- Dying is a form of education ✶
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Gabriel Winslow-Yost, writing about Elden Ring at Harper’s Magazine:
One of the insights underpinning FromSoftware’s games is a recognition of the opportunity that the medium presents—an opportunity not for narrative simplicity, as it has been seen in the past, but for a new kind of complexity, a centerless, centrifugal form of storytelling, defined by discontinuity and uncertainty and yet, at the same time, propulsion and accessibility.
Sunday, 1 December 2024
- Brain rot ✶
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The Oxford Word of the Year for 2024, defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”.
The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
Saturday, 30 November 2024
Spacebourne 2
Jotting down my thoughts on indie spaceship and looter shooter combat exploration game Spacebourne 2 here amid the bits and bytes of the digital ether web world.
Gameplay videos are recorded live at twitch.tv/hypertexthero.
Notes
- Autosave feature needed when getting in and out of ship to avoid frustration.
- Equipping character perks is somewhat confusing. The interface could do with sound effects for hovers and clicks.
- Nice kill sound effects.
- Collision boxes of points of interest on planet surfaces can be buggy.
- Not enough visual feedback on health status makes deaths too sudden.
- Press Left Alt to drift in space when piloting the ship.
- Press U to find radio volume control knob.
- Enemies are affected by gravity and have detachable body parts in on-foot combat.
- Bravo on making a game that lets you take off, fly to space, and land on a another planet, and get in and out of your ship anywhere, including space. Elite needs this.
- Voice of first character you meet upon waking up needs improvement. The voice of Axa, the guy in the dilapidated station, is much better.
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- Acknowledgement of uncertainty ✶
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Jon Udell, writing in 2021:
The best way to improve news literacy may be the SIFT method advocated by Mike Caulfield, which shifts attention away from intrinsic properties of individual news stories and advises readers to:
- Stop
- Investigate the source
- Find better coverage
- Trace claims, quotes, and media to original context
“The goal of SIFT,” writes Charlie Warzel in Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole, “isn’t to be the arbiter of truth but to instill a reflex that asks if something is worth one’s time and attention and to turn away if not.”
Friday, 29 November 2024
- The user experience of Lego interface panels ✶
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My favorite Lego parts, other than the minifigures.
Via Daring Fireball.
Tuesday, 26 November 2024
- Daily global composite satellite map ✶
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Amazing. Here’s how it’s made.
Saturday, 23 November 2024
- The Last Thanks ✶
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Photograph by MacArthur Fellow Wendy Redstar.
- Uxn ✶
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The Uxn/Varvara ecosystem is a personal computing stack based on a small virtual machine that lies at the heart of our software, and that allows us to run the same application on a variety of systems … Uxn is programmable in its own unique language, and the distribution of Uxn programs is akin to sharing game roms for classic console emulators.
Friday, 22 November 2024
- Ingenuity (helicopter) ✶
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Click on the animated helo-drone in the above Google search results page for a nice Easter egg. Use arrow keys for flight control.
- Operation Sol Raxxla ✶
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There’s a new hypothesis that Raxxla, an easter egg supposedly hidden in Elite for over a decade, is in Neptune’s moon Triton in the Sol System.
If you have a Sol system permit in the game consider helping find out if the hypothesis is true by doing your bit.
There’s measurable progress already, and when I transmitted this information to Cmdr Schippah, I received the following reply:
Blinking lights in the background.
A soft humming springs to life followed by a hissing sound, decompression of a pneumatic nature. The sliding of a door, footsteps on a metal surface in the dark.
A short silence ensues.
With a short intense burst the sound goes from a soft humming to a pronounced metallic purr.
Reactor… online
Life support… online
Engines… online
Shields… online
Weapons systems… online“Computer, commence interstellar communications. Open a channel to Hypertexthero.”
“Message as follows:”
“Greetings commander, It’s about time.”
“End message”
“And computer,”
…
…
…
…
“Action stations.”
Tuesday, 19 November 2024
Flight Simulator 2024
Notes that will coalesce into somewhat coherent writing about Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2024, which you plan to use for most of your flights in a flight sim voyage around the world.
Videos of flights will be recorded live on your HyperTextHero Twitch channel and stored in a YouTube playlist for posterity.
You’re most interested in flying fairly low in small “general aviation” airplanes that can land on rough terrain.
Notes
2024-11-25
Career missions sometimes make you taxi to a distant point at the end of a different runway instead of the one you landed on.
Pilot careers seem to span the globe, with different missions in far away places, not just around your selected headquarters.
The C-172 Skyhawk startup checklist is quite detailed.
Almost crashed on takeoff due to confused camera view so found out that Shift+Spacebar resets camera view.
2024-11-23
Photo mode (Shift+V) screenshots are saved in the following location on PC: C:\Users\Your_Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024\Screenshot
To turn off waypoint and path markers in the 3D world: Settings > Controls > Tools > Assistances > Toggle Visual Assistances Display. I mapped it to Alt+V
The wings of small planes like the C-172 disappear too soon as they fly away, making it difficult to fly them from a distance in drone view. Maybe there’s a level of detail (LOD) setting that affects this? I found Air Traffic under Settings > General > Graphics > Advanced Global Rendering Quality > Advanced.
Here’s information about liveries, also known as paint jobs or skins], in the Flight Simulator 2024 Software Development Kit (SDK).
2024-11-22
Finished training and got my PPL, which unlocked career missions, after almost hitting a bus on the taxiway.
Tested how far I could push things with my first passengers, who had stereotypical dialogue that made them jankily humorous. Progression is fun!
Here’s how to turn off the copilot:
- Click your profile name.
- Customize identity.
- Co-pilot.
- Select empty space.
2024-11-21
Here’s how to turn off HUD instruments in cockpit and external views in MSFS 2024. If someone knows how to turn off copilot Christopher Walken please let me know.
The animation of the right aileron and flaps of the P-51 don’t work. Looks like a bug.
Managed to log in without issue early in the morning of the 2nd day after launch, and all the airplanes from the Standard Edition I got seem to be there. Yay!
In the First Solo Flight mission of Take off and landing flight training, I missed tower message options as I didn’t notice you could scroll down to see more of them. I think progress and scrollbars could be made more visible in the interface in general. They’re too thin.
2024-11-19
I was surprised to see the game had downloaded in less than 1 hour after I left it on while “Loading languages 7%” showed in the status bar. Many were not so lucky.
Craziest user experience problem I ran into: I clicked on the yellow “Sign in to Xbox Account” button which launched the Windows Live login dialogue, but when I tried typing in my password nothing would appear in the password input box and the cursor would lose focus!
Frustrated, I MASHED the buttons on my keyboard quickly and saw letters appear in the box once in a while, so I clicked on “Use a different sign in method” and then on “Use code sent to email address”. The input box now showed numbers instead of ••••, so by MASHING each number of the 5-digit code repeatedly I managed to eventually get each number to appear, and log in.
I left graphics settings on the recommended one for my PC (High End), and framerates in rural areas and also in NYC were good, feeling above 60fps, though I did not spend much time in the city.
Lighting seems more nuanced now, especially environmental light.
I only had two planes available, the Flight Design CTSL and the Beechcraft Bonanza G36, no C-172 for the training or career missions, so could not proceed with those. Apparently due to server issues, as communicated by GotFriends’ GotFriendsMykrode in stream chat:
It’s bugged because of the servers. They show up in the marketplace section, but have not been sent out. Seems like everyone got a different selection of aircraft randomly.
VKB Gladiator stick, throttle and rudder controls did not have automatically assigned controls, so I had to map them. I’ll add my basic controls here eventually to help others.
Menu music and ambient soundscapes are good, much better than MSFS 2020.
The Flight Design CTSL would seemingly start with no fuel despite having half the tank filled, so my first and second landings were emergency ones after airborne starts! Maybe there’s a switch to change tanks from one wing to the other that I missed.
There seems to be an audio bug where you need to move the throttle for the engine sounds to start when going into cockpit view.
The Bonanza had no sounds at all during the introduction flight in the career mode. Maybe missing files due to server issues?
There’s a volume limiter setting under Audio Settings now.
I did not see any raindrops on the windshield of the Flight Design CTSL while flying through clouds.
No flyby view button (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
You can get out of your plane and do a preflight check and walk around the world (Shift+C), and my character naturally became Harry Potter during my first stream of MSFS 2024.
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. . ˚ . ੈ ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .
Friday, 15 November 2024
- Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update ✶
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Never played Valve’s second classic? Get Half-Life 2 and its sequel episodes for free on Steam until November 18th. And try clicking on the grav-gun on the bottom of the page and then clicking on any page element :)
Wednesday, 13 November 2024
Celeste
Notes that will become writing about a beautiful cult-hit pixel platformer game called Celeste that you tried once a while back.
Gameplay videos will be recorded live on your HyperTextHero electric twitch consciousness stream.
Notes
Ongoing notes about the HyperTextHero Celeste experience:
- Elegant pixel graphics art direction.
- Smooth movement mechanics. Jump. Hold. Holding activates certain things. Double jump in any direction. Move character in mid-air. Nuanced force feedback control response.
- Curious story. Climbing. Overcoming adversity. Trying again. Learning from failure. Perseverance. Secret areas. Tapes. Strawberries. Love interest?
- Difficult, with the right amount of challenge and fast reload after death for quick iteration, making it pleasurable to overcome obstacles. Player wants to keep playing, keep climbing, keep going.
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- Enlightened Imagination For Citizens ✶
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Alan Kay:
In our world, we have enough power to topple our most important systems, but not the power to restore most of them.
Tuesday, 12 November 2024
- Learning in depth ✶
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One of the great paradoxes of education is that only when one knows something deeply can one recognize how little one actually knows.
…
In her portfolio is a beautiful large sheet on which she had written, almost like a medieval manuscript, a copy of W. B. Yeats’s poem “The song of Wandering Aengus,” with an illustrations of the ‘glimmering girl / With apple blossom in her hair’ and of Wandering Aengus who had looked for her for so long, and thinking when he had found her that they would pluck ‘till time and times were done / the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.’
- Don’t Be a Sucker ✶
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Scope & Content: Dramatizes the destructive effects of racial and religious prejudice. Reel 1 shows a fake wrestling match and “crooked” gambling games. An agitator addresses a street crowd; he almost convinces one man in the audience until the man begins to talk to a Hungarian refugee from Germany. A Nazi speaker harangues a crowd in Germany denouncing Jews, Catholics, and Freemasons. Reel 2, a German unemployed worker joins Hitler’s Storm Troops. SS men attack Jewish and Catholic headquarters in Germany, and beat up a Jewish storekeeper. A German teacher explains Nazi racial theories; the teacher is dragged away by German soldiers.
Via Armin Ronacher.
- Booklets ✶
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Print, cut, fold, staple. Drop off at a little library, big library, bus stop, coffee shop, laundromat, workplace, dentist’s office, the mailbox of your crush…
Friday, 8 November 2024
- 1933 and the Definition of Fascism ✶
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Ancient and military historian Bret C. Devereaux:
And if hearing about these things that happened is unpleasant, well, Polybius offers the solution: “men have no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past” (Plb. 1.1.1). We must correct our conduct.
Tuesday, 29 October 2024
- Imgtlk Garbatella 2024 ✶
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A somewhat random project powered by food, wine, and @erikvaningen.
Monday, 28 October 2024
- Paradise: Tove Jansson’s public paintings ✶
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Exhibition of public artworks by Tove Jansson at the Helsinki Art Museum. I’m not familiar with her art, but loved The Summer Book.
Tove Jansson: Bird Blue, 1953 (detail). © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen.
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