That’s the difference shareholders make.

I once did comic sans for a while because I am not highly typographically sensitive and wanted to mess about, but I usually like a mono serif typeface for the terminal, most recently Noto.

Pragmatically, I am, not because I chose to play the game, but because I didn’t play well enough to win.

With the benefit of perspective, no one’s. There is no author. The game, the loss, all of it, and even the world it took place in are meaningless. It’s all just part of the universe playing with itself.

Not really.

‘Mood disorders’ are highly heritable. Poor economic circumstances are highly heritable. Unhappy people who have children rarely cite them as the cure to their unhappiness. It’s very likely that, if an unhappy person had kids, they’d be unhappy too. Not a given, but more likely than not.

Well, first, you gotta join the military.

Free will is based on the concept of the individual, a concept bounded by a separation already as arbitrary and illusory as a nation’s border. It’s pragmatic to pretend these things exist in your day to day life, but they don’t mean anything to the universe.

Ultimately, asking for a simple guide to privacy is like asking for a simple guide to safety. It’s a broad category, and different people have different needs. Certain parts are simple (privacy: avoid interaction with big tech, safety: don’t leave a fire unattended) but many elements are either unnecessary (windows privacy-supporting software for someone who only uses an iphone, flotation devices in the Sahara) or necessarily complex. (data hygiene procedures, having the correct type of fire extinguisher) There is no prebuilt ‘Privacy Guide for Darkguyman’s situation.’

I’d frame it more as ‘a comic artist is not spreading normative ideas. They’re just using the ideas people already have and juxtaposing them to get a laugh. They aren’t there for debate because no one should be taking a comic artist’s ideas that seriously. e.g. Dilbert guy’

Any technology is cool if you look at it in isolation. I just can’t get terribly excited because I generally doubt they will be used in a sensible/humane manner.

Med tech is looking cool. It’s one of the few unambiguously good uses of AI. AI systems for reading scans, detecting disease, etc. seem like they could be used to make medicine faster, easier, and more affordable, but I have doubts that the tech won’t just be used to increase profit margins and somehow mess things up to benefit insurance company executives.

CRISPR/synthBio looks like it could do amazing things, but I have to wonder how long until things hit the sweet spot, intersecting democratization of powerful tools and destructive ideology, and lead some lunatic or group of lunatics to develop a society destroying bioweapon.

It’s hard to get excited about the development of a new power when you look at who’s likely to hold it.

Okay, pero どの言語で sol ich poster?

I liked that it wasn’t a parody of itself. Most of the writing could have been unchanged if it hadn’t been anthro themed. And the writing was nice, nothing ham-fisted, and had some respect for the reader. I keep running into games where you’ve just talked to an NPC about how they need you to hit the blue button, and you’ve gone through a hallway of posters saying your goal is to hit the blue button, had a quest marker guiding you there that says ‘this way to the blue button you need to press,’ and your character still feels the need to speak to the air about the need to hit the blue button when you walk into the blue button room.

If you want to see someone play Vagante, check out Pakratt13 on the tubes. He did a daily show of roguelikes for a bit and vagante was in the rotation. That’s how I heard about it.

I play, almost exclusively, non-AAA games. Some gems, known and hidden:

• Autonauts and Autonauts Vs Piratebots - Cute automation games
• Spelunky - Elegantly simple and well executed platformer
• BPM: Bullets Per Minute - Rhythm FPS. Others have tried. None I have found have been as good.
• Immortal Redneck - FPS roguelite
• Ziggurat - FPS Roguelite
• Receiver II - Unique FPS roguelike. Every part of everything that moves is simulated. The hammer on your gun hits a firing pin which hits the primer on the cartridge. You can get stovepipes, misfires, double feeds, etc. You don’t reload by hitting ‘reload’ but go through the full manual of arms in a shooter where the tolerances for failure are fairly slim.
• Valley - running game. The feeling of letting a hill propel your running to otherwise impossible speeds, bottled. Nice little story too.
• Dredge - Lovecraftian fishing game.
• Tunnet - lovecraftian network technician simulator. Build a network to allow communication between computers in an underground society with unspeakable horrors occasionally destroying your mind/body.
• Opus Magnum - Programming puzzles
• Vagante - roguelike with tight tolerances
• Ruiner - Cyberpunk slash n dash with a soundtrack half by Sidewalks and Skeletons. Very fun.
• Tails Noir - Detective story. Normally find the anthro thing a bit tiresome but this was pretty good. Well written.
• Elderborn - First person brawler
• Webbed - be a peacock spider. Rescue your lady spider. Help insects. Fight a bird. Dance.
• A Story About My Uncle - Movement game. Jump, dash, grapnel. Simple and elegant.
• Tormentor X Punisher - Top down twin stick shooter. Everything dies in one hit. All the enemies, and you.
• Tin Can - Survival game in which you try to keep up an escape pod long enough to be rescued, which is hard when it seems to have been made by the lowest bidder’s lowest bidding subcontractor and maintained with all the loving care of a convenience store bathroom.

I’ve never played it but ‘Pony Island’ seems to have a pink color scheme and I’m guessing it’s about ponies, so maybe?

It can be that. Never played Ghosts so I don’t know about that one in particular. Some games do other things with it, but that sort of thing is absolutely usable to create that ‘trapped’ feeling.

If you want to produce the sensation of being trapped you have to use the feeling of power and loss. It stems from the sense of ‘If I could just…’ If I could just get out there, I could defeat that henchman for him. If I could just get out there, I could solve that riddle for him. If I could just escape this box, all would be fixed.

Now, the trick is, because this is a video game, players have a reduced sense of agency. The player’s sense of capacity is ‘what happens when you hit the button.’ Mario, before more modern adaptations, had a capacity to move left and right, jump, run, and ‘use ability.’ The player never had the ability to do anything else, so it never feels like a limitation. No one ever said, ‘playing Mario makes me feel trapped because I could beat Bowser if I could just access the cannon that’s right over there.’

So, to produce the feeling of confinement, one must create the sense of power, and then take it away. Give the player enough power that they could even defeat the dragon, but then take it from them so they feel limited. If you can find a way to make it feel like it’s not even forced, as in they feel like they could have won the game in Act 1, Scene 1, but their lack of skills as a player were what made them lose, all the better.

If that’s the style of game you are looking for, I could see a structure of 'do code golf puzzles to:

• program robots to help the knight directly’
• ‘trick’ henchmen or magical castle elements (abstracted coding) into doing things that help the Knight’
• write the guard’s ‘daily action plan’ so they patrol in a way that doesn’t get the knight caught’
• complete abstract ‘magical haxors’ that open the dragon’s firewalls’
• social engineer the dragon between runs to let you have more supplies’
• give simple instructions to collections of small woodland creatures to do simple things that add up to a real goal (in the vein of Opus Magnum)’

I played one a few months back that might fit the bill. ‘Garden Life: a Cozy Simulator’ It’s a game where you grow/decorate a garden of flowers and sell/give them to people. Very pleasant.

You kidding?

(Looks at them)

That empty spot is where those two would be, if they didn’t have to do 55 hours/wk at work and care for their families the rest of the time.

He got depressed and vanished a year ago. No one knows where he went. He didn’t leave any contact info.

He’s literally too stupid to breathe. We keep him around for the laughs but no one is going to tell him anything.

And he’s literally dead.

Wait til you find out about the pilonidal cysts!