Coffee Is Hard

Post by pshc » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 10:27 PM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #111

knzhou wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a totally backwards take. Most of these things are modern labor-saving devices that replaced even worse drudgery. Sweeping takes longer than vacuuming. Washing dishes by hand takes longer than a dishwasher -- especially if you don't have unlimited running water, or dish detergent, or if you need to start a fire to get hot water. Ancient Romans didn't have to deal with rush hour traffic, but research says their…

The most stressful thing about modern commutes is that you can easily die if you take your eyes off the road for one second. Romans on horseback certainly didn't have that problem.

Post by aidenn0 » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 10:28 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #88

aidenn0 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LucasArts had a very strong bent towards not putting you in a fail state. My understanding is that Sierra was intending to be more fair as time went on, but they had a bias against playtesting so there were still some big goofs that got through. I think all of the first 5 KQ games had ways to lose items that would later be needed to win. KQ VI had a branching path and if you picked the "easy" branch you were unlikely…

I never got full points on that game. I think I wasted months on it before giving up. Maybe my favorite KQ memory was KQ 3. Just getting out of the house took my family weeks. Every single misstep turned you into dust. And once you figured it all out, just walking down that stupid path you were 1 pixel away from death in some places. Those were some fun games.

Post by namaemuta » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 10:44 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #44

Loughla wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to sound too much like a hippie, either, but I learned (actually after having a kid as well) that when people talked about enjoying the ride, that's what they were talking about - the tedious stuff. I always assumed it meant travel more and look for adventure, but I have come to understand that 'enjoying the ride' in your life, not always just pursuing some next thing is about enjoying the tedium. Some of my favo…

Sisyphus may disagree. :) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus

Post by bryanrasmussen » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 10:48 PM UTC

bigred100 wrote: post #66

davinic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just ye…

She may also be a deranged and unrepentant child abuser who uses whatever societal approval is thrown her way to justify and escalate her abuse. There’s simply no way to know.

Post by J5892 » Fri, Oct 18, 2019, 11:00 PM UTC

throwaway66920 wrote: post #34

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #4

This reminds me of Scribblenauts. There was an interview with one of the devs at the E3 before it was released and he discussed how much time went into the game simply to pad the internal "dictionary" and conjure up not just things, but also make sure that those things could interact with other things (e.g. "bread" should be able to interact with "toaster" to make "toast"). I don't remember if it was the dev talking…

I always thought that game must have an incredible ontology underneath it that would be amazingly useful to other ventures... I also recall playing it and, at a certain point, realizing that I was stubbornly uncreative in using the variety of options available to me. In retrospect maybe that wasn’t true, and the game managed the massive potential for variance by condensing things into smaller buckets. Either way thos…