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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • It might disappoint you to learn that among american english speakers, literacy isn’t a good indication of maturity by age. Barbara Bush made a literacy initiative that’s still around, the One Good Thing® left over from the bush regime. The site has a handy map to show you the 40-60% adult literacy rate counties spread all over the states. It definitely helped me come to terms with the fact that sometimes a kid who is trying is gonna be more eloquent than an adult repeating the same tired take they’ve been rebutted for a thousand times.

    It’s easier for me personally to gauge age as it scales up when anonymity is involved - referential humor, recognizance of the ancient runes (Duckroll, Bill Murray’s face with only the jaw moving), and informed chitchat about presidential behavior predating Bush SR are all dead giveaways that a user is older, but with younger users you have a lot of hobby/interest overlap going all the way up to people in their 40s. You can’t look someone in the eyes and see if the light of youth has gone out yet on forums and imageboards.


  • I was of this opinion until I moved in with my partner who had a bearded dragon. Reptiles move strangely, but this bearded dragon had been a classroom pet for the first few years of her life, and was surprisingly social. She’d make eye contact, gesture with her body, present her head to be gently pet around the bristles, and even flip over to be rubbed on the belly like a dog if she was not currently or just finished eating. Responsive with body language to some specific one or two syllable words like her name or the words for mealtime, and very aware of visual cues (like any of the objects she was handed a mealworm from, even just once).

    I imagine a tarantula probably has some behaviors that would surprise me if it was conditioned as a pet and socialized, I know they have a fair number of ways aside from the bite to show displeasure or anxiety like flicking hairs and quickly shuffling away to show a defensive posture. I think it could be a fun experience and wouldn’t turn my nose up at it instantly these days if the opportunity came along; animal cooperation is a small joy even when it’s a bit foreign.





  • Lmao, enjoy missing out on the nier titles, the devil may cry series, every fable game, kingdom hearts, the whole god of war franchise, asura’s wrath, and the new final fantasies. Hell, even skyrim has more committal animations. You’re talking about a lenient and forgiving version of animation mechanics that are present in basically every action RPG.

    In the fighting game community at large, we have terms for people who blame the mechanics when they can’t come to grips with them, Scrub being the main one (as new players wildly hitting buttons at random on an arcade cabinet looks akin to “scrubbing them clean”). This is you. Your refusal to treat the game as it is, and expectation that it behave a way it doesn’t, is confounding to anyone who has put any effort into the title. The rules will not change just because you refuse to learn them. Stay furious though, I guess.


  • Some people like developing an artistic skill. This is that. Fuck up on the piano? Start that part over and get it right this time. Fuck up in elden ring? Start that part over and get it right this time. Both have acceptable amounts of variation that lead to success. Elden ring is in fact easier, because things can change that aren’t solely your skill level (stats/gear). There’s a lot of reasons the souls series and similar games are conducive to speedrunning, this loop of self-improvement is a major one.

    When I read comments like yours, they come across as saying “practicing anything is stupid and I do not see the benefit”. It’s easy: practicing anything is fun and you only get to see the benefit after you fail, then succeed. If there’s some mental disconnect you have where you can’t envision success for yourself, or you think succeeding won’t be fun, it certainly isn’t the fault of the game or the community.




  • You sound like everyone who has ever seen me menu spells in a KH speedrun. You sound like someone who turns weapons off in ULTRAKILL. Neither of these are explicitly bad things, but the system in place (a scrollable selection menu in real-time) can be utilized at the same level of efficiency as a spell wheel; you just need to exercise your memory when you set up and when you use your belt items.

    There’s a lot of titles that allow you to pause and utilize your menu. Dragon’s Dogma 2, for instance, allows you to pause at 0 HP and still use healing items, so long as you haven’t finished your dying animation or been knocked flat.

    Dark Souls and similar games make a deliberate choice in keeping the game in real time when you menu, and there’s a lot of truly functional items you can keep on your belt to help those weapons: status items can help you finish applying a status when an enemy leaps back, the physick, stamina regeneration, many extremely powerful effects that they want a small execution and collection barrier on. Alone in the Dark (5) had a real-time menu like this too far before it was popular, and people complained bitterly about it, so I get where the complaint comes from.

    Without dramatically reducing your available options or developing a completely different system of menus, the controls can’t really be less “clunky”. If horizon’s wheel and DaS’s menu aren’t for you, you may just not like how action RPGs control. If it’s about needing time for the menu, these specific titles may not really be up your alley. There’s a TON of games that operate the way you’re expecting, and at this point the community and developer alike are committed to sustaining this experience that provides friction. Friction is basically how you talk, from a design standpoint, about the difficulty of the game and why it’s present and what it does functionally.

    If you don’t understand how friction and fun are related, the game was unironically not made for you, and misunderstanding that or not being eloquent enough to explain that has led to the “git gud” divide. The menus are meant to provide friction. The combat animations and the period you must wait before acting again provide friction. Being a relatively heavy RPG, you can overcome friction multiple ways, either through developed personal skill or overleveling or picking tools that the boss isn’t equipped to handle or statuses it’s weak to.

    TL;DR of course the menus are clunky dude they’re based on a decades-long tradition of interfaces that provide gameplay fun. The fun is there for a grand majority of people, if you’re not having fun with the ball-crusher, nobody is making you use it.






  • You should look into the origin of the word meme. It’s not terribly old and you clearly don’t understand it. You’ve also gone and thrown away your benefit of the doubt by arguing semantics on what’s clearly meant to be a lighthearted and hyperbolic comparison. Propping up random ideas and putting them, as words, in someone else’s mouth is dumb as hell. Pretty sure there’s hundreds of places online where you can argue with other people who don’t know the difference between socratic and aristotelean logic.


  • The same thing actually passing a turing test would require. You’ve obviously read the words “Turing test” somewhere and thought you understood what it meant, but no robot we’ve ever produced as a species has passed the turing test. It EXPLICITLY requires that intelligence equal to (or indistinguishable from) HUMAN intelligence is shown. Without a liar reading responses, no AI we’ll produce for decades will pass the turing test.

    No large language model has intelligence. They’re just complicated call and response mechanisms that guess what answer we want based on a weighted response system (we tell it directly or tell another machine how to help it “weigh” words in a response). Obviously with anything that requires massive amounts of input or nuance, like language, it’ll only be right about what it was guided on, which is limited to areas it is trained in.

    We don’t have any novel interactions with AI. They are regurgitation engines, bringing forward sentences that aren’t theirs piecemeal. Given ten messages, I’m confident no major LLM would pass a Turing test.


  • While it was the complaint, the game did mention a required PSN account on all storefronts. This was disabled when auth/login was unplayably bad on launch week, then not re-enabled until a while later (with a week long heads up for new players and a month long heads up for existing players). Nobody actually got locked out of the game, and as my PSN account is registered somewhere I do not live, I don’t think anyone would’ve been stopped playing by the change if it had been pushed.

    What we “won” and sony “learned” is that they can’t get accurate metrics on playercount since HD2’s statistics aren’t being tracked correctly by the game’s session system and the playerbase is uncooperative. In this era where data is king, this just means we’ll stop seeing Sony funded helldivers ads on youtube while they market their giants that correctly report the data they’re looking for that helps them make a userbase that prints money.

    Oh, and we marred the all-time and recent review score from overwhelmingly positive. Guarantee you the successful action was the steam refund count on the game - truly unsolvable problem. As refund requests that don’t meet an automatic metric need a reply, and resolution usually takes ~an hour, the 6 digit refund count was not realistically solvable without rolling the requirement for a legitimate PSN account back. You can track how many total refund requests steam has day by day, as this is a public count in steam’s support page. There were 800k more than the average weekend.

    Tl;dr: while the complaint was this, the reality was not. The review bomb hurt arrowhead’s relationship with sony more than it hurt sony. The refund bomb didn’t cause steam to change policies this time but damn if it isn’t justified now.