I’m close to a similar point, my PC has been Linux for a couple of years but my old surface book has been on windows 10 (with some 6 year security update thing that was mentioned during the time Win 10 was dropped).
The main reason I haven’t dropped it is that I sometimes use it for work or uni, so compatibility and other people being familiar has been a priority but I’ve graduated and got a work laptop so it’s probably time to drop Windows outright.
I would consider myself a Lord of the Rings fan, I’ve read the books maybe 3 times through and read The Silmarillion once.
I forgot the ring makes people invisible.
I did hear a point about general game dev trends which is how optimisation wasn’t really a step in older games like it is now. When confined to the MB scale, or even just the finite scale of a single disc, the process wasn’t one of bloat and then half-arsed optimization but hyper optimised from the get go. I don’t think this shift is entirely the performance budget of modern games, but the multi-platform, limitless upper end, no disc limit design of modern games.
In the film, we see the ring shrink to Isildur’s ring size when he hold it, and it remains that size when Déagol finds it, after thousands of years without a carrier.
If you put it on a chicken, it is also gonna get really small, like chicken fingers small.
I’m not sure if this is a pro or con.
I forgot Gemini was an LLM and thought this was hate for people born May 21st - June 21st, that they are dumb due to trepanning.
It is my first distro where I’m not dual booting to Windows.
I swapped to it in May from Endeavour OS as I happened to be doing a clean install, and 90% of my PC usage nowadays is gaming, and I have never looked back, even though I thought Endeavour OS would have been the end of my Distro hopping.
I went into this lukewarm on Nolan and a massive nerd for The Odyssey, so I was primed to be unhappy with any unfaithful choice, but honestly I was absolutely blown away.
One thing that stood out to me would be the general interpretation that the sea people causing the bronze age collapse was actually the declining of an honour code that is seen in the ancient greek laws of hospitality. I’d often thought about the tonal shift between the age of heroes and the Illiad onwards, how the Caledonian Boar Hunt may have been the last key event of Heroic age, and by the end of The Oresteia and The Aeneid, the early identity of the post-bronze-age collapse Mediterranean societies are visible. The sea people concept is largely debunked now, and the collapse is generally considered to be a mix of famine, climate disasters and most importantly the collapse of relationships between the east Mediterranean states.
Nolan then taking this as Odysseus’s fear of travelling home, a changed man, to a world he changed for the worse, is particularly powerful, and his take on Athena as a manifestation of this guilt at breaking Zeus law and witnessing a very real rape and pillage of the city due to his subterfuge was good. I also think that Zendaya was very likely this interpretation’s version of Cassandra too, which is neat.
I went into the film already guarded against the visual style. I’d have loved to have seen an authentic approach at bronze age style from talented art directors and production designers, and I had similar feelings about the muted and gloomy colour palette. I still have these feelings; everyone looked like a monochrome Roman, not even a classical Greek, but seeing the direction as a whole, I understand the choice. The somber narrative, editing style, soundtrack, etc, all serve the same tone that the muted and stripped by colour and art style do.
That said, I’m shocked at the lack of spears in this film. Everyone fights with short swords and no shields, which is basically a Hollywood fantasy in any time in history, but this is the iconic era of spears. I counted one use of a spear, despite several war scenes, and almost every death at the hands of a weapon would have been prevented with a shield.
As a fun side fact, people who play VR combat games like Blade and Sorcery often start using swords and default to spears and clubs, because they’re incredibly intuitive to untrained people compared to swords, which have a far more tactical skill ceiling, making them the default of soldiers right through the era of knights with swords.
Another fun side fact. Ajax, a 5th Century BCE poem about the PTSD driven suicide of Ajax the Greater towards the end of the Trojan war, was performed to 500 marines in 2008, I think by Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, and Michael J. Fox, and was remarked to resonate incredibly strongly with the audience. Myth from the Trojan was onwards suddenly really cares about consequence, particularly in regards to the human condition.
My other pet peeve is the sound design of the weapons (Odysseus’s incredible bow string sound excluded). This was a very ‘swish and pew’. Back in the early 2010s, I stumbled across a Skyrim mod that changed the bow sounds (example here) and I was amazed how much more satisfying it was, not just from a realism point, but just a pleasant resonant heavy sound, like how shooter games have hit marker sounds. Not just was every launched arrow (including from Odysseus) very whistly, but so was every sword swing. For a film with otherwise incredible sound design (so good I’d peg it for winning the oscar this year), every fight was a bland cartoony swish fest.
I also thought the massacre of the suitors was a little bit unwarranted in it’s action set piece style. It makes sense that a trained warrior king who spent a decade in a bloody war would be a better combatant and a bunch of immature suitors, but I think it just overstepped my suspension of disbelief a few times, in a way the monsterous and magical elements didn’t.
My closing thought is that this may be one of the best adaptations of Greek myth at all. It’s ability to take the tonal shift that is the Trojan war and its concluding breaking of Zeus’s Law and the sack of the temple of Athena, pointing that to the beginning of the end of Mycenaean Greece, and its neighbours, and then tying that so incredibly to Odysseyus’s character arc and PTSD is so well done. The fact that my cirques are so specific and nit-picky is a testament to the strength of this film.
Don’t worry, they make them look like people as a silly game, we’ll be chased down the street by drones.
It’s strange to look back at the Legend of Korra and realise it was totally fine, just worse than the original show, when comparing it to literally everything else that’s come from the IP since.
I played and modded Skyrim at the wazoo back in the day too, and haven’t touched it in a decade. It still holds a really special place in my heart in a worldbuilding and lore space that nothing I’ve played since, newer or older has sated quite as strongly, including other elderly scrolls games.
I’ve just started replaying it, as there is basically an entire story’s worth of high quality expanded mod content to explore, plus the original game has faded to a point of re-enjoying it. I’m probably going to introduce my partner to it with my own riff on the Gate to Sovngarde modlist.
The thing is, I don’t care for the next game. I have no trust in Bethesda to make something that scratches the itch that Skyrim did, I don’t expect it to be moddable in the same way looking at the creation club, and I literally expect it to be an objectively boring game.
If I want more of the elder scrolls experience I fell in love with, I have it in the old games.
I finally got round to a significant upgrade to my PC last week. I’ve been running the same PC for 10 years, and it’s really been dying. Fans and HDDs were failing, and it couldn’t play new games at all.
I haven’t replaced my GPU (still on a GTX 980ti) but I jumped to some decent DDR4 RAM, a better CPU, and moved into an SFF case, but I have no confidence any prices are set to stabilise, so I just gave in and built what I could.
Mushroom circles grow in circles because they drain the nutrients from the ground, and eventually you have a nutrient barren center that grows with the ring of mushrooms around it.
I wonder if this is something similar, although I’ve not heard of mold using up a resource before.
I’m 95% sure it isn’t, I’ve obsessed over that game for years and this makes no sense to me.
Edit: It’s the wizard of Oz
TLDR: I think AI is coming for teaching (for better or worse), but not coming to replace us, because the teacher:student ratio is already as poor as can be.
I’m a teacher. Giving a serious answer, AI is likely going to be very involved in this industry over the next decade, purely for it’s ability to track and scaffold individual learning better than one adult doing the same for 30 people, but that would require a shift to even more digital learning, which takes the “how” of teaching out of the hands of a teacher in a way it currently is not.
That said, I don’t actually think it’s coming for my job precisely because there is 1 teacher to every 30 students. If you compare us to how cashiers have been replaced by self service tills, teachers have already been stripped to a minimal coverage of the classroom, and you cannot have 30 students independently working, because children and teenagers are predominantly motivated to avoid working. I’m this regard, it can only supplement our job, as they can’t meaningfully cut the adult to student ratio further for safety reasons.
Also, although I think it’ll start to be seen in the next 10 years, I’m not sure where it would come in. State schools do not have the budget, energy or time to experiment with individualised AI learning support, and private schools prefer to maintain older styles of teaching for a long time, as they prioritise the development of attitude and trust over academic scores as not only does it supplement academic scores, but it is what the corporate employers of privately educated students seek above merit.
Funnily enough I actually have Firefox open by default whenever I boot up my PC.
I have no taskbar or desktop items. I always default to a specific workflow of pressing the windows key (or whatever we call it for Linux), and searching for everything. I have since early windows 10.
I realised that 90% of the time, I was opening Firefox, so now it just opens. I have a pretty minimal toolbar setup for it, so it’s basically just an address bar that automatically focuses when I start typing.
One day I’ll set up something where I have multiple search hotkeys for web search, file search, application search, music etc, that will sort of replace this.
China aren’t strictly speaking allies. They get a lot of oil from Iran and have plenty of deals in place, to the point that many people believe that the Venezuela coup and Iran war are a US ploy to destabilise China specifically.
China basically stay out of geopolitics far more than people assume. They are very unlikely to enter the Iran war on either side, ever.
27 here, back to university too for similar reasons and seeing the same thing.
I don’t actually blame the lecturers or teachers. A huge part of higher education is self motivated learning with access to people who are incredibly knowledgeable, who also happen to be your teachers / lecturers.any lectures are there to guide the topics of independent learning.
Until a certain point, the purpose of most education was education itself. The matter half of the 20th century into today has seen a shift of the purpose of university being for employment on the other side. This is an enormous difference, it no longer appeals only to people who are passionate about the subject. If 70% of the lecture theatre is there not to learn but graduate, it changes the learning itself. People by nature want to optimise their tasks to get their goal; if the goal is to be as educated on the subject as possible, then you’re motivated across the board. If the goal is to get a job and the degree is a checkbox in the process, or even if you’re going because “that’s what you do”, then the motivation is to pass. There is no bare minimum to learning, there is to graduating.
The goalposts move on difficulty too. Universities are for-profit companies, who sell qualifications. Inevitably the difficulty of the qualification will creep downwards, as the expectation of difficulty from the learner does the same.
I think this has been happening for long enough that in all but the most prestigious or passionate corners of higher education, the staff and teachers also first entered higher education in establishments where everyone was motivated by either employment or profit.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe plenty of people in higher education are motivated by education for the sake of it, but it’s no longer the default expectation.
I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.
If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.
Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.
Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.
As a teenager, I played a lot of the early Assassin’s creed games, but fell off the franchise around Origins, when they stopped releasing to steam and kept it on the Ubisoft store, and in general fell away from gaming in general in this era.
Eventually I pick up Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla together, probably about 3 years ago and play each. I put about 60+ hours into the first two, and somehow put 200 into Valhalla, basically just mentally switching off and getting 100% of the content, which is a lot for Ubisoft game.
Perhaps it filled a good ‘get home from work and crash’ need for me, and the experience wasn’t wholly bad by any means, but it’s so bland. I’ve dropped off the franchise entirely now, after being an obsessed fan a decade ago when I was younger and more naive. The entire game basically has 0 positive memories attached, basically no memories at all, good or bad.
I tend to hold off calling anything that’s not AI slop, but this game needs to be an exception. Assassin’s creed doesn’t deserve all the hate it gets, if you ever boot into the historian exploration mode and just walk around ancient landmarks hearing the development commentary, the respect for the historic is monumental across all the games, and in the gameplay there are lots of interesting aspects amongst everything else, but that everything else is very much the problem. Slop is the perfect word, it’s blended pulp where the quality of the ingredients vary from gourmet to rotten, and I was the pig at the trough.
I could honestly give e the exact same feedback for the Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga game. I have find childhood memories but that game doesn’t have an ounce of passion in it.
These games aren’t helped by the fact that the 3 games I played through after this era were Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium and Hollow Knight, which IMO are the three pinnacles of what games as a medium can be.