she/they/it // powerlifting the pain away
One I haven’t seen in this thread yet: the last playable bit of Bastion, if you choose to take Zulf with you. An early example of Supergiant’s mastery of interactive storytelling, coming to a head with a recognition of humanity in the midst of apocalyptic war.
I won’t overhype it, as others are saying it changes up a lot and there’s a particular section near the end that a few people I know bounced off of. It will be a very different experience, built on the same bones, but trying to accomplish something different.
But holy shit, to me it’s an improvement on an already phenomenal game, and builds on its narrative and mechanics in ways I thought were really clever. It feels like the other side of the coin from the main game and bolsters its themes from another perspective. Can’t recommend it enough.
I gotta get around to the other games in the series sometime, To The Moon was incredible. It’s been so long and I don’t remember many specifics, but I do recall it being one of a few games that encouraged me to come to terms with mortality.
Same on both counts. TWD season 1 is absolutely masterful and got me to care for its cast incredibly quickly.
I genuinely can’t believe the renegade interrupt that can happen during that scene in ME3 is in the game. I haven’t gotten spoiler tags to work consistently across Lemmy so I won’t say it but you know the one. One of those times where being given a choice to kneecap an incredible story moment felt really weird. Maybe other players didn’t connect with him as much / had more desire to continue the genophage?
Outer Wilds got me too, for sure, and stayed in my thoughts long after I finished. The music from the slideshow at the end of the DLC still makes me well up a bit. Such an incredible game. I still think of “the universe is and we are” from one of Solanum’s logs all the time.
I was raised around a lot of “patriotism” (closet nationalism) and have had to adapt the feeling now that I understand better what America actually is and has been. I found that trying to abandon the feeling altogether was making me feel cynical and alone. The parts of America that I love in fact tend to exist despite our government and dominant culture, which steals and appropriates the things I love about us and turns them into the things people know about us and dislike for good reason. I love the source materials, not the end result. As a white person born into privilege on stolen land, my existence is not entirely apart from this, but all’s I can do with that is try to make something better of it.
There’s a salt-of-the-earth working-class segment of this country that’s getting screwed over, knows how and why they and others are getting screwed over, and has learned to survive together in spite of it. People that make families out of communities. Rail hoppers, union organizers, queer punks, the list goes on. That spirit is not unique to this country but there do exist uniquely American forms of it. I’m more proud of these people than words can express, and that’s about as close to patriotic as I can feel these days.
Maybe I just like seeing our shitty protestant labor worship turned to something more productive. Maybe I just spent too much time in the mountains to not fall in love with the land itself. Or maybe I just love banjos.
I’m definitely with you in that diet culture does much more harm than good and the weight loss industry overcomplicates it in favor of wacky diets and subscriptions and such.
That being said, just because grifters overcomplicate something, doesn’t mean it’s actually not complicated - especially psychologically, which matters a lot when eating disorders, sensitivities, and difficulties acquiring and preparing quality food, all are in the mix. The psychological aspects are what “weight loss solutions” try to sidestep and I think it really sets people up for failure even if they see some short term loss early on.
Knowing about energy balance could be enough for some, but it’s also definitely reasonable for someone to have further challenges and seek outside help for it. A good nutritionist, trainer, or even therapist can be invaluable for someone struggling to lose weight and keep it off.
imo nobody who is struggling to lose weight needs to be told about energy balance. Everyone knows what a calorie is, and that there’s a daily amount at which they will either lose or gain weight. They probably know they’re above that amount, and need to bring it down to lose weight.
Unfortunately either a lot of good advice or a lot of bad advice can follow that. Nutrition and the psychological factors that influence people’s diets are more complicated and no answer is complete without getting into that too.
the best way to make it stick is to take it slowly. Become more aware of the food choices you make - a food log is helpful here - without necessarily looking to correct them first. Just note the times when you think about food, the times you’re able to eat healthy and smaller portions and the times when it’s harder. Then try and inject some alternatives, make healthier options available for yourself at home, and gradually move your food decisions toward more nutritious food and smaller portions of comfort food.
Even then, thinking in nutrition has moved on from eliminating “bad foods” to eating “good foods” first, and finding a level of moderation with less nutritious food that fits with your goals.
“Stop eating” diets and “fast weight loss” as a primary goal are very good ways to sabotage yourself in the long term. The psychological costs of very restrictive diets are real and lead to losing adherence down the road. Maybe it works for some but the more gradual choice-focused approach worked a lot better for me. Just do what you’re capable of day to day, always trying to push that needle a little further, and you might be surprised at how fast noticeable progress comes!
It’s working out great! I’ve been openly polyamorous for a few years now. Romantically engaging with multiple people has allowed for the longest-running, most secure relationships I’ve ever had, with basically no downsides except the fuCKING work. It complicates the logistics (my shared calendar is a nightmare) as well as the emotions. (recognizing when I am jealous is a nightmare)
But the payoff is so worth it. We make the best use of the time we have together, because we have to. We communicate effectively, because we have to. Through many intersecting relationships with appropriate boundaries we’ve weaved a cohesive family unit, one that achieves a lot of mutual aid needs around housing, food, and mental health support among local queers. I’ve grown a lot as a person through having to communicate my insecurities, sort out my trauma, and think more clearly about the people in my life.
I think some people on the internet have heard of insane polycule drama at some point and declared it categorically unapproachable. But idk, we don’t write off monogamous relationships because a cousin’s friend’s marriage exploded. Polyamorous relationships run the same spectrum of great to dogshit, but with less rules that monogamous relationships demand, we have so much more flexibility to solve problems when they come up.
glad it worked out for y’all! It seems rare for a monogamous relationship to be successfully opened up, rather than it being the expectation from the outset. I can imagine it being a big challenge and test of your compatibility + ability to communicate. Was that your experience?
I crunched like hell in my mid 20s on a live service game that I enjoyed playing, was well loved and consistently played by a few fans, and had a few unique ideas in its niche. I gave up a lot of life for that game to see the light of day, under extremely tight timelines and wavering support from a flakey publisher.
It lasted less than a year in release because of a few mistakes in early access and it inhabited a saturated market that seems near impossible to penetrate now. The console ports that caused the worst months of the crunch never even saw a release.
Me and the rest of the devs would love to just play the game again, but the game’s kinda just rotting somewhere in storage of a publisher that long ago tried to pivot toward NFT/metaverse bullshit, to predictable results. Outside of a few early playtest builds a few people have (and definitely aren’t supposed to) we have basically no way of playing it ourselves, much less letting others play it. We couldn’t even get much approved to show in a portfolio once the studio closed and the assets went to the publisher. It makes me really sad and I’m no longer in game dev / tech at large professionally for that reason. This story is not unique, this is pretty much just how the industry works and devs near-universally feel screwed over by it.
In the age of early access viral hits, optimization is just something no publisher wants to put resources into before they know the game’s a success or not.
True story, a game I worked on at my last job shipped on Xbox One and PS4, the PS4 version was not even built until a month before shipping.
for me I just… couldn’t stand either of the main characters and thought the reviving-their-dead-marriage arc was really trite. I didn’t believe these were people that “should” be together and around the time they dismembered that elephant (???) I was fully checked out.
The game was wonderful when we were actually playing, probably the most fun I’ve had in a coop puzzle game since Portal 2. I really wouldn’t need much in the way of story to convince me to keep playing, but there were so many goddamn cutscenes! I’m glad others enjoyed it more than me, and did enjoy a lot of the gameplay, but the characters really soured me on the game eventually.
I picked up a $10 cane at random last year and it helped me walk enough to realize there was a chronic issue at play. Definitely worth trying if it seems like something that might help, worst case you have a walking stick.
definitely seconding this - I used it the most when I was using Unreal Engine at work and was struggling to use their very incomplete artist/designer-focused documentation. I’d give it a problem I was having, it’d spit out some symbol that seems related, I’d search it in source to find out what it actually does and how to use it. Sometimes I’d get a hilariously convenient hallucinated answer like “oh yeah just call SolveMyProblem()!” but most of the time it’d give me a good place to start looking. it wouldn’t be necessary if UE had proper internal documentation, but I’m sure Epic would just get GPT to write it anyway.
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more complex yes, but more hands in the family unit and structure between the other two can be a really nice perk too. when conflict happens, you have someone else you love who knows your partner and relationship who can bridge the gap and give perspective.
This tracks for how a lot of people use the app, but depending on where you are you can also have some fairly normal (for a dating site) conversations with people as well. I spent a couple months on Grindr despite not being interested in hookups, since it’s a decent way to meet other trans folk in my area. My inbox was mostly dick pics but I also met some amazing people I’m still with several years later!