Getting it done with the power of friendship since 1991.

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Discord for Japanese-style role-playing game (JRPG) discussion: Seventh Heaven - come say hello!

  • 4 Posts
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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2025

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  • Seconding this on going without sex hormones, from first-hand experience: it’s absolutely not a place for a depressive to be, to the point where I would consider a psychiatrist willing to okay it for a depressive patient to be dangerously ignorant, at best. I urge you to seek out a new mental health team for this and other reasons.

    Also, I’m surprised no one’s mentioned this: sex with friends is a thing. I’ve had just as much sex with friends in my life as I have in committed relationships. It just requires good communication and boundaries.


  • When one breaks something down to its components, nothing is new under the sun. I used to feel the same about games several years ago (albeit a little more about story rather than gameplay), but I eventually I reframed that into familiar systems and stories being comfort food. Now I actively seek those things out. That way, I’m generally assured of some enjoyment at worst, and at best I find some fun ways developers are putting twists on frequently-used concepts. Some of my all-time favorites are games I’ve played only in the past few years.

    I also felt that way about time wasting, but once I started being more intentional and structured about my daily goal setting and time boxing my day, that went away. Now when I’m done for the day, I’m done for the day and I give myself permission to have downtime. Tangentially, Adderall also helped with this by giving me a hard physical signal to tell me I’m probably not going to get much more done for the rest of the day. Unfortunately, these days now I’m often too tired during the week. 🤷🏻‍♀️

    That said, I also don’t like achievements. It’s something I would have loved 30 years ago back when there was way less to play, but there’s too much choice now. I’d rather see what else is out there instead of spending time digging into something I’ve already seen most of. Feels like diminishing returns. Some people really get into it, though.


  • Andor isn’t nearly that straightforward about it. It’s complicated and messy, with self-interested people juxtaposed against the idealists. Most of it is character-centered, soul-sucking spycraft tension like The Lives of Others or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but then also exasperating bureaucracy as in Chernobyl–and Stellan Skarsgard is equally phenomenal in Andor. Your toys aren’t here either; no lightsabers, few scenes with the old droids, very little time in space. Most of the time you need the architecture and the stormtroopers and Imperial dress whites to recognize it as a Star Wars setting.

    It’s completely different than any Star Wars screen production before it.



  • Mass implementation is a mistake, and I suspect implementation in consumer goods is where the bubble’s bursting will be the most devastating. Recent news tells us Dell has figured that out already, and I don’t think it will be long before society decides it can’t tolerate things like AI companions for young children.

    Ultimately, I don’t think widespread implementation with any sort of value will be possible unless someone figures out how to make effective prompt creation so easy anyone can do it. Everyone seems to think AI is just a box you press a button on and it’ll spit something out, but getting valuable output isn’t like that. Good prompt engineering and tool selection is hard, and it’ll have to be a trained skill for people working with the systems generative AI does stick around on.

    The really unfortunate thing is LLMs are the perfect snake oil for sociopathic executives. They can provide something approximating meaningful human interaction to these lonely, workaholic MBAs, and from there, it wasn’t a hard sell to make them believe they could replace their pesky labor force, too. When you’re that far outside the real world, sycophantic illusions are seductive.






  • Well, something to consider is that engaging on Reddit isn’t even on the level of limited individual action like voting is. You’re having a cascading effect on the viability of the site by engaging with other people. It’s what makes the site function. You’re the product for advertisers in more ways than one.

    Besides, clearly you believe in the power of collective action making a difference, given you’re promoting firearms training with others. Same energy applies to withdrawing from the site.






  • Yeah, that’s part of why it was so disappointing! Hah. I had a really good time with Kingmaker, really the only big complaint I had about it was the encounter density. Just far, far too many fights. The kingdom management fell off the rails at the end, too, but at least that was a pretty small part of the game. So I figured I’d love WotR. Most of my complaints are with the story (especially since I loved Kingmaker’s villain, so that’s a tough bar to clear), not the gameplay, but yeah, so much of it didn’t land for me.


  • This feels like cope a bit, honestly. The thing about the current push for system requirements these days is it’s less about visual fidelity and more about saving development time. This is especially the case with ray tracing, with setups that are far easier to get passable lighting on. Not that there’s ever a fortunate time for exploding hardware prices, but it’s especially unfortunate that they hit while the most popular GPUs right now are 3060 and 4060s. Not exactly RT powerhouses. It would have been better for everyone involved if RT hardware was a generation ahead, and the “we want to spend less time on optimization” part of the push isn’t going to stop.

    I don’t know if the AAA devs will hit the brakes a bit on visual fidelity in response to the hardware situation slowing down, but that and the gradual rise of handheld PCs will certainly create an opportunity for lower-spec games to find a market.