Khrux

Also worth adding it sadly doesn't really exist anymore, the iconic look here is gone, although game mechanics still begin getting weird.

Also although people have teleported to it, Minecraft is so big that I assumed nobody would ever reach it in survival. I'm not surprised it took 14 years.

He was actually just there in the water for the reference images, and got left in by mistake.

Funnily enough, when I do ask an LLM to rephrase anything I write, it changes any sentence with a semicolon to one with an em dash. I've probably always overused the semicolon because of its availability on a keyboard, but it appears a lot in my normal work.

Now I trust the semicolon, it's an identifier of me.

I'm in the UK too and the gradual shift to WhatsApp has been a relief considering it used to be WhatsApp, Snapchat, messenger, Instagram, iMessage and twitter about ten years ago, not that anyone did all of them.

It's a shame it's meta but it's so nice that it's not a huge pile of useless features, just a few.

I don't even understand the purpose. Who the hell cares what colour your texts are?

I've never made the link between that and gender before (linguistically), it seems obvious in hindsight.

Blurry photos is fine to make an stylistic choice. The 2019 movie The Lighthouse stylistically looked like a 1920s film, before modern music intentionally used bitcrushing, it used vinyl cracks, boomer shooters made in this decade intentionally look like 1990s Doom clones.

When a medium's shortcoming is patched by technology, it ultimately becomes an artifact of the era where it was accidental. Once a few years have passed, it becomes more synonymous with the era than the mistake.

It's not necessarily nostalgia, Gen Alpha and the younger half of Gen Z never grew up without smartphones, so they don't miss the era of poor film photography. Although every generation does this simulation of forgotten mistakes, it's particularly poignant now, where the high quality, perfectly lit, professional feeling photos convey something artificial, i.e. smartphone software emulating camera hardware, faces tuned with filters or outright AI generated content. Even if it's false imperfection, the alternative is false perfection.

Art using deliberate imperfections that were unavoidable in the past is romanticising something perceived as before commercialism, and that's admirable.

I agree. Provided you aren't betraying your own values in the work you do, there's no shame in not taking pride in how you sell your labour. Be are not defined by our jobs.

I've used ChatGPT a little, particularly a few years ago but still on rare occasion now. I won't bother giving it this prompt and wasting the processing but it probably won't be biased, I've been really really surprised with how critical it is of itself. I think by the nature of the dataset it's trained on (i.e. basically everything), it's not really showing any major bias at the moment. It matches my energy and decries capitalism, AI, OpenAI, Sam Altmann etc in a cartoonish, toadie way.

Sadly I don't think being an AI engineer is quite as bullshit, the obvious allegory is someone who provides the syllabus and marks the exams, rather than just doing addition for rich people.

I cannot believe character.ai was valued at over a billion.

^bubble

People disagree because it's still an abstraction of camo. Wearing it in the first place came from people fawning over militarism.

I actually think it can work with a queer look in one of two ways, so you are likely fine: Either it's effectively teasing the pro authoritarian militarism camo types, or it's a radical anarchy armed rebel look, which without praxis is really just the former look again. Either way these are fine.

Another reason maybe you've been downvoted is that people loathe the deep abstraction of modern, or rather postmoderm society. Camo was made for soldiers > Camo was worn by patriotic civilians simulating the soldier aesthetic > particularly under the Bush administration, it became less a symbol of soldiers, and more a symbol of patriots. Patriotism is nationalism.

Today when most of us camo in the military cosplaying way, we think 'nationalist'. When we see a person in a little bit of camo, perhaps just some came shorts and a regular t-shirt, we think either 'nationalist', 'okay with nationalism' or 'ignorant of nationalism'.

So when most people see someone in a blended queer and camo look, they probably assume one of three things: 'ignorant of nationalism', 'critical of nationalism in a rebellious manner' or 'pro nationalist queer'. Of course one of these is fine, but one is very bad.

I think there is a nebulous point where people collectively agree a game feels old. If I go back to the Witcher 3, it feels a little old graphically but otherwise it's fine.

A friend of mine was once going to run a D&D game heavily inspired by dragon age, so I bought all the games in a sale. I couldn't get through the first one, many hours in I realised that the dated mechanics actually blocked my engagement entirely.

Nostalgia also plays into this. I've replayed the assassins creed games before and I'm basically blind to the early jank because I played them when they were brand new, same with many wii games. But these games definitely feel old.

Not every game starts feeling dated, early mario games were so well polished that the intended experience still shines through playing them now. Minecraft came out closer to Quake than to today and even with updates, it's pretty similar to when it was new.

At some point I'd place near the early 2010's (although it didn't happen overnight) innovation in gaming, particularly AAA games stagnated. Most genres: 4X, Multiplayer FPS shooters, open world adventure, survival horrors, etc found a formula which has largely only been iterated on since. Different genres found this at different times, there isn't a huge noticeable difference between a 2009 Call of Duty lobby and a 2024 lobby. The Witcher series is a good example of this, the games are overhauled in almost every way in the 8 years since between their first and third installment, yet modern open world exploration games feel pretty similar to The Witcher 3.

Games from before this decline of innovation were far more wild west in their development, and sometimes you play a game from then which was beloved and it feels incredibly dated. When I think of an old game, I think of one which feels older, rather than a strict timeframe.