That’s not really being rich, though. The guys on that list could theoretically buy whatever countries they wanted, hell, they could buy multiple, hell, they could just buy owning stock in every country by way of bribery. If you’re the leader of a single country, it’s as though your money is all invested for you already in that single country. You’re mostly locked down to wherever you are. But the Walton family, owning Walmart, last time I checked the third largest economy in the world, they can extract that money and pivot wherever they want, with basically no borders or limits.

I mean I feel like I’ve seen him get smeared since way way before covid was happening, like, since the 2010’s at least he’s been getting heat for no reason, I feel like

No yeah for real. I’ve never seen him doing anything I would really consider to be annoying, or at least, more annoying than any other science communicator, and he constantly gets shit on for being like, too cocky, but then when you push back I never get any examples of things he’s actually fucked up on, just that he has bad vibes.

I mean, I dunno. I was sort of okay with the link’s awakening remake using this aesthetic, because it was a one off game, but it does sort of strike me as a very like, default, low rent kind of appearance, and the item and enemy copying ability also strikes me as something that’s not that interesting, and not as interesting as the normal zelda dungeon by dungeon kind of scheme. A good portion of the things you’re gonna copy are probably going to have exceedingly similar behaviors, they’re going to be functionally identical.

It’s obviously a copy, ironically, or maybe an extension, of the design philosophy behind the recent two big zelda games, and this one’s adapted it to a lower budget 2D game. I dunno, I’m still not in love with the idea as a whole, and that’s kind of after two big games. I dunno if it’s really ever gonna be on the level of, say, portal, or something, right? Which is a weird comparison to make, but I do feel the need to make it. I’ve never really found physics puzzles to be that interesting, which is gonna be what a lot of games that try like, universal mechanics, are going to have to cowtow to, because physics systems are theoretically infinite even though they actually do have a relatively small set of constraints, right. I’ve also never really enjoyed stacking boxes on top of one another as a solution to a puzzle, despite that being omnipresent in every good immersive sim, which is weirdly what I would kind of peg the modern zelda design philosophy as belonging to.

I dunno. I feel like the change in style has been kind of hard for me to pin down. It’s very obvious in a difference of feel, right, but in terms of formally locking down the actual difference, I can’t say I’ve really found much that’s all that weird about it. Sure, you can theoretically use whatever ability, anywhere, at any time, to make any vehicle, or scale any platform, stuff like that. But 90% of the time, it’s going to be totally useless as an ability. You’re going to fall into a couple of discrete, routine behaviors, even given an “infinite” ability that you’re just sort of, free to use and abuse like that.

Compare this to a conventional zelda tool, which is not generally usable anywhere, right. You can use the hookshot to stun or damage enemies, right, you can use it to grapple onto a discrete set of platforms, but outside of that it’s not gonna be too useful. I don’t see that as being all that different from like. Ahh, well, with this ability, you can paste together two pallets! It’s effectively the same, they’re gonna come with a pretty similar set of constraints and behaviors.

I feel like, to me, a lot of the fun of emergent mechanics comes from eeking out solutions to puzzles that designers probably haven’t thought about at all. Sometimes you can basically sidestep a challenge that otherwise you would’ve had to do, and in that way, it feels very much like a casual version of a speedrunning trick, or, it’s something that rewards your cleverness, or your understanding and mastery of the mechanics beyond even what the designers might anticipate. I like that much less when it feels like the designer doesn’t have a set, like, idea of a solution to a puzzle. When they’ve just given me all the tools, and then they tell me to go nuts, I don’t feel as though I’m circumventing anything, I just feel as though I’m doing the puzzle as god intended. There’s probably also some amount of, if everyone’s super, then no one is, going on there. If every puzzle is some puzzle I’m able to circumvent with clever rules lawyering or mechanics abuse, then it gets older, faster.

So I dunno. I really like the third banjo kazooie game, it was probably ahead of it’s time, if this is the kind of direction we’re going in now, and obviously I have some level of nostalgia for it, because the 360 was my formative console, because I’m a zoomer. Feel old yet? At the same time, the first two games were probably just straight up better games, if I had to actually be honest with myself. They have wider appeal, and even if you just have an ability that you can only use on a specific pad, with a specific symbol, and 95% of the challenges can only be conquered how the game designer intends, it’s probably still gonna be better and have more broad appeal than having to either come up with a discrete set of vehicles, use the defaults, or else spend like 50% of your game time in the vehicle creation menu constructing increasingly niche vehicles to better perform the specific task.

I dunno. You see what I’m getting at, though?

I’m gonna be honest most times when I write a response I’m taking a shit and not paying very much attention to the thread which it belongs beyond my vaguest recollection to what was said

You know it’s kind of funny but at the same time I do think it’s somewhat dystopian to see like, a natural phenomenon, right, a creature, and a creature that we need a name for, named after a brand of toys. Whenever I see this stuff it’s funny but it’s also sad and kind of dystopian, and kind of undignified. It’s like, I dunno. Imagine a kid points to a picture of a spider in a little book and asks their parents what the name of the spider is and instead of being like “that’s a tarantula” they gotta be like “yeah, that’s the hot wheels spider”. It’s a shitpost, it’s funny, it’s existentially hilarious, but it’s also so fucking depressing.

I mean I just don’t think it’s so much a calculated effort by the ruling class as kind of a natural evolution of the market taking hold of and exploiting the human mind to the nth possible degree, such as they have always done.

What’s the pod?

i’m fairly sure the point (whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not) of having politics moved there is because there is no political topic that could be discussed properly there. it makes for good, distracting noise.

It’s more stupid than that. The idea is that 140 characters is a lower barrier of entry for a reader, compared to reading a series of paragraphs that might be able to at least talk about something, or attempt to summarize an issue. It’s why accounts like wint can pop off, and become so prolific.

You know fun fact I learned recently from a let’s play: tentacles only refer to the appendages which end in suckers, but along the rest of their length, have no suckers. The other appendages are called arms. So, octopuses actually have no tentacles, they have arms. Squids have 8 arms, and 2 extra tentacles, which are the long ones that have little spade shaped sucker hands on them. So, probably when you pictured tentacles, you were actually picturing cephalopod arms.

imagine, over the centuries of blood donation, the sword slowly grows from a knife, into an absolutely huge dragonslayer behemoth

Fucking awesome, exactly the comment I was looking for in this thread

Maybe the sword is just the product of a small cult which drains blood to create it?

this is some damn 2011 millennial humor

that’s so based hoo lee I must’ve missed that one gotta do a rewatch

we’d do it cause it’d be funny even if they weren’t tortured or nothing. can you imagine a little asshole running around the utopia being like “no, no, I’m supposed to own things, where are my stocks, where are my numbers, no!”. probably it’d suck that all their friends are deade though. I’m sure you thaw a couple cause the have rare diseases or certain kinds of DNA though.

There’s a lesson here about the differences between history and a good historical narrative, but that’s the lesson of most history and no one ever listens to it.

There’s a lesson here about the differences between history and a good historical narrative, but that’s the lesson of most history and no one ever listens to it.

I suppose a third paradigm is cold-blooded, individualist Realpolitik; It’s a dog eat dog world, fuck you, I’m just trying to get mine as hard as everyone else is.

This secret third one is the one that basically everyone has, yeah, it’s pretty depressing.

I dunno, at this point I’m more given to a kind of blade runner, or maybe mad max paradigm, of like. Even if the star trek future is the shit, right, even if they come up with and use terraforming technologies, which we could probably do at least for offsetting carbon emissions if the theoretical short term proposals are anything to go by, we don’t have any real way of understanding what the real knock-on effects of those short term solutions would be. We would probably be just as likely to increase ocean acidification by a couple points in our quest to sequester carbon by dumping a shit ton of iron oxide in the ocean, and then end up killing a bunch of sea life which is connected to everything else. It just becomes a kind of whack a mole style game where you trade one consequence for another at the expense of the environment, and if that ends up happening, I expect pretty quick humanity will attempt to totally shutter off any consequence which might pose a threat to humanity or capitalism, and put them off onto the broader environment instead, and the people who are reliant on those environments to survive. I.E. you get put into a horrible blade runner future, where the survival of humanity isn’t in question, but humanity’s humanity has gone extinct.

Couldn’t we have like greenhouses at some level of scale? Maybe even like, integrate it more easily into normal housing or just larger public spaces? Banana trees get tall, but they don’t get so tall that you couldn’t probably fit them into a lot of places. Beyond that I think maybe the only problem would be, like, humidity, which there’s probably some sort of workaround for, I dunno.

I feel like the solution is probably more local banana