The world feels almost real, every hill, wall or tree is climbable, every crevice has something interesting, if you just swing your sword in a field you'll cut grass and lizards will pop out. It's hard to try to go on a mission and not get lost going after something cool that you find along the way.
It’s not really like other Zelda games, nor really an RPG. It gives you lots of freedom and bodily autonomy, but personally I found it very hard to piece together an interesting experience out of the (admittedly very flexible) constituent parts. It’s an extremely good physical simulation of a world I struggled to care one iota about, and there were so few ways to express yourself as a character that you can’t really tell your own story in your head. I sometimes feel similarly about the Assassin’s Creed games - what a lovely engine, that gives you this unique feeling of freedom even within a huge, teeming city, but I wish somebody would make a different game with it. I don’t think you’d enjoy it coming from western RPGs, with slightly meatier worlds and a more developed sense of self. It’s more like Minecraft, if anything.
Zelda games are generally considered in the action-adventure genre, rather than RPGs (though this is controversial). Unlike the RPGs you mentioned, there are no explicit stats that you can choose to level up. There is no min-maxing of numbers. Progression is your own gameplay skill improvement and items collected that assist either giving abilities you didn't have before, or are stronger than previous items.
I think Zelda games are in a league of their own, and always have been at every generation. The general mechanic is being able to initially explore, yet running into obstacles that prevent you from going many places. Then you solve the necessary puzzles and kill monsters to acquire tools. Finally, you must figure out where when and how to use those tools to overcome those obstacles to travel to previously unreachable areas. Its a very gratifying experience the first time through, and there is a lot of replay value in the games too.
Haven't played TOTK but its predecessor BOTW is one of the best and most open immersive open world games of all time. All physics mechanisms work with other mechanisms and if you can see something, you can go there/interact with it. The map is also big enough thats its in top 10 largest open world maps and from what I've heard TOTK has more than doubled that in size.
The reviews claim that TOTK has only improved in the immersiveness aspect as well.
The fact that it runs on the switch (and they managed to fit it in 18 GB) is a huge feat.
The thing I liked about it was how beautiful the puzzles are, really simple but fun to solve and figure out, often teaching you a new skill as you go. Fighting is also quite fun.
The thing I didn’t like was its easy to get off track and laborious to get places super quickly.
Also I didn’t really get the food/items/combinations system at all, it’s quite unexplained as far as I could tell.
I can't really draw a parallel to those games, probably the closest would be to fallout, the open world 3d ones specifically. BotW & now TOTK have a massive focus on it's world and it's pretty immersive to clamber over mountains and discover things. It has unique systems to interact and traverse the world, improved further in TOTK.
If you've played any open world game, it's pretty much the same, just a little more formulaic. Characters, story, world are all incredibly basic and predictable. You'll stop finding truly new things after a few hours, making exploration more of a chore than anything else.
Is there an existential threat looming? Could Spotify make an API change that would completely break libespot and Spotifyd? Any insights as to why/why not that might be likely?
Also, any plans to add the ability to save the tracks that are streamed? (for e.g. offline playback or for exporting to mp3 etc.)
I don’t think so; we’ve never had a regression related to the Spotify api that I’m aware of. I know librespot has big plans in the near future to switch to a newer version of the Spotify api so I think we’ll be good for now.
As an Australian, with an economy always experiencing very high inflation (8%) I just immediately question what is the composition of the US CPI. Perhaps it’s not reflective or is disproportionately weighted
Australia has had a lot of asset inflation and is only recently starting to show in the consumer prices. eg afaik house prices are not included in the CPI
It's a defamation case and you will note the main question was whether or not publication occurred. The rules governing dissemination of copyrighted material are completely different.
if providing a link by google to an article is not publishing then why do you think providing e.g., a hyperlink to a magnet link by a torrent search engine becomes publishing of a copyrighted material?
(torrent search engine shows links to a link to a "link" to a material)
"Facilitating" defamation isn't defamation, so not a crime. Facilitating copyright infringement is explicitly prohibited, whatever the definition of "publish" is.
You're right; my spectacles-supplier makes it possible for me to watch infringing videos. So they're "facilitating".
Arguably a website operator can do something about it; Vision Express can't, and nor can Apple.
The battle between copyright maximalists and the "information wants to be free" crowd won't end until there's a copyright regime that most people think is fair. I think that means that (a) all copyright expires on the authors death, or after 70 years, whivhever comes first; (b) copyright infringement is a purely civil affair; (c) copyright holders get to sue for lost royalties, which they have to demonstrate, thus suppressing actions against people whove never made a penny from infringement.
That's how it was when I was a kid, and it seemed pretty fair. All the subsequent changes have been to favour the RIAA and the MPAA, enacted by the US government, and then rammed down the throat of the rest of the world through trade agreements and so on.
Given how the HCA has taken so many traditional (archaic) views on media publication recently (see Voller 2020) I wonder to what degree this a political decision. The respondent is a very unsavoury figure in the legal world. Any lawyers able to interpret how narrow or broad the ruling is?
The Australian High Court is generally not partisan or political. The Justices are not generally predictable in their rulings, unlike in the US. So, if you're right that it's an archaeic view, I wouldn't put that down to politics.
An example is a recent hot button issue where the Court ruled Aboriginal Australians could not be classified as "aliens" under the Constitution (Love v Commonwealth). The decision was condemned by conservative media as judicial activism. The majority comprised Bell, Gordon, Nettle and Edelman JJ, the latter 3 were conservative government appointments.
I found the ruling to be pretty cognizant of the nature of the web, drawing apt analogies with librarians looking up and leaving post-it notes on books while following references, and (importantly) noting where the analogy breaks down in places relevant to the decision at hand.
Even the dissent shows cluefulness, pointing out that “although the Google search engine system operates in a "fully automated" manner 140 , the systems of which it is comprised are designed by humans and operate as they are intended to operate” [¶108].
“Here, Google was fixed with knowledge that Mr Defteros claimed the material was defamatory when a solicitor [...] lodged a removal request on Google's website for the Underworld Article to be removed from Google's search results. Google was provided with the Uniform Resource Locator ("URL"). The removal request form was provided and generated by Google. [...] Google was therefore aware of the defamatory character of the Underworld Article a reasonable time after having been given notice and the defence of innocent dissemination cannot be established.” [¶113]
“Contrary to Google's submission, its vast repository of information obtained and organised by the web crawler and indexing programs is not "an undifferentiated mass until a search is requested". And in crawling and indexing, news articles are a particular, if not primary, focus. A webpage which appears to be a news article, importantly, is separately crawled – identified – and indexed as such a page 181 . "Important" webpages are crawled more often 182 . The web crawler program and the ranking algorithm's focus on "important" webpages, the crawling of such pages for updated data more frequently, and the PageRank and freshness clues used by the ranking algorithm then combine to produce search results in response to a search query 183.
The design of the Google search engine system as a whole is intended to, and does, affect the results that are produced when a user enters a particular search query. And it is for that reason that, in seeking protection for its search results under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Google has itself successfully argued that the design of its search engine system involves the exercise of evaluative judgment 184.” [¶123-124]
Essentially saying that “hey, you said (and the US supreme court agreed) your results are protected as free speech because you're exercising judgement in preparing them, so why should we agree that you're not exercising judgement in preparing them now?”
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this as Murdoch machinations (old media tax extraction - besides, that's settled law here). During oral arguments one of the justices rightly pointed out that Google has a financial incentive in hyperlinking. Consider that Google may summarise a news article and display it in the search results - effectively stealing the ad traffic from the news publisher.
I'm no fan of Google but it really was the height of hypocrisy for news publishers to demand their content be visible in Google search results while simultaneously complaining that their copyright is being infringed with respect to titles/snippets.
Explicitly allowing crawlers and — perhaps most tellingly, offering specific metadata for SEO optimisations — is tacit permission for the republication of hyperlinks/titles/snippets. If you don't like that deal, just deny Googlebot (et al). It really is that simple.
The settled law is a joke.
(Or in the alternative, as a non-news publisher, I want my cut too.)
I genuinely love how American, Australian, and British, English all differ in these subtle ways. I think another example that gets me is:
`e.g.` vs `e.g.,`
MS Word favours the `e.g.,` which I never see in Australian English.
I'm British and have worked in the US so I've used most if not all of these forms.
I'm not sure why the British one feels more logical to you, but I don't feel strongly drawn to either so probably it's more about familiarity.
> Plus, the word 'parentheses' is a mouthful :-)
There's a certain flow to the term "parenthetical" that I enjoy too! Alas I am entirely too parenthetic in my own writing and thus spend an annoying amount of time eliding the parentheticals :)
Logically, yes, but "curly brackets" is the only term I have ever heard used for these types of brackets. In Canada, which tends to use a lot of UK-isms.
I work with UK and US people regularly, and despite not being an official name this is the only name for those characters that everyone has automatically understood.
Huh, I'm from the UK and use the American versions. They American ones feel more logical to me. Probably all the programming books I read used the word 'parentheses' (:
