The nightmares are increasingly thinkable

Art used to be considered not very worthy unless it had a moral message. The modern art movement helped us break free of those limitations. The new way society has found to limit the arts is the notion that art should be made for profit, and valued mostly in terms of price.

Sequels and reboots are an aspect of this, I’m beginning to feel. The code of old games should absolutely be maintained so that access to them is preserved, but what’s the real value of a remake, if the point is not to contribute to the conversations the original was influencing?

Creatives who aren’t driven by a hunger for new ideas and fresh concepts don’t usually leave us works that deserve to be revisited and maintained, but even works of homage should bring something new to the table.

Take Skywind; they’re remaking Morrowind, but they’re adding their own content, expanding on what was there, and flattering the source material to the extent that the original looks somewhat shabby in comparison.

If there is something worthwhile to be done with Fallout at this point, people can do it whether Todd Howard likes it or not. Tim Cain is totally on point here, and I wrote too much bye

It’s over. It was honestly over long ago, it’s just playing out in slow motion.

It will probably continue to play out for another thirty years at least. Increasingly horrible, so at any point “eight years ago” feels like back when things were sane, except we lost our minds decades ago already.

Sorry we’re the nation equivalent of DJ Khaled; we think we’re “suffering from success” but in truth we actually are and we don’t know it.

Now why would they be doing that?

Do you think I would sit here and try to make fetch happen if there was any chance you could stop me? Fetch happened 25 minutes ago.

It’s fetched, but not very far

I think you’re probably closest. There aren’t “filters” so much as we live in a universe that can only support life on a highly contingent basis, entirely by accident, at random intervals. It’s filters all the way down, really. None of us are getting out alive, might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

I have never cared for human nature. It’s tedious at best and often ghastly. We should all concern ourselves much more with human nurture.

To put it plainly, we should not be letting corporations do research on how to manipulate our most base instincts on social media. That would have been a moderate solution a century ago. Now we would need a more radical approach, such as outlawing most forms of advertising content and social media manipulation. And even raising the topic probably makes me sound insane.

If a platform puts arrow buttons on everything people say, and tell you that up means you get “points”, it’s a social metric. At this point if you’re trying to create a consensus metric, you’ll have to think of something else. It’s too ingrained in us.

Fuck the junta

It all hangs together. Nicely done

The bullet hell thing has firm Axiom Verge vibes

It’s a temporary first world problem. Either aging therapy breakthroughs will kick the can until after we destroy society some other way, or we’ll try your Logan’s Run thing (except by accident and even stupider than we’re imagining)

incredibly detailed rundown

Of course, there’s a lot I’m leaving out…

Was this off the dome, or did you have this whole thing in your pocket?

That’s pretty interesting. I fully agree that builds differ a lot in terms of how much they depend on player skill in these games, and I can see how that’s not necessarily a good thing - but it is rather to my point that it’s part of the “difficulty settings” that I’m arguing are intrinsic to the game mechanics. You’re meant to choose your own difficulty setting in this way, and I think it was a deliberate choice to make it so, and not a failure to balance everything to equality.

I still haven’t beaten BB or Sekiro, but DS 1+3 were pretty doable. I admit I haven’t gotten through all of ER yet, though from my experiences so far I feel that’s mainly due to work and parenting being such a drag on my mental energy.

I used to power through these games in a very slow, mistake-prone fashion. I’ve never been what you’d call “gud” at these games, which is pretty much my point - but it’s only a matter of troubleshooting the difficulty on my own terms (if I ever have free time and no burnout at the same time again, wish me luck on that).

Nodding acquaintance at best really

From Software games are great because of this feeling. They allow us to experience suffering, but it’s always a suffering we can overcome. It’s cathartic.

The game is not “difficult” per se, it’s just that the underlying systems of how to make it easier aren’t made explicit. You’re meant to engage with it and learn how to create the advantages you need. It’s supposed to be a process of learning and growth that feels rewarding and earned. Or read a guide.

It’s honestly one of the easiest From games, once you engage with the particulars. Let me be clear: This isn’t an elaborate “git gud”. That began as an ironically bad opinion that inevitably became a genuine opinion held by fools.

Engage with the systems and dynamics presented to you, and you begin to see that the difficulty setting in ER (and other Souls games) exists on a conceptual level.

The exception that proves the rule here is Sekiro, which was an amazingly interesting experiment in putting you into a character’s shoes through game mechanics - the only way to beat the game is to adopt the bold and precise combat style of the main character. The difficulty of that game comes from hesitation, fear, and carelessness - and it is painfully unforgiving.

A lot of tech firms bought into the gold rush mindset. NVIDIA sold the shovels. Sooner or later, when they figure out the world isn’t excitedly opening their wallets, the bubble will pop, and they’ll move on to the next empty hype train.

Japanese work culture is no joke. Though it can be hoped