AnarchistArtificer
@AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Increasing the surface area of a substance increases its reaction rate. Proof by garlic. 16 hours ago:
Did they know it was you? Or did you sheepingly pretend to also be annoyed at the smell
- Comment on Thank Goodness You're Here - most absurd & hilarious game what did I just play? 2 days ago:
Ooh, Barnsley! That’s actually super close to where I hail from (we had a Barnsley phone number and post code, despite not technically being in Barnsley). That’s so cool, it’s not the kind of place you typically see depicted in media
- Comment on Thank Goodness You're Here - most absurd & hilarious game what did I just play? 3 days ago:
“Northern Englishest”
As a Yorkshire lass living in Manchester, you have me intrigued with this description. Hell, I’m more than intrigued — you’ve sold me on it
- Comment on ad block block 3 days ago:
This extension is Art
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
I’ve not played Factorio Space Age yet, but I’m looking forward to it whenever I next get a hankering for Factorio.
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
Your pitch has sold me on it. Yet another game to add to my wishlist
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
That sounds like a space version of Eco, with the roles stuff. In Eco, it’s impossible for one person to acquire all skills, so people on a server have to specialise.
I started out as a miner, to honour my late best friend who was a dwarf at heart and would definitely have been a miner if he’d been playing with us. Then I branched out into masonry to make use of the absurd amounts of stone I’d been mining. If I wanted something made of wood, I had to go flutter my eyelashes at my friend who had started out as a logger and branched into carpentry. I enjoyed having a domain that was my own, and a clear way to be useful to the server. Other players had some level of mining and masonry skill by the midgame, but for anything serious, they had to wait until I was online.
It sounds like Space Station 14 is far more hectic than this, but in an interesting way. I wonder if it will scratch the same itch that Eco did wrt being useful in a clear role
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
Space Station 14 sounds interesting. What kind of multiplayer is it? I.e. is it one where the typical experience is to play with randoms via matchmaking, or is it a game best enjoyed with friends?
I have discord server full of nerds who I played games with during COVID (and its aftermath), and this might be a good excuse to see if I can reawaken that server for games
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
You’ve reminded me that I still need to finish that. When I started it, I played it so much that I burnt myself out on it a tad (not in a bad way, just in a way that requires I take a break and play something else for a while). I’m looking forward to getting back to it.
I didn’t play the first game, but I remember seeing a lot of the promo/development stuff about it because my partner at the time was super interested in it. My impression of the first game was that it was ambitious and interesting, but rocky in its implementation, but the second one is a refinement in all the ways you would expect a sequel to be. Certainly I have enjoyed it thus far
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
Thanks for replying and giving me yet another game that I’ve not even heard of that I’m probably going to check out.
I’m not a huge RTS person, but occasionally I get a strong craving for one. Next time I do, I’ll see if Beyond all reason scratches that itch
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
I’ve never heard of Drova or Cruelty Squad, so thanks for the recommendations. This thread has given me so many interesting games to check out, thanks for replying
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
If @blomvik@sopuli.xyz hadn’t already sold me on Cruelty Squad, you certainly have now. In terms of vibes, it sounds right up my alley.
And I do love a bonkers community. I find that when I get into a piece of media (whether that be a game, TV series or something else), I really enjoy participating in what I call “fandom tourism”. I enjoy dipping my toe into the community after I’ve engaged with the media itself, and it feels like bonus content. I don’t tend to stick around in any fandoms, so that means that even if a community is bonkers in a bad way (e.g. lots of drama), I even sort of enjoy being able to understand and spectate those dynamics, as a quasi-outsider
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
I’ve heard so many good things about Lies of P that I think I’ve been avoiding it in a similar way to how I was irrationally reluctant to play Hollow Knight. It’s a bit of a moot point at the moment, because I don’t currently have the brain space to get my teeth into a Soulslike, but when I do, I should resist that silly instinct of mine.
I’ve not heard much of Dispatch, I should check it out
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
Most of those games are ones I’ve never heard of before, but you’ve really sold me on them, especially Split Fiction and UFO 50
(Mini tangent, but I find it interesting how, in this age of algorithmically driven slip content, I cherish the opportunity to find little snippets of meaningful connection with my fellow humans. Like, I don’t know you, or anything really about your preferences or tastes in games, so what reason is there to put much weight in your recommendations? You’re just a random person on the internet, after all. But no, your recommendations feel meaningful because you’re a person who cared enough about these things to write about them, and matters to me (especially in our current climate))
If I was going to try out Split Fiction and UFO 50, which would you recommend I start with?
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
Nice! I haven’t attempted Sekiro yet, but it’s high up on my list. I am saving it for when I have the brain space to take a proper crack at the game. I remember that my first exposure to Fromsoft games was in 2017, when I attempted Dark Souls 3 during a Summer where I extremely burnt out due to doing a soul-sucking internship. I bounced off of it so hard, and that taught me that I need to be in the right headspace to play certain games.
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 days ago:
Despite the high skill level required, I actually found that it was quite forgiving for people who were learning. I barely did any parrying until I was well into Act 3, for example. I like the way that the feedback for dodges work — I started trying to parry more when I realised that I was consistently getting perfect dodges, which meant that if I had parried, it would have been successful.
I also like the way the difficulty works in the open world. It reminds me of games like Fallout: New Vegas, where the enemies aren’t scaled to player level, so you can be dumb/brave and wade into encounters that are way beyond your power level. Sometimes that works out surprisingly well, but often you try fighting a difficult enemy and get pwned so thoroughly that you accept that you’ll have to come back later. In Expedition 33 especially, it is super viable to just go and explore elsewhere and come back with more levels, better weapons and better pictos. The beautiful world also means that exploring is fun even without the mechanical perks.
- Comment on Roundup of Roundup 5 days ago:
I sometimes reflect on how an evil version of me would be so successful. I’m actually rather good at a lot of the capitalism type skills, and especially in recent years, I’ve reflected on how those skills combined with my genuine expertise in machine learning would make me exceptionally good at making bank off of the dumbasses who have wholeheartedly drank the koolaid. I went to a university with a lot of effective altruists, and man, they’re easy to scam, and I could be so much more comfortable if I just sacrificed everything I value in life.
It turns out that I’m not actually sad that I have a moral compass, but rather that people with strong values are so often forced to consider compromising on those values because they’re desperate to not live in precarity. It’s grim.
Something significant that has just occurred to me is that the compulsory banking internship I had to do after my first year of university as part of a scholarship might’ve been more useful than I had previously realised. It was a soul killing experience and I reached some extremely low periods that Summer because of it, but I’m realising that it was a useful learning experience. Prior to that, I would’ve been far more likely to consider selling my soul for a comfortable life, but if nothing else, that internship taught me I physically couldn’t live a life like that. Good thing I learned that on a low stakes internship, rather than something more committed.
- Comment on Roundup of Roundup 5 days ago:
The thing that always annoys me in this toxic cycle is the insistence on applied research. I’ve seen people across a few different fields run into this problem.
Let’s say that they do some really interesting applied research, where they build on existing basic research to come up with some really cool applications. Yay, science! But this brings them to the boundary of what we know in that area — there’s no more basic research to build upon. What they need to do (and what is very clearly cued up by what they just published) is take this applies research and just do a bunch of structured “fuck around and find out” and see what happens, hopefully producing some additional basic research that they, or other researchers, can then figure out how to apply that in interesting ways.
But noooooooooo. It’s like that meme comic with the dog where it has a frisbee and it says “no take, only throw”. Everything you make has to be useful, or you will struggle to get funding. The area I know most about this is in protein structure stuff, and it drives me mad to see papers complaining about how many potentially druggable targets there could be in the “dark proteome” — the large array of human proteins that we don’t know shit about. Countless papers lamenting how we’re not researching proteins where we’re most likely to find new and useful stuff, but rather we’re just doing more and more research on proteins we already know a heckton about, i.e. “searching in the areas where we have the best light”^[1]. But of course people are doing that, when someone who wants to go and search in the dark are expected to produce useful results right away.
The way it’s meant to work is that some people go spelunking in the dark, and they say “hey, I might have found something here”, and that causes other people to head over there to shed light on the area so we can evaluate things better. We need to start somewhere!
[1]: To be clear, I’m not blaming the researchers who write these papers or editorials, because there’s very little that they can do to change it. Hell, writing these papers is likely their attempt to change this unreasonable system of expectations. Unfortunately, the root problem here is how capitalism and our funding model for research leads to toxic cycles such as “publish or perish”.
- Submitted 5 days ago to games@lemmy.world | 90 comments
- Comment on Never tried it but it sounds like fun 6 days ago:
That’s fine, it just becomes a balancing task.
- Comment on all the proof i need 6 days ago:
Excellent content, thanks for sharing. I enjoy tormenting my friend with a constant drip feed of nerdy jokes, so I’m always looking for more to add to my supply (lest they learn that I do not actually have an infinite supply of them)
- Comment on Had enough of having to change it every 3 months 1 week ago:
Seconding the recommendation for Bitwarden.
Starting using a password manager is one of the single most powerful improvements to my life in a long time.
You know the phenomenon where you try to log into a website you rarely use, but your regular password doesn’t work, meaning you have to reset it — only to discover that your regular password didn’t work because the website has weirdly specific and persnickety password requirements (bonus points if you modify your usual password to fit their requirements and then the system says you can’t reuse an older password)? Well I haven’t had to deal with that problem in years.
Being able to avoid that kind of thing saves a surprising amount of executive function energy in the long term. If I stongly encourage you try one out
- Comment on Look at this. Or don't. 1 week ago:
I do enjoy being part of a nice, orderly queue. Makes me feel like I have some purpose in life. I can just slip partway into derealization as I submit my will to the queue.
I didn’t notice it as a thing that we did until I went travelling in Europe and frequently found myself ambiently stressed due to the lack of queue in a situation that would benefit from one. Sometimes if enough British people congealed together in one place by coincidence, we might find ourselves forming a neat little queue.
There’s so much that makes me ashamed to be British, but this is silly and fun; I like it.
- Comment on Look at this. Or don't. 1 week ago:
The thing that made it click for me is to realise that particles and waves don’t really exist — they’re just terms we use to try to understand the world. When we see weird quantum shit happening, it’s not actually weird in and of itself, we’re just finding that our reductionist (but often useful) models are breaking down and we can’t straightforwardly say “that’s a particle” or “that’s a wave”.
I think of it as analogous to statistical averages. If I have a group of 100 people for whom I know the average height (and other summary statistics). Thinking of them in terms of the group is like treating them as a wave. They don’t have a precisely defined position (because they’re a diffuse blob of people), and although I know their average height, it’s clouded by uncertainty. When we do statistics on a group of people, it’s almost as if the individuals cease to exist. If all you have are the summary statistics from the group, you can’t know the heights of any individuals within the crowd.
I can “zoom in” and pluck a person from the crowd and measure their height, then that’s sort of like wave function collapse. Now I can precisely define the position of this person, because they’re just one person — if someone says “which person are you talking about?”, I can point to them and say “this one here”. However, I don’t know anything about their surrounding context — whether they’re taller or shorter than average. They’re basically a particle.
The key to this is how “zooming in” on an individual person gives us a fundamentally different perspective to the zoomed out view of the crowd.
- Comment on Skyrim on Switch 2 ships with severe input lag and a huge 53GB file size despite being capped at 30FPS 1 week ago:
This song is evergreen
- Comment on And my axe. 1 week ago:
I learned about it last week; it’s delightful. A close friend is half Czech, so I often end up sharing with her cool stuff I learn about Czechia, and this was one of them.
Something that’s been cool about this is that before I knew of her Czech heritage, I knew very little about Czechia. I’ve realised that whenever I stumbled across cool facts about the place or people, my brain didn’t have anything concrete to attach it to, so it’d just end up in a nebulous blob of Eastern European-ness, and would more readily be forgotten. A lot of what I’ve learned over the last year or so has mostly been because if I stumble across something cool, like this dam, then my brain now goes “ooh, this is cool, I should tell my friend about this”. She acts like a sort of semantic anchor in my mind, and that’s really cool
- Comment on Squad Goals 2 weeks ago:
Stuff like this is pretty context dependent, and vibes based. Did it feel like this happened because people recognised that you belonged to a marginalised group, and were earnestly making an attempt to subvert systemic oppression you may face as a researcher by raising you up? Or did it feel like you were being instrumentalised, boiled down to a 2D representation of who you are in order to further the aims of that conference and/or research group?
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
When you’re a member of a marginalised group, it’s easy to just become dead to it, because it’s just part of your regular life. You can’t do anything about it, so it’s either die, or just get on with it as best you can. This is pragmatically necessary, but it’s easy to end up internalising a bunch of unhealthy stuff and begin feeling like the suffering you face is your fault. It’s a slow process, where you just sort of forget that you’re suffering an injustice, because it’s just normal.
My late best friend was like in the OP. He would often be shocked and outraged at some of the things I face as a disabled person, and it was always jarring in a way that reminded me of how bullshit it is that I have to face some stuff. He’d say things that would make me go “Yeah! That is fucked up”. Being angry at a thing doesn’t necessarily make things any better, nor does it make it easier to bear, but getting angry at myself (which inevitably happens if I slip into internalised ableism) definitely makes things harder.
Recognising my suffering as oppression is also a powerful step towards finding community and building solidarity, which is a useful step towards concrete political change
- Comment on WHY??? 2 weeks ago:
I feel like I just got goatsed by Saturn
- Comment on Do you cheat in video games? 2 weeks ago:
Sometimes. I tend to have quite hard lines about what feels like acceptable levels of cheating though.
To use Terraria as an example, I remember going mad searching for a lava charm, and I ended up using a map viewer to check whether my world actually had one. It didn’t so I used a save editor to give me the charm. This part was a mistake, and felt like the kind of cheating that makes the game less fun in a slippery slope kind of way. I regretted what I did.
In future games, I would sometimes check to see if a Lava charm existed on my world if I had spent a while searching for it to no avail, and if there wasn’t one, I’d try going to a different world. If there was one in my world, I’d try to not pay attention to where in my world the chest(s) with the lava charm(s) were (and in some cases, I’d get a friend to confirm whether one existed on my world, so I wouldn’t even know the rough area where the chest was. Sometimes cheats can make the game more fun and engaging, if used wisely and in moderation.