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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • When we switch to DST, we "Fall Back. ". We set the clocks one hour back, at 2:00am Sunday, so basically we get an extra hour of sleep just on that night. Then we lose one when we set the clocks forward in the spring.

    To be fair, I don’t think that extra hour, once in the Fall, is used as a reason for Daylight Savings in any debates.



  • Andonyx@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzWe lost Keanu
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    1 month ago

    I’m not sure if you’re arguing that it being fictional is an interpretation or that its demise from the ire of the Gods is an interpretation.

    If it’s the former, you are incorrect. The single best primary source being his own protege and student Aristotle who also makes it clear the whole thing is didactic invention. (There are debates that some individual events within the story are inspired by actual events in Egypt and Athens, but its existence is never presented as fact. The entire idea that this was some historical account came mostly from a judge writing his own history books in the 19th century.)

    This is also not debatable due to translation. It’s Plato. The best scholars of all time in both language and history have studied this, literally for centuries. There is not any serious or scholarly debate about his intentions with this story. And multiple, equally capable translations of Aristotle corroborate that.

    If you’re talking about the destruction of Atlantis, it’s been too long for me to argue that specifically, but the idea that it was divine punishment is the prevailing view of that story.


  • Andonyx@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzWe lost Keanu
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    1 month ago

    Plato did not suggest ancient Atlantis existed. He was very clear that he was illustrating a hypothetical “great society” to discuss his views on effective and beneficent government.

    When he discussed it sinking it was a divine punishment from the gods of Olympus because they had strayed from a righteous path. All of it is meant to be a parable.




  • It’s interesting that we had reverse experiences regarding the recent FF titles. I think for me, it was because I played them very close to each other, and I probably would have been fed up by halfway through whichever one I played second. My gaming buddy mostly really liked Rebirth.

    But they both had a slightly different version of this same issue, and my tolerance was pretty low by the time I got to Rebirth.


  • I think you’re hitting on a slightly broader problem. Any game where combat is the major mechanic shouldn’t have a situation where you can’t do any damage for any extended amount of time. The Yakuza series handles this well, enemies can block, but the moment they do you have attacks that can break the block immediately, and start damaging again. (Or you can skill up to that that attack.) As the game goes on, it gets more intricate, different enemies have different blocks that require different moves to break. The player character also has different fighting styles that have different block breaking moves that you have to keep track of, but if you know what you’re doing, you can break almost ANY block with one move.

    Far far too many other games decide to arbitrarily create a mechanic where you can’t do any damage for a WHILE. It’s either the invincible enemy that you just have to spend 3 minutes dodging, which is boring and miserable in both action and even turn based RPG battles. Or they have a shield that you have to do some elaborate and rhythm breaking routine to remove the shield. It’s a miserable slog whenever they do that kind of thing. Back in the early 2000s The second game of the Xenosaga trilogy changed the entire combat design and added the thing I hate most, the RPG stagger. You can do no appreciable damage to any thing in the game until you figure out what combination of attacks cause a stagger. It could be a three move sequence involving two characters that has to be done in the right order, or woops! Start all over. If you didn’t give one of your characters a specific ability or attack during leveling, screw you, you’re basically fucked.

    The players, rightfully, rejected that crap then and they got rid of it for the third game. Now, it’s everywhere. Every RPG I’ve played recently has that crap. I finally just put down FFVII Rebirth half way through and said, screw this, because it was so exhausting and miserable. Every battle becomes the equivalent of getting on a non-working escalator and your body still jerks because you think you’re going to start moving. I hate this trend and it’s everywhere as developers think, “this battle isn’t bossy enough.” “Add a stagger mechanic to make it last longer” “Brilliant old chap.”

    I don’t know what disease is moving through the game development community that boss battles, especially, have to be a certain length. Is this a marketing thing? Is this being handed down from the publishing execs? FFXVI had 20-25 minute battles towards the end that were just repetitive dodging and a kaleidoscope of flashing lights. I could have just had a gummy and watched an old screensaver and it would be more memorable and less annoying.

    Okay, I’m done complaining, but the long battle for no reason other than to make it feel like a boss, is, I think, an extension of the collect-a-thon, open world, sandbox mentality that just adds superfluous crap so they can say “This game is 44% larger than the last game we made, and will take you 215 hours to complete!” Who cares if it sucks?



  • Look at it this way, Google stopped caring about their viewers as anything more than wallets to empty years ago. Now they’re going through the same cycle with advertisers. They don’t care if the ads land, or the targeting works, just that they can convince them to keep buying ad space.

    Eventually the ROI will show as not worth it to the advertisers, but by then Pichai and the rest of the C-suite will be pulling the same scam at another company whose investors are more greedy and stupid than saavy.

    Because the horrible truth of America now, is that CEOs and their ilk have stopped caring about creating value, or building a sustainable business model with long term revenue. Now they just look at witless investors as wallets to be emptied too.











  • The counter argument, and I’m not saying this is correct, is that we had electric cars over a hundred years ago:

    “Over the next few years, electric vehicles from different automakers began popping up across the U.S. New York City even had a fleet of more than 60 electric taxis. By 1900, electric cars were at their heyday, accounting for around a third of all vehicles on the road. During the next 10 years, they continued to show strong sales.”

    https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car

    If we had pursued the electric car at the same rate we pursued advances in ICE engines, perhaps they would have been better by now. They made resurgences in the 70s and 80s during the energy crisis in the west.

    Clearly burning hyrdo-carbon rich fuels was easier, but it’s hard to say how much the pursuit of fossil fuel driven vehicles and machinery was influenced by both momentum, and the manipulation and interference of the fossil fuel industry. It’s possible that we could have had electric cars and still all the of the traffic, infrastructure and urban societal issues that we do today.