Should probably link it here: https://youtu.be/laZpTO7IFtA

25-27 is about right for me. When left on my own without responsibilities, such as back in my college days, my wakefulness hours would slowly rotate through the day/night. Nowadays, I still rotate a little when I have time off, only to have to painfully snap back when the time off is over— whether this is a weekend, a three day weekend, or actual vacation time.

And advice given to always keep the same sleep schedule whether you’re working or not? Fuck that. Fuck that with a red hot poker. Keeping my work schedule is strain— and strain needs relief sometimes. That “steady sleep cycle” advice is for other people. Genuinely, I mean that. Some people thrive under those circumstances. I don’t.

At some level, it’s because each platform costs a lot of money. If a game is not available for your platform, it’s super expensive to get another platform. So other platforms having fun games your platform doesn’t can mean losing out— either you won’t get to experience the game, or you’re going to have to shell out, and either way hurts. Thus, it is actively in your best interest if the other platforms fail, thus encouraging devs to spend more effort on your chosen platform.

The emotional flashback against the definition of a planet was probably foreseeable, and I think the framing of it as a “demotion” was what makes people bitter to this day. People’s mental model still has an orrery of 9 objects spinning around the sun, with that last one “cast off” because it’s “too small”. That garners pity.

But note that mental model… it doesn’t even include Ceres. That got “kicked out of the club” too, and no one cares. Why? Because it’s part of the asteroid belt. That’s not a demotion, it’s a reassignment to something different but just as cool!

And yet…… that’s EXACTLY THE SAME CASE AS PLUTO. Pluto isn’t just the 9th and smallest object circling the sun far far away, it’s a member of the Kupier Belt! And that’s awesome, there’s a whole second belt! But Kupier is hard to pronounce from the spelling, and Kupier isn’t a sci-fi common word like asteroid…

Not to mention that using the adjective “dwarf” just sounds insulting.

Sigh. Pluto is definitely not a planet, but the terminology definition conference definitely screwed up the framing bad.

I loved act 1 of this game, but the rest seemed scattered and unfocused. I would have loved if the story from act 1 developed further over the course of the game, instead of ending abruptly with a boss fight and then basically never mentioning anything in the act again.

I can’t comment on Nier, as I’ve never played it. But I did notice the reverse situation— after beating Final Fantasy X, I replayed it with a “no sphere grid” game… and suddenly found a lot of these scenes far more impactful. What used to be a “meh, another stupid boss fight, whatever, no big deal…” suddenly became impactful fights to the death that carried emotional weight for me. So I think you have something there in your hypothesis.

If not connected to the internet, no problems.

If connected to the internet, there will probably not be any problems for a little while. A couple months, maybe a year— but at some point, someone will inevitably find a security flaw that impacts the way you use the computer. Maybe a flaw that allows an advertisement you find on a website to infect you. But maybe a flaw that will enable anyone hunting for computers online to exploit, in which case just being connected to the net will be enough to get infected.

At this point, your computer will simultaneously be part of someone’s bot net, mining for cryptocurrency on someone else’s behalf, rented out for processing farms, and so on and so forth. You might also get hit with advertising Trojans and scriptkiddie shit, but it’s far more likely that the stuff they’ll infect you with will just syphon your processing power for their own purposes.

Found and fully fund an activist think tank aimed exclusively at moving the Overton window left.

I wanted to love bastion so much, but I’ve found I hate twin-stick— or rather, keyboard to move mouse to target in a third person action game controls too much and it just gets in the way. For third person, I just want keyboard only, and target where I’m facing.

The semi-emotionless, or at least restrained emotional delivery of the lines always hit me really hard. They never screamed, never cried, but the matter of fact way they said Kharak was burning, and how you needed to hunt down the perpetrators… it was chilling. The emotion was somehow bleached out of the voices, yet so, so, so powerfully deep and present nonetheless… I don’t know how they managed it, but it was incredible.

This IS the descriptive approach. Trying to wrangle fish out of ghoti is simply not how people read.

Reminder that according to the actual rules of English orthography, “ghoti” can never be pronounced as “fish”, because said rules feature “position within a word/syllable” very prominently. An onset g simply can’t be pronounced the same way as a final gh, and in fact, any “gh” followed immediately by a vowel must be pronounced with the hard /g/ sound. “ti” is only ever allowed to fricitize to the “sh” sound if it’s followed by another vowel. Ghoti can only be pronounced the same as “goatee”, and English speakers know this intuitively even if they can’t articulate why they know this, the same as we internalize hundreds of other language rules without knowing that we know them.

Nice rework! I thought yours was the original for a moment, and was rolling my eyes at what I thought was the rework in the comment… yours just flows so much better. I like it!

No. Enshittification has a very specific definition. It’s a business model that follows exactly these steps:

Step 1: make a product or service of high quality to users, offered for free, to gather a large user base.

Step 2: slowly optimize the platform for “business users”, aka advertisers. The service now starts to become worse for the original user base.

Step 3: make the product worse for both end users and businesses in order to squeeze more short-term profits.

It’s not a general term for “things getting worse”, it describes exactly these three steps, in this order, exactly as stated. Any variation would need a new term… except we have enough examples of this playbook that no such variations have been spotted.

‘sup fellow ptsd person. My psychologist explained that ptsd comes from an extended period of time where you believe, actually believe not and just muse about abstractly, that you are going to die or an equivalent level of terror. I have little doubt you could get ptsd from it. It’s the end of your life as you know it, even if not literally the end of your life.

If you haven’t/aren’t already, I strongly suggest finding a therapist trained and specializing expressly in ptsd management. I had some therapists that were a bit more generally trained, and they… did not really help. The specialist untangled multiple of my triggers, and let me live my life again— there’s still some left, but I had to move away and I haven’t found another specialist left. If only ptsd was the sort of thing that went away over time (it doesn’t). And definitely, definitely run (don’t walk) away from anyone suggesting anything remotely resembling talk therapy. Talking about your ptsd can literally make it worse, and reprogramming triggers can be as complicated and delicate as defusing a bomb.

For those not aware, avoid lemmy.ml because it’s a tankie run and enforced echo chamber, where Russia, China, and North Korea can do no wrong, and saying otherwise is banned as “hate speech”.

Not even close. This old ZeFrank video really applies: https://youtu.be/-KQb3Mx2WMw

Teens just think differently. It’s not their fault, no more is it the fault of my four year old when he can’t understand things. It’s just part of growing up. But this part of growing up involved emotions being heightened not just to 11, but like 27 or something absurd like that. It creates so much drama, heartache, and pain.

Now, all those saying that work is, in fact, just like high school? They’re complaining about individual people they meet who act immature, reminding them a little of high school. The fact is, as adults we SHOULD be leaving that all behind, and anyone that continues to do it is an outlier. And outliers get attention, and we tend to focus out experiences on them.

But it IS an outlier. Adult life is not like high school, except in exceptions that we sometimes focus on in frustration because we shouldn’t have to deal with it, but sometimes do.

In highschool, it’s not the exception, it’s just how things are all the time. It can’t help but be that way. It’s how you grow up. It’s how we are as young humans, anywhere and everywhere.

Adulthood is different. There are times we remember being young and stupid, mostly when witnessing people being stupid sometimes— and that never changes. But adulthood is different.

It’s fascinating that they expanded the known landmass to cover the sphere instead of leaving the unknown area blank or oceanic. I wonder if Columbus saw this globe and figured it couldn’t be hard to get to India because of it, while everyone actually educated knew the planet was far bigger than that, with a much bigger gap.

Personally, I describe the word as basically being every language spoken at once, yet you hear it most clearly in whatever language you understand best, and more to the point, it speaks most clearly to your soul, which (on a failed save) cannot help but to obey and thus perish. Even on a save I try to describe just how creepy and horrifyingly eldritch it is.

I dm’d a steady group at my FLGS for a couple years with people I didn’t already know. It took an embarrassingly long time to learn some of their real names. Definitely that last one for me.