There are really no low points in the entire soundtrack. Although, I haven't actually played all of the DLCs, so I might have not even heard all of them.

This is a hard question. I think that we would be better off if more people adopted secular worldviews. But throughout history? I don't think we can simply say "what if there were no religions" -- we'd have to be completely different creatures for it to have gone that way. But I do think we'd be better off if we were that kind of creature.

It's interesting that every group of people, basically ever, has started a religion. I'm no anthropologist, but as far as I know, every civilization to have ever existed has formed one. Forming a religion is as natural as forming a language. Clearly, it's a thing we do. Lacking an explanation for our questions, from "what are rainbows?" to "what happens when we die?" we will apparently just fill something in. Everyone did it.

For us to have not formed religions, we'd have to be more comfortable with uncertainty. We'd need to have been better at accepting that we don't know some things, and we can doggedly look for answers, but we shouldn't insist that we know something before we really do. And I think our species kind of sucks at that.

If we were better at accepting uncertainty while still pursuing answers, we'd all be better off. And maybe, as a side effect of that, we wouldn't have formed religions.

When Og and Bog saw the sun come over the hill one morning, and Og was like, "Hey Bog, how do you think that happens?" Bog should've said, "I don't know. Maybe someday, someone will know." Instead, Bog went off on some real bullshit, and now here we are.

The Dead Cells soundtrack. Especially:

• Prisoner's Awakening (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzK3z8MLSpA&list=PLombWqRALIZDwEsPJuGvD6soVFA46I7f2&index=3)
• Clocktower (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ1Pk8HBYJU&list=PLombWqRALIZDwEsPJuGvD6soVFA46I7f2&index=21)
• Temple (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg0R4w7LvG4&list=PLombWqRALIZDwEsPJuGvD6soVFA46I7f2&index=20)
• Lighthouse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fqHBOTFgcI&list=PLombWqRALIZDwEsPJuGvD6soVFA46I7f2&index=41)

Just charge them for bananas. 4011. Everything is bananas if it doesn't scan.

Do this as a temporary measure. We will code it properly later

I'm always blown away whenever someone says that they like some language or framework because it's "great for prototyping."

Like, what magical fairyland software company do you work at where your prototypes are not immediately put into production as soon as they kind of start to work?

I once had a job in an office building that was shared by several different businesses. One of them was an accounting firm that seemed like an incredibly boring place. And I swear, every time two guys from the accounting firm passed each other in the hallway, they had to say to each other, "You having fun yet?" or "Are ya workin' hard or hardly workin'?"

It must have been a requirement. Literally company policy. I heard it so many times in just a couple years, there's no other explanation. Like, if you didn't say it, the manager would ask to see you in his office, and he'd be like, "Hey Phil, someone tells me that you and Dave passed each other in the hallway, and neither of you said 'you having fun yet.' Now you know we like to have fun around here, and 'you having fun yet' is part of our company culture, so I'm gonna need you to make sure that you say 'you having fun yet.' It's for fun. And we like to have fun. It's mandatory."

Job: cashier. Not my current job, but definitely the one that racked up the most irritating quotes.

Customer: "Now, don't you try to double scan my items. I'm watching you."

I heard this one constantly when I was a cashier at a grocery store. At first I assumed that they were kidding. After all, it's such a stupid accusation to make. It was only after about 100 elderly people had said it while staring daggers at me that I realized they weren't kidding.

I assume there must have been a news report in the 1960s about store clerks charging you twice for an item and then taking the extra cash, and a certain kind of person had been paranoid about it ever since. Except this wasn't in the 1960s, it was the 2010s, and such a scam couldn't even work anymore. The cash register isn't just a lockbox like it was in the 60s, it's a computer and it knows exactly how much money should be in it. And if it has less than that in it when your shift ends, you're screwed.

Plus, you're paying with a credit card, Gertrude, how am I supposed to steal your shit when you're paying with a credit card?

I think the thing that made it so irritating was the fact that they are willing to whip out this assertive, domineering attitude at you based on information that hasn't been true for about forty freaking years. They have a mistrust of other people because they don't know how the world works anymore, yet they think they've outsmarted you.

I swear on the soul of my father, Stardew Montoya, you will get all DLC for one price.

Congratulations! I want to point out that going from 5 to 6 kilograms is, in fact, a huge jump. That is 20% more than what you were doing before, which is literally huge. That is a big accomplishment -- and also, you won't have to jump by that much in the future.

This is an unfortunate paradox for people at the beginning of their workout careers: the smaller weights are harder to move up in, because each step up is actually a pretty large percentage increase.

going from 5 to 6 is 20% more going from 6 to 7 is 16.7% more going from 7 to 8 is 14% more and so on

So eventually the next weight will only be like 10% more than the previous weight, and that's a much more reasonable amount to increase by. If each new dumbbell set feels way harder than before, just know that the next step up will be easier than the last one you just did.

Nice screenshot. One thing this game did get right from day 1 was the art style.

This article brings up a great point.

In addition, I've always thought that video games work the way we were told the world worked. (At least, the way we were told it worked in the 90s in America.) Work hard to get some resources so that you can use those resources to build more stuff to get more resources, etc.

Kids today can work as hard as they want, only to still have no chance of paying for college and still have no chance of buying a house. Video games at least provide that "strategy -> effort -> reward -> next level" cycle that our brains find very rewarding, which, for far too many people, does not exist in real life.

That's probably what makes modern games so disappointing, too. Games were one area that actually was a meritocracy... until pay-to-win messed that up.

Sonic and Dr. Robotnik are codependent. They don't actually want to defeat each other. That's why Robotnik is always building these elaborate bases that, for some reason, have a bunch of perfectly Sonic-sized tubes for getting around in. And it's why there's always that moment at the end where Sonic is chasing Robotnik but doesn't catch him.

Cool! I'm not a hardcore sim racing fan, but I got a little into them when I realized that you can play them without a wheel if you use the gyroscope in a PS5 controller for steering. It's not perfect, but it's accurate enough to play these games that are otherwise unplayable with an analog stick.

BTW if anyone is reading this and thinks you might want to try it, Assetto Corsa is two dollars on the Steam sale right now. It came out a while ago, but there are graphics mods that make it look nice. https://store.steampowered.com/app/244210/Assetto_Corsa/

This looks incredible! Maybe I'll finally stop forgetting my own custom layouts with this.

I had no idea any solenoid keyboards were being made. Looks like a solid endgame right there.

Been mostly playing Capcom vs SNK 2 on my Anbernic Arc handheld lately. IMO, it's the only handheld with a d-pad that you can enjoy fighting games on, so I've been using it for that. Current goal is to get through arcade mode as Terry and Evil Ryu with no deaths.

In case anyone doesn't know, this game is basically Devil May Cry but in the Metal Gear Solid universe.

I'm telling you that because I didn't know that when I bought it. I had played MGS 1 and 2 before buying this game, and it took a couple of hours for me to realize, I don't think I'll be sneaking up on anybody in this one. It's a good Devil May Cry game, though!

This is very cool. I'm hoping 404media.co and aftermath.site do it -- those are two independent sites that I've subscribed to after hearing about them on the fediverse. Seems like most of 404media's writers are on Mastodon, at least.

I also like that this feature creates the ability to have a known link for an author across multiple websites. With that, you could show posts that link to any other article by the same author, regardless of which site the article was published on. So then you can see all the threads of discussion about all of the articles that particular author has written.

It could've been the first YAAA YAAA YAAA YAAA YAAA game. Instead, it's just an AAA game, and I'm probably going to skip it. :(

Yes! It's the only kind of game where an LLM would be a good addition.