Seeing as I'm 30lb down as of today (still early in this process tho), I figured I'd make a quick thread on what's 'finally' worked for me, after years of miserable failure at this taking quarter and half steps towards weight loss, only to make no progress, or fail off the wagon. First up, the adage 'weight is lost in the kitchen' really is true. Every time I've tried to 'out-workout' my diet in the past did... nothing.

This time, I reoriented my life around a new way of eating: Calorie Restriction with large Low Calorie Density meals. To expand on this:

The 'AI porn' moment coming is going to be a fascinatingly distinct one compared to the prior domains that we see image synth slamming into, for a bunch of reasons that are fairly domain specific.

Porn is such a weird medium because of its homogeneity relative to its scale... Like the diffuse ad-model that supports it all, and the centralization of so much of it 'tube' sites means that with exception to commission-driven fetish niches (furries, bdsm, sfm, etc.) most everything is funneled towards being 'generic' within its genre...

Now that I've played about 60 hours of Elden Ring, I think the primary critique I have of the game and the FromSoft format is the way in which the world has next to no underlying derivable systemic logic to its loot distribution.

This is to say... The fact that an obsessively written wiki is the best place to find information on damn near anything is a tremendous failure.

For a game about builds, about layering equipment and buffs and such to get very very specific results, that there is no diegesis to this is a waste.

Playing around with #GPTChat with @rust_lucas and the stuff this can generate is legit hysterical. Robotic Mouth that Chews Food For You

Playing around with #ChatGPT and this shit is wild

The most depressing thing about VR to me, as a game designer, is how the medium has, 7 or so years in, failed to usher in much of any interesting novel deeply simulation driven games. The 'immersion' of VR is skin-deep. Literally just the view point, occasionally physics. The games that have taken advantage of the medium most are the ones that were already out on the sim-heavy axis: Driving games, Flight games, Golf games, Gun games, Physics puzzle games.

As I look at Darktide and just how 'game-ee' it is, I just crave so deeply a like... 'immersive' 40k shooter. Like something where you're picking equipment based entirely on how it is described and conceptualized 'in universe', instead of like DPS and cooldowns and shit. I don't want to be reminded at ever juncture by system grammar that I am playing a game. I want to inhabit a character. I want the ontology of that experience to be framed in terms OF my character, not me sitting here at the desk. Me at the desk is fucking boring and bored.

Ah yes. Pantomiming shooting at people in your apartment complex's outdoor public areas from your Balcony.

A recreational activity everyone should ABSLOLUTELLY DO IN AMERICA.

https://twitter.com/VRScout/status/1593362501059477504

Is this like... 'Everyone in VR is eating Lead Fucking Paint Chips Day' or something???!

The Peripheral 1st Ep Thoughts:

Interesting intro
Awkwardly forced accents
Strange cross section of tech for 2099
Beautiful imagery with uneven camera work
Weird pacing
Boring town crime guy
SUDDEN BODY HORROR JESUS
Lots of vague insinuation that I hope pays off 2nd Ep

Enough attachments on those rifles? lol
Really? 2099 rifle can't go through an 18 inch tree trunk?
Incredible costume design
Moretz's nose job is constantly distracting
Plot reveal is hmm
CHARACTER ARGUING IS CONTENT
And 2nd episode crash in pacingzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Saw an artist today who was flabbergasted by seeing some rando say that they found current AI art output more interesting than things on Artstation.

I don't see why this would be surprising or difficult to understand.

An adult taking 3 steps is unremarkable. A child; special. The AI art isn't interesting because it's perfect. It's interesting because it's a mess in particular ways. Because it produces artifacts in multiple cadences that results in serendipity. Because it's algorithmically impressionistic. Because it conveys truths about its dataset.

The biggest trap I ever fell into, and sat buried in for most of my life, was the idea that I'm valuable, or capable of being loved as a person, only because I make things.

There's been no greater impediment to me just being able to simply -be-, and be ok with myself. Looking back I can see all the experiences that shaped the view. A militant mother who rewarded achievement and scorned anything appearing to be laziness. A self employed dad who worked constantly. Just being poor on general and having so very little.

As many of you know, I've been running a #DnD campaign, and using #Midjourney to generate everything from Character Portraits, Interiors & Exteriors, Equipment, Monsters, the whole shebang.

I just finished making the first big city, New Mecharium, so here's a tour in a thread. New Mecharium is the Capital City of one of the campaign's factions, the descendants of a stranded damaged Spaceship called the Amphion, forced to settle on a medieval world atop the ruins of a far more advanced society.

It's a grim place, fitting for the 41st millennium :-)

Just played the Deadlink demo. I'm super torn on it.

On one hand, the juice and vibe and aesthetic feel awesome. Lot of smart thinking with the system design/progression there.

On the other, it's just -way- too Doom Eternal for my tastes. The equipment-power juggling loop... Feels as prescriptive here as it does in D:E. It's SUPER well designed for its clear goals. I just... hate those goals personally.

It's that 'character action game' style where you're cycling through 4-6 things constantly. You love it or hate it.

My life has measurably improved since I figured out how to nail the exact flavor/texture combo of the Chicken Finger subs from my hometown (Buffalo, NY) Assorted tips to making an authentic Buffalo Chicken finger sub:

Your wing sauce should be half a stick of Margarine to 1/4 of Franks. Add a spicy concentrate in if you want more heat, not more Franks. DO NOT use butter. Water makes for soggy chicken fingers .

I feel more aware recently of the split between folks who seek out games as an 'immersive' (dissociative) experience, interested most primarily in the complete illusion of being elsewhere, and folks who embrace gaming as an activity within the world as conscious integrated layer. I feel like you can chart almost every game as being somewhere on this axis by intent. With things like... Inside, some VR experiences on one axis, and like... Pokemon Go, schedule/obligation mobile games, many MMOs, etc on the other side.

Tech journalism's complicity in allowing every major corp to pretend as though things that have been done before are suddenly 'new' when they do them (Facebook, Apple, etc.) is one of the core things that undermines any notion that what they do is actually journalism. Also, it's no surprise that peeps don't engage with the written ad-hoc gig economy 2nd stage marketing when it lacks all of the pizazz of the ad-hoc gig economy 2nd stage marketing done on youtube by attractive young fun to listen to 'influencers'.

Dead business model.

The most resonant moment from Rick and Morty as a series to me, is in Morty's Mindblowers, where the two have lost their memories, and after Morty decides to kill himself due to the ep macguffin, Rick, despite total amnesia, is like 'Fuck it, I'm in, Suicide Pact', on pure vibes. It struck me because the moment feels as though, with all the details of his life peeled away, at his core, Rick just has the impulse to die, and is just looking for an excuse. Only family and distractions and happenstance manage to keep him here, despite all the agency he has.

Anton went on a gun-tastic adventure yesterday.

I spent almost the entire day (10-5) on a cross-LA journey to buy a firearm or two.

It ended up being fairly BATSHIT, given it seems SO WAS ALL OF CALIFORNIA.

This thread is about my observations about what's going on right now. 1. So, the journey took me between 4 different gun stores and sporting goods store.

You might ask, why so many?

That's because pretty much everything (that isn't a bolt action, target gun or big stupid revolver) is SOLD OUT.

EVERYWHERE.

Hot Take:

What VR-skeptic gamers don't seem to get is, this IS the natural evolution of the First Person Shooter.

I'm sorry but, the genre is just BETTER in VR.

Full stop.

It takes everything that was amazing about PC FPS and arcade lightgun games of old and combines them. Can you do everything in a VR FPS you can do in a pancake one? No (without an iron stomach).

But for every way in which traversal has had to be tamed, object manip., tactical parallel equipment use, and micro-mechanical complexity has exploded.

This is the future of shooters.

So many of these Metaverse-obsessed folks like Rosedale go through this cyclical process of designing a platform while completely ignoring how people use computers/devices/media, then getting upset/depressed when they don't mass-adopt something that also ignores those things. I was struck recently by the Marshmellow concert that in Fortnite.
This was something that Rosedale and others kept trying to use an example of what a "Virtual World" could do uniquely. A massively-attended concert.
SL did it with hundreds at most.
Fortnite brought 10 mil.