When I take commercial flights across over an ocean, being stuck in one seat, unable to recline, dry lips and lousy food and uncomfortable bathrooms, for 8 - 12 hours, I hate life and have to find ways to disassociate my mind from how miserable the experience is and every time I swear I will either never go again or pay extra for first class.

I cannot possibly imagine sitting upright in a half-sunken big-gulp bobbing in the water for three fucking months.

I keep going back to it to try it again and again because I recognize the potential is great, but every time I get in there it’s the same feeling of being in a weird technicolor circus, a universe that has a weird scale and no real sense of vastness because the systems are cramped together cartoon solar systems and there’s no real feeling of consequence, no feeling of “going too far, I need to come back later when I’m stronger” or conversely no feeling of “I need to get to that place over there” and it seems the only real challenge is some dangerous robots and animals so you leave that place and go get your fuel somewhere else.

I think it would have connected a lot better if it was less easy to get around, less teleporters to identical space stations, less fast-travel and less ships flying in the sky, less aliens hopping all over the place on planets, less stuff everywhere. Maybe more of a survival feeling where you really do have to climb down in caves to search for a part to get your life support going, even basic, tired old hunger/thirst type mechanics would have really spiced up the experience and would have made finally being able to fly and explore feel awesome.

Also, the crafting isn’t fun, they lean into a lot of weird space minerals and space chemicals and such that you have no intuitive idea what you need to keep. To say nothing of how boggling the inventory/upgrade system can be, I don’t know why they reinvented the inventory/skill/upgrade system so much.

The Outer Wilds - I get recommended this over and over, I know it’s a huge hit, a cult classic, and beloved to many people. I finally got it and gave it a real solid attempt, several times so far. I understand the gameplay loop I guess, the repeating, the weird ship flying. I mean, I appreciate it and love that people are experimenting with new ways to make games that break old molds. I really like the atmosphere and maybe if I were a lot younger it would feel fresh and interesting.

But I never really started having fun, never really connected with the characters or the world, I never got hooked. Everything felt like a janky obstacle instead of progression and reward.

Maybe I’ll try it again sometime, but maybe it’s possible some games just don’t rub me right.

Also, ITT: lots of people arguing with other people why their feelings are wrong.

My parents were crazy apocalypse preppers, the first 10 years of my life we lived in tents and vans, they had PO boxes the entire time. It’s not exactly nuclear-bunker level security.

Also, commenter above hypothesizing a new housing/living regime entirely which doesn’t seem that far off tbh.

Yah, anyone can buy the materials to do the same thing, this isn’t arcane mad science, it’s just using organic chemistry to make simple processors. We’re as far from “growing a conscious brain in a jar” as we are from traveling to Alpha Centauri.

They just made a basic microcontroller out of organic chemistry, relax and learn even basic science before you get murderously bent out of shape by the next sensationalist clickbait headline.

Yah but the visuals of “growing a human brain and trapping it in hell” gets a lot more clicks than “We made a very basic microcontroller out of organic chemistry to interact with an old video game poorly.”

Which part

It’s not like we see faces in everything :)

Welcome to the late 2020’s. It’s only going to get weirder.

To be clear, the LLM in this story did not actually “want” a robot body, it doesn’t “want” anything, it’s not a thinking entity like you or I (assuming you’re real.)

The guy fed it a ton of crazy shit and he got a lot of crazy shit amplified back to him by the world’s best associating machine, crafting detailed and fleshed-out narratives based on every inadvertent prompt he sent into it. People are very bad at understanding how these things work in the best circumstances, so if you’re already unbalanced or have deep emotional/mental health problems, an LLM can be incredibly dangerous for you.

Yah, shit, I was making salary for the first time in my life and my entire job consisted of acting engaged at pointless meetings.

I make half as much now, but I also hate this work too so there’s that. I keep thinking about picking up some better coding skillsets but then I see yet another workplace gutted by AI and wonder how much time I have as a white-collar worker at all. Might have to go back to painting figures for money.

Every country with economic power is a propaganda machine powered by institutional financial corruption.

All the rest are poor pawns that are shuffled around by the economic powers and sometimes turned to rubble.

Take care of and support the best outcomes in your closest community wherever you are, everything else starts there. We’ll never solve this issue but we can make better lives for ourselves and those around us. No, do not run out to the wilderness and live alone, community is strength against all of these forces.

One of my last jobs I started entry-level clerical work but I noticed everyone in the office was talking like this, so I started in on it, I would take advantage of meetings and group projects to just spout utter bullshit like “We really have to circle our wagons and take some of this conversation offline so we can maximize the returns from our diversity” and holy shit did it have an impact. I was promoted before my first year was up, I was invited to more and more meetings, I was treated like a manager before I was even given the role. I was eventually laid off when the company was bought out by private equity but not before climbing to higher management.

I was raised conservative, back-country compound with apocalypse preppers, homeschooling, israel prophecy, the whole nine yards. I was raised with The 700 Club and Rush Limbaugh playing every day and night.

I read science books that distant family members managed to smuggle to me in gift boxes alongside other “safe” books like Kid’s bibles, I learned more and more about the world around me, I started collecting my own book collection and just read and read and read, and the doubts started to grow, uneasy, shameful, scary-as-fuck doubts.

But the big turn happened when I got out of there, and America started one it’s many wars and I was watching FOX news cover it. A humvee passes a civilian box truck and shredded it to pieces with an automatic grenade launcher. Probably a family trying to escape the city… cut to the host, smiling and praising America’s might, and that’s when it hit me: We’re the bad guys.

A few more things really sealed it, when I had friends start to come back from these conflicts in boxes, or a couple guys I knew who blew their own brains out after coming home. I still despair at these horrific wastes of life and I can’t figure out why more people don’t see life as precious. How fucking stupid do you have to be to justify war, murder and causing destruction to society.

We’ve had a long line of animated characters absolutely fucking with all our developing wires when we were exposed at a vulnerable age.

I go way back, Disney’s Robin Hood/Maid Marian was my problematic pubescent mind-worm. Didn’t help that when growing up without school or friends or even a phone, it was one of only a handful of VHS cassettes I owned so I watched it a thousand times.

Later generations had so many others, from the mainstream favorites like Lola Bunny to more obscure ones like Minerva Mink in Animaniacs, to where we are today where I don’t think I can even watch Zootopia around others without feeling uncomfortable because of how much “content” is floating around out there.

I do think it’s healthy though, I think if we allowed more people to realize that their attractions are highly subjective and do not need to follow some homogeneous cultural norm, we would probably have a lot fewer people with crazy hangups and crippling insecurity about their weird kinks and desires.

A lot of this would make a lot more sense to you guys if you saw these plants in their original, non-cultivated states. They don’t look anything like the shit in grocery stores.

I’ve heard great things about flavored sparkling water as a beer-alternative, unsweetened or lightly sweetened. I can’t recommend quitting drinking enough. It gets harder and harder to break the habit and makes you have a great big ol’ belly that won’t go away easily. (Fruit juice and other carbs will do the same thing. Sugar belly sucks.)

Wine was my poison for many years, does the same thing. I now just drink a lot of water at night.

Well, to be more correct, if they see a venture or tactic of theirs isn’t paying off as their delusional AI’s told them it would, we can at least get them to scrap that direction and try something else. We’ll never actually “stop” them, but we can use the thing we have, that they want, to at least direct them away from the places that they are causing harm to things we want to preserve.

I am under no expectation of this happening at all, we have hundreds of millions of families who will throw whatever new, shiny, mainstream tech-toys and “blockbuster” releases at their kids as a babysitter, those are the breadbasket of the tech and entertainment companies.

No.

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Antros