I’d love to see you get better sleep and more food security. That’s going to be a game changer. Do your best for now and I hope you will reduce that course load.

You take the rough with the smooth

I’ve got to get this one for my wife, it’s been too long since we saw a hefty action film with heart. She’s been pining for Kung Fu Hustle, and this sounds like it might be just the tonic.

Do you use flash cards? Anki got me through a lot of uni. Sorry I don’t have any stronger suggestions, lessening your overall work load and getting accommodations would have been my first suggestion. I guess the only other recommendation I could make is troubleshoot your sleep habits. My wife and my kid both have unmedicated ADHD and they really burn out fast on bad sleep.

You’re into an extremely rigorous degree taking a full course load, working, and planning a wedding?

I don’t even have ADHD. I can push myself and focus all day, I can memorise without struggling much - at uni, I could draw you any given amino acid from memory, and that was for an elective. And I’m telling you, what you’re describing sounds like too much for me.

Is that what they’ll do.

It sure is a lot of work to not have trains, isn’t it?

Maybe, but who pays those premiums? The driver? If it’s the auto manufacturer paying insurance premiums in perpetuity on cars that they don’t own, that will incentivise them to not actually sell those cars, but to lease them instead. The change in liability with a mass adoption of self-driving cars necessarily changes the structure of overall ownership of transport.

In the span of a century we will have went from publicly owned transportation to a system of transportation owned by corporations. This is the deeper question that has to be faced by self-driving car technology in the face of much cheaper, more environmentally friendly, safe, achievable public transport options. Automakers have shaped the conversation around transport funding for so long that these questions sound almost conspiratorial, but I urge you to consider the wider ramifications of the technology. It might seem cool to sit in a car that is driving itself, alone and unbothered, but I cannot shake the sense that it is borne of an individualism that chiefly benefits moneyed interests.

It is a question of legality more than the harm itself. When a driver kills someone, someone is responsible. When an AI kills someone, I’ll be damned if the car company will accept liability.

Maybe he could try to make another TV series.

Concerned-antocommie is such a troll alt username

They’re very different games in some respects, but Silksong for me so far is very much a direct continuation and elaboration of the creative aims of the original. Same ideas, taken further. It’s early for me, but it feels a little like it was taken in more of a Sekiro direction with the combat precision and more deliberate choice of weapons loadouts.

I can’t spoil shit, haven’t even beat the first major boss yet.

The fun of this game for me is a lot like back before GPS and ride share apps, how you might be lost at night and walking home, broke after a satisfying night out. You don’t know where you are exactly, but you feel a creeping recognition as you make your way through unfamiliar areas. Then you get a moment of pure elation as your mental map puzzles it all out. Your world feels bigger, you feel safe again, and you’re ready to return home with a true sense of satisfaction.

Then there’s the way this game trains you to fight like the main character. You can’t make too many mistakes because HP is limited and healing is often a high stakes moment, so you quickly learn a way to use the moveset - and when it clicks, it looks good.

You learn how to fight like Hornet, and the way she fights speaks to her story. Being the royal progeny of a spider and something eldritch, her style of combat is graceful yet intense, smooth as silk and totally merciless.

The surface elements (the storybook aesthetic, the gobbledygook bug-talk from amusingly forlorn characters) keep it all from becoming too grounded. If Team Cherry ever tried to make their work seem grounded in realism, I never noticed it. They use real things (like the “needle” you use as a weapon) as only small reminders that this is a story about bugs. These bugs are fully capable of metallurgy and heavy engineering, so anything that refers to the human world only exists to keep the sense of scale in focus.

To add to what you’re saying, the game changes on you so much. From the start it’s no Hollow Knight, but as you gain new abilities and ways to arrange those abilities, the game changes almost as fast as you can get good at it. I can’t wait to get into the second act.

Ten four, good buddy.

You know what? I’d have a scrap. Would you have a scrap?

It’s not simple. The only real way I have to know if it’s a problem is to react based on whether the jokes are funny or not.

Example: When my life is being literally ruined, I don’t joke about suicide, I joke about how much fun I’m having. When I get a loose eyelash stuck under my eyelid though it’s right to “Jesus fuck just kill me please”.

When you’re a kid with no understanding of game design, no internet, and no subscription to magazines that explain it, all those dirty tricks that we now rightly put to much rubbish did have the power to make you think “I suck at this”. They didn’t have to be clever back then to give us this insane need to be punished by game designers just the right amount so that we can finally just try really hard, get really annoyed, stick with it way too long, and eventually get to say “yes, fuck you, I win!” For a certain kind of kid from that generation, that’s almost a healing fantasy.

I’m only saying I agree with the chap. Have you been to Paris? It’s lovely in April.

Time will tell. These games all have so much talk about how certain builds are “cheese” or how the ashes make the game too easy or whatever - that’s all just dumb. The game itself is the difficulty settings, sometimes.

It seems too early to say how Silksong will be remembered, and Team Cherry still only had two games under its belt so it’s arguably too early to judge them. Will their next game be totally different and a massive risk, or do we have a Vivaldi on our hands, doing masterful variations on a theme?

I hate to answer a rhetorical question directly, so please forgive that; my satisfaction would have been much greater, if I was able to achieve those things. I have a realistic sense of what I was able to do given the challenge that I faced and the skill I was able to muster, and although more success would have been sweeter, I am able to be content because I have a shared context with other people who faced the exact same challenge.

I know many have been unhappy with what they are able to accomplish in games with no difficulty settings, and I see it as a choice by the creator to set people apart. It’s a harsh choice that seems most appropriate in grim and harsh stories.

Those who say it is passé argue so very convincingly, but I can’t hide that it appeals to me. It speaks to something primitive, perhaps anhedonic. I was wondering if it’s a generational preference more prevalent among people who grew up during the era of “Nintendo hard”, and if single-difficulty games will fade away in time completely. Maybe this game should have been called Swansong, if so.

There might also be a generational divide taking shape. People my age grew up with “Nintendo hard” and the industry was all about making games seem longer by making them extremely difficult to beat. Our options were to get better, cheat, or give up.

These days the industry is all about mass appeal, and all the problems that we see with games having massive budgets and having to make sure as many people can like them as possible. Indie games have different incentives, and so when a game comes along that was made with priorities that aren’t in step with what we’re used to, it tends to ruffle feathers.

I know my kid doesn’t have any sense that games should be difficult, or that a challenging game can be satisfying. Even FromSoft games are trending towards less difficulty, despite having the fans who famously chant “git gud”. Bigger studios might know something my generation doesn’t get about younger gamers - maybe games like Silksong are having their swansong, so to speak. I hope not, but it’s hard not to notice once it’s been pointed out.

The thing is, I can’t personally think of an accessibility setting that would serve the intended function without removing the sense of having finally met the challenge. I struggle with difficult games too, and I don’t always complete them. That struggle and uncertainty is part of the journey though to me and if there was a difficulty tweak available as soon as I got frustrated the first time, it would erase those stakes (for me).

I mentioned Celeste as a positive example. I did feel a satisfaction with completing that game, but if not for the highly emotional personal journey of the narrative potion of that game I don’t think it would have been as satisfying. At every point I knew there was an easy way out, and staying frustrated and gradually getting better was a conscious choice without any real stakes attached to it other than my own self-satisfaction. The was never any worry that I’d fail to complete the game. Those stakes do make eventually winning feel real.

So I just can’t think of any suggestions for this. It’s elitist or ableist I realise, and I’m not happy with that. The creator certainly was aware of games like Celeste, and they had plenty of time to consider those options. Before casting any judgment or making suggestions on their behalf, I’d be really interested to hear what they have to say about the choice. Do they think the struggle has to be as firmly set as it is for the triumph to feel as elating? I can’t read their minds, so if there’s an interview where they address that I’d be all ears.