My wife and I just started watching this a couple months ago. We’re partway through Season 3.

Over the weekend we saw Nine Inch Nails live. To our complete shock, once the band left the stage and the lights came on the house music that played while everyone left was… The mysterious and sad piano theme from Twin Peaks.

A bit of research later revealed that David Lynch directed a NIN music video, and he has featured their songs in movies. And perhaps more notable… NIN appeared on the show in season 3, just two episodes ahead of where we were. It was a wild coincidence.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/rotating-a-cow-in-mind

I suspect the memes started because research into image rotation got in the news cycle, and the Internet took it from there.

Yes, and the amount has also been increasing.

Wandering Bard > Bad Dragon

I’m convinced that the whole concept of spoilers is driven mkre by modern marketing agencies than genuine original feelings.

“You NEED to hurry up and see the latest movie, in theaters, or else your coworkers will spoil it for you!”

“You NEED to buy and play this $80 bug-filled game as soon as it launches or else you might stumble across a comment on the internet that SPOILs IT!!!”

“You NEED to watch the SuperBowl or whatever else on live TV (and coincidentally sit through all of the advertisements) or else someone will SpOiL it for you!!!”

Great stories can stand up to being told over and over again. In fact, they’re usually BETTER on subsequent experiences because you can pick up on little hints of foreshadowing. I’ve never heard anyone say “I’ve only read Lord of the Rings once because it’s boring once you know how it ends”.

It’s fucking February

Discord has been getting worse and worse for years. They’ve been letting venture capital it’s the business for years, and filed plans for an IPO last month.

This was finally the push needed to get the lovely FOSS communuty motivated to make replacements.

Can we count wealth hoarding as a mental illness though?

I think these thoughts are healthy and necessary, and exactly the kind of thoughts I like to have in the shower. It’s great to, as you’re waking up, reflect on the day before with a little bit of distance.

We all fuck up. Sometimes it takes another person pointing it out for us to realize it and apologize. But I find apologies are even more meaningful when the wrongdoer realizes it and apologizes on their own.

Well, it might help to identify some criteria first:

1. Economics. When was it easy to just… Buy and play games? No microtransactions or season passes or subscriptions. Games were mostly physical purchases that you could buy used or re-sell.

You could make an argument that anti-consumer games have always existed in some form. Arcade games designed to sucm quarters out of pockets, games with special codes or info in the box/manual needed to progress that would deter people from buying used. Pokemon selling 2 versions of the same game and locking content behind promotional events. But all that was less common and less egregious. For some games, DLC used to be a great value because it added a lot of content cheaper than the base game- Roller Coaster Tycoon was a great example.

I think everything through PS2/GameCube/Xbox is pretty safely within this range. PS3/Wii/360 is arguable.

2. Technology. This may be controversial, but I think there is a minimum level of fidelity and performance that needs to be considered here. There are definitely some great 8-bit and 16-bit games, but there’s also a lot of duds from those days. There’s also plenty of great 2D games that came later on systems that are ALSO capable of great 3D games. So I’m eliminating anything prior to the PS1/N64/Saturn.

Except… Even just comparing that generation to the next is still a huge difference. Storage space was quite restrictive. N64 games look like garbage, and particularly with multiplatform games you can really feel how limiting the cartridge was. The Saturn was a joke. PS1 games… The aren’t bad, but there’s still a wide gulf between them and the next generation. Compare Metal Gear Solid to Twin Snakes for example, or any of the multiplats that crossed generations.

I know a lot of answers here are “what you grew up with”, but this is the point where I have to admit that what I grew up with was immediately objectively surpassed by the next generation. PS1->PS2, N64->GameCube, and Saturn->Dreamcast/Xbox were all strictly better upgrades, and the only real downside was that Xbox started charging for online multiplayer.

3. Scope. AAA games got too big. They take too long to make and cost too much money. A lot of developers saw GTA and became obsessed with open-worlds with tons of silly collectibles. Assassin’s Creed is an example, and I think the PS3/360/Wii generation is where this started, though it certainly got worse afterwards. I remember Skyrim taking hours to install, and even then the load times were so bad that my wife and I would usually be playing Pokemon on our DS’s during the load screens.

The increased fidelity also seems to correlate with a decrease in creativity. This has gotten a lot better since, but the PS3 and 360 are remembered for mostly brown/green/grey games. Everything was “gritty” and realistic. I like realism, but it was overdone here. The Wii, on the other hand, mostly just looked like GameCube games. I could be misremembering, but I think this is when a lot of games moved to target 30FPS instead of 60FPS. Trying to be more “cinematic” and reducing the importance of gameplay, and thus reducing the importance of responsiveness.

4. Tutorialization. I’m not exactly sure when this started, but it seems like almost all modern games lie on opposite ends of the spectrum. Either they hold your hand and force you to read through tons of dumb text prompts poorly explaining every element of the game all at once, or they copy the FromSoft formula and give you nothing and make you look everything up online from a fan community. I suppose older games like the OG Zelda are also known for being hard to figure out, or other games made you look stuff up in the manual. I look at Portal as one of the best at this: the whole game is basically a tutorial that slowly, constantly introduced new wrinkles for you to learn without holding your hand about it.

So I would say the GameCube/PS2/Xbox era was the peak. That being said, there was plenty of garbage released during that era, and plenty of great games released before and after.

The only other things I can find are that, allegedly, Linkin Park sampled a Biggie song (Until it Breaks, allegedly sampled “Who Shot Ya”, but when I listen to them I don’t hear it. Maybe it’s actually just a lyrical reference not a true sample?)

Also Chester’s son Jaime Bennington has gone off on a lot of rants against Shinoda and other LP members and seems real salty about the band continuing now. He accused Shinoda and other members of Machine. shop records of attending two Diddy parties in 2004 and 2010. And one time Diddy tweeted out that he liked LP and they re-tweeted it. So… Everything seems pretty innocuous to me.

Lol this is a good one

Some of these are real stretches involving band names getting swapped around.

The original band called “Judas Priest” broke up entirely. KK Downing, and Ian Hill were in a band called Freight together. Al Atkins of the now-defunct Judas Priest joined Freight, and they decided the now-available name of Judas Priest was cooler. It was not the same band. Furthermore, before their first album was recorded Atkins was replaced with Halford, and Tipton also joined. So I would count Ian Hill, Rob Halford, and Glenn Tipton all as founding members.

Opeth is similar. The first Opeth before Ackerfeldt broke up without recording any albums.

I have some confounding factors.

First of all, my house was built in 1921 so is not designed around a big screen. We have a 70" TV in our living room, but it’s over the fireplace and rough 12’ away from our faces. Experts recommend something larger for that distance, but that is the biggest thing that fits between the mantle and ceiling. We could look into one of those fancy moving TV mounts for fireplaces, but they’re quite expensive too and seem like a pain.

The second piece is that I had my retina re-attached a few years ago. Even with a strong prescription I still find it harder to see details from far away ever since.

So I prefer smaller screens closer to my face in general. I do a lot of my gaming on the Steam Deck. I watch a lot of stuff on my phone, and I have a 10" tablet I use sometimes too.

Sound is another thing. I find good quality headphones best anyone’s fancy expensive home theater setup consistently, but the tradeoff is that headphones are usually less convenient and get uncomfortable to wear after a while. Bluetooth means less battery life for my phone, wires means I’m tethered (I have an Xperia so I have a headphone jack at least).

I mean, that exact same criticism applies to every diet. Caloric restriction, intermittent fastin, pescaterianism/vegetarianism/veganism, etc.

There are 3 options:

1. Eat to live, rather than love to eat. Treat nutrition as a utility and not entertainment.

2. Learn to enjoy healthy eating. Not just the mouth feel and taste, but appreciating how much better you feel for the ~21 hours of the day you don’t spend eating.

3. Eat all the terrible things. Enjoy the taste and mouth feel. Laugh, and grow fat.

The correct pronoun to use was always “it”.

This may be unpopular, but I think this is great news.

Skyrim became one of the best-sellign games of all time in part BECAUSE of how great it is to see your character get ragdolled into the lithosphere by a giant, or to watch the chaos of spawning thousands of wheels of cheese on top of the throat of the world and watching them roll down.

An Elder Scrolls game that was built around having realistic physics, or being restricted to more cinematic movement and knteractions, would lose a key essence of what made the earlier games great.

I don’t want engaging combat in Elder Scrolls. If I want combat that I have to pay attention to, I’ll go play a Souls game or a fighting game or one of the thousands of games that have tried to be “Skyrim with better combat” that have languished in obscurity because they miss the point.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times

• Bruce Lee

If you make the same meal repeatedly you get really good at it.

I eat egg cups almost every day for breakfast. Line muffin tins with sliced ham, crack an egg into each one, add seasonings and toppings, back. Let them cool, store in the fridge, microwave for 30 seconds and add a splash of sauce to eat.

Protein smoothie for lunch. I’ve got it down to the point where I optimize what order the ingredients should go into the blender in so that they blend smoothly. Orange juice, protein powder, banana (optional), peanut butter, ice, peanut oil (optional).

I also love various kinds of meal prep for dinner. Doing things in bulk and in advance is usually more efficient for both time and money. And such deliberation usually leads to better nutrition too.

I also enjoy experiencing new flavors. I love seeing new restaurants pop up nearby, immigrants bringing flavors from their homeland I’ve never tasted before. But that’s an expensive (and often unhealthy) treat for special occasions.

Eating to live vs living to eat.

If you look at his Senate voting record, he didnt really then conservative until 2025. His stroke was in 2022 before he even won the election.