Videogames!!! Whoo!!

I am so fired up about Blue Prince. I delayed playing it because I was busy with Silksong, which ended up being a good call because the stars are lined up just right right now where I’m in a great headspace to fully appreciate it + have some extra time away from other responsibilities.

Continues to blow my mind the more progress I make, it pushes a lot of the same buttons as Outer Wilds for me

I’d steal directly from their wallet if I had the opportunity

It’s AI all the way down! We’re gonna need a lot of data centers

Be reasonable. Maybe implement a second AI to fact check the first one?

When you say isolate content from greenscreen what do you mean? Like take a finished shot and re-green the stuff that was greenscreened in?

So if you look at the top IPF powerlifters (excluding the uncapped weight class), who are more or less the most heavily muscled group of people in the world who are regularly drug tested, they tend to be a few notches into the “overweight” category.

As I understand the early rungs of “overweight” are not particularly associated with disease. It’s just where risk factors begin ramping up a bit on a population level, but it’s understood that active muscled people who land there have better health outcomes than lighter weight sedentary people

Hey can we actually start spreading this around? I have this amazing mental image of some self proclaimed alpha male type trying to get on my right side to talk down to me but I just keep rotating in place so he ends up circling me like a little puppy

We joke about it but that’s really exactly how they feel, even if they would phrase it differently

Right so if you look at the feel good story from that perspective - if a whole bunch of people teamed up to help out just one person, they must be deserving of that help right? The group has in a sense vetted them

But if we set up a system that functions the same way for anyone, it’s basically relying on a self assessment whether or not you’re deserving of the help. So the first thing that pops into their heads is how people will just abuse the system

Idk how to really resolve this perceived problem. I can say “who cares if someone on food assistance buys doritos” and they can say “I do I’m very upset by that actually. It ruins my whole day”. That’s if we can agree on reality at all. I literally spoke with a guy yesterday who said he doesn’t support assistance whatsoever because another guy told him he’s Definitely Sure™️ that people are using workarounds to spend it on lottery tickets

Hence the book!

Can do whatever you want really, it’s your time after all! For one example, I prefer trail running but if conditions don’t permit it I just hit the treadmill with an audiobook.

We could probably make a whole separate post for this! Ask people if they’re night owls or morning maniacs, and what they like to do with that time

The key is not to give the best hours of your life to your employer. If that’s the first 2-3 hours after you wake up, then wake up rebelliously early and rock out before work.

Way to tell is you normally find yourself coming home from work and basically collapsing and not being able to fully engage with the things you love. If that’s you, it’s worth giving the early bird thing a fair chance.

Of course, if you know in your bones that that just ain’t you and life begins at 9pm, then get your groove on then and don’t worry about what the morning people are saying. In a different life the two of you would have just taken different shifts keeping watch to defend the village from wolves and stuff.

Important thing is just finding what works best for you

Thanks, yeah the whole introduction of the article is quite misleading

Why even have the maps with you when you’re going out drinking?

Edit: the reason he got hammered was because he was stuck in a six hour long military dinner event lol.

As for why he had the maps, despite us all reading the summary the same way, the “and” in “lost maps on train and got concussion after drinking” is actually being used to delineate two entirely unrelated events

I hate when my stomach huarn surnog

It’s been driving me insane for a while lol. Been using touchscreen phones since they first came out and I really never had any issues typing, iphone android or otherwise.

Happen to be using IOS at the moment and something happened to it. I can barely make it through a sentence without ridiculous errors.

I decided to actually watch my fingers one time instead of the text body, and intentionally stop the instant my finger made contact with the screen. I could literally see how my finger would be perfectly centered over the exact letter I wanted, yet a different letter I was not in physical contact with would be entered instead.

Nothing is more infuriating than executing your task perfectly and having some unbaked software layer make random unnecessary changes

Funniest trial ever filmed, do yourself a favor a look up some clips

Whoops! Big mistake buddy, you said something on the internet. Now we’re gonna fight! I miss balled mice. How ‘bout them apples? Nothing is as satisfying as cleaning the lint out of those things was

Yeah you’re probably right. I was just looking right above the highest point of the cat’s back where there’s a missing dot. In one image there’s four that form a square, in the other the bottom right dot is missing

Zooming in now tho it looks like the image with the darker cat is heavily compressed, so that particular dot probably just got lost in the process

Different details on the back wall too. Very strange. Possibly at some point someone ran it through an AI filter to get it to look like their cat?

Honestly a lot of the “sense of superiority” and “these games will beat you senseless” types of sentiments regarding Souls actually stem from some really early marketing decisions that the developers didn’t originally intend

Fromsoft is actually self published in Japan, and Bandai helped them distribute the game to western audiences. There’s a whole essay worth of information we could talk about regarding what was popular in the west at that time, but basically when marketing the game they focussed on the intensity and the violence and how hardcore and badass you’d be for making it through.

It worked like a charm, and the games succeed financially and developed that frankly kinda rancid reputation (fans bragging about finishing a boss, coining “just get good”). It was enough to deter me from getting involved with it for literally a decade, until Sekiro came out

I go crazy for katanas and any samurai type stuff so I jumped in. Had a great experience, still one of my favorite games, and it was enough to get me to go back and try out the older souls games.

And the truth is the games are nothing like what the marketing or the rabid fans would have you believe. The art and presentation is that intense, but the actual game is borderline…cozy? In a weird way?

The thing that trips people up is the game has animation commitment, so once you hit attack you have to wait for the whole move to finish before you can act again. But the enemies are also like that, and furthermore, Fromsoft has the best animation telegraphing in the business. So you can just watch the boss, learn what they’re gonna do, wait to see how long they’re vulnerable after a given attack, and then subsequent times you see that attack you have a good idea of how much time you have to land your own attacks.

So once you “tune in” to this style of combat, it becomes a really meditative experience, one that rewards patience and observation. What makes it work so beautifully is that the presentation and music is so intense, to the point where you can actually become wrapped up in that and lose focus.

So in essence, I would say Souls games more than anything are about cultivating a mentality of remaining calm and peaceful during a storm, and then witnessing how your peaceful nature will allow you to endure any hardship.

We didn’t really get that sentiment much in games in the west at that time. So everything about the perception of the games stems from that. People feel so strongly about finishing the games because doing so genuinely taught them an important lesson. But the early marketing colored the public perception of the experience in a way that really misled many people who I think would ultimately adore the games