ConstableJelly

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Love a new youtube rec.

This is a really cool idea though. I'm actually playing F.I.S.T. right now and I've absentmindedly noticed some neat details in the environment backgrounds. Might slow myself down to a stroll in one of the city areas and take a closer look.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Been thinking about this type of thing a lot, especially as my older child is reaching an age where his friends are being allowed to play things like Roblox. Finding myself needing to explain gambling-adjacent risks, design patterns intended to capture rather than entertain or delight, and general digital citizenship.

Because he doesn't have a ton of experience, I think he finds it unnatural to believe people like game makers might act deceptively or even maliciously. And I imagine he's skeptical that his attention could even be manipulated the way games try.

Even "educational" games like Prodigy, endorsed by and used in his school, are lousy with operant conditioning and flow state design (and by some credible accounts are not even educationally valuable). I drew a line immediately against spending money within games and he's so far been accepting of it. But the temptation is all over the place.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

I think the argument is that even if you're not consciously noticing it, your brain picks it up and that's part of the unsettling feeling you get. Is that true? I don't know. I was unsettled as hell watching Hereditary, but there's a lot more unsettling content besides the quasi-noticeable woman in the corner of the ceiling.

I'm glad to see It Follows included in the essay though. Watching characters converse in the grass, in the sunlight, in a scenario that in almost all other horror movies would be a tension-relieving safe scene, until you notice another character, blurry and deep in the distance, walking robotically on a straight path toward the central characters, still gives me chills. It remains one of my favorite effects, and is a top-tier reason why I love horror movies even though I don't love feeling tense or scared.

 
 

Downloading now. I'm excited to give it a try. Paradise Killer was a super unique and really fun experience that has left a pretty strong impression. This seems like a really big departure gameplay-wise, but I hope it's good.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

There are multiple sources referenced to weave a new commentary about the relationship between video games and labor for both players and creators 🤷.

 

"Single-player games with plenty of weapons to upgrade, skills to gain, and currencies to spend are perhaps the archetypal iteration of this phenomenon, but almost all contemporary games contain some mimetic elements of work and market exchange. They don’t offer fantasies of escape, of imaginative play for its own sake; they offer a fantasy of rules—a rationality otherwise missing from the contemporary wage labor process. Vicky Osterweil has called this type of game a “utopian work simulator”; it doles out rewards at predictable intervals in exchange for our disciplined effort. These rewards can make the game easier, allow us to purchase in-game adornments, signal our achievements to others, and progress in a logical and satisfying trajectory toward an achievable goal. Games remain a form of diversion, but what they divert us from is not our labor, but our disappointment with its volatility, its arbitrariness, its cruelty and unfairness."

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Because email federation is inherent to everyone's understanding of how that service works. And perhaps more importantly, email "instances" are run by corporations. Laymen are not signing up on a "server" or "instance," they're signing up for Google, Apple, or Microsoft - the service they get aligns to a company that provides it. Nearly every single service that anyone has ever signed up for online has followed the same essential process: go to fixed url, create id and password, gain access.

It's easy to underestimate, especially in communities like this, how enigmatic the entire infrastructure of the internet is to the general population. Think of those videos where people are asked what "the cloud" is: they pause and ponder and then guess "satellites?" because they've never even wondered about it. I'm guessing that for many people, something like Twitter is just something that lives in their app store that they can choose to "enable" on their phone by installing it.

People know that software is "made up of code," but they don't understand what that means. The idea that an "application" is a collection of services run by code, that there are app servers and web servers, that there are backends and frontends, is completely unknown to (I'd guess) a significant majority of people. And if someone doesn't understand that, it's honestly near impossible to understand what anything in the fediverse is.

And most importantly: this is not any user's fault. IT and the Internet developed so quickly, and it was made so seamlessly accessible by corporations who at first just wanted their services to be adopted, and then wanted everything even more deliberately opaque so those users were more likely to feel locked in and dependent while the services themselves tail-spun in degradation.

We need more, and more accessible, and friendlier, tech literacy in general. The complexity of our world is running away from us ("I have a foreboding [of a time...] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues" - Carl Sagan) and we simply can't deeply understand many of the things that directly impact us. But because of its ubiquity, IT may be the best chance people have of getting better at understanding.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I fear Matthew Vaughn has just lost his grip on the humanity that so brilliantly balanced the silly stories he likes to tell. Stardust is one of my all-time favorite movies, and Kick-Ass, X-Men First Class, and Kingsman are some of the most entertaining blockbuster flicks available, where the action is satisfyingly contextualized through excellent character work.

But his last three movies just don't have the right equation. From what I remember, Argyle started out really strongly but seriously devolved after the halfway point. I think he's indulging too much in the overwrought spectacle that he first toed the line of at the end of the first Kingsman.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Lincoln was a great biopic. Hyperfocusing on one pivotal moment in the man's illustrious life, and using the complexity of those circumstances to explore his intelligence and charisma from all angles was so much more effective than the whole-life-in-fast-forward approach so many other biopics follow.

Plus Daniel Day Lewis in peak form. Just an indescribably good performance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Truly I wish that lawsuit the best. I still think the tone of the article is off, but certainly I may be guilty of the same.

Thanks for taking the time. Hard to keep from sinking too deep into despondency.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I get page not found 🤷

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

I may very well be wrong, happy to admit it. Do you know what laws are being broken?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

So...to my untrained ears this sounds kind of dumb.

cybersecurity has always been about protecting computer systems more generally from any sort of misuse, no matter how the adversary might access them.

And misuse is defined the system's owner, who in this case has given explicit permission to Musk. The whole article is predicated on the idea that Elon Musk...lied or put on a disguise or something. By any currently known measure, he's allowed to be doing everything he's doing because that's what the current, duly-elected administration told him to do.

There was an image on the front page today of the everything-is-fine dog sitting among the flames saying "they can't do this it's illegal." That seems apt for this article. America elected a fascist, and that fascist is openly tearing down all the informal rules and norms that we've always treated like laws.

Pretending like there's a legal issue with a lot of what's been happening is a distraction and waste of time that Democrats appear to be perfectly comfortable using as air cover to not exercise what little power they might have. I feel confident it will lead nowhere, and unless the people with power and influence who pretend to care figure out how to actually accomplish anything, we will just keep sinking.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I think the remake addresses these issues as well.

 

Granted, it's only out of 9 reviews, but it came out on Tuesday. Seems like many publications are sleeping on it.

Its predecessor Ender Lilies was probably my personal biggest surprise of 2024 (when I played it, not when it was released). I wrote up some thoughts in the Playstation community earlier. I'm excited to pick this up once I clear out some of current commitments.

view more: next ›