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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2054 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 30, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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When is the last time you truly got sucked into something, and experienced a sense of childlike wonder?

For me it was, predictably, watching the VisionOS demo. I found it magical, and so exciting to think of the future of where that technology could go.

The GPT-4 release and my first tryst with Stable Diffusion as a closed Alpha tester.

Had that sense of future shock yesterday, that dawning realization that I'm on the cusp of the Singularity and that you all need to learn to love sci-fi novels, 'cause you're living in one now.

Playing King's Bounty: The Legend. Watching some of the movies by Wes Anderson. Both are quite eager to defy genre conventions.

Oh, and watching Bobby McFerrin live. It's the same feeling of discomfort as Anderson's movies when an old Black guy in front of you starts to babble, but then you get into it.

Honestly, playing with midjourney when it first came out was really exciting. I've never been good at drawing but always had ideas of things I wanted to draw, and being able to generate decent approximations out of thin air felt like magic.

Edit: also recently tried an E Bike. That felt like I was Iron Man or something, like it made me feel like a super person. Super fun.

Last year when I started playing Breath of the Wild

I've been playing it the last few days! I struggled to get into it, but it finally clicked yesterday and I'm having a blast. Part of the reason I wrote this post, actually.

Out of curiosity, what made it hard for you to get into it initially?

Have you played Tears of the Kingdom yet?

Not yet - I'm still slowly making my way through Hyrule in the BoTW. It's taken me over a year and counting to finish the game; I only play a few hours a week and when I play, I explore every nook and cranny because I find the map so enchanting and fun. The sense of "childlike wonder", as the OP put it, is still going strong.

What about you?

I don't own a Switch nor have the desire to emulate the game on PC. But, I've only read good things about ToTK, and it's great to hear that, after all this time, you're still enjoying BoTW.

A new insight to fill the last gap in my last graph theory paper. It was incredibly bitchy to prove the nonexistence of a counterexample in generality, but there suddenly appeared a bijection with a large but ultimately finite family of strings that could be ruled out case by case.

I’ve had the feeling before (research, homework, Project Euler). The secret sauce is 20+ hours of fruitless struggle beforehand :)

Fascinating. I'm too uninformed to understand this, but it sounds nice. Congratulations.

I'm currently in the middle of probably my third playthrough of Alien Isolation. Within about half an hour of my first playthrough I had a really strong feeling that this would be a game I would find hard to put down and would return to again and again. The controls are tight and responsive, the level of detail and craft that went into replicating the visuals of the original Alien from 1979 is breathtaking, the sound design is impeccable, the atmosphere is more powerful than BioShock.

Suffice it to say that, even though it's my third playthrough, I'm itching to get back to playing it.

Having seen the film several times, and having read about the game, the idea of playing it seems just.. incomprehensible.

The film shows what you get for being insufficiently paranoid and unarmed out there in the unknown. It's meant to be unpleasant for a good reason.

Doing it over and over again ... well, we are all different.

The game alternates between sequences in which the player character must evade the Alien; and downtime sequences which advance the plot, or in which the player character must face off against other enemies.

The latter sequences are at worst a little tense to play, but manageably so. The former sequences with the Alien are exhausting. When I get to the end of such a sequence, I typically find myself needing to take a break for a little bit just to calm down. I think that's the mark of an effective horror story, really.

I felt bad about never finishing the game, about giving up, stuck, at a save game where I can either sneak out and inevitably get slaughtered shortly afterward or stay in my hiding spot until the end of time ...

But you've given me a whole new perspective! It's not that I suck too badly to win and lack the fortitude to keep trying through death after terrifying death, it's that I'm trying to be faithful to film canon.

stay in my hiding spot until the end of time

Wait, you can get soft-locked in the game like that, or do you merely have to wait five minutes for the alien to wander off ?

In theory: wait a few minutes for the alien to wander off, sneak out, use well-practiced stealth skills to evade the alien, make progress.

In my game (when I got enough levels in): wait a few minutes for the alien to wander off, sneak out, realize my stealth skills are not well-practiced enough when the alien inevitably finds me...

Not the game's fault, I'm sad to say. I was improving from level to level, but not quite as quickly as the difficulty was increasing.

While I played a bit of Minecraft early on, it was VERY early on, pre-nether.

During the summer of 2020 many of my friends and family, including those who hadn't played many video games in years, were stuck inside more for obvious reasons. So one of my friends spun up a Minecraft server for everyone to play on.

Between the new stuff added to the game in my long absence, the fresh world and people playing and building stuff at all hours (between furloughs, different shifts and different time zones) I was constantly discovering new things while playing and was often sharing that experience with people who I had not talked to as much as I'd have liked in recent years due to diverging paths in life.

Died down over time, once again for obvious reasons, but for a month or two it recaptured the feeling of playing games with friends back in elementary.

Didn't make up for all the stuff we couldn't do, but it definitely helped take the edge off.

Ahh yeah, that's my favorite thing about videogames. Every now and then you can recreate that feeling of freedom you had when you were a kid. The sense that there's a large open world to explore, and you have so few restrictions. The surprise, etc is crucial. Glad to hear it helped you through the lockdowns bud.

Everytime I go to the ballet. Those dancers can almost fly. And to be able to do so while making putting their body into a pleasing pose I'm still amazed after years.

I sort of chase that feeling with the stories I like to read. Big expansive fantasy worlds. There is sometimes a moment when reading where I lose sight of the words in front of me and the specific story, and my mind wanders to other possibilities within the world. I will also chase it at night when I'm trying to fall asleep by conjuring up my own fantasy worlds and cities. Sometimes my dreams will deliver even if my waking mind has been too distracted with the real world.

I also have two young kids, and sometimes I can experience a bit of vicarious child wonder by watching their reactions.

There have also been some video games I've played where I realized early on "oh hell yeah, I'm in for an awesome ride, this game is gonna be awesome!" Usually happens the first time I play a game of a newish genre. Terraria, Factorio, Minecraft, Mount and Blade, Kerbal Space Program, Hardspace: shipbreaker, and Hades were all games I found as an adult, but also instantly knew I'd enjoy them for many hours.

I was struggling to gesture at this exact feeling.

There is sometimes a moment when reading where I lose sight of the words in front of me and the specific story, and my mind wanders to other possibilities within the world. I will also chase it at night when I'm trying to fall asleep by conjuring up my own fantasy worlds and cities. Sometimes my dreams will deliver even if my waking mind has been too distracted with the real world.

Wow, I can relate to this 100%. I could've written those sentences, I have done the exact same thing most of my life. It's truly an amazing feeling, the only time it seems my mind can truly relax.

Don't plan to have kids, but I could see that being a huge plus.

I absolutely got that feeling with Terraria as well.

Without outside substance influence? I can't remember. But I was in Thailand in February and for whatever reason decided with some friends to consume cannabis gumi. I have smoked pot probably a few dozen times in my life, but because of where I live and the draconian laws I haven't done so in at least 20 years. So this sudden reacquaintance with mon vieux had unexpected effects. I recall we were sitting at some bar, as one does in Thailand at night, and I had the most intense feeling that everyone present I had known before in a previous life. Now I know what you may be thinking. But no. This was not some sentimental cloying feeling of camaraderie, but a very real conviction, without passion, that all of the people present I had not only known before, but known throughout a full lifetime that had a beginning, middle, and end. And I also realized that none of the people there knew it, or needed to know it. Nor did I announce this in some slurred declaration. I just knew it.

I know it was bullshit. But this is one of the reasons that I absolutely love pot--with the caveat that I never go near it in normal life. A good reason to get back to Thailand someday.

I apologize if this isn't quite what you're after, and I suspect it isn't. I do know what you mean though, and those moments of childlike wonder are worth coin.

This reminds me of an experience I had in Western China.

My brother and I had been traveling through random places throughout Yunnan for about a month and found ourselves in the historic district of a city in the low Himalayas. This being the region where tea was first cultivated, we found a tea shop to browse; they had thousands of teas, fresh and aged, fermented, cakes pressed into elaborate shapes hanging from the walls. The owner and his wife were fascinated to see us (blonde, Dutch young men, one of us fluent in Mandarin) and invited us into their living area where we enjoyed drinking many rare and expensive teas with his family late into the evening. They had a tea preparing table carved into an elaborate landscape, the teaset occupying clearings and civilized areas, the runoff water and spent tea rushing down miniature mountain streams.

Now, if you've ever had much truly good tea in a short time, you may know that it can affect you in ways foreign to mere caffeine. https://youtube.com/watch?v=HrLaKX9J8Uo The Cha Zui, tea drunk, is usually a state I perceive as a mild euphoria accompanied by a moderate strengthening of subjective experience and creativity. I use it to read or write a good fantasy.

This time was different.

As we left, red lanterns burned high over cobblestone streets and lit the edges of golden carved eaves above us. We stopped for a quick drink at a basic bar; everything was delightful and dreamlike, time seemed utterly meaningless; it was just now, light, color, sway, peace. We returned to our lodgings and I sat on the bed, suddenly caught in an urge to meditate, and the elaborately carved lantern above my bed exploded into ten thousand sides and facets, each with a divine message, purpose, meaning that I seemed to plumb without end. After, I simply felt content with it all and fell asleep.

Still the most vivid ecstatic experience I've ever had. Perhaps all the new experiences of travel can leave us susceptible to such things? Or perhaps I've just never had that many decades-old teas over the course of a few hours before.

Funnily enough, a few days later we found ourselves in the home of some old crone trying to sell us some wild marijuana she had harvested from the mountainside, but that's another story.

Ha! An amazing experience, thanks for sharing. I would like to hear the old crone story at some point down the line as well, if you ever feel like telling it. The most obscure tea I have had is Lapsang Souchong which some call "bacon tea" and which was purportedly Churchill's favorite tea. I measured out a bag of it last time I was in the US (though it is a Chinese tea it is hard as hell to find in Japan). I have to keep it wrapped in said bag and locked in a metal tin to contain the odor--which I like, but which is a bit potent. Never had any groovy experiences drinking it, but a hot cup of it is great, nothing at all like the usual Earl Grey (that I also enjoy.) Did you ever get any names of those teas you drank?

Hah, Lapsang Souchong is a flavor blast to be sure! I like it from time to time, but my favorite use for it is actually to steep it in bourbon for a day to get a more complex, smokey Old Fashioned out of it.

No other tea I know of is so deliberately and strongly smoked, but some very rural/single family teas still have a bit of a smokey aroma from having been dried just in the rafters of their family homes, which tend to accumulate smoke from cooking or heating fires.

The specific teas we were drinking are long gone - they were aged Pu'erh teas, which like wine are sold by grove and year, each production being a small and local affair, and many were several decades old at that point. But you can find various ones like them, say, here - https://yunnansourcing.com/collections/aged-raw-pu-erh-tea

I stay stocked up on them, imho it's the most interesting genre of tea out there. Stark and bitter, though! It's an ascetic enjoyment.

Rock Oolong and Dragon Well are two excellent teas that will also reliably give you a tea buzz, but if you're in Japan a high-quality Sencha can do the same. Wouldn't try with Lapsang or Earl grey, you're gonna blast out your taste buds and stomach before you get close.

Red Dead Redemption 2, maybe?

Interesting. I’ll have to add that to the list. Picking up a lot of games this summer sale.

Is it sad that this unironically seems cool to me?

Skinsuits are standard tropes favored by older 'impossible women', and I thought this would be something like it but it's vastly less sad and vastly more hilarious.

but ...cool ?

Did we read the same thing ? I don't think I've read a more disturbing thing this week

I mean the ending is crazy and disturbing of course, by design. But a totally impervious suit that basically augments your movements, makes you stronger, makes you perceive more, and lets you record all of your sensory input? That sounds amazing if we can get it right, leaving behind the tongue in cheek dystopian bullshit.

.. I don't think you were reading it carefully enough.

(euch)

:(

What's an "impossible woman"?

Impossible women are to women what Impossible Meat(tm) is to meat.

It's a humorous euphemism.

Hah I like his writing, thanks.

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