They know how this works: wait a week for everyone to move on to the next thing. The only thing that has even slightly managed to defy this pattern is the epstein list, and even then it’s still too early to tell.

“No? Too far? Aright ‘sorry’, let’s move on.”

I sincerely apologize for taking you seriously. You tried to warn me with your alternating caps, so it’s my fault. Cheers.

That’s fair, though that’s more of a flaw with the email protocol. There’s no way around leaking that to the receiver’s email provider as well.

Good point, I hadn’t considered that.

For the record, if your security is based on “trust”, you’re going to have a bad time. The whole point of a cryptographically secure line of communication is that you don’t need to trust anyone except the recipient. Protonmail users choose it specifically because they don’t trust anyone, including Protonmail.

What’s old is new again…

The golden rule of fascism: always first accuse others of the conspiracies you’re going to engage in.

And lastly, I am wondering how this is going to impact Nazis like Kirk in general. Are they going to ramp it up or step it down?

There’s a reason marvel used a “Hydra” as the mascot for fascism. We’re still at the beginning of this roller coaster.

“You will not get gun deaths to zero. You can significantly reduce them…by having more fathers in the home and more armed guards in front of schools.”

I fucking burst out laughing. This guy was a walking meme.

Party of small government, ladies and gentlemen.

Museum of the Bible

Whoever named that place gave zero shits lol

If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I barely consider that one a run back. It’s like 40s to get to the boss from the bench. And at that point I the game, I noticed myself start hitting the bounce plants much more consistently after having to do this run many times. Up until then I hadn’t been forced to repeat the same small section yet.

And (staying vague to avoid spoilers), the bench itself was particularly “surprising” specifically because of the long gap without any benches leading up to it, forcing you to repeat the same long platforming/combat sections over and over. Players would not have been “surprised” by it if they weren’t so desperate for a bench.

I will need to play more of silksong to be able to comment fully, but I felt that, even though you could understandably say all the same stuff about Hollow Knight, I still do think that the only times I struggled in HK (on required content) I later found out about an upgrade that was available if i had looked that would have made the fight much easier (nail upgrade, ability, charm, more hp, etc).

No, not to the same degree as Elden Ring, i agree, but I do think HK’s exploration played a very similar role as it did in Elden Ring. In both games i would tell people to only bash your head against a boss if you want to hurt yourself, otherwise go explore.

The US economy is now completely detached from productivity and is now running on speculation

Yep, the market feels like it’s in max-greed mode. There was a taste of fear when the tariffs were first announced, but wallst was quick to token TACO to justify just ignoring everything. My question for the last 9+ months has been, “how long can a market willingly ignore reality?”

I assume it will take until a critical mass of those speculators start needing to liquidate. I don’t know what will trigger that, but at some point the profits come due.

And that’s what the title should be. “Cracking down” implies there is something that needs cracking down on.

Do you believe DS and Megaman could have been even more iconic if they had listened to players and made their runs back shorter?

My point is, it’s not like the designers didn’t know what they were doing, this is a very obvious aspect of their gameplay. And regardless of how minor inconveniences like this make us feel as players, we don’t know that it’s not precisely those lows that contrast with the highs to create the intended experiences which made those games cult hits to begin with. You wouldn’t look at a Rembrandt and say, “look how much of the painting is just black! You’re wasting all this space! You could add so much detail and context in there!”

I’m a firm believer that “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. If players weren’t complaining about the run back, then they would be complaining about the empty flask drinking animation. Inconvenience is not a convincing argument to me. Just like any art, games are free to evoke any and all emotions. It only becomes a problem if the emotion they keep evoking is boredom lol. But even then, boredom is a valid tool on the artist’s palette; sometimes the only ones who are getting bored are the boring people.

Have you considered that the run back is trying to tell you something? The game doesn’t want you to bash your face against the same enemy the same way. It may not even want you to fight that boss yet at all.

The run back is meant to be an incentive to think about your options. Do I have other areas to explore? What do I keep dying to? Am I overlooking an obvious weakness during a particular boss mechanic, or am I not using an ability as effectively as I could be to stay alive?

If you let the player immediately run back into a boss, they will veg out and do just that until they eventually get lucky and barely down a boss by the skin of their teeth. But that’s not how you should be approaching these fights.

Sometimes the most productive run back even involves a good night’s rest.

This is to be expected. Silksong gained so much hype that now you have a bunch of people trying it who are finding out it’s not their thing.

I know people these days are used to early access garbage being shoved out the door as a full release, and are ready to rush to the comments to explain why the game is wrong, but I promise you this is not one of those cases.

So far, every run back I’ve experienced in silksong has a purpose. If it’s not something you enjoy, I recommend not playing the game. But don’t be in that overlap of the Venn Diagram between people who are enjoying the game and people who are complaining they aren’t enjoying the game. Either stop playing, or finish it and then we can talk about its design.

I would consider this post itself a liability if I were living in china. Yeah, even if I thought it were safe initially, there’s no guarantees that living there is safe long term. Like right now, people still generally consider it safe to continue living in the US, but I don’t blame anyone for choosing to leave, because there’s really no group that’s entirely safe from Trump’s hate mongering (besides sycophants).