My son got it a few months ago and was enthusiastic about it early on - I haven’t asked him about it recently. As someone in category 2, maybe I should plan to visit and then trade a dinner on Dad for an hour of game time.
I didn't look at the details, but this dovetails nicely with the old adage that when reading any psych study conclusion, you should mentally replace "people are" with "college students looking for beer money are".
No, but it appears very likely. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has brought numerous witnesses before the grand jury and offered Trump a chance to go before the grand jury, an indication that the office will seek to indict him. Though it is possible for the grand jury to vote against charging him, grand juries rarely decline to indict. And if the district attorney’s office thought they were in danger of the grand jury voting “no,” prosecutors likely would have paused the proceedings.
I watched the first episode to see what the hype was about, and i wasn't too impressed... though part of that was probably that I was expecting something more Buffy-like. Then a year later, when we had our son home for the summer, he pressured my wife and me to watch the whole run -- and we did kind of grow attached to the characters. It was a little sad to say goodbye so quickly.
In the absence of a Like button to click, just wanted to say that I enjoyed this anecdote quite a bit (thanks to the spammer for drawing my eye to it!) and will likely be stealing a couple of lines for my everyday use -- especially "related only by my bank account".
The beauty of our modern life is that most of us can enjoy all the blessings of human achievements and pat ourselves on the back about how advanced "we" are, without having the foggiest idea about how everything works.
It was four decades ago but I think I couched it more in terms of what that group would need to stay sane. It wasn't hard to convince a group of teenagers that they could never survive endless days of difficult life without music.
In high school we did an exercise like this (WW3 had just happened and there are 10 survivors in a bunker but only resources enough for 8) -- but each person had a different actual skill or resource, not this stupid IDpol stuff. We took turns playing the role of one of the people and arguing for not getting thrown out (I have a satisfying memory of taking the role of the musician, initially being voted as one of the superfluous ones, and then successfully convincing the group to keep me after all).
It's nice how the conversation here has illustrated how some of the mores in our cultural inheritance were determined by specific challenges faced by our ancestors. We're free to relax or change them now that we don't have nearly the same level of need for a steady supply of soldiers or field workers...but let's hope that situation doesn't drastically change.
To be fair, even before this new information, it was not an unknown phenomenon here for people to vaguely hope they might contract a sudden fatal illness so that they wouldn't have to complete their projects.
Yeah, that's a nice touch. I mentioned the video this morning on a work meeting, and of course everyone immediately brought up Terminator -- pointing out that "nah, that's way too much work, it's just going to trick us into killing our own damn selves" was a bit of an eye-opener.
So we all left the meeting feeling like there really wasn't much point in doing the work that the meeting was about.
I guess it depends on how much their regular viewers trust them. If they don’t usually do that kind of thing, I think it probably would work pretty well - would be a signal that this person is actually worth listening to, and that it’s worth sticking with what starts out a little dry.
Making the rounds again maybe because he made a guest appearance on a popular crypto podcast recently, and the hosts were pretty shaken, enough so that they added a prologue warning the audience: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gA1sNLL6yg4
I suspect the whole Metaverse thing and the Ready Player One stuff has given a lot of normies the wrong idea about what VR is. "Put this thing on and you can be spinning the wheel with Pat Sajak!" is definitely a more enticing pitch. But there's a high barrier to surmount -- most of my (non-gamer) friends see it as an oddity and aren't even interested to try it.
I've been enjoying Ancient Dungeon VR on the Quest -- roguelike dungeon-crawler with pixelated graphic style, basic but very fun. Unfortunately all the slashing and dagger-throwing has aggravated my tennis elbow (which I got originally from too much bow-and-arrowing in "In Death Unchained" VR) -- you don't see this aspect of VR mentioned much in mainstream articles.
I’m asking a practical question - how would you design a reparations program to get money to the people you think deserve it and not to those who don’t? Anytime the government gives away money, there will be many people trying to get some — what are the criteria for inclusion?
What hole? It's a perfectly valid question to you and Chip -- how do you distinguish between a "Black" person with white ancestry and a "white" person with Black ancestry? How do you measure "lived experience"?
This got me thinking about how way back in the 90s, I came across the Usenet "interactive fiction" group and was interested in the discussions about the possibilities and ideas for moving from the puzzle-game approach to something that was more like what the term implied, experiencing the story and being able to affect it without making it a bunch of puzzles. Part of the challenge was how to still make such a thing interesting to be in for more than a few minutes, and another part was how to get non-gamers to realize they didn't have to be a "gamer" to try it.
How many people are like that Potterhead non-gamer, and how many stories/experiences could be created to cater to that kind of person rather than a gamer who brings in a bunch of expectations about what a "game" should be?
Maybe there *is*, but I'm saying there *shouldn't be*, or at least no more than if the reporter overheard that they took some other letter from two years ago and made a few context-specific changes.
Yeah, I get that it's novel but the only (very minor) sin here is not taking out that text -- individuals and orgs use templates and samples all the time. This is about as bad as accidently leaving the template name at the bottom of the doc.
I think that kind of thing has been happening for a while now on a small scale. I recall my daughter telling me about some activists who came to her campus 6-7 years ago with a VR experience of life in a refugee camp someplace.
There's an article in The Dispatch today about Meta losing $13.7 billion on their VR division and questioning the strategy -- this quote seemed relevant to the discussion here:
Bailenson argues that VR as a medium makes most sense for users to experience things that are dangerous, impossible, counterproductive, or expensive (DICE), and anything that couldn’t be done in the real world but is either fun or educational. (“Counterproductive” refers to having VR users engage in actions that wouldn’t make sense in the real world but can serve to teach them behavioral lessons, like experiencing homelessness or engaging in deforestation.)
Meta, on the other hand, is trying to maximize daily usage that resembles social media usage: Zuckerberg has envisioned his metaverse as a place where users can do everything from play games to shop to have work meetings.
“VR is not for that,” said Bailenson of Meta’s approach. “VR is for these small doses, limited amounts of time for these special experiences that may DICE.”
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Hogwarts Legacy: The “I Beat It!” Review”
My son got it a few months ago and was enthusiastic about it early on - I haven’t asked him about it recently. As someone in category 2, maybe I should plan to visit and then trade a dinner on Dad for an hour of game time.
On “Throughput: Politicization Edition”
I didn't look at the details, but this dovetails nicely with the old adage that when reading any psych study conclusion, you should mentally replace "people are" with "college students looking for beer money are".
On “Bad News for Trump But No Arrest (Yet)”
Apparently it's very plausible -- see this Politico article:
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 3/20/2023”
I watched the first episode to see what the hype was about, and i wasn't too impressed... though part of that was probably that I was expecting something more Buffy-like. Then a year later, when we had our son home for the summer, he pressured my wife and me to watch the whole run -- and we did kind of grow attached to the characters. It was a little sad to say goodbye so quickly.
On “An Unexpected Illumination”
In the absence of a Like button to click, just wanted to say that I enjoyed this anecdote quite a bit (thanks to the spammer for drawing my eye to it!) and will likely be stealing a couple of lines for my everyday use -- especially "related only by my bank account".
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 3/13/2023”
Yeah, that was beautiful.
"
I liked Ben Dreyfuss's take on this. This scenario assumes that these ten people were the selected finalists...but why?
"
The beauty of our modern life is that most of us can enjoy all the blessings of human achievements and pat ourselves on the back about how advanced "we" are, without having the foggiest idea about how everything works.
"
It was four decades ago but I think I couched it more in terms of what that group would need to stay sane. It wasn't hard to convince a group of teenagers that they could never survive endless days of difficult life without music.
"
In high school we did an exercise like this (WW3 had just happened and there are 10 survivors in a bunker but only resources enough for 8) -- but each person had a different actual skill or resource, not this stupid IDpol stuff. We took turns playing the role of one of the people and arguing for not getting thrown out (I have a satisfying memory of taking the role of the musician, initially being voted as one of the superfluous ones, and then successfully convincing the group to keep me after all).
It's nice how the conversation here has illustrated how some of the mores in our cultural inheritance were determined by specific challenges faced by our ancestors. We're free to relax or change them now that we don't have nearly the same level of need for a steady supply of soldiers or field workers...but let's hope that situation doesn't drastically change.
On “Falling in and out of love with an AI: Part 2”
To be fair, even before this new information, it was not an unknown phenomenon here for people to vaguely hope they might contract a sudden fatal illness so that they wouldn't have to complete their projects.
"
Yeah, that's a nice touch. I mentioned the video this morning on a work meeting, and of course everyone immediately brought up Terminator -- pointing out that "nah, that's way too much work, it's just going to trick us into killing our own damn selves" was a bit of an eye-opener.
So we all left the meeting feeling like there really wasn't much point in doing the work that the meeting was about.
"
I guess it depends on how much their regular viewers trust them. If they don’t usually do that kind of thing, I think it probably would work pretty well - would be a signal that this person is actually worth listening to, and that it’s worth sticking with what starts out a little dry.
"
Making the rounds again maybe because he made a guest appearance on a popular crypto podcast recently, and the hosts were pretty shaken, enough so that they added a prologue warning the audience: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gA1sNLL6yg4
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: All I Wanted Was A Rehash”
I suspect the whole Metaverse thing and the Ready Player One stuff has given a lot of normies the wrong idea about what VR is. "Put this thing on and you can be spinning the wheel with Pat Sajak!" is definitely a more enticing pitch. But there's a high barrier to surmount -- most of my (non-gamer) friends see it as an oddity and aren't even interested to try it.
"
I've been enjoying Ancient Dungeon VR on the Quest -- roguelike dungeon-crawler with pixelated graphic style, basic but very fun. Unfortunately all the slashing and dagger-throwing has aggravated my tennis elbow (which I got originally from too much bow-and-arrowing in "In Death Unchained" VR) -- you don't see this aspect of VR mentioned much in mainstream articles.
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 2/20/2023”
I’m asking a practical question - how would you design a reparations program to get money to the people you think deserve it and not to those who don’t? Anytime the government gives away money, there will be many people trying to get some — what are the criteria for inclusion?
"
What hole? It's a perfectly valid question to you and Chip -- how do you distinguish between a "Black" person with white ancestry and a "white" person with Black ancestry? How do you measure "lived experience"?
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Hogwarts Legacy After A Week and Revisiting Duskers”
This got me thinking about how way back in the 90s, I came across the Usenet "interactive fiction" group and was interested in the discussions about the possibilities and ideas for moving from the puzzle-game approach to something that was more like what the term implied, experiencing the story and being able to affect it without making it a bunch of puzzles. Part of the challenge was how to still make such a thing interesting to be in for more than a few minutes, and another part was how to get non-gamers to realize they didn't have to be a "gamer" to try it.
How many people are like that Potterhead non-gamer, and how many stories/experiences could be created to cater to that kind of person rather than a gamer who brings in a bunch of expectations about what a "game" should be?
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 2/20/2023”
These open threads are basically Twitter for OT.
"
Trump vs Biden? The bigger question right now is whether this helps Trump in relation to DeSantis.
On “From The Vanderbilt Hustler: Peabody EDI Office responds to MSU shooting with email written using ChatGPT”
Maybe there *is*, but I'm saying there *shouldn't be*, or at least no more than if the reporter overheard that they took some other letter from two years ago and made a few context-specific changes.
"
Yeah, I get that it's novel but the only (very minor) sin here is not taking out that text -- individuals and orgs use templates and samples all the time. This is about as bad as accidently leaving the template name at the bottom of the doc.
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 2/13/2023”
I think that kind of thing has been happening for a while now on a small scale. I recall my daughter telling me about some activists who came to her campus 6-7 years ago with a VR experience of life in a refugee camp someplace.
"
There's an article in The Dispatch today about Meta losing $13.7 billion on their VR division and questioning the strategy -- this quote seemed relevant to the discussion here:
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.