queerlilhayseed
@queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone
- Comment on How will you celebrate? 1 day ago:
Unrequited love is a hard thing but I imagine unrequited hatred must be worse.
- Comment on The Tragic Beauty of Majora's Mask 3 days ago:
Something I’ve always wondered is why Majora / the mask / the skull kid decided to rob Link, and I think this analysis sheds some light on it. If Majora is a physical representation of unresolved childhood trauma, it makes sense to me that they steal his horse and ocarina: these are precious things, but they are also reminders of his traumatic past. I have felt the contradictory urge to destroy or dispose of things that are precious mementos because they also carry associations with painful memories.
Trauma also emotionally stunts you and can make you appear childish to others even when you feel like an adult, which is why Majora curses him into the form of the Deku child.
I also love how Link learns to come to terms with his trauma. First, he must do what he must to survive, which means getting his ocarina back and getting himself into a position where he isn’t faced with the threat of imminent death, which he does by remembering the song of time. Once he himself is in a safe state, he goes about methodically helping everyone he can find who needs help, and asks for nothing in return. For these deeds he receives masks, memories of good deeds that he has done. Finally, in order to fully self-actualize, he gives these masks freely to the children on the moon.
One of the children on the moon asks Link if he will become a mask salesman. I think a mask salesman, in the context of the game, is someone who has amassed great wisdom but hoards it, only sharing it selectively with those who can offer something of value in return. Instead, Link gives his masks away. Not only that, he gives away every non-transformation mask he has, getting nothing in return (as far as he knows). If he can do this, he learns from the Majora child how to become the Fierce Deity.
I think it’s fascinating and thematically beautiful that Link can defeat Majora without becoming the Fierce Deity. You don’t have to be a Buddha to overcome trauma. But if you can learn to share the wisdom you have gained by your suffering, and ask nothing in return, then the fight becomes much, much easier.
P.S. Something that occurs to me as I’m writing is that this game also shows Link’s journey experiencing empathy. When he encounters the body of the Deku child, he doesn’t really understand what he’s looking at. By the time he meets the ghost of Darmani, he has acquired the tools he needed to heal himself, and is able to use them to heal Darmani as well. With Mikau, he rescues him from the water, hears his dying wish and honors it, eases his passing, gives him a proper burial, and mourns him. That’s a considerable evolution.
- Comment on The Tragic Beauty of Majora's Mask 3 days ago:
It’s one of my favorites as well. In a class of it’s own, I think. It’s still clearly a Legend of Zelda game, but I’ve never played anything else like it.
- Submitted 3 days ago to games@lemmy.world | 4 comments
- Comment on Why is stack overflow so horrible? 3 days ago:
What turned me off of SO entirely is when you actually do google it and the results are all SO posts with “closed as duplicate” and no actual answers :(
The snake fully ate itself.
- Comment on loserrrrrr 3 days ago:
Conservationists out here winging for the entire planet ❤️
- Comment on Super Meat Boy 3D, coin-pushing chaos and other new indie games worth checking out 3 days ago:
Curious to see if Super Meat Boy can pull off the jump to 3D. The original was fantastic but it’s a hard transition even for talented devs.
- Comment on How do you feel about a 25 year old dating a 46 year old? 5 days ago:
When I was 25, I would have said “of course it’s not a problem, they’re both adults. As long as they’re happy it’s fine.” and that is true, but now that I’m closer to 46 I have some additional caveats around “as long as they’re happy”.
You know how in order to really develop a skill, you have to do it for a long time? I think relationships are like that. If I were to compare it to chess, this scenario is kind of like someone who’s been playing chess competitively for 20 years playing against someone playing their first major tournament. It doesn’t mean that the more experienced player is guaranteed to win, or even that they’re better at chess, but it does confer some advantage because playing in a tournament is very different from playing chess casually or in clubs. There’s money at stake, your reputation is on the line, people may be watching you play and commentating in real time. It’s just a different activity altogether, even though it is still technically “just playing chess”. It really helps to get a few tournaments under your belt to get comfortable with the nerves, the additional tournament rules, publicly making a really stupid error, etc. If it’s your first time you might make some rookie errors. That’s part of being a rookie.
Where the analogy breaks down is that with chess, there is a brief competition with clear rules and referees, and there is (almost) always a clear outcome: win, lose, or draw. With relationships, A) it’s supposed to be cooperative, not a competition, and B) if your relationship partner is skilled at manipulation, you could be in a losing position for a long time and not know it, because you haven’t had the time to develop the skills necessary to identify what a dysfunctional adult relationship looks like.
This doesn’t mean that a relationship with a small age gap can’t be toxic, or that relationships with a large age gap can’t be healthy and happy.
But
I have observed a pattern of older people (usually, but not exclusively, men) who serially date young adults because those young people don’t recognize the signs of a toxic relationship. These are rookie errors, and there is no shame in them. Everyone that does anything new has a rookie period, and this includes adult relationships. These older people take advantage of that naivete instead of working on themselves to become the kind of partner that people want to stay with after really getting to know them. As soon as these young partners begin to understand these problems and challenge them, they end the relationship and trade them out for a younger model. You can be unhappy in a toxic relationship for a long time and be unable to identify why you are so unhappy, because they know the tricks. Undercut your partner’s relationships with their other friends or family, accuse them of not being smart enough or loving enough or patient enough, make them financially dependent on you. There are a lot of tricks, and people refine their techniques with each partner. And when you’ve just started having adult relationships, you are at a serious disadvantage if you wind up in a relationship like this because you just haven’t lived long enough to see firsthand how this kind of thing plays out.
It’s not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with it, but it does ping my danger radar. My danger radar sometimes gets false readings, but I still pay attention to it.
- Comment on Turbines are our friends 1 week ago:
As an old Jedi Master once said, “[Masters] are what they grow beyond”
- Comment on Turbines are our friends 1 week ago:
Wisdom from a Jedi born to bring balance to things.
- Comment on Turbines are our friends 1 week ago:
It turns out spinning things is really useful and boiling fluids is a convenient way to spin things.
- Comment on Why do some people (i.e. white conservatives) think all Spanish speakers (especially native Spanish speakers) are Mexican? 1 week ago:
It’s a complicated question, especially I imagine for someone not familiar with US culture. Whether a person from Spain is “white” is itself a complicated and irrational topic. IMO it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to be confused about. I’m from the US and I find it confusing myself.
- Comment on Are Americans Actually Idiots? 2 weeks ago:
Certainly. I think it’s kind of a truism that a high opinion of one’s own intelligence is comorbid with idiocy.
- Comment on Are Americans Actually Idiots? 2 weeks ago:
Anyone that lived ~through the pandemic~ knows that yes, most people are idiots
- Comment on Is Flappy Bird a good game? 2 weeks ago:
LMAO thank you, I spent a while trying to figure out what title to give this post. I generally don’t like sorting games (or art in general) into “good” and “bad” buckets, but I didn’t really have a good handle on why people liked Flappy Bird, and I didn’t want to make assumptions about which parts of the game make it good or bad in people’s minds. “Is it good” is the most generic criterion I could come up with, so I went with that and hoped people would expand on their reasons in the comments. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the comments (yours and others), it’s given me a lot to think about ❤️
- Comment on Is Flappy Bird a good game? 2 weeks ago:
That’s a good point, I too think it nailed one of the requirements of “simple” single-mechanic games, which is getting the player up to speed and into the fun part as quickly as possible.
- Comment on Is Flappy Bird a good game? 2 weeks ago:
That makes sense. I think with more complicated games (or any art) there’s some leeway where you can appreciate some things about the game enough that you endure the parts that don’t tickle your fancy. With games that really focus down on a single element, whether you are interested in the game at all hinges entirely on whether your tastes align with that one thing.
One of the reasons I asked is that, since precision timing games are not my thing, I can’t really tell if Flappy Bird is an exceptional example of the genre, or if it’s more of a Tiger King situation where it’s not that good, but it’s a fun thing that became a fad. Seems like the crowd is leaning closer to the latter.
- Comment on Is Flappy Bird a good game? 3 weeks ago:
IIRC the reasoning was that if the play store / app store synced, the app would be removed from the phone. I think for the vast majority of people, you may as well ask them to cast a spell as ask them to “sideload an APK”, so if they really really wanted to play Flappy Bird and felt that was beyond their capacity, this was the only alternative. Or maybe people thought phones with the “original” app would appreciate in value as collector’s items? The whole thing is mysterious to me.
- Comment on Is Flappy Bird a good game? 3 weeks ago:
I can see why people like games like Flappy Bird. I like a game that does one thing but does it really well. Precision button pressing has never been my forte so I have no sense of whether Flappy Bird was a “pretty good” precision button presser that just happened to get weirdly famous, or if it got famous because it really nailed the precision button presser genre.
- Comment on Is Flappy Bird a good game? 3 weeks ago:
It was extremely popular. For a while after it got pulled there was a small market for phones in airplane mode that still had a working version of the app. Some of the auctions went into the high five figures.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to games@lemmy.world | 32 comments
- Comment on Anyone remember that "First is the worst, second is the best" rhyme kids used to do? Where did that come from? 4 weeks ago:
Also third is the one in the polka-dot vest.
- Comment on Bet 1 month ago:
frfr
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Will no one rid me of these troublesome conspiracy laws?
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 2 months ago:
I think oppressors have a conscience already, they’ve just been taught to ignore it or accept exceptions to it. Or rather, I think it’s more that oppressive leaders are in on the game, but the vast majority of their coalition has to be hoodwinked into following along. Look at the modern American news media machine: we kind of forget how expensive it is because it’s also profitable, but that’s a huge amount of concerted effort directed at making white americans afraid of and angry at non-white people. If people were just naturally OK with oppression none of that would be necessary, they would just do it and not bother trying to justify it with scare tactics. It’s also fragile to argument, which is why books get banned and civil rights leaders get assassinated.
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 2 months ago:
Have there been cycle breaks? I’m not trying to be combative but I am curious to know what examples you have in mind. I don’t think human history has ever seen a break in the cycle of violence as I would define it. The active bloodshed has waxed and waned over the centuries, or at least moved from place to place, but violent oppression has been alive and malignant in every chapter of human history that I can think of.
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 2 months ago:
That’s a hard question and I don’t know. I don’t know that a strictly nonviolent movement can work if there’s a critical mass of oppressors who believe that those they oppress deserve to be oppressed. I think the theory of nonviolent resistance is built on an assumption that, deep down, we all know that what oppressors do is wrong and that there is a contrivance of convenience that allows oppressors to except themselves, or simply ignore that knowledge. I don’t know if that deep down knowledge is universal. But I know from personal experience it’s quite easy to ignore it, especially when one’s own life is hard, or when the oppression is mostly hidden from view, or simply when the problem of oppression seems overwhelming and unassailable. I believe that most people who don’t try to resist oppression either disapprove but feel helpless in the face of it, or they benefit from it and therefore try to justify it, or usually a combination of the two. If that belief is correct, then the answer I think is one of education. Give people the tools they need to fight nonviolently: Educate about local elections, form citizen watchdog groups, show how propaganda uses common tropes to reinforce ideas about the “inherent criminality” of the oppressed, teach the history of how oligarchs use flunkies like trump to implement favorable policies while deflecting blame onto minorities, and the million other things that people need to know to have a well functioning society. Use shame to dislodge the privileged from their comfortable niches and force them to answer for the consequences of their actions or lack thereof.
I think, especially now in America, this seems so far away that even to seriously consider it seems fanciful. Maybe it is. Maybe we’re at the point where violence is necessary to jerk us back from the cliff of autocracy. It certainly seems like trump and his goons want a fight, and it seems likely that sooner or later they’ll get one. But I don’t think violence can be solved with violence, and even if America goes through some violent convulsions I don’t think they’ll end us in a place where we aren’t doing violence to each other. Nonviolence requires nonviolence.
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 2 months ago:
Yeah. The question is whether to work to continue the cycle or work to break it.
- Comment on The highest-rated games and what the people say 2 months ago:
The fun thing about art criticism is there’s no barrier to entry. Literally anyone can do it.
- Comment on Tf is a ternary diagram 3 months ago:
Don’t be fooled: Loamy Sand is just Sandy’s mild-mannered, glasses-wearing alter ego.