VoxAdActa

One of the biggest hurdles I had was learning to play Saturn games on a modern controller; the Saturn controller had 6 face buttons lined up in two rows of three, while all the controllers out today copy the xbox/playstation setup of 4 face buttons in a diamond configuration. It was a real pain to remap the controls for some games.

Reading this article is a total waste of time; you might be just a teensy bit more smarter at the end than you did in the beginning.

To save you a click:

A big consciousness experiment that was meant to solve a big scientific dispute came back as inconclusive.

We don’t know how consciousness is generated.

We still don’t know if animals are conscious,

Some researchers, using one unproven model, think only three groups (mammals, cephalopods, and arthropods) might be conscious, but the actual evidence (especially for arthropods) is weak.

Some other researchers, using this other unproven model, think consciousness started with the common ancestor of jawed vertebrates, which would mean a whole bunch of creatures (including insects and most fish) are conscious.

But we don’t know.

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn’t be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I’d be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

Got to the one where I had to include an emoji. I know I can get them on desktop, but I wasn’t willing to learn how tonight.

I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.

You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.

It doesn’t help that a bunch of influencers descended on YouTube one day selling classes for how to get rich quick with drop-shipping. A couple thousand gullible dipshits emptied their wallets and dumped a load of cheap crap onto Etsy, with product descriptions that read like they were written by Skaven.

yeah I’m not a climate change denier but neither was Crichton.

That dirty motherfucker wrote a whole-ass book denying climate change.

Can we please keep the Reddit spam in the specific Reddit-centered communities? I’m trying to stop paying attention to Reddit.

That’s 1 string theorist, Brian Greene. It is absurd to call all string theorists liars. Are all psychologists liars because they had a reproducibility crisis?

That’s like saying NDT is “one astrophysicist” or Freud is “one psychologist”. We’re talking about the guy who brought the entire concept to the public, and he’s sure as shit not the only guy who wrote fantastically optimistic treatises about a concept that real physicists didn’t bother with because it was inherently unfalsifiable due to being entirely untestable.

None of them wrote books that said “Yeah, this is a cool thought experiment that will never be able to do anything scientific hypotheses are supposed to be able to do”. Fuck, just make another thread asking “What do y’all think about the Many Worlds hypothesis?” and you’ll get a hundred comments talking about how cool it is as they walk straight out of the real of science and into the realm of crackpot woo-woo speculation. BECAUSE OF THESE PEOPLE.

Yeah, I agree with the video. After a certain point (I’ll be generous and say that point was 2000-2005), it was a lie. A scam. A con. No different from the guys who say the pyramids were alien landing markers and Stonehenge was built by fairies. It was a load of people saying nonsense stuff to sell books and speaking engagements.

Like, ok, at first? Sure, I can go with “it’s not a lie if you actually believe it,” in 1985 or even 1995. But by 2010? Come on. And then in 2020, to be like “Well, I mean, I never specifically said I believed in it, just that, you know, it was a thing…” is so gross. It’s like some shit my ex-wife would have said after a three-day-long running argument about some basic fact of the universe.

I still think we’ll see TES6 around the same time we see Half-Life 3 and the next Game of Thrones book.

Don’t know what to say that hasn’t already been covered in five pages of comments, but don’t date people who denigrate your hobbies. There’s no “age cutoff” for enjoying the things you enjoy. You don’t just stop enjoying things after a certain arbitrary age threshold.

The old view of adulthood as being a time of constant misery, struggle, and hardship, in which every moment of enjoyment you manage to claw from it is a moment stolen from the future, which will be replaced by further misery, is fucking stupid. Do what makes you happy, and ditch the Karens.

I didn’t say that. Which of the alternative names would you prefer to describe a thousand clones of the same game?

I mean, it’s not the rest of the world’s fault that Japan produced enough Final Fantasy clones to create a whole genre. But I guess we can try to call them something else. FFRPG? Linear RPG? Grindy-RPG? Not-Really-RP-RPG? Semi-Open-World Turn-Based Narrative? What would be preferable?

Judging from my Elder Scrolls Online experience, it takes me about 175-200 days played to burn out on something I’m really into. But nothing else has really come close to that since I quit about a year ago. I’ve been kind of bouncing from game to game, got a couple hundred hours into Guild Wars 2, a hundred hours or so each on Grim Dawn and Diablo 3, a little less than a hundred on Vermintide 2. Basically, when I find a game that scratches an itch, I will play it until I’ve squeezed every drop of content from the bottle. And it looks like I’ll give a new game about a hundred hours to hook me, if I can get past the first hour or so.

I kind of want to go back to ESO, but it’s 75% less fun for me without the subscription (the Craft Bag is BAE, and the DLCs are where I’d be spending my time), but I’m hesitating on the question of “Is it responsible of me to be spending $15/mo on a game I’ve already quit playing once?” And yet, nothing else has come close to hitting that mark for me. GW2 is really amazing, it’s got a lot of things I’d definitely miss if I went back to ESO, but… it’s not the same, somehow.