The one I like is “Document it yourself.”

Hey, this application exposes a Python API to the user, where’s the API reference? How do I learn how to use it?

We didn’t write it.

Well…could you?

If you want it to exist, you write it.

How am I supposed to do that?

Examine the app’s source code.

I’ve seen two things out of “Men’s Health Awareness Month”:

• The rainbow hair squad bawling about “No it’s Pride Month”
• People posting lazy image macros with lies like “It’s okay to show your feelings” in them.

I have no fucking interest in National Whatever Day or Something Awareness Month. They always end up an exercise in worthless busybody tokenism, and the more of them we put in place the more hilarious collisions we’re going to find. I got a great idea, let’s start observing National Temperence Week as the first week of May, so that we can generate pointless anger at the people drinking Corona and margaritas on Cinco De Mayo. I can hear Latinos now saying “Oh what the fuck have the white people made themselves mad about now?”

The messaging I have seen about “Men’s Health Awareness Month” has mostly been addressed to men saying things like “It’s okay to share, it’s okay to cry, there are five lights.” His lived experience has shown that no, it is not. He is overwhelmingly expected to be stable, and any display of weakness will permanently lessen his worth in anyone’s eyes. Telling HIM to open up when those are the consequences he knows await, addressing the problem as a change HE needs to make is just pissing up a rope.

I’m going to use the movie Fight Club as an illustrative device here: Pretty much all of the men in this setting find their social and emotional needs unmet by the structure of society. The buzzword you see thrown around today for this is “lack of third spaces.” The men in the testicular cancer group have basically only one pain to share with each other: loss of family, marriages, jobs etc. The men respond strongly positively to Fight Club, which at first is basically an underground bare knuckle boxing ring started by a mentally ill man. I have a hypothesis that something like a pickup game of basketball would have served much the same function, that what the men in this setting really need is time to do physical activities with other men, to form those bonds the way men actually do.

On that note, I’ll be right back.

Gentlemen, let’s go on a hike

This is one where I think the ball is very much in the women’s court.

I’ve seen a trend of vertical videos of fathers playing with their children, with a caption similar to “my latest ick.”

Millennial men are the most engaged cohort of dads in living memory, and women have responded pretty poorly to this.

Bring back periods in initialisms. U.N.

Yeah at first during onboarding when you’re running like one smelter into one constructor on the ground with a wavy belt and spamming power poles everywhere it’s kinda goofy but when you start designing factories you can make some cool looking stuff.

Y’all, I just got my replacement tooth, so I’m finally off my mechanical diet, and I’ve been waiting months to eat some hard shell TACOS! Some SPICY CHICKEN TACOS!

Same setup, same results. I do intentionally keep the resolution low though.

Fathers versus childless men, rather than husbands vs unmarried men. Telling.

openscad is kind of a bad choice for architectural drawings.

Is RNG always bullshit? No; only a sith speaks in absolutes. There are appropriate uses of randomness in video games. Is RNG very often a source of bullshit? Absolutely. Do I feel like that’s the case in Blue Prince? ABSOLUTELY

“I got the pump room but not the boiler room again so I still can’t try doing the thing I’ve been trying to do.” Said players of a game designed to disrespect their time.

If, at the start of each in-game day, you were given all of the rooms you’d unlocked so far, and were allowed to arrange them however you like right then and there, and were then free to move around in it however much you please, would the game be worsened? I’m convinced it would only be improved, because pretty much all you would do is remove “Welp, for the fifteenth time, I know what I want to try, but random chance prevented me from doing so.”

The presentation is charming and the puzzles are intriguing but I think the community is putting up with the deeply terrible mechanics out of sheer novelty, and another game made like it isn’t going to be well received.

Adding bullshit RNG to a puzzle game to make it take longer might make it more “challenging” but doesn’t make it better, is my point.

Putting a jigsaw puzzle together is a challenge. You could increase that challenge by requiring yourself to roll a die and getting 6 five times in a row before you’re allowed to try to fit a piece. Does that sound like good game design to you?

Could it present the player withbsmallband large puzzles/mysteries without egregiously misusing RNG?

I’m not interested in the RNG telling me I can’t work on the thing that’s on my mind.

My very first save file, I got to coal power…I had started at the way south of the grass fields, there are two coal patches down there, neither of them are near water, and I wasn’t really ready to travel as far as the snaketree grotto yet. So I gave that up, started in the Northern Forest at the cliff, back when it was THE obvious start point, and I went all the way to the last elevator launch (that was in Update 5).

From what I saw of Blue Prince, it would be like playing Return of the Obra Dinn, except after you get one of the death scenes and the soundtrack blarps at you for awhile, there’s the door unlock sound, and there’s a random chance it’s going to make you arbitrarily replay the game.

I’m just not on board with all the shit they piled in front of the mystery to solve.

That question is the thesis statement of a 2 hour long video essay if ever I heard one.

Most games involve random chance somehow to make the game feel more alive and less deterministic, like in an early Zelda game, should the Octorok run 3, 4, 5, or 6 tiles forward? Should it turn left or right? Should it drop a rupee or a heard when killed? These I’m fine with.

In an RPG, things like monster encounter rates might use the RNG to simulate the behavior of a dungeon master, both “roll for initiative” and “I’ll have them encounter 4 groups of low level monsters on their way through the creepy forest.” Using an RNG and lookup table for that is a reasonable low overhead way to add some unpredictability and adventure to the game. Note: I don’t really play RPGs that much.

The term roguelike has started to be overused to mean any game that features procedural generation and permadeath. By that definition I think Tetris qualifies as a roguelike. The original Rogue kind of worked like a virtual dungeonmaster, it would create an RPG campaign for you to play in, and then it played like any RPG where you have to explore a dungeon, learn the mechanics etc. with permadeath and the consequence of having to relearn everything you’ve learned thusfar generating stakes and pressuring the player to survive, no “whatever, I’ll just die and respawn.” So that’s an innovative use of a computer random number generator. Most things that call themselves “roguelikes” are more “We designed a cool primary gameplay loop but can’t really be bothered with level design so here’s some procedural generation to beat your head against over and over again, maybe hoping to find a scenario you can possibly win.” Quite often, it’s not that the game randomly re-engineers itself, it throws the same pre-scripted things at you in a somewhat different order, so they end up playing more like old arcade games than an actual adventure.

A “roguelike” I’ve spent the most time with is FTL: Faster Than Light, and its roguelike structure is by far my least favorite feature. I don’t really like beating my head against the RNG hoping a permutation of combats, 50/50 “do you help with the giant spiders” encounters goes my way so that I have enough scrap, and that it gives me a shop with a useful array of weapons so that I have a chance at the end encounter.

Blue Prince takes the randomization to a whole other level. It might be compelling if it procedurally randomized the house for each playthrough such that you do have to learn YOUR way through it, and you have limited stamina so that each day you can only explore so far, but you can get upgrades to your stamina so that you can stay in the house longer and explore deeper, but…I can’t see the way they implemented the game’s RNG as anything other than flagrant disrespect of the player’s time.

The “AHA!” moment in a puzzle game is what you’re after. That hapens in the player’s mind. If the player thinks up the solution, but the mechanics of the game make it take a long time to implement, all you’re doing is grinding the player’s teeth together. And Blue Prince seems designed to maximize teeth grinding, because the player may know the solution to a puzzle, but contriving the circumstance necessary to implement that solution requires several unlikely rolls back to back to back to back to back.

Sorry, I’m just convinced it’s bad game design pretending to be novel.

My mother got into it. I’m not going to.

A puzzle game that puts RNG in between the player and the ability to attempt a solution is something I’m not willing to tolerate.

how is it different from playing Riven with one of your sticks of RAM poorly seated so the computer crashes on a semi-regular basis resetting your progress?

No. Not for me. I’d be more interested in wearing the corner fire hydrant in my ass than playing that.

Lookin pretty good. What’s the first game you’ll play on it?

Hand blown vacuum tubes, a power supply rated in PSI…

Controlled Flight Into Terrain, or CFIT, is the case of being extremely specific. It’s not a mid-air collision with another aircraft, in-flight breakup or fire, flight control failure, crew incapacitation or anything like that. CFIT means the crew was present and alert, the aircraft was functioning correctly and hadn’t departed controlled flight, they’re flying along and all of a sudden the ground happens.

It’s almost always a case of egregious amounts of pilot error. Failures in judgement such as deciding to fly down a canyon because it looked so cool when Luke Skywalker did it, and then being unable to climb out and slamming into a wall. Failure of navigation in the mountains. Failure to maintain minimum altitude on an instrument approach (Look up that Cross Air flight that killed the German pop band Passion Fruit) Failure to compute takeoff and climb performance and flying an airplane straight into the mountain off the end of the runway because you needed 900 feet per mile and at this density altitude you could only manage 750. Or, one of my favorites, the Korean Air Cargo 747 captain that chased a broken ADI straight into a forest outside London.