Flamekebab

So far I’ve mostly just aged. I’d like to be a good dad to my upcoming child.

I wear a custom-fitted mask whenever I’m out in public so they can have fun with that.

What are your requirements?

The Mr. Freeze fight certainly turns the tables. Shame I don’t play the Arkham games to be prey!

I’m glad it’s not just me that has these thoughts. Shigsy did loads of interviews back in the day.

Probably at home? I worked from home running my own business so really didn’t notice any change to my circumstances.

My elderly neighbour on the other hand - he was on a very long cycling holiday in New Zealand. He was up in the mountains when it all went down. He came down the mountain and found the place like a ghost town and had no idea what was going on!

Regardless it’s an insult I wouldn’t throw at anyone other than a fascist.

Ye gods, I’m not reading that wall. I tried to make it clear that I was not interested in continuing this interaction but let’s make it a bit more explicit: this conversation is over. You’ve been tremendously abrasive (hence my response in kind) and refuse to take the hint. I’m blocking you now. Best of luck in future interactions, I hope they’re more pleasant than this one.

…it’s not an actual apology, it’s a rhetorical device. Was that not clear?

I don’t really understand why you feel the need to second guess my own assessment of my own mind. I’m not interested in an explanation either, just to be clear. Each time you keep drawing comparisons that paint me as naïve and childlike. It’s perhaps not intentional but the end result is tremendously insulting, hence why I’m not interested in further talk on the subject.

With regards to learning new things, the world of human experience is vast. I am not shutting the door on chess out of petulance. I do so knowing the journey I would need to take is incompatible with my own preferences for discovery and growth. To my mind it is a distilled competitive logic puzzle. I don’t like logic puzzles of any complexity, and I particularly don’t like pared down ones with no set dressing or storytelling.

I am actually quite happy to engage in puzzle solving - it’s one of the things I do for a living. However there the puzzles are more cooperative and with many, many more facets to them. They can be solved in a huge number of ways and with a variety of different skills.

I’m explaining this because it seems you need it spelled out rather explicitly. Particularly as you seem to have rather strange ideas about who you’re talking to. I’m nearly 40 and your comment about not recognising past versions of myself could not possibly be further from the truth. The various iterations of myself have been built atop the old ones. The eleven year old boy is still in there, as is the teenager, twenty-something, and the several versions of me from my 30s.

I don’t necessarily know everything I like, but I’ve tried a great many things and have a firm understanding of what kinds of activities I dislike. I can also extrapolate fairly well, and it’s not like chess is an obscure interest such as shin-kicking. The journey and destination both look rather dull to me, whereas many others do not. I cannot do everything in one lifetime and must choose. Chess has had its chance with me. It blew it. The same is true for gambling, as it happens. I have tried it in various forms and found it universally dull. I also don’t enjoy ales, gloomy literature, tennis, or horror movies. There’s much about those things I don’t know and I intend to keep it that way in order to explore other potential interests. Things that I hopefully won’t be bored by, or at least I enjoy some element of the journey.

Otherwise I might as well just be working - at least then the boring bits result in a paycheque.

That’s part of my point. If we were talking about painting then the skills might well be useful for other stuff, but everything I’ve read says that it’s just a game. It doesn’t build other useful skills.

What I played was called chess, followed the rules of chess, and seemed to be chess. I didn’t like it.

Building an opinion around the game I actually played rather than some hypothetical higher level game feels like an extremely reasonable approach to me. I’m sorry that you feel it’s not, I guess.

all I said is that we are unable to objectively judge whether chess is fun or not before we’ve learned the rules and memorized common openings.

At no point did I seek to judge it objectively.

I have played some chess at various points throughout my life. My subjective judgement is that it didn’t grab me, unlike many, many other games. It might well have some divine beauty to it but the subjective barrier to entry is far too high. I also don’t bother with TV shows that “get good in the second season” or endure multiple chapters of tedium before bailing on a book.

I’m just saying don’t accuse reading of being “unfun” because you hate learning grammer and punctuation.

You’re now putting words in my mouth.

At what point did I state anything other than a subjective opinion?

In fact I went out of my way to make it abundantly clear that these are my opinions and not a judgement on the game as a whole.

It’s unfun at the level you’re at, but the next level is a completely different game. I’m not saying you have to go to the next level, just stop judging it based on the current level.

If this thread is anything to go by, I wish I’d played even less chess than I already have. Sorry that I’m enjoying my hobbies wrong?

I have not enjoyed my limited experiences with chess. They have turned me off pursuing it further. The same is not true of many other games I’ve played. To me that makes chess subjectively worse than those other games.

I really don’t buy this comparison at all. I think a better comparison would be to JRPGs - “it gets fun after 30 hours!” There’s also the presumption that a game like chess must be fun and everyone will definitely enjoy it. I’m really glad you enjoy it, I find it irritating that I don’t. However if the basics of it don’t draw me in, and I see no ancillary value in learning how to play it to a higher level, why would I continue? The world is full of enjoyable diversions and not everything is for everyone. I enjoy playing football (as in soccer) but find watching it to be awful. If I invested enough time I could perhaps find myself engaged enough in the bigger picture, care about the minutia, but why? There’s so many other things I found enjoyable from the outset. Reading included.

Pretty much the problem. It’s very pure but I find that puts me off rather than draws me in. I kind of have the same problem with Quake 3!

If you’re going to throw around an insult like that I’d like to see some working. I find chess boring, I’m not a fucking fascist.

The pared-down nature of chess really puts me off. I’m sure there’s some elegant simplicity in it but I mostly find it dull. I like an element of randomness in my games.

Chess doesn’t feel like a gateway to other, more fun games, and if it’s not a fun game for me, why would I pursue it? I’m fairly sure it doesn’t build skills that translate to anything else.

I also get that there are layers to it, although I’m adding that as apparently that’s not so self-evident as to be taken as read. I can see where the path leads and find it no more appealing than the obnoxiously boring gambling machines in casinos, or Dota2, or athletics. Learn the meta, build an understanding of the underlying concepts in order to be able to build more complex strategies based on a combination of instinctive statistical analysis and assessment of your opponent, etc. etc… I get it, I’m just not interested.

Edit: oh that’s interesting, some of you have gone into my profile and systematically downvoted my older comments. That’s what I get for not just blocking a Lemmy.ml user as soon as they chimed in.

I thought it was just the lads in my flat that called them eeeeeeeeeeeepeecees!

Bojack Horseman!

smothers it with a towel and stuffs it into an oven

Or sitting in a cupboard off-gassing, oozing, and generally making the home a safer environment.

It does remind me of the Acts of Gord’s use for an N64 - as a doorstop with a note saying “This is all I am good for.”