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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2688 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Obscure one. Ages ago I saw a screenshot of a 4chan thread where they were all complaining about Reddit, and one guy did this pitch-perfect imitation of a rambling Reddit text post, absolutely nailing the vocabulary, cadence and so on, telling an anecdote about a guy going to a bar with his father, uncle and girlfriend (a trans woman). Anyone have a link?

Many of you have probably seen this already, but if not, some of the questions are pretty funny: https://computerwebsite.net/ratpurity

Is there a better alternative to Spotify extant?

yt-dlp downloads a song in about 3 seconds. On telegram, vk music bot lets you do the same.

Way too much hassle. I pay for instant convenience.

I pay for instant convenience.

Go with Apple Music.

YouTube Music is better in the very specific way that it allows you to play songs from YouTube videos on your phone in the background, without keeping the video up on your screen, and without having to download the video at all. If there's a lot of music you want to listen to that is on YouTube and is not licensed to any streaming services, it's the obvious choice.

Which is to say, its killer feature is facilitating light piracy. In other respects it leaves much to be desired, but being a fan of Showa-era Japanese pop music, for me they're the only game in town.

I just put YouTube reVanced on my new phone, haven't tried the music-specific one yet. Works amazingly well, and of course has background play and no ads.

RiMusic is really good if you're on Android.

Wow. That is really good. I tend to download rather than stream music, since I'm often working well out of range of my Wi-Fi network (and have a $10/mo limited data phone plan), but that's great for music discovery around the house.

I want as little to do with google as possible.

You don't need to pay for youtube to play music in the background. NewPipe can do that.

Newpipe is great but recently I switched to tubular which is a fork with sponsor block built in. RiMusic is nice of you want more of a music player experience with playlists, radio stations, albums etc

Yeah, getting sponsor block and downvotes back was my biggest reason for dropping Newpipe for reVanced (except for downloads)

What constitutes "better" in your view? For me, having your own collection of music + using something to stream (e.g. Plex) blows Spotify out of the water because I don't value the ability to browse new music on Spotify. If you do value that, then obviously hosting your own music isn't a great option. So you need to lay out requirements a bit more to get recommendations.

I have a music collection, but I switched from my mp3 player to my phone around Covid, when I couldn't be bothered to keep the former charged. I now try to listen to my own collection when I don't have any conference calls, but foobar2000 has a discoverability problem.

A streaming service might not have everything I want, but it's a skippable radio: I can tell it to play me some synthwave, or classic hard rock, or EDM, and it will, throwing both familiar and less known performers at me. If I don't like a song, I can skip it, if I really don't like it, I can dislike it, and the service will remember.

I have a well-organized collection, so I can drag the "classic rock" folder into the playlist and it will play the songs from there, but the number of songs by each artist doesn't really reflect how much I want to listen to them. I am not going to delete the discographies of The Doors and Pink Floyd just because I only like a handful of songs from each band. I am not going to split my collection into "hoarding" and "listenable" piles, either. So I have to make playlists, and I don't have enough patience for that.

So I find myself resorting to the streaming service simply because I can tell it, "computer, play me some more terrible upbeat pop like The Ting Tings", and it will.

Right.

I enjoy the possibility of getting instant access to most music without having to go via a site/torrent etc, and having it available on my phone too without any in-between. Just searching up a track or a podcast and listening instantly is worth something to me. I do feel Spotify is a tad overpriced versus what I actually get from it though. Most of the time I just listen to tracks on my liked list/a playlist.

It sounds to me like you may want to have a private collection of music for most of your listening, and just keep free Spotify around for the cases where you want to go listen to some random song. Assuming the free tier is still a thing, that is - I haven't used it in a while. That way you can still pull up something for instant access to music, but don't have to pay a sub where you aren't really getting much value most of the time.

Free Spotify has a long ad, if I remember correctly.

Do you need access to your music collection if you aren't home?

Not all of it, no.

You could look into self-hosted options. Another popular music streaming service is Apple Music, which works best if you are already in the Apple ecosystem.

Fun thought experiment. Would you use a sophisticated AI/VR headset if it did the following? (Pretend concerns of social judgment don’t apply)

  • Told you, at any given moment, the most realistically valuable thing for you to do, from when to eat and exercise, work or rest, stroll through nature or call a friend.

  • Rather then saying a simple “do this”, it shows you two clips of your probable future, one of more enjoyment and one of less, so that you saliently grasp the optimal choice and freely choose it.

  • Warns you against slips, mistakes, and poor habits by showing you a clip of the consequences in your life. When going for a bag of cookies it will briefly show you where that would lead you in VR reality. You may freely choose, but the presentation would be persuasive.

  • On any given work or hobby, it reminds you of your progress with figures and data, shows you everything you have gained as a result to enhance motivation.

  • Biometrically gauges your vigilance level and informs you when you are too stressfully alert or too relaxed.

  • When you are feeling down or defeated, it reminds you which of your actions have lead to that.

  • It may take on the voice and figure of an inspiring tutor for extra motivational salience.

Besides the use case for technology, this is interesting as a metaphor for the superego (or conscience, moral spirit, mindfulness, God, whatever). Everyone’s mind already attempts to do this, with varying degrees of consciousness, maturity, and accuracy. And we already use external tools to help us. Calendars, managerial accountability, peer ranking, reminders of positive experiences, and so on in dozens of ways. Prayer beads for counting one’s blessings (literally) have been independently invented across cultures. Even Video Games have seen an increase in the externalized superego with increasingly externalized measures of progress. The Quake free for all has transformed into the competitive grinding of Call of Duty with leaderboards, ranks, counts, milestones, calendars, etc. Same for running apps. So there appears to be linear progress in the externalization of the superego with AI plausibly perfecting our efforts. The future battle over mankind will be fought between the superego headsets and the id headsets.

It sounds like the Oversoul.

I find headsets uncomfortable to wear for even short periods of time.

Who controls it/created it?

It seems to not be body-hijacking and mind-erasing like the Whispering Earring from Til Iosophrang vaults, so it is not an instant no.

But who controls it? With which values it was set? Can it be remotely tweaked, disabled or controlled? Can I inspect or change its value system?

How likely is that it will list as "the most realistically valuable thing for you to do" participating in conspiracy to assassinate $POLITICIAN? How it would react to my daughter $CULTURE_WAR_LIFE_DECISION?

Is it calling back home and reporting back things? Can it be enabled to do so? Can police/court obtain warranty to see logs? What is logged there?

(Yes, the same applies to existing software. Yes, I apply it. Yes, that is reason why I strongly prefer open-source self-hosted software even if it is of worse quality and poorer UX*)

*amusingly, open-source software gets better ux than proprietary - often due to etshiffication, see Linux vs Windows.

No, I wouldn't use it. Because it would make me dependent on an external intelligence and agency, and weaken my own.

Where do you think yours comes from?

Part of the problem with omniscient omnibenevolent omnipotent hypotheticals is that they have an answer to any possible objection. Maybe the headset would tell you to do some quick and effective intelligence-and-agency strengthening exercises.

You'd be effectively enslaved forever.

Sounds like removing the headset would be the most realistically valuable thing to do in that situation. It's also a slip, mistake, or poor habit to over-rely on the headset, so it would warn you away from it.

Every objection to the headset can be countered with "but it'll do good things instead of bad!"

*more dependent on an external intelligence and agency than you currently are

Obviously.

I was trying to make a version of this using LLama v3 (70bn) and a predictive algorithm which learns to predict the user's replies (and therefore implicitly actions, thought processes and needs). It's a work in progress: I turned it on, it told me to get up out of my chair and do something useful, and I turned it off.

But a 'programmable superego' is exactly what I want out of AI.

An AI powerful enough to be usefully accurate in such predictions makes me obsolete and irrelevant. Such a machine could surely do any work better than I could, at a much lower price.

Such a battle over mankind may well happen and it may have vast effects, billions of lives altered. But it will be secondary to the big picture issues of 'is there any future for humanity at all' and 'who is in control and what are their preferences'. You could imagine such machinery used in humiliation rituals for unfavoured populations, to bully them into submission or mould them ideologically. Maybe it's more fun to do old-style brainwashing than boring direct mental rewriting.

From A Certain LiveJournal:

In the treasure-vaults of Til Iosophrang rests the Whispering Earring, buried deep beneath a heap of gold where it can do no further harm.

The earring is a little topaz tetrahedron dangling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whispers in the wearer's ear: "Better for you if you take me off." If the wearer ignores the advice, it never again repeats that particular suggestion.

After that, when the wearer is making a decision the earring whispers its advice, always of the form "Better for you if you...". The earring is always right. It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own.

It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you happiest. If it would make you happiest to succeed at your work, it will tell you how best to complete it. If it would make you happiest to do a half-assed job at your work and then go home and spend the rest of the day in bed having vague sexual fantasies, the earring will tell you to do that. The earring is never wrong.

The Book of Dark Waves gives the histories of two hundred seventy four people who previously wore the Whispering Earring. There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following the earring's advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always right.

The earring begins by only offering advice on major life decisions. However, as it gets to know a wearer, it becomes more gregarious, and will offer advice on everything from what time to go to sleep, to what to eat for breakfast. If you take its advice, you will find that breakfast food really hit the spot, that it was exactly what you wanted for breakfast that day even though you didn't know it yourself. The earring is never wrong.

As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring's commands momentous on the level of "Become a soldier". No more are they even simple on the level of "Have bread for breakfast". Now they are more like "Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way" or "Articulate the letter p". The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be.

Soon, reinforcement and habit-formation have done their trick. The connection between the hisses and clicks of the earring and the movements of the muscles have become instinctual, no more conscious than the reflex of jumping when someone hidden gives a loud shout behind you.

At this point no further change occurs in the behavior of the earring. The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.

When Kadmi Rachumion came to Til Iosophrang, he took an unusual interest in the case of the earring. First, he confirmed from the records and the testimony of all living wearers that the earring's first suggestion was always that the earring itself be removed. Second, he spent some time questioning the Priests of Beauty, who eventually admitted that when the corpses of the wearers were being prepared for burial, it was noted that their brains were curiously deformed: the neocortexes had wasted away, and the bulk of their mass was an abnormally hypertrophied mid- and lower-brain, especially the parts associated with reflexive action.

Finally, Kadmi-nomai asked the High Priest of Joy in Til Iosophrang for the earring, which he was given. After cutting a hole in his own earlobe with the tip of the Piercing Star, he donned the earring and conversed with it for two hours, asking various questions in Kalas, in Kadhamic, and in its own language. Finally he removed the artifact and recommended that the it be locked in the deepest and most inaccessible parts of the treasure vaults, a suggestion with which the Iosophrelin decided to comply.

Niderion-nomai's commentary: It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points.

Scott wrote that well but I think he slants the reader’s perception of the device by describing it in biased language. It’s magical, it’s tucked away, the brain mass decreases (?). A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents? But they are doing the same thing: attempting to optimize your happiness based on what they know, in a given context.

A reply on that blog says that they wouldn’t use the device because they love the freedom of choice like in a good video game. But video games do not give you freedom of choice. They are designed by experts in fun mechanics to give you the right amount of guidance within a finite set of rewarding choices. It’s funny that his go-to example of loving freedom is actually loving a well-designed, consciously-created walled enclosure, in which intelligent designers have predetermined what choices you will make to give you the most satisfaction. Were we to imagine the development of a device that granted optimal happiness, it would have to include the enjoyment of picking, but that’s a trivial design problem to solve (do what video games do).

I’m tempted to say that humans do not actually like freedom ever, in any sense. They are misattributing what they like to the concept of freedom. They like the act of finding and choosing objects from a set of choices, but only with a predetermined set of mostly positive choices that lack real harm (as their prehistoric ancestors would do according to their tradition of eligible foods). They like the act of trying something and anticipating the result, but only in contexts where there is probable gain and no real harm. They like exploring novel spaces, but only when there are enjoyable things to find. These are all confined activities that lack freedom, and they are most satisfying when they have been designed for us.

the brain mass decreases (?) (...) A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions.

No. The story describes earring hijacking body and no longer being advisor, but instead of controlling body directly, skipping conscious mind. As in, some alien intelligence killing you and taking over your body.

As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring's commands momentous on the level of "Become a soldier". No more are they even simple on the level of "Have bread for breakfast". Now they are more like "Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way" or "Articulate the letter p". The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be. Soon, reinforcement and habit-formation have done their trick. The connection between the hisses and clicks of the earring and the movements of the muscles have become instinctual, no more conscious than the reflex of jumping when someone hidden gives a loud shout behind you.

Though

The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.

(on the other hand "usually" is a big issue anyway - if less usual end being successful mass-murderers or similar than even on purely utilitarian grounds it would be hard to justify)

A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents?

If the mentor's first piece of advice is "stop listening to me" and then they proceed to run your life, that would be mighty sus.

Especially since in normal mentorship relationships you eventually get everything you can out of it and/or your mentor fucking dies and you become the mentor. In the story you are just following orders forever.

A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents? But they are doing the same thing: attempting to optimize your happiness based on what they know, in a given context.

No, there's a bound on how minutely a mentor can influence your actions. Scott's decision to take it all the way to the absurd, to have it dictating muscle contractions and phonemes to you, was an exercise in examining just how much influence we can take on before we do lose our agency. It's contemplating the line between mentee and thrall, where most would be distressed at the prospect of becoming a thrall if sufficiently warned at the beginning.

A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents?

Yes. Teachers and mentors can be useful only to the extent they're moving you to be able to make decisions and understand problems on your own. Otherwise, at best they're just moving you from place to place, more often just babysitting you. Outsourcing your ability to evaluate evidence is costly no matter who or what is doing the evaluation; outsourcing the process of doing evaluation is impossible and is just simplified badly in this thought experiment.

A reply on that blog says that they wouldn’t use the device because they love the freedom of choice like in a good video game. But video games do not give you freedom of choice. They are designed by experts in fun mechanics to give you the right amount of guidance within a finite set of rewarding choices.

Depends very heavily on the environment and game. I've gotten the GregTech bug again, and in one sense, yes, there are a limited number of options, and the worst of them are still not going to reach out and club you in the head, and broader modpacks can make that even more varied. There answers are available, but even the most hand-holding of modpacks won't run you through the full process, and outside of skyblock most can't.

Okay, that's an extreme case, and most games aren't Minecraft-likes. We're looking at 2012, so what about Mass Effect? There are build options, but most of them suck, and you can still beat the game with a bad one. There are choices, but most of them are wrong, and you can still make bad choices and win. And by Mass Effect 2, a lot of the 'bad' decisions were just delaying, like trying to do literally anything with the stupid scanning mechanic. You can't choose to survive schtupping Morinth Because Radical Freedom, and often the dialogue options were extremely constrained. (Indeed, some explicit advice from the in-game advisor is wrong, in ways that kill the character giving the advice..

But Mass Effect's designers don't know what would give me the most fun, and not just in the sense that they eventually dropped the ending to ME3. A lot of people loved the Vanguard charge builds, and other people (myself included) found them absolutely obnoxious to play. Some people like having all the morally-cleanish people on their team with all of their Personal Issues being solved, and other people like to intentionally make non-optimal decisions because they say better things about the story.

((In my case, I'm trying to automate a GregTech skyblock factory solely using Create for long-distance item transportation. ngmi, but I find it fun.))

If you're referring to his comment, Douglas Scheinberg was comparing the earring to video game walkthroughs, and that's got meaningful difference. The exact point where this hits varies from person to person -- there are people who don't like mechanics spoilers as simple as 'wiremill or plate bender' for gregtech modpacks, while other people are fine with getting romantic advice for their GarrusXShepard playthrough -- but eventually you've gone from guide to backseat driver.

They like the act of finding and choosing objects from a set of choices, but only with a predetermined set of mostly positive choices that lack real harm (as their prehistoric ancestors would do according to their tradition of eligible foods). They like the act of trying something and anticipating the result, but only in contexts where there is probable gain and no real harm.

I think this is not wrong, but it's incomplete. For most people, there is a necessary component of variation and surprise that is vital to make something feel like entertainment rather than chore.

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Now I'm really curious if you've played Dragon Age, and if so, your feelings about the new one that was announced!

Now I'm really curious if you've played Dragon Age,

DA:O was great, I've played through it multiple times (I think I installed the Fade-skip patch after my second playthrough, though)

DA2 was meh. It's peak BioWare companions, and I didn't like the companions in the game.

I didn't even try DA:I

and if so, your feelings about the new one that was announced!

Alien(s) and The Terminator are two perfect dilogies and I'm glad they haven't made any sequels to either franchise. That just about sums up my feelings about DA4.

I played DA:O and DA:I. DAII is on my to-play list, though I'll admit it's been there for a while. DA:O was the one I played the most, if with pretty normie gameplay decisions for most runthroughs and complaining about The Deep Roads pacing every fucking time. As gameplay matters, both are very happy to let you take subobtimal decisions, but it's also far more punishing than Mass Effect: most of my runs used Arcane Mage approaches, because I found that origin most interesting, but Arcane Mage could faceroll hard and readily challenge nightmare difficulty where Shapeshifter-only struggled on medium and even easy, especially with some of the unavoidable fights. And fights were long enough that struggling was less fun.

While DA:I suffered a bit from throwing in random game mechanics to fill time, it really built on a lot of the setting ideas. Cole explores a lot of the spirit world stuff better than Wynne did, imo, and as much as Iron Bull (and the game in general) suffers from the Drizzt problem where every named member of a race is explicitly defying the stereotypes (and explicit rules, given the Qun!) rather than just being more complex than the stereotypes, he was still executed as well or better than Sten as someone you'd actually want to work with. Actual combat gameplay was a lot more even, both in highs and lows, and there's a bit more handholding for character builds.

It's good to hear that DA4 hasn't been cancelled, since it'd been pretty much incommunicado for a while now, and there's definitely some interesting balls left in the air after DA:I that would be pretty frustrating if they never land. The series has been a lot less than Mass Effect, for better or worse -- I don't think anyone expect the Big End Game Decision from DA:O to mean the last game in the series will want your save file, even if that necessarily cuts off a large portion of the lore and characterization space (eg, warnings that killing all the Archdemons will cause an apocalypse don't work great if one of the archdemons is in a Schrodinger's cat, Cole's loyalty quest limits what DA4 can do with him short of declaring one choice canon). But if that means the game also doesn't devolve into choosing between three big lights at the end, I'm willing to accept weird retrocanon.

I never even considered having the fan particles run along the length of the belt! What a great idea.

Running a single fan over a long belt like that is slower for cooking than the traditional lava ring fed by smart chutes, but if you're already throughput limited elsewhere (in this case, both the press and the burners for the steam engines are pretty slow), this approach is a lot better at limiting unnecessary entities. Not sure where I first saw it, probably someone's Create:Above and Beyond play?

Create is an absolute blast of a mod for having little options like this, and for having most of them simultaneously be very hard to guess would work from scratch and obvious at a glance after it's been done Oh Of Course. Using Item Drains as one-block unpowered belt alternatives is one that I only learned about just a couple months ago, dropped offhand by Beardstone in the middle of an otherwise very typical build, and it cleans up so many builds.

What would the id headset be? Endless porn/satisfaction tiktok?

Maybe: AI would determine which fantasy traps your attention the best (whether game, drama, porn) and then play that in front of your eyes at all times using Character-AI-like persons and a plotline written by AI according to the media you have consumed and enjoyed previously. AI would realistically predict which aural and visual cues have been associated with the most pleasure in your life and then place that into its stimuli, effectively rewriting your memories in the process. We can easily imagine a corporation supplying the idset in exchange for something resembling slave labor.

The prominence of CharacterAI hasn’t been explored enough. Kids are already addicted to chatting with a fake AI persona, something like 20% of google queries are made by CharacterAI already. That’s just text. It won’t be long until it is a visuospatial and aural VR experience.

I bought starfield. There is a sweet spot with Bethesda games where modders are still active, the price has come down, and the latest official expansions/patches are out.

It has been alright so far. Inventory management was a pain but I changed max carry weight in the difficulty settings to mostly fix that.

The criticisms that it has no soul seem mostly on point to me. But soulless games are sort of my bread and butter since I shamelessly play clicker games.

It's also been a great game for my podcasting habits. I like to listen to comedy podcasts while I play video games. And starfield is a great semi-mindless distraction.

The ship builder seems too difficult right now. Hoping I'll break into it at some point.

I hate ship combat anyways. Juggling power systems seems annoying. All the ships seem to fly in such a clunky way, yet they designed it like a WW1 dogfighting game. If you aren't gonna go for any realism please just give me the Assassin's creed black flag ship mechanics.

The gunplay is kinda fun. I wish it was easier to find it. I'm now looking at a journal full of quests that all seem to involve talking with people. Luckily most of the quests have devolved into shooting anyways. I don't like to talk things out in video games.

A security defense force that wants to halt piracy set me up for a crime and then kidnapped me. I turned down the offer to join them, because they fucking kidnapped me. The game for some reason interpreted that as me wanting to join the pirates, rather than me having a legitimate grievance against kidnapping (a moral grievance, but mainly a gameplay grievance, I was in the middle of a thing don't interrupt me). I have yet to follow through on the pirate request, but I look forward to shooting my way out of that meeting. I guess this is going to be a repeat of the Skyrim army vs army quest line where both sides are objectively dick heads.

The vibe of "computers stopped getting better in the 90's" is a pretty cool aesthetic for a space game. I feel like it neatly justifies all the reasons you might want to have humans still running around doing things. Some of the robots are still a little too smart and self sufficient. I might not have played enough, but they also missed the opportunity to have more super computing complexes. Which is a thing the government and military used to build more of when they needed more processing power for something.

I didn't get deep enough into Starfield to interact with the plot in a meaningful way, but from what I've seen and what I've read online, it's even more barebones than the one in Skyrim.

But at least Skyrim felt like you were exploring fantasy Norway. Starfield didn't feel like a space exploration game at all.

sweet spot

To me, that implies it’ll get worse from here. How so?

Or did you mean that it’s just now crested the hill of being “worth it”?

Yes, I experienced this with Skyrim. I think the optimal years to play Skyrim was between 2014-2017. If you go to try and play it now you get far fewer mod offerings that fit with the latest version of the game, all of its expansions, and each other. There also needs to be time for the mods to "bake". They need to get made by fans, which is slow. And then heavy cross play with the mods where the community is downloading and playing a bunch of the mods together to figure out compatibility.

I think the mod community for starfield is dying out much faster than it did for Skyrim. Thus the sweet spot for playing is smaller and sooner.

I didn't play much Starfield, but i did complete the SecurityVPiracy questline and it reminded me strongly of the Skyrim Thieves Guild questline, in how little of the plot actually makes sense. I have mercifully forgotten most of it at this point, but my overall impression was that it was deserving of the kind of breakdown that the late Shamus Young did for the aforementioned Thieves Guild quests. That said it does at least have one decent (by the game's abysmally low standards) dungeon on a lost, derelict ship.

I quite like Starfield and I agree that the weird fiction that semiconductors or whatever stopped improving in the 90s makes the setting less nonsensical than a lot of sci fi where humans run around with guns but advanced AI and drones exist.

Bethesda games don’t engage emotionally or strategically, but they have a certain pleasing rhythm, like a good police procedural.

I enjoyed the unstated premise in Andor that computer technology in that universe had largely not advanced beyond early 80's human capabilities, excepting the droids which I am now convinced are actually cyborgs.

Any comedy podcasts you would recommend?

Too many.

Tim Dillon is great if you like someone making fun of US culture or government.

Still drinking with mark Normand and Sam Morrill is good for nuts and bolts of standup comedy, movie snobs, and funny complaining.

Matt and Shane's secret podcast is great. Only podcast I'm patreoned to.

Stavys world is good if you want a funny take on peoples interpersonal drama.

Your mom's house if you like gross and offensive internet videos and wish you had more people to share them with.

The episodes of protect our parks on joe Rogan for just a rollicking and little crazy drinking podcast.

Kill Tony for live comedy and roasting.

Chris distefano for wild silliness.

Bad friends for a great buddy podcast with Bobby Lee and Andrew Santino.

Also if you see one of these podcasters as a guest on one of the other podcasts it's usually a good episode.

Surprised not to see Tuesdays With Stories here (Mark Normand and Joe List).

Do you not like it or (I’d be surprised) have not heard of it?

I'd heard of it but never got around to actually watching it. I felt like I was getting too much Mark Normand.

Im also sure I left off five or six podcasts I just forgot to add. The Regs is a recent one I've been listening to, very good group party dynamic. A sober less famous comedians version of protect our parks.

I also didn't list Two Bears one Cave, whiskey Ginger, something's burning, Whitney Cummings podcast, or Dan soders podcast. All of those have had good episodes I enjoyed.

Also Bertcast kinda got me into comedy podcasts in the first place. He would get drunk and have five hour podcasts that were epic. It has significantly changed as a podcast. Some old episodes were pure gold though. And he would have interviews with people that would go onto become rockstar podcasters and comedians.

Your sub list has a good bit of overlap with mine, though I wonder if you'd agree with my opinion that Dillon has moderated quite a bit with his more recent success. His earlier work, up to and including the L.A. porch series was some of the best cultural critique of the 21st century IMHO. Still like his stuff, but he's mellowed now that owns multiple properties and he's not constantly afraid of losing the fleeting success he was clinging to, many such cases.

Any thoughts on lemon party, Ben Avery's podcast? I don't keep up with it seriously but for extremely online types I think it's been a real treat, close to a modern cumtown. Right on the edge of the politically unspeakable too, two of the regular hosts made an appearance on a podcast with Sam and Nick of MDE very recently (had a few fun clips dumped onto my homepage).

Ugh motte ate my comment. Yes agreed Tim has gotten a little less insane with his takes. Had a specific example of him covering a shooting.

Thanks for the rec I'll check it out.

Not OP but Tim Dillon is usually pretty funny.

I need some advice, I know we have some regular rock climbers here. I picked it up about 6 months ago and have been climbing pretty regularly, 2-3 times a week. But I have found myself plateauing on top rope 5.10s, I can do them pretty easily. But am completely unable to do more than a few holds on the 5.11s. Is there a particular technique(s) or muscle(s) that I need to practice to make that dyno?

A bunch of things. I'm assuming you're climbing primarily inside at a gym rather than outdoor.

-- Six months to 5.10 is pretty good, but six months at any level in any activity isn't a plateau. Literally the answer is probably a cold goes away in seven days on its own or if you take antibiotics it'll go away in a week.

-- Grading in indoor rock climbing is mostly fake and gay. In all rock climbing it is purely ordinal, a 5.11 is harder than a 5.10 and easier than a 5.12, but it's not "one grade" harder in any measurable sense. For the most part, grades get broken down in frequently climbed outside areas north of 5.10, so it goes 5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d then 5.11a etc. Indoors they often don't bother. So it might be that you've gone from 5.10a to 5.10d but don't see it because your measurement tool isn't fine grained enough, or it might be that they set all the 5.10s at a 5.10a and all the 5.11s at a 5.11c. Nobody ever really critiques gym grading hard enough to change them, and when they do there's a social pressure grade things down rather than up. Every guy wants to say "Oh man that wasn't a 12, for me that felt like an easy 11;" no guy wants to say "Hey, uhhhh, that one is really hard, I barely got it, I don't think that's an 11 I think that's a 12." Most grades are decided by the setter, or one manager, looking at it and making a rough guess.

-- What you're seeing might be oddness in your local grading, which frequently is set up in a funny way by staff who have weird social reasons for doing it that way. A lot of times the low grades at gyms are super easy, and set kinda lazy because the setters don't care about them and the higher grades are set to prove a point to each other and the other good climbers at the gym. Grades in gyms are fake, they often reflect more from the marketing angle than they do from the sporting angle. They want people starting out to feel like they are making progress fast, but once they get into the 11s and 12s they're often moving between gyms on occasion, or going outside, and you don't want your grades to be known as too soft or you'll lose the regulars. They might have different people do all of the 10s vs all of the 11s. 11 might just be their jumping off point where they figure the climbers are serious so the climbs can get serious.

-- Try to find a gym that's doing a youth comp, that's going to be the best way to grade yourself. We would set our wall with 60-100 new problems for the comp, all graded ordinally 1-X in terms of difficulty by committee of setters and regulars. That might help you see exactly where you land. Or find a dense outdoor crag, that's the most "peer reviewed" grading, but honestly: I dislike grade chasing in outdoor climbing. I mostly climb as a workout indoors, but on the rare occasions I get outside, I'm just in it for the lulz, grades only matter inasmuch as I pick areas and climbs with stuff I can do.

-- Style. Even when I was really climbing a lot, I basically never did pockets. I'd flash a 12 that was all crimps, and just flat out refuse and jump off if I had to do a 10 that had a lot of pockets. They always make me feel like my fingers are going to fly right off. Insert jokes about disappointed girlfriends here. Can you do ALL the tens? And you can't ANY 11s? Try to do different ones, you might be surprised at the difference. I was always good at dynamic strength based climbs, but not at actual dynos; crimps good pinches good slopers ok pockets absolutely not. If you're climbing outdoor, it's probably this, differences between rock types and crags can be HUGE.

-- If you need more to work on, consider bechtel's strength standards and work on your flexibility. I never got much out of hangboarding, but I'd get on the campus board to show off if I felt like it.

My grandfather was a bomber pilot stationed on the Aleutian Islands during World War II. With not much in the way of local entertainment, the USO on base would provide what they could. This included a lot of books, and my grandfather either bought or stole the 20th anniversary anthology of a popular periodical that remained in his library until he died. I have a deep love of old books, but that apparently runs in my family, because upon the death of my grandmother (who outlived her husband by 10 years) this anthology was one of only two old books from their library I was able to claim.

In it, there's a wonderful article titled "My Five Best Dinner Companions".

Here is an interesting thought: You and I will give a dinner tonight, and our guests shall be five men we choose, out of all who have ever lived.

I love how, in 1924, le petit caporal is the obvious choice they feel a need to dismiss immediately. They pick Socrates, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys, Montaigne, and Lincoln. Read the short article here.

Myself, any time I am given hypothetical time travel powers, I feel a moral obligation to pick Homer so we can get the missing poems from the Epic Cycle. If my sole purpose was for my own enjoyment, I'd pick Robert Heinlein, and talk with him about our alma mater, politics and space travel. For the sake of an entertaining dinner amongst my friends, though, the only option is Samuel Clemens. That is to say, if anyone wasn't entertained by Mark Twain at dinner, I wouldn't count them as my friend.

Who would you pick?

My four great granddads, none of whom I've ever met, and Hitler for some physical exercise, otherwise they would get drunk too quickly.

I feel a moral obligation to pick Homer so we can get the missing poems from the Epic Cycle

Homer: why the fuck did you invite me, then? I didn't write them, your own... Βικιπαίδεια says so

I've never felt so interested in any specific historical person's outlook that I'd pick them. I don't know what mechanism others use to figure out their picks, it all reads like "le based military leaders and greek philosophers" to me. I probably wouldn't even pick the authors of my current most favorite fiction.

If you put a gun to my head, provided I can pick from living people, I'd choose my top 5 vtubers.

That's quite a different outlook from me; I'd love to learn more about why you think that way. I feel like I could fill a month of enjoyable dinners easily from my imagination, and a year of dinners with some web searching.

Have you ever read and enjoyed a biography? Have you ever seen a live speech and enjoyed the speaker, or even topic? Are there comedians whose sense of humor you relate to? Why wouldn't you take an opportunity to have a more personal experience from any of those people?

I don't recall ever deliberately reading a biography. When a book includes the author's biography in the beginning, I'm annoyed - that's not what I've got this book for.

I also have trouble writing biographies (such as for tabletop RPG characters).

I don't recall being particularly attached to a live speaker, even if I like the topic. I do have particular content creators whose overall style and sense of humour I enjoy.

I suppose I can't think of any topic I'd want their input on that they haven't already released tons of words on (that I have read or listened to).

Thanks for your perspective.

I've tried to get into vtubers and aside from the occasional music video, I have never been able to watch them without getting bored. Who is/are your favorites, and what is it that draws you to them?

You didn't ask me, but I'd try watching one clip of Fallen Shadow. 95% chance instant filtering will sate your curiosity permanently.
Downside: 5% chance your soul is lost forever.

I mostly just watch clip compilations, music videos and sometimes put a stream/recording up in background. They're professional entertainers,and different ones have different draws. Some have a unique brand of humour (Nyanners), physical comedy and chat banter (Zentreya), others scratch the pretty simple itch of "cute girl being silly and chatty while geeking out over the same games I like" (Gawr Gura, Koseki Bijou). Some shine when collabing with others (Fuwamoco, this particular example being a literal pair of twins who almost always stream together). The kayfabe of actually being a shark girl from Atlantis or what have you is engaging.

"You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, living or dead, would you invite?

I’ve always loved this exercise, the imaginary dinner party! What fun! I see Oscar Wilde there, of course, Voltaire, Carol Saroyan Saroyan Matthau (wife of William Saroyan, William Saroyan, and Walter Matthau, and a writer in her own right), Hitler (not witty but quite a “get”), Edie Sitwell, Molière, Oscar Wilde (so witty I thought why not double him and place him on each end of the table so everyone could enjoy his witticisms?), Aristophanes, and Sir Kenneth Dover (to translate Aristophanes’ jokes for the other guests). That’s more than three, but one must assume there will be cancellations. Oh, and Jesus."

from

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/books/review/charlie-kaufman-by-the-book-interview.html

Xenophon, Ernst Junger, Frederick II, Julius Caesar, HL Mencken. I particularly look forward to Junger introducing the other four to mescaline after dinner.

Seems like the dinner discussion would be pretty heavy on military strategy. You wouldn't bring a more contemporary perspective into the mix with someone like MacArthur or McChrystal, or would you expect Junger to offer that?

All of the four military men had highly philosophical outlooks (even Caesar wrote poems and works on grammar/rhetoric, which are now lost), and I suspect they'd rather discuss more abstract things they learned from their experiences in war, exploration, and statecraft. Junger could hold court explaining industrialized warfare to them, but he'd be too modest to go on at great length, and having Mencken would probably shut down any longwinded boasting from the emperors pretty quickly.

The Complete Psychonaut Field Manual: A Cartoon Guide to Chaos Magick

Thought this was interesting as a simplified demystified introduction to the occult. Not my cup of tea but interesting to get a handle on what they're driving at and how without the extraneous waffle.

The Psychonaut Field Manual, attached in whole below, is a comic book guide to chaos magick created by Bluefluke. It’s an incredible, concise piece of work, demonstrating how to use altered states of consciousness and flexible belief to achieve a greater experience of reality.

This is fun. Thanks, when I get some time I'm going to read through this. I don't buy any of it but I enjoy reading through if it's done in an engaging way.

Still looks pretty mystified to me.

But perhaps, without the waffle, there would be nothing left at all?

There's definitely a lot of waffle.

I'm not convinced it's empty, underneath, though. There's a lot of overlap in the actual exercises here with tulpamancy, though a few parts of the surrounding framework (eg 'must delete agents after task completion') would have the two perspectives at each other's throats, and you don't have to spend too long talking with practicing tulpamancers to see sometimes radical changes in behavior or personality. Tearing out the mysticism and rankings and obfuscation would give a description that's a lot less interesting (and might still come across as a self-improvement cult), but it'd still involve testable predictions of whether certain meditative practices change your own behaviors. The extent psychonauts want (maybe need?) to imply some broader metaphysical impact can and should raise alarm bells, but it doesn't make the actual claims undisprovable.

((This is separate from whether it's a good idea: tulpamancy scares the pants off me, or see some of Scott's discussions on the Dark Night for traditional meditation. I have done some therianthropic practices, and there's absolutely a version of it that's completely stripped of mysticism or spiritualism, and can still give you phantom limb syndrome or put you into a short duration fugue state, and some level of quadrobics seems a) unavoidable and b) Not Great for certain tendons on your legs. And as dumb as 'astral doppelganger' sounds, it's still not as bad as phantom-shifting.))

There are some usual defenses of the waffle. "Wait, were all the nouns in that paragraph synonyms for each other?” faces the possibility that they aren't, and as much as the author here tries to draw links between different religious meditative practices and their own, practitioners would be horrified if someone used their name for the root chakra to describe the crown chakra. The Third Eye is a goofy metaphor, but there are reasonably well-established (if not especially well-understood) mechanisms where practicing repeated visualization exercises improves ability with their broader class, as any Factorio player will tell you. Scott compares classical meditation enlightenment to low-grade bipolar disorder, and that's not wrong, but it's an awkward fit, and as a naive non-psychologist it seems like it'd be useful to distinguish even in a non-therapeutic context.

But I think there's a more fundamentally weird option. In the same way that the Dodo Bird Verdict implies that a lot of psychology is less about what's being done, and more that something is, the (claimed? but the psychonauts don't really claim it) overlap between wildly disparate spiritual practices suggests that it's more important to have weird terms than what exactly those weird terms are. They may not describe a real thing -- I absolutely don't buy that the Brodmann Area claims for the Third Eye metaphor correspond to physical behaviors in any sense but the dead fish fMRI -- but by presenting a set of descriptions and behaviors with a name and explanation (even a wrong one), you get a more effective way of thinking about the matter and training yourself into whatever the end goal is.

(Again, for better or worse.))

Among therians, there were some people successful using boring and prosaic frameworks, but at least back when I was able to follow those spheres, it was very uncommon for people without some degree of spiritual or metaphysical structuring of their beliefs to get a lot of the more immediate and controllable results. ((VR may change or have changed that.)) Even prosaic stuff seems to run on this sorta problem: there's a lot of problems with True Believers in outreach organizations, but it's not rare for them to have more insight. Maybe the arrow of causation points the other direction -- it's quite possible that only people open to the waffle have the right neuroplasticisity -- but I'm skeptical, especially given how readily people with strongly tuned anti-waffle instincts struggle with 'mainstream' problems of belief.

But perhaps, without the waffle, there would be nothing left at all?

You're a describing a human.

Perhaps I should have said comprehensible instead of demysitifed. I suspect there's a kernel of "something" in there as a lot of it is reminiscent of things I've heard about meditation, hypnosis, mental illness, anthropology, mysticism, tai chi/yoga, psychoanalysis, placebo and so on.

Clearly you didn't read the part about the third eye.

I'm not a person that considers video games his primary hobby but I like them. I mostly like shorter games, so I can actually finish them over huge open worlds with 100 hour playtime but only 15 good hours contained within. I wish there was a director's mode where you only get the best missions within a game and just get your "RPG powers" over the course of the missions, like in ye olde linear days.

I bought Cocoon and I can highly recommend it. I didn't have high expectations, despite the good scores it got based on a game with analog stick and only one button controls. Boy have I been proved wrong. This is really good and I don't even love puzzlers.

I also bought Assassin's Creed Mirage because I read it's "only 15 hours" long which is a positive to me. I'm not far and had to play around with all the obnoxious interface stuff. One has to strike a balance between visual clutter with some information content and immersion while losing out on necessary information. I like it OK so far (2 hours in) but as someone that only play 2 AAA games a year, the quality drop-off from the last few games I played (ex. God of War: Ragnarok) in production is very noticeable.

Anyone with similar preferences for length?

I'm not similar in length preference in general, but two recent games I played that didn't take very long (are right in your length wheelhouse) and were just plain fun were Armored Core VI and Hitman. Of the two, the first you would probably really like. You're in a mech, and you blast through some fun levels with everything from a laser sword to shotguns to massive homing missile racks. There's a great mix of disposable baddies that are incredibly satisfying to blow through, and since it's still From Software, there are some satisfying boss fights too. However, they've maximized fun here; when you get to the boss and die, you can start again right at the beginning of the boss fight without replaying the whole level, and you can also swap out your entire build for a different one if you want or are having trouble, provided you have the parts purchased. And even back at base, you can resell parts you don't want for full price! And save build presets. You can be anything from a tank that can barely jump but has massive weapons and shields, to a lightweight super-dodger, to a normal mech that can do a super-jump and fly above everyone. The controls are tight, some of the levels and enemies are unique, you can literally fly. Beat the campaign? There's also an alt-campaign, sort of a Nier Automata-lite, where you can side with the opposite faction on certain missions, with a few more interesting weapon and mech unlocks. The game equally supports spending a whole day getting sucked in, and also spending no more than a single hour or half-hour session just messing around and having fun, which is a rarity. The only downside is that it's expensive, but I pirated it so... (would re-buy if it was just a little cheaper and I wasn't broke). I recommend Armored Core VI to almost everyone.

Hitman is also just fun. There's plenty of cool locations, the mechanics are mostly pretty tight and consistent, there's some "story" assassination methods as well as some things you can plan out yourself, plenty of routes through most locations, I did one today that also contained a murder mystery (!) in the same level. Just some well-designed games. You can pick up the whole modern trilogy for under 30 bucks right now on Steam.

I think most of my games with playtime over 50 hours are roguelik/tes, as opposed to AAA games that take 50 hours to finish PoI grinding.

I wish there was a director's mode where you only get the best missions within a game and just get your "RPG powers" over the course of the missions

Some of the examples on this list might be what you're after: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StoryDifficultySetting

I don't play games for the story, I play games for the individual missions, scenarios or gameplay segments.

Having them contextualized with a small story is fine, but I'm mainly there for the interaction.

That sounds like you should be playing rougelikes. There must be something more you're looking for, otherwise you'd be playing Slay the Spire and Binding of Isaac and Noita.

My preferences are broadly opposed to yours, but I understand what you mean when you describe a satisfying 15 hr game. There is something very satisfying about a story that you can sit down and casually chomp through over the course of a handful of post-shift evenings. As someone with multiple 100hr+ games in his steam library though, I can't agree on the point with open worlds with only 15~hrs worth of content in them, again with an understanding of what you mean; the only AC game I ever played for more than fifteen minutes was some 2d sidescrolling Prince of Persia-esque sidestory for the DS, played out of a child's desperate boredom and not desire.

The majority of what's on offer from major studios for probably the last ten+ years has been dreck, almost without fail. Titanfall 2 was a rare exception to the AAA studio putting out a mediocre product at full-game prices, and it very predictably flopped as a result. As someone who autisticly gets into the systems of a game, and plays them for that satisfaction, the high end of mainstream vidya has been largely uninteresting and I have ignored it entirely as a result.

Helldivers 2, for all the strangely political discussion that's surrounded it, has been by far my most played game since its launch simply because I can see how much effort was put into these systems I get to exploit (rounds are modeled, counted and persistent in the mag/belt/cylinder/chamber, semi-volumetric ballistics for enemy armor, spalling while not modeled is simulated in the damage characteristics of each weapon, etc.). It was a small AA studio that put out an ambitious nearly decade-long project at an AA pricepoint and people loved it and then got bored and moved on. I've put in 400+ hours and have fun playing it still. We all get what we deserve.

Did you put those 400 hours into Helldivers by playing with randoms?

In my mind playing things with people you know is a different thing than playing merely the designer's game. Of course there is an art to get to an engaging level with multiplayer games where you can shoot the shit and the balance if you want to get into competition. But other people are doing a lot of the lifting in my experience. I think the Steam/Twitch flavor of the month, which is often multiplayer shows that groups of online players tend to migrate together and Even after cracking 100 hours they aren't necessarily positive about the game itself. I have a coworker that gets let's say 700 hours playtime while being part of this herd and when I ask him what game he really enjoyed in the last year he often shrugs. Most likely Rocket League, which he plays when the other roamers aren't online.

My playtime for HD2 specifically is probably a 30/70 split between playing with my friend group and running randoms respectively, though I get your point about multiplayer games where the fun is dicking around with buddies. Lethal Company is a pretty good example of a cheap FOTM game that went wide and died off, not mechanically deep, complex or satisfying to play but it's great for a few weekend sessions with the gang.

I know people can get cranky when someone brings up "core gameplay loops" but if a game isn't at least enjoyable to interact with (in terms of controlling the character/player avatar in the gameworld) I'll drop it immediately. As the great Reggie Fils-Aimé once said, "If the game's not fun, why bother?". I would probably play HD2 from time to time even if the servers were shut down (don't think that's actually possible, thanks GAAS, so it goes) just because running around and shooting the guns feels good to me.

I also have a few coworkers who don't seem to understand, admitting they've played with a toy they don't like for hundreds of hours (or even better, bought into the ingame store) is telling on yourself. I genuinely think less of people who do that, they've shit up my hobby.

I'm firmly in the camp of core gameplay loops being very important. But I, like many others am not very consistent with what I like when I try to categorize stuff. I know that I don't care about story in (most) games but I like vignettes.

For example I think for whatever reason it's just fun to move and fight in Spider-Man but the open world POI stuff does nothing for me in general and many missions are just go somewhere and fight people. Whereas I also really liked The Witcher 3 which I don't think has a good core loop and fighting system. (Also not a good main story) but just being in that world and going to different small towns and solving their monster problem was great.

That's singleplayer. In multiplayer it is only gameplay. I could play Quake 3, Counter Strike and Rocket League for 10 years and still like it. But due to life reasons I don't want to play multiplayer anymore, except at Old school LAN parties with the people in the same room. Which I do once a year.

I would argue that this isn't about long or short games per se, but pacing. A lot of modern games are full of fluff that just pads out the length, but you could have a 100h game that doesn't feel like a slog because something interesting is always happening.

The Persona games come close to being engaging for 100+ hours, but they, too, are bloated.

Offhand I can't think of a single-player game in which the campaign takes the average player 100 hours to complete and which is consistently engaging throughout. Have you played any games meeting that description?

Persona 4 is the one which comes to mind. The story was good enough that I never really felt like the game was dragging. The dungeons are a slog, but they were a slog from the beginning (seriously, fuck the procedurally generated dungeons Atlus loves so much) so I didn't really notice them as a function of game length.

I can't think of "a single player game in which the campaign takes the average player 100 hours to complete" at all...

It seems cost-prohibitive for AAA games especially.

RDR2 and AC Valhalla have to be close if you do most side content, and they’re AAA(A).

I found one: https://howlongtobeat.com/game/36059

Never played it though so can't comment.

It's not uncommon for RPGs. Persona games are that long, several Trails games are that long, etc. For other genres you're right though.

Persona 5 supposedly takes 100 hours for the main story and 140 hours for a completionist playthrough.

Can confirm, the base game took me ~100 hours and it was good, I replayed the entirety of it come Royal (which took around 130 hours) and it was even better. It was a slog at some points, I won't pretend Persona games aren't bloated either but as long as it's not 200+ floors of fucking Tartarus I'm good.

Off-hand I can also think of Monster Hunter World, which strictly speaking is not a single player game but I played it like one and the base campaign took me like 70 hours without Iceborne (I too enjoyed it throughout), and Divinity Original Sin II which was probably not 100 hours (can't see the numbers for my first playthrough only) but still felt really fucking long. All of these games do usually involve grinding at some point however so maybe that's not "pure" campaign playthrough time.

Yeah that's basically true but I don't know a 100h game that I would think qualifies. I played Baldur's Gate 3 and The Witcher 3 and thought they were fantastic but they had lots of problems, IMO. The best longest game I have played is God of War: Ragnarok and I don't even understand how they pulled off a relatively long game without the typical soulless Point of Interest splattering that you get from Ubisoft, et. al.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 took me about that long and I felt like it was pretty consistent throughout.

I put 500 hours into TF2 (though I haven't played in years now o7)

Not 100 hours, but IMO older Final Fantasy games tend to be pretty good about this. For example, I clocked about 60 hours to play FF7 back in the day and I was really engaged the whole time. I do think that the longer a game gets, the harder it is to pull off great pacing. Or at least that's my take on why longer games which don't drag are so rare.

Factorio, Minecraft come to my mind as >100h games. But it is an utterly different game type and only small part of people is so invested.

You can plausibly do a first run to the Ender Dragon and End Cities in 20-50 hours, but yeah, 100+ for a typical player isn't unreasonable, and multiplayer worlds will often have different and more ambitious targets that are much more time-consuming. And modpacks can be far longer-term investments: even outside of nutty variants like GregTech New Horizons (estimated minimum time: 4k hours) or SevTech: Ages (500ish hours), Regrowth and Blightfall were probably 200+hour games that were pretty engaging throughout the process.

Rimworld is probably only 20-50 hours for a map before you're just watching a killbox fill up, but there's a lot of reasons to run multiple maps.

FFXIV is probably around 300 hours to get the MSQ to the end of Endwalker, and that's skipping a lot of side content that has its own (or related) story. There's definitely some rough spots (and it's something like 70 hours of voiced cutscenes even before the last expansion), but it's pretty engaging for the overwhelming majority of it.

I don't mind longer games so long as things stay fresh, but looking at steam I rarely spend more than about 30 hours playing a game. I guess I either lose interest or finish the games by then.

Hob is a somewhat underappreciated game that's about 20 hours long. Would recommend.

Hob

I've tried Hob in the past and the performance killed it for me. I may put it on a list when I maybe get the Steam Deck 2. ;-)

I don't remember performance issues, but I usually play games on minimal settings unless they are really old.

Yes.

I can handle about one 100+ hour game a year (if that), but it better be pretty damn good considering the time investment. I feel similarly about other forms of media (essays vs books, movies vs television shows). The shorter, the better. There's almost a power-law function/Sturgeon's Law/Pareto principle at play within the piece of media itself.

100%. I'd rather replay a short-ish game many times than get bored half-way through a long one. My most-played is still CoD Modern Warfare 2: about ten/fifteen hours of pretty good gunplay and exciting story, nicely divided up into forty minute missions. I miss levels, and level select screens.

If you like that length, have you played Doom 2016? It's neither too short, nor too long, and it's the first time for years that I honestly had so much fun that I had to sit down and play until I was finished.

Do you have some recent AAA recommendations?

I played Doom 2016 but I'm not a huge fan. I'm sure it's fine but I'm not into singleplayer first person shooters. Even in the days of Max Payne 2 I was more a third person kind of guy than a Half-Life 2 person. So it's nothing specific about Doom. I just like third person games more.

My AAA recommendations is God of War: Ragnarok. It's not short, but it felt great and the optional side quests didn't feel like dumb filler. I think that game did almost everything right, including having people talk constantly which I know is an issue for a lot of people. I was always engaged, I even did a lot of the raven collectibles, because they were fun with the axe throwing arc.

What's hard to communicate is that I don't absolutely philosophically hate long games, if they are very well made but the majority of long games aren't. So it's easier to say I like short games because they are presumably cutting for quality.

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