"Every time I sat down to play [the game] it was like walking into a dark shed full of rakes, treading on one, and getting blatted in the face... and then I'd go back into the shed, thinking maybe it was just the one rake, when blat in the face again. So I thought, I'll just keep tanking the rakes and maybe I'll become psychotically in love with being rake-faced. And that's kind of what happened."
> make unique swallowing monsters (Juiblex) resist magical digging from inside
Oh noooooooooo... yeah that's fair.
Lots of overdue gameplay changes here, really. I was something of an expert player 20 years ago, my best ascenscion being Atheist/Genoless/Wishless with no pet to boot. It seems a lot has changed. I see fixes on this list for things that bothered me then. :)
Every few years, I think Yahoo's old attempt to have real people build a phone directory of the web wasn't such a bad idea. And I occasionally wish Google still worked by seeing what other people thought was a worthy web page on a topic. My algorithm for finding worthwhile content is similar: I try to visit the community of interest and see what they like. There is no substitute for the human element in evaluating quality.
Interestingly, tragically, YouTube seems to have gotten the message that I like long form informational videos, and serves me ones with intriguing titles that are clearly written, illustrated, and read by AI. I seem to be training it to deceive me, which is not a good thing. In fact, I had trained it so well to push my psychological buttons that I recently had to leave entirely, which is surely not what anyone wants.
A side effect of Reddit/Twitter/etc having captured most of the population/eternal September might be that a
web directory has become feasible again. Ignore social media, ignore AI, ignore paywalled sites. What's left and high enough quality might be manageable to maintain a directory for.
Easier said than done, obviously, but the point is that the worthwhile web isn't so big anymore.
Every now and then someone shares a small web link here (Kagi is one aggregator). It’s like survivors picking up the shards of civilization after the apocalypse. Of course such a project can remain viable and useful as long as it remains niche, which is virtually guaranteed as long as there’s no money in it.
It’s incredible how too much money corrupts everything it touches.
Some of my best work has been done as a labor of love. I do have the vague impression that we as a society have taken a wrong turn in selling the sacred. I am not in favor of collapsing society down to hippie communes or anything, but it does seem to me that we told better stories back when stories were freer.
I sometimes imagine gathering up some number of like-minded electrical and software engineers, and founding some sort of monastary in which everyone was fed and taken care of and built the best technology they could, as a gift to humanity. I do wonder if the day's robber barons would find a way to shut us down, of course, but I still remember a bright and optimistic time when technology was made to serve people, not to oppress them, and it seems to me like a bright expression of human spirit that oughtn't to have been sold.
Some critical differences between the situations that come to mind:
- The problem of counterfeit currency is well acknowledged and has roots in antiquity. Reasonable people agree that currency genuinely cannot do its only job if counterfeiting is possible, and have had that agreement for thousands of years. In addition, the sole right to print currency is given to the US government in its constitution (almost certainly for this reason). These two things grant government control over printing currency both a moral and a legal legitimacy that government control over printing gun parts doesn't have.
- Because the government has control over the design of legitimate currency, it is actually practical to prevent software from reproducing it. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation . Gun parts have no such distinguishing characteristic, and cannot be made to have one, since there is no authoritative body responsible for all of them. Having such a marking could be made legally mandatory, but it is not actually required for the function of the part, whereas currency needs to match the authentic design in order to be useful. It is therefore much less practical and effective to mark gun parts to prevent replication than it is to similarly mark currency.
- Creating your own guns specifically (and weapons, generally) is widely seen as a natural or God-given right. I would go so far as to say that it is intrinsically human, and that losing access to it would be as painful to some as losing access to rock 'n roll. I would say that due to this pain, losing that right is one of the chief signs of an enslaved people. While not everyone would agree with me, many would, which gives the issue a divisive moral edge. By contrast, creating your own currency might be seen as some sort of natural right by some people, but creating your own US Dollars certainly is not seen that way by anybody. Well, I'm sure you could find someone, but you know what I mean.
- As far as I know, there is no law compelling printer/photocopier manufacturers to use anti-counterfeiting software, and compliance is voluntary (but apparently pretty widespread -- though I doubt it's universal). A similar voluntary setup with 3D printer manufacturers would be less objectionable (though also much less likely to succeed). Introducing any sort of mandatory compliance regime introduces friction, slows innovation, and invites corruption.
- Manufacturing gun parts is actually pretty easy, and could be accomplished via many methods accessible to hobbyists, ranging from whittling by hand to duct taping hardware together to lost wax casting to desktop CNC to a desktop injection molding setup to metalworking on a lathe in a garage machine shop. It is in no way limited to 3D printing, though that admittedly lowers the bar a bit. Learning to work on guns is not significantly harder than learning to work on cars, though perhaps fewer people know how to do it. Thus, a focus on 3D printing seems much more driven by sensationalism, paranoia, and ignorance of this fact than it is by practical assessment of the issue. By contrast, creating even minimally recognizable counterfeit currency without the assistance of a computer is practically impossible and certainly cost-prohibitive. In manufacturing gun parts, it is perfectly practical in some cases to do the equivalent of drawing a dollar bill with a crayon -- something much less successful in the counterfeiting world.
- Adding broad pattern-recognition controls to a 3d printer is a novel and difficult problem that will likely impact innocent people doing legal things. Preventing the printing of accurate-looking currency has a much more narrow impact, and is much more focused on people doing illegal-adjacent things.
Without meaning any malice toward your question, I mention that I write because you have stepped on one of my pet peeves: it seems to me that an inability to see the difference between things that are, in fact, different, is one of the major failure modes of modern society in general. We need an appreciation for texture and nuance if we are to navigate the world rightly.
I once became so famous that a community of several hundred people knew and recognized my name for a few years. At the time, it was very ego-flattering, and I was delighted to have done something that had such a big and positive impact. However, as an experience it really did not agree with me, and even this very minor level of fame has left me resolved to never, ever, ever become that famous again if I can help it.
I don't think I am unique in that. In fact, I perceive that it is very normal for public figures, not merely to fade from public attention, but to actively seek out seclusion.
While I'm not Satoshi, I would put the odds of someone in such a position of maintaining radio silence far from "zero chance". I would put it more around 70 or 80 percent. And at any rate, it is certainly what I would do.
I agree that there is a parallel between governments and corporations multiplying surveillance and preppers impractically multiplying gadgets. I perceive both to be responding to some sort of psychological issue relating to control or insecurity, not to be practically pursuing resilience.
A government with aggressive surveillance ambitions but a decaying police department and justice system looks to me very much like the guy with a mountain of guns and ammo but no parallel investment in something like battlefield medicine. Whatever you're telling yourself about the reason for what you're doing, it is manifestly not correct, at least going by other investments I would expect to see and find neglected.
That was my first thought, too. I and a couple of my kids have great affection for Minecraft. However, I don't think that affection really matches the absolute foaming-at-the-mouth excitement we felt for Descent.
I don't think it's that video games have gotten worse (though perhaps they have). I think it's more that it's impossible to recreate the way they impacted us back then. It wasn't just about the games, but also about the times. DOOM today is a fine game and even a classic, but back then it was the first time anyone had ever seen anything like it and we were inventing online play and fps tactics and amateur map design in real time. Descent had that same blockbuster feel, but that for me that feeling faded from new releases over the next few years. (Though I won't deny Minecraft caught something of that old bombshell energy.)
I suspect the way I feel about the video games I grew up with is a feeling my kids will never exactly have. Sure, they love their games, but the 90s were an incredible time for the art form. By analogy, I love the music I grew up with, but I don't feel about it the way my parents feel about the music from the 60's. Music is always special, but that was a particularly special time for music and if you weren't there, you weren't there. In time the absolute electricity of the British Invasion became "So what kind of music do you listen to?" So I think it will go with games.
I will always love Star Wars for the 15 minutes of Return of the Jedi that make the point that, with all of magic and technology at your disposal, love is still the strongest weapon in the universe. The rest of Star Wars (and all of Star Trek) is comparative fluff.
B5 spends most of the series saying that sort of thing.
Yahtzee was talking about Dark Souls, but it applies. (Vigorously NSFW, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=STrYyhEwkbY )
That said, I think Nethack is best experienced with liberal and unapologetic spoiler use.
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