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Notes -
I recently got a Sega Dreamcast and have been enjoying games I first played on the Game Cube. Soul Calibur holds up really well and looks beautiful. Sonic Adventure... not so much. Anybody else been getting into retro game stuff?
I preordered an Analogue 3D N64 FPGA (already have the X7 Everdrive).
https://www.analogue.co/3d
I also preordered a bespoke PCB for retro DOS/9x games called the Llama ITX.
https://old.reddit.com/r/thisweekinretro/comments/1fbt7w9/itx_llama_a_brand_new_pc_for_1990s_dos_games/
But I’ve actually been playing remasters of retro games - namely Warcraft 3 and StarCraft lately.
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Mentioned the other week I did an alpha centauri run one night. The interface is a little dated, but the rest of it holds up great. Finally managed a 70 turn transcend win after plotting it since childhood.
Also once again have the Deus Ex installer for my once a decade replay, but that's too big a time investment unless I get snowed in for a few days this winter.
I'd like to hear how @WhiningCoil 's retro builds are doing.
Which faction? I always played either Zakharov or Yang. But I think I’ll go for Miriam or Santiago next time.
Zak is really the only option when you've gotta go fast (and building facilities too slow!), ironically because the v-tubers project gives him perfect drone control on transcend difficulty, without any base facilities.
Used to play Gaia as a kid, overrating the free worms.
Miriam always seemed super fun, and a great excuse for using probe teams. She's basically the one case where the player can't casually wipe the other factions with impact rovers, and you actually have to play diplomatic+spy games to catch up on tech.
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I recently gathered up all the major 8bit and 16bit Zelda games to play through via emulator. I've tried playing the later games before but lacking the rose coloured glasses of childhood nostalgia meant I couldn't get into them and found them to suffer from the familiar issue with open world games of using a map that is too large for the amount of content. Combined with the Zelda games' approach of making everything a multistep puzzle resulted in time spent mostly travelling from one side of the map to the other searching high and low for whatever tiny clue I'd overlooked to unlock the next level.
Making a game that takes months for a child to complete when you only have 128kiB of rom space to work with necessitates some very annoying game design. This ended up working to Nintendo's favour because kids on the playground would discuss the game and trade secrets.
I remember A Link to the Past being pretty straightforward. But I haven't played it since I was a kid.
The big problem with early N64 games is that they expect you to be so wowed by the 3d graphics that you'd try things a modern gamer would never think of trying. Ocarina of Time gives you fire arrows when you try shooting your bow at the sun. Mario 64 has a level that you enter by turning to see where a light effect is coming from.
Oh and Zelda 2 the Adventure of Link is just completely unfair.
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Which ones do you mean with "later" ? At least for the N64 ones I didn't get this impression - though I admittedly don't mind open plains much.
The 3D era games. To be honest I only played Ocarina of Time as it's rated so highly and since I didn't enjoy playing that one I don't see much point in trying any others. I'll admit that I use a walkthrough for handholding when I get really stuck, at this age I don't have the time or the patience, but I like to give the puzzles an honest try first. It's embarrassing to admit but for OoT I literally had to look up a walkthrough just to get out of the introduction and training area after scouring every inch of it, and it continued in the same vein until eventually the telecomms workmen repaired our broadband connection and I happily switched it off forever.
I think it might be because the 2D worlds are broken up into discrete screens and so you can mentally map the world to a series of separate tiles that you travel between, each one with at least some kind of distinct feature, while the 3D ones largely just roll on and on in every direction. That works well in an action game but in a puzzle game it ends up feeling like looking for a correct sequence of needles in a haystack.
Funny coincidence: I've been half- watching a friend do a completionist run of Twilight Princess, because I'd never played anything other than OoT and apparently missed out on the best waifu in the series.
The actual dungeon puzzles don't seem awful, at least compared to my memories of the OoT water temple, but the side quests are ridiculous.
Huge open world to explore? Sure. But needing to fly a chicken to revisit a specific hidden ledge, at night, only after you can control your wolf transformation and have talked to a specific NPC in a subbasement on the other side of the world... Yeah, that gets a bit much. Playing it blind would require searching every inch of the world about 10 times over.
I can imagine it would get annoying to play if you're not as obsessive as my friend, but Midna's ass covereth as many sins as it inspireth new ones.
I haven't played Twilight Princess, but looking up Midna on Google Images gives me a disturbing possibility: you like weird goblin looking things.
I was pretty disturbed when it was revealed that my former progressive college acquaintances (I think everyone screenshotted is either nonbinary or trans now) vocally expressed their support for some image in the manga where Link is embracing the little fucked up imp thing in a sexual manner.
Think I just got to the scenes your friends were talking about. the writers went so hard on their relationship I'd have thought this came from a doujinshi, not an official Nintendo manga.
Checked the authors' early life sections just to confirm, and of course they are both women.
Someone could write a book on why women love the small bratty girl vs strong but vulnerable guy pairing so much. I've just been calling it the Ernest & Celestine effect
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Looks like the manga was a big factor in reviving her popularity. I got sent a panel from their first meeting after saying I never played it. That damn grin <3
All I can say is that your friends saved up all their correctness points to be objectively correct about this one thing, at the cost of not knowing what sex they are.
If it makes you feel any better there's a good chance they've silently done a 180 in perfect lockstep since then. The "le heckin wholesome" reddit fandom go from gushing about things to declaring them ultra-problematic on a weekly basis, with feuds between influencer cliques bubbling into ideological shipping turf wars like a much gayer version of the 30s soviet union.
Just tell your friends they're guilty of a gross objectification and done a yikes media illiteracy, because only alt-right Blue Archive playing chuds like Midna. That should take care of it.
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Twilight Princess is great, but yeah the Midna thing with some of the fans is hella weird. She does tell you the whole time that the imp form isn't what she normally looks like. And when you do finally see her with the curse broken, she is a fairly normal (for a fantasy setting) young woman. But generally you don't see the fans gushing over the real Midna, it's always her imp form.
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To some extent, if you're not that obsessive you just don't do that level of completionist run: the games have increasingly made the more annoying collectibles useless or mocking.
That said, there's a lot of the earlier 3d games that were really bad about it. Not fucking about with Korrok Seeds in recent 3d zeldas is the healthy option, where Majora's Mask and the Couple's Mask was legendarily difficult to figure out and time-consuming once you have, and it was something closer to 'major side quest' than 'random golden crap'.
I've always wanted to play Majora's Mask just to experience the groundhog day mechanic. Being able to have active NPCs without breaking a save if you messed up their questline seems really cool. But nobody copying it in the last 20 years means it probably didn't pan out as well as I'd hoped.
And I always give the japs a little extra leeway when it comes bizarre puzzles, just because half the time a Japanese player would be going "aha, this is clearly a cultural reference to kaguyahime the moon logic princess, that means I should go cut some bamboo and give a rabbit his mallet back."
That's fair, and definitely happens -- I think there's been a few Persona games that ask for Majong questions that are trivial for anyone familiar with the game, but nonsense to most Americans, myself included. For the Couple's Mask, there's a bit of that, but mostly the logic is fairly reasonable: it's just the timing being incredibly tight. There's a good number of critical points where you have to be in the right place in a 10-minute window, and if you screw up even one bit, you're back to stage one.
And if you aren't trying for a completionist run, it's a lot less bad. I think my first casual play got a little over half the masks without any real problems or GameFAQsing.
You see variants of the gimmick a bit in visual novels and related games, though usually with a different framing. Being able to continue on and learn from a failure before a reset is a really clever gimmick where it works, and I'll point to Ghost Trick as another game that's a great exploration of that concept. The flaw is less there, and more that the introduction of a strict timeline struggles where the time pressure is too high or too low. Where that pressure's right, you have a lot of strong incentive to keep playing and keep your tempo and focus together. But even with a casual run in Majora's Mask, there'll be a good couple times where you have to sit around for a few minutes just waiting for an event to pop, and there's other times where you'll be sprinting from one event to another because you underestimated how long a fight would take. And that's a problem common to games that did pull a bit from Majora's Mask's social graph side, like the increasing focus on timed behavior in Harvest Moons and other lifesim games.
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I don't want to get into physical retro gaming, but I really enjoy Seiken Densetsu 3 on SNES and replay it every few years on an emulator.
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I just got a 100Ah 12v battery from a known-good supplier for $99! They were like $800 a few years ago.
Admittedly it was a pricing mistake with an accidental double-65-off, but they're honoring mine.
Anyone think of a good project, or should I just add it to my home backup system for longer uptime? Could run my whole house on 2400wh for... Uh, 2hrs in winter. But minus the heater, water heater, oven, and well pump it would run everything else all day.
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Has anyone else played Indiana Jones and The Great Circle yet? It's out now and is up on gamepass if you don't want to pay a hundred bucks for vidya, and it's pretty great if you are a fan of Indiana Jones.
It's an action-adventure game. That is the best way to describe it really. It plays like an im sim - in the Vatican level I caught myself considering using a water arrow on a light the thief vibes were so strong. But it has a lot more direction than most im sims and it is chock full of puzzles of varying complexity. It's no outer wilds or talos principle of course, and you can actually ignore a lot of the puzzles if you like, which makes sense in such large, detailed and open levels.
I don't know how much of my enjoyment is the actual game being good and how much is my love of Indy though so I'm looking for alternative opinions. It definitely feels really comforting to get a new Indiana Jones story that isn't bogged down by stupid fridges and whatever a phoebe waller bridge is supposed to be. The music is fantastic, Troy Baker mostly nails Indy's voice (the guy doing Marcus does a great job too) and it all actually feels like something Indy might have been doing between raiders and last crusade. And it's Tony Todd's last role and he's awesome in it.
Tried it briefly. Will wait until I have a 16 or 32 gb 5000 series GPU. My 8 gb didn't really cut it. Seemed like fun though!
Not sure if I'll play with kb/m or controller.
I'm playing it kb/m, but it was definitely built for a controller and then lazily ported to kb/m - rmb is right fist if you are unarmed but aim if you have a weapon, which is especially dumb since the combat is built around picking up and using disposable weapons mid fight. And you can lean (pressing z and c, not q and e because while the game has context specific controls they're shit - if Indy is looking at something and you open the map, pressing e won't tab to your notes it will exit the map and pick up the object) but only if you have a weapon.
But it's certainly a lot of fun.
Ok. I used my PS5 controller when I tried it. Seemed fine, even though playing anything in first person without a mouse used to seem sacrilegious to me.
It is sacrilegious my brother, listen to your heart. Maybe just keep the ps5 controller handy for the boxing ring bit, that's the only place I found it impossible to manage.
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Worth A Buy's review convinced me to hold off until it's on deep discount.
Can you explain why so I don't have to watch the video? All of the negative reviews I've seen are bitching about the performance, which hasn't been an issue for me or my circle of gaming friends, the only bitching about the gameplay or story I've seen has been generic 'oh its corpo shlock with cut content and sweet baby were involved' and that's a knee jerk reaction these days.
Also on the side, you shouldn't buy any triple a game that isn't on a deep discount. With things like gamepass and scheduled steam sales triple and double a devs instantly put about $30 on top. It's a sick industry that you should exploit however you can, because it will do the same to you.
I plan on playing the game eventually, but my expectations and hopes have been tempered by the reviews I've been seeing, which all seem to criticize the same things. The performance is one of them, though that's been a mostly minor point; more serious issues are the stealth gameplay and the puzzles, both of which have been described as insultingly easy by almost every review I've watched. Particularly the stealth enemy AI has been said to make this year's Star Wars: Outlaws's enemy AI look smart in comparison. Bad stealth gameplay in an Indiana Jones game is perfectly forgivable, but then the puzzles are also said to be extremely easy, which would leave basically just the combat to carry the gameplay, which the reviews say are pretty bare-bones.
The tone and story have received basically universal praise, which is what draws me towards the game as a lifelong fan of the original film trilogy, but I was also hoping that it would have some decent puzzle-solving or exploration gameplay, like it was a modern incarnation of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the LucasArts point-and-click adventure game from the 90s.
Ah yeah, my puzzle expectations were tempered from the get go - aside from the December release I know how Bethesda operates these days so I knew we were in for uncharted style puzzles, and it would be largely casual level. I'm actually impressed at the lack of hand holding in the game in that Indy doesn't tell you the solution two seconds after you find a puzzle.
As for the stealth sections... The ai definitely sucks, sometimes it won't see you standing right in front of it and at other times it will see you straight through walls. You rarely are forced to stealth though, most of the time you can just barrel in and start punching and smashing wine bottles - and the fist fighting is a lot of fun once you get the rhythm down. The only time the direct approach has failed me so far was when I was sneaking through military tents at the Vatican and somehow alerted every guard in the city.
I too wish it was more like the Fate of Atlantis though, damn did I love that game.
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Overheard at my hospital:
Senior psychiatrist, about 15 years older than me- "I need to get a breast reduction done, look at me, I'm tiny, and I swear a third of my weight is up here."
Then she went on about how it wouldn't be covered by the NHS, and it would ludicrously expensive to get done privately here, hence her plan to fly in to Turkey and get cut down to size there.
The shame! The squandering of God-given gifts! An imminent call for a diagnosis of severe body dysmorphia with threat of self-mutilation requiring involuntary commitment! A man can only sigh and pour one out.
God can neither deceive nor be deceived. He loves us and wants us to be happy.
You are disordered. You seek that which will not fulfill you, but will only bring forth more sorrow to your life.
Yea, I say unto you, repent! And know the Lord is your God.
Be an Ass man.
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It's one thing to have round gravity-defying breasts that sit high on the chest like they were made by a hentai artist or a Mauryan stonemason. It's a very different thing to have breasts that look good only when stuffed into a bra, that painfully obey the laws of motion and look that way too.
The fact that breasts lose elasticity with age is proof that there is no God.
Huge tits look great when a woman is young, but they age horribly, becoming saggy and veiny.
One of the reasons Asian women age so well is that they are so flat.
Are there corrective measures, surgeries of any capacity to maintain their shape. What age does the sagging become apparent, how much of it is due to a loss of muscle mass?
The surgeries are called breast reduction and implants, and there're practically no muscles in human mammary glands.
So if there is a woman who has an above average bust, the only way to fix sagging is getting silicon implants?
Think about it logically.Here's a nsfw link to the clinic where my wife got her implants. Most of the post-op breasts (and the whole page is called "breast lifting without scars") look like they have at least some silicone.That link is a handy demonstration that breasts of any size large enough to count as breasts will be prone to the appearance of sagging. It goes with the territory of growing fat tissue with little more than dermal tension for structure, and after the fat has finished rapidly developing at puberty to a bigger or smaller degree the skin gradually catches up to accommodate it.
All else being equal I personally prefer natural/saggy breasts over pert breasts with surgically circumscribed nipples.
If that's without I'd hate to see the page with.
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That there's no omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God, to be pedantic.
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If you catch a plastic surgeon drunk they'll often argue that ANY desire for plastic surgery is body dysmorphia. Any at all.
There's good reason that they'd say so only when they're drunk, because it's a ludicrously over-expansive claim!
What makes going under the knife qualitatively different when it comes to nigh universal desires to change or improve one's body? Getting rid of burn scars? Removing a mole? Does wanting to get a haircut or go to the gym count as body dysmorphia?
There are no neat edges here, but at the very least I'd expect a degree of delusion about the current condition of one's body, as well as obvious negative harm before I'd consider medicalizing the situation to be warranted.
All yes per them.
(and therefore the dysmorphia isn't necessarily a bad thing).
Well, modus ponens, modus tollens heh
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Usually they just need to lose weight.
It's mostly because women hate women with big boobs. Really hate.
The maths is easy - huge boobs are very rare, but their appeal is substantial. About a third of men have a straight out mentality of 'the bigger the better', so the 1 in 30 woman with huge ones has a big edge. There's also some back pain but nothing 20 minutes of exercise a week wouldn't fix.
This is wildly untrue.
My wife literally became a yoga instructor seeking to fix her upper back issues, and if she doesn't work out >4 times a week they recur.
... I said 'breast-related' upper back issues.
... Yes? That was the topic under discussion.
Okay, but suppose she did just the core / upper back exercises, how much would that take her during the week ?
I mostly reject that hypothetical because achieving functional strength and good movement is a whole body process
That said, I would guess she could do it on five times a week ten minutes a day? It's hard to say because I really don't think it's isolable.
But I should note that Mrs. FiveHour is an extreme outlier in terms of poor balance in this case.
Hmm.
As a final word, lucky you.
wdym? Congenitally weak musculature? Unusually large lungs, in excess of 1kg?
Her bra size is essentially fake, in that in America we have decided that all cup sizes above D are kind of gross, disgusting, not sexy. The old Jeff Foxworthy joke about "If you think a 401K is your mother in law's bra size, you might be a redneck!" But cup size is just breast size relative to rib cage, and her rib cage/waist is tiny relative to her breasts. So her measurement would actually come out to something like a 30-F or G, but that doesn't exist in any American store, so she buys a 30-DDDD. Which also mostly doesn't exist.
So when I take her to Nordstrom to buy bras once or twice a year, she's always hoping her rib cage size went up a little, so that her cup size would reduce slightly, and she'd be something more normal like a 32-DD, which might actually be stocked in normal stores. Instead, turns out she's still the same size, and we find out that they have one, basically orthopedic, bra in stock in her size, in nude and black.
I am extremely lucky. But primarily for other reasons.
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I like the subtle flex here hehe.
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I saw a breakdown on this where they showed some pictures of women and asked men what they preferred. The sizes were something like this:
DD cup was the most popular size, followed by the super big unnatural size.
And that's why the most popular size for women who get implants is 300-400 mL per breast – about the size of a softball. Ouch.
As you can imagine, it's a class thing, with lower class men preferring the largest breasts.
[citation needeed] It is quite hard to persuade women to get breast implants if they're not of the right sort. Between women wanting to avoid being hated on by other women, that most women are more persuasive than men, there is probably a lot of unfulfilled preferences out there.
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But do lower class men actually like larger breasts more than upper class men, or are upper class men just more sensitive to appearing vulgar and crass and temper/moderate their responses? What do you think of the boobs vs butts phenomenon where the map of global preferences looks suspiciously like an IQ map? And Jewish women being known for their breasts?
Ofc people falsify their stated preferences to enhance their social standing.
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The ideal forms change with time, in the 90s it was really slender people generally, our times appreciate someone who has above average levels of muscle mass and standout secondary sexual characteristics. I personally always leaned towards the second and never understood the appeal of androgynous, skinny, low muscle mass body types.
The Greeks got both the male and female form right. Youthful heracles is my reference point personally and aphrodite might have been one had I been a girl.
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What if causation is structured differently? Like, a preexisting proclivity for temperance leading to (1) preference for smaller breasts and (2) better life outcomes.
Does the lower class thing hold up in places where there is no correlation between class and obesity rates? Most people like looks that they grew up with.
"Those who disagree are just falsifying preferences" is a too emotionally satisfying theory to not be suspect. Also, even if it is shaped by social pressure, in what sense is a sufficiently internalised preference less valid? Nobody likes IPAs or jazz in a state of nature, either.
I would guess that IQ correlates positively with a lot of sexual preferences that are not reproductively advantageous. Furries are known to be something like the Jews of IT, too.
I think the only limiting factor on preference for breast size is once they become so large they're a visible deformity (at which point you get into inflation fetish territory- aka the DeviantArt school of sexual attraction). Of course, that also means having breasts that large is selected against.
I think that pushes the average size preference up, not down, for 'she looks like a little girl that means ur a pedo hahah also die' reasons.
In my experience I only really feel this dynamic online. IRL I wouldn't feel embarrassed to introduce my parents to a gf with A cups, introducing my parents to my H cup gf would feel shameful.
y tho
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This article spends several thousand words arguing "Yes".
You always link the most based articles
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I haven't really heard this before outside of "khazar milkers"-posting.
Really? My friend (now a Republican state senator lol) and I were joking about "jewbs" all the time in high school in 2006. Granted about half the girls in our school were Jewish so we may have been in an usual situation...
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I don't remember if it was a copypasta or a random 4chan comment that lamented "There are women all over the world walking around with big boobs full of milk and they won't let me have any. Why even live?"
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Who'd ever name their son Sue? It's something out of a Johnny Cash song, no real dad would do this, right?
Guess what? Meet Stacy Smith, the chairman of Autodesk and 100% not a diversity hire.
Mike Hammer was played by Stacy Keach! I was going to link a clip of him being a bad ass but I couldn't find a good one, so here's another clip of Stacy Keach being very unfeminine - https://youtube.com/watch?v=uGXEsFRpHq8?si=Xtn_ItFJaT1uPSHX
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Lots of female names were formerly unisex names. Famously Evelyn Waugh (the male writer) was married to a female Evelyn.
But eventually, in most case, the female name crowds out the male name. Stacy (like Shannon) was a relatively newfangled name post WWII that was originally mostly female but perhaps 20% male. Now it's 100% female coded.
In 20 years, people will be saying, "Haha, this guy is named Taylor. Did his dad want him to get beat up, haha".
Or Ariel.
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Also Ashley.
Likewise Vivian/Vivienne. Vivienne doesn't see much use anymore and Vivian has been pretty much 100% ceded as a female name, but as recently as the 1980s a Britcom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Ones_(TV_series)) had a male character in it named Vivian (or Vyvyan, rather), and I don't think it was intended to be a joke like "ha ha this edgy punk has a girly name".
Lynn, Leslie and Kimberly were all common enough male British names too.
I believe the modern convention is that "Leslie" is female and "Lesley" is male.
Horrible name for a person of either sex though.
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I heard she was wild in bed. A real homonymph.
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This is actually not an unheard of Anglo boy name -- I've worked with one, anyways. I presumed it was some kind of family tradition.
That particular guy did have a bit of a violent insecurity complex though (and you could bully him at any time just by saying his name with the right inflection!), so maybe the song is true?
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How much longer do you think this guy lived after the photo was taken? Take your guess and then reveal the answer.
I wonder how AI would do in predicting life span based on a selfie?
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Wrong thread, this is Friday fun thread.
Thanks. Thought i was in small question. Moved it
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I went to an in-person ACX meetup for the first time today. I didn't find it too awkward and actually really enjoyed the conversation. I was surprised that many of the attendees had either never heard of The Motte or only had a very passing familiarity with it.
Has there ever been a Motte meetup? I imagine we’re too few for it
Not that I know of, but I thought there was a lot more overlap between the Motte and Astral Codex Ten than there is. I don't read much of Scott's stuff myself, but he seems to have a much larger following than The Motte does.
theMotte may originally be an offshoot from SSC, but by now the connection is pretty weak. Scott only very rarely links here, and vice versa Scott is now just one of many writers that get mentioned here regurlarly.
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Yeah this place is not super big in rat circles
ACX readership is now well outside of the ratsphere.
Not really a surprise that a niche spin off forum isn't super well known amongst the many substack readers. Unless you read SSC long enough to see the announcement all those years ago, or posted on the SSC reddit, it's not got any public advertisement
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If a English isn't your native language, are there any words that aren't in English that you miss?
As a Swedish speaker, glapp is one example. It means a loose connection somewhere in a circuit. E.g. if the sound intermediately cuts out in a livestream, you can say "the sound is glapping". A useful concept to be able to quickly express, but sadly lacking in English. Any others?
Very, very few. I believe I've noticed such, that is I remember doing so, but can't remember them. Both Czech and Slovak are far less rich languages.
English is worse in some ways, it's harder to be precise in English, you can't aliterate entire meaningful paragraphs, but vocabulary is pretty much unmatched.
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Isn't that just glitching?
"Glitching" can be any error, really. It doesn't really convey the "you haven't plugged the cable in all the way" or the like that "glapp" does.
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I recalled a video from back when RPS was a cool gaming website that parodied various "mad skillz" montage showcases from Call of Battlefield gamers. I asked YT for "360 crop rotation" and turns out it wasn't made by a random schmuck that had his 15 minutes of fame. No, he was just getting started.
Man, I miss those parody MLG videos.
I have some good news for you about the best FPS released this year, then.
Immediately wishlisting
You can get the original here.
I find that the original is much more committed to the bit than the sequel (and in the sequel, you can capture some of it if you turn the Meme Power up to 69), but I am hoping in the meantime for a mod that restores what belongs in the game after a certain point rather than what the creators were forced not to include in a game for reasons related to selling it for actual money.
That said, I found the rationalization for why things are the way they are relatively satisfying, and it's actually a plot point so I'm not too sad about it. It's Duke Nukem 3D for the Internet Age, complete with Mighty Foot.
I also find that, whenever someone makes something like this, the impression I get of them is irrevocably positive. There really isn't any room for cynicism or personal callouts if you're doing this; it's just childish, unironic love of the patently ridiculous through a lens that everyone who experienced it sees as personally empowering. It's very difficult to show it to people who don't quite get it and that makes me sad, because it's for a very particular audience at a very particular time (kind of like HomestarRunner, for that matter).
I think I played the original on release and got a great laugh out of it. Looking forward to playing the sequel.
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For those desirous of that old flavor of classic internet degeneracy, may I suggest Sliphantom:
The Unicum Guide to the T26E4 Super Pershing
Tank Autism 2: Revolutions
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Sseth is…he’s iconic. I’ll go with that. I can’t believe the farming simulator bit was him!
My introduction to the genre was Train Simulator Bitch. Could have sworn it was originally posted by a League of Legends YouTuber, though?
Wasn't sseth a LoL YTer in the olden days? I might be mixing him up with Dunkey though
You are correct; amongst his older videos you can find classics like Spawn Karthus.
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Where to get good, non-trivial gift ideas for Christmas?
I found a neat idea a few weeks ago that has now entered my roster of 'gift ideas for people I know but not well enough to get something explicitly personal' - double walled mugs with pressed flowers inside the walls. https://www.kogan.com/au/buy/ashdene-wildflowers-forest-double-walled-glass-mug-09314689238472 I also plan on inflicting otamatones on all of friends with small children - they're affordable, interesting, cute and not so annoying as to cause drama.
I really wish there was a good dealer for Ashdene in the USA, but sadly I haven't been able to find anything.
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For whom?
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Fights
Pantoja fights Kai and Ian Garry fights Shavkat this weekend on UFC 310. The card is pretty good, it also has the ghost of Chris Weidman fighting, I hope this is the last we see of him. Shavkat is an interesting mixed martial artist, his style is similar to a Khabib but more of a buzzaw on the feet, with a higher emphasis in the clinch and more confident overall. He will age poorly but his style can crush guys who fight off the back foot and can't one shot him. It does seem like mma is not as popular or getting new audience from the west. Net positive since sports viewing, the way modern people do it is something I dislike, I kinda see my own consumption of mma like how I'd view smoking.
Will try to watch the animated movies watchmen chapter 1 and 2, dc makes a lot of animated movies, I pop them on semi regularly.
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If tomatoes were called nightshades, the standard hamburger toppings would be abbreviable as KLMMNOP.
I'm not sure what all those stand for, but who on earth puts onions on a burger as standard? Onions are nasty fam.
Quality comment, I truly can't imagine which country you could be from.
"Onions are nasty" is surely a sentiment that could only be expressed by an American, but an American would surely know that onions are standard on burgers. Even a Big Mac has onions.
I'm American, and I definitely would not say onions are standard on burgers. It varies widely. Some have em, some don't.
sometimes I bake a raw onion in the oven and eat it plain.
You do you I guess. Though I will say cooked onions are vastly different from the raw onions that are typical on burgers. Cooked onions are alright - they don't really move the needle for me one way or the other. It's only raw onions which are disgusting.
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I literally eat raw onion slices with grilled meat skewers. Satay needs the acrid sharpness of unprocessed alllium to contrast caramelized sugar and soy sauce marinated meat.
Also onions on burgers are super common! The Animal Style of In'n'Out has grilled onions, Five Guys has onions 3 ways as toppings, White Castle has shaved onions, an Oklahoma style burger has a literal mountain of onions, every fancy burger place puts onion rings or fried onions as a topping addon in addition to grilled raw or caramelized options. The whopper and big mac both have onions! I HAVE to know which burger product in the USA is heavily patronized which does NOT use onions, except for baconator and shack stack.
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Us Americans, who also spell catsup "Ketchup": Lettuce leaves, Mayonnaise and Mustard spreads, and slices of Nightshade, Onion, and Pickle.
A Buddhist walks up to a food truck and says, "Make me one with everything."
I could not figure out what the two "M"s were, thanks! I would not have said mayo spread as a "standard" topping, though, to me it's a slightly less common choice than cheese.
Avacado, Bacon, Cheese, and the third M, Mushrooms, would make it ABC KLMMMNOP.
That reminds me of the sandwich shop I always wanted to open. The primary sandwich would be the BLT, but you would be allowed to add or remove toppings - if you could form a word out of the initials. And you can use slang or nicknames as long as they weren't too outlandish. So you could add egg and make a BELT, but not just avocado, with avocado you would have to drop the lettuce and make a BAT or drop the tomato and make a LAB. Alternatively add something like edam to make it a TABLE. Or you could change the lettuce to romaine or rocket and make a BRAT, or call the lettuce iceberg and then add lemon juice and cheese to make a BALTIC. It would be a fun store to run.
I love the idea, but I feel like the internet would ruin it since it would no longer be clever ideas passed from customer to customer, but an immediate "Top 10 acronym hacks" that everyone would read.
Yeah true lol, nowadays everyone would probably stand in the queue asking gemini to tell them what to order.
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I plugged KLMMTOP into Copilot, and after asking it to guess, it said:
LLMs are pretty good at their jobs.
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The vendor gives him his order, and the monk hands him a $20 bill. The vendor takes it and turns to the next customer. The monk yells "Hey, what about my change?" "Change must come from within."
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If wishes were fishes, there would be no room in the ocean. (the line that has most firmly stuck in my memory from the copious Redwall reading that I conducted twenty years ago)
"If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets."
If wishes were fishes we'd swim in the sea.
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How does one increase readership on a blog? I've been blogging for about 4 years now, and my readerbase has grown from just my two roommates to around ~100 random people on the internet. I'm not necessarily interested in making $$ (although I wouldn't say no) but I would like to get more engagement on my posts.
My blog is mainly focused on two topics: language learning and literature reviews (that usually take some kind of culture war angle). Link is here if any are interested.
Comment, politely, intelligently, on thoughts from other blogs, give teasers to your thoughts on that blog, and use tactics from Quora, StackOverflow, Wikipedia to pull readers into your other works.
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Post on social media and link in your bio. I noticed you have a review of A Song of Ice And Fire, that means you should have a few comments a week in each subreddit associated with that fandom, for about a month. Pretty low-effort if you're knowledgeable about it.
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Basically get big on social media and link to it from outside.
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There has been some discussion of architecture lately. Have you considered how the square–cube law affects building design?
Using the International Residential Code's prescriptive tables, it is easy to design a code-compliant 30-foot (9-meter), 2700-ft2 (250-m2) cubic house. With the International Fire Code's occupancy rules, we can assume that such a house can contain 13 people. But what if your scope suddenly changes and you need to design a 60-foot, 21600-ft2, 108-person apartment building?
Obviously, dead load and live load will increase by a factor of eight, and wind load will increase by a factor of four. Therefore, we can generate a slapdash design by simply: (1) octupling all the stud and footing area, which resists the dead load and live load; (2) quadrupling the layers of sheathing, which resists the shear force of the wind; and (3) multiplying the depths of all the truss joists and girders by three, which will increase their resistance to dead loads and live loads by nine.
As they say on 4chan: Wa la!
I always thought the main problems with just scaling up a cube were:
People will complain about the lack of natural light in the interior rooms. For example Munger Hall. I personally think this is way overblown, especially for college students staying out until 4 AM and waking up at 11 AM. Or people in Minneapolis with no sun for normal at home hours in the winter, and the sun waking you up at 4 AM in the summer. With high CRI, high intensity, fresnel lens adjusted, power efficient LEDs atifical lighting can be better than the sun. Completely controllable timing and intensity, no unwanted solar heating, controlled glare, controlled color temperature, etc.
The mechanical integrations eat up much of the cost savings of the structure. Isolating and running the HVAC for that many units requires a bunch of ducting runs, eating up interior volume. Additional expensive and loud air handling units are required to over come the static resistance of all the ducting. Times 2 for the plumbing. This is why it's so hard to convert a space designed for a cube farm to residential use. You can feed an open space with a single giant plenum, but individual dwelling units require individual ducting for air quality.
Of course, you can overcome these by only scaling on the z-axis, but then you lose much of your scaling law advantage. You also run into other scaling problems, for example The Mile-High Illinois, where you would have eaten up most of the lower floor space with elevators.
That wiki article is almost as detached from reality as its subject. Love it.
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I'm starting to think factorio space age suffers from the same gamey mechanics problems that make modded Minecraft unappealing for me.
Everything goes quadratic, everything before a particular weird meta becomes instantly obsolete the second you hit an arbitrary point on a tech beeline.
Like the correct way to make Legendary Concrete is a rube Goldberg system of turning stone into basic furnaces and recycling them back into stone with quality modules and filtering. Then taking all the non-legendary concrete, painting stripes on it, then erasing the stripes in an infinite loop to farm a 1% drop rate of the highest tier concrete. It's a game mechanic totally disconnected from both reality and the internal rules established at the start of the game.
The same sort of thing turned me off Minecraft too. You get invited to a group server and play for a bit, and then someone goes:
I don't know, it just ends up seeming so arbitrary that there's no real joy in thinking your way through it, like one of the old point and click adventure games with the nonsense puzzles.
Maybe I'm just a stick in the mud, but this is the reason I always preferred the vanilla experience in games. It's like all the mods are just cheat mode but with an extra long and frustrating to type console command. And space age feels like a mod.
And ? Even if you know the meta it takes effort to put it into practice. And what use is 'meta' in a non-competitive game ?
You can't erase the stripes. Yeah, you get a free 10% extra quality boost by being able to turn it into strips, which makes concrete easier to boost in quality than other stuff.
But even there, what is the point of of 'correct' ? With infinite energy, not much limited space.., it's much easier to just slap down so-so designs than to spend 8 hours squeezing 10% more efficiency out of an existing ones..
PVP Factorio could be pretty interesting, afaik,basically no one ever played it and it was never balanced for it, however the 2d map doesn't seem conducive to it, and Space Age with the silly spaceships that can't even come close to each other is definitely even less suited for it.
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Yay! Factorio Friday thread again!
Love the game, and love the expansion even more.
A few secrets to enjoying the game and avoiding optimizing away the fun:
Maybe you'll have more 'fun' but the headaches involved mean you will want to keep spaces for transit.
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There's something that kind of bugs me about players who optimize for optimization with any game they play.
The game, as a piece of software, is basically just a program that is running from a start state to an end state, and the player's inputs are the one factor that determines how long, or even if it gets there. Yes, this is an obtuse oversimplificaiton. I apologize, computer science is not my forte.
Back in the day the end state was often a literal "YOU WIN" splash page before restarting from the beginning.
So by 'playing' the game, you're 'helping' the program reach a given end state. All well and dandy. But when you attempt to optimize your play to push towards that end-state as quickly as possible, you're suborning all of your other goals to that of simply 'completing' the program. The program at that point, I'd argue, no longer exists to 'serve' you, you are choosing to serve the program.
Yes, its all just math at the end of the day, and by creating a certain sequence of inputs you can make the number or the line go up more quickly pursuant to that math, and perhaps that is satisfying in its own right.
But damn, it strikes me as inverting the 'purpose' of playing games. Yes you 'win' when a given end-state is reached, but supposedly the process of reaching that end state should be fun, and/or challenging, and/or educational, and/or induce certain emotional states, and/or 'entertain' you and your friends. In fact, if the process of reaching the end state is enjoyable enough, it should be a tad dissappointing when you actually reach it!
The end state is not supposed to be the point? Unless you're in a very strictly defined 'competition' where the stakes are such that you absolutely MUST reach the end state that favors you as the 'winner' to continue.
Like, yeah, a Chess tournament is not really about 'the friends we made along the way.' Its about finding who is the absolute best at chess, which REQUIRES everyone play optimally for victory.
BUT MOST GAMES AREN'T ABOUT FINDING THE BEST POSSIBLE PLAYER! Its about helping your brain release the happy-juice or to learn something or to maybe even to kill some time... which implies that you want the game to LAST LONGER, not shorter!
At any rate, 'optimal' play, in my book, should be defined largely by what the player thinks their goals are, not inherently what the math/logic of the game itself demands to reach a point defined by the game. Its fair to say that if you do the latter, you're not playing the game, the game is playing YOU!
And yes, I realize I've called out the entire concept of "speed-running* when I say that. These are the guys who go to obscene effort to find ever bug, exploit, and corner-case possible to force the game to run from the start-state to the end-state without going through all the steps in between, and thus skipping the 'process' entirely. And they pride themselves on thus becoming so engrained with the program that they can make it run to completion in obscenely short times, by programming themselves to create the best possible set of inputs so as to achieve the endstate. Not because of their own particular goals.
It's all Progress Quest under the covers
James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games will make you think very differently about video games ... to the point that you may stop playing them.
This also sort of touches on the memes about "Open-World" vs. "Linear" games.
The joke is that open world games still ultimately railroad you to the same place, it just lets you wander around whatever winding path you like to end up there. The 'choice' of open world games is just when to move on to the next chapter in the story, but the story will still unfold in the same order.
And while I do think there's a distinction between a very cinematic linear game like Uncharted and, say Fallout: New Vegas or Baldur's Gate 3, there's something to the argument that a game can never do anything that wasn't programmed in, and whether it directly railroads the player to its end or it merely places boundaries on player actions and patiently waits for them to get there, the 'choices' presented by the game aren't actually producing new, surprising outcomes.
Wasn't the idea behind No Man's Sky that it was open-beyond-open in that it was procedurally generated. The game would actually shift and expand its world in a pseudo-random way based off of player actions?
IIRC, it was too successful at this and players never go to do ... anything. There was a lot of wandering around planets and zipping around space without much contact. In order to generate meaningful action, you have to have some sort of fixed and directing game mechanic. Help me out of I'm remembering this wrong.
P.S. something something we accidentally proved the existence of God through experimental video game design.
No Man's Sky got a TON of flack at launch because its procedural generation was actually far too limited and there was no interaction between players, despite implications or promises made by the publisher.
But then it improved in fits and starts over the next couple years to actually deliver on or exceed most of those promises, and now its a shining example of reputation rehabilitation. So the procedural generation is indeed impressive by any fair standard, now.
And they've released a lot of new content and upgrades to the game over the years.
Yet I think it is still running into the limits of what you can actually do with procedural generation. Only some subset of those generations will seem 'unique' and even fewer will be 'interesting' so the thrill of discovery is going to run out eventually, even if planet X-9-1-3-C-7-J is technically very different from planet X-9-1-3-C-7-Q, you won't feel like there's much difference if you can see how the lego pieces were rearranged to make each one.
I think the disappointment arises because any sort of full deterministic universe probably won't be like the Star Trek Universe, where you can run into nonstandard, unexplainable phenomena all over the place and the galaxy is just teeming with intelligent life that has abnormal powers, strange morality, and biology that defies understanding so the effort of exploring is rewarded, and there's nigh infinite novelty to be found because the rules of what is possible simply can't be pinned down.
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Hmm... I can relate to this sort of thinking. I too think something is lost in the transition between a casual game and a competitive game. But something is gained too.
Speedrunning Minecraft, is a different game than Minecraft. Even if they share most of the mechanics in theory. Letting the game play you... Is the point.
We're doing to ourselves something similar to what we do to train LLMs. Because falling into the flow of that training is pleasurable. And optimizing for something (like speed) helps us to unveil something new about the game and provides a direction for improving our own capabilities.
Those ACE bugs can be used for more than just end credit skips after all. The knowledge generalizes back to casual play. And if you don't like one category, because too much of the game has been cut out or you have grown tired of the route, you can always switch to another. Or to casual play. It's not like your free will has been entirely circumscribed.
I do think the communities get a bit overly excited about the metric of mastery over the game improving, (completion speed) when the more valuable thing to me is the understanding that has been gained regarding the game. But its alright. I won't begrudge them their records.
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This is what has burned me out on most video games. Eventually you discover that there’s one “right” way to do it and everything else is pointless. That’s part of why I loved PUBG so much: you had to scavenge limited supplies of items from the game world so most of the time nobody is running meta because they have to work with what they can find.
I don't really mind if there is a right way to do things, irl or in games. It's just that figuring it out should feel like reasoning from first principles, not trying to get into the head of the writer to follow his weird moon logic.
It's like the old adventure game puzzles where to fix a broken pump you had to use a banana on a metronome to hypnotize a monkey. There's no way your intuition can lead you there, you just have to know what the designer wanted you to do.
Minecraft mod packs almost transcended this because the appeal is in exploiting unintended interactions between different designers' moon logic progressions. You're back to real reasoning again, but at the end it's still built on a pile of gibberish.
And yeah, I feel the same way about working with what you get. Starsector is at its most fun in the early game, when you're using ships and weapons because they're what you salvaged from an ancient debris field.
It's less fun later on when you're micro-optimizing fleet builds to farm the end game content for 1% AI core loot drops
You take that back about Monkey Island 2! The correct example is Gabriel Knight 3. In a world where masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair, you use it to make a fake mustache to disguise yourself as a man who doesn't have a mustache.
This is my favorite sentence of the week.
It is a summary of Old Man Murray's article, who absolutely deserves the credit here.
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By contrast, this is why I find BR games literally unplayable- they're either boring as fuck because you're busy scavenging and not fighting, or you roll suboptimally, die, and have to wait 10 minutes to get back to a place you can try again. I hate not being in control of how I get to play.
This is why people bitch and moan about people picking the character with the most interesting mechanics available out of the box, getting downed, and immediately disconnecting.
CoD 4 was peak gaming because it wasn't 10 minutes, it was 10 seconds (other titles that didn't include support for having 32 players on the map had this closer to 1 minute). You could use meme strategies and bad guns, and still have a chance of having fun.
All other popular games- like the camping simulators (R6 Siege, Counter-Strike) and the MOBA-in-FPS-clothing (Overwatch)- have by their nature very opinionated ways to play. And it's as you say; they aren't fun because of it.
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I maintain (with no personal disrespect intended) that this is a self inflicted problem. If the game is less fun when you go with the optimal solution, it is very easy to simply... not use the optimal solution. I do it all the time (for example, I played wide in Civ V despite all the game's mechanics pushing you away from that). Humans aren't rats who can't help but do the things that trigger dopamine in the brain, we have agency and should use it.
@ZorbaTHut had a post on I think /r/TheMotte about how, as a game designer, you basically had to trick the players into having fun because otherwise they'd fall into whatever pattern looked "optimal". I can't find it though.
This?
That's the one. How did you find it? I couldn't get DDG nor Google to cough it up.
Normal google/bing/ddg search is pretty useless on modern reddit: you pretty much have to use tools like pullpush. In theory, newer threads should be searchable with the reddit-internal search, but it's incredibly unreliable.
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I know the one you mean. It was about Rimworld, and how players wanted grow lamps for plants to turn off at night (because they used a lot of power). But the lamps were intended to be expensive, to nudge people towards growing crops outside. So they wound up having the lamps turn off at night, but use twice as much electricity when active.
Another similar example is how beta WoW had a "fatigue" penalty to XP from kills (after playing for a long enough time), because they wanted quests and not grinding to be the best way to level up. Players complained, so they added the rest XP system which was mathematically equivalent but inverted - you always gained the lesser rate of XP, but if you logged out for a while you would gain rest and earn double XP while rested. And people praised the system even though it was the same thing.
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Yeah, I know what you mean. Seeing people “correct” others’ Space Age designs online, they’re basically scooping out the fun and replacing it with a vague sense of “correctness.” It defeats the whole point of having a fresh playground of puzzles.
You’re 100% right about Minecraft, too. I remember listening to all my friends argue about solar panel layouts and energy budgets and thinking to myself, “why did I just spend an hour planting 50 different crops?”
I guess the best I can do is try to avoid spoilers for the main progression. But the longer I take to play the actual game, the less likely that gets…
The game spoils a lot about the progression just through in game research trees. Best of luck in avoiding the spoilers.
I've beaten the game at this point and my one suggestion is to just go for it. The major progression points in space age felt big and daunting, but when I was in the moment overcoming them it was just fun and less worrying than I thought it would be.
Oh, yeah, I'm not trying to avoid spoilers for planets/mechanics. I'm trying to avoid the posts which cross the line from "tips" to "guides." Optimizes the fun out of it for my slow ass.
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Minecraft is at least also about building. No amount of Draconic Evolution having higher numbers really replaces how cool this worthless farm I built looks.
And usually, unless its a challenge pack with altered recipies, most of the best building tools will be fairly early game allowing you to entirely sit out the combat or energy meta or what have you. It's not like most packs give you anything to kill with that infinity + 1 sword that doesn't already die to the infinity - 1 sword anyway...
Though... maybe the meta is to build a ComputerCraft Turtle and download your entire base... Still. Even with super intelligent building tools there's still your own personal aesthetic to choose to express.
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I had to cave on Gleba and look some things up. My production lines were constantly running out of seeds because I didn't notice that biolabs have a 50% productivity bonus, and you only really stay seed positive if you do your basic processing on them. Oops. Then I looked back and noticed that Vulcanus' forge building also had a 50% productivity bonus, which I guess explains some things, but I wasn't forced to be aware of it to survive.
I'm currently trying to work up the motivation to just wrap up some science and rocketry on Gleba and peace out. But I've been distracted by playing Final Fantasy XII again, and dabbling in Heroes of Might & Magic 1.
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This week I learned that LLMs are terrible at coming up with quiz questions.
We're having an end-of-the-year party with my team of data engineers, and I want to prepare a quiz for them. I don't want Jeopardy-style "either you know it or you don't, your only hint is the category name" questions, my gold standard is the What? Where? When? show that has questions that:
For example, "
droste.zip
is a small Zip archive that contains two files. One of them isdroste.jpg
, a very small picture of a Droste hot chocolate poster. Its only purpose is to make the presence of the other file even more impressive. What is the other file in this archive?"Or, "Charles O'Rear has spent more than 20 years working for National Geographic in exotic locations. But his most expensive and most viewed work is a very simple landscape. Name this photograph."
ChatGPT is hopeless at this. It suggests questions like "What does
su
insudo
stand for?" even when you explain what you want from it, why its questions are wrong and even give it my handcrafted questions as examples. I thought Russian-language LLMs would be better at it, having a better corpus of competitive W?W?W? questions to learn from, but they were even worse.Since I sincerely hope none of you work for me, here's some friday fun for you:
Go to db.chgk.info instead of reinventing the wheel. You don’t even have to translate the stuff :)
I know about it, but it doesn't have a filter by theme.
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Others have answered correctly.
Here's my effort.
In a well known Jack Nicholson film his character plays or we hear on the soundtrack the following:
Fantasy in F minor
Fantasy & Fugue in D minor
Piano Concerto no 9 in E flat major
Prelude in E minor
Fantasy in D minor
Characterize these and if brave tell me the name of the film.
This is the kind of question I do not want on my quiz, unless it's a movie-themed quiz. While this film has been praised by the critics, I don't think a 1970 movie is on anyone's mind in 2024, unless they are a big movie buff.
But you did know the answer! Winner!
I didn't, I googled for it.
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Question 1: wild guess.Itself?
Question 2:Windows XP default desktop background?
Nice job!
Surely both of these require knowing random trivia?
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It has to be windows xp
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There is a good paper called Embers of Regression which basically points out that LLMs do not have a consistent intellect. Their ability to perform tasks such as “Write the following in word-reversed order” will change markedly depending on whether the result is a sane/common string or not. So trying to get novel material is hard.
I can’t answer your riddles, I’m afraid. I was never good at puzzles.
Thank you very much for sharing that paper. It is excellent.
Do you have any other "must read" papers on LLMs? Or a link to a good list?
Glad you enjoyed! I subscribe to TLDR AI, it’s surprisingly good.
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