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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • You don’t have to have nostalgia for the game to appreciate how wonderfully crafted and expansive it is. It has one of the best soundtracks of any game, period, and its art is highly detailed and numerous. It has a ton of secrets (including one MAJOR secret) and a couple of extra game modes that enhance the replayability.

    I would say the game seems to get better every time I play it. Is that nostalgia or something else? There are a lot of games I played before I had ever seen SOTN, yet I don’t feel the same desire to keep replaying them. I think it’s like a piece of classical music or a great movie. The more you replay it, the more details you come to appreciate. The original Deus Ex is like that for me as well.


  • The commands aren’t very complicated. You’re mostly looking at stuff, taking stuff, or using items on stuff. It’s usually just [verb] [noun] type simple 2 word sentences.

    The hard part of Zork is figuring out where to go and what to use where. Navigation in the game is usually by compass directions but the map is not a plain grid, so you can go north and then go west and end up right back ever you started for odd reasons. You’re highly encouraged to make your own map on paper, in addition to lots of notes about things you saw in each area.

    The game even includes a maze, a reference to the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure’s “maze of twisty passages, all alike.” Navigating it is a real challenge!


  • “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”

    ― Jean-Luc Picard

    Sometimes we get stuck in local extrema. The biggest challenge facing the human race is not climate change, it’s collective action. Simply put, we’re unable to cooperate effectively enough on a large scale to be able to deal with these sorts of problems.

    My city could invest billions of dollars in building a fully electric streetcar transit network and climate change could still proceed largely unabated due to the actions of other people in other areas. In that scenario, my city ends up losing because climate change happened and we wasted all that money on a system that didn’t stop climate change. This is the worse possible outcome so the rational thing (on an individual level, see game theory) to do is avoid it by doing nothing.













  • I think it’s susceptible to the same problems we have now. Elites gonna form and do their thing. Whether they’re in the party or on the board of directors, the effect is the same.

    I think we’re just way too naive about systems. We expect them to work for us without putting in any effort. We should stop focusing so much on systems and start focusing on communities and cultures.

    The best societies have tight-knit communities and a culture of cooperation. You can’t achieve that by passing laws or writing a new constitution or whatever. You have to get buy-in from everyone.


  • At the time when Oscar Pistorious was competing, there was an actual conversation around the fear that people would get their legs amputated so they could get prosthetics like he had if it would gain them a competitive advantage. No one actually knew if his prosthetic legs gave a real advantage because there was no way to do a comparison without having a real athlete go through the amputations.

    If you look into the scene around body building and the extreme lengths people go to with steroids, extreme diets, dehydration and more, it doesn’t seem all that implausible that some people would transition in order to gain a competitive advantage. Heck, some people deliberately get their legs broken in order to stretch out the bones just so they can be taller (no competitive reason). That’s an extremely painful process undergone for less extreme reasons.