There was a lack of sinisterness to the PalmOS ecosystem that we’ve lost.

Probably PalmOS.

Yeah, that regular hexagon is something like twice the Earth’s diameter on a side, it’s enormous. I was wondering if we know of a regular hexagon larger than that anywhere in the known universe?

It’s a bit like, is the Titanic the largest manmade object ever accidentally broken in half?

Hold up, the Ulysses probe didn’t take any pictures of the Sun’s poles? Or did it not carry a camera?

Is there a known regular hexagon larger than the one on Saturn?

this car’s a lost and blinded fool…oh no I’ve said too much. I said it all.

Could it present the player withbsmallband large puzzles/mysteries without egregiously misusing RNG?

I’m not interested in the RNG telling me I can’t work on the thing that’s on my mind.

From what I saw of Blue Prince, it would be like playing Return of the Obra Dinn, except after you get one of the death scenes and the soundtrack blarps at you for awhile, there’s the door unlock sound, and there’s a random chance it’s going to make you arbitrarily replay the game.

I’m just not on board with all the shit they piled in front of the mystery to solve.

Basically functioning as a digital proof of purchase.

Somebody’s gonna watch some Ashens tonight.

Yeah, the thing is I want to remove the possibility for the likes of Ted Cruz to have a say in anything technical.

I propose we call Microsoft’s portable Xbox a “Xune.”

I wonder if we need a multicameral legislature with several smaller bodies segregated by purpose.

Have a house of politicians, career folks who do things like treaties and appointment of diplomats, that sort of thing. This probably needs to be no term limit or lifetime appointment because the purpose here is to be a member of the boy’s club, you’re the guy the chancellor of Germany has a rapport with. If you’re caught taking bribes, foreign or domestic, your death will be humiliating and uncomfortable.

Have a house of professionals, open only to doctors, engineers, folks like that. This body handles industry regulation, this is where anything from highway construction to food and drug laws to aviation regulations will be written. I would be tempted to eliminate voting here and make it like jury duty. If you’ve got a professional degree or license, (in fact I’m favoring licenses; I don’t care if you have a medical degree, I want a license to practice medicine. I don’t care if you’ve got an AeroSci degree, I want an airline transport pilot certificate, I don’t care if you have an engineering degree, I want a certified PE) you might be called to serve a term. It might be that this year the body is made of ALL medical doctors as health, wellness and medicine related laws are reviewed and updated, then next year it’s all civil engineers and they review highway and building codes, etc. Maybe mixed sessions happen for things like occupational safety where industrial engineers and medical doctors both weigh in. May also need to include folks with technical certifications like nurses, A&P mechanics, folks like that. This body doesn’t touch social issues, only things like standards for mineral content in municipal water supplies and testing standards for fall arrest gear.

Have a house of businessmen, who are given fake microphones and staff that pretends to do what they’re told, with actors making fake news broadcasts that make them think they’re policies are enacted. I think a core problem with democracies in the modern day is they don’t feature such dummy loads, so we shall install such a thing.

A house of lawyers whose job it is to maintain things like contract law.

What else am I missing?

Very Douglas Adams. Those who are capable of being elected President are absolutely not qualified for the job.

Possibly through ignorance or misunderstanding, btu I still think the tech behind NFTs may have some function, but it’s certainly not the weird pictures of badly colored in monkeys speculation market that happened there.

The first two-way video call was demonstrated in 1930.

LLMs are going to replace some developers, the companies that do that will fold because their product doesn’t work, the developers will get jobs elsewhere.

Is it correct to say we “cured” smallpox? A vaccine isn’t a cure, but we used that vaccine so effectively that we eradicated the disease. But the overall sentiment of your post holds up.

It did though? The Lord of the Rings was written in the 1930s and 1940’s, the moon landings took place in 1969-1972.

That question is the thesis statement of a 2 hour long video essay if ever I heard one.

Most games involve random chance somehow to make the game feel more alive and less deterministic, like in an early Zelda game, should the Octorok run 3, 4, 5, or 6 tiles forward? Should it turn left or right? Should it drop a rupee or a heard when killed? These I’m fine with.

In an RPG, things like monster encounter rates might use the RNG to simulate the behavior of a dungeon master, both “roll for initiative” and “I’ll have them encounter 4 groups of low level monsters on their way through the creepy forest.” Using an RNG and lookup table for that is a reasonable low overhead way to add some unpredictability and adventure to the game. Note: I don’t really play RPGs that much.

The term roguelike has started to be overused to mean any game that features procedural generation and permadeath. By that definition I think Tetris qualifies as a roguelike. The original Rogue kind of worked like a virtual dungeonmaster, it would create an RPG campaign for you to play in, and then it played like any RPG where you have to explore a dungeon, learn the mechanics etc. with permadeath and the consequence of having to relearn everything you’ve learned thusfar generating stakes and pressuring the player to survive, no “whatever, I’ll just die and respawn.” So that’s an innovative use of a computer random number generator. Most things that call themselves “roguelikes” are more “We designed a cool primary gameplay loop but can’t really be bothered with level design so here’s some procedural generation to beat your head against over and over again, maybe hoping to find a scenario you can possibly win.” Quite often, it’s not that the game randomly re-engineers itself, it throws the same pre-scripted things at you in a somewhat different order, so they end up playing more like old arcade games than an actual adventure.

A “roguelike” I’ve spent the most time with is FTL: Faster Than Light, and its roguelike structure is by far my least favorite feature. I don’t really like beating my head against the RNG hoping a permutation of combats, 50/50 “do you help with the giant spiders” encounters goes my way so that I have enough scrap, and that it gives me a shop with a useful array of weapons so that I have a chance at the end encounter.

Blue Prince takes the randomization to a whole other level. It might be compelling if it procedurally randomized the house for each playthrough such that you do have to learn YOUR way through it, and you have limited stamina so that each day you can only explore so far, but you can get upgrades to your stamina so that you can stay in the house longer and explore deeper, but…I can’t see the way they implemented the game’s RNG as anything other than flagrant disrespect of the player’s time.

The “AHA!” moment in a puzzle game is what you’re after. That hapens in the player’s mind. If the player thinks up the solution, but the mechanics of the game make it take a long time to implement, all you’re doing is grinding the player’s teeth together. And Blue Prince seems designed to maximize teeth grinding, because the player may know the solution to a puzzle, but contriving the circumstance necessary to implement that solution requires several unlikely rolls back to back to back to back to back.

Sorry, I’m just convinced it’s bad game design pretending to be novel.