SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
No bio...
User ID: 84
How much of that was because you were "woman who was sheltered, probably on the spectrum and very lacking in social skills" and how much because you were "18 year old" hanging out with people older than you?
To me it seems that the problems complained about are specific to the individual and have next to nothing to do with being 18 in a group of older people.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
In contrast, rural people, churchgoers, and those with thick multi-generational communities are pretty used to enjoying the company of people of all ages.
You don't even need to live in any sort of "conservative" environment. Just have some interests that aren't strictly age segregated or a part time job and you'll end up meeting and socially interacting with a bunch of people of different ages. Back in the 90s I attended a couple of BBS meetups when I was 16 and had no problem whatsoever having discussions with people ranging from my age to those in their 40s (all of who I only knew from online). By the age of 18 I had a summer and then part time job and ended up getting drunk with people ranging from 20s to their 40s. It really isn't awkward if you have enough social intelligence to find some commonality with people who aren't exactly like you.
Sure, teens don't usually want to hang out much with adults but that's because they think adults are "boring" or "out of touch", not because people are being weird about it.
Since when has that really stopped anyone much?
Many moons ago when I was 19 I visited an older friend I knew from IRC who lived in the Midwest. I ended up hanging out with a bunch of local 17-19 year olds there and while my friend's wife forbade him from buying us booze, the only thing limiting (but certainly not stopping) us getting alcohol was how much we could tolerate the company one rather annoying girl who was 21. I don't think I've ever drunk as much alcohol while traveling as on that trip.
The same way some of my friends here in Finland had no problem getting drunk when they were 15-16 even though the legal age is 18.
There's a big difference between "can't" and "many don't much want to".
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
Which is a deficiency specific to American governing, not any sort of attribute of 18 year olds.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
But I do know that the problem with distilled water is the leeching of minerals.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
If you just don't want to be responsible for keeping the environment controlled then own it and boot her yourself.
Why should the environment even have to be controlled if all the participants want it to be uncontrolled? That is, more than with any other recent addition from a different background.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
So it's not totally unreasonable to question whether the gunshots were necessary
It's easy enough to answer: Just consider how the police would have reacted in a bunch of other western countries in similar situation. If they're all "Yeah, there's no fucking way they'd have shot the tasered guy", that's pretty clear answer.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
I hope it gets out of Kickstarter Development Hell. The Escape Velocity Override remake, "Cosmic Frontier Override", was not so lucky. The devs wasted a bunch of time poorly rewriting everything and then apparently Peter Cartwright, the original creator, died while this all was going on. Maybe it'll keep going. The remaining dev is incentivized to keep going, because he somehow made a Patreon account a year or two after the kickstarter to get even more free money to develop freelance.
Relatedly, we've been toying with maybe doing a Kickstarter for hw device with a friend and very fast came to the conclusion that the only way we would ever do is if we have a production ready prototype and need upfront capital just to order a limited batch from a contract manufacturer as well as a known set of guaranteed buyers. Otherwise there's far too high risk of ending up at /r/shittykickstarters.
If that was actually the case, my dislike for artists as a group wouldn’t increase so much of the time I interact with them in other venues too, including even the real world. Yet it keeps doing so over and over and over again.
Similar thing hasn’t happened with engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, nurses etc.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
This is overly simplistic. Let kids have interests, unless those interests are truly beyond the pale. Everyquest, Star Trek, soccer, whatever. But not toasterfucking.
I see you're not a fan of the 2003 Battlestar Galactica reboot.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
I mean if you wanted to make that argument, the first things you should ban is professional models, movie stars and most of all social media and Tinder-like apps.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
I'm a zoomer.
Wait, how does a zoomer end up referencing a game from 1992 (and one of the best games of all time) in their nickname?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
I wonder how much that is influenced by locality / microenvironmental factors that aren't shown in the statistics. Eg. Finland used to have a fairly high homicide rate (compared to peer countries) while actually being a very safe place to live as long as you weren't a middle aged unemployed alcoholic male drinking with your buddies.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
I remember playing ”Cops” as a kid in the very early 90s. It involved one guy being designated as the bad guy and the rest being cops who would then run after him and tackle him on the ground as a group. Not surprisingly nobosy wanted to be the first to play the bad guy. Ah, to be young again…
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
One exception: Exposure therapy. Despite being counterintutive, it works! If someone is afraid of a thing, and the thing isn't really all that scary/dangerous, then 'forcing' them to be in the presence of that thing, repeatedly and at increasingly high intensity, they will acclimate to become less afraid of it, which is exhibited as a tangible change in behavior.
Except when it doesn’t, of course. I have a phobia of wasps (and by adjacency bees because they look so similar but consider bumblebess to be harmless because their colors and flight are immediately distinguishable). While researching wasp traps it wasn’t hard at all to find many accounts of people who had gone through exposure therapy without any improvement. So YMMV.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
I have a hard time seeing how spending a year at a Wyoming ranch would improve the social skills of anyone much.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
”I’m in this moderated online debate group. You’d find it really boring.”
Nerdy subcultures are so because a small section of the nerdy kids and teenagers have some kind of trouble adjusting to the society of fellow non-nerdy teenagers and start building self-image out of imaginary simulacra found in internet.
(bolded addition mine)
Even with that addition I'm not convinced of that explanation, not least because as far as I can tell, back in my teenager days (ie. the 90s) the only "subcultures" I witnessed were the occasional guys wearing metal band shirts (which amusingly included one Jehovah’s Witness who really loved Helloween and power metal) and a bit later some friends of a friend being into hiphop music and clothes. Even for those people it seemed to be limited purely to music and fashion and as far as I could tell, they didn't fraternize among the group any more than random friends did.
It's possible that (unlike here in Finland) in the US such subcultural cliques really were / are common but this would point towards this not being any inherent aspect of being a western teenager and more something learned via local / national cultural examples (possibly imported ones, in the case of anime nerds). Certainly there were a few "castouts" (in the sense that they were weird in various ways and seemed to keep themselves aloof of the rest of the students) but they didn't hang together either and seemed to be content with being weird loners (the very notion of a clique based on being castout / loner would have been absurd).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
As far as I know, most people arrested aren't (much) crazier than everyone else. Sure, they're more impulsive and don't have the best life skills on average but that's a far cry from most having schizophrenia or similar mental condition.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
I knew kids who were Jehovah's Witnesses, and even though I was casual acquaintances with them, all the restrictions their parents made them live under (no Pokemon, no holidays, etc.) made them stand out like a sore thumb, and made it hard to form the easy, breezy friendships typical of K-12 education.
As an opposite experience, I also had a guy who was a JW in my class in junior high in the 90s. Apart from refusing to eat Blodplättar (which TBF weren't that popular with other people either), separate religious education and allegedly preparing to do the door-to-door thing Jehovah's Witnesses do, he seemed like a regular guy. Knew all the typical pop culture stuff, wore Helloween band shirts, had normal sounding plans for future. He even wanted me to print him a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook I had on my computer.
I was/am a nerd, but then I run into the nerd nerds and I feel the need to shove them into a locker and then go wash my hands afterwards.
I never did understand why people engaged in the American stereotypical nerd culture when I was growing up in Finland in the 80s and 90s. Sure, I also had nerdy interests like programming, reading fantasy books and the occasional RPG session but I never felt like they defined who I was. They were just things I was interested in or liked to do, the same way some other kids liked to play sports without making that their whole identity.
I see "anime culture" as like that cliche nerd culture: A bunch of people who fail to distinguish between their interest and their identity (quite possibly because they don't much have one) and that leads to all sorts of issues.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
I'm pretty sure a philosopher who critiqued, say, Maxwell's equations would be rightly laughed out of the room by anyone with a clue.
Not to mention that the screenshots you linked are distinctly labeled CGA and EGA
If you look at them, the EGA image uses the same low resolution blocky graphics as the CGA, just with a different palette (same as in the Tandy version I believe). That limitation was present throughout all Sierra games made with their AGI interpreter until they finally moved to actual EGA graphics with SCI in Kings Quest IV. Of course even those were much lower resolution than what EGA was capable of.
VGA was absolutely not common in 1988
It was common enough that not only were there multiple super VGA adapters on the market but that the industry recognized the need to standardize them in late 1988. Hells, there was even a ”laptop” with vga by 1988 (My mom used to take it home from work occasionally on weekends, so that was my personal hands-on introduction to PC and programming - in addition to playing games at friends’). And besides, we're talking about "pushing graphical standards in games".
If Sierra had actually pushed graphical standards (as opposed to persistently catering to the lowest common denominator), by 1988 the games could have looked like the second and third images here. First is original low res game graphics, 2nd is how it could have looked on VGA, 3rd is how that could have been displayed on EGA without requiring any additional storage and the 4th is Nano Banana reimagining of the original that was used to produce 2nd and 3rd images by downscaling to 640x350 and dithering to 16 color images with a fixed palette (not even optimized per screen) - all images upscaled to 1280x800 for ease of comparison and avoiding aspect ratio problems. In fact the games could have looked like the 3rd image by 1985 as far as the hardware was concerned (EGA was released in late 84).
I'm guessing you're younger than me and didn't grow up in this era
Not only did I grow up in that era but by 1991 I was writing VGA graphics code, so I was familiar with what the hardware had been capable of with reasonable effort since the introduction of VGA (at least for paid developers who had actual budget to buy hw documentation books etc). Obviously I wasn't writing anything professional level, but did know enough to use the magic spells mov ax, 13h; int 10h and xor ax, ax; mov dx, 3c8h; out dx, al; inc dx; rep outsb (If you know you know and if you don't you may not be qualified to judge the topic in the first place).
Note that game logic was also a significant part of the CPU's load
Sure, for an action game. For adventure games like the ones Sierra made? Not even remotely because they essentially had no running logic until you typed something in the parser or changed screens.
please give even one example of a contemporary game that looked better.
Defender of the Crown from 1987. Note the lack of fugly blockiness.
Falcon, also from 1987. Not that the graphics are pretty as such but at least they aren't a horrible blockfest.
For VGA graphics, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade from 1989 - over a year before Kings Quest V.
A-10 Tank Killer, also from 1989.
But like I said earlier, "A lot of the late 80s / early 90s western games had self limited graphics because the artists were apparently incapable of using custom palettes and the companies had outdated ideas about common graphics hardware." The problems were industry wide and it took until the mid 90s before parts of the industry started really pushing the envelope, Doom being one of the early examples.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
8d ago
paste a wall of ai slop into the comments section
This is something I truly don't understand. Why do people who clearly aren't bots on reddit still keep writing their posts and comments with AI when it provides no value for them or the readers (and will get the posts removed)?
What gets me is some women in their late 30s or even 40s imititating American thirst traps. Like WTF woman, why would you think that's in any way a good look on you in public channels?
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