I think I speak for most people when I say that I’m a good representative of the general population.
I’ve been playing Axiom Verge, it feels like the platonic ideal of metroid. I’ve cleared almost 90% of the map so I’ve got to imagine I’m close to finishing.
I’ve been suprised by how much I enjoy the lore. You can find notes hidden around that expand on the story and I get more excited stumbling on one of those than finding a new powerup.
Eastward is an indie game I actually first learned about here on lemmy, just a couple weeks after its release. I went back and replayed it just a month ago and it’s so good. I can acknowledge that it’s not for everyone, it almost feels like the target audience is me specifically.
The dialogue is really wonderful and you fall in love with the characters. When I play games I generally am talking to every npc, Eastward made that feel rewarding for me. There’s not much for tangible benefits, it’s just that to me the dialogue feels very…human (the robots included). If you’re inclined to check in with the npcs you’ll catch wind of little dramas and occasionally see them resolved, and none of it really affects gameplay or the story but it makes the world feel more alive.
My personal favorite, and one I wouldn’t have found without going out of my way to talk to the npcs - the train attendant robot talking shit about the repair-worker robot:
The most frequent complaint I’ve seen about Eastward is too much dialogue and too little game, so ymmv. Slight oversimplification, but the gameplay is basically Zelda but with a frying pan instead of a sword. It’s not innovative but I still find it fun.
The story was heartwarming at times and (with help from the environmental visuals) creepy at other times. I will say it was a bit of a letdown just how much was left open-ended at the end though, there were a few plot points where I was looking forward to seeing how they’d be explained or where they were going and the game just never gave an explicit explanation.
The pixel art is so special. I try to avoid looking up too much before playing a new game and there was one moment in particular that just floored me visually. I do think the game as a whole made a stronger impression on me because I went in mostly blind, some of the ways the environments change and evolve visually as you move forward really impressed me.
tl;dr the appeal is lots of emotion captured in the details
You clearly weren’t saying they all are, but what I’m saying is that my impression is that the bar for weirdness isn’t higher at all. There will always be examples of mathematicians behaving weirdly, because there will always be examples of people behaving weirdly. Spending a lot of time thinking about abstract nonsense definitely improves your proficiency at thinking about abstract nonsense, but I can’t see how it could affect the way you process other things any more than frequent practice with sudoku or chess would.
The mental process in math is no more special than any other intellectual hobby. If you invest decades into chess I’m sure you’ll think about chess in a very different way than a beginner, but in my opinion seeing chess differently should have minimal impact on how someone thinks about things unrelated to chess.
I have to imagine their lawyers aggressively made sure no one who has recently owned a playstation made it to the jury.
It’s really depressing. Every year I get more nostalgic for the internet of twenty years ago.
I recently played through Slice of Sea, which is an adventure game, a bit similar in spirit to the old LucasArts games. I could give a lot of criticism on the gameplay, but it was so artistically captivating that I’d call it worth my time regardless.
I got through it in about nine hours without a guide, but I think trying to play it in a couple sittings would be miserable. If you get stuck put it down and come back a couple days later.
Maybe this implies I’m one of the weirdos, but my experience has been wildly different. My experience has been mathematicians are just people, what they have in common is a passion for math. Sometimes they’re weird, but that’s because they’re people and not because they do math. I never got the impression I was talking with a schizophrenic or a Kaczynski type. They exist, but non-mathatician schizophrenics do too.
There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people’s houses to collaborate on some math.
I don’t think heard of this and I’m skeptical. Give me a couple names to jostle my memory?
One, who coined the phrase “another roof, another proof”, was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70’s antidepressants.
I don’t know this quote but I’d give it a 90% chance it’s Erdös.
Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.
Come on man, this isn’t weird. It’s representation theory, there literally isn’t a transparent description. It’s weird to think having fun with a title isn’t a normal impulse from time-to-time.
7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don’t need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
This reads as partially random to me, what is “the equation defining structure”?
I didn’t get it until I read the transcript. I thought that the second panel was a jab with barbed wire (tetanus risk) and that the joke was basically “if your body is punctured, be sure to treat it by puncturing your body”.
I actually think I find that reading more fun than the intended one.
I can’t get this method to work for me, do you have a guide?
I just finished Anode Heart after a million hours over the past couple weeks. Spectacular game. It’s an indie monster tamer, it doesn’t have the graphics of Nexomon: Extinction or Cassette Beasts but I liked it better than either of those.
I’ve started a monster taming game called Anode Heart and it’s good stuff so far. There’s a lot of depth to the gameplay, somewhat nonlinear with a strong story anyway. It came out about three years ago. Comparing to other indie monster tamers I’d definitely put it above Cassette Beasts, not sure about Monster Sanctuary but it’s much less well-known than either and deserves to be.
A class of students doing that would be a million times more fun for the professors too. Acadamia would be so much better if education were its primary purpose.
That was my niche in grad school. I authored a paper proving that the CW-complexes in the category of small categories under the Joyal-Tierney model structure are exactly the groupoids. I never came up with a reason why anyone should care, but at least it was fun.
I believe veganism is ethical but have failed repeatedly in attempts to give up comfort foods. A lot of tastes nauseate me, so I don’t intend to give it another try until I can afford the costs (in time, finances, emotional health) of trial-and-error to find more meals that work for me.
intrinsic critical thinkers whose nature overcame their upbringing
I’m going to push back on this because I don’t think it’s true and also because I think it’s harmful.
There are not people who are naturally inclined not to think critically. Just as much as upbringing can shape someone’s worldview, environment can shape willingness and capacity for introspection. People don’t think critically when they’re naturally predisposed to do that, they think critically when they’re either adequately distanced from the disincentives for reflection they’ve known forever or when the incentives for reflection create enough desperation to overwhelm.
I say harmful because is there anyone who sincerely doesn’t picture themselves as an intrinsic critical thinker? Everyone is already there, so the “intrinsic critical thinker” worldview means assuming some people you meet will be worse at it. “I’m naturally better at critical thinking than this person” is a mindset that provides a shortcut to dismissing this person’s viewpoints without actually evaluating them.
I never went further right than voting democrat, but I used 4chan occasionally for a good decade and I’m convinced that support of Trump’s campaign on there was well-understood to be a running joke until people unaware it was a joke started joining to participate. I’ll admit I wasn’t using it much anymore at all by that time, but when I saw comments about Trump support start popping up the first couple months my thought was “this is hilarious”. The idea of actual Trump supporters existing was not something I was capable of imagining at that time.
I can’t even get mad, I find it genuinely funny that that’s the argument he came up with to elaborate on why AI disclosure mandates are irresponsible.
It’s full-on “no one reads past the headline anyway” effort-level without understanding that people who read past the headline are his only possible reachable demographic, because not looking past the headline is defaulting to the easy assumption that Epic is just spewing garbage.
Anthropic is right! AIs trained without direct consent from the owners of the training material should be blacklisted!
We demand that our governments criminalize all AIs developed without full permission for use of training material, in support of Anthropic!
I’ve never heard of him either but this is clearly false since he’s displaying full mastery of a game in the video we’re commenting on.