The worst part is that those who do not understand this will tell you you are insane, catastrophizing, should just focus on your own life, and will get angry at you for really caring… while the ones who do understand, generally just get depressed.

Meanwhile, our political system implodes as we have passed the climate threshold. Rivers in Alaska are running orange as a result of permafrost thawing. That means we are releasing methane now, means its only going to get worse faster.

Thank god I have never wanted and do not have children.

Thanks, we know, we will instead be getting theocratic fascism in about a year.

Can I marry you and move to wherever you live?

Pack of compsognathus says hello.

Not sure how out of date the research is, but in the original Jurassic Park book, there are roaming packs of these things that overwhelm and kill people.

Though the on screen scene of them killing people happens in the second movie, it actually takes place in the first book IIRC… anyway, they’re basically depicted as land piranhas.

God damnit.

I…

I didn’t want to have to resort to this, but there’s only one man even crazier than Kool Aid man crazy enough to out crazy this situation.

Get Jeb on the phone.

Its possible they could last long enough for some kind of rescue mission, assuming they were in the cabin and not blown out into space.

Fairly sure the payload bay does not have windows.

Or they may have been able to rendezvous with the ISS and live there, assuming the damage was only to the shuttle bay.

They’d certainly die if they attempted to re enter the atmosphere.

Though, judging by how small the earth is… they seem to be significantly higher in earth orbit than any shuttle missions I am aware of?

Howabout a reasonably advanced civilization destroying itself and its homeworld after exploiting and then running out of petroleum?

Depends on how the combo works. Is there an element of skill involved? If it’s like a rhythm game I would just call it a puzzle/rhythm game. Otherwise it’s just a puzzle game with extra steps.

That was in my OP though, that most games can be thought of as puzzle games with extra steps.

EDIT: I would agree that Tetris is not a puzzle game.

This is quite interesting to me.

My main point of this post is to highlight how the genres and categories we have for games breaks down upon examination and I guess changes over time.

I would say that most people either have or would call Tetris basically the most popular puzzle game.

When it came out it was basically the titular, archetypal ‘puzzle’ game.

You think that pushing a button that generates a purely random outcome is a game?

To me, those are neither games nor puzzles.

There is nothing one can do, in terms of thought or execution, to influence the outcome.

Other than I suppose choosing to play or not play.

To me, a game must include some capacity of the player to influence whether they succeed or fail, within the game itself.

I will grant you that, I agree.

If there is no thought required to determine the difference between a correct and incorrect choice, if its purely just ‘do this’ and the only difficulty is in execution, then yes I would agree this is not a puzzle.

A very simple puzzle which our brains and bodies usually perform automatically, yet there are quite a number of situations and conditions that make breathing significantly more difficult, or where precise breathing or certain ways of breathing are skills that require mastery.

Swimming, diving, circular breathing for wind instruments, controlling your breathing while shooting, trying to calm yourself down from a panic attack, etc etc.

Puzzle games can be solved or “won” by identifying the solution. Not-puzzle games require execution.

If you have 2 minutes to solve a puzzle, is it no longer a puzzle game?

If moving certain colored pieces requires a button combo or sequence, instead of a simple action, is this no longer a puzzle game?

EDIT:

Also, by this logic, Tetris is not a puzzle game.

…but knowing the optimal thing to do will still not give you victory which imo disqualifies them as outright puzzle games.

Knowing the optimal thing to do can be seen as but a higher order puzzle.

MMOs are probably the most notorious genre at this point for being extremely overproduced puzzle games.

Sure, there are different builds and strats… but its all very formulaic and boring once you find something that works.

Not to mention a huge, huge amount of them are basically just pay to win, to varying degrees, these days.

Although you could argue they do not actually have a goal… hrm.

Like obviously there are quests and goals and story arcs but technically, there probably are some mmos where you could just make your personal goal something wildly unconventional.

I haven’t played many mmos in a while, but that kind of spirit seems to just only be further and further dying out, I just hope theres still some mmo it exists somewhere.

Is Portal a… First Person Shooter with Puzzle Gameplay? A First Person Puzzle Game?

Is Elden Ring an extremely difficult Action RPG, or is it really just an easy Action RPG hiding behind an opaque and complex system of weapons and armor and enemy types and stats that becomes simple once a viable solution to the puzzle of stats and weapons becomes apparent after either reading a guide or just brute forcing through tens or hundreds of hours of bad solutions?

(For that matter, what even is an RPG?

Role Playing Game?

If that just means that you play a character, ie role, and it is an immersive and or compelling story and world, ok, thats a loooot of games.

Does it mean you can customize your character’s appearance or weapons or stat-build? Ok tons of non RPGs allow for that, and tons of classic RPGs do not allow you to alter your character’s appearance.

If it means you have the ability to put yourself into the game, make choices and do things differently in a way that meaningfully changes how the world of the game responds, then a whole lot of ‘RPGs’ are hardly RPGs at all, as many develop your character(s) as part of their story line to the point that many decisions presented seem entirely out of the established character’s likely responses, or give the player few if any impactful choices, having a mostly or entirely linear storyline.

By that metric most immersive sims are more RPG than many ‘RPGs’, anything with a branching storyline or highly reactive world is as well.)

What game involves super human perfect timing that does not include some other kind of puzzle to be solved?

Fighting games? Micro Heavy RTS or MOBAs? Bullet Hell Shooters?

All of these have strategy and can thus be reduced to puzzles.

I suppose if a game was purely just, click button as fast as you can after something happens, then ok, you got me, but add even one more element, and technically this is an extremely simple puzzle, albeit brutally unforgiving in terms of getting your human body to solve the puzzle.

Is there something different you have in mind?

I would say you also have got me on a pure RNG slot game. Theres no gameplay, theres no puzzle, theres no strategy.

At least, within the game itself. If youre going to somehow exploit or hack or something, arguably thats now a real world puzzle of how to do it and not go to jail, but excepting that… yeah, there are lots of online ‘games’ with literally no puzzle element, just do thing and then random output happens, with a bunch of flashy graphics that have 0 bearing on what the outcome will be, whether its a digitized horse race or slots or whatever.

I would argue those are not really games though.

The player cannot make any choice that is more or less likely to achieve the goal, thus its the illusion of a game. No meaningful choices.

I’m going to M A N I F E S T my problems away!

It is amazing to me that millions of idiots whole heartedly believe in some variant of magic/placebo/prayer/astrology, some very slightly different version of it becomes popular when someone figures out some new lingo that sounds neat, and can lie convincingly in a video.

Hold on , I’ll edit this when I find a link.

Edit:

Ok, so here is OpenAI wanting to make… well basically it seems to want to have not only an AI agent in a text support chatbox telling you how to fix a problem…

…but give it the ability to completely take over your computer and just do it for you, presumably via Remote Assistance and whatever the Mac equivalent is.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/openai-plans-chatgpt-supersmart-assistant-135029243.html?guccounter=1

No way this could go wrong and lead to fake support sites just fucking writing a batch file and executing it in the blink of an eye.

Then we’ve got both Zoom and Otter who yes, straight up, want to build AI powered avatars, based on each employee/user and replace the human entirely in meetings.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/zoom-s-ceo-wants-a-manipulatable-ai-avatar-of-you-to-attend-meetings-instead/ar-BB1nGO5m

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/could-ai-personas-attend-your-work-meetings-for-you-one-tech-ceo-says-yes-and-by-the-end-of-the-year/articleshow/107797330.cms

Fuck the infinite paper clip making machine, we are intentionally trying to make the infinite meeting machine.

Dear sweet christ, I’ve been the manager of a medium sized non profits databases (everything other than finance because they’re special, as in using an overpriced wacky proprietary tool because they are used to it, oh and probably commiting fraud) and, as the author references, I have actually had one of the members of the board get a bunch of other people with 0 technical competence to try to get me to ‘implement blockchain technology’ on postgres.

Non of those fucking morons could ever provide an actual project outline. None of these fucking morons even knew their own teams processes, and they would all change depending on team member asked and date.

Not relevant to this story, but basically I am now disabled and living off of SSDI after being assaulted and seriously injured.

I am 99% sure, after years of working with completely technically incompetent managers, I am never going to work in tech again.

I would literally rather be poor, do uber eats delivery when I feel like it, and slowly build a video game, by myself, not even to make money, just to give my tech brain something to sate it.

I am too autistic to be able to handle the constant stream of bullshit and social manipulation/pressure from everywhere I have ever worked.

Ive been calling this the reverse turing test:

Can you tell that a known human being is not an ‘AI’ chatbot, based on text correspondence?

Apparently we are now just going to have AI simulacra of ourselves date each other on dating apps and meet with each other on zoom.

The meeting thing in particular is so fucking insane.

Problem: Meetings waste time and accomplish nothing!

Solution: Don’t hire or train competent people, instead, automate meetings, the transcripts of which will presumably still have to be read, and will likely not make any sense, thus necessitating more meetings.

The goal of technological civilization apparently truly is to create maximum misery via maximizing meetings.

Hey, I’ll take it haha!

Unfortunately my default joke state is basically dad jokes and puns, but my life has been so utterly absurd that I can basically just reference some insane nonsense that’s happened to me in the past somewhat indirectly, and most people just think I’m creatively making a joke.

In seriousness, I have found that more conventional charcuterie boards are a pretty cost effective, while also decently fancy first kind of at someone’s place date, if presented well.

I’ve done this multiple times and it has worked every time, and almost every time I’ll be told this is extremely adorable and no one has ever done this for them…

…Then I find out, a year or two or three into the relationship, oh god, this person I love is extremely abusive, takes me for granted, and is astoundingly irresponsible.

So I guess just hand me both of those whiskeys, neat, please.

To start off, put the gummi worms in a shaker, shake, collect the sour dust, snort.

Next, add the whiskey to the shaker, set aside

Dunk the bread in the McNuggies sauce, sprinkle on cocaine to taste.

Add weed, thin crackers and coffee beans to grinder, grind thoroughly. Take the brie and your ground up spices, work them into each other as if you were making meatballs.

Eat this raw.

Ok, now vomit into the condoms.

Now that the appetizer is done with, grab handfulls of the other cheeses, salami, prosciutto and McNuggies, and just stuff it into your face as if you were eating popcorn.

Now that you’ve been thoroughly fucked by this culinary experience, finish it off with the drink you set aside earlier, which should hopefully be a lovely semi congealed glass of gummi whiskey.