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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • That is generally the impetus behind religious institutions disdain for it. Their best chance to increase their numbers is through indoctrination of the children of their current members. Conversions rarely occur, despite how much they are talked up when they do.

    They are, of course, wrong to think that. Toys, in practice, generally increase intimacy and likelihood of a couple having children. But not as much as being raised your entire life being told that it is the entire purpose of life and if you don’t have as many kids as you theoretically could, you have done yourself a disservice. So as long as they conflate the results, they will keep assuming they are correct in doing both.




  • Hehe yeah, I was always put off on souls games because people described them as being hard, then when there wasn’t alot of choice early on in VR games, I picked up a souls-like since it was the closest I could get to a long-form rpg at the time. And it wasn’t that hard at all, but people were still complaining about how hard it was all the time… so I tried other souls games on desktop, and they were fine too. So I picked up the actual dark souls… this is what people were complaining about? It’s like, not even megaman difficulty?

    That was when I learned that it’s a good thing there wasn’t much internet yet back when I was playing megaman games, or I might have never tried them either. And also it turns out I like “hard” games, to me that is like the whole point of games. If you finish something first try, then you didn’t get better at anything.






  • Origin stories tend to resonate with people, it’s basically “how did this person go from being a normal everyday nobody, to one of the most powerful people in the universe” and, if done right, you can empathize with their journey.

    Some origin movies maybe suck at that, but that is them squandering an opportunity, you get alot of potential baked-in just from the concept alone.

    The Matrix was maybe one of the most successful uses of an origin arc, but most origin movies have a similar free boost, whether the rest of the movie supports and earns that boost is up to them. But many still do.


  • I liked reloaded and revolutions even on first viewing, but I didn’t need them to feel the same way the first matrix movie felt in order to consider them good. Like, The Matrix stood out from pretty much every other movie I had seen before. You don’t get that a second time right away, especially from another movie of the same type about the same thing. They continued and closed the story very well, but none of them were an origin story, and origin stories are pretty much always more awesome than the other movies in the same series, no matter what order they are made in.

    The Matrix was unfollowable, and they managed to follow it ok. They were always gonna be worse in comparison, but they aren’t actually bad.

    I haven’t seen Resurrections, not for any particular reason, just keep forgetting anytime I do manage to remember it, before I remember it long enough to see it.



  • My solution is that my screen is 20 feet away and battery powered, and I keep the batteries on a separate floor, so every 2 hours, I have to get up and do the stairs at the very minimum. But I also tend to walk around or do my life while using the screen, since it also floats around and follows me wherever I go. And when not using a floating screen, I just visit other random worlds that tend to involve alot of exercise, like people trying to murder me but I have swords, or magic, or guns… or maybe a world where the objective is dancing… but usually the murder worlds.

    Been doing VR for 10 years now, only the most recent headset (Quest 3) has been a full-day headset, before that, most headsets were 6-10 hours at most even fully modded. Looking forward to future headsets too, now that they don’t have to come from meta anymore to be good. It’s crazy how much firing most of their workforce and replacing them with AI has tanked their software and firmware dev. They used to have it all(enough that it was worth buying their stuff despite meaning you have to buy ‘their’ stuff), but then they threw away what they had, first the software and firmware, and then at a critical point of time they decided to throw away hardware too.

    Looking forward mostly to Steam Frame at the moment. And of course with my lifestyle, the number 1 expansion port upgrade I’ll be getting is high-res color passthrough. Glad I get to pick it rather than having to use whatever is good enough/cheap enough for everyone. I would easily sink 200$ into that feature alone if someone makes one worth it. Rather than whatever 20 dollar ‘pretty good’ option would have made sense to include en masse by default.






  • Ok, so it’d be like if a wikipedia page about jesus said he was “our lord and saviour” instead of saying “some people consider him to be their lord and saviour”. A page for “Lord and saviour” as a phrase might still list jesus as one possible link.

    Basically taking a first person position on it, instead of a third person position. Like grokipedia is writing from first person perspective that Hitler is the fuhrer, which when you consider that it is a significant departure from the wikipedia article, as only 0.01% of the content of grokipedia is, suggests it’s a hand crafted article written by someone that would refer to hitler personally as the leader, and not as someone some people used to call “the leader”.

    There is a reason it was edited immediately as soon as people noticed, due to how bad it looked once pointed out.



  • To be fair, the wikipedia article says he was called that by the people that followed him. It never calls him that itself.

    The grokipedia article, just calls him that.

    A subtle, but very important, distinction.

    Not to mention the other important part where grok buries any mention of the holocaust 13000 words in, where as it’s in the intro on wikipedia.

    Keep in mind, by default, grokipedia started with a copy of what wikipedia said, so any changes are what was hand-edited on purpose.

    The changes speak to what they wanted it to say and do differently.