Satellaview

…which seems like a much better way to generate summaries, honestly. Pull in human-written ones, and expand the simple version as necessary.

And here I thought I was just being weirdly picky about this!

…Well, I mean, it’s still probably weirdly picky, but now I’m part of a tradition of being weirdly picky about it!

The article describes this too: healthy people balk at the high premiums, drop their insurance, the pool of people on insurance becomes proportionally more sick people who can’t risk dropping coverage, the insurance companies realize they’ll have to pay out more per person, premiums go up.

I mean, your job might be screwing you over regardless, but there are other explanations.

Those are, in fact, perfectly sensible guidelines.

Oh, this is a good one.

It lets you view modern life from outside.

Which of the things we do every day are truly necessary? When you remove something or add another, what happens to the greater shape of society? What do our relationships to each other look like without cars, without jobs, without money? What might take their place?

What does it mean to be sentient? What does it mean to be human? What’s the shape of the gap between those two things?

I find it philosophically entertaining.

I’ve never heard that.

Rest for the mind. Anything that lets me not think and just kind of exist.

Long baths with nice-smelling bath bombs, meditation, even just deciding with intention “okay, this evening I’m just going to lay in bed and watch this set of YouTube documentaries that looks interesting, and if I fall asleep for a bit, I’ll just rewind when I wake up.” Put on an album and listen to it start to finish, and either let it wash over you or let yourself get lost in the little details.

I tend to “relax” by starting new projects, so finding ways to actually relax has been hard. If you’re a little bored and understimulated, you’re on the right track.

Good luck. Medical work is really, really hard, and I hope your new job is a hell of a lot better!

Yeahhh… Every once in a while, there’s a solid episode! But pretty often, it feels to me like their big dramatic moment doesn’t actually follow from the rest of the events.

I still enjoy SNW, but I can’t see myself going back to rewatch it, like I’m rewatching DS9 right now.

I’ve never seen The Orville, but I hear a lot of good things about it around here! I just finished Babylon 5 for the first time, and after that, SNW really does feel all the more poorly written.

Yeah, that was… a hell of a choice. I was specifically thinking about the “epigenetics of elemental good and evil” plot point from that very episode as I wrote it.

Yeah. Honestly, it’s kinda funny—their sci-fi has a shaky grasp of science, their drama is tedious and annoying, the basic storytelling fundamentals are purely vibes-based and miss actually connecting setups to payoffs half the time… but every romantic episode has been at least okay, imo.

Unfortunately, that’s turned every character into this. Sigh…

Maybe this creative team would be better for The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

Even a bad episode of Mandalorian is still, like, perfectly fine. I’d just watch until you’re no longer enjoying it, or you finish it—whichever comes first.

See, my contemporary high-school complaint was “if the weight constraints are really so precise, then a successful liftoff would have already burned too much fuel because there’s too much weight, and this ship is doomed no matter what.”

To be fair, I learned a lot from that story. Just not quite what the teacher intended.

goals tbh

When maxing out the damage stat just makes your game trivially easy.

Stat systems are hard and prone to optimization problems. But c’mon, you at least gotta test the glass cannon build that you know everyone’s gonna try first.

Oh, there is DEFINITELY a point where too much cheese becomes a mistake. Somewhere around 400%, I think. I felt sick for days…

U

I mean, when I was reading the books as they came out, I expected “oh yeah obviously he’s gonna overturn the corrupt order and we’re gonna pay off on this whole elf slavery plot, which surely is written comedically just because an unflinching representation would be far too dark for a kids series.” That’s how stories like this usually end, after all.

And then, uh, it didn’t do any of that.

So I think it’s something like “it’s fairly generic, the other stories in this genre skew left, and nobody expected it to have a weird aggressively-centrist swerve a decade later.”

This happened to a close friend of mine. He was already on the edge, with some weird opinions and beliefs… but he was talking with real people who could push back.

When he switched to spending basically every waking moment with an AI that could reinforce and iterate on his bizarre beliefs 24/7, he went completely off the deep end, fast and hard. We even had him briefly hospitalized and they shrugged, basically saying “nothing chemically wrong here, dude’s just weird.”

He and his chatbot are building a whole parallel universe, and we can’t get reality inside it.

…you probably don’t do anything that complicated in your life where this would give you genuine value.

God that’s arrogant.