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No idea about the movie, but I wonder if figuring out the exact quote would be a useful step in the right direction (making it easier to google, ask about, etc). The closest I’ve found so far is “The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far”, from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.

I assume that the movie used a correct quote, so it should be possible to find the quote without knowing the movie. If the movie invented a brand new quote, then the idea of using the original quote as a stepping stone towards finding the movie won’t work.

well I guess they found one

It’s been forever since I messed with this sort of thing, but could you use something like Wireshark to see what programs are sending network traffic? I see that you’ve already gotten a reply about pixel dungeon specifically, but if this is an ongoing concern for you it might be useful to know how to check yourself for an arbitrary program. Iirc you can just run it and it will show all packets being sent/received by your machine and which programs are sending them. I haven’t used Wireshark in over a decade, but a quick google seems to show it still exists, and if it’s like I remember then it shouldn’t be hard to learn how to use it.

The next generation could go down. The PS3 was crazy expensive, and then the PS4 cost significantly less than the PS3 had. So, there’s precedent. Adjusted for inflation, the ps3 was even more expensive than the ps5 pro.

He actually did a video on this a while back, “a 4000 year old recipe for the babylonian new year”. I cooked his version of the recipe after watching the video, it was pretty good (although I had to make some changes because of ingredient availability and household allergies, so iirc I switched an obscure vegetable for a quarter of a red onion, and the sour beer for a 50/50 mix of white wine and chicken stock)

I feel like this pattern of people lying to doctors and doctors adjusting things to account for it really messes with rigorously honest people.

A little while back I was reading how when they ask you how much pain you’re in, with 10 being the most pain imaginable, they pretty routinely have people calmly say “12”. So, if you’re actually using the scale where you’ve probably never experienced more than a 9 and would be sobbing at an 8, so you say 7, they automatically assume you’re in basically no pain because you said less than 10.

Kind of wish we could just speak accurately and take each other literally instead of playing games where we try to figure out exactly what lie to tell to convey the truth, but I guess that’s not how most people are wired.

Every time I hear this observation, I automatically hear Jim Carrey’s voice in my head saying “It’s dead people laughing! Those people are dead!”

I guess he said it in the 1999 movie Man On The Moon and the line has somehow been permanently lodged in the back of my brain for the last 25 years

Are you set on using light sources, or would you be okay with a shader that just creates the shadows without checking for specific light sources? It looks like this might do what you want, but you might need to modify it to work with your exact use case (multiple z levels).

Generally it seems like some kind of shader might be your best option, it seems like the 2d lights are intended for casting lights within a given z level rather than between them. If you want more complex shadows across multiple z levels, you might need to create your own light objects (just a position, color, and intensity) and pass them to a shader that does something similar to the linked example, but modified based on your lights list.

It’s possible there’s a simpler way that someone else could chime in with (I’m pretty new to godot), but as far as I can tell the built in 2d light and shadow systems aren’t designed for different z levels, so you’d need to use something else.

It means the overall death rate in the sample group was decreased substantially. The number of people who survived because they didn’t get lung cancer or blood clots was so large that it had a noticeable impact on the number of total survivors, even when you include death by bus. This is a useful measure for a couple of reasons. One, it accounts for the prevalence of the disease being prevented - cutting all pork from your diet prevents 100% of deaths by trichinosis, which accounts for like 0.00001% of deaths from all causes (completely made up numbers and example, without consulting any sources). Two, it could account for net change in survival, for a treatment or behavior that has both positive and negative effects - giving radiation therapy indiscriminately to everyone with any kind of lump might decrease rate of dying from breast cancer, but increase death “from all causes” because it causes more problems than it solves.

I guess an additional way it might be useful is if we don’t yet have data on the exact mechanisms by which the treatment helps or what exactly its preventing - all we know is that we gave group A the treatment and not group B, and after 20 years there were a lot more people alive in group A, but we haven’t yet found a pattern in which causes of death were most affected and how.

This has been pretty widely discussed under the name “the double empathy problem”, although as always it’s good to have more actual data. The general gist in the existing discussion is that autistic people and allistic people have trouble with each other’s communication styles, but this is treated as a communication deficit in autistic people rather than two different styles that have difficulty understanding each other. An analogy might be a minority that (poorly) speaks the language of the majority, and then is considered stupid despite the fact that they are bilingual and none of the people they’re speaking to have made an effort to learn the minority language.

I wasn’t sure to what extent this was autistic community in-group jargon, so I spent time trying to loosely explain it, when it turns out that a quick Google to check whether I’m crazy indicates it’s pretty well established and I could probably have just linked the Wikipedia page.

Tl;Dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

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The linked article mentions that one of the predator types merged into the dragon is raptors (as in birds of prey, not velociraptors)

You might enjoy crpgaddict, a blog that is playing through every computer roleplaying game in chronological order, providing scores for each one on various metrics. The reason I bring him up is that he doesn’t rate on a curve, or give things marks for being “good for its time” - if pool of radiance scores higher than skyrim, it’s not because it was influential or good for its time, but because he thinks it’s outright better regardless of age (just an example - I’m not saying he would actually rate those two games that way, and he has not rated skyrim). There are early 80s games that he remembers fondly and had a huge impact on the industry that he rates as like 23/100 or whatever, because the scale leaves room for the Witcher 3.

It takes a long time to get through all those games, so he’s currently up to the early 90s, having updated his blog regularly for over a decade. But his list of highest rated games might be a good place to start.

Oh, and while we’re talking about old-ish RPGs that would score well on his scale, I might as well mention Morrowind and the Baldur’s Gate series (before 3, obviously), which he won’t reach for a long time but has been known to hold up as solid examples of the genre. Personally I still think Baldur’s Gate 2 is great. I’m also a big fan of the quest for glory series, which crpgaddict has rated, but might not make his list of top scoring RPGs, because they’re a hybrid adventure/RPG, so not all of their strengths appear on a scale designed for pure RPGs.

As someone who didn’t play them back in the day, I feel like SotN holds up but Super Metroid doesn’t. Just as another opinion. I couldn’t really get into metroid fusion either. To me it feels like the moment-to-moment action gameplay is too clunky in the early metroid games I’ve played, even if the exploration element is neat. I did enjoy playing SotN for the first time a couple of years ago though. It’s been a while since I played either, so they’re not totally fresh in my memory - I guess it’s possible that I’m just more forgiving of clunky melee combat than clunky shooting.

Tangentially related, always amuses me how “metroidvania” has become the genre name, when originally it was just a way that reviewers poked fun at the big change between SotN and earlier castlevanias. They were like “this isn’t what I expect from a castlevania, it’s a great game but maybe they should have named it metroidvania”, and the name stuck. Another odd fact about that terminology is that according to interviews, the SotN designer never played metroid - they were inspired by the non-linear exploration with different routes opened up by items/upgrades in Zelda games (although obviously adding that to castlevania’s platformer gameplay makes it more closely resemble metroid). So it should probably be considered a zeldavania.

Large language models (chatgpt etc, basically any of the AIs you’ve seen recent headlines about) aren’t especially good at distinguishing true from false claims. It’s one of the biggest weaknesses that AI researchers are actively trying to find solutions for.

V

part of the appeal is how bad I am at both the gameplay and the lore

I was literally just thinking about this, like a few minutes before seeing this post. It sounds like for some reason this political usage of “weird” is working, and annoying me is a small price to pay to stop Trump. But it does bug me, mostly because anything the left starts using, the right will eventually appropriate, and then it will spread and get widespread use outside of politics. I can see it becoming like “snowflake”, which used to mean “special and unique”, and then started being used in political discourse to mean “oversensitive”, and is now being used everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if this trend means that a couple of years from now, “weird” is a very popular go-to insult even outside of politics, which will habituate people to associating weirdness with negativity (not that people need any incentive to do that).

Obviously it’s a better outcome than a lot of other things that can result from politics, but it’s irksome now and I can imagine the world being mildly more uncomfortable for everyone who doesn’t conform to mainstream social standards in a couple of years than it is now.

Tl;Dr - sounds like you’re thinking exactly what I was thinking, down to the mild-to-moderate level of discomfort and the acknowledgement that it might be necessary

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