16
eliND: scary movies (lemmy.world)

Probably a neurodivergent thing to some degree, but I don't know how literal people are being when they talk about being scared during/after watching a movie about scary things.

I can totally get picking up second-hand anxiety from on-screen portrayals, similar to picking up second-hand embarrassment or cringe.

But to my mind that's very different emotion from fear, and I don't quite grasp being afraid of something you understand is fictional, or what precisely persists after the movie is done.

I mean sure, jumpscares can be startling in the moment, but I don't get walking around with elevated threat-perception outside of the very narrow context of suspending disbelief, which is what people seem to describe. Threat of what?

Do people actually worry that the axe murderer is going to walk out of the TV and kill them in their beds? Is it just hyperbole when they talk about being afraid during, or especially afterwards? What do people actually experience?

Yes it's a stupid question, but I'm wired up funny and have no ground truth here.

For bonus points, I don't get sad at sad movies either: oh no, they stopped drawing the deer. But what really fucks me up is sudden vindication, and I don't know what to call that emotion.

As an accessible example: Inside Out. I didn't blink at Bing Bong dying, but when Joy finally realised what Sadness was for, and that she wasn't just a useless burden... I have very few defenses against whatever the hell that emotion is. What is it, exactly?

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 152 points 3 weeks ago

Because the conditions required for fascism to take root have been incubating for decades.

Massive wealth inequality, insecure employment, non-existent labor laws and worker's rights, hollowed-out education, healthcare and social services, large corporations getting to write their own laws verbatim, political parties sucking dick for their donors, endless war ensuring unlimited money for the military-industrial complex, demonization of brown-people-of-the-week, fetishization of 'the troops' and ongoing acceptance of brutality.

People are poor, desperate, ignorant, exploited and forgotten, they're shown every day that killing the shit out of outsiders is the solution to all the country's problems, anyone pushing actual progressive ideals is shut down and demonized as a threat to the profits of the 0.1%, giving people a choice between rightwing bastardry and neoliberal bastardry as their only lens through which to see the world.

Give that the opportunity to flare up and of course it's fucking going to. The republicans want it, the dems do nothing to prevent it.

It's like watching a party get the wrong kind of rowdy all night, you keep supplying drinks regardless, then you wonder why it turns into a fight, oh no how could this ever happen?

136

I've been playing the things since Diablo I; I love the concept and the gameplay loop, but the game-design issues they run up against, and the mechanics that get implemented to address them... irritate the crap out of me over time, and I want to talk about that.

I think the paradox at the core of it all is that the gameplay loop is basically Stardew Valley in Doom clothing.

It's not a hunting game, it's a gathering game. Walk through this area, and harvest all the objects. Explore every part of the map, rip up all the weeds, look for hidden goodies under every fallen log.

The satisfaction you feel ripping through a wave of mobs isn't the satisfaction from triumphantly pounding your enemy's skull into a pile of bloody ashes and limping away, it's the satisfaction you get from ripping off a really big crackly sheet of tree bark in one go. You could probably reskin the whole thing into an apartment-cleaning game and it would still work.

And that would be fine in and of itself, but it probably wouldn't sell many copies - so they dress it up as Epic Monster Combat, and that's where the problems begin - layers and layers of obfuscation to hide the seams.

In order not to feel tedious and grindy, there needs to be a sense of progression; your standard power-fantasy stuff, where the challenges increase, you improve to meet them, rinse and repeat. In practice this equates to a varying number of clicks-per-mob. You start out needing three clicks to defeat a mob, over time you get better gear and go down to two clicks, level up and drop to one click, and woah I'm so powerful. But oh no! A new area with bigger scarier mobs! They take three clicks, even with my new powers!

But of course you'd see through that straight away, so they put numbers on everything. You see bigger and bigger damage numbers as you level up, so it keeps feeling more impressive. For a while, at least.

But that only lasts so long before you start to feel played for a chump, so slap on more and more layers to hide the lines, and make little mini-metagames around navigating them. Trouble is, those minigames really aren't very fun.

Scattering a dozen different stats and resistances across half a dozen gear slots is just a box-packing game. You want to get the best possible numbers for each attribute, but they're clustered randomly across all the different items, so you need to evaluate a butt-ton of different combinations in order to get the best coverage. I'm guessing that's going to have some kind of shitty NP-hard algorithmic complexity, so you're basically doing the travelling salesman problem in your head. Wheee. (ok but seriously this has to map to a named problem that someone's analyzed already... any ideas?)

And hey look, there's the insanely complicated perk tree of PoE, or the similarly confusing devotions from Grim Dawn. Again it looks like they're confusing complexity with richness, and making optimization too confusing to do without third-party tools or even less fun, following a published build. (for god's sake, if we're going down that route, let us plug the final build in at the start, then auto-level towards it)

Item sets! Because there's nothing like grinding for weeks until your corneas dry out, filling up endless stash tabs with partial sets that you'll level out of before you ever complete; it's so much fun. Crafting recipes, same deal, and even worse, meta builds that rely on unique items that are impossible to reliably SSF, so you spend your whole game grinding for trade.

And on and on, there's so many symptomatic patches to delay the eventual ennui, but no fixes to the fundamental design issue that causes it. You can't just take them away and replace them with nothing, or you'd be bored in minutes. But building up to completely jaded after a couple of weeks once you start playing the engine rather than the game is also pretty crappy.

How do you make the fighting feel like fighting instead of watering cauliflowers, or else how do you make crop-harvesting feel badass? How do you create a sense of progression beyond mere stat inflation? How do you do a rich slew of possibilities without creating spaghetti hell that ends up only having six basic metas at the end of it? How for the love of god do you make combat feel intense without blanketing the entire screen in particle effects? Could someone design a system where every build can be effective if you adapt your playstyle to suit?

I dunno, It just feels like the genre is still only half-invented, and waiting around for someone to do it properly.

Thoughts?

203

So, fungal spores are literally everywhere, and the requirements for fungus to thrive seem to be trivially low; give it a moderately humid environment and it'll grow on a bare concrete wall ffs eating god only knows what; the dust from the air maybe?

Well, and the great outdoors is full of slightly damp places, many of them downright soggy most of the time - and absolutely rife with organic material to snack on.

Where's the bottleneck? Why isn't the world a choking fungal hellscape?

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 216 points 3 months ago

Cut bits of a girl baby's genitals: jail.

Cut bits off a boy baby's genitals: An occasion for a fucking party.

83

Actually this would be a neat mechanic in-game: everyone around you nopes the fuck out at the sight of you, especially if you killed them previously.

They don't know and they don't understand, but things are very firmly Not Ok.

Partly the cost of failure, possibly a strategic tool.

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 158 points 3 months ago

Sex work is work.

The people that do it deserve respect, and all the social and legal protections that attach to any other kind of work.

Your own preferred attitude to sex isn't the point.

34

So, uh, stupid question, but I'm not from the US.

Do Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and Michael Scott (Steve Carell) share a specific accent? If so, what is it?

They both get that same distinctive tone in their voice when excited; is that a thing from somewhere, or do they just kind of sound alike as humans?

245

City boy checking in.

So, this one time out on a hike in a semi-rural area, the trail opened out on a grassy riverbank kind of place, and there were a dozen or so cows between me and the path onwards.

Now, I mostly grasp which end of a cow the grass goes in, but that's about my limit; I have no real idea how they operate IRL.

I ended up carefully edging my way past them and gave them as much space as I possibly could, and got extremely stared at by all of them, who probably thought I was nuts.

Just out of curiosity - how careful did I need to be? Can you just like walk through the middle of them, or would that be asking for trouble?

69

As I understand it there's two main kinds of empathy: cognitive and affective.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand the emotional states of others, and affective empathy is actually sharing those emotions yourself.

I do the former, but the latter doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Like, if I see someone being sad, it's possible that I'll be sad or angry that they're in that situation, but those will be my feelings about what's going on, not theirs.

But for those of you who inherently feel-what-you-see, how does this work with, say, anger?

If you see someone being terribly angry, do you feel angry yourself? If so, who do you feel angry at? If you see a fight going on, do you hate both participants?

If someone is angry at you, are you also angry at you?

I guess this applies to any targeted emotion, but anger is a good example.

-53
61

Yes it's old, I know.

In this opening theme, that deeply unsettling fuzzy vibrato tone.

I'm sure it's copying some kind of hospital sound effect, like an old-tech intercom tone or a warning buzzer, but I just cannot fucking place it. I know I know this sound.

It's driving me nuts. Can someone please tell me what it is? Bonus points if you can link to a recording.

26

while picking up some paperwork. AAARGH.

164

M49, I tend to go a bit long between haircuts which is on me, but I seem to have a really hard time explaining that I want short hair, like 20mm / 3/4"

I usually ask for a #2 clipper on the back and sides, (which works fine), then take as much as they off the top so I can still brush it straight up, preferably too short to grab onto.

Basically a cigar butt with eyes, shut up it works for me.

Even indicating with thumb and finger, this somehow gets interpreted as just barely trimming the tips off and painstakingly shaping the surface, barely affecting the overall quantity of hair.

How's that for length?

What no, get in there with fire and the sword, wreak devastation, I want all of this gone.

:carefully trims another quarter inch off:

It's not just one guy, not just one place, so I am obviously using wrong and misleading words.

How do I ask for the thing I want?

62

That is to say, could they get enough forward thrust to push themselves along, without taking off? Maybe with like a little perch to hang onto...

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 197 points 8 months ago

Female as an adjective is perfectly fine.

A female patient, a female politician, a female customer, etc. That's the best way to refer to those.

What's bad is using 'female' as a noun: "A female. "

In general, you just don't use adjectives-as-nouns to refer to people. You don't call someone "a gay", "a black", or "a Chinese". That is offensive, and "a female" has the same kind of feel.

(there are exceptions to the above: you can call someone 'an American' or 'A German", but not "A French". I don't understand why - if you can't feel your way, best just avoid it)

Now, you could get around it by calling someone "a female person" - except that we already have a word for "female person", and that's "woman". And to go out of your way to avoid saying "woman" makes you sound like some kind of incel weirdo, and you don't want that.

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 111 points 10 months ago

All your basic staples: salt, flour, oil, sugar, pasta, pasta, milk, eggs etc. There's literally nothing to do better or worse, so for god's sake don't pay for the label. Fancy olive oil is nicer, and fancy butter for actually putting on bread is nice too - but for cooking, cheap the hell out.

Get your spices from an Indian / Asian / etc grocer - you can get a huge bag for the price of a tiny supermarket jar, and because they have so much turnover, they'll be plenty fresh.

Store-brand laundry detergent and dishwasher tablets work just fine for me (and dear god you can save a lot on those).

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 133 points 10 months ago

third party cookies != cookies

Unless they've invented a stateful http, cookies aren't going anywhere.

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 130 points 10 months ago

The disclosure isn't complete, it's only the people who haven't been excluded in previous orders.

As all the perpetrators are rich and can afford fancy lawyers, that mainly just leaves the victims.

So yeah, the victims are the ones that will get fucked over. Again.

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 226 points 11 months ago

This never was about Hamas, and never was about the hostages.

It's about exterminating Palestinians and destroying their infrastructure, while ensuring that enough of the survivors are radicalised enough to keep the military funding going.

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 153 points 1 year ago

I mean, it won't let me. Windows Update inists my PC doesn't meet the minimum spec, and I'm not inclined to argue with it.

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 111 points 1 year ago

Israel has been a huge crybully virtually since it was founded. It's been annexing Palestinian land from the beginning, running a shitty apartheid state, committing ongoing slow genocide on the Palestinian people, then crying the innocent victim whenever they hit back - and guzzling unlimited billions in US military aid to do so.

Hurt people hurt people, and oppression breeds radicalism. Hamas are not nice people, but they're from a place where nice people don't live long enough to matter. As with any abusive relationship, there's going to be toxic coping mechanisms as a result, and it's important to acknowledge that it's not okay to do those things.

But Israel (the country, not the people) sure as hell rakes in a lot of money and influence from being constantly under threat from the mean nasty baddies that they just have to keep oppressing and killing and oh look more money.

Hamas is awful. But still and all, fuck Israel.

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 145 points 1 year ago

It's whinge, pronounced winj.

UK / Australian English thing. It has a slightly different connotation.

Whine is what a dog does when it wants to go out.

Whinge is what a 14yo does when they don't get their way. It's salty whining.

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 150 points 1 year ago

Your body is constantly generating heat. If that heat has nowhere to go, your temperature goes up and up.

You need to be in an environment that sucks heat away as fast as you create it - and if the external air temp isn't cold enough to do that on its own, then you have to rely on evaporation of sweat to help shed the heat.

If that doesn't cut it, you die.

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TheBananaKing

joined 1 year ago