Khrux

If you ever start watching YouTube tutorials around cooking, there’s a reason Binging With Banish is a huge name.

Between ingredient cost, recipe difficulty, taste and the product actually coming out right, I’ve always found him super reliable.

But a huge part of cooking doesn’t come from recipes, it comes from experimentation. Learning how to make a simple pasta sauce from tinned tomatoes and other things is a useful step, because 90% of the ingredients last a while, so you only need to buy a few cheap bits, and can control the flavour yourself to find out what you like.

It’s worth noting that eating at home can still easily become accidentally expensive. Pasta and pasta sauce is a reliable way to keep prices low when cooking, but once you’re cooking with 20 ingredients, it can creep up quickly, although most of these can last weeks, if not months, so you only need to buy them once in a while.

There’s a clip of Conan O’Brien playing this, and you can tell he’s definitely not a gamer, and he’s so shocked by a death animation. I don’t really understand their place in the game, they are so disproportionately violent compared to everything else, and it’s random.

There is a novel called Blood Meridian that has a lot of incredibly violent scenes to the point many consider it unfilmable, but that violence is depicted as an almost detached spectacle, the prose is externalised and the scenes are never lingered on for pleasure. It’s generally considered perhaps the most violent classic novel, but the entire metaphysics and purpose of the book exists in this violence.

When I first played tomb raider, I didn’t notice half the violent scenes, because the medium is so unnecessarily stuffed with it. It wasn’t until replaying it after seeing the Conan O’Brien interview that I really honed in on it.

In comparison to Blood Meridian, it’s so much worse. It doesn’t really have a message or a story purpose beyond showing the setting as dangerous, and it lingers on the violence, taking pleasure in the sudden violence, that has befallen our protagonist who we deeply care about and can internalise her suffering easily. We see a young woman, who we live through and care for deeply, come to a brutal, sickening end due to sheer bad luck, and then we hit restart.

I’m not even really mad about it, like it said, I’m so desensitised to video game violence that I only noticed the brutality of these scenes after seeing Conan. Perhaps the creep of violence in the medium alongside the fact that in 10 seconds, she’s fine and you do it again is enough to justify it, but it’s weird that it exists so normally in the first place.

That’s exactly it, we expected better. Regardless of if one likes his music or hates it, he’s built a brand on being a decent human being. Basically every story of him before this week has been one of positivity, I’m pretty sure his rider has always been something like a glass of water and packet of crisps, he’s donated a lot to good causes and generally stood up for those who need it.

Billionaires are parasites on society, and Kraft is the kind of man who influence global politics and facilitate ethnic cleansing to line his own pockets, and nobody is surprised by that.

Sheeran showed that the moment anything is on the line, his entire brand of kindness can be bought. I actually believe he thought he was making the non-decision in this, but that was clearly motivated by a desire to keep his brand out of a situation that is basically a for-profit genocide.

Unless he gets up on stage tomorrow’s show and makes a statement with some balls, his entire persona dissolves, and that is his brand. Sadly we all know he won’t.

Day 100 of me mistaking this guy’s tweets for Edward Snowden until after I read the tweet.

I backed it in 2015 and suspected it was a scam then, with most advice online being that you should only buy it if you think you’ll enjoy what’s already out.

I think the saddest thing is that they have a lot of genuine ambition, and we’re trying truly innovative things a decade ago like a persistent world space “from pupil to planet” weather simulations that were incredible, and more. But as time has gone on, the bar has risen and everything that they had that was ahead of the curve has been done.

As a teenager, I played a lot of the early Assassin’s creed games, but fell off the franchise around Origins, when they stopped releasing to steam and kept it on the Ubisoft store, and in general fell away from gaming in general in this era.

Eventually I pick up Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla together, probably about 3 years ago and play each. I put about 60+ hours into the first two, and somehow put 200 into Valhalla, basically just mentally switching off and getting 100% of the content, which is a lot for Ubisoft game.

Perhaps it filled a good ‘get home from work and crash’ need for me, and the experience wasn’t wholly bad by any means, but it’s so bland. I’ve dropped off the franchise entirely now, after being an obsessed fan a decade ago when I was younger and more naive. The entire game basically has 0 positive memories attached, basically no memories at all, good or bad.

I tend to hold off calling anything that’s not AI slop, but this game needs to be an exception. Assassin’s creed doesn’t deserve all the hate it gets, if you ever boot into the historian exploration mode and just walk around ancient landmarks hearing the development commentary, the respect for the historic is monumental across all the games, and in the gameplay there are lots of interesting aspects amongst everything else, but that everything else is very much the problem. Slop is the perfect word, it’s blended pulp where the quality of the ingredients vary from gourmet to rotten, and I was the pig at the trough.

I could honestly give e the exact same feedback for the Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga game. I have find childhood memories but that game doesn’t have an ounce of passion in it.

These games aren’t helped by the fact that the 3 games I played through after this era were Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium and Hollow Knight, which IMO are the three pinnacles of what games as a medium can be.

I’m close to a similar point, my PC has been Linux for a couple of years but my old surface book has been on windows 10 (with some 6 year security update thing that was mentioned during the time Win 10 was dropped).

The main reason I haven’t dropped it is that I sometimes use it for work or uni, so compatibility and other people being familiar has been a priority but I’ve graduated and got a work laptop so it’s probably time to drop Windows outright.

I’m actually pretty lukewarm on the Witcher franchise. I’ve read all but the most recent book, tried the show for 2 seasons, and played all the games. As much as people hype this franchise as some sort of rival to A Song of Ice and Fire or Lord of the Rings, it absolutely falls short.

That said, the Witcher 3 specifically deserves all the love it gets. I actually boycotted it for a few years after release because the graphic downgrade it had after the early gameplay trailers came at a time of extreme manipulation of this sort from other studios, but eventually picked it up with both DLC in a sale, approaching it with a lot of cynicism.

Not only does Hearts of Stone tell what I’d consider the best witcher story, Blood and Wine is a fantastic post-game to the franchise in its vibrant pageantry romp through a riviera; it’s just a happy environment to end Geralt’s story in.

I would consider myself a Lord of the Rings fan, I’ve read the books maybe 3 times through and read The Silmarillion once.

I forgot the ring makes people invisible.

I did hear a point about general game dev trends which is how optimisation wasn’t really a step in older games like it is now. When confined to the MB scale, or even just the finite scale of a single disc, the process wasn’t one of bloat and then half-arsed optimization but hyper optimised from the get go. I don’t think this shift is entirely the performance budget of modern games, but the multi-platform, limitless upper end, no disc limit design of modern games.

In the film, we see the ring shrink to Isildur’s ring size when he hold it, and it remains that size when Déagol finds it, after thousands of years without a carrier.

If you put it on a chicken, it is also gonna get really small, like chicken fingers small.

I’m not sure if this is a pro or con.

I forgot Gemini was an LLM and thought this was hate for people born May 21st - June 21st, that they are dumb due to trepanning.

It is my first distro where I’m not dual booting to Windows.

I swapped to it in May from Endeavour OS as I happened to be doing a clean install, and 90% of my PC usage nowadays is gaming, and I have never looked back, even though I thought Endeavour OS would have been the end of my Distro hopping.

I went into this lukewarm on Nolan and a massive nerd for The Odyssey, so I was primed to be unhappy with any unfaithful choice, but honestly I was absolutely blown away.

One thing that stood out to me would be the general interpretation that the sea people causing the bronze age collapse was actually the declining of an honour code that is seen in the ancient greek laws of hospitality. I’d often thought about the tonal shift between the age of heroes and the Illiad onwards, how the Caledonian Boar Hunt may have been the last key event of Heroic age, and by the end of The Oresteia and The Aeneid, the early identity of the post-bronze-age collapse Mediterranean societies are visible. The sea people concept is largely debunked now, and the collapse is generally considered to be a mix of famine, climate disasters and most importantly the collapse of relationships between the east Mediterranean states.

Nolan then taking this as Odysseus’s fear of travelling home, a changed man, to a world he changed for the worse, is particularly powerful, and his take on Athena as a manifestation of this guilt at breaking Zeus law and witnessing a very real rape and pillage of the city due to his subterfuge was good. I also think that Zendaya was very likely this interpretation’s version of Cassandra too, which is neat.

I went into the film already guarded against the visual style. I’d have loved to have seen an authentic approach at bronze age style from talented art directors and production designers, and I had similar feelings about the muted and gloomy colour palette. I still have these feelings; everyone looked like a monochrome Roman, not even a classical Greek, but seeing the direction as a whole, I understand the choice. The somber narrative, editing style, soundtrack, etc, all serve the same tone that the muted and stripped by colour and art style do.

That said, I’m shocked at the lack of spears in this film. Everyone fights with short swords and no shields, which is basically a Hollywood fantasy in any time in history, but this is the iconic era of spears. I counted one use of a spear, despite several war scenes, and almost every death at the hands of a weapon would have been prevented with a shield.

As a fun side fact, people who play VR combat games like Blade and Sorcery often start using swords and default to spears and clubs, because they’re incredibly intuitive to untrained people compared to swords, which have a far more tactical skill ceiling, making them the default of soldiers right through the era of knights with swords.

Another fun side fact. Ajax, a 5th Century BCE poem about the PTSD driven suicide of Ajax the Greater towards the end of the Trojan war, was performed to 500 marines in 2008, I think by Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, and Michael J. Fox, and was remarked to resonate incredibly strongly with the audience. Myth from the Trojan was onwards suddenly really cares about consequence, particularly in regards to the human condition.

My other pet peeve is the sound design of the weapons (Odysseus’s incredible bow string sound excluded). This was a very ‘swish and pew’. Back in the early 2010s, I stumbled across a Skyrim mod that changed the bow sounds (example here) and I was amazed how much more satisfying it was, not just from a realism point, but just a pleasant resonant heavy sound, like how shooter games have hit marker sounds. Not just was every launched arrow (including from Odysseus) very whistly, but so was every sword swing. For a film with otherwise incredible sound design (so good I’d peg it for winning the oscar this year), every fight was a bland cartoony swish fest.

I also thought the massacre of the suitors was a little bit unwarranted in it’s action set piece style. It makes sense that a trained warrior king who spent a decade in a bloody war would be a better combatant and a bunch of immature suitors, but I think it just overstepped my suspension of disbelief a few times, in a way the monsterous and magical elements didn’t.

My closing thought is that this may be one of the best adaptations of Greek myth at all. It’s ability to take the tonal shift that is the Trojan war and its concluding breaking of Zeus’s Law and the sack of the temple of Athena, pointing that to the beginning of the end of Mycenaean Greece, and its neighbours, and then tying that so incredibly to Odysseyus’s character arc and PTSD is so well done. The fact that my cirques are so specific and nit-picky is a testament to the strength of this film.

Don’t worry, they make them look like people as a silly game, we’ll be chased down the street by drones.

It’s strange to look back at the Legend of Korra and realise it was totally fine, just worse than the original show, when comparing it to literally everything else that’s come from the IP since.

I played and modded Skyrim at the wazoo back in the day too, and haven’t touched it in a decade. It still holds a really special place in my heart in a worldbuilding and lore space that nothing I’ve played since, newer or older has sated quite as strongly, including other elderly scrolls games.

I’ve just started replaying it, as there is basically an entire story’s worth of high quality expanded mod content to explore, plus the original game has faded to a point of re-enjoying it. I’m probably going to introduce my partner to it with my own riff on the Gate to Sovngarde modlist.

The thing is, I don’t care for the next game. I have no trust in Bethesda to make something that scratches the itch that Skyrim did, I don’t expect it to be moddable in the same way looking at the creation club, and I literally expect it to be an objectively boring game.

If I want more of the elder scrolls experience I fell in love with, I have it in the old games.

That’s equally just because when working with adults after education, I feel like we all become so blind to age.

It’s kinda accurate as we’re all on different life paths, one colleague may be 19 with two kids, another may be 30 and their life revolves around Minecraft. Either is fine of course, but I just start seeing all colleges as a nebulous colleague age.