davetansley
8
30
davetansley

@kbin.social

Dice maker, gamer nerd, developer, Dolphins fan. Reddit refugee (maybe).

Still fighting the 80s 8-bit wars, one port comparison at a time.

Me on Mastodon
Me on Pixelfed

davetansley 15 points 3 years ago

I'm almost reluctant to post suggestions about what I'd like to see on Lemmy/kbin. It feels kind of entitled, you know? It's early days and there are obviously lots more important things to get stable and established first. Not to mention the devs are doing this for free and about to come under a lot of pressure. As a dev myself, used to listening to users making subjective demands about the "right" direction to take an app, I fully sympathise :)

That said, my offerings for the suggestion pile would be:

  1. Discoverability - finding and joining communities isn't intuitive at the moment. This seems to be a fediverse problem rather than a lemmy/kbin problem, as Mastodon has similar issues. It should be as simple as "search for a topic, hit subscribe". Instead it involves copy pasting cryptic strings of text, editing them sometimes, then searching, and a bit of hoping. I think this will be the number one issue that impacts adoption.

  2. UX - more one for lemmy than kbin, but there are improvements that could be made to the UI to improve user experience. A general tidy up to improve visuals (things like alignment of community names without icons, for example), ordering of lists of communities, external links opening in the same tab (appreciate some prefer this, but it tends to lose your place in a feed).For kbin, easy access to your list of subscriptions would be great.

Honestly, most of the UX stuff is low priority compared to getting the apps stable and coping with scale. I hope they figure out those wider challenges though, because there's definitely a lot of promise here.

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davetansley 10 points 3 years ago

Back when I first started using the internet, early-mid 90s, there was a feeling that we were in control - the users. The giant corporations hadn't taken over yet, content was all user generated, the apps and early sites were all user run. It was weird, uncontrolled, unpredictable, janky as hell... but also really cool.

Lemmy, and the Fediverse as a whole, feel like that again.

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davetansley 9 points 3 years ago

Iceland. One of the most beautiful, weird, friendly places I've ever visited.

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davetansley 8 points 3 years ago

How familiar are you with retro gaming generally? If you're not familiar at all, there are some of the real classics that are extremely playable today:

  • Super Mario Bros 3 (NES)
  • Ninja Gaiden (NES)
  • Tetris (Gameboy)
  • Super Mario World (SNES)
  • Super Street Fighter 2 (SNES)
  • Sonic The Hedgehog (Genesis)
  • Streets of Rage 2 (Genesis)
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Playstation)
  • Wipeout 2097 (Playstation)
  • Tekken 3 (Playstation)
  • R-Type (Arcade)
  • Outrun (Arcade)
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davetansley 8 points 3 years ago

About 13 years ago, I made this fella.

https://i.imgur.com/hZYFEmC.jpg

It was a huge amount of fun to build and I was very happy with the result. I hardly play it, but sometimes just put it on and let it cycle through games to fill the house with an arcade-y ambiance.

It started off life with an old PC in it, but currently runs a Raspberry Pi 3.

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davetansley 6 points 3 years ago

I tried Memori, a Celeste-style platformer with some cool puzzle mechanics. Some of the rooms were super-hard, which made completing them feel very satisfying. It has a chunky-pixel look and controls really well. The front-end UI needs a tiny bit of polish, but other than that I really enjoyed it. Can imagine it'll be popular with speedrunners.

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davetansley 5 points 3 years ago

This!

Coding isn't for everyone, but sometimes you can get involved in a coding project just by contributing good suggestions/bug reports to github.

Be thoughtful about how you report things - if you're reporting a bug, add as much detail as you can to help the devs recreate it; if you're suggesting a feature, make a solid case for why the application might benefit from it, think about potential issues it might solve (or cause), consider how you might address users who don't want that feature (make optional).

It is extremely satisfying to see an issue you've reported get fixed or a feature you've suggested get implemented. It gives you a stake in the project, something you won't often get on the corporate-owned platforms.

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davetansley 5 points 3 years ago

Like everyone else, I mostly remember being amazed by both the graphics and the price. Nobody I knew had one, except one guy who acquired it using money he'd raised through, shall we say, illicit means. As such, he kept it under his bed all the time in case his parents ever found out and nobody saw it. Come to think of it, he may have been making the whole thing up...

As mentioned elsewhere, this was the first system I was enthusiastic about emulating.

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davetansley 4 points 3 years ago

Do you have "Show top bar" enabled in settings? If I enable this, Magazines disappears from the navbar.

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davetansley 4 points 3 years ago

Steamdeck owner since August last year, here. And I love it... As a traditional console gamer, it's been great to dig into my basically untouched Steam library that I've steadily accumulated with Humble Bundles over the last decade or more. Steam sales are a game changer... I've discovered so many titles I would have otherwise missed! I should say that I am 99% a docked gamer as well, and the Steamdeck works absolutely fine like this.

In terms of games - I've just started Ori and the Blind Forest (currently on sale). I'm also playing Final Fantasy XIV on and off. I spent 120+ hours on Elden Ring on the deck. And I'm patiently waiting for the Dark Souls games to go on sale so I can pick them up and start yet another playthrough.

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davetansley 3 points 3 years ago

Outrun, the correct answer is Outrun :)

Final Fantasy VII a close second, though.

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davetansley 3 points 3 years ago path: 0 342269 345374, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
davetansley 3 points 3 years ago

Oh, I love the soundtrack to Final Fantasy XII! The Rabanastre theme always seemed like the perfect non-Christmas Christmas music to me.

I should probably replay Final Fantasy XII...

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davetansley 3 points 3 years ago

I'm equally intrigued by the idea of not experiencing nostalgia... :)

I guess the root of it is yearning for a time when things were simpler, but also it's an associative thing - you remember being happy/content, and you associate the context you were in with that feeling. I had a happy childhood, and I played a lot of games, so my mind links the two together.

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davetansley 3 points 3 years ago

I just cannot get beyond "rad".

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davetansley 3 points 3 years ago

Yeah, that is a good one. Amazingly, the Gameboy even got a version... which is okay, but a bit fiddly.

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davetansley 3 points 3 years ago

I'm nearly fifty, thirty years since I last did a school exam, and I still have recurring dreams about them. Weird, because I didn't have any stress or anxiety at the time... at least not conscious stress.

My dream takes the same basic form as yours. I am approaching a time when I know there should be an exam, but I haven't been to the class at all for the year. Mostly the dream consists of me hoping no-one will mention the exam and I can just kind of pass it by default. It makes no sense.

Other recurring dreams:

  • I stumble on a previously unknown room in my house
  • My Grandad, who has been dead over 20 years, is suddenly alive again. Everyone knows he should be dead, no-one really mentions why he's alive again, and there's a weird feeling that he's hanging around on borrowed time.
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davetansley 3 points 3 years ago

It didn't take too long - the trick was to work out that you need to use a particular type of ink that is heavier than normal alcohol ink and will cause it to sink. Yeah, we use a pressure pot.

Our process for this type of set is:

  1. Mix up your base colour and fill the moulds to about 3/4 full.
  2. Alternate drips of normal ink and mixative ink on top of the resin. About 2 of each.
  3. Fill the moulds with base resin, carefully, trying not to disturb the dripped ink.

Sometimes you end up with heavy drips of ink that settle on the bottom and make large patches. For this reason, we learned quickly that these dice work better as double-cast dice (cast first as blanks, then in full moulds). This puts the splotches "under" the numbers and looks more purposeful.

You can see the process here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CiFVevkAjBr/

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davetansley 3 points 3 years ago

This is amazing! It basically recreates my reddit browsing experience and makes the whole site so much easier to navigate!

I can see references in the code to "sort alphabetically" (which would be very welcome!)... but I can't see the button. Did that function not make it into this version of the script?

Thanks again!

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davetansley 3 points 3 years ago

Thanks!

No extra steps required really... the tricky part when doing these is finding a way to grip the dice in such a way that you don't mess up the pattern. I've found the best way to do this is to drill a small hole in one face and push a cocktail stick into it. You can leave this in while the die dries (pushed into some plasticine). When you remould the dice, the hole goes under the logo, so it won't be seen.

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thanks for using Leebra!

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