self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2hr ago
One of the small tragedies of aging, for me, has been watching my relationship to video games invert along the classic time-money-energy triangle.
When I was younger I had basically infinite time and near-infinite energy, and almost no money. This meant I could grind for ten hours straight, but only if the game was free, or pirated, or ran on a potato, and only if I was willing to tolerate 200ms ping to Europe from India. I wanted the hobby very badly and could not afford to do it properly.
Now the triangle has rotated. I have the money, finally, and I went out and bought the absurd top-of-the-line PC that 16 yo me would have posted about reverently on forums. It mostly sits there collecting dust, because I rarely have the time, and more importantly I no longer have the energy. After work and adult responsibilities, launching anything more demanding than a browser feels like a project.
I hate this. Some of my best social memories are from gaming. The peak was late-night Arma sessions with my UK friends, where it would be 2am for me and completely reasonable for them, and we would spend three hours planning an operation that fell apart in ninety seconds. I was important, I was indispensable, they literally would have to pack up and quit without me. We ended up grabbing beers, almost a decade since I got to know them, and several years since I was playing with them regularly. They didn't feel like strangers at all.
I was never particularly good at Escape From Tarkov, my survival rate high because of caution and a preference to always work as part of a team, but I was patient, which turns out to be a rarer skill than good aim. I was also a good mentor, the patient kind, the kind that still remembered the many ways you had to learn to avoid the game dragging your juts over ground glass. Over a few years I ended up shepherding maybe half a dozen new players scattered around Southeast Asia from total noob panic to genuinely cracked PVP players. Most of them do not need my help anymore, but they still remember it, which feels disproportionately meaningful.
I bring up Tarkov here because it is a terrible game in almost exactly the way people mean when they joke about CBT. It is deliberately unpleasant, unfair, and stressful. And because of that, it ends up being a weirdly good test of character. You learn quickly who tilts, who blames lag, who can lose a full kit they spent a week building and still laugh and queue again. You learn, very quickly, who you can rely on to cover your back, who isn't greedy about loot, who can be trusted to repay every favor. Suffering does not automatically build character, but voluntary suffering with stakes you care about will at least reveal it.
Which brings me to the broader point I keep coming back to when people my age get sniffy about games. Video games are not a unified thing any more than books are. The medium does not determine the value, the specific activity does. Spending six hours a day on Candy Crush is cognitively equivalent to mainlining low-effort YouTube Shorts or reading vampire smut on Wattpad under the covers. It's not morally corrupting, but you are still consuming empty calories. Spending six hours building a nuclear reactor in Factorio, or watching a 3Blue1Brown series until you finally intuit linear algebra, is edifying in the same way a good nonfiction book is. In other words, it's not the act of eating, it's the difference between junk and genuine nutrition.
I do hope I get the old energy back someday, in the same way you hope an old injury finally heals. In the meantime I have mostly substituted one low-cost dopamine loop for another. I argue with strangers on the internet and indulge a pretty shameless addiction to insight porn. It is not the same as staying up all night with friends, and if I am honest it is probably a cope, but it is at least a cope I can respect. And hey, it brings me the kind of attention I really craved. Younger me would have been awe-struck to learn that he had the opportunity to meet Scott, that he's been read and re-shared by Gwern, that people genuinely remember him for his writing and express their appreciation for it. It's not a bad place to be, I just wish I could still play the vidya and enjoy it like I used to.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2hr ago
That's... a lot to munch on, in a good way. I have a lot of thoughts, but I'll have to come back when I have the time to compose them. Saying this just in case you think that all your hard work and effort went unnoticed, it didn't!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
17hr ago
I was so mad when I read about them bringing on a psychiatrist for their assessment. Should have been me...
I can't say that my tastes have changed, more like I've lost most of my ability to enjoy the games I used to love, while it's very rare for something new to come out and strike my interest. MENACE is great, and I played it a decent amount, but it's pretty much what I'd tell you I enjoy ten years back.
Marathon doesn't look bad, and it seems much better on release than the initial preview. They fixed the worst of the issues. The thing is, I liked Tarkov for reasons that aren't just "it's an extraction shooter". I'm a gun-nut, I have a fetish for realistic tacticool firearms. I love milsim games and team play, and 90% of my 1700 hours in Tarkov was in a squad. I don't mind some degree of punishment. What killed Tarkov for me was the difficulty and grind going from awful to unbearable, without enough new content to draw me back in.
Marathon doesn't excite me. I look at it, and go, eh, not bad. The guns are not as punchy or visceral, the stakes are nowhere near as high, and while I don't mind the scifi setting or aesthetic, it's not a major draw.
Same reason I haven't bought ARC Raiders, even if it seems like a great game. But that has its own issues: Third person in a PVP shooter? Shoot me first, not third.
On the other hand, I did try Grey Zone Warfare, which had a rocky launch, but had a recent massive update that's made it much better, with the player numbers to match. It's my best bet for a Tarkov killer. I'd probably be playing it right now, if I didn't have a lot on my plate. Maybe I will, once the exams are over.
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