rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Especially while it's at 75% off in the sale, making it 62p:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/406150/Refunct/

For anyone who might want to sample some easy platforming with a very very low entry threshold.

Chill and rather lovely environment (okay, probably depends on you liking brutalist architecture, but still -- there's a day-night cycle! there's sunshine! the water is gorgeous! the music is gentle!) with no time pressure and no penalties for failing a jump hundreds of times (except that, at worst, you fall in the water and have to swim about and haul yourself out again).

N.B. Most reviews describe this as a half-hour game, and there are achievements for speedrunning it in under 8 minutes or under 4 minutes.

It took me over five hours of playtime to beat it, which should be indicative of the co-ordination and skill levels I'm working with here. And yet it did not at any point feel stressful or humiliating for me. It felt like a pleasant, relaxing environment in which to fail repeatedly and experiment.

It started at a level low enough that I could manage it, and then had a really satisfying difficulty curve. If I was stalling on the next objective, I could still run and parkour round the environment purely for fun (and sometimes ended up working out how to pick off the optional achievements in the process).

Towards the very end, I started to think that the last jumps might just flat-out exceed the limits of what I am currently capable of, and it felt like if that did happen, I would still be able to walk away pretty happily having already got way more than 62p's worth of enjoyment out of it.

Will absolutely be playing it again.
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
A whole world of games not playable on Mac has opened up to me, and it's Steam summer sale time!

Please rec me your favourite games, bearing in mind that I have very limited reflexes/co-ordination.

(I'm not completely ruling out games involving them, but the threshold for entry has to be very very low. I am currently enjoying Refunct because it allows me to try some simple platforming in a very chill and pleasant environment with no time pressure and no penalties for taking several hundred tries to get a jump.)

feelings are weird

Jul. 3rd, 2025 10:40 pm
mellowtigger: (Default)
[personal profile] mellowtigger

I logged in on my work computer this afternoon long enough to apply for a promotion at my current job, becoming more of a Lead support technician. I was on the proverbial fence for several days. The money would be a few thousand more per year than I make now. Money never hurts, but it's not enough to make a huge difference. Money seems so meaningless these days, and it doesn't go far. I'm not motivated by money anyway, or prestige.

What finally tipped my decision in favor was more consideration of what my supervisor said during our biweekly 1-on-1 meetings this week. They're considering the possibility of creating an A.I. subject expert on our team to coordinate answers we give from across departments to our users. They were curious if I'd be interested, "even though that role usually goes to leads". Subtle. Very subtle. Yes, of course, I'm interested in that. LOL.

I applied to the job. I don't have strong feelings about it, though, which seems weird. I've applied to other jobs in the past that I wanted very much more than this one.

I'm also experiencing an odd emotional state about tomorrow's holiday in the USA. It's not the feelings I usually associate with the day.

rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
* SAVE OFTEN, especially in the early game when you may be very fragile and the game's auto-save is infrequent.

BUT -- don't reload from a save unless you actually die or otherwise hit a "game over."

This game is about failing, and it rewards you for playing forwards through failure. Some of the best moments in the game come from failed checks. There are always alternative routes and ways forwards. If you tried to savescum it, you would miss most of the game and all of the point. Embrace failure.

Okay there are those two specific checks where failing is so emotionally devastating I would not judge anyone for savescumming. But apart from those.

* You can just pick one of the Archetypes for a starter build, and leave messing around with custom character creation until you've seen the stats in action and understand how the system works. Don't stress about it. Or, if you want, you can throw yourself into custom character creation despite not having a clue how it works, and you will also have a fun time. Your initial build and your later choices about what you put points into will radically change your experience of the game, but you can't do it "wrong"; there are no optimal builds which are "better".

* Press tab to highlight objects you can interact with, or activate "detective mode" in the settings to do it automatically. Yes I know this is the sort of thing that is probably obvious to people who have played video games before.

* If your Health or Morale (displayed on the lower left of the screen) fall to zero, you have about 5 seconds to apply a healing item (if you have one) by clicking the cross above that stat.

This is the one timed element in the game, and also the one mechanic that some of us initially have trouble grasping.

With all the other mechanics in the game, you can not only learn them by flinging yourself in and floundering about, this is IMHO the best and most enjoyable way to learn them. No idea what the Thought Cabinet is or what Internalizing A Thought means? Try it and find out!

* Perhaps the most important tip of all:

If you feel you are flailing around and failing on most of the checks you try and you've just been informed you have acquired a Thought you can internalize in your Thought Cabinet and you have no clue what that means or maybe you just had a heart attack and died before you even got out of your hotel room or you had a nervous breakdown because a child insulted you and you have no idea what you're doing and it's been three days and you still haven't got the body down from the tree --

THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME "BADLY". THIS IS IN FACT THE UNIVERSAL DISCO ELYSIUM EXPERIENCE AND MEANS YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME CORRECTLY. WELL DONE.

PSA

Jun. 29th, 2025 01:54 pm
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Disco Elysium is currently 90% off in the Steam summer sale, making it a mere £3.49.

Play Disco Elysium, everybody. Yes, even if you don't play video games.

(It was the first video game I ever played -- apart from having once(?) played Pac Man as a child, many many decades ago -- and it was a perfect choice.)

If you understand the principle of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, have a vague sense that "stats" and "levelling up" are things, and can grasp "click to go to a place/interact with an object," you are sufficiently equipped.

ETA: Okay, I will add in [personal profile] astrogirl's excellent content warning:

It's definitely not for everybody. I mean, for one thing, it gets pretty much all the trigger warnings for everything. Alcoholism and substance abuse, suicidal thoughts, discussions of sexual assault, gore (not visual, but some of the descriptions are very vivid), you name it. A number of characters are giant racists. (Towards fictional races/ethnicities, mind you, but it's still ugly.) Evil children will hurl homophobic slurs at you. That sort of thing. And whatever your politics, the game will try very hard to make you feel uncomfortable about them.

just how tired?

Jun. 29th, 2025 06:40 am
mellowtigger: (sleepy)
[personal profile] mellowtigger

Ever since starting this job, I've commented about how exhausting it is. It's hard to quantify it. Just how tiring is it? Yesterday was unusually busy for a Saturday. No common thread to the issues, just an unusual amount of everything. I avoided yard work afterward (as usual) and just watched television until bedtime instead.

Last night, there was a Minneapolis tornado warning. I didn't know until I woke up this morning and saw the news headlines. I saw on Reddit how people reacted to the phone alert, some local electrical outages, the thunder-rattled windows, some video of the lightning (even this plane), and especially this commemorative t-shirt ("I survived the 1am tornado scare").

I slept through it. I didn't hear the tornado sirens blare. I didn't hear the phone alarm beeps. I didn't hear the thunder. I just slept through it all. That's how brain-tired I was.

rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/06/25/trans-westminster-lobby-ehrc/

The organizers are estimating circa 900 people showed up, putting it on a par with the biggest LGBTQ+ lobbies ever (against Section 28).

Outstanding work from the Trans+ Solidarity Alliance, who also organized the legal briefing for MPs in May:

https://www.attitude.co.uk/news/trans-legal-experts-warn-supreme-court-ruling-could-be-breaching-human-rights-in-parliamentary-briefing-483801/

You can support them and get the "Maybe I'm trans?" badges or just support them without badges:

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/maybe-im-trans
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/solidarity-projects-campaigns-fund
mellowtigger: (Default)
[personal profile] mellowtigger

A serious problem that I saw in Trump's first term was the significant delay (even when he was no longer President) in filing prosecution for illegal acts seen committed over the 4 previous years. Delay almost 4 more years while Biden was President, then finally send things to court shortly before the next election. What? Why wait? Even the Mueller report about Trump obstruction of justice during the first presidency was basically just a document saying, "Somebody should do something about this, but it won't be me."

Trial is supposed to be speedy, which means two things need to happen.

Click to read my thoughts and the example of my kin...

1) Charges must be filed, and 2) Defense must be given opportunity to collect their own evidence. Delays in either process can harm the potential for actual justice to happen. With each delay, evidence is lost to simple entropy or willful destruction, and witnesses forget details... or worse, construct inaccurate history. For #1, we have the statute of limitations. I don't always agree with the numbers, but at least they are clear and impartial. For #2, however, things are murky, and I desire clarity.

I think about it now because of this particular case:

  • A relative of mine is held in county jail, accused of murdering another relative of mine. (search jail records with Booking # "57369-2024" here, and news story here).
  • The deceased was killed on 2023 December 27.
  • Jail records show the defendant was booked on 2024 Feb 06.
  • It is now almost 1.5 years later, but the defendant is still in county jail.

I wonder, because my own short 1.5 days in county jail brought me zero knowledge of how I was even supposed to contact a lawyer while I was there, and my cat needed water and food back home. What is the justification for delay of trial? Not justification in the sense of reasonable explanation of logistics, I mean justification as in ethical cause for incarcerating an innocent-until-proven-guilty citizen? Even for murder, even for murder of my own distant kin, I tend to think that the government should just drop charges if they cannot make their case within a year. Yes, a whole lot of criminals would go free and crimes go unpunished. On the whole, though, isn't that better than some innocent people losing portions of their short lifespans to government process? There are innocent-until-proven-guilty people awaiting trial from jail because they cannot afford bond, and some people eventually are judged innocent of the accusation against them. In addition (unrelated to pre-trial in discussion here) some people were wrongfully convicted and sitting in prison, and they number more than a few. All of them are held behind bars, and we should have a good reason for it. That's a product of our authority, government acting on our behalf.

I've tried to read about it. This legal case, for example, is eye-opening. That murder case took 7 years to bring to trial. I understand that the Sixth Amendment grants right to speedy trial in federal cases, and I understand that the Fourteenth Amendment extends that right to state prosecutions as part of "due process". That Sixth Amendment, though, is short. What does "speedy" mean in practice?

The devil is in the details, as they say. I don't know how I would write the code that determines justice in the courts. Do you have any thoughts?

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