People like you are why I finally got round to playing the original Hollow Knight (Thank you; I’ve been having a lot of fun)

I’m not on Bluesky, so I’m not going to follow this person. However, I really appreciate how considerate it is to leave this link for people who would like to. Thank you; this is the kind of action that communities are built on.

I really like the world exploration. The world is pretty big, and it’s common to come across an obstacle that you can’t get past. I like the feeling of spending a few minutes trying to assess whether there’s a way past, and then going off adventuring elsewhere, eventually finding something that makes you go “ooooh, that’s how I’m meant to get past that earlier place”. I like that it really rewards exploration. There’s a lot of hidden stuff, but it’s not overly opaque — there are usually lots of clues that help you to find secrets.

The open world also makes bosses easier. I’m not great at bosses, so quite often I will get bored of trying against a difficult boss and go elsewhere. There’s nearly always more places to explore, and possibly find things that will make things easier.

I also love how well tutorialized the game is. When you get a new ability, the level design in the section after that helps you to learn first hand how that ability works, so even though the literal tutorial bit is little more than "Press [button] to [use ability], you come away with a good understanding of what that new ability will allow you to do.

I’m also typically not keen on platformers, but this game scratches a different itch for me

This is hilarious. I’m deeply sad that I don’t think my irl friends would appreciate this joke, because I want to share it with everyone.

(I am personally irked by vibe coding because some assholes in my life have been real smug about how much better of a programmer they are than me due to vibe coding. )

I recently used Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) as a static site generator. I found it easy to use. I personally used Gitlab pages, because I didn’t feel confident hosting on my home internet (didn’t want to inadvertently cause issues for my housemates when I’m still learning this stuff).

The nice thing about static sites is that it’s pretty easy to find free or extremely cheap hosting for them.

Yeah, the returns really become increasingly marginal the longer a comment chain goes on. ^(I think I’m committed to the bit though)

Yes, I did delight in getting to accurately use the word “factoid”; it’s useful for working through the trauma of learning that “factoid” doesn’t just mean a neat tidbit of fun facts, but rather quite the opposite. And for a “learning is fun” kind of gal like me, misinformation masked as genuine learning is deeply unfun — that is, unless we make the factoid itself our new object of study.

The system works!

I think there’s no better example of the harms caused by cis activists than how teenage cis girls put themselves through all sorts of torture just to perform a pastiche of femininity. They do absurd things like tweezing every body hair they can find (including in extremely painful areas that are liable to lead to ingrown hairs if not done properly), or saving up to get semi-permanent makeup. If anyone is in any doubt that cisgenderism is literally a cult, they clearly haven’t seen how teenage “cis girls” behave at a sleepover.

(Jokes aside, possibly useful context is that I’m a cis woman, so I have firsthand experience of the above insanity. The pressure was so heavy that I feel like it was often actively unhelpful in understanding my own gender as a teenager and young woman. Also relevant is that a huge part of me actually processing that stuff healthily was having trans and non-binary friends, as well as generally being in community with other queer people)

I am going to consider this a success story, given that you were transparent about the provenance of this factoid, and you corrected yourself. Yay for learning!

" I could go on, but realistically who will read this far?"

Me! I’ll read this far.

Joking aside, this was a good comment and I appreciate the time you spent writing it.

It tangentially reminds me of something I was reading recently about how Western Buddhism functions. The piece argued that Buddhists in Western countries engage with Buddhism in a manner that often involves trying hard to be scholarly in relation to reading canon — that there’s an instinct to cling to a sense of traditionalism as a source of legitimacy, which felt ironic to me. The result is that the practice of Buddhism in places like the United States looks super different to how it looks in places with a longer history and larger population of lay Buddhists.

I found it super interesting because it made me reflect on how the interpretation of Buddhism has had to change over the years to adapt to changing times, and how part of that ongoing change includes the interactions of Western Buddhism with more traditional sects of Buddhism. For example, I always used to find secular Buddhists odd because it felt like they were trying to pick and choose parts of a religion in a manner that was incompatible with how I viewed religion at the time. However, nowadays, I think it’s more practical to see these strands of secular Buddhist thought as being as legitimately Buddhist as anything else, because ultimately they’re a part of the conversation. It helps that since that time, I’ve seen many examples of people across many religions picking and choosing elements of their religion to adapt it to their particular cultural context — there’s far more nuance to it than I realised.

That makes sense. Sometimes when I’m cooking, I find that I need to take some time away from cooking before doing the final taste test and seasoning.

I have a dressing gown that’s made of a cool herringbone weave, and it looks super cool from a distance — almost like it’s iridescent

Edit: I realised I was sitting on my dressing gown, so here’s a close up image. I can’t capture the cool sheen type effect on camera unfortunately

If I were judging that comment in isolation, I’d probably give them the benefit of the doubt. In combination with the comment on this thread though, I feel like any of my doubt is dispelled

Now I’m deeply curious about your fashion sense. What’s the weirdest item that you love and regularly wear?

Yeah, I legit laughed out loud at this. It was a good joke

I suspect that I am someone who has aphantasia (inability to visualise stuff) and it’s weird, because I only relatively recently realised that it was a thing that I likely had. I knew it was a thing in general much before this, but it didn’t occur to me that it could apply to me, because surely that isn’t just something you can just not notice about yourself. It turns out that yeah, actually, it can be something you don’t notice, because if you’ve lived that way your entire life, you have nothing to compare against.

As a comparison, I am autistic and struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, as many autistic people do. Loud sounds and bright lights literally hurt me, and for a large chunk of my life, I didn’t realise that I was literally experiencing the world differently to other people; I thought that everyone felt this discomfort, but I was the only one making a fuss out of it. It really blew my mind when I was diagnosed as a teenager and realised that not only was I experiencing stuff that most people weren’t, that there may well be countless other ways in which my fundamental perceptions and cognition could be different, and I’d have no way of knowing.

Shit’s trippy as hell.

I remember way back when I was still intimidated by the command line, I was having issues with a video, and the only info I could find was on using ffmpeg to do some conversions directly. I laugh at the memory of me being nonplussed at trying to launch ffmpeg and expecting a GUI to pop up.

I am glad that I spent some time getting to know ffmpeg directly. There’s been a few times where knowing that it was ffmpeg under the hood helped me.

I have a Ulefone, which is too small of a brand for there to be much specific guidance on how to counter some of the unwelcome power management stuff

Very cool research. I was one of the few who seemed to like studying the plant module at university, so I’m having fun learning about this new development.

Unrelated to that, I gotta give props to one of the researchers quoted heavily in the linked article, Sarah Assmann, for how well she’s playing the grant game:

"We identified hundreds of metabolites in apoplastic fluid, which no one had analyzed to this extent before,” Assmann said. “That, on its own, is an important contribution to the field, independent of the research question that we specifically were addressing, because it gives a lot of leads on other potential signaling molecules for processes throughout the plant.”

Like, that is an expertly crafted statement in terms of bigging up the significance of your research in a manner that is honest, but strategic in terms of future grant money. I feel like I’m surrounded by researchers who are either doing awesome research that they’re terrible at pitching, or people whose projects are meh, but they turn the bullshit up to 11. These guys are playing the game well though