mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
Future apocalypse survivor
User ID: 3273
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
Dishonored and Prey are great immersive sims, unfortunately the studios behind them have been shut down. Immersive Sims always have their studios shut down. I am not that fond of the other Assasins Creed games. The advancements you saw in those with Ezio as the protagonist in a pre microtransaction, leftier than thou world was quite good. The sequels may be good but they are not that much better, and frankly, they are not even proper RPGs the way actual RPGs are. They are less RPG like than new Fallout games, which are terrible shooters LARPing as RPGs, except for New Vegas, which is awesome.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
I have not, I fear that the non-reboot stuff is better, so playing the worse game first would at least let me enjoy that, though a good chance I never get through this list either given that I just don't care about games as much now given my turbulent life is currently. I fired up Quake Live yesterday and an hour went by in a flash. I had fun despite like a 1/25 kd.
Devil May Cry series seemed to be much more fun than the God of War games, will check out others you mentioned too. Bayonetta is highly rated.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
They killed off Unreal tournament in pre alpha and I have lost interest since then. I suck at FPS, ability wise I am bottom 99th percentile, I still find these games so much more fun, I have quake live and I would pick that over any console shooter.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
On point. Games just suck and I am somehwat glad neural networks will at least keep graphic cards useful as I cannot bring myself to enjoy new games. You barely have any changes, id software shipped quake 3 in less than 2 years, a game whose engine was hailed as a marvel and was Carmack's last great hurrah, Carmack who is widely seen as one of the best hackers to ever touch a keyboard.
I am even fine with the lefty woke subversion if the gameplay is good. I just do not want to play the same game with a slightly different re-skin. Half Life, Quake 3/Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex were all first-person mostly shooting heavy games that all played extremely differently. 25 years later, modern games do not have any advances.
This reminds me of something a good hacker I know said which is that the average good hacker today is far worse than a good hacker 25 years ago. We fucked up big time somewhere. How do you take hundreds of millions and 5 years to make the same fucking game Ubisoft. Why is making another Elder Scrolls a two-decade long process when New Vegas was made in percentages of that by a studio you cucked out of payments.
Open worlds like Gothic 2 are much better than anything you get now, bigger just means worse.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
No, I solely mean games like half life, deus ex, the quake and unreal games at the turn of the century and they were much more fun because they were faster. I enjoyed a game like Arkham Asylum the most since it came out in 2009 but quake and unreal tournament were much more fun.
I cannot name a single game in this era as impactful as the ones I have mentioned. I second @SubstantialFrivolity here. I am 24 and mostly pirated games too. My taste is quite mainstream but Far Cry 3, Arkham Asylum, Assassins Creed 2 were way better games than Far Cry god knows what number they are on now, Whatever Beat em up DC game they made and the black samurai assasins creed.
Arkham Asylum was a step forward like how New Vegas was a step forward. Games today actively regressed. Ioper who I would have tagged had I not been blocked has made some good points.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
Prey is n the list, they fucking mangled arkane. The world cannot have studios that make immense sims.
Eidos, Arkane and Looking glass. It's ludicrous lol
I would love suggestions. My current to-play list includes
- Gothic 2
- Fallout New Vegas (played it a bit, loved it)
- Unreal Tournament 2004
- Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal
- Vanquish
- Metal Gear Rising
My malaise also stems from the fact that the IPs that I liked from the 2010s are either dead or should be dead. Assassin's Creed stopped being fun post Brotherhood, Far Cry got worse. The popular AAA summer blockbuster sorta games feel quite familiar, I wish we could experience breakthroughs in how the games felt.
The jumps from Wolfenstein to Doom, from Doom to Quake and from Quake to Quake 3 were pretty large. You could polish Arkham Asylum graphically, and a guy who has never played it would not find it old or clunky like you would have found Half Life after having played Vanquish.
Maybe I'll never recreate the rush of pizza, coke and old vide games with my cousin from 18 years ago. Welp
Edit - forgot to add immersive sims and some others I forgot
- Deus Ex (original and both the Eidos reboots)
- Prey
- Dishonored
- DmC
- Metro Last Light
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
For me it's not really about the activities, but the times and places I've left behind. I often miss the easy serendipity of college, where I didn't need to create a partiful and blast reminders in order to get 10 people to show up to an event.
This is also why I liked Pai so much, it was a small town where you could just do what you wanted with other travellers without prior notice.
In my case, I never had a fun college or high school life, the last two years post uni were even worse due to my startup LARP so the bar for me is a lot lower. Good chance I do and think the way you do once I party a bit after my sabbatical.
I definitely do miss just being able to walk places and have events going on, but that's a choice I made in exchange for living somewhere I can actually afford a house, so c'est la vie.
Worth it imo, owning a house in a decent town and having savings really makes a difference. Unless its Manhattan and you are stuck with a 60 year mortgage lol. The US is quite unique this way, in India, you cannot buy a decent house unless you are involved in shady things. You get a third-rate run-down apartment in Delhi for the price of a ranch in a smaller blue state in the US, which would have a much better quality of life.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
Piggybacking off of my last comment, are there others who feel that modern games seem not to be as fun as games from late 90s to late 2000s? This may be nostalgia talking, but people around me game less than they did, and most games they play are MMO ones, as opposed to campaign-focused ones like Half-Life.
I have not played a whole lot of modern games, but their gameplay does not seem to be that big of an improvement over things I have seen before. In many cases, modern shooters feel quite slow compared to arena shooters like unreal tournament or Quake. I was looking at games to play and very caught my eye beyond the new doom games.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
Indo-Chinese food is excellent, and I prefer it over other varieties of Chinese food. Chinese food in general takes the cake here. I also had a soft spot for delivery pizza, but Domino's is hot trash now.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
General Updates
I finally made my first project and am a fourth of the way through with boot.dev, though real stuff begins now, it's still some progress. I have a GitHub account with repos, things I made, something I never did for the longest time. India is facing a concerta shortage, and if I cannot get any, I will still keep up with my work. I can crank out 9 hours max on a good day, after which I can barely read a book or even pay any attention to anything at all. This is a lot higher than what I expected, though I feel bad saying anything nice about myself. The entire process is extremely satisfying, my head is in a much better place when I can experience a real sense of progress in the right direction. A hard day of work feels nice, at least when I am done with it at night.
March
March is my favorite month of the year. My family was extremely invested in my academic success, March was when your academic calendar ended, so we would get a 3-4 week break where we had literally zero work. After exams, all the kids would visit these gaming parlors with PCs hooked up via LANs to play Counter-Strike with each other. I would watch movies with my cousins who would come to visit us for Holi. We would play video games all night on my pc, check out bougie cafes, discuss anecdotes from high school. I still feel some of that with my cousins, but I am not in touch with anyone from high school or even uni for that matter.
My strongest emotion for a long time was nostalgia, always wanting to go back in time. In uni I missed high school, in high school I missed middle school, in middle school I missed being in 5th grade. This pattern of thinking was parasitic because even if those years were better, I cannot relive them again. With enough effort, I actively look forward to the time I am in now and have a belief that the near future is genuinely going to be better. My love for video games died almost completely, all the cafes feel stale.
So, do you guys have any thoughts on what it feels like to grow apart from the people of your past life? Are there some things you did with them once that you no longer can enjoy? Many report a falling out with video games or partying.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
My experience was the total opposite, I only ever used them in South East Asia and everyone was helpful, cordial and happy to help. Being a girl makes a difference but we did have female expats there who reported the same things.
After 3-4 days of the same clothes it must have been a special type of smell haha.
I still bathed 1-2 times a day, so it was not that bad. Otherwise, I would have done worse with the girls there. Though there is something about worn clothes, some girls liked the smell of my t-shirt if they were into me, as it reminded them of me. I was too intoxicated to notice anything, honestly. Though I looked like a sitcom character with the raincoat and crocs and trying to shuffle whilst wearing that. I still cant believe I was able to dance for 7 days wearing fucking crocs.
Otherwise, I risk catching the attention of creeps.
Most dudes are creepy by default. If you live in the west, then some might even be homeless drug addict kinds who would scare any sane female.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
I have some traumatic memories with laundromats. I never used one back home since here we have domestic help who take care of all our laundry needs, but I did need to wash all our clothes (my ex-co-founder and I, I had two co-founders, talking about the younger, saner one here). For a few months, I forgot what it felt like to wear clothes that had been folded or ironed at all.
A funny incident was the time a friend of mine came to pick me up at my mud hut that I was vacationing in for a week. We both fell in the mud since the slipperiness was too much for his Vespa. All my laundry fell out of my bag. I spent 3-4 days wearing the same pair of shorts and t-shirts with a raincoat, to the point where most people I met would light-heartedly joke about it, including the PUAs reading my field reports.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
May Shiva bless you and your family, congrats.
Just start, use supersets when you do strength training. A lot of cardio is specific to the sport anyway, plenty of marathon runners huff and puff on their first class since you're not as efficient when you start out.
As long as you keep getting stronger and do some assault bike training, you'll be alright. Many in MMA and Steve Maxwell swear by HIIT stuff on assault bikes as a time-saving way to get there. It's easy on the joints. I don't do it since my gym lacks an assault bike.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
Try jal neti and tape your mouth after a few weeks of doing it twice a day. It's the only ayurvedic thing that works really well and helped me go from being hooked on antibiotics anytime I got a mild cold to not getting sick as frequently.
Ent visit may help but go give jal neti a shot. I shill it because I could never eat or drink cold things since I'd always end up getting sick, it's better now due to my adherence to nasal irrigation.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
I had a terrible month and saw my therapist, I'll be back on track though I've been feeling a little off. My path to getting good at web Dev stuff and math (later ml) is quite long and no one I know irl ever does anything real or cares about it enough. I go out and everyone I meet tries their hardest to seem important.
I'm still doing better, my terrible days still end up with 2-3 hours of focused work, I only log zero if I'm sick and can't get up. Not having friends irl does seem a little wierd to me. I'm a hermit and I really enjoy the satisfaction from a good days work. I'm quite tired right now and it feels great, it means I didn't sit around waste another day of my youth.
India in general is a place where everyone's in a perpetual little league, I do not want to end up that way in the long run. Being isolated feels nice, I get the urge to interact with people and without fail I come back feeling worse about the world around me. People even look at me weird if I tell them that I'm doing math and don't wish to be another soydev.
Even within white collar circles, everyone simply only cares about one upping their colleagues. I've never had a job but I'd be depressed too if I pretended to work all day with toxic co workers. I am quite privileged that my parents allow me as a nearly 25 year old to stay with them and study stuff for better future outcomes but I do get a feeling that most people I know would never do it.
This update is pretty vague, I'm just losing my taste for a lot of things or rather care even less about them. Beyond you folks and some other e friends, everyone I know or meet does fuck all.
Beyond that I also had drama take up some of my mental space. My former oneitis messaged me out of the blue, stating that she met a former friend of mine whose name she didn't reveal. It happened at a party, where this person approached my former oneitis, told her to hat her that she was saying because of me, how I'm a total fucking loser, how I'd go around showing people photos of her and slut shaming her. Etc etc. It wrecked my day since I didn't actually do any of that.
Before I started the whole pickup artistry arc, I was a complete wuss, which is why despite being taller and better looking than average, I never managed to even kiss a girl. I'd tell people about my life quite candidly and even tell them about the girl in question since I was a total chode. My reward for being nice was being as a creepy wierdo.
Now my oneitis and whoever this rested was are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, they're both strangers so whatever they think is immaterial and I'm not in Delhi but it did sting. I don't go around slut shaming girls but I will avoid talking to ones I'm not hooking up with from now on. That may take a few months but till then I'll try to meditate more to deal with isolation.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
Congrats on the quarterversary. Grappling is the only combat sport you can do for life and you should be totally fine as long as you can avoid knee, back and staph issues. My resting heart rate was in the 40s when I was doing mma regularly, I remember having to sit in my car for a bit before driving back home after a really hard session, far more intense than anything I've ever done.
Bjj culture is whack and most "cultures" are best avoided though you'd fine craig jones pretty funny. Especially his bjj ruined my life rant.
Rolling and getting subbed by a girl is a right of passage, you can sense that they are super weak yet you get caught by a rear naked choke you saw coming.
I would highly recommend direct neck training and a decent mouth guard. Having a stronger neck helps a lot beyond sub defence.
I really enjoyed the more humbling aspects of rolling too. Do you plan on doing some recreational striking after this. Judo is a great sub in a pinch in case you're out of town or move places.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
True, I too was pissed of seeing a White african playing the role of a Slavic person. Imagine the horror!
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
will check out cc @Turniper
I wanted to read masters of doom since I wasted all my life knowing nothing, the story of a master craftsman and the proper use that tech felt really appealing. Video games seem dead now though compared to how they seemed 15 years ago. Not sure what changed. Game devs are some of the best craftsman you can find even today.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
I recommend every book and movie in my reviews. I remember a lady who would post weekly reviews here, which is also why I intermittently leave them here too. I recommend all the things here very much.
- Book review - Masters of Doom
My second memorable FPS experience was Doom. 2007 or 8, I was in third grade, my school would organize a carnival on the large green pastures of its premises and all the stalls were run by students and teachers of a respective class (every grade had multiple sections, which I am referring to as a class here). My older cousin was in town, I won this cd with the title Doom 2 and we went back home and fired up the pirated game inside of a 700 mb cd. It fucked me up and I never went back to the game ever again after a few weeks but with some luck I also encountered wolfesntein 3d, previous flaghsip game by id software and got to experience the changes fps saw as a genre at an appropriate age where I could stil enjoy them
The book is about two Johns, Carmack, the ace craftsman who cares about solving problems more than he does about breathing and Romero, the ultimate gamer rockstar of the 90s, whose rags to riches stories oversaw him single-handedly play a part in shaping two genres. The book is extremely easy to read and it's just an account of how these two met, what they did together, their feud and ends with both being cordial with each other again. Carmack became too focused and judgemental to see how Romero was important, and Romero got too big of an ego to see how things were leaving him behind. Both Romero and Carmack express regret over what they did, both wish that they could stick together in various podcast appearances.
Carmack is a bonafide legend, and programmers hail him as a paragon of virtue for good reason. Here is a guy who would bang out code with full intensity till his brain shut down for 12 hours a day (not including bathroom breaks), bench 250, do judo and inhabit the focus one associates with a craftsman. Carmack not being distracted by porn playing in the background or with topless strippers delivering him pizza are impressive exmaples of how he was wierd. Romero on the other hand understood games. For all his criticisms, his work post quake was far better than Carmack in terms of impact as he fought his way to get Deus Ex released under his new banner.
I recommend the book to everyone, when I read, I hated Carmack a lot by the end but now that I have thought about it, I cannot blame either of them for much here. Also, it is quite funny that a lot of stuff there was personally relatable to me since I did spend a year at my own failed startup.
- Movie review - Kill
Kill is Indian John Wick in a train, and it does not offer anything earth-shattering. It is set in India, it has Indian actors, yet it is quite western in how it is set up. Closer to Punisher than John Wick, it is quite bleak, the love of the protagonist's life is killed off by halftime, and it is just him slaughtering people till there is no one breathing. Much like Doom, it is the criminals stuck inside a train with him rather than him stuck inside the train with a bunch of criminals. It does its action set pieces and worldbuilding fairly well for an action movie, and I recommend it since I want more people making movies that are good.
- Movie review - The Northman
Aryan as fuck, the movie screams the word Aryan so hard that it tingles my sacred thread. Eggers does a great job with the cinematography. Northman, like LOTR, is a capsule that leaves with a sense of pride for atavistic values. Values from times that will never come back. I personally liked it a lot, I was brought into Hinduism after my agnostic beliefs due to my interactions with Curwen Ares Rolinson of aryakasha.com whose blog covers his interpretations of the similarities between Aryan cultures. Ancestor worship, especially survives very strongly within my caste and in the specific area that I am in far more than most places on Earth.
Despite what I wrote, it is still not a rosy movie like LOTR. I watched it on NYE, not thinking I would like it as much. The movie is very Indo-European.
- Moview review - Babygirl
Halfway through the movie I was convinced that it was directed or written by a woman since no man who is not a pick-up artist can know the subtle details of female sexuality as much as this movie. Nicole Kidman is Milf of the week and gets erotically dicked down by her junior. As a recovering beta male who has spent way too much time on trying to get laid, the depictions of things up until the end were highly accurate. It is an erotic piece of film best enjoyed with a girl by your side. The ending is cucked ofc because a hypersexual chick directed it but it's still pretty good. The actors are extremely hot in the movie, Kidman, and they somehow make Banderas do well as a cuck. I could not recognise him in the movie since my image of him is that of a Spanish-speaking womanizer.
- Miscellaneous
Spring is gonna end in Jaipur soon as Holi marks the beginning of summer. It is a few days away and polo is gonna stop soon so I won't have my weekly interaction with the outside world on Sundays anymore. Beyond that, I am reading the now habit as suggested by a mottizen here. Have a great weekend!
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3mo ago
Appreciate it pal, the more I work, the less I care about everything else, it's very humbling seeing how little I know, how far I have to go.
Long update - tl;dr worked during terrible conditions, had a spiritual experience, developed some self respect.
Happy Mahashivratri to everyone! Shivaratri translates to the night of Shiva and celebrates his birth, I have recently begun to be influenced by Kashmir Shaivism and would meditate to celebrate the festival, it's not a real big festival like Diwali or Holi but people still offer prayers and fast.
I have two updates, the first is easier to understand as it's about work, the second relates to spiritual progress which is linked to Kashmir Shaivism.
Last weekend my family and I embarked on a journey to Mahakumb, a holy site where people celebrate the particular festival once in 12 years, it was a massive affair in India and I'll not sour everyone's Wednesday by whining about it, instead I'd like to post something I never thought I'd be abl to to do. My last month has been terrible productivity wise, past week being the literal worst, due to eye strains despite my 6/6 eyes, I got barely anything done and was worried that I'd get kicked out of diamond league on Mathacademy. We left on Saturday evening and I banged out 3 hours worth of math in 7-8 hours in a train where my family had to share the berth with me since due to constraints on expensive tickets we only got two berhs instead of 4. The other two was with another family of two, I studied for the entire duration under a pinhole light sitting without any back support inside of a small berth with constant chatter.
On the flight back, I did the same on the airport, instead of waiting around and scrolling, I decided to do math and ended up finishing my quota of 3 hours before we landed back home, even did 30 minutes on the drive back.
I have never done anything like this before, boomers here tell stories about how they studied under a street lamp on a public railway station to highlight their struggles and I was always the opposite. Fory entire life I was always the guy who looked for excuses, my aim was to live an easy life, get validated and quit as soon as things got difficult, instead this time I actually worked. Not so that my co working partners would appreciate me or because I want this forum or others arounde to think better of me but because I am a different person now. I do all that I do for my own self, I am genuinely happy when I successfully do a good days worth of work.
My posting here has reduced and that's because I can't bring myself to post updates at times since I feel that it may be kinda perverted or validation seeking to post small achievements. Though if there's anyone who's posted about his life as publicly it's me and if I can truly change from a guy who's default is to lie to himself and waste away his life to someone who genuinely acts.
My second update is one that I shared with @TowardsPanna and it's about my first spiritual experience. On 14th February I achieved what one calls Shaktipat (edit - used an incorrect word here). It's the first experience you have which marks the beginning of your spiritual journey. I woke up, worked out,meditated and when I opened my eyes after my sit, I sensory overload, a level of clarity I have never felt before. It's beyond words, you read these accounts of people who meditate and it all seems figurative, hyperbolic.
It's not, it's all real, the accounts are being literal, I've experienced some things including drugs and nothing comes close. It's not due to the euphoria, the clarity I felt was startling. I put on some drum and bass and every note was crisp for all the instruments.
So yeah, after 5 years of posting, I finally felt some tangible changes in my life, experiences that I worked for and got via sustained efforts and life feels different. I no longer care about what people think, when I have a good day I'm tired, I sleep well and look forward to repeating it the next day. I'm not as consistent as I want to be but I'm getting better and if I don't post a lot of updates, then it may mean that I'm doing well. My view of myself is quite low, working and getting better at something helps me respect myself, just a little bit.
A big reason behind all of this is this forum, I finally have a real update worth sharing and I feel a sense of joy doing so on the day of Mahashivratri. It's a long long journey, I really want to finish two more math courses, work on foundational ml models, continue my Web dev slogging as a backup plan, meditate, workout so that I can finally have some modicum of aesthetic physicality. Life is still terrible, my parents curse me every single time I chat with them but I don't reset them now and they don't resent me as much either as they see me working.
I read masters of doom before I hopped on the train and John Carmacks defining trait seemed to be his focus. They'd bring topless hookers to deliver pizza and blast porn, yet he'd be the only one working, it's quite admirable. I want to write a review of it, maybe another thread.
Life's really short, I don't want to judge people who do the minimum or are happy being in the little leagues, my aim for myself is to be as good as I can. All the things my mom or elders told me about not caring about others and distractions if you're focused enough came true. I'm satisfied, somewhat and want others here to know. It's an auspicious day for the update.
Hari Om.
They have an unreal tournament episode too which I wish to watch as the game got axed from its pre alpha. Unreal Tournament 2003(?) was the first arena shooter I played, 6 year old me was amazed by it, I need to play unreal tournament 3 now that I think of it.
I made various comments about the comparisons for AAA games then vs now. I will say that peak game enjoyment was somewhere between late 2000s and early 2010s, but peak advances were made in late 90s to early 2000s.
Games are better, but by miniscule amounts, the gameplay jumps that you had do not exist and the slight improvements are not as fun for me. Gaming was much better when it was smaller, studios spending the same time and money on a game, the way marvel does on movies, gives you marvel movie like games.
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