as true.

Propaganda is a hell of a drug.

All of the Russian state-sponsored misinformation campaigns have probably paid for themselves ten times over with how strongly they’ve succeeded in tipping the scales of geopolitics in Russia’s favor.

Lemmy is also primarily used by super nerds who don’t care about sportsball. Not enough normies here compared to Reddit.

No arguments here. I used to love Geoguessr when it was 100% free, but have never once paid for it since they switched to a subscription model. I just blame Google more than Geoguessr is all.

Depending on who you ask, a lot. Or very little.

For me today, though, it was the large downtime earlier. It’s big by Fediverse standards, microscopic by Reddit standards, and as-is it struggles to keep stable uptime some days.

Honestly I think it’s hideous. Wish they would take this one back to the drawing board. I prefer the sleek and minimalist push they used to have, but now it feels like they’re going back in a maximalist direction.

My phone’s OS doesn’t need to be a theatrical experience with every press or swipe, it just needs to get me from point A to point B as quickly and simply as possible.

My understanding is that Google charges for use of their API. The game could switch to a traditional flat price model, but the moment they stop making enough in sales to pay Google for API access, the entire game is dead for everyone.

The subscription sucks but it’s basically a requirement to continue running. Would be nice if there was any sort of open map standard with even half the street view data Google has so they wouldn’t need Google at all.

We’re all entitled to opinions.

Some opinions are awful, though.

Seems like back, forward, share, and refresh are still buried in the context menu, though. It’s more button presses.

Would also love to have “Find on page” face up.

So much for physical media.

Which version are you on, out of curiosity? Wondering if you might be on an earlier version that hasn’t updated yet or if they might be doing A/B testing or something.

It takes up space on the screen, which I know for some folks makes it a worthless/intrusive addition. IIRC it was also the case early on in the nightly builds that there was no way to turn it off either, which bothered people as well.

Everyone has “modes” they get used to using their apps with (and I am no exception in that regard, which is why I am here with this question in the first place), and when something new is added which disrupts someone’s usual mode, that causes friction and a negative impression.

I know my experience is niche, being that I am a relatively newer Firefox mobile user who liked having that feature precisely because it more closely resembled the non-Firefox experience that was more familiar to me. So to an extent, I understand this decision that was made to avoid alienating the core user, even if that means potentially dissatisfying fringe users like myself. I also can’t complain because this is the nightly build, where things change on a whim and there are no guarantees that any feature makes the cut (I would have been on stable build if this feature existed in the stable build at all).

Not to mention that Mozilla also isn’t rolling in cash, especially with their future income model uncertain as the US government continues to go after Google’s partner agreements that are currently propping Mozilla up, so they have to make difficult decisions about which features to spend time and resources supporting and which to cut.

But it still stinks, y’know?

I think it’s unfair to say that the US is what dictates the direction and usage of the English language. It contributed, sure, but it’s not because of the US that English is so widely-spoken in the first place. We have Britain to thank for that.

If the US ever adopts a second language to use for trade, it will be Spanish, just by virtue of who its neighbors are and how many native Spanish speakers live in the US already.

It’s basically a reflection of global power. Before English had that standard in Europe, it was French. We still describe such languages as a “lingua franca” even in contexts where that lingua isn’t franca anymore.

Esperanto isn’t anyone’s native language by design, but it meant that there was no major global power which necessitated its use. So it fell by the wayside, which is why English is spoken around the world instead despite being such a poorly-constructed option.

Ori is very good.

Would recommend playing Ori and the Blind Forest before Will of the Wisps though, the plot might seem a bit confusing if you don’t.

The app on the right in this image looks atrocious. No thanks.

At first I was like “Why would anyone want to change OoT’s art and mess with perfection?”, but I do have to admit that I have really been craving a modern Zelda game in the vein of the N64 releases, which is a formula they haven’t touched since Skyward Sword in 2011. And Oblivion just recently showed me that sometimes a new coat of paint really is all you need.

Wind Waker at least is a game that (visually) aged very gracefully and I think can still stand against newer games even now, but I’ve played it to death and just wish we had something new.

Also not to discredit BotW/TotK or anything, I think they are still great games and I also really enjoyed them, but they’re just built different. Zelda is now a franchise of 3 distinct styles, but only two of them (2D and open world) are still getting new releases.

This is the video I didn’t know I was looking for in life.

I’ve been very into Zelda rando stuff lately, but the mod support shown here just seems above and beyond what I’ve seen so far from my limited experience with Ship/2Ship.

Thank you for the detailed explanation! I had thought Ship was decompiling and recompiling it into its own package, but what you describe makes more sense.