fracture [he/him]

if it’s not worth preserving

IT’S NOT WORTH PURCHASING

rarely, i like to play a fluffy, feel good game with no real stakes. enter: Flynn, Son of Crimson

there is absolutely no chance of anything really bad happening in the game, the worst that happens is your powerful guardian diety dog loses his powers at the beginning of the game (but it’s OK, he just rests until you reclaim his powers and he feels better). you never really feel like anyone is really in danger, you get to play a pretty fun 2d action platforming game, and it has some really fun sections later on that make you feel awesome

it wraps up nicely in probably 20 hours too, if you want to 100% it, so it doesn’t overstay its welcome and lets you experience all of its content with low demands. really a lovely little experience. it’s not pushing the envelope at all, but if you want basically 20 solid hours of lighthearted fun, this is a great way to get it

gonna throw in my caveat here; ITT is a really good co-op game but there’s like a 25% chance the story isn’t for you. it’s the kind of story where, if you think about it too much, you start to realize that the characters do some pretty fucked up stuff including

::: graphically tearing a plush doll apart while it screams for mercy

:::

i don’t want to come across as judgemental if you enjoyed it; i get that some people are gonna find it more slapstick than anything. but it was more than enough to make me and the person i played it with flush it, and i wouldn’t feel right not mentioning it for specifically “uplifting games”

if you can ignore the story, the co-op gameplay is super solid, though

(sorry if the spoilers don’t show up right, my client doesn’t show them properly)

to clarify, i’m talking about the hypothetical situation where OP’s wife, who has chronic fatigue, also has a baby. i’m sure there are people out there with chronic fatigue who have had babies, of course, and they are champs, but uh, i believe that would be a future situation for OP :)

haven’t had a kid, but 2 weeks with a wife who has chronic fatigue seems really short. honestly the start up life doesn’t strike me as great for having a kid, but idk what your job situation is. can you peace out for a day or two every week without things going off the rails? if so, you might be fine. but usually, start ups are pretty lean, and rely pretty consistently on the presence of each person on the team (or at least, this is what i’ve heard, i haven’t done a start up, either)

how much do you have to help your wife? have you asked her thoughts on the situation? does she work?

you’d might want to do some research on child development to help form some timelines. e.g. when does the baby start crawling around / how long are they breastfed? learning stuff like this should help you roughly forecast how much supervision you’ll need to give (it’s probably not linear, fwiw)

last thing to consider is, what if your wife or baby comes out of this requiring more care than average? what benefits does your work provide in those situations? not everything goes as planned, and i’d be a little worried about that given your wife already has one chronic condition. pregnancy is not exactly easy on a body

regardless, i hope you can figure things out and everything works out well for you and your family!

lots of great suggestions in this thread, just wanted to shoutout this little indie i played and had a delightful time with: Flynn, Son of Crimson

it’s a little 2d adventure game with pretty linear progression, although there will probably be some backtracking if you want to 100%. but it’s level based and not open world at all. the movement and combat both feel pretty good, the story is very fluffy and feel good, and you have a giant dog as a pet, what more could you want?

it’s probably like a 15-20 hour game in total, if that. a great time if you want something short, fun, and uncomplicated

beyond the obvious ways this is fucked up, imagining this happening with AI gen text is insane. trying to craft a post to both empathize with another poster, kindly demonstrate flaws in thinking or logic about a point they usually care a lot about, and trying to explain how the different point of view better supports the things they care about it such a monumental effort already that AI just cannot do. no actual persuasion will come out of this (not that a ton happens on the internet to begin with, but even less than that)

and honestly if you’re firehosing people like that, AI is just going to absolutely drown out any actual communication from happening. at some point, we’ll just have bots going to war for us about our points, and no one will be reading it

big shoutout HOTS… i should tap back in… FUCK deadlock (note: this user has not played deadlock)

i would have liked it if this had offered a COVID perspective on communal baths. i’m inclined to think that a hot moist environment is a likely place for it to flourish, and it seems odd to neglect to mention that three years of a pandemic probably had an outsize impact on the number of bathhouses still open in 2022

obviously we probably don’t have a ton of data on how to circulate air and filter COVID out of bathhouses, but i also bet there’s a way to do it in a relatively energy efficient way

anyways, it feels like a major spot that’s lacking in an otherwise informative and well thought out read

really good thoughts and write up that you linked, thanks

that’s YOUR union, go get involved and fix it!

even unions are gonna eventually fall to corruption and laziness if ppl think they’ll solve your problems for you

the union IS you (and your coworkers)

not until they’ve unionized ✊

these are not totally serious thoughts, altho they reflect my kind of feelings about it

but IP should be periodically put to a vote, maybe a year or two after a major release, in which the public decides if they should retain ownership of the IP

if not? it’s released into public domain. obviously the original company / creator can still do something with it, but others can, as well. but if they do a good job keeping people happy with it, they can keep it

obviously this has some problems, mostly about constantly polling people and probably only dealing with IP that’s popular enough

but the idea gives me some deep satisfaction after seeing some companies ruin their IP, and i like the idea of consumers having some power to punish them for being shitty lol

this take in the article was really funny

My guess at the real reason for all this grave dancing is that it feels like a victory over FOMO. If the new $40 game sucks and no one is playing it, I can safely go back to whatever I was playing before without worrying that anyone’s having fun without me.

i don’t know what most people’s reasons for deriving enjoyment from concord’s failure are, but there’s no way FOMO cracks the top 3 lmao

seeing the trailer, i definitely thought it was a bandwagon hero shooter that might have had some creativity if a bunch of suits didn’t say “make it GotG”, but realistically, it launched with little fanfare, in competition with valve’s first new game (beta) in ages. not that it was fated to fail but it didn’t have a lot going for it

these people are real heroes

more than the content of the video, which i am already pretty much sold on, is a passing line mentioned in the video - “resilience is built on uniqueness”. that’s an idea i’ve never encountered before, would love to hear other people’s opinions on it

it’s an interesting article, but i think the authors are conflating friction for wanting genuine human interaction; its easier than ever for me to make friends because i can instantly connect with and message back and forth, quickly and in real time, over various platforms e.g. discord, the depth of which is only limited by our interactions and how we treat them. forcing us back to sms/email/paper mail doesn’t make our interactions deeper, even though it adds friction. it means we can easily choose what the depth of connection we want is

that isn’t to say that there aren’t examples where less friction leads to less interaction. dating apps are a great example. but i think the authors are conflating the friction for the interaction. yes, you could add friction that would encourage interaction, but you could also add friction that doesn’t. i think the more salient point would be, encouraging interaction often includes friction, but one shouldn’t shy away from that, as a UI/UX developer

which, granted, isn’t as catchy of a title. but they could have gone into greater detail for that in the article, too

regardless of this critique, i enjoyed reading it and the perspective it offered, even if i don’t strictly agree

oh okay, sorry, i took away a different impression from your OP talking about how the FDA process is flawed due to appeals being the starting point (which very well may be true) - but including that with this article made it seem like you felt that way about this particular incident (e.g. the link was supporting evidence), not that the commentary on the FDA process was it’s own, unrelated thing

glad to hear that we’re in agreement about the denial, though

i can’t really comment on the process, i’ve never taken mdma myself. that said, you say there’s no way you wouldn’t know you’re on it, but there’s a number of substances out there where you’d think that would be the case, but it isn’t (think like, the stereotype of people acting drunk with little / no alcohol, just thinking they had it). also, the dosages may be lower / less obvious, although i have no idea what the dosages used for recreational use vs for therapeutic use are here

idk dawg this seems pretty sound according to the article

The FDA and its advisors identified flaws in the design of the clinical trials, missing data, and a variety of biases in people involved with the trials, including an alleged cult-like support of psychedelics. Lykos is a commercial spinoff of the psychedelic advocacy nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

FDA advisors also noted the public allegations of a sexual assault of a trial participant during a Phase II trial by an unlicensed therapist providing the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

…

On Saturday, using the existing data and scientific literature to support MDMA therapy got a little more difficult for Lykos. The journal Psychopharmacology posted retraction notices for three studies that involved Phase II clinical data of the therapy. The studies included a 2019 rationale for a Phase III trial design, a 2020 pooled analysis, and a 2020 study on how antidepressant use may affect the response to MDMA therapy.

The retraction notice cited two reasons for the retractions, including “protocol violations amounting to unethical conduct” at one of the clinical trial sites—a reference to the sexual assault allegations—and undisclosed conflicts of interest by the authors.

like. these are pretty good reasons for not going ahead. it’s on lykos and the scientists running the trials for not keeping their paperwork straight and, you know, not warning people about the risks of the study

from an article cited within (https://qz.com/1809184/psychedelic-therapy-has-a-sexual-abuse-problem-3):

A few years ago, a therapist working in a MAPS MDMA study publicly spoke about his challenges dealing with a patient’s sexuality. Early in his career, Richard Yensen was working with a “lovely young lady who became very sexualized in her relationship around the [MDMA] sessions,” he told an audience at California Institute of Integral Studies in 2016. “It got so intense,” said Yensen, that the chair of his department saw him mid-therapy session and told him to leave the room, warning him to always have another therapist alongside him during sessions. “And thank god, because she became more and more and more activated sexually,” said Yensen. “I don’t think I could have handled it.”

Not long after, Yensen was accused of sexually assaulting a PTSD patient, Meaghan Buisson, during a MAPS clinical trial on MDMA

like. even GENEROUSLY assuming that nothing truly unethical happened. this is a huge issue that will only get worse if it’s made publicly available

i’m not taking a position on whether or not it should be made available as a treatment. i don’t know and i’m not qualified to determine that. but given what’s been said, it feels reasonable to want more data and perhaps go “hey think you could run a trial without getting accused of assaulting people?”

can they just please make a lower budget game for the sake of branching out instead of pushing millions into a game expecting it to explode in sales? no? too much to ask? ok…