And he and I can egg yours.
Round and round it goes~…

I took an entire week off for Rebirth, and the whole time was like “Whee! :D”

No problem! There is about 40 hours of walking down a single path, but I actually like 13 a lot.

I’ve never seen google do that, by the way. That’s crazy.

The paradigm shift system also introduces this… I dunno, ducking and weaving style gameplay? It’s like you’re the director of an orchestra looking for the right musical swell at the right time.

This paradigm shifting is the same kind that you do in other games when a party member needs to stop and focus on healing, but now that you have to shift your entire team’s focus, while keeping in mind that each role really needs time and momentum to truly be effective, you end up making these real-time opportunity cost decisions about which urgent thing needs the most attention, or whether you can split your focus even though a team that can do this is much weaker at both things it’s trying to accomplish. I really like the way 13 forces you to think about party formation.

I also give it credit for establishing the stagger meter, which was such a good idea that they’ve included it in like every game since then.

That would be 13. :p

I actually really liked 16’s main storyline. Not sure where I rank it, exactly, but parts of it were extremely cool.

What I did not like were the barrel-bin jrpg-tier sidequests where characters show up out of the blue because they’re supposed to be in this scene and “you really thought I wouldn’t see the two of ya’s slinkin’ off” was all I guess the project had the budget for.

I can’t tell you how many times it felt like a character would tell me to go somewhere to do a thing because they can’t go, and so I’d go do it, only for them to show up anyway so they could thank me with sad music.

It was just exhausting how shallow and uninspired most of the side content was.

Funny enough, 13 is actually the one I’ve replayed the most. I think I’ve beaten it like 3 different times, in addition to whatever runs I didn’t finish. It’s kind of grown on me as one of my favorite ones.

Do be ready for about 40 hours of single-path walkways if you ever go back, though. I don’t actually think this is the problem some people make it out to be, but the game isn’t polarizing for no reason.

Metal Gear Solid V >:)

I bought that game day one, actually played like the first 4 missions, thought to myself “Wow, this is going to be incredible! I should wait until I have a loong weekend, hehe~”, and then never touched it again.

I am glacially making my way through the first 4 now, though.

Tonight, Australia sleeps for the first time in ten years.

Oh yeah, absolutely. The fact that we own nothing these days is crazy.

I’m sorry, did you not want to play Ocarina of Time in the year of our lord 2046?

People should be allowed to smoke and gamble, too.
I still don’t think it’s good that they do that, though.

One of the aims of Stop Killing Games, as far as I’m aware, is the preservation of history, which seems like a very odd thing to be indignant about.

I also noticed that they were talking about sending arguments to a custom function? That’s like a day-one lesson if you already program. But this was something they couldn’t find in regular search?

Maybe I misunderstood something.

All right, I guess I’m here to collect then. We doin’ paypal or what?

You didn’t answer the question.

If the DNC doesn’t listen anyway, why would a 3rd party vote “get attention from them”?

There is no other way to get the attention from the politicians.

And if those politicians are so keen on ignoring you, why would they listen to this? Oh, you voted for Cornel West because you’re “unsatisfied,” literally who cares? The status quo wins again, goodbye. Say hello to the camps.

I was equivocating singular words and entire sentences on purpose.

If you can recombine sentences in interesting ways, into paragraphs that are your own ideas, that isn’t plagiarism. Why would “people can’t construct unique sentences either” be a rebuttal if that’s not what plagiarsm is?

Instead it studies the prior work of humans, finds patterns and combines these in unique and novel ways.

You’re anthropomorphising.

LLMs are little clink-clink machines that produce the most typical output. That’s how they’re trained. Ten thousand inputs say this image is of a streetlight? That’s how it knows.

The fact an LLM knows what a Lord of Rings is at all means that Tolkien’s words, the images, the sounds, are all encoded in its weights somewhere. You can’t see them, it’s a black box, but they live there.

Could you say the same of the human brain? Sure. I know what a neuron is.

But, LLMs are not people.

All of that is besides the point, though. I was just floored by how cynical you could be about your own supposed craft.

A photograph of, say, a pretty flower is fantastic. As an enjoyer of art myself, I love it when people communicate things. People can share in the beauty that you saw. They can talk about it. Talk about how the colors and the framing make them feel. But if you’re view is that you’re not actually adding anything, you’re just doing more of what already exists, I really don’t know why you bother.

Nobody has seen every photo in the world.

Okay, assume someone has. Is your art meaningless, then? All of photography is just spectacle, and all the spectacles have been seen?

it doesn’t mean you can’t combine them in a unique ways

Okay, so you don’t believe new things can’t be unique. You just think that plagiarism is when one person uses the word ‘the’ and then a second person uses the word ‘the’.

Why do you find it such a depressing idea?

That art is dead? Through sheer saturation alone, no one has anything left to say? That watching the new Cinderella is line-by-line the same as watching the old Cinderella, and the money machine keeps this corpse moving along only because people are too stupid to realize they’re being sold books from a library? I really don’t know how you couldn’t.

This is like asking me why a polluted lake is sad.

the truth is a moving target somewhere in between.

Token guessing and… consciousness?

I’d argue it’s virtually impossible to write a sentence that has not been written before

I mean this sincerely: why bother getting excited about anything, then?

A new Marvel movie, a new game, a new book, a new song. If none of them are unique in any way, what is the point of it all? Why have generative AI go through this song and dance? Why have people do it? Why waste everyone’s time?

If the plagiarism engine is acceptable because it’s not possible to be unique anyway… I just, I don’t know how you go on living. It all sounds so unbelievably boring.