pixelscript
Emojis to me are like a strongly flavored seasoning. It’s only appropriate in specific contexts, and even in those contexts, just a pinch goes a long way. Too much and it can detract from the experience.
Emojipasta is grossly overseasoned food. But that’s the point, obviously. It’s the emoji version of those white women on Tiktok who throw three pounds of ground beef wrapped around an entire block of cheese in a baking sheet full of milk and bake it in the oven for rage clicks.
Me, personally, I usually don’t need emoji seasoning. I’m fine with it plain. Besides, most emojis to me have all the class of drowning your entire meal in ranch dressing. There are a very small handful of exceptions. But that’s just my lame opinion.
And of the ones I do find theoretically useful, I’m always hesitant to use them, because emoji rendering is platform specific. They’re not quite like text, where the glyphs are entirely utilitarian and typeface it’s written in conveys little to no information. But with emojis, the subleties pile up. A thinking emoji rendered on a Windows PC isn’t quite the same as a thinking emoji on an iPhone, or various kinds of Android phones. Unless I’m on a platform like Twitter or Discord that forces all clients to use a single emoji set, I can never confidently send a precise emotion with an emoji.
Platforms like Discord that let you create your own emojis instead of using the comparatively sterile, corporate-approved, general purpose set provided in standard Unicode is another story. I like those and use them extensively. If Lemmy natively supported a Discord-esque system where instances or communities could define custom emojis that didn’t rely on custom clients, plugins, or instance-specific rendering hacks, I’d use them all the time. Though this would, I presume, be to the extreme chagrin of many.
Kind of a lame example that depending on who you are may make you go, “Uhh… yeah? Duh?” but…
Y’know how Hollywood has been using the same library of stock sounds for like half a century? Wilhelm scream tier stuff? Like, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard one of those stock baby noises, or that ape screeching, you know the ones, I’d have a good chunk of change by now.
And if you ever encounter real world examples of some of these things, they never sound quite like those recordings. This is in large part because Hollywood loves pairing sounds of specific creatures or objects with footage of completely different creatures or objects that in reality sound nothing like that (e.g. no, bald eagles do not make that noise at all). So these sounds become reified in your head as “the sounds fake shit in movies make”. The acoustic equivalent of what fruit flavored candies are to actual fruits. Does that make sense?
All this to say, it’s really disorienting when you encounter things in the real world that actually make these noises. Particularly if you aren’t regularly used to being around them.
For me in particular, it’s roosters and horses. My mind is conditioned to assume that the stock noises for these creatures I hear in films and the like are, I dunno, extremely cherry-picked noises from some specific breed or species of the animal that aren’t the ones I’d commonly find around me. Not the case! They really do sound like that! To a spookily accurate degree, too. Being around them feels like someone is pranking me with a soundboard, I almost can’t believe it’s real.
It’s a bit depressing that sound design of film has disillusioned me to the point I’m shocked to hear that roosters in real life actually sound like roosters in movies and on TV, but nonetheless here we are.
It’s speculated that the patent in question (or one of) is one that essentially protects the gameplay loop of Pokémon Legends Arceus.
https://ipforce.jp/patent-jp-P_B1-7545191
Running the first claim of the invention through Google Translate yields this massive run-on sentence description:
The computer causes a player character in a virtual space to take a stance to release a capture item when a first category group including a plurality of types of capture items for capturing a field character placed on a field in a virtual space is selected based on an operation input of pressing an operation button, and causes a player character in the virtual space to take a stance to release the capture item when a second category group including a plurality of types of combat characters that engage in combat is selected, and determines an aiming direction in the virtual space based on a directional input, and further selects the capture item included in the first category group when the first category group is selected, and the combat character included in the second category group when the second category group is selected, based on an operation input using an operation button different from the operation button , and causes the player character in the virtual space to take a stance to release the capture item when a first category group including a plurality of types of capture items for capturing a field character placed on a field in a virtual space is selected, and determines an aiming direction in the virtual space based on an operation input using an operation button different from the operation button, A game program which, based on an operation input of releasing the operation button pressed when having the player character perform an action, has the player character perform an action of releasing the selected capture item in the aiming direction if the capture item is selected, and has the player character perform an action of releasing the selected combat character in the aiming direction if the combat character is selected, and when the capture item is released and hits the field character, makes a capture success determination as to whether the capture is successful, and when the capture success determination is judged to be positive, sets the field character hit by the capture item to a state where it is owned by the player, and when the combat character is released to a location where it can fight with the field character, starts a fight on the field between the combat character and the field character.
Essentially, Nintendo has a patent on video games that involve throwing a capsule device at characters in a virtual space to capture them and initiate battle with them. In other words, they have a patent on the concept of Poké Balls (as they appear and function in Legends Arceus, specifically).
Palworld has “Pal Spheres”, which are basically just Poké Balls with barely legally distinct naming.
If this sounds like an unfairly broad thing for Nintendo to have a patent on, I’m not so sure I agree. It’s not like they’re trying to enforce a blanket patent on all creature collectors. Just the concept of characters physically throwing capsule devices at creatures.
If you think about it, that’s kind of the one thing that sets Pokémon apart from others in the genre. If there’s anything to be protected, that’s it. It’s literally what Pokémon is named after–you put the monster in your pocket, using the capsule you threw at it.
Palworld could have easily dodged this bullet. They claim they aren’t inspired by Pokémon, and that they’re instead inspired by Ark: Survival Evolved. Funny, then, that Ark doesn’t have throwable capsules, yet Palworld decided to add them. I’m not sure I buy their statement. And if this is indeed the patent being violated, I don’t think a court will buy it either.
I’m not trying to be a Pokémon apologist here. I want Palworld to succeed and give Pokémon a run for its money. But looking at the evidence, it’s clear to me Pocketpair flew a little too close to the sun here. And they’re kind of idiots for it.
I’m just surprised they aren’t getting nailed for the alleged blatant asset theft.
The meme format implies she catfished you with the promise of “Netflix and chill” at her house only to pull a gun on you.
In particular, she wants you to review and merge that goddamn pull request she made to your open source project repo two months ago that finally fixes that one really annoying bug.
“Anymore”? I’ve never met a single soul who knows this is even possible. I myself don’t even know how to do it if I wanted to.
I do use NoScript, which does this on a site-by-site basis, but even that is considered extremely niche. I’ve never met another NoScripter in the wild.
I’m not sure what’s regrettable about this information.
In the next scene where the date takes place, they embrace their old school cool, knock it out of the park, and have a blast. It genuinely romanticizes being this old and made me look up to being this old when I watched as a kid.
All this meme is telling me is, “Congrats, you made it, now go find people in your cohort and live it up with them in ways that mean things to you, even if the kids think you’re cringe,” and that’s wonderful.