Suchian Musings And Ramblings About General Designs Involving Notable Estuaries

D.B. Hecati · 2023-11-09 04:42:27

Ali_Roz said:
What those terms mean in this context is not what our blighted modernity uses them to mean. I lack the sophistication to explain further.

I understand.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-12 03:04:08

Sonic Adventure is better than Super Mario 64 and I'm tired of being alone in that opinion.

Look, I get it, I ain't played a Sonic game that came out any later than Sonic and the Black Knight (and that's the only one I've played with a release date after Heroes), and Shadow The Hedgehog and Sonic 06 are worthless, but darn it, I like the 1999-2005 era of Sonic as much as the 1991-1998 era. Darn it, I like the Star Wars prequels. I like the later Backyard Sports games. All of those were come mostly from the same people who made the classics they "ruined".

The very late nineties and early 2000s get so upstaged by the very late eighties and early-to-mid nineties. They also get subsumed by the post-smartphone decadence of the 2007-and-later era.

But you know, when my childhood years ruined a not-actually-very-old classic, they at least made it end, and carried themselves as though they were the finales to something. You went into these with the understanding that there almost certainly wouldn't be any more, or at least more than a couple more. There was a grandiosity to this finality, a dumb experiment taken too seriously as a bunch of people who'd once made something wonderful try to catch lightning in a bottle again.

The risks didn't pay off, the decisions and ideas weren't good, and it ended in flames, but dang it, they took risks, made decisions, and had ideas, and faced the prospect of an ending boldly.

The game's different now. Things don't end, they just go on and on, and you hope the next one is good, and even if it isn't, you stay loyal and hope the future might be better, but you know the thing will continue. This sort of stuff doesn't get made without deals to make sequels.

And, well, that's not a bad thing, in my opinion, as someone who values preservation so highly and hates change so much. I would have hated the stuff I grew up with had I not grown up with it, had I grown up with what it replaced.

If I could tell my child self that there would be MULTIPLE genuinely great Star Wars shows on television, multiple genuinely good Sonic games and movies, a Baldur's Gate 3, and Age of Empries IV, and that I would find myself not getting into them because I was sticking with what I remember from my youth and being satisfied with that, I don't know how that kid would react.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-12 03:06:03

Since my grandma passed away, I've been revisiting a lot of pop-culture things that meant a lot to me during my childhood. Games I played with my next-door-neighbor-cousins at their place. Books I loved, and films. It might be a cringeworthy era, my childhood, but I wouldn't trade it.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-12 03:18:46

I gotta be a grognard, though, on Baldur's Gate 3, for having the nudities and not having alignments.

Now that I'm in the position of older-kid/young-adult/not-as-young-as-I-used-to-be-adult living in a world where one of my favorite fiction-things is continued but without the crucial aspects that gave it a "heart and soul", it ought to be MY turn to tell newcomers to the franchise that they're stupid and lame for liking the new one and getting into the new one without first getting into the originals, but (1) lots of great people are being introduced to the series with BG3 and they don't deserve that (2) all the cool slightly-older-than-me people who ACTUALLY beat BG1 and BG2 really like BG3 so once again I'm the three year old telling the two year old to stop being a baby while the four year old rolls her eyes.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-12 03:23:56

(For the record, I have zero problems with the new Star Wars movies. They got the sound design right, and the aesthetics, and I don't give a tinker's cuss about story or character in a Star Wars movie 'cause I'm too busy appreciating those SWEET SWEET SCI-FI DOOR-HINGE SOUNDS).

I'd even bet that the current seasons of The Simpsons, and the Hobbit and new Harry-Potter-Universe stuff and the current Marvel-Movie stuff aren't even worse than the fifteen-years-or-more-ago stuff, we just got sick of it all because there was a bad patch for some years and we also got overexposed to stuff right when it started getting bad so the culture lost its taste for a thing like how if you eat the same food too much you'll hate it even if they get better at making it.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 18:34:10

South Island West Side Island Angel Island Flicky Island Little Planet | Theme

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Marble Zone Mystic Cave Lava Reef Volcano Valley Quartz Quadrant | Cave/Lava

Labyrinth Zone Aquatic Ruin Hydr./Marb. Garden Rusty Ruins Tidal Tempest | Flood/Ruin

Spring Yard Casino Night Carnival Night Spring Stadium Collision Chaos | Abusement Park

Green Hill Emerald Hill Ang.Is/Msh.Hl Green Grove Palmtree Panic | Idaho

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 18:49:31

Sonic Adventure arguably has the same pattern with Red Mountain, Windy Valley, and Casinopolis, but has Emerald Coast instead of a true Green Hill Zone equivalent (I guess it would be closer to Palmtree Panic or Angel Island Zone). This makes it Oregon-Themed instead of Idaho-Themed. If we accept Oregon/Idaho as a paired theme like Flood/Ruin or Cave/Lava, then it fits.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 19:05:43

I mean, if we accept this pattern, then we can fit four of the five levels in Sonic R.

If we add a "Robotnik's Mechanized Base-place" theme, we can find a level for that theme in each game, thus including all levels from Sonic R.

(Windy Valley only kind of fits the "ruin" theme, but we could have the sewer part of Casinopolis as flood and Twinkle Park as the abusement park).

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 19:20:57

Sonic Adventure 2, in starting with City Escape (because seriously, nobody plays the Dark story first), makes it feel like it starts in a different key signature or something. Green Forest don't count, at least not on first play, because they're so frantic and breathless for a first-time player who is staring down an 8-minute counter (in a game that otherwise lets you take as long as you want to do whatever you want) with no idea of how long the level is going to be. I mean, once you git gud, it's a 3-4 minute trip through more than 300 rings (a similar ring-to-second ratio to when you git gud in certain levels of the other games), but the music won't let you relax, so City Escape has to do Idaho/Oregon Introductory Level Duty.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 19:59:01

You can tell that the Dreamcast was at the end of its lifespan and SEGA was crashing, that SA2 was made in the understanding that it was going to be the very last one. There's a "What are they going to do, fire us?" energy in it. It could serve as a finale, with the Hero and Dark teams teaming in the end, and it's not hard to imagine Robotnik maybe giving up on World Domination in the end.

Sonic Heroes feels like a game-long unexpected last hurrah, a full-game-length version of SA2's reward for getting 180 Emblems. Metal Sonic being the villain just feels right, what with (1) the Eggrobo and Mecha Sonic and their role in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, (2) Sonic Adventure having a robot that looks very similar to the-Robot-I-always-called-Silver-Sonic from Sonic 2 in a glass tube, and all of Metal Sonic's appearances in side games and other media. It even starts with Seaside Hill, and if you squint you can see these same themes pop up in places, but less prominently, because Sonic Heroes has so many previous games to draw on for inspiration and those games have so many levels not in that theme-pattern.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 20:53:12

I think the main gameplay elements in these Sonic games are (1) Fast-Going, (2) Exploration, and (3) Minigames.

You'd think (1) and (2) would be at odds, but exploration often requires fast-going in order to get the momentum to clear vertical and horizontal distances to small platforms, and fast-going often requires exploration to figure out what routes allow you to best keep up momentum. Since it's possible to overshoot, and off-paths and dead ends sometimes have goodies or secret breakable walls but are sometimes just time-wasting detours, they are sometimes at odds. It's an interesting push-and-pull.

(3) mostly serves as a change of pace, a gameplay shift/break. While optional (or at least semi-optional), this has a large effect on pacing and allows special stages to serve either as fun breaks from intense levels or as the main difficulty between you and getting a good ending.

I like how Sonic CD lets you get a good ending through either (1)&(2) [by going to the past <requiring fast-going> and then finding the machines <requiring exploration>] or (3) [getting the time stones].

I like how in Sonic 2 and Sonic 3&Knuckles, getting the Chaos Emeralds lets you get a super form in which you go faster and jump higher, so the end reward of (3) is a boon to your ability to do (1) and (2).

I like how in Sonic 3&Knuckles, if playing as Sonic or Sonic-and-Tails, the checkpoint-special-stages can give Sonic a shield and the shields add to his moveset, again making the reward of (3) a boost to (2). I also like how in Sonic #&Knuckles, finding the big rings requires exploration, so (2) enables (3).

I like how your score in a lot of the games accounts for time, goodies-gotten, baddies-gotten, and score-from-minigames, so getting a good score can come from multiple facets of good gameplay.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 21:10:22

Sonic Adventure gave the characters markedly different physics constants and constraints, so they'd play differently, but then that meant that they had to tightly fit each level to the character it was meant for, which meant the levels couldn't really accommodate multiple movesets, a large step back from what could be done in Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Still, though, specializing each level in this way let them play to the strengths of the movesets and physics the had made.

I think the bigger change is how (1) Fast-going, (2) Exploration, and (3) Minigames got split by character, with Sonic focusing on (1), Knuckles on (2), Big/Gamma focusing on (3), and Tails and Amy respectively being mostly (1) with some (2) and mostly (2) with some (1) . It's like splitting a sandwich between friends not by cutting it into fractions, but by giving each person a different ingredient. The parts are the same, the sum of the parts is the same, even the pacing can be similar depending on how you switch between characters, but it leaves nobody with a full sandwich, and some people get cheese while others get mayonnaise.

Sonic Adventure 2 decided to have six playable characters split (1)-(2)-(3) and (1)-(2)-(3), leaving out the combinations which had overlap and doubling the three most well-received play-designs from Adventure (Sonic, Knuckles, and Gamma).

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 21:15:58

Sonic Heroes put these pieces in a blender in an attempt to reconstruct the original sandwich. It worked better than it had any right to. They even brought back special stages, and doing the same level as different characters. In having the characters together in a team, they could un-split what they had separated.

Unfortunately, this blender-use meant that instead of four teams that each played very differently, or four sandwiches, we got a rather homogenous mush (either one sandwich blended and put into four cups, or four sandwiches blended and put into four cups).

On the plus side, I still enjoyed it as a kid, and I think it was better than it was ever given credit for.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 21:26:01

Sonic R managed not only to fit the theme-patterns in the races, it had exploration (in finding the Chaos Emeralds and coins) and minigames (baloons, tag, time attack), while having playable characters with different movesets.

Sonic 3d Blast is the odd one out, in that it tried to have all three core gameplay elements, but only really managed (2) and (3) because the controls were so slippery that even the relatively-slow movement speed felt uncontrollably fast. It's the difference between riding in a bumpy shopping cart going down a hill, and being in an airplane as it flies. One's going much slower, but feels like it's going too fast, while the other's going faster but feels smoother. In other words, Sonic 3D Blast feels faster than it is.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 21:39:28

Sonic The Fighters, Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, and Sonic Spinball are basically expanded minigames and are fun, I'm not counting the 8-bit or game gear games, anything that wasn't either on PC or GameCube (mostly the Gems and Mega collection) I never got to play, and I'm also not counting anything else that was portable-exclusive.

I guess I played a half hour of Sonic Riders once.

Heh, my entire experience (other than Sonic and the Black Knight on Wii) is ports, except for a few weeks when one of my brother's friends let my brother borrow his Dreamcast for a few weeks, and I got to play Sonic Adventure.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 22:04:53

I guess what I'm saying is that for someone whose first, last, and only home console is the Wii, and whose first, last, and only portable is the DS, who has never even seen a Sega tape, I've played a surprising amount of 20+ year old Sonic games.

I miss Komodin.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 22:08:07

He would have loved Mania.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-13 22:14:17

The fact that Sungazer Lizards exist in the Sonic Universe now gives me unspeakable joy. And the new game has Fang The Sniper / Nack the Weasel in it!

You guys, it's like they specifically decided to appeal to the reptile-and-hat-obsessed demographic. To ME specifically!

I'M SO HAPPY!

Odradek · 2023-11-14 01:51:54

Ali_Roz said:
I guess what I'm saying is that for someone whose first, last, and only home console is the Wii, and whose first, last, and only portable is the DS, who has never even seen a Sega tape, I've played a surprising amount of 20+ year old Sonic games.

I miss Komodin.

I think about him sometimes, he was the first of the gang to die as the song goes. Nice guy.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-14 04:12:22

He never got to see all these great Rom Hacks that have come out in the years since. He would have been fascinated by the November Prototype. I really want to know what his opinion on Superstas is in heaven.

I know it's just dumb video games, but I miss talking to him about them, and I miss reading his thoughts on them. I wish I'd got to know him better, and I wish I'd been a better friend. Or heck, even a real friend rather than an acquaintance with a shared interest (I was too young and self-conscious to admit my full enthusiasm for Sonic games back then), mutual friends, and the same stomping grounds.

I wish I'd been a better friend to everybody who's no longer active here. Other than the spambots and one or two banned not-to-be-named, I'd straight-up welcome anyone back with a hug and open arms.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-14 22:36:55

The success of Toy Story proves that plagiarizing Casino Night Zone is okay.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-14 22:50:56

Headcanon: South Island, West SIde Island, Angel Island, and Flicky Island were once part of a continental landmass that split, like Antarctica-Tanzania-Australia or (Indian Subcontinent)-Madagascar-Africa or (North-America)-Greenland-Europe. Either this, or the Flicky-Ring-Teleportation-words-are-hard-thing from Sonic 3D Blast, is why we see the same species of small animals on these different islands.

Addendum: The North Star Islands from Sonic Superstars were also probably part of this same landmass. This feels right, given that we have South Island and West Side Island.

Headcanon: The fact that there is a South Island, a West Side Island, and the North Islands implies an east-named island.

WMG 1 (not original to me, can be found on TvTropes): Angel Island and West Side Island were adjacent before Angel Island took to the skies, and that's why West Side is so named, for being the west side. The two Hidden Palace Zones and the Lava Reef Zone and the Mystic Cave Zone are all part of the same cavern-complex cut in half.

If we accept WMG 1 as true, then Angel Island could be the East-type island, and could perhaps be called East SIde Island. Alternately, Angel Island could have originally been the in the middle, so perhaps Flicky Island is the east side of the original landmass, and is thus the East Side Island.

If we don't accept WMG 1 as true, then Flicky Island could be the middle of the original landmass (thus not getting a direction-themed name), and Angel Island could be the East Side of the original landmass.

WMG 2 (original to me): The direction islands aren't just the four cardinal directions, but Up and Down as well. Angel Island is thus the Up-type Island, and the Down-type island is sunken either underground or underwater.

If we accept WMG 2 as true, that gives us either six orthogonal directiosns, or seven if a center is included.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-14 23:14:20

Headcanon: Rings are just a natural occurrence in the universe of the games, like rain. The presence of Rings makes loop-de-loops happen, like how rain and wind can cause consistent erosional patterns. Radical Highway was not built with loop-de-loops any more than a highway is built with potholes or weather damage, they just formed naturally.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-19 22:44:10

As you might expect from my opinions on copyright and the public domain, I have opinions on abandonware.

Abandonware-being-legally-available is a form of preservation, but a better one is buying a secondhand copy of the original form. Physical media is preferable to downloads (downloads are terrifying and I'm paranoid about getting viruses). If enough people buy secondhand copies of the original form, it's more likely that they'll start making them again. I'm so glad I can play Age of Mythology on a disk, and not have to play that darn Extended Edition. Speaking of this, remakes and patched versions and widescreen-iterations of originally non-widescreen games are often quite different from the original.

Furthermore, there's a difference (to me at least) between "you won't get in trouble for downloading this game because its creators made it open source years ago and nobody actually holds copyright on it" and "You won't get in trouble for downloading this game because the media conglomerate who bought the media conglomerate who bought the company that made the game doesn't care enough to go after you". The former is acceptable for games from 1997 and no later, the latter is never acceptable. Lego Island is the cutoff, Lego Island will always be CURRENT and nothing will ever make a non-CD version acceptable. Being from 1995 myself, I can't have something that was new when I was new become old/classic/obsolete. Stuff that's older might be acceptable to emulate as long as you later buy the original and buy the hardware to play the original.

When I get a job, I'm going to buy some old computers and some old consoles and games. If I don't want to play the game that bad (as in, not enough to spend 2 to 8 dollars to get a copy on eBay), then I can find something else to play.

I wouldn't pirate a game that came out yesterday, that'd be immoral. The passage of time doesn't change that, so it will never be okay to pirate a game from 2023. I wouldn't have understood any of this in 1997, so copyrights from before that time have a slightly weaker hold on me, because there was, in fact, a time when those copyrights were both (1) current and (2) not applicable to me because I was too young. Copyrights that expired before the one-hundred-and-first-day of 1995 may or may not be recognized by me, as just because I CAN recognize that a copyright expired doesn't mean that I HAVE TO. Just because a thing isn't compulsory doesn't mean it's forbidden, and vice versa. Typically, though, my inclination is to accept things in the state that they've been my whole life, because I don't like change.

This inclination means that if I would have felt guilty about breaking the copyright then, then I'd feel guilty about violating it now, and the mere changing of legal status of the IP in question does not change the fact that I renounced such legally-grey and piratical behavior at the end of my young criminal days (R.I.P. old ipid Nano and old computers that died from viruses).

Wow, it all sounds insane when I write these vague feelings down. But hey, this modernity's all about self-expression and this generation loves to have complicated-and-bizarrely-morally-charged thoughts about copyright and then to tie those thoughts into self-identity, and lots of the people here miss the way things were in the 1990s and wish to reject the current ways in favor of such, so why can't that be my insufferable affectation.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-19 22:55:22

Like all type-17 insufferable affectations, the purpose is to prevent the person-having-said-affectation from doing fun things so as to take smug satisfaction in refusing-to-do-a-thing-nobody-asked-you-to-do and refusing-to-come-up-with-a-good-reason-for-this-refusal. It is the glee of a child's arbitrariness, the fun of telling your parents that you're not going to shovel snow barefoot in July and they can't make you.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-19 22:57:41

I'm an adult. If I want to go to the store and buy sugar cookies and then eat them, I can. If I want to pretend that copyrights that expired in 1907 still apply but only to me, I can. I'm not going to write Alice in Wonderland fanfiction, and nobody can make me.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-20 01:17:17

Also, feeling this way about copyright cheeses off my brother who calls it "parasitic rent-seeking", so that's a plus. Such feelings are, for neither of us, reflective of our respective opinions on other things, so don't go making assumptions about my brother from this.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-20 03:05:52

Few things wither my enthusiasm like knowing I share with someone I loathe my high regard for something.

So, if I ever become insufferably positive about something, you guys can just bring up a satirist or comedian who also likes or liked that thing, and it'll shut me up real good.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-20 03:11:50

There are a few exceptions to the previous post. There are a few things that nothing can diminish my warm feelings towards. The obvious ones are my friends, family, and faith, but cardamom bread, the Toyota Previa, hats, reptiles, thirty-five-hundred-year-old juniper trees, root beer floats, and the town of Quincy, Illinois are also things such that, if I ever speak ill of them, it means I have been replaced by an impostor.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-20 23:25:42

I think the worst thing about there being another Dune movie coming out is that it's become harder to find stuff about Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty on the internet.

I mean, this game is pretty much the origin of, or at least the main headwater to the river of, the RTS genre (my favorite game genre), and now the writing on it is buried under mass-produced bot-made surface-level clickbait marketing stuff.

Similarly, it's much more difficult to find stuff on Baldur's Gate I and II than it used to be.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-21 23:18:32

I think censorship is underrated, underappreciated, and misunderstood.

I also think that a lot of people like censorship without realizing it.

Adblockers are a form of censorship, spam filters are a form of censorship, and antiviruses are a form of censorship. The purpose isn't to prevent the user from having access to content*, but to enable it. Or, perhaps, a more accurate description would be that it enables the user to safely have access.

Thomas Bowlder's sanitized and altered versions of Shakespeare's works allowed segments of society to experience the stories who likely wouldn't have been allowed to at the time (children, women of certain social standings, people who couldn't afford the more expensive unaltered texts). It did not replace the originals, whose circulation and popularity significantly increased, and, if anything, was an act in direct opposition to the then-somewhat-popular idea that Shakespeare's works should be outright banned.

When I would watch stuff on Odra's (hopefully weekly) fringe media stream and you guys would warn me of stuff I wouldn't be okay with watching, telling me when to jump out and when to jump back in, that was censorship. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to safely experience the stuff.

Perhaps "censorship" isn't quite the word I'm looking for. Perhaps there's some other word that means a mindful way to let people engage with material they otherwise wouldn't, or a meaningful control over what you expose yourself/others to.

*Perhaps I should use the word "material" or "stuff" here, as "content" brings up certain associations while failing to bring up others. In the case of e-mail, the "stuff" is communication with other people.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-21 23:50:47

And even banning has its merits in the right time and place. Banning a book from an elementary-school library is not the same thing as banning it from the local library, especially if the book was never meant for that context. An elementary school library has limited space and is intended for a specific part of the population (one of its duties is to challenge the children with books they may find difficult to read, or to expand their horizons by exposing them to unfamiliar ideas). A local library, serving the public as a whole, has many duties to that public (one of its duties is to challenge the public with books they may find difficult to read, or to expand their horizons by exposing them to unfamiliar ideas).

You have to walk before you can run. Even a precocious child likely can appreciate Captain Underpants long before developing the reading skills to fully appreciate the works of Maya Angelou. The point is that the child can go to the local library and check out the works of Maya Angelou, and the adult can go to the local library and check out Captain Underpants, but the elementary school library and the young-children section of the local library don't have to appeal to the grown-ups to serve their function of helping kids to grow up to be creative, open-minded, book-loving grown-ups.

Maybe "banning" isn't the right word here. Perhaps there's some other word that means a mindful way to fit a collection to the people it serves.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-21 23:57:09

Heck, even full forbidding and all-context-disallowing can be warranted. I'm not going to mention them, but there are things that merit it.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-22 00:04:23

It's troubling to me that people can use these respectable goals as pretexts to further wicked ends of bullying and oppression. This is what a lot of people generally mean when they speak of censorship.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-22 00:34:47

Are the only two options a laissez-faire nightmare where everything is covered in advertisements and the signal is lost to the noise or a totalitarian nightmare where everything is illegal and the signal is lost to the silence? I don't think so. I don't think so at all.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-25 22:41:19

Spoiler:

I think I'd like to have at least one fiction where somebody says "there's no escape" and then there actually isn't any escape.

Spoiler:

This can mean that the unfortunate one is just stuck there and never leaves during the course of the story, that some sort of prisoner exchange has to take place instead of a rescue, or that the rest of the story takes place there so the audience can't get away either.

Spoiler:

Note that this ought to apply to neutral parties, protagonists/hero-aligned, and evil/villain-aligned. Take some of the burden off of death for carrying all the stakes and drama.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-26 04:09:43

Shout out to Zhagu for being around and feeling like he was always around. 10/10 guy.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-30 22:42:08

Perhaps we are excessive in our self-expression. If someone peeled potatoes that often, for that long, it would be reasonable to expect that person to get exhausted and desire a break. But here we are, having opinions and emotions, and communicating them all the darn time.

It's not that one ought to not talk, but perhaps we as a culture don't appreciate the strain on the voice that continuous talking is, to use a metaphor.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-30 22:54:48

Furthermore, there's a strong tendency towards criticism. More than just coming up with statements, one often finds that one has to make sure the statements hold up to analysis, scrutiny, and critical appraisal. Sometimes further statements are required as support or justification for that which does not justify or support itself. One's enjoyment or whatever-the-opposite-of-enjoyment is must be defended like a thesis paper. One's own thoughts must be torn apart and understood, each idea measured by the yardstick of reason, each emotion analyzed and given a cause, effect, and meaning; each paradigm inspected for structural weaknesses to shore up.

No wonder people are so scared of the idea of losing humor: it's an accepted way to bypass reason, critical thought, analysis, and scrutiny. It's an accepted way to cause involuntary responses in other people. Perhaps there used to be more other things that filled this role, but if so, our society is too rational and too skeptical, too enamored of the idea of critical thinking, to accept them.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-30 23:00:40

As if that wasn't enough, often the justifications must be justified, and the reasoning must be valid.

A wonderpost is a way to doodle a scribble house without needing to draw the foundations, include the correct support beams in the relevant places, calculate the total wood for the joists, and otherwise follow the rules of architecture.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-30 23:24:36

Since this non-"serious" mode allows for expression, one can express a paradigm through it. Since this non-"serious" mode slips past the mind/heart/self's defenses, one can induce involuntary responses in another. The combination of these two is deeply concerning. Maybe that's why there are so few things that are allowed to do both.

It's rather disturbing to me that children are taught logic and critical thinking in schools so that they can defend themselves from those voices whose intents are malicious. It is a worried paradigm in which the onus must be on children to defend themselves, and in which they must face statements with statements. A siege mentality is a war mentality.

Ali_Roz · 2023-11-30 23:41:31

Future generations will probably think "Wow, those folks really valued reason more than anything. Look at how often they accuse each other of being unreasonable. They must have been far more logical than we are.".

NOTE: In the future, dogs are trained to smell metaphorical bullcrud as well as literal. Along with sincerity-detecting ferrets and unintended-consequence-predicting hamsters, they really make humanity wish that truth-discerning-Dodos hadn't gone extinct. Also in the future nobody looks at the sky because the color blue is to be avoided at all times. Also also the letter "n" must not be spoken, written, or otherwise invoked. There are no non-invisible fish or birds, but there's also no disease, poverty or war. Everything has a grapefruit-flavored iteration except grapefruits, which are no longer grapefruit-flavored, and pomegranates, which cannot be grapefruit-flavored. It's not a utopia, it's not a dystopia, it's just strange and distressingly different from now.

This nonsense makes this a wonderpost so I ain't gotta justify any of what I just said.

Ali_Roz · 2023-12-01 00:43:10

So, remember: sometimes people are tired and it's okay not to force them to defend all their thoughts.

Ali_Roz · 2023-12-04 19:50:34

"Someday I'll be in charge, and I'll change things. Then people will act like it's always been that way. There will be nothing you can do about it, and eventually you'll start to wonder if that which you so cherished was just a delusion all along."

Imipolex G · 2023-12-06 00:30:04

yes but

Ali_Roz · 2023-12-13 17:29:56

It took me a moment to get the joke, my first reaction was "well, yeah".

Ali_Roz · 2023-12-14 19:15:08

Spoiler:

Sometimes, I think that when I die I will go to the place where terrorists go when they die. Not the big ones, who kill thousands and plan the crises that leave millions refuges, but the small ones, who kill a half dozen satirists and half a dozen innocents and make only martyrs of their enemies and oppressed underclasses of their own people. Stupid, passionate youths whose sin is not their fanaticism but their lack of love towards their fellow man. Sensitive to any slight against their God, incited by unnumbered provocations, and either deaf or uncaring to the suffering they cause God's children. To forgive is a wonderful thing. To be patient and kind is worthy above all. I struggle with such. I see through a glass darkly, lacking wisdom. Fear of consequences, and not love of my fellow man, keeps me from the violence I would commit.

Ali_Roz · 2023-12-19 21:07:46

Playing Final Fantasy 6 (or at least the steam version/remaster) for the first time.

Things I knew before playing the game:

* You have to wait for this one dude instead of escaping at some point if you want to save a party member and stuff like this is why everybody keeps thinking there are secret ways to save party members in Final Fantasy Games.

* It's not Final Fantasy IV, so it's automatically better than Final Fantasy IV, but it has a reference to that one scene from Final fantasy IV that was referenced in Undertale, so it automatically loses "good game" status for having a connection to the exact point in Undertale when I said "screw this" and decided I'd never play Undertale again or buy it for myself.
* It's got really nice pixel art that didn't get the appreciation it deserved in its time because 3d was all the rage and people, in all sincerity, acted as though Final Fantasy VII had better graphics because Final Fantasy VII was the Spore/Mass-Effect of its day and its technical rendering achievements were mind-blowing at the time, but these days Final Fantasy VII looks like garbage and Final Fantasy VI looks amazing.
* There are things called Phoenix Downs that you can use to resurrect party members, but I ain't going to start using consumable items in videogames after all these years and I ain't going to stop savescumming to win fights after all these years so it's more like Phoenix DownSTAIRSINABOX amirite.

* There are airships and you can do all the sidequests once you get one (or maybe that was a different Final Fantasy game)?
* I will probably get bored really quick because JRPGs outside of Shining Force tend to be far too grindy even for my absurdly-patient-with-grinding self.

Ali_Roz · 2023-12-19 21:21:53

Things I know after a half-hour playing the game:

* These default steam keyboard controls are garbage, and that's coming from someone who used j and k as the two main buttons in Sonic Adventure II the entire time from 0 emblems to 180 because I couldn't be bothered to change it and mess up the muscle memory I was trying to develop.
* This fighting system seems to be a mix of real-time and turn-based, where you have to wait between attacks, and it's tedious as all get out.
* Oh, this is where Tv Tropes got the name for Magitek from.
* Lol, Wedge and Biggs, except on the side of the Empire.

* There's a big zappy-snail thing and I want to play as the big snappy snail-thing instead of these vertebrates, but nooooooooooooooo.

* RIP dogs and guards, the game wouldn't let me not kill you despite making it blatantly clear that the main character was being mind-controlled into doing bad things.
* What the heck, why is a crown the means of mind-control, that's messed up and scary, hats aren't supposed to be like this, I do not like this guy and his "With your mind subsumed by the crown, you'll be all mine! Tee-hee-hoo-hoo". Plz stop.

* I do not like this empire.

* Oh dear, the mind-enslaving-crown isn't a unique item but there are evidently a bunch of them.
* This unnamed dude in the recently-attacked town is very forgiving. I would've handed that gal over to the guards because mind-control or no, you do NOT kill the people of my hometown.
* Oh dang, I have to kill more dogs and guards. Where's the button to turn myself in?

* These "Moogles" are unsettling and I think they'll turn out to be secretly evil.

* Oh, is this where the "you did a thing" victory music comes from, or was that from an earlier game in the series? Doot-doot-doot dweeedle da doodoodoo. Ba-na-na we eat the ba-nana, eat the ba-na-na, yaaay. Ba-na-na we eat the ba-nana, gotta shout hooray.

Ali_Roz · 2023-12-19 22:59:35

I found the original "Over 9,000" Youtube video. 15 and a half years old, 16 and a half million views, 16 seconds long. By my calculations, this represents an average of one view every 30 seconds or so. For the total dataset "seconds between this video's posting and now" the average "number of times it was playing somewhere in the world on this very second" is thus closer to one than

Suchian Musings And Ramblings About General Designs Involving Notable Estuaries

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