What I’ve Read This Week (July 26 2021 to August 1 2021)

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Irreconcilable Differences

Recently the Mastodon project launched a first-party iOS app. The app’s visual design itself is mostly uninteresting, it looks like a clone of the first-party Twitter iOS app (not a bad thing) and covers most of the basic functionality of the Mastodon software.

What is interesting however and what has caused a great deal of consternation and frustration among certain segments of the fediverse is what is missing. The current version (as of July 31, 2021) is missing two basic features that are currently present in the official Mastodon web app and in other third-party iOS and Android applications.

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What I’ve Read This Week (July 19 2021 to July 25 2021)

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Zelda

This week reviews for the Skyward Sword HD remaster came out and it brought me to a realization. I realized that I don’t actually care about Zelda as a franchise.

The reason I played Breath of the Wild was because it was a novel open world game which encouraged exploration. Nothing about the characters or the story was particularly interesting or compelling. The final boss fight felt more like a obligation than a fun thing to do.

One thing that was interesting to me from reading this review was seeing the origin of ideas that got refined in Breath of the Wild. Systems like the stamina system and weapon degradation were present in a crude way in Skyward Sword. I hope BOTW 2 sees further refinement or even removal of the weapon degradation system because that was another part of BOTW that was not enjoyable at all.

Weapon degradation in BOTW meant that the flow of the already mediocre combat system got broken in the middle of a combat encounter. So you stop and switch to another weapon. Aggravating to say the least.