??

That was actually pretty good video.

I mean they're gamers so some bad takes are to be expected, my most controversial comment on Reddit ever has been saying that video game review judgments shouldn't be taken as objective. But honestly the chill tone helps a lot compared to other gaming boards.

Literati refers to either intellectuals or literature - more the highbrow stuff - junkies. It's often ironic or somewhat mocking in contemporary usage.

There's a pretty good community on Reddit, /r/patientgamers, that is all about visiting past gaming titles. It's probably a good idea to read a bit of their opinions before delving into a new game, you can find little tips and whether the game has actually aged well there. (Contemporary reviews can't tell that.)

The Secret of Monkey Island (c. 8-16 hours, idk lmao)

It's a pretty rare game in that it's genuinely humorous and is honestly really sweet. Guybrush Threepwood is just a boy who wants to be a pirate! And the game universe takes this seriously enough to set a tone that this is indeed a legitimate pursuit. It's pretty close to the ideal introduction to the adventure genre. If you hate it, you probably won't like the rest of them either. Some points in favor:

1. There's a remastered edition that works on modern systems that lets you also choose old presentation. Secondly there's a great software that lets you play these old adventure games named ScummVM. You can actually play these on modern systems with minimal hassle!
2. The first act is like a god tier tutorial into how the game systems work. Thus the real game gets to begin straight on and you don't need to consult shit like manuals and maps that were the norm for, say, really old school RPGs.
3. It was so influential on graphic adventure games that if you enjoy it you can find plenty of similar titles.
4. The biggest problem of adventure gaming, poor puzzle design, is mostly absent here. The creator wrote an essay on the topic and it shows.

EarthBound (c. 20 hours)

This game has sort of a weird reputation. There's too much emphasis on how bizarre and odd the game is in lieu of conveying what the point even is. On one level, it's one Japanese man's take on Americana and the way America sees the rest of the world. On others it's a game that is quite cognizant that it's a game (it's like anti-immersion), it's a growing up story, a road trip. It's pretty cool in how it uses game mechanics to convey characterization. It's sort of a mash up between science fiction and magical realism. I feel it's general viewpoint is like genuinely good and valuable. Some points:

1. If you're aware of the general RPG mechanics, you get many of the meta aspects. No need to play other 8bit or 16bit RPGs before hand. It's imo the best 8 or 16 bit rpg so it makes a good enough introduction to them.
2. The soundtrack is real solid and the graphics are solid among 16bit rpgs - I think people mistaked the art style for laziness, but it's clearly quite deliberate.
3. One of the most famous boss fights in all of games.
4. I honestly prefer the Blues Brothers parody to the original thing. They are a joy! The references the game does aren't just Family Guyesque jokes, there's some amount of respect for source material at play.
5. It's not a difficult game and the battle system isn't very central. Which is good, because I don't think RPG battle systems are that interesting really. There's hardly any grinding in the game save for the first town.
6. It was created by a non-gamer and honestly it shows positively.
7. There's a good sequel Mother 3, if you like the game and want more Shigesato Itoi goodness. Actually Mother 1 is pretty good too.

Nethack

This is perhaps the most dubious choice on this list. If someone knows a clearly superior roguelike, that's probably the thing to choose instead. You should totally read a whole lot of spoilers, it's how everyone plays the game.

Honorable yet possibly dubious mentions:

1. The Incredible Machine was a great puzzle game back in the day. The task is to construct Rube Goldberg contraptions.
2. Some GTA game. I've never finished any of these, but have played lots of four of them. Just driving around and doing random shit was fun enough on its own.
3. One Civilization-like game is totally worth a try. My favorite is Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It's one of those titles where the whole is better than the sum of its parts. After a planetfall, competing ideologies group into factions and duke it out for survival on a hostile planet. Curiously there's also a plot to this game that plays out to completion if you manage to transcend to the next level of being, that is, the technology victory. Also a shout out to when game covers were cool: 1, 2
4. Canabalt. An infinite runner web game that was incredible back in 2009. It's a good example how simple a good game can be yet use setting, audio and graphics to great effect. You can sense the hopelessness and desperation (and feel these yourself) as you play the game, but the game has no lore (thank god).

What I should try out

Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 are the biggest gaming omissions that I probably should get around to play. I watched a hbomberguy video dunking on Fallout 3 and the man came hard in favor of the earlier titles.

Xcoms and Jagged Alliance 2.

Rocket League is a lot of fun.

Yeah I'm actually big into floral patterns, but I find that particular pattern a bit busy.

'Twitterati' is just word play on 'literati', in a condescending way. The twitterati have been dunking on this Ikea sofa. I feel like the vibe of discussion has been that the new flower covers are too retro too soon, so obviously I had to do a vaporwave palette swap.

I'm positively envious.

'Twitterati' is just word play on 'literati'. The twitterati have been dunking on this Ikea sofa.

Hens in Europe have been vaccinated against salmonella and afaik the eggs aren't pasteurized here.

feeding frenzy

So this is about the folks with and behind Nostalgia Critic, that you may have heard of. He's one of the originating forces behind the "angry male nerd ranting at the camera as criticism" trend of YouTube. But Channel Awesome was way worse than just being bad at criticism, clearly wading into abuse territory.

Naming things is truly one of the two hardest problems in software engineering.

The GIMP has been around under that name for going on 20 years. Its user base has grown exponentially worldwide, and the tool kit itself is standing on the brink of a quantum leap in capabilities. I see no signs that its name, which has positive brand recognition across a very large community of users, has held back the GIMP's market penetration in the least. At this time, a name change would be actively harmful to long established organic promotion that works very well.

Any "quantum leap in capabilities" is strictly inconsequential to naming, I hate nerds.

I just checked the Wiki (I have never studied lambda calculus), can you beta reduce Y g = ...stuff... by hand?

Yeah it's a solid choice, however, you could try finding texts in pīnyīn for reading practice. Reading has benefits and you can circumvent the usual scripts for the most part with tech. Functional literacy needs thousands of words in your vocabulary anyways and you can start grokking the characters later.

I actually neither speak nor am I learning Chinese, I've just had some casual interest into CJK scripts. I've read Chinese philosophy and literature in translation where some passing knowledge of the script is useful. But honestly after seeing this thread... Maybe I should start it too. I've got my previous hobby languages, French and Swedish up to the point I can read them just fine and I don't have atm access to speech practice without, like, effort.

I just have a few resources in my mind that you might not be aware of that I've found useful for language learning:

1. Paul Nation's What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?. It's only 56 pages of lucid prose and by far the best source for solid strategies for learning. Nation is apparently one of the biggest names in second language vocabulary acquisition.
2. Nation also offers survival vocabulary lists. These are 120 words and phrases that are the most important ones for a person going on a brief visit. Here's the one for Mandarin. This is the original paper that outlines the methodology for how it was constructed and tips for usage.
3. Some of the very best public domain foreign language courses are those by Foreign Service Institute, who train US diplomats etc. The Mandarin one is probably good if somewhat outdated. There are tons of hobby pages dedicated just to hosting these courses.
4. I'm big into Anki the spaced repetition flash card software. I've got 10,000 cards atm. Flash cards are like outrageously good for vocabulary.
5. Learning With Texts is a quirky yet cool tool for reading practice. You copy paste a foreign language texts, you can add dictionaries to translate each word by clicking them, you can collect words and make flash cards out of the sentences. It shows which words you haven't encountered yet and so on.

Actually some Youtube video comment sections are ok.

then again screens and keyboards

Impure! Banish them!

Nota bene (and I'm not necessarily directing this at you, 1vs): the writing system - as you allude with 'simplified' - isn't a language, it's a writing system. It's entirely possible to write Chinese in a latin alphabet using pinyin, like:

Wǒ shì Měiguó quánměi diànshì[tái] zhíxíng tái zhǎng Zhāng Huìjūn. Wǒ de wèntí shì: yǐ guǎn zīběn wéi zhǔ zhuǎnbiàn, guózī jiānguǎn zhínéng shì dāngxià dàjiā dōu pǔbiàn guānzhù de yīgè huàtí.

And so on. Here's (1, 2) Victor Mair, a world renown sinologist, on the topic of learning to read Chinese. TL;DR: delay learning the characters in lieu for spoken language and reading pinyin (or pinyin annotated) texts.

I use the flashcard program Anki for a bunch of stuff and answer questions from time to time on /r/Anki and many Japanese and Chinese learners there make this grave mistake of trying to memorize like 10 characters a day from the beginning and I basically all the time have to tell them this biz since wasting so much time would be tragic, so it was on my mind.

It's this.

I didn't realize that this was by the mcmansionhell author now I gotta actually read this!! and not just think "same"

but yes me and art thoughtz are friends now - old pals, in fact.

I'm an extreme neophyte and have no idea what's his deal but I loved this baby.

טקסט בעברית

mods, excommunicate!

Oh the things people do for puns!