Whoa, I was weirdly into My Little Pony for a while but I didn’t realize it powered data centers.

Funny story.

Indications were he shouldn’t have recovered; and he was surprisingly positive, showing resilience to his disability and thinking about how he might continue life as a poet.

But, his sister, a dark mage, was far more mortified about it than he was, and made a magical sacrifice, killing some creature and draining her own lifespan - to restore his full motion. All of this, without asking his permission. He turns out okay, but there’s an implication he shouldn’t have.

So yeah, it’s part of a dramatic arc in that story.

High Fructose Corn Syrup is pretty close to a drug. It blocks the receptors in your mind that signal to you “Okay, I’m full, that’s enough now.” Even sugar doesn’t do that.

I’d love it if a group could collude on a standard for music signals.

Imagine this: You have a music player following this signal standard.

Game starts, it signals GAME_STARTED, and the media player signals STOP_GAME_MUSIC, so the game itself plays no BGM, leaving it to the music player. But, then the game can also signal later on: THEME_MENUS, THEME_EXPLORE, THEME_COMBAT, THEME_BOSS; and the media player can respond to that by cross fading between playlists built for each.

Watch Dogs 2 had an “invasion” system like Dark Souls, but it also allowed pausing in the world anytime you weren’t being invaded. It’s been a nice thing to point to anytime Souls fans make that excuse.

I could still see it as an admission of imperfection.

Arc Raiders includes an “unstuck” feature. They’re aware their physics system isn’t infallibly perfect, and getting stuck permanently could lead to loss of hard-earned gear. So, if a player is in one spot for more than a minute, they offer an option to teleport you to a safe place a few feet away.

The thrown into a wall thing had a nice subversion in Dragon Prince, mostly a kids show. A primary character, a knight, is batted by a dragon into a rock before being chased off. As they finish, they go to check on him, and he’s been permanently paralyzed from the neck down.

Similarly but even more nerdy is a car making one swerve on dirt, that requires switching traction control off. Top Gear did a bit on it where they were hired to record a chase scene for a movie, and insisted on the following shot;

“You have to hold the mode button for ten seconds to turn off Traction Control!”
cue ten quiet seconds of holding the button

I feel like I get where he’s coming from, but I can see the revulsion.

I picture someone asking their AI to write a rules engine for a gamemode and getting masses of duplicative, horrific code; but in my own work, my company has encouraged an assistive tool, and once it has an idea of what I’m trying to do, it will offer autocomplete options that are pretty spot on.

Still, I very much agree it’s hard to sort the difference and in untrained hands can definitely lead to unmaintainable code slop. Everything needs to get reviewed by knowledgeable human eyes before running.

I’ve never even installed the Epic Lawnchair. I just use Heroic, which works very well.

1. Developers should spend effort vouching for a launch without startup logos. Even if supporting libraries/publishers are credited some other way, startup movies take up a lot of time when gamers launch the game many times.
2. Trails in the Sky has a feature where you can choose to launch the game directly into your most recent save game rather than ending up at the menus. This would be a boon for many singleplayer games, especially those with densely animated menus.

Only a small blow in a big battle, but one suggestion: Put active effort into your searches for positive content on something rather than negative.

Don’t watch 8 videos about how Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 sucks, and it’s over for Activision. Do a search for videos highlighting 10 great indie games that deserve your attention. YouTube even has an “AI search” that, while it is tools of the enemy, may let you be more explicit about what you’re looking for.

The secondary benefit of finding these videos is that anyone putting them out is probably aware negativity and outrage manufactures more views, and is instead choosing to better their content for its own sake.

Some other search options to curate your feed: Animations by hobbyists and college students, zoologists giving introductions to animals together with their name/location (NOT out-of-context 5 second clips of funny animals stolen without permission), any decent animations in Garry’s Mod / SFM, Machinima…

Heck, if someone wants a specific pointer and has a spare day, look up the Clear Skies trilogy. Yes…trilogy

Sort this one with the girlfriend’s “would you still love me if I was a worm” philosophy. It’s so far outside of reality it’s not worth considering.

Publically accessible does not mean publically reusable. You can find a lot of classic songs on YouTube and in libraries. You can’t edit them into your Hollywood movie without paying royalties.

Showing them to an AI for them to repeat the melody with 90% similarity is not a free cheat to get around that.

This is in part why the GPL and other licenses exist. Linus didn’t just put up Linux and say “Do whatever!” He explicitly said “You MAY copy and modify this work, but it must keep this license, this ownership, and you may NOT sell the transformed work”. That is a critical part of many free licenses, to ensure people don’t abuse them.

Yeah…a long time ago I learned lessons about patience, delayed satisfaction, and ended up building a large roster in that game without giving them a dime. I could afford their packs, but it seems like a bad price ratio especially when acknowledging the low chances.

On the gacha front, I play Zenless Zone Zero. Parry mechanics are nothing new, but I love both the way they have you parry by swapping in an agent to take the blow, and the very detailed effects and animations they have for each attack.

It’s still a gacha, and I remind myself to stop playing anytime it bores me; but it manages to hold my attention decently.

Here’s aiming to be hopeful…

I remember back when playing DRM video in a web browser on an open source operating system seemed like a worrying impossibility. Many sites stayed stuck on closed-source flash players for that reason alone. It was a while before we ended up with this solution I only partly understand - where the DRM decoding is handled through some kind of trusted block, that generally doesn’t have full OS control?

It’s total happenstance that the best stories told in those worlds have come from game developers. Making those stories interactive as well as cinematic is an entire extra layer of difficulty upon the creative process, and they cleared that hurdle too.

Jedi Survivor even made the struggle of staying human, confronting anger (and the dark side), and the fight for survival far more nuanced and well-written than the third trilogy did.

I feel like a lot of these pointer devices miss the simplicity of a remote. A simple one will have a tough time entering passwords, but it’s perfect and simple for the most common actions: Turn on without walking across the room, open the most recent application, play the next episode of the series I was watching last, usually just by mashing confirm. (Nothing to tell it to go fullscreen: Because that’s an obvious assumption for everything)

Running it all on a PC just adds more steps, unless you follow a LOT of guides to configure it to get through those things easily.

I’d really like it if web standards were better at allowing a video website to be navigated with an “Up/Down/Left/Right/Confirm/Back” device, so that you didn’t need apps for everything. That would be good for consumer devices like Apple TVs as well as people running home PC setups.

Everyone else didn’t have these social media options. So, a lot more people were seeking interaction via community locations.

I think certain shared topics like religion have fallen aside too; even if you find Sky Man to be silly, it was quite often a good reason for people to gather and chat.

Increased media also means we have limited time and attention spans. We have such a ridiculous number of options for how we use our eyes, it feels wasteful to commit them to one thing, even just socializing, for a long period.

It’s not impossible to break the cycle if you recognize how everyone else also recognizes the issue. But being open with others, especially being the initiator everyone appreciates, takes practice.