Do you have a reference to an official Lego City set with semi-autos? I find that hard to believe.
311 karma · joined March 20, 2017
A more recent example for me was when I played and finished Dark Souls 3 and then Bloodborne.
I had been reading the discussions on a fixed vs growth mindset, and grit, but it hadn't really clicked for me. I realized that my default state was a fixed mindset. I remember my mother praising me for always being better and smarter than other kids, not based on any real results or me having spent a lot of effort doing something, so I just assumed it was something built into me. In school, I had an easy time with some subjects, but a harder time with others. This didn't encourage me to work more on the hard ones, but avoid them. I valued people that displayed seemingly effortless genius rather than people who worked hard, because I thought the hard workers were stupid or less skilled and just had to make up for their lack of talent.
I finally had a tough time with math as a master of science student at the university, because I didn't have any study habits and expected math to be effortless like before. When I did pass the exams after multiple attempts, having finally sat down to study, I wasn't proud, I was just relieved and hated the whole experience. I was annoyed that math seemed to be based on making mistakes: You reach a problem you don't immediately know how to solve, you attempt it and fail, and study the rest of the material until you can figure it out. But the whole point is to be challenged! If you could breeze through all math problems without failing, the level of math is too easy for you. But I hated failing or feeling stupid.
Back to Dark Souls 3! The game is very hard, but it's also very fair. When you die it's because you made a mistake, but the game will throw the same thing at you again and now you can avoid it. Enemies are placed behind corners that surprise you the first time, but the second time you know they're there. Bosses telegraph their attacks. The first time you fight them, you're supposed to die and have to fight them again and again, learning their moveset. If you could beat all bosses in a Dark Souls game at the first attempt, same as with math, the game would be too easy. It's supposed to challenge you and, same as math, force you to be precise and focused, forcing you to accept that you will have to adapt your playstyle to the bosses to beat them.
In Dark Souls there's a a feedback loop where you die, but get infinite lives and can retry the same section of a map or a boss over and over. You know that other players can beat the boss, so why shouldn't you? The game definitely taught me grit and perseverance, where I before would quit a difficult game, this time I attempted again and again until I had figured out the map or boss.
A lot of people view playing the souls games as masochism, and I can see that in the same way that I considered studying math to be masochistic. Now I've learned to appreciate the process and take joy in learning to incrementally overcome an obstacle. I'm no longer afraid of not knowing enough when I start a task at work, but instead know that by just spending time and incrementally attacking a problem I will be able to figure it out. Dark Souls and Bloodborne helped me move from a fixed to a growth mindset, something I try to instill in my kids today.
https://bloodborne.fandom.com/wiki/Notes
That said, some people get creative trying to bend the system into new uses, for example "amazing chest ahead" in front of an NPC rather than a storage location. Or "try tongue, but hole".
The message system also gave rise to a tradition of calling people "skeleton" when encouraging them on Reddit and elsewhere. In Dark Souls 2, a bunch of skeletons were placed in the world by the designers, and players started attaching creative messages to them:
https://66.media.tumblr.com/27bb20783b49cf5e63522c3f51092e4a...
https://i.imgur.com/0ewexGV.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/ZpENzv8.jpg
https://66.media.tumblr.com/01d2e6acf80247332b937db84c45d2fc...
An interesting feature is that you can rate messages, and if your message is rated (good or bad) you get back full health. There are many threads from players that managed to beat a boss because of this, but you can't abuse it because you can't reliable expect it to happen at the right time.
Not all messages from players can be trusted. There are many "illusory wall ahead" messages in front of places that look like they should have a secret door, but don't. Then you'll spend some time hacking at a regular wall. There are also messages that say "try jumping" in front of cliffs where you die if you jump off. This creates an extra level of connection to the players who left the message, because you have to consider if you trust a random person you never met or not, and if they trick you, you get that human element in a situation that was supposed to just be a regular cliff. Someone spent time setting up that joke for you. Sometimes jumping does work, and you hit a hidden platform and find some loot, so you never know.
https://www.cnet.com/news/moirai-expand-hackers-lulz/
It goes into some different details and can be a nice companion article to the one you posted.
Pick a cadence that is fast enough so that you don't forget what you did last time, but is also slow enough so that you have time for other things in your life and have time to look forward to it. It can be every week if that works for everyone, or every other week, or once a month. For us it's every other week.
One feature of having a fixed day is that it's possible for everyone to schedule other stuff around the activity. But the best part is that you don't have to spend a week coordinating peoples' schedules, having to decide if the player that "prefers" Monday gets to decide over the player who "prefers" Tuesday, and so on. At the start of every other week, it's already there in the calendar.
Also, since everyone in the group has jobs and kids now, people will miss sessions now and then. I've decided to play anyway, as long as we're at least two players plus the game master. If we were to wait for everyone to be available, we would always cancel, because someone is almost always away. We just pretend their characters are busy and decide at the start of next session what they did, or they float along as spectres with the group without interacting. If they hold quest items, we just give them to another character for a session, and so on. We make it easy to drop in and out.
I'm a player in another group that insists that everyone is present, and we have six-month gaps between sessions that are supposedly bi-weekly because there are always sick kids or deadlines at work for someone.
The time travel aspect and that you control three characters in the past, present, and future, where things you do in the past affect the future was truly innovative to me. I realize now that it's not as magical design or programming wise as it appears. It's not that hard to have something done in one room affect something in another room in the game, but as a player having to think across time as well as space was really cool.
The article goes on to talk about the time travel, so it's not ignored, but it seems that I found it more innovative than the author.
Walkthroughs in text today are OK because you can read until the first mention of something you haven't done to get unstuck, but nothing beats a real person giving you appropriate hints. Also, there's the Universal Hint System [1] that gives you more and more detailed hints when you're stuck, but I haven't used it in a real situation. I looked up a puzzle now that I was stuck on in Day of the Tentacle, but couldn't find it.
Shigero Miyamoto has talked about this about The Legend of Zelda. They purposely added secret stuff in that game with absolutely no hints, almost impossible to find for a single player, to encourage people to talk about the game in school and elsewhere. You could only find the secrets when discussing the game with others, which was what they intended. Imagine getting a hint at school and having to wait until you can run home and test it; that way you're thinking about the game all day!
I replayed the remastered game a couple of years ago on PS4 with my daughter who was seven years old, and this time the only thing I was stuck on was the cat puzzle with the squeaky mattresses. I read a blog post just now about that puzzle, and it's special because you use the Use verb on two different things outside of your inventory. You usually go inventory->world or inventory->inventory, but here it's world->world. So I had to look up that one solution in the whole game.
Playing as an adult, it's much easier to keep in mind what clues you have and what the open puzzles are. As a kid, I would just start using everything with everything else, and the hints from failed interactions wouldn't clue me in. Now I see they make a really god job at telling you why things don't work and what you should try instead.
I was pleasantly surprised that my daughter thought the game was hilarious. I expected her to get bored quickly, but we played through it all together.
I read a great newspaper article ten or so years ago. The journalist visited a vegan and a person following LCHF (low carb high fat). Both said that their diet made them feel great, made them lose weight, gave them lots of energy, kept them free of illness, and so on.
The journalist noted that they basically split the nutrition circle (I don't know if this is a world-wide thing, but it divides different food sources into pie slices) in half: the vegan eating the grain and vegetable parts and the LCHF person eating the animal parts.
The article basically showed how good the human body is at making up for when you limit an omnivore diet. If you asked any of the two participants, they would say their parts of the nutrition circle were the healthy ones.
You didn't mention this either, but if you want to avoid protein powder, it may be harder to find lean protein sources. I just looked up nuts (peanuts specifically), that have 27% protein but also 51% fat. Chicken breast also has 27% protein, but only 8.7% fat.
I'm not a body builder and haven't investigated how to go about it in detail as a vegan though the full cycle of bulking and shredding, but if you just want to gain strength getting enough calories and protein shouldn't be a problem. I've also read that most body-building magazines completely overestimate how much protein you need, citing numbers four times what sports science says.
You have first-hand experience in this situation and I'm clearly speculating, but perhaps you didn't get enough calories rather than enough protein? Of course it all depends on what you're eating. When some people say vegan food, they mean raw food or mainly vegetables, while others include a lot more legumes, nuts, and seeds.
It's the same for vegans, or perhaps even better, if you see the links below on cow's milk.
Your parent post talks about how you need cow's milk for calcium and meat for iron, but interestingly enough, cow's milk limits iron absorption. If you search for "cow milk iron" you get a large amount of articles stating this.[1]
Note that the example articles I linked talk about infants and toddlers, because in some societies they are most likely to drink milk. I'm Scandinavian, and here people drink milk into adulthood, but I can't quickly find studies on milk and iron for adults.
Also note that the parent's link doesn't mention cow's milk, but instead suggests you should drink it, even though it limits iron absorption, so it all depends on where you look.
There link between the calcium in milk and bone health has also been questioned. We've all learned that you should drink milk for strong bones, which means that Scandinavians shouldn't have any problems with brittle bones of older people, but it's the opposite.[2]
Another interesting factor is that vitamin c (ascorbic acid) helps iron absorption. A vegetarian or vegan will probably eat vegetables high in vitamin c with their iron sources, which helps absorption.
I've read elsewhere that when an omnivore eats heme and non-heme iron, the heme version is preferred by the body because it's easier to absorb. When you go vegetarian or vegan, you have a two-week period or so of lower iron absorption before the gut bacteria changes and improves absorption of non-heme iron, so that there's no longer an issue.
I've also read that vegetarians and vegans often have better iron values that the general omnivore population. As a single test case, my wife is also vegan. When she donates blood they measure her iron level, and it's always perfect. We eat a mix of fresh vegetables, processed soy burgers, things made from pea protein, and so on, anything that's vegan, so it doesn't seem to be a problem.
But the parent talked about "weird supplement focused diets", which may or may not include vegetarians and vegans and could be talking about people who drink a single everything-included meal-replacement drink all the time.
[1] Some examples:
https://www.aafp.org/afp/2002/1001/p1217.html
"In infants, the introduction of cow's milk in the first year of life is the greatest dietary risk factor for the development of iron deficiency and iron deficiency anemia. Cow's milk is low in iron, and its iron is poorly absorbed. In addition, it decreases the absorption of iron from other dietary sources. Therefore, the strict avoidance of cow's milk in the first 12 months of life is essential in preventing iron deficiency anemia."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22043881
"Consumption of cow's milk (CM) by infants and toddlers has adverse effects on their iron stores, a finding that has been well documented in many localities. [...] The high protein intake from CM may also place infants at increased risk of obesity in later childhood. It is thus recommended that unmodified, unfortified CM not be fed to infants and that it be fed to toddlers in modest amounts only."
[2] https://www.webmd.com/osteoporosis/news/20141029/is-milk-you...
"The risk of any bone fracture increased 16 percent in women who drank three or more glasses daily, and the risk of a broken hip increased 60 percent, the findings indicated.
Lots of milk did not appear to either protect against or promote broken bones in men."
I'm only familiar with PS4, but it's much, much quicker than that today.
Battlefield V [1] was released Nov 20 2018 for $60, in Dec 6 it was $36 (60% of original in 16 days), and in Dec 18 it was $30 (50% in 28 days) with PS Plus, which you need anyway to play multiplayer.
God of War [2], to take another example not plagued by BFV's troubled release and also being a single-player game, it took at bit longer to go down. It was released in April 20 2018, was down to $50 (83%) in June 8, $34 (58%) with PS+ in Aug 17, and $22 (37%) in Nov 16.
You really pay a premium to play at launch day or a couple of days early by pre-ordering. If you wait a month you usually have the first discount.
There's a nice community at Reddit called Patient Gamers [3]. You don't have to take vow to never buy new games, but people there usually wait at least six months before buying a game. Three super nice benefits of that:
1. Games are cheaper.
2. The game has been patched to fix bugs or add more content.
3. You can read reviews or check the Metacritic page to see if the game is actually as good as claimed or if it's hype based on the trailer. You can watch some real gameplay not carefully produced by the designers.
Still, a lot of people apparently pre-order games or buy mega-deluxe editions for $100, so game companies can get money from that group and then lower the prize a month later for the rest of the gamers.
[1] https://psprices.com/region-us/game/2347184/battlefield-v
Whenever I hear people say this, I'm really sceptical. Does this mean never buying any products with animal ingredients? Nothing that has butter or milk, no ice cream, never a turkey sandwich or anything with egg or gelatine in it, like candy? Because if you do, they most probably don't come from farms certified for their animal welfare.
I'm not trying to attack you personally, it's just that I suspect that you either exclude the majority of animal products you consume, or you're one of the rare people that never buys anything with a list of ingredients.
If you're the latter, that's great, because I think that's a very good way of knowing exactly what you eat. I want to get better at eating from basic ingredients myself, where I snack on things like an apple or nuts and not something with 5-10 ingredients.
When you say "against animals suffering in any form" you make it sound like you mean both in the human-operated animal industry and wild in nature, and also that these vegans would want to prevent wild animals from breaking their legs or something because it induces suffering. I haven't seen vegans argue that we should interfere with nature to limit suffering in that way.
Some vegans are utilitarians (what I've read of Peter Singer comes to mind), and then I guess it comes down to if you think that the benefits of the animal's life outweighs the suffering when considering if they should have been born or not.
Other vegans are into animal rights, where you assign unalienable rights to animals like the right to freedom, but these vegans wouldn't even consider your idea of ending all animal suffering. They would be antinatalist in the sense that being born into captivity and raised just to be slaughtered for meat is wrong, and for that animal it would surely have been better to not have been born at all.
I'm heavy on the animal rights side and extremely suspicious of utilitarianism. I'm sure that hardcore utilitarianism could lead to the bizarre conclusion that you're presenting, but I haven't seen it argued.
I agree. This topic recently ran as Today I Learned on Reddit, and of all the vegans checking in, no one had heard about this. It's the same with me and all my vegan acquaintances, no one has heard that figs wouldn't be considered vegan.
The article title makes it sound like everyone agrees that figs aren't considered vegan, which is weird.
Speaking of fringe views, I read an interesting article debunking the idea that vegans are deficient in common nutrients. It looked deeper into the studies presented, and it turned out that they had studied fruitarians (only eats fruits and perhaps nuts and seeds without killing the plant), or religious groups with extremely limited food sources. Those groups are vegan, but they are a small subset of all vegans, and it would be incorrect to say that findings with these groups apply to people eating varied vegan diets.
You shouldn't leave out the egg part.
But yes, terms change. I've read early Vegan Society texts where they talk about "fruitarians" as those vegetarians that only eat the fruits produced by animals, i.e. milk, egg, honey. Today a fruitarian is a vegetarian that only eats fruits (and sometimes nuts and seeds) that you can pick without killing the plant.
There are also different opinions on the term vegetarian. In Sweden, it commonly includes milk and egg, and if you order a vegetarian pizza you get cheese from cow milk. But the Swedish National Food Agency, and other agencies like the Consumer Agency, define a product marked "vegetarian" as being strictly vegetable based. The last couple of years, soy hot dog manufacturers have been forced to add "lacto vegetarian" or "ovo vegetarian" to their packages.
So it's nothing strange to have different points of view of what exactly is denoted by the terms vegetarian and vegan.
There's a middle ground as well, exemplified by Gary Francione (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_L._Francione). He's an animal rights abolitionist, meaning that we should just improve the welfare of animals in the animal industry, but abolish it completely. Yet he keeps pets, by only taking in rescued animals from shelters. He argues that their lives are already ongoing, and we should make the best situation we can for them. But we shouldn't buy animals from breeders, because then we help perpetuate the situation.
I think it's a sympathetic position to take, so yes, it's possible to want to stop people from breeding pets while still caring for the ones that are already here.
You can compare it to choosing between a life in prison or living alone on a deserted island. If the person affected makes the choice, that's one thing, and it doesn't really matter which option they choose from a moral standpoint. But choosing for someone else is iffy. How can I decide if it's best for you to be in prison or on a deserted island?
For anyone else searching for it in your podcast app, it's actually called "The Privacy, Security, & OSINT Show".
Other benefits, when I think about it, are that an automatic frees up one foot and one hand. I can drive with my cup of tea or coffee without having to shift, which is great. I don't know if it directly helps with awareness, but it helps me stay awake.
I would feel stupid doing that, even if I see the benefits, but I enjoyed reading out loud to them, because then you have a script to follow. I wouldn't read "Dog - Apple - Ball" children books, but stuff I wanted to read anyway, just to get them used to hearing my voice, the speech rhythm, and the vocabulary.
Some fears are rational, but as you say, a lot of fears are totally out of proportion. It's important to not exaggerate any negative consequences that might arise from a situation.
Another neat thing I heard in a podcast on writing was that the author fought her fear of talking in front of an audience with the fear of missing out. She knew that if she declined the invitation to speak at a convention, she would later regret missing out on the experience. So she used the latter fear to fight the former.
It's important to not attempt to remove all fear from your life, as that's bound to fail anyway and make you more anxious, but to learn to live with fear on a low enough level so that you still keep acting.
I read a bunch of years ago in Branded by Alissa Quart of American schools where soda giants would fund equipment for the sports teams and provide free soda for the cafeteria. So the school would both have to pay for their own drinks in the cafeteria and refuse sponsorship of the sports team to avoid being involved with soda the companies. It just makes economic sense in that case to let the soda company rope the kids in.
It's been a while since I read it, and I can't verify the truth. For me, it sounds like schools should have no part in getting kids addicted to soda.
Both school and pre-school make it sound like they don't allow sweets, so it's very disingenuous. At least they're not served lemonade daily for lunch, and the afternoon snack is fruit.
For me, the first step is to commit to only a five minute overview and information gathering session. During those five minutes I will figure out what output is expected from me, write down a couple of concrete tasks, and then start with the one that either looks like it will add the most value or, if I'm low on energy, the one that's most fun. When I tick it off, I'm at least closer to completion and hopefully has enough momentum to start the another task on the list.
All of the above are best case scenarios, as I still usually put off things for way too long and have to work through the night to catch up. I constantly try to improve this, but as soon as one deadline has passed with a marathon work session, I relax because the next deadline is far off.