ameancow

@ameancow@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I spent a bunch of solo time just building up a base and trying not to progress too far so I wouldn’t ruin the fun.

  I have about 20 games where I stopped before getting too far “just in case they decide to join me.” Those games are now piled up in dusty, forgotten crates alongside the Ark of the Covenant in that same giant warehouse. I think I’m part of the slim margin of people who enjoy simulated hardships as a social bonding experience, I don’t know if makes other people too bored, or too anxious, but I can’t make people play hard, slow games where you have to rely on each other and talk through problems.

  I used to be able to, I had great success running groups in SCUM and Project Zomboid but as more and more short-attention-span gaming has been released, people have migrated away from investment-gaming and now just want to “chill” with some colorful slop and fast battle royals or loot extraction. Now when I ask if someone wants to play something like SCUM, they ask if we can play a game where loot and experience gain is turned up to max, enemy robots are disabled, and you can order loot from discord bots in chat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Between raising two young boys and putting in long hours at a marketing job, Kevin Caldwell can almost never find the time to make dinner. So he and his husband spend about $700 a week to order in"⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I do entirely mental work all day and it leaves me feeling like I’ve been digging trenches. I can’t really impart this to people who don’t have similar jobs, I get told I should be energetic and grateful I have a job I can do from my home office.

  And I am grateful, that doesn’t make it easier when you actually care about your work and try to do it effectively. I’m just as tired doing a week-long analysis project for a big-ticket corporation doing it from my office as if I went into corporate and made use of their “first come, first serve” workspaces.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HD 137010 b⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Additionally, imagine if it’s true that the universe is actually infinite. There’s no real reason to believe it’s not, and if it is, that means we cannot possibly predict some things about it. Such as the chances of us living in a densely populated region versus being literally a trillion light-years from the nearest occupied planet. Large-scale patterns of distribution of just about anything could look like anything imaginable over any given area, and there may never be a scale in which homogeneity becomes stable and perpetual.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yah I keep hearing fantastic things about the game, but I can’t connect with the “looping” mechanic and the weird ship/floating controls make it hard to want to keep doing the same planets or whatever again and again.

  And I mean, I KEEP trying to get to a place where I’m like “Oh yah, here we go again, lets do this” like with other games and it’s just not happening. I can’t find the fun part. Maybe I’m too old.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Diablo 2 was one of the best games of its type ever, and everything after has just been desperately trying to recapture that feeling. PoE was kind of close, but got a tad grindy. I like when a game just wraps up and you don’t have an endless slog at the end to do completion sub-goals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I was in that pit for a while, it took me years to actually sit down and play it long enough to kind of figure out what to do and how to play, when I did it was very good. I still never had the time to actually finish it, but I highly recommend just pushing through that first barrier, it’s worth it for at least a few days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Arc Raiders took this trope and turned it on its head. The game is entirely about being a loot goblin around other people in a no-rules environment but if you don’t pick fights, you will gradually get matched to servers with other people who don’t pick fights, and you start to meet people and have adventures together, it happens very organically and pleasantly, and if you ever DO run into a PvPer the game doesn’t really give a huge advantage to sweaty try-hards, a newb with a basic gun can defend themselves just as well as some well-equipped player hunter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It was marketed as a game, when really it’s an interactive novel. If you don’t like that kind of experience, you won’t like it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I know a number of people who have motion-sickness issues with games like this, it’s almost entirely first-person games that cause this.

  Some things to consider from my years of assisting managing it:

  • You get motion sick because your eyes tell your brain that you’re moving, but your inner-ear gyroscopes say you’re not, so your brain assumes you must be infected with something so it starts measures to evacuate your stomach of potential poison.

  • View bobbing, screen-shaking, depth-of-field, motion-blur and frame-rates have a huge impact on your sense of balance and visual processing of motion, so try to always turn those off. (Minecraft has had view bobbing since early on, it’s always “step one” to turn it off for everyone.)

  • Framerates also can make you sick. If you’re playing an first-person game and the field of view isn’t moving smoothly it will be more likely to make you start to feel nauseous. Turn graphics settings down until your frame-rates are at least 40 or so. (You would have to look up the game and/or platform to figure out how to turn on FPS display on your screen to see where you’re at.)

  • The brain is highly elastic for learning new things, but also learns negative associations. This means sometimes you have to train it like a toddler or puppy. Patiently and with persistence. This can take the form of only playing for 15 minutes instead of waiting until you start to get nauseous. You need to train your brain that the viewing experience isn’t actually harmful by disconnecting the association with feeling sick, by getting used to the game without triggering the motion sickness. So frequent, short sessions, not letting yourself get sick. (This is the most effective method anyone I know has tried.)

  • Medication. Seriously, anti-histamines work pretty effectively. Motion-sickness pills are literally just anti-allergy medication. It will make you very quite groggy though so don’t plan on staying up late playing. Chewable nausea tablets also help a lot. Again, you’re just trying to let your brain adapt to a new perspective/activity without getting fully sick.

  • Field of view is also a huge factor. Try turning it up or down, most 3D games give you the option. Additionally, playing on a smaller screen can help a lot too. Play in windowed mode and gradually work on making the screen larger and larger until you’ve adapted.

  • Engagement in the game also helps. Once you start having fun you will often forget about the negative sensations and give your brain more time to adapt. If you’re not enjoying a game, don’t force it. Try a different one until you find some mechanic you enjoy that hooks you.

  • After adaptation, you would likely also need to periodically “refresh” it and play a 3D game for a little while every day or you will slip back into motion-sickness triggers again easily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I keep trying Civ VI and keep uninstalling it before finishing a single game.

  I can’t put my finger on exactly what’s changed since earlier games, but it’s lost a lot of the addicting charm and intuitive flow that made me play prior versions for days.

  If that’s the trend of the franchise I sure won’t be touching any of the later ones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m also waiting for it to hit a low-enough price to justify the amount of time I will lose just trying to mod the thing into a playable, enjoyable state.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d love to play Baldur’s Gate 3 with a diverse group of real people and share an adventure together, but have no friends who enjoy games that aren’t mindless slop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HD 137010 b⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  And not only would something have to be alive there, they would have to have be intelligence and have formed civilization that is currently using radio technology, AND be at a point where they are actively listening at the point in which the signal arrives there, assuming we can send a signal strong enough to be received at all at that distance, which may be doubtful unless we put in a lot of effort as a species to send a super-signal to a distant star.

  For reference, Earth has had life for somewhere between 3.5 to 4 billion years. Our entire species has lived for around a million years at most, and out of that time we only figured out electromagnetism in the last couple centuries, and only started actively using radio in the last century.

  A hundred years out of ~4,000,000,000 is microscopically small. If another species developed their technology a century or two before or after us we have no way to know if they would possibly notice or recieve a radio signal., but it’s far more likely if the planet had intelligent life that it would have developed some number of millions of years before or after us. We don’t even know if other intelligent beings would use radio.

  I’m sure there are or have been plenty of sapient beings emerging in the galaxy but they could have had entire, multi-million year epic stories play out and rise to glorious intergalactic heights with grand stellar-empires, and then either collapse in a million-year war or evolve past material consciousness, and still have been just a pinpoint in the timeline somewhere between the extinction of our dinosaurs and like, the evolution of early whales.

  To say we are ships passing in the night would be a vast understatement of the problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Truth hurts!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  he problem is that the current definition makes no sense and is, frankly, bad.

  You haven’t said why though, I have received zero good arguments why reclassifying a ball of ice and rock that crosses other planetary orbits harms science, it’s a dumb hill to even point at, much less die on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Truth hurts!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Pluto is a wonderful, amazing and beautiful world. I will never forget the awe I felt when I saw the first images when New Horizons blasted past it, the colors and textures and vivid landscapes and variety and hazy atmosphere layers, an utter treat, literally brought tears to my eyes that I got to see something I thought I would never see in my lifetime.

  All that said, it’s fine it’s been reclassified, it takes nothing away from the world and the dwarf planets are ALL interesting and worth admiring.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are americans taking health advice from a former heroin addict ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  vast majority of people who believe in RFK also believe being an addict is reprehensible.

  While true, they’re also the segment of the population most impacted by the opioid epidemic.

  There is no logistical consistency in the conservative mind, we have to stop trying to make square pegs fit into something that doesn’t even have holes. These folks go with how they feel, and they adore having a health and human services leader who gives them validation for believing in magic water, essential oil and avoidance of scarrrrryyyy needles and vaccines. That’s ALL they care about, nothing in his background would change that. NOTHING.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Truth hurts!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay you googled what classifies a planet and saw the line about mercury, I am familiar but not sure how that makes any of this “unscientific.”

  I’m just confused how anyone has a problem with this, nothing is perfect, nothing has hard boundaries but we have to draw lines somewhere or we have solar system models where when we say “planet” we include 90 other objects that are very far removed from each other, besides being “somewhat roundish.”

  I’m perfectly fine with 400 astronomers deciding to draw a line somewhere, they’re ones doing the goddamn work. I’m sure there’s a share of people seeking attention pretending to be outraged, but why give those voices power? If you’re an astronomer doing planetary science, you need to define different kinds of bodies, they’re not doing it to make people comfortable, and it shouldn’t make you uncomfortable, if it does that’s really, really weird. From the outside it screams some kind of issues with authority.

  Yes, you are right it changes nothing in how we live, so I’m baffled why there’s always one out a hundred people just angry that people doing science changed something in the way they do work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Truth hurts!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think the original user I was asking actually has logical steps as much as a desperate need to get negative attention online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Truth hurts!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  How is that unscientific though? We need to create definitions and classifications, and it makes more sense to create that definition in the simplest place possible. IE: it’s simpler to consider Pluto a dwarf planet along with many, many other dwarf planets, than create a new solar-system model that has 50 more actual planets.

  And lets say that we went with the 50+ planet solar-system model… what would be the delineation point there? What standard should we use to preserve that number 50? What if we find 50 more small bodies in the coming years? Where does it end?

  The reclassification of Pluto made more sense than just saying we don’t have a clearly defined solar system. Planetary science requires the terminology so we can say what we’re looking at. Planets? Dwarf planets? Trojans? trans-neptunian objects? There is a LOT of stuff out there, we can’t call it ALL planets. So where would you have drawn the line that makes it “more scientific?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Truth hurts!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There is a fantastic array of worldlets out there. I am so excited for Lucy and getting first glimpses of worlds we’ve never seen like the Trojans dragged along by Jupiter. We are so fortunate to be in an age where we get to see these sights. I feel like it’s easy to forget just how amazing this entire thing is, that we’re seeing the surface of places beyond Earth… and so far, most of them have been unique and surprising in some way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Truth hurts!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh? Do explain, and pretend I don’t actually know a lot about planetary science.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Penetration⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on the origin of the neutrino. The really old ones leftover from the beginning of the universe are so low-energy that they’re like, a millionth of an electron volt. Very not-hot.

  A supernova-originated neutrino can have over 30 mega-electron-volts. For a single particle, that’s pretty hot. You still wouldn’t feel it if it hit you though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Truth hurts!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Anyone who complains about this are the same people who whinged about the change of Pluto’s status as a planet.

  In that, they are clinging to nostalgia instead of embracing a new, wondrous truth. Feathers and fur on dinosaurs shows an entirely new way of imagining the world before us, just like Pluto’s downgrade was simply because we found potentially thousands of more Pluto’s.

  I think a lot of people broadly are insecure about change right now. Stability feels precious, and this nostalgic retreat is being leveraged by anti-science groups.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Denominator, go Mercator⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The good news is Dourif is such a good actor and played such an iconic character in that role, that I doubt anyone is going to connect him to the apt-term that is already spreading through public lexicon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Denominator, go Mercator⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel strongly part of why he’s even more “shrieky” and unhinged than normal is because the GOP broadly has NO plan right now for when Trump keels over. They tried so desperately hard to parade JD Vance around to get him ready to take the reigns, but so far MAGA haaates him, he talks like a politician, he has all that inhuman proceduralism that made people embrace Trump’s open hatred and malice.

  So Miller is slowly realizing once Trump dies, which could be any moment, that he’s going to potentially face charges, and all the comparisons to people who met their end on a rope are likely dancing around in the back of that huge, empty skull.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Denominator, go Mercator⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of conservatives have wanted Greenland for a long time as some throwback to US imperialism and very outdated cold-war era defensive posturing.

  Stephen Miller threw the idea at Trump and wormtongued it as some idea that claiming the country would be some monument to Trump’s legacy that would outlive all the scandals, and that’s all the old turd wants, he just wants adoration and cheering crowds, that’s his entire ethical framework.

  What does Miller want from it? No idea, he’s utterly, inhumanly insane. He’s just literally an Elliot Rodgers in a suit who managed to get way too much power.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slay Girl⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  After swimming around all of this for way too long, I’m also entirely convinced that anyone who connects with or espouses pro-natalism is just hung up on some sexual kink. Almost strictly. And I know it’s hyperbolic but I’ve gone way harder and deeper trying to dismantle those weirdos than I have here, and it’s so deeply connected to the trad-wife cosplay kink thing and conservative-masked race-play fantasy that the entire online pro-natalist sphere is just a hookup app at this point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slay Girl⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re putting a lot of work going to bat for, and feeling contentious for people who are, and I say this a little respect, largely crazy.

  The vast majority of people who feel the way you do, do not identify as anti-anything and just live their lives and either change their minds later or they don’t.

  Anti-natalists are, as a self-identifying group, really bad lol. I’m sorry but they’re deeply stuck up their own ass, personally and as a human value system. Just do whatever for whatever reasons and don’t wear a uniform, once you do you end up doing really weird things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Real and True⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  it’s how self-important shut-ins talk about their PC to make it sound important.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slay Girl⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Do i believe that we must all stop procreating? no. Do i believe that there are cases in which it is actively irresponsible and negligent to bring a child into the world? Absolutely, yes.

  Okay then you’re not really anti-natalist, you’re just mad at people who are irresponsible, which is relatable.