Man now I can’t watch Seinfeld anymore? Why people got to do this?

I took AI courses in college and it was fun to learn about then when it was a bunch of toy examples that showed the potential of these systems, but it was clear enough to anyone in those classes or doing that research how not ready they were for real applications because of all the known flaws with how model training worked. And then some ceos just ignored all that and started blowing up the bubble.

So my answer is the research models that could play video games kinda good. Everything after that was getting ahead of ourselves.

I played BG3 twice but I bounced off of E33. But I’m not as much of a fan of JRPGs so /shrug. I might go back to it at some point though.

I’ve never heard it called that before, but I like it.

have you been to a psychiatrist, ideally more than one? Done any research yourself beyond just the depression?

Yes. Quite a few at this point. A few that just diagnosed and managed medications, but then there was also a clinic that did a brain scan to try to help figure things out, this is where I learned I was also autistic, but that didn’t really lead to anything useful. I also went to try TMS and Ketamine. Lately I thought that I might have ADHD, so I went to go get tested for that, but they decided that wasn’t it even if I did have some attention problems, they were just more related to the depression symptoms. After that, I’ve started doing ECT. I’m still in the early stages, but I’m starting to get to the number of treatments where people supposedly start feeling it helping and they of course ask me every time I go and I just never know what to say. I can’t really tell if I feel any different. At some point if it’s not helping I’m gonna have to stop because this is easily the most painful, disruptive treatment I’ve had so far. At least with the Ketamine I was basically just zonked out listening to music for like an hour. The ECT involves going to a hospital that’s like a half an hour away, not eating for 8 hours, not drinking for 2 hours, getting a needle stuck in my arm for anesthesia, then getting my brain zapped. I feel like shit the rest of the day. So if it’s not working, more than any other medication or treatment I’ve had, I need to end it. But I don’t want to miss my chance at what feels like the last thing that might help.

I don’t know what to expect with this. Probability of it turning out good feels low. It looks like it’s just gonna be a lot of action. I didn’t get much personality from the trailer. I’d hope they add in the weird stuff. Although I guess Sekiro had less of that than Souls or Elden Ring.

I think the interesting thing about the US is that its propaganda sews the seeds for eventual dissent. It runs on ideals about freedom, democracy, equality, individualism, progress, prosperity, etc. The national mythology isn’t “fuck all the poor people.” The trouble is, the US isn’t any of these things. It just makes it hard to recognize that or what the alternatives are. So I wouldn’t say I moved along the political spectrum as much as I slowly started to notice that I wasn’t where I thought I was. You grow up seeing Obama go from “Hope and Change” to continuing to do all the wars, torture, and spying… it makes you realize “hey I don’t think these people were being honest about sharing my values.” And it’s just a long, slow trip from there to figuring out what movements actually represent your politics.

We can all lie and give some cultural sites that you should totally go see but… food. All my real suggestions are food related. If you’re not from the immediate surrounding area, you absolutely have to get at least one slice of cheap pizza. Not from a fancy tourist place. Just literally find some random thing on a corner selling it for like a dollar or two and you will have the best pizza you will have had in your life (again if you live outside of the NY metro area).

After that, look to see if there are any street food festivals happening. Might be some interesting stuff.

There are quite a few touristy restaurants in the middle of the city that are going to be expensive and crowded, but they can still be fun to go to once if you don’t mind the cost and can get a reservation.

For actual activity suggestions… highly dependent on what you like. Museums? Parks? Shows? They’re all there, it just depends on what you want. I guess one recommendation in that regard is that if you want to see a broadway show and are willing to be flexible, there is a ticket counter in Time Square that you can go to day of to get discounted tickets for a show that day.

Nah. First question is “do you have insurance?”

I think the difficulty and motivation are related. A lot of cool, creative things I want to do are difficult. Not just to be the best or professional at them, but often to even get any personal value out of it. I might want to play guitar, but it’s not really fun to just randomly strum and not get any music out of it, so before I can even get that basic enjoyment out of it, I need to spend a lot of time being bad to learn and practice. And that takes a LOT of motivation. Meanwhile I can get moderate enjoyment out of something simple like watching a show or playing a game I’m already familiar with without much effort or uncertainty, but there’s kind of a cap on how much I can get out of that.

It also doesn’t help that I have a few of these skill heavy interests and they don’t necessarily overlap in skills. So I have trouble picking anything because all of them take commitment to spend time and effort on uncertain, unfun work, with no guarantee of payoff. How long do I give to something I’m not enjoying before I give it up to try something else? If I do that for all of them I’ll end up not getting to the fun part of any of them. It’s paralyzing.

It’s impressive how much the show can mix up its art style and level of detail. Lower res for the anime bits. Super high detail/realistic lighting for the camera bits, etc.

It’s been interesting getting to see more of Marin’s life/friend group and how they look in on their relationship. There’s that contrast between Gojo’s fears of how people judge his interests with how relatively reasonable everyone has been. It feels like that girl from his childhood was the anomaly, although it could also be that it was more common and most people just grew out of it after a certain point. That was kind of my school experience. By sometime in late high school the people who used to be bullies just kind of stopped. We didn’t suddenly become friends, but they didn’t go out of their way to cause problems for me either.

It makes me wonder if that girl is going to show up again for some character arc that reckons with their past or if that’s just not something the show wants to tackle now that it’s settled into a groove.

At this rate Gojo is going to be the last person to know that they’re dating. :P

Personally I think they’re still playing catchup from their launch commitments, but what’s been added so far has been pretty good. Season 2 expanded out the endgame content and crafting loop by a lot. This season looks a bit tamer in the grand scheme of things. A relatively smaller endgame content system with some new loot. Some class reworks. A new chapter in a still unfinished campaign.

Tech-wise I haven’t really had problems with it after the first few days of s2’s launch, but new patches always come with new bugs, so I’d expect some instability at s3 launch.

Also like others said, they got bought out so………………. Yeah… we’ll see what happens with that.

Not Christian, so take it with a grain of salt, these are just my observations:

These are people who thought that public schools not actively supporting their religion was the same thing as religious persecution. If “woke” stuff represents their shrinking influence over public life, then a government being “anti-woke” lets them go back to asserting themselves over others, or at least not having their views challenged. So even if the leading guy isn’t a moral paragon of their religion, the fact that he’s giving them permission to go back to their old ways is probably good enough.

Also, not really relevant, but the last bit about the Pope is funny to me. Most American Christians are Protestant. Evangelicals specifically are Protestants. While it probably isn’t a big deal anymore, tensions between WASPs and the more recent Catholic immigrants from Italy and Ireland were a feature of early to mid 20th century politics. It was actually a pretty big deal when JFK was elected because he was Catholic. So I really doubt Evangelicals care much about the Pope other than when he happens to agree with them.

Some good answers already here, but I can only answer for myself: I used to be that kind of leftist that was “Well I want socialism, but not like those scary foreign authoritarian countries. They’re doing it wrong! Or that’s not really socialism!” At some point after learning more history and talking with others online, I’ve softened my view on these places. Some of that is learning that some of what I knew about them was straight up misinformation, but some of it comes from a shift in perspective: These aren’t abstract ideals of countries. They’re real countries. With real people, real histories, real material conditions, real geopolitical relationships to deal with, etc. They’re doing something really difficult and it’s really easy to be an armchair quarterback while sitting cozy in the US where I don’t have to deal with any of their tough decisions or the consequences of them. Am I happy with them doing some authoritarian policies? No. But maybe they’re necessary to deal with the interference of the US? I don’t know for sure if that’s the best approach, but I don’t have to imagine the counterexample of what it looks like if you don’t take defensive measures, the US has helpfully provided a bunch in the form of all of the countries they’ve backed coups in for the crime of electing even a slightly leftist government. We could squabble about better ways to deal with this, but neither of us has the full context to have an educated discussion on the matter. Also for the genuinely bad stuff, I wouldn’t go as far as specifically supporting those things, but it’s worth putting them in perspective. You can’t talk about China online without someone bringing up Tienanmen Square, meanwhile the US has been a never-ending avalanche of evil in it’s short history, but you can talk about any number of things not related to politics in the US without a random leftist wandering into the discussion about the latest hollywood movie shouting the entire lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” I mean we’re happy to bring all that stuff up if it’s in the right context, but people are so deranged about communist countries that the ONLY thing they can think to bring up in relation to them is their less savory moments that may or may not even be true/exaggerated.

It’s really hard to sort good information from bad about these places because there’s so much propaganda. I get that those other countries have an incentive to put out their own propaganda, but it’s hard for me to know what their reach is or what their motivations are or how much they are lying vs countering US misinfo. Meanwhile I KNOW the US has a fairly sophisticated system of propaganda spanning government agencies, media companies, NGOs, etc. I KNOW the US is motivated to prop up the interests of capitalists and try to stop other countries from pushing back against them. A lot of the bad shit and lies the US has done is just straight up declassified history. So I’m sorry if I’m a little skeptical about what the empire that’s made it it’s business to deny self-determination to countries around the world has to say about those countries.

As for Russia, I’m not specifically a supporter. Ever since the USSR collapsed they’ve been another capitalist, imperialist country. But in terms of scale they’re just not even remotely comparable to the US. They are at worst a regional power and outside of nukes can’t really threaten the US on the global stage. So when the US war machine starts saber rattling about them, I know what it’s for because I’ve seen it a million times before. We always need an external enemy to justify the massive amount of money we spend on the military and all of the capitalists who profit from it. Even if I think it would be good if someone in the region pushed back against Russian aggression, I think feeding the beast that is the US military industrial complex is a net negative for the world. Not that I really have any say in it. I can’t remember the last time my congressperson or senator asked if I wanted to give another couple billion dollars to their friends in the “defense” industry. And then of course there was all the hysteria about Russian interference in our elections from the Democrats. I don’t even care if they’re right or wrong. That’s besides the point. The function of the claims is what is more valuable to look at: The implication of “Russia is subverting our democracy by interfering in our elections.” is “We had a previously uncorrupted democracy before the Russians got involved. Please ignore how our own billionaires have bought out all of our elections.” It’s a way to shore up support for a failing system by externalizing it’s problems.

I just want to live in a world where we can all live dignified lives. US capitalists are the current greatest obstacle to that dream. I’d rather have imperfect allies against that than throw my lot in with the “Endless war, exploitation, and ecological collapse” team.

The Halo warthog run music.

The same way people go on knowing their president is a war criminal. We’re so far past the line that this doesn’t even register.

“Duh nuh nuh naaaaaah! Dun nuh nuh naaaaah! Dun nuh nuh naaaah!….”

I tried it out when the testing started. It’s… fine. I’m not much of a shooter/action game player, so the higher skill elements of it are a bit of a barrier on top of re-learning a lot of DoTA-type stuff. I can imagine getting into it more if it came out years ago. But now it’s hard to find the time and motivation I’d need to dedicate to even get back to the level of incompetence I had with DoTA.

It’s really hard for me to separate my nostalgia for older games with what I’d think about them now. There are some games I’ve played a LOT but haven’t touched in years for one reason or another.

Some pre-Steam games would be things like Halo 3, World of Warcraft, Runescape, and few Pokemon games.

On Steam my most played game BY FAR is DoTA 2 at ~2100 hours. I loved that game and I still think it’s really well designed… I just haven’t played it in years because it makes me too mad to play with randos and it’s impossible to get 5 friends who play DoTA online at the same time anymore.

If I was going to pick a top 3 outside of those nostalgic outliers, maybe:

• Slay The Spire
• Dark Souls
• Deep Rock Galactic