Sarah Katz, 21, had a heart condition and was not aware of the drink’s caffeine content, which exceeded that of cans of Red Bull and Monster energy drinks combined, according to a legal filing
Religion is a social construct wherein humans organize and participate in communal activities for the purposes of creating human connection/bonding and quelling anxieties through relinquishing perspective of control in life.
Trying to make an AI preacher is an exercise in trying to emulate the latter without the former. The latter is spiritualism: the beliefs a person creates/adopts to create a sense of 'belonging' in the world. The former is the aspect that takes spiritualism and turns it into religion, as religion is essentially the social commodification of spiritualism. Of course no one seeking religion is going to be satisfied with an AI preacher, because anyone seeking religion is seeking human connection. You could use an AI to discuss spiritual beliefs with people instead, but at that point you're not creating a preacher, but rather a chat-bot theologian.
Nah. I played before DPS/speed-clear meta and all the powercreep. When you actually fought the enemies, took damage, and didn't die to one-shots. I enjoyed that, and the game has always been downhill. After 1,400 hours of playtime, I realized I was only playing hoping for it to feel like it used to, but it never came.
I haven't bought Starfield, and I don't plan to, but I watched some gameplay and... Well, the game is a pile of issues. And the few bits that are acceptable are bits I've already seen from NMS - and their implementation is usually better than Starfield. So as I'm watching Starfield footage, all I can feel is a desire to reinstall NMS and play that instead... And I'm not even a big NMS fan. It's not a good sign if your 'revolutionary' game already feels beat out by competition that had existed before your game was even halfway in development. Bethesda had all the time and manpower in the world to compete with NMS, and still fell short.
Fair enough, but there's a difference between reading headlines/articles to make a judgement, and watching actual real-time gameplay for several hours to make a judgement. The only difference was that I wasn't the one holding the controller. If several hours of uninterrupted unedited gameplay isn't enough to make a surface-level observation, I'm not sure what is.
Plus, I was just saying how what I saw made me feel, and I said I'd rather play one game over another. If we want to talk about unnecessarily strong opinions, let's start with you attempting to shut down my honest two cents to reinforce your negative worldview. Let's all be kind to each other, okay? :)
Well, sure. And Starfield follows in the wake of Fallout 4's lackluster RPG experience, offering shallow conversations and the illusion of choice. After Fallout 4, I'm not sure I can get myself to play another game modeled after the same system of "Would you like a quest? [Yes/Yes but sarcastic/One question first then yes/Maybe later]". If the story is railroaded, Starfield and NMS aren't too different then - there's a main quest line, with things to learn and people to meet, and you check off the boxes until it's done.
But as to whether they should be compared, I think it's unavoidable. There's too much overlap, and no other games like it. Games in which you can customize a space ship, explore thousands of planets, make a home base on any planet you want, and are incentivized to explore and find new places and meet new people? NMS, Starfield, Elite Dangerous, maybe Star Citizen. With some similar gameplay elements and a small pool of games, comparison is natural and expected. Nothing wrong with that.
Most of what I see as 'issues' are personal preferences. Stuff like railroaded dialog choices even worse than Fallout 4, or stiff/awkward voice acting, or landing on planets being randomly generated despite claims otherwise. But as for actual issues, two things stood out to me: spaceship flight is very dangerous because bumping into things has a good chance of bugging the physics engine and killing you instantly (but other times, barely even registering damage). And seeing a player get stuck because they got a bounty without even knowing it, and then the bounty was making them shoot-on-sight by guards and them having no clue how to deal with the bounty. I'm sure there's a perfectly simple way out of the situation, but without any communication to the player, that's nothing but frustration. Add in broken NPC pathing/animations (people getting stuck inside objects like bar counters), making it all-too-easy to fall down ladder holes in ships, and horrible performance optimization (with Todd Howard being quoted telling people to just buy better computers), and I think it'll need a bit of polish before really considering giving it a shot.
That was a >100gb download that took the moderators time to download and test. And the admins weren't involved. All the claims of admins backing the torrent or deleting comments has had zero proof, as it was all hysteria drummed up by the psychotic cracker called Empress, who has had a long standing imaginary feud with 1337x.
1337x can have malware in anything, as anyone can upload. The volunteer moderators downloaded and tested it as soon as they could. I'm sorry some people downloaded it faster, but there's no conspiracy here.
Do you think a "soulslike" is defined by being dark and gritty? I find it odd that you think the inclusion of anything cute or hopeful/friendly would be only a negative. Maybe your preferences are for dark and gritty only, but I assure you that many people enjoy other styles. There's a charm to there being hope in a dying world, isn't there?
Besides, I'd say most people define "soulslike" by their gameplay, not aesthetics. Maybe the "git gud" fragile-masculinity crowd needs their unforgiving combat system paired with a dark, 'masculine' atmosphere to fulfill their power fantasy, but again, I assure you that many other types of people enjoy those games - especially Elden Ring, which has much broader appeal than the previous souls games.
I'll wager you're a toxic "git gud" type that hinges their identity on these types of games, and that's why the idea of your sacred icon being blemished by comparison to Soulframe upsets you so much. I really can't see why else anyone would be this angry over a game not being to their preferences. If people enjoy something different than you, let them. :)
Transcription: crude line drawing of a young goofy person sitting in a school chair. They have mid-length straight red hair, messy and needing a trim. They are wearing a hoodie of GIR from the cartoon show Invader Zim. That character is a pet-coded green alien dog with a goofy long tongue. Dialogue: off screen character saying...
Nuance is needed here... The terms high- and low-functioning are definitely problematic, because they're too reductionist, and lead people to assume things. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that autism having "levels" is bad - the DSM-5 (as horribly flawed as it is) contains two sets of three levels each for determining level of support needed by an autistic person, with the two sets being related to socialization and life-skill functioning. Given that autism is a spectrum, and some autistic people aren't disabled by it at all, being able to categorize people by their needs is useful - we just have to make sure that it's qualitative, rather than arbitrary labels being picked by how the doctor is feeling that day. And it's something to be kept in medical records, not used for self-identification.
I'm not sure that the labels themselves are the issue in either of these cases. It's worth remembering that we're talking about historical periods of mistreatment as well. From my experience, Psychiatry as a whole has historically had its favorite diagnosis for the 'bad and unwanted' people in society. Hysteria is the obvious reference, but that shifted towards labeling the 'undesirables' as schizophrenics (and later as borderlines). It wasn't (and in the case of BPD, still isn't) uncommon for people to receive these labels purely to communicate to other doctors "I don't like this patient"/"They're faking"/"They deserve mistreatment".
Let's not forget that the label of schizophrenia started as a combination of the idea of early-onset dementia and stigmatization of behaviors that do not fit into society. The latter half is covered up by history, but the initial 'symptoms' of a schizophrenia diagnosis included things like not making small talk and having strong beliefs about politics. The list of symptoms read half of what you'd expect in terms of psychosis, and half like it was copy-pasted from the 'symptoms' of Hysteria. That's why these additional labels were harmful - some of them were associated more with not fitting into society than actual pathology.
It's no coincidence that when this general issue of mistreatment and over-diagnosis was being fought against, Psychiatry was busy switching over to using Borderline as the new maligned diagnosis. The schizophrenia labels were removed during the wider push for humanizing treatment of schizophrenics, but I don't think the labels themselves were a significant part of the issue - the bigger issue was the inherent power imbalances and patient abuse present within Psychiatry. After all, BPD was previously unnoteworthy, but now has become the new stigmatizing label, and all the mistreatments of schizophrenics are being shifted to borderlines. After all, there's now a "quiet borderline" label - for people who clearly aren't borderline, but psychiatrists want to give the 'bad diagnosis' to anyway.
Autism is adjacent to Psychiatry, but the story is the same. Autism is currently maligned by society, and the fact that people are so hostile towards autistic people is the real problem, not the labels they've made up to 'justify' their hostility. Getting rid of the labels doesn't remove the hostility, because the hostility is just looking for an outlet. That's why my only focus is making sure that labels are medically useful - because managing societal and medicalized hate of disabled people is another issue altogether.
This has been known for at least a decade now, and no changes have been made. I've even seen estimates on how little it would cost to modify the feed, and it's negligible, but any extra cost is too much cost I suppose.
You can't get a lobotomy anymore, but doctors still prescribe ECT all the time. You just need to modernize your standards for physician-inflicted brain damage.
It causes temporary and often permanent memory loss and brain fog. The goal of ECT is to, quite literally, make people detached from their illness or trauma by either forgetting it entirely or by damaging the pathways of learned stress responses, both of which are achieved through random damaging of soft tissue by routine 'treatments' until the right spots are hit, with every other damaged area being deemed acceptable losses.
It's proven effective, sure. It's more effective at causing improved mood than doing nothing. So is a heroin addiction. At least once you stop abusing heroin, you recover physically. ECT does permanent damage in most people who undergo it. Plus, ECT isn't a single course of treatments - any benefit it gives eventually wears off, and additional treatment cycles are planned in perpetuity. This is because of neuroplasticity, where the brain will recreate some of those connections that were damaged by ECT, thus bringing back trauma memories/associations and symptoms of illness.
Is it really worth it to suffer bits of permanent damage every time you undergo what is essentially medicalized repression of memory? There are people who lose memory of their partner of several years, have zero emotion towards them, leave them and continue on in their life never remembering the love they had. Is that worth it, for something that just returns anyway?
"Proven effective" and "outperforms placebo" are statements that focus on a single variable and don't mention how much damage something may cause elsewhere. Don't take it at face-value.
I used to think that. Then I realized I was dissociating all my memories away, and that my panic attacks were reality catching up to me. My life's fairly empty, but things definitely happen, I just don't remember them. It wasn't until I started living with someone else that I had someone to remind me of all the things I forget.
But I figure, my brain's doing it for a reason, right? Guess this is just how I deal with the stresses of life. It has its disadvantages, and I'm no stranger to hating myself for not remembering things, but any other way of getting through life would have its own downsides. Or so I tell myself.
/r/Place has always had massive country flags whenever it ran. But the way I see it, the largest murals need the most people working on it, and getting many people involved means having them all be connected in some way, and country-of-origin is the easiest way to do that. Combine that with the fact that the biggest non-English communities on western social media like Reddit (and Lemmy too, now) tend to be German or French, and it's no surprise that the two largest murals are those flags.
You'd wish people would find something else to represent them and have fun with things like this, but people gravitate towards the largest groups they feel a part of. Low hanging fruit, I suppose.
Takaya Imamura, the art director of Majora’s Mask, reveals that, before he retired, he was interested in making Zelda “a bit more unique, with a little twi...
Is it just me, or does the language in this article feel very AI-generated? And this website is only 10 days old, has only one writer, over 10 articles posted every day by that one person, and is being posted here by an account with the same name as the site. This feels strange.
A console will offer higher performance at similar price points
Building a PC evens out the cost (or pushes it in the consumer's favor), but requires both knowledge and time to plan and execute a build
Improper hardware purchasing decisions (which is likely given unfamiliarity with PC setups) can render certain games impossible to play without additional investment
Maintaining a gaming PC involves managing OS updates, driver updates, chipset and hardware compatibility troubleshooting, navigating increased security risks (uninformed users accessing online services through their web browsers; scams, phishing, viruses)
Non-standardized hardware configurations means manually tweaking settings of every game, which means again an investment of time and knowledge
Lack of cross-platform support leading to separation from friends
Lack of standardized support: going on sparse tech help forums versus contacting Microsoft or Sony's customer service
I could go on. The point is, there's a LOT that makes consoles a much more feasible option for someone who does not own a gaming-capable PC and lacks knowledge about PCs. These people are the majority of people, because people who invest time and effort into learning a topic are naturally the minority. Of course PC is the superior choice - IF and only IF you already are ingrained into the PC hobby, or are willing to invest significant time and effort into learning it. To someone who isn't into tech spheres and just wants to play games, it's console or nothing.
Now if you want to argue that gaming as a whole would be less toxic and more consumer-friendly without the patronage of console gamers, feel free, but don't insist that it's likely (or even possible) that console gamers would simply convert to being PC gamers if consoles went away. They would switch to other hobbies that require similar [minor] levels of investment. They only have so much time and effort to spare, after all.
To me, this sounds like legal ass-covering to be used as a defense should Microsoft ever be investigated for attempting a sort of gaming monopoly. "No, we're not buying out all the big developers so that we control the AAA playing field, we just don't like exclusivity!"
I mean, if they don't like exclusives, why go on to complain about how much they're losing by putting their games on the competing console? Sure sounds like they'd rather not pay those fees at all, maybe... by making their new games exclusives? Hmmm...
Family files lawsuit against Panera Bread after college student who drank ‘charged lemonade’ dies (www.nbcnews.com)
Sarah Katz, 21, had a heart condition and was not aware of the drink’s caffeine content, which exceeded that of cans of Red Bull and Monster energy drinks combined, according to a legal filing
Researchers tried out AI preachers -- and it didn't go so well (www.zmescience.com)
Anon is afraid of change (sh.itjust.works)
Brinner Rule (lemmy.sdf.org)
Starfield hasn’t hurt No Man’s Sky’s popularity – it may have even helped it (www.vg247.com)
No Man's Sky has had a great month, coincidentally around the launch of the other big space adventure of the day....
Pirate Pro (lemmy.ml)
Soulframe is Elden Ring meets Ghost of Tsushima, but with 'Disney princesses' - PCGamesN (www.pcgamesn.com)
Gir Rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Transcription: crude line drawing of a young goofy person sitting in a school chair. They have mid-length straight red hair, messy and needing a trim. They are wearing a hoodie of GIR from the cartoon show Invader Zim. That character is a pet-coded green alien dog with a goofy long tongue. Dialogue: off screen character saying...
Cow poop emits climate-warming methane. Adding red algae may help (www.sciencenews.org)
Adding a type of methane-inhibiting red algae directly to cow feces cut down methane emission from the poop by about 44 percent, researchers report.
Nineteen Eighty-Rule (beehaw.org)
Suiruledal thoughts (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
U/SPEZ not popular on place (lemmy.world)
A current state of Place on Reddit shows seems to seems to be signalling something to u/spez :)
Zelda: Majora's Mask art director wanted to work on another 'weird Zelda' (gamerkick.com)
Takaya Imamura, the art director of Majora’s Mask, reveals that, before he retired, he was interested in making Zelda “a bit more unique, with a little twi...
“Microsoft acquired Bethesda after hearing Starfield would be exclusive to PlayStation” Strong allegations being thrown here. (www.theverge.com)
Microsoft says Sony paid third parties to keep games off Xbox