Frank

Eternal Darkness was so, so good. Just amazing. It deserves a re-make so a new generation can experience the absolute bonkers terror of it.

I was in college when it came out and we legit stacked couches on tables to make stadium seating and had like twenty people watching someone play like it was a horror movie in a theare. Whenever some new mind-screw faked everyone out the whole audience would start shrieking and going omg omg omg. It was a wonderful experience.

"Americans do not have access to a comical amount of weaponry" is a trope/oversight I really enjoy. If you're not literally in New York City then literally everyone is strapped. Even the gun control perverts who act like it's unthinkable anyone would own or need a gun are strapped. The people who claim gun statistics are misleading because guns georg owns ten thousand guns are strapped. If you're setting a movie in america then there should be problems caused by too many guns rather than a lack of guns.

Project Zomboid is a great example of this. You can immediately tell it was made by Europeans because it's set in Kentucky but every house does not contain several shotguns and hunting rifles with a few dozen rounds of ammunition.

Be still my heart. Consensus building? The leader as the executioner of the views and conclusions of the collective? The chairman as a goad to produce comprehensive consideration of the question?

That image is all kinds of fucked up. Like there are serious alien geometries in it.

I'm really hoping someone will figure out how to effectively poison hte well because I am experiencing legit despair looking at thsse things.

One of the things left out of the luddite narrative is that while the looms were very good at producing cheap and abundant cloth they didn't produce good cloth. Hand weaving by true experts could produce fabrics of a quality and fineness that doesn't exist anymore. When the looms destroyed craft weaving those secrets of the trade were lost. Entire categories of fine fabrics don't exist now, can't be had for love nor money because no one knows how to make them. At most a handful of hobby weavers might be able to produce very limited amounts.

Being able to produce vast amounts of cheap, good enough fabric was mostly a huge boon as it brought the cost of clothing down enormously. But we don't need infinite cheap good enough art. And if what happened to all the crafts - the replacement of skilled craftspeople and masters with good enough mass production, with the loss of all those trade secrets and skills - happens to art we will be incomprehensibly poorer for it. The Mona Lisa hinges on a few brush strokes that set it apart from other pieces.

Ooh true. Conservation of detail is a hard and inescapable factor in art. You have to make decisions about where you focus your time. Once you hit your thirties detail begins to very literally cost pain and you have to weigh the effort you're putting in against what it will cost you in pain in your hands. Most artists don't waste detail where it isn't needed.

Note how none of the objects are objects. The fasteners on the shoulders are smeary blobs, not representations of anything. The gem on the breastplate, on close examination, isn't a gem. It's a red blob. What is that thing sticking out of the left arm? It's nothing, it's just pixels stuck together by a machine.

It's getting less reliable, but look at the details of complex objects. The computational plagiarism engines can't think, and can't do abstract concepts. They fuck up hands because they don't have a concept of "hand" as a category of objects with fingers on the end of arms that grasp things. They're not drawing hands, they're putting pixels where those pixels are statistically probable.

So, look at complex objects - jewelry, buckles, electronics, guns, anything complex. The plagiarism engine doesn't "'know" what those things are. It doesn't know what buttons are or that buckles fasten things together. It's just putting pixels in statistically probable positions. Hence those objects tend to be smears of color and light and dark without actual details. That smearing is still present in many images even as the machines become more sophisticated. The boundaries between things are indistinct and wrong because the machine doesn't "know" what things, objects, concepts, are.

Iirc Fidel didn't admit he was wrong about gay people until the 60s, after GULAG was shut down, so it seems plausible the soviets were being shitasses.

What if we built combloc sadness housing, but we spread all the blocks around like Legos on the floors of god's living room so they had none of the advantages of apartment blocks and also made them cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and also isolated them in the burbs.

This dovetails with my thesis that very few people, even in the industry, understand game design and what it means that games must be designed.

Sad posting about bipolar