78 karma · joined September 28, 2023
Metal Gear Solid 2 was especially prescient, it's even more relevant today than it was at the time. It seemed like crazy babble at the time but now it's just like, "wow, ok, this all came true wtf".
Kids like to play good games too.
Souls games have the community agreed level cap of ~125 for PvP matchmaking, so minmaxing makes sense here - but there barely ever any RNG involved in making a Dark Souls build and you just level up and beeline for the things you want while playing the game "normally" (beating levels and bosses, sunbro'ing to get additional XP along the way, etc..). That said, there's an argument to be made that when ignoring the multiplayer aspect that getting to level 300+ to beat NG+7 is way more fun than minmaxing a 125 build and trying to beat NG+7 that way (my preference, of course).
If there was additional RNG involved with weapon stats or anything like the EV/IV system in a souls game I would never play it, for sure. It's simplicity is what makes it amazing. It's why I hate the bloodgem and chalice dungeons in bloodborne, despite it otherwise being my favorite souls game.
RTS and Tower Defense games I'll give you, since the meta strategy is efficient resource management and maximizing damage to obliterate your opponents with as little resources used as quickly as possible.
The elipsis ... especially rubs me the wrong way because multiple periods either .. or ... denotes range types, but now we have a special case where ... is something completely different. Bah humbug.
They seem nice in clean blog scenarios with trivial examples, but in my experience they are not conducive to writing readable and maintable code.
Thankfully I can just disable their use in my projects (for the most part) with rubocop. All the hip young kids can write their magic code, I'll stick to more straightforward constructs that anyone can figure out.
7 minutes of Pharo Smalltalk for Rubyists
Turns out after you spend a decade solving problems and creating/maintaining products that “coding” is probably the least difficult part.
These days I’m relieved when a task involves just some rote coding rather than racking my brain stuck in a debugging breakpoint for 3 hours to change 5 lines of code to get it to work correctly.
FTFY
After that was when I ended up cold turkey because I lost my doctor and psychiatrists during a big move and couldn't get a refill at any clinic in the new town.
It ended up working out, but it took about a year of absolute torture and probably about another year of just "weirdness". But these days I'm "normal" and off the drugs and never been happier.
Going cold turkey was absolute hell, but it worked out well for me because of my excellent support system.
Would not recommend at all for anyone else though, absolutely not: tapering with a doctor is 100% the best course of action.
After 10 years on them, the next 6 months were absolute hell (i legit thought at one point I might go full Joaquin Phoenix in Joker) but I made it through, no small part thanks to my wonderful amazing wife.
Rebound depression have been an issue - though in general I feel like I am much better off without the antidepressants now than with them - and I've also noticed that pulling an all nighter would actually fix the rebounds for a bit. A small dose of melatonin before bed worked wonders for me now. I sleep better and the rebounds are extremely rare.