Khrux

If you ever start watching YouTube tutorials around cooking, there’s a reason Binging With Banish is a huge name.

Between ingredient cost, recipe difficulty, taste and the product actually coming out right, I’ve always found him super reliable.

But a huge part of cooking doesn’t come from recipes, it comes from experimentation. Learning how to make a simple pasta sauce from tinned tomatoes and other things is a useful step, because 90% of the ingredients last a while, so you only need to buy a few cheap bits, and can control the flavour yourself to find out what you like.

It’s worth noting that eating at home can still easily become accidentally expensive. Pasta and pasta sauce is a reliable way to keep prices low when cooking, but once you’re cooking with 20 ingredients, it can creep up quickly, although most of these can last weeks, if not months, so you only need to buy them once in a while.

I backed it in 2015 and suspected it was a scam then, with most advice online being that you should only buy it if you think you’ll enjoy what’s already out.

I think the saddest thing is that they have a lot of genuine ambition, and we’re trying truly innovative things a decade ago like a persistent world space “from pupil to planet” weather simulations that were incredible, and more. But as time has gone on, the bar has risen and everything that they had that was ahead of the curve has been done.

I went into this lukewarm on Nolan and a massive nerd for The Odyssey, so I was primed to be unhappy with any unfaithful choice, but honestly I was absolutely blown away.

One thing that stood out to me would be the general interpretation that the sea people causing the bronze age collapse was actually the declining of an honour code that is seen in the ancient greek laws of hospitality. I’d often thought about the tonal shift between the age of heroes and the Illiad onwards, how the Caledonian Boar Hunt may have been the last key event of Heroic age, and by the end of The Oresteia and The Aeneid, the early identity of the post-bronze-age collapse Mediterranean societies are visible. The sea people concept is largely debunked now, and the collapse is generally considered to be a mix of famine, climate disasters and most importantly the collapse of relationships between the east Mediterranean states.

Nolan then taking this as Odysseus’s fear of travelling home, a changed man, to a world he changed for the worse, is particularly powerful, and his take on Athena as a manifestation of this guilt at breaking Zeus law and witnessing a very real rape and pillage of the city due to his subterfuge was good. I also think that Zendaya was very likely this interpretation’s version of Cassandra too, which is neat.

I went into the film already guarded against the visual style. I’d have loved to have seen an authentic approach at bronze age style from talented art directors and production designers, and I had similar feelings about the muted and gloomy colour palette. I still have these feelings; everyone looked like a monochrome Roman, not even a classical Greek, but seeing the direction as a whole, I understand the choice. The somber narrative, editing style, soundtrack, etc, all serve the same tone that the muted and stripped by colour and art style do.

That said, I’m shocked at the lack of spears in this film. Everyone fights with short swords and no shields, which is basically a Hollywood fantasy in any time in history, but this is the iconic era of spears. I counted one use of a spear, despite several war scenes, and almost every death at the hands of a weapon would have been prevented with a shield.

As a fun side fact, people who play VR combat games like Blade and Sorcery often start using swords and default to spears and clubs, because they’re incredibly intuitive to untrained people compared to swords, which have a far more tactical skill ceiling, making them the default of soldiers right through the era of knights with swords.

Another fun side fact. Ajax, a 5th Century BCE poem about the PTSD driven suicide of Ajax the Greater towards the end of the Trojan war, was performed to 500 marines in 2008, I think by Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, and Michael J. Fox, and was remarked to resonate incredibly strongly with the audience. Myth from the Trojan was onwards suddenly really cares about consequence, particularly in regards to the human condition.

My other pet peeve is the sound design of the weapons (Odysseus’s incredible bow string sound excluded). This was a very ‘swish and pew’. Back in the early 2010s, I stumbled across a Skyrim mod that changed the bow sounds (example here) and I was amazed how much more satisfying it was, not just from a realism point, but just a pleasant resonant heavy sound, like how shooter games have hit marker sounds. Not just was every launched arrow (including from Odysseus) very whistly, but so was every sword swing. For a film with otherwise incredible sound design (so good I’d peg it for winning the oscar this year), every fight was a bland cartoony swish fest.

I also thought the massacre of the suitors was a little bit unwarranted in it’s action set piece style. It makes sense that a trained warrior king who spent a decade in a bloody war would be a better combatant and a bunch of immature suitors, but I think it just overstepped my suspension of disbelief a few times, in a way the monsterous and magical elements didn’t.

My closing thought is that this may be one of the best adaptations of Greek myth at all. It’s ability to take the tonal shift that is the Trojan war and its concluding breaking of Zeus’s Law and the sack of the temple of Athena, pointing that to the beginning of the end of Mycenaean Greece, and its neighbours, and then tying that so incredibly to Odysseyus’s character arc and PTSD is so well done. The fact that my cirques are so specific and nit-picky is a testament to the strength of this film.

It’s strange to look back at the Legend of Korra and realise it was totally fine, just worse than the original show, when comparing it to literally everything else that’s come from the IP since.

But I want maximal acoustics in my bathroom. The world needs to know.

Honestly if you never go back, not much. It wouldn’t even impact your credit rating, and your country likely doesn’t have the means to enforce it. I could imagine you get harassed by us debt collection agencies but they can’t do anything about it either. If you’re never returning to the US, it’s fine.

You could likely even still holiday in the USA. It won’t impact your visa as it’s not a criminal offence either.

I’m not a lawyer, and could be totally wrong, but I asked my dad who is also not a lawyer.

And everyone please stop using it as a forum for the love of God. I have no use for discord as a platform, but every damn FOSS program asking me to go there for troubleshooting is insanity.

Also worth adding it sadly doesn’t really exist anymore, the iconic look here is gone, although game mechanics still begin getting weird.

Also although people have teleported to it, Minecraft is so big that I assumed nobody would ever reach it in survival. I’m not surprised it took 14 years.

People disagree because it’s still an abstraction of camo. Wearing it in the first place came from people fawning over militarism.

I actually think it can work with a queer look in one of two ways, so you are likely fine: Either it’s effectively teasing the pro authoritarian militarism camo types, or it’s a radical anarchy armed rebel look, which without praxis is really just the former look again. Either way these are fine.

Another reason maybe you’ve been downvoted is that people loathe the deep abstraction of modern, or rather postmoderm society. Camo was made for soldiers > Camo was worn by patriotic civilians simulating the soldier aesthetic > particularly under the Bush administration, it became less a symbol of soldiers, and more a symbol of patriots. Patriotism is nationalism.

Today when most of us camo in the military cosplaying way, we think ‘nationalist’. When we see a person in a little bit of camo, perhaps just some came shorts and a regular t-shirt, we think either ‘nationalist’, ‘okay with nationalism’ or ‘ignorant of nationalism’.

So when most people see someone in a blended queer and camo look, they probably assume one of three things: ‘ignorant of nationalism’, ‘critical of nationalism in a rebellious manner’ or ‘pro nationalist queer’. Of course one of these is fine, but one is very bad.

The flip side to this article is that most of the criticisms, while really valid, talk about the intended play style for life sim games to be to live through the key points of their character’s lives with immersion.

For literally 20 years, I’ve barely seen it used for this purpose, instead people make themselves, their friends, their dream house, they cheat in money and turn off aging etc. Actually stopping to roleplay your character making friends is the activity most people do when their bored of the regular things they do.

Still, InZoi seeming to not simulate the lives of any of the other NPC’s is a big loss. Even if you’re not interacting with that part of the game, knowing it’s there is great. The Sims 4 (or 3, I forget) strove to reach the dream version of this: You buy a cheap property in a fully open world and ‘functioning’ town and you could walk from your front door to the town center, and the neighbour you see may also drive to town and you’ll see them there. Then as you play, you go from working in the gym to owning it, and can now modify it like your property because it runs on the same rules, the same goes for everything else. The Sims didn’t manage this but their later games clearly launched with this as their design’s guiding light.

I’m mostly interested in the game as a character creator and house builder, but that’s because I don’t expect any game to do a good job of what the article writer wishes for, The Sims included.

I agree, it’s unfortunately impossible to boycott AI outright. The game you love that didn’t use it for the writing, art or code probably still had plenty of planning meetings where copilot PowerPoint tools were used. A programmer who doesn’t use AI may use something from someone who did. An artist may get a job over another because they used AI for their job application.

And that’s ignoring everyone that uses it intentionally for projects. I genuinely loathe AI content but it’s not worth boycotting like many other causes.

In the 19th century, the Jacquard loom became widespread, using punchcards to automate weaving. Belgian workers who lost their jobs from this would protest by throwing their wooden shoes, their sabots into the machines. This act is the origin of the word saboteur. This era of industrialisation was shared by the movement of the romantics. Romanticism existed to contrast industrialisation and enlightenment, to celebrate nature and imagination and individuality. Poets like Lord Byron led wonderfully flawed but human lives, while capturing this feeling in their art, poetry and philosophy.

But humans although wonderfully flawed, seek convenience. Evolution loves convenience, dopamine loves convenience, capitalism loves convenience. When it’s allure comes from all directions, we cnt fault ourselves for succumbing to it.

Although their name lives on, the saboteurs couldn’t stop the world seeking convenience. Although Romanticism always existed before it’s heyday, it eventually diminished. From the punchcards of the Jacquard looms, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (the estranged and father-loathing daughter of Lord Byron) developed the general purpose computer. Technological convenience survived.

There is a growing opinion that we are living through a new romantic era, this time opposing the digital world, the algorithm and artificial intelligence. I agree with this sentiment. Although I consider myself a socialist, pro workers rights and supporter of radical ideals, I don’t see the new saboteurs winning; I don’t see boycotting AI, or poisoning our art and media with AI confusing language and imagery as a path to victory. Eventually convince always wins. Instead I want to be a romantic, who can celebrate everything human that AI cannot be, without believing that I can exist outside of it’s influence. I can both love human made art, media and content, and consume that which has been touched by AI.

God knows why I wrote this all I guess it’s just not a conversation I’d ever get to have in real life. There are probably typos in here, I hate to proof-read.

How do you mean? I know it’s pretty standard to pirate the Sims games because of their dlc costs, but I don’t know any way to get it legally and on steam.

If you get around to Microscope and enjoy it, it recommend both The Quiet Year and For the Queen.

When I played Microscope, I found that the game was a little too unconstrained and it was very hard to keep things from becoming totally silly, then in the close up scenes, everyone would basically want to default to playing a super rules-light generic TTRPG, and two or three of those scenes would dominate the session. I feel that it may get better with frequent play, but that’s not really what it’s designed for. Ben Robbins, the creator is a very talented game designer and is also famous for the West Marches style of D&D play, and has made numerous GMless TTRPGs since, and I’ve only ever heard great things about them.

The Quiet Year is a game with a more constrained setting, that basically uses a map you fill in as you please and a bunch of prompts tied to playing cards to play out the 4 seasons of a small settlement moving from it’s founding to a final point where either the settlement is implied to die out, or is a fantastic springboard for a traditional TTRPG to take over. There are plenty of hacks online that move the tone from a post apocalypse feeling survival focused game to basically anything that charts a settlement for a year, including one by the creators called The deep forest which I understand to be a decolonising focused and a bit more cottagecore / cottagecore. I preferred this to Microscope mostly because of the fact that it’s prompts constrain the tone from becoming all out silly.

Finally For the Queen has been one of the best games I’ve ever discovered. I’ve played the first edition but there is a second created by the same creator, Alex Roberts, produced by Critical Role’s Darrington Press. If you’re Critical Role averse for some reason, the first edition was not tied to them at all. This game is by far the easiest to teach new players, and is the first game I’d bring to play with absolute TTRPG newbies. In my opinion it generates the best story, although rather than being solely worldbuilding, it places a primary interest on your characters and relationships to a queen figure. I find that despite this, the world’s that comes out of it are far more evocative and exciting to develop than other GMless TTRPGs, and a large part of that is the hard to hack reality that it’s just got good prompts. Despite that it’s got the most hacks of the original of anything here, as the original game is so streamlined and well playtested, which really shows while playing it.

I think modern TTRPGS in general steer towards things like temporary summons because of how it lets the players actually use them in combat. Nobody wants to play the necromancer who is suddenly just some guy because there are no corpses available where the battle kicks off.

I have an enormous soft spot for narratively putting in the legwork to assemble your undead hordes, and when I’m the GM, I’m always keen to set up good moments for the necromancer to build an army, but it’s so easy for that to set up a situation where a player doesn’t get to actually use their features. Making them temporary summons from nowhere in particular is the easiest fix.

I had a similar experience in my 5e game, no real combat but basically the intrigued that drove the game got tenfold more complex and was revealed to involve each member of the party in a varying but believable way.

Seperatly, I also played Alice is Missing the month before and it lived up to the hype I wanted, but it’s very up.my street. What I seek in an RPG is being able to move between being immersed enough to feel what my character feels when I want it, but when I don’t, be able to act as my own drama maker for later. AiM absolutely delivered that for me. It also didn’t need magic or tech to deliver any agency which is a big plus to me.

Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.

For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.

I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.

I deleted my comment because I came from the TTRPG network homepage and didn’t realise I was responding to pathfinder. I gave quite a few D&D 5e specific examples and was a little worried people wouldn’t be happy about it.

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I loathe their lootbox system but I’d say valve is better than their rivals in most places. I’d put them far above Epic, Playstation, and Xbox for their games marketplace, far above meta in the VR space and on par with the game developers I respect in basically every aspect except lootboxes.

I don’t think we should respect, like or trust any large businesses but Valve is certainly the lesser evil of many choices.

I agree that no games are uncrackable in theory, but to my understanding (from about two years to two months ago at least), there were only two people able to crack new denuvo games due to how intensely complex the task is. One of those people only cracks football games and the other is EMPRESS, who from what I’ve seen glancing into the scene, is one crazy lady.

Although modern denuvo may technically be crackable, but while it’s so difficult that only a handful of people have the skill to do it and takes hundreds of hours of work per game, for all intents and purposes, it may as well be uncrackable.