mrvanillasky
Future apocalypse survivor
User ID: 3273
mrvanillasky
8d ago
Will check em out. People here don't have much in terms of understanding with regards to complex issues like emotional support so I want to help him out.
Interventions -
A close friend of mine who is doing his masters at a decent uni here has been doing pretty poorly and a whole bunch of us, his friends want to hold an intervention for him where we can convince him to start being honest with us and help him fix his life. I was able to get mine on track, so any suggestions as to how to do it would be appreciated.
Spring -
I'll meet some friends again at the golf club or maybe at their house. I look forward to the weekends now that I'm tired after working. It doesn't need much, The weather here is ideal as it's 30-35 degrees Celsius so you can sit out in the open and see all the trees come to life. It sounds strange but glass bottles of coke and just soaking in the weather go well if it's nice out.
Gaming -
Which reminds me, I fired up Quake Live after my last comment and had a k/d of 1/20, it's a dead game and I'm terrible at fps but it's so fun. Everything is fast-paced. I'm tempted to pick up video games again but it's hard just to play one match or play for just half an hour.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
My favorite was gow2, I just did not like it as much story wise since greek gods are still gods, so I never recomemnd that game lol. I would say that I really liked the combat there which is why devil may cry and Metal gear rising tempt me.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
Dark Souls is worth checking out, but I have been told it is super hard and frustrating. I have heard that they are making half life 3, I really wish valve never stopped, Half Life 2 was one of my favorite campaigns ever.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
My only point of disagreement is with movies. Literature sure peaked a few centuries ago but the oslo trilogy or drive or many other post 2000s movies are just amazing. The Dune and John Wick franchises are better than movies of the past in the same genre because they do benefit from the higher budget and better tech.
As for games, perhaps like hacking, the more people did it, the worse it got even at the top levels. This is a statement my friends who are good hackers make, I am unqualified for now.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
I was shocked by how clunky Far Cry 3 felt since I grew up playing arena shooters a little bit. PS2 saw some of the best games a console has seen. Console shooters, sandbox titles larping as RPGs became worse with each generation.
Quake Live feels like a different world compared to Valorant.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
I relate with what you say a lot since you are not much older than me and saw a fairly similar place growing up. Gaming is still unaffordable for most Indians, the same way a normal healthy diet, peace or anything good is. My dad, due to being a young professor at a top engineering uni (he is a humanities prof) caught on to computers, so we always had a slightly underpowered PC at our house where I could play pirated games in.
Today, I have a turbulent life, I cannot bring myself to game since I am unable to do anything but be a vegetable after a productive game and want to git gud, get a job and migrate out before the year ends.
More than just the energy, gaming is not as popular in my circles as it once was. People go out to cafes or unsuccessfully try to woo girls far more than playing video games since sexual liberation, much more of a thing now, even for early teens, phones and Instagram make it much worse. My gaming itch died when my dad refused to update our PC when I was 16 since I wanted to play doom but he realised that I needed to do my exams better so killing the gamer inside me indirectly helped me do better with the JEE.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
I made various comments about the comparisons for AAA games then vs now. I will say that peak game enjoyment was somewhere between late 2000s and early 2010s, but peak advances were made in late 90s to early 2000s.
Games are better, but by miniscule amounts, the gameplay jumps that you had do not exist and the slight improvements are not as fun for me. Gaming was much better when it was smaller, studios spending the same time and money on a game, the way marvel does on movies, gives you marvel movie like games.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
Dishonored and Prey are great immersive sims, unfortunately the studios behind them have been shut down. Immersive Sims always have their studios shut down. I am not that fond of the other Assasins Creed games. The advancements you saw in those with Ezio as the protagonist in a pre microtransaction, leftier than thou world was quite good. The sequels may be good but they are not that much better, and frankly, they are not even proper RPGs the way actual RPGs are. They are less RPG like than new Fallout games, which are terrible shooters LARPing as RPGs, except for New Vegas, which is awesome.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
I have not, I fear that the non-reboot stuff is better, so playing the worse game first would at least let me enjoy that, though a good chance I never get through this list either given that I just don't care about games as much now given my turbulent life is currently. I fired up Quake Live yesterday and an hour went by in a flash. I had fun despite like a 1/25 kd.
Devil May Cry series seemed to be much more fun than the God of War games, will check out others you mentioned too. Bayonetta is highly rated.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
They killed off Unreal tournament in pre alpha and I have lost interest since then. I suck at FPS, ability wise I am bottom 99th percentile, I still find these games so much more fun, I have quake live and I would pick that over any console shooter.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
On point. Games just suck and I am somehwat glad neural networks will at least keep graphic cards useful as I cannot bring myself to enjoy new games. You barely have any changes, id software shipped quake 3 in less than 2 years, a game whose engine was hailed as a marvel and was Carmack's last great hurrah, Carmack who is widely seen as one of the best hackers to ever touch a keyboard.
I am even fine with the lefty woke subversion if the gameplay is good. I just do not want to play the same game with a slightly different re-skin. Half Life, Quake 3/Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex were all first-person mostly shooting heavy games that all played extremely differently. 25 years later, modern games do not have any advances.
This reminds me of something a good hacker I know said which is that the average good hacker today is far worse than a good hacker 25 years ago. We fucked up big time somewhere. How do you take hundreds of millions and 5 years to make the same fucking game Ubisoft. Why is making another Elder Scrolls a two-decade long process when New Vegas was made in percentages of that by a studio you cucked out of payments.
Open worlds like Gothic 2 are much better than anything you get now, bigger just means worse.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
No, I solely mean games like half life, deus ex, the quake and unreal games at the turn of the century and they were much more fun because they were faster. I enjoyed a game like Arkham Asylum the most since it came out in 2009 but quake and unreal tournament were much more fun.
I cannot name a single game in this era as impactful as the ones I have mentioned. I second @SubstantialFrivolity here. I am 24 and mostly pirated games too. My taste is quite mainstream but Far Cry 3, Arkham Asylum, Assassins Creed 2 were way better games than Far Cry god knows what number they are on now, Whatever Beat em up DC game they made and the black samurai assasins creed.
Arkham Asylum was a step forward like how New Vegas was a step forward. Games today actively regressed. Ioper who I would have tagged had I not been blocked has made some good points.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
Prey is n the list, they fucking mangled arkane. The world cannot have studios that make immense sims.
Eidos, Arkane and Looking glass. It's ludicrous lol
I would love suggestions. My current to-play list includes
- Gothic 2
- Fallout New Vegas (played it a bit, loved it)
- Unreal Tournament 2004
- Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal
- Vanquish
- Metal Gear Rising
My malaise also stems from the fact that the IPs that I liked from the 2010s are either dead or should be dead. Assassin's Creed stopped being fun post Brotherhood, Far Cry got worse. The popular AAA summer blockbuster sorta games feel quite familiar, I wish we could experience breakthroughs in how the games felt.
The jumps from Wolfenstein to Doom, from Doom to Quake and from Quake to Quake 3 were pretty large. You could polish Arkham Asylum graphically, and a guy who has never played it would not find it old or clunky like you would have found Half Life after having played Vanquish.
Maybe I'll never recreate the rush of pizza, coke and old vide games with my cousin from 18 years ago. Welp
Edit - forgot to add immersive sims and some others I forgot
- Deus Ex (original and both the Eidos reboots)
- Prey
- Dishonored
- DmC
- Metro Last Light
mrvanillasky
15d ago
For me it's not really about the activities, but the times and places I've left behind. I often miss the easy serendipity of college, where I didn't need to create a partiful and blast reminders in order to get 10 people to show up to an event.
This is also why I liked Pai so much, it was a small town where you could just do what you wanted with other travellers without prior notice.
In my case, I never had a fun college or high school life, the last two years post uni were even worse due to my startup LARP so the bar for me is a lot lower. Good chance I do and think the way you do once I party a bit after my sabbatical.
I definitely do miss just being able to walk places and have events going on, but that's a choice I made in exchange for living somewhere I can actually afford a house, so c'est la vie.
Worth it imo, owning a house in a decent town and having savings really makes a difference. Unless its Manhattan and you are stuck with a 60 year mortgage lol. The US is quite unique this way, in India, you cannot buy a decent house unless you are involved in shady things. You get a third-rate run-down apartment in Delhi for the price of a ranch in a smaller blue state in the US, which would have a much better quality of life.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
Piggybacking off of my last comment, are there others who feel that modern games seem not to be as fun as games from late 90s to late 2000s? This may be nostalgia talking, but people around me game less than they did, and most games they play are MMO ones, as opposed to campaign-focused ones like Half-Life.
I have not played a whole lot of modern games, but their gameplay does not seem to be that big of an improvement over things I have seen before. In many cases, modern shooters feel quite slow compared to arena shooters like unreal tournament or Quake. I was looking at games to play and very caught my eye beyond the new doom games.
mrvanillasky
15d ago
Indo-Chinese food is excellent, and I prefer it over other varieties of Chinese food. Chinese food in general takes the cake here. I also had a soft spot for delivery pizza, but Domino's is hot trash now.
mrvanillasky
17d ago
General Updates
I finally made my first project and am a fourth of the way through with boot.dev, though real stuff begins now, it's still some progress. I have a GitHub account with repos, things I made, something I never did for the longest time. India is facing a concerta shortage, and if I cannot get any, I will still keep up with my work. I can crank out 9 hours max on a good day, after which I can barely read a book or even pay any attention to anything at all. This is a lot higher than what I expected, though I feel bad saying anything nice about myself. The entire process is extremely satisfying, my head is in a much better place when I can experience a real sense of progress in the right direction. A hard day of work feels nice, at least when I am done with it at night.
March
March is my favorite month of the year. My family was extremely invested in my academic success, March was when your academic calendar ended, so we would get a 3-4 week break where we had literally zero work. After exams, all the kids would visit these gaming parlors with PCs hooked up via LANs to play Counter-Strike with each other. I would watch movies with my cousins who would come to visit us for Holi. We would play video games all night on my pc, check out bougie cafes, discuss anecdotes from high school. I still feel some of that with my cousins, but I am not in touch with anyone from high school or even uni for that matter.
My strongest emotion for a long time was nostalgia, always wanting to go back in time. In uni I missed high school, in high school I missed middle school, in middle school I missed being in 5th grade. This pattern of thinking was parasitic because even if those years were better, I cannot relive them again. With enough effort, I actively look forward to the time I am in now and have a belief that the near future is genuinely going to be better. My love for video games died almost completely, all the cafes feel stale.
So, do you guys have any thoughts on what it feels like to grow apart from the people of your past life? Are there some things you did with them once that you no longer can enjoy? Many report a falling out with video games or partying.
mrvanillasky
19d ago
My experience was the total opposite, I only ever used them in South East Asia and everyone was helpful, cordial and happy to help. Being a girl makes a difference but we did have female expats there who reported the same things.
After 3-4 days of the same clothes it must have been a special type of smell haha.
I still bathed 1-2 times a day, so it was not that bad. Otherwise, I would have done worse with the girls there. Though there is something about worn clothes, some girls liked the smell of my t-shirt if they were into me, as it reminded them of me. I was too intoxicated to notice anything, honestly. Though I looked like a sitcom character with the raincoat and crocs and trying to shuffle whilst wearing that. I still cant believe I was able to dance for 7 days wearing fucking crocs.
Otherwise, I risk catching the attention of creeps.
Most dudes are creepy by default. If you live in the west, then some might even be homeless drug addict kinds who would scare any sane female.
mrvanillasky
19d ago
I have some traumatic memories with laundromats. I never used one back home since here we have domestic help who take care of all our laundry needs, but I did need to wash all our clothes (my ex-co-founder and I, I had two co-founders, talking about the younger, saner one here). For a few months, I forgot what it felt like to wear clothes that had been folded or ironed at all.
A funny incident was the time a friend of mine came to pick me up at my mud hut that I was vacationing in for a week. We both fell in the mud since the slipperiness was too much for his Vespa. All my laundry fell out of my bag. I spent 3-4 days wearing the same pair of shorts and t-shirts with a raincoat, to the point where most people I met would light-heartedly joke about it, including the PUAs reading my field reports.
mrvanillasky
19d ago
May Shiva bless you and your family, congrats.
Just start, use supersets when you do strength training. A lot of cardio is specific to the sport anyway, plenty of marathon runners huff and puff on their first class since you're not as efficient when you start out.
As long as you keep getting stronger and do some assault bike training, you'll be alright. Many in MMA and Steve Maxwell swear by HIIT stuff on assault bikes as a time-saving way to get there. It's easy on the joints. I don't do it since my gym lacks an assault bike.
mrvanillasky
23d ago
Try jal neti and tape your mouth after a few weeks of doing it twice a day. It's the only ayurvedic thing that works really well and helped me go from being hooked on antibiotics anytime I got a mild cold to not getting sick as frequently.
Ent visit may help but go give jal neti a shot. I shill it because I could never eat or drink cold things since I'd always end up getting sick, it's better now due to my adherence to nasal irrigation.
I saw her comment a few weeks ago too about laundromats. Haven't seen what she writes on CW stuff since I've been inactive internet usage.
My favorite threads are Friday ones besides the CW.
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