I think most people tend to forget that part of the cat girl fantasy IS having an ancient demon trapped inside. Uphold the traditions!

I recently sat down with Baroque, the cult classic dungeon crawler for the Sega Saturn. Very good, top 20 games for me now!

First off, play the Saturn version. You can liberally rebind the controls in an emulator to make them feel a lot more like a modern FPS (d-pad up & down to left analog up/down for forward and backward movement with L & R to left analog left/right for strafing while putting d-pad left & right on right analog left/right for turning. Also rebind attack to R1 or R2 and map to whichever you didn’t bind attack to). Use scanline shaders, something like crt-royale or just hyllian-fast. Under the hood this game is a fairly standard mystery dungeon style roguelike but it’s ALL about the vibes.

The story is opaque but advances simply by doing runs through the dungeon. Make sure to talk to all the NPCs and do what they tell you to/fulfill their requests and you’ll figure it out. The gameplay is simple but the player movement is fast and smooth enough as well as hits having decent enough feedback when connecting with an enemy that it avoids feeling too much like a clunky old game. The weird monsters, gnawing on bones, and using torture devices really sell the atmosphere. A+ soundtrack, IMHO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRXUEH0ijdk&list=PLfhw8A1mg64H1MVWcSPocp6qaaQoiOAJo

TIP: Throw stuff at stuff. Experiment by throwing all the things at all the things. Throwing is a big mechanic in this game, don’t sleep on it. Throw things at sense spheres to teleport them out of the dungeon so you can guarantee them for your next run. Here’s an adorable Neocities fanpage for if you really get stuck, https://nervetower.neocities.org/guide

I’d skip the PS2/Remake, the vibes are all wrong and again, this is just a good game to spend some time with and soak in the bleak world they created. The PS1 version is pretty similar to Saturn but I think honestly the Saturn just nails the atmosphere a bit better.

Just from personal experience, I was in a relationship like this once and found it absolutely intolerable for me.

I have many friends and I value them quite a bit. I also manage my time and emotions by spreading them out. I can’t always talk about everything with everyone, nor can I always do the things with friends they want to do or spend all the time with them that they want. It’s a delicate and complex web. It doesn’t take a lot to manage, it’s just simply, “This for you, here and now, while I can” and “This for you, here and then”.

She on the other hand was co-dependent. Cut everyone else out of her life to wrap herself tightly around me and lean her entire emotional weight on me all the time. Any thought she had was run through me and any time she needed attention she’d come to me because she had nowhere else to turn. It literally broke me.

Maybe some people like this or can manage it better than I could, but be aware the toll this may take on your partner as well.

This was my very first thought, too. There’s already something out there he’s aware of and making a call to flood the internet with AI generated videos is going to lose it in the wash. Brilliant move honestly, if you’re a dirty skeezebag without a shred of humanity.

For me a lot of it is just weird motivations. I have a laundry list of games that sound interesting to me - really good in fact! And that I absolutely want to play, but sometimes that particular game just isn’t clicking for me, so I put it back on the list and I’ll try it later. Don’t be afraid to shuffle things around and try out different things until something sticks.

Lately I’ve been trying a lot of different genres that I never thought would appeal to me. I hate the actual sport and concept of playing golf but I will totally obsess over Hotshots. Same with racing. Was never a huge racing fan but something about the simplicity and focus of Trackmania really clicks for me. And bullet hells. Thought I’d find them waaay too difficult for my tastes, but it turns out memorizing patterns and getting into a flow state while some of the best 00’s electro you’ve ever heard fills your ears is pretty therapeutic.

Try changing the way you approach gaming.

Another thing I’ve really been enjoying is setting up EmulationStation Desktop (ES-DE) with RetroArch backend and building out a full retro collection. When I don’t want to play games directly, I can still sift through them. Download a completed Sega Genesis/Mega Drive collection, scrape the boxart and manual data, fix titles, patch fan translations. And if I see something interesting while I’m doing this that I’ve never seen before, I’ll pop into the game and poke at it a bit to see if it clicks and maybe THAT will be my thing for a bit. Look up some articles for best hidden gems on the PS1 and see if there’s something new, or get into a system that you’ve never touched before like the TurboGrafx-16. Discovery can be part of the fun, too.

I know we’re all burnt out and frazzled, sometimes forcing yourself to play that one game that you’ve been meaning to play and want to enjoy is just the wrong ticket and only puts too much pressure on yourself, further disincentivizing you.

People saying “it was the same with 4K” are really missing the point. It’s blatant consumerism pure and simple.

Viewing distance and diminishing returns play a factor .While some people cite upscaling, that can be of various and questionable quality depending on how it’s being done. 8K content is also exponentially more expensive to create, store, and stream and while I won’t say it’ll never happen, I don’t know if it’ll happen before the full collapse of society at the rate we’re going.

This could be a motivating factor for AI-generated content to reduce the cost of production, but I already think AI-generated content is slop and in 8K resolution any oddness or imperfection is just gonna be magnified.

In the end, though, you just can’t argue with some people when bigger number = better.

EDIT: I do admit there is some bias in taste here. I’m a 120hz nut and while I admit I can’t really see the difference between 60 and 120, I can feel it, especially in 3D action games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Psychonauts 2 where you pan the camera around to look at the environment and it’s buttery smooth. It makes playing Bloodborne wanna hurl my guts out from nausea (I’m sorry BB, I love you but you know you’re nasty).

Coup. Coup, coup, coup.

I feel like this is possibly one of those things where Dune was responsible for a lot of the things you’re seeing in it that you might call derivative. Dune was written in 1965 and while I don’t mean to imply that Frank Herbert’s work was wholly original and that he didn’t take great influence from a number of things himself, it was also highly influential at the time and provided a lot of themes and tropes that would be taken up by sci-fi in the coming decades as well.

Hasn’t it been said that Star Wars was admittedly pretty influenced by Dune? Lemme see if I can source that …

EDIT: Yes, apparently Herbert himself even noticed and directly complained about it, https://nerdist.com/article/everything-star-wars-borrowed-from-dune/

To be clear, I don’t think this is a bad thing. I don’t think Lucas was wrong to wear his influence on his sleeve and I don’t think Herbert was wrong to take some offense at it. This is just art, this is how things work. Was it too much? I think it’s debatable. Whatever. I’m too old to be arguing about Star Wars on internet forums at this point.

For me a lot of it depends on the perspective.

• For an FPS, I think non-inverted feels more comfortable. I generally just want the view window to move in the indicated direction, but I understand people that like it inverted.
• If it’s third person, I actually prefer completely inverted (including horizontal). Especially with something like Dark Souls where one stick controls the player and the other stick controls the camera. It’s more clear that the camera is an external entity and I’m controlling the angle, not the view window. It feels unpleasant and unnatural to me to push left and then also have the camera bend to the left.
• If it’s a rail shooter like Panzer Dragoon or something, we’re back to non-inverted. I’m controlling the absolute position of a targeting reticle and I just want it to move to where I want it to move.

Alright, chilling out for a second, I understand your point better. Thank you for the additional information.

I do still feel we may fundamentally disagree though.

It’s honestly been a good long while since I read 1984, but I think my interpretation was different. You use the word “collapsing” but Newspeak was a more intentional reinforcing through rigid structure. They purposefully reduced the language to good and ungood as a direct means to smooth out the nuance.

In essence I’m contesting that strict language standards are necessary to be understood. I mean, of course some standards are still required, just not strict enough to be all uptight about it when people start to bend them. The fluid nature of language is what allows it to evolve and I think stifling that evolution is both foolish and downright impossible in the long run. The advent of the internet and social media speeds things up.

Let’s set aside the stupid TikTok censorship stuff for the moment because that has it’s its (ah fuck, don’t crucify me) own unique motivation. Slop as a noun has existed for a long while with its set definition. The modern use of it has evolved this new connotation to specifically imply something is rushed, derivative, or overabundant. As people start to apply it in more situations, it shows an understanding of those new connotations even when they haven’t been directly communicated. I think that’s cool. I think that shows a deeper understanding of how language moves and is shaped than strict adherence to definitions. True, eventually its overuse may dull the meaning a bit, but by allowing language to be continually fluid we leave the door open for other new wordly innovations.

But again, I aim’t not linguist.

Lol, wut?

Burying the lede here.

I don’t think this is the expression you intended to use, or if it was, you used it poorly.

In my post I:

1. Open by indicating that I think it is foolish to enforce strict language standards
2. Affirm this point by saying that the primary purpose is to simply be understood
3. Expand on this point by saying I think it’s cool that language evolves

Where did you even pull that “good” and “ungood” dichotomy from?! Don’t be smarmy and quote high school literature reading lists at me. But if that’s the extent of your repertoire, perhaps I have some recommendations for you 🫤

I do not understand people who get uptight about English. French? Sure (I’m still gonna laugh at them, but I get it).

English has always been a joke of a language and I have nothing but respect and sympathy for people who pick it up as a second+. So long as you’re understood, it’s fine. Brutalizing it is half the fun. See how far you can bend it and still get your point across.

The speed at which it mutates is also interesting just to watch, and I say that as someone who isn’t even a linguist. How quickly a term catches on, gets overused, and migrates to ironic is culturally fascinating. I type like this and use proper spelling because it’s a stylistic choice for how I represent myself on the internet, but I couldn’t give a damn if you use the wrong you’re/your when half of you buffoons are spelling it “ur” anyways. I’m not ur English teacher, do what you want.

No, look at this, it’s fundamentally awful! It’s a stylistic decision to omit the mouths of the characters that leads to more expression through the eyes and overall design. The AI is incapable of understanding that and FORCES mouths onto them because things need mouths. Especially the one on the right where like, ugh, what the fuck is going on there. It’s gross, I hate it.

It’s like those high-res texture packs that just upscale everything for the sake of upscaling it and loses all artistic merit or cohesive aesthetic in the process. Fuck this.

At OpenAI, we can’t eliminate that disruption.

… oh yes you can …

Please, Don’t Create the Torment Nexus was written in the 70’s. The author only had a vague idea of the concept. We can make it better. Tormentier.

Of course they’d never just outright admit to it, but it’s kinda like who farted in an elevator. Somebody is doing the jamming. Jamming is happening. I wonder who it could be? Who could it be?

I’m old enough to have bought a boxed copy of Hexen off a shelf at Babbage’s. I have always wanted to be excited about that game but it has never clicked for me.

I just recently waded my way through From’s old Shadow Tower Abyss (quite good actually!) and am craving some dark dungeon crawling, so I’m hoping maybe this time I can come at it with the right approach and finally appreciate it …

Newsom is a wet sack of political ambitions with no stance or principles.

“We’re about to put a memecoin out. And you know what? Donald Trump, we’ll see how well your coin does versus our coin,” Newsom said.

Seriously, what the fuck??? Memecoins are scams through and through. You don’t release a competing scam to troll Trump. It’s asinine.

All of this is a PR team backing him up anyways. He’s had some short term success with a few hits that landed with milquetoast liberals, but he can’t sustain that “momentum” because none of it is genuine. That fake, toothy smile makes my skin crawl. The mask will slip, but even with all that said, I’m still afraid it’ll be sufficient to fool enough of the people. I hate it.

Some sites have started sending them to you before you’ve even done anything!

Never been to this site before? Don’t worry, chat bubble in the upper corner already displaying a little red dot with a 5 in it. There’s already an AI chatbot trying to offer help and discounts off on things and … AUGH!

I see your point but there is one major difference between adults and children: adults are by default fully responsible for themselves z children are not.

I think you miss my point. I’m saying that adults, who should be capable of more mature thought and analysis, still fall victim to the manipulative thinking and dark patterns of AI. Meaning that children and teens obviously stand less of a chance.

Independent of technology, what a parent can do is learn behavior and communication patterns that can be signs of mental illness.

This is of course true for all parents in all situations. What I’m saying is that it is woefully inadequate to deal with the type and pervasiveness of the threat presented by AI in this situation.