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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2023

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  • It’s not reductive, it’s misrepresentative. A puzzle game is only a puzzle game as long as coming up with the solution is the main task. There are more than enough games where coming up with the right solution is not difficult, but performing it is.

    Also the name puzzle game implies that there are designed puzzles. Any game where you have to make decisions in generated situations aren’t puzzle games. For example if you take a specific chess situation and ask which move would lead to check mate in x moves then that’s a chess puzzle. That doesn’t make the game of chess itself a puzzle.




  • Name one situation where this device makes killing someone easier than it already is.

    You think that this device is considered less lethal than the knee that killed George Floyd?

    Do you think the police officers who shot a civilian in the back several times or who shot a man in his car when he told them that he had a licensed firearm in the glove compartment were thinking rationally enough to be worried about collateral damage?

    These drones are too expensive and unwieldy to be used in situations like that, so they could only be used in a premeditated killing. So let’s check these out:

    A civilian wouldn’t use them, because attaching a bomb to an off the shelve drone is much cheaper, and you can buy everything you need without raising eyebrows.

    When the government kills one of their citizens they don’t kill them on the spot. They put them on death row for years, kill them with an injection and then watch John Oliver make an episode on the people and companies that were involved.

    When they kill people in other countries collateral damage is not really holding them back. And also: they already use missiles with blades instead of explosives.

    I really can’t imagine a situation where these drones would make things worse than they already are.



  • I understand the criticism of the tone of the video, but what I totally don’t understand is that some comments say that this technology was “scary”.

    How? You are aware that we are loving in a world where missiles can carry nuclear bombs and where thousands of those are kept in working condition so they could be launched at any moment? A world where terrorists have successfully destroyed a building in another country with a plane? Where school shootings are a thing? Where there is a war in the Ukraine where much cheaper drones are used to kill much more efficiently with explosives?

    I guarantee you that no one will ever acquire one of these drones to attack an individual because there are so many ways that are cheaper and easier and have been around for decades.





  • you’d never have player movement in the GameManager class

    You want to bet? (Source: I teach game programming on a college level.)

    But yeah, your comment about the gear icon is sadly more true than people may realize. Game developers do questionable things. => Engine developers cater to people. => Students argue that if something is supported it can’t be that bad. Sometimes it feels like fighting windmills.


  • The real naming fail is calling the class “GameManager”, still my number one pet peeve. With a class name as vague as that you would have to add tons of information into the variable name. (Also the class name begs for unorganized code. I mean name one function or variable that you could not justify putting into the “GameManager” class. After all if it’s managing the game it could justifiably perform any process in the game and access any state in it.)

    Once you put the first bool into a class with a name like AccessibilitySettings, calling it something like HighContrast is completely sufficient.










  • I am surprised no one mentioned my all time favorite: The Fly by David Cronenberg with Jeff Goldblum.

    Most horror movies present you with an external threat. The good protagonist is threatened by external forces like zombies, murderers, psychopaths etc. The Fly is different in that there isn’t really a bad guy. You identify with the monster just as much as with their victim.

    For me that makes a much more powerful horror experience, because in my day to day life I don’t have any meaningful external threats. Sure, there are thieves, murderers, angry mobs etc. in our world, but it’s not like I woke up hoping that today I wouldn’t meet one of them.

    But this fear of losing control over yourself, lashing out at your children, saying something wrong at work or losing control in a very different way like finding out you have a tumor that has been growing inside of you for a long time - those threats are much more real to me.