darthelmet

At some point recently I realized I had kind of forgotten about it. There is just an absolute deluge of ongoing and increasing threats that demand immediate attention that it can be hard to remember the thing that, while super urgent, has distant consequences. That thought made me really depressed because I realized that not only have we made little progress on fixing this existential threat to humanity, but in some ways we're getting further from being able to fix it. Fascism and surveillance capitalism are tightening the noose around effective political organizing and improvements to technology like AI are only going to make that worse on top of it's impact on climate and the environment.

I keep having this irrational thought pop up in my head that's something along the lines of "surely... they won't keep making this worse right? There has to be some limit on just how cruel the people in power can get... right?" and then I snap myself back to reality and remember all they've done and continue to do and realize that isn't going to happen. Over my life I've watched as things have just steadily gotten worse. There were glimmers of hope when Obama got elected, but seeing him continue most of the bad stuff was a real shock to my worldview. I thought that maybe things were going in the right direction with Bernie's campaigns, but then that was crushed and now we have more brazen fascists in power.

I was recently thinking about just moving to a communist country like China or Vietnam, but aside from the logistical challenges involved in that, but even there the US will still manage to fuck me over with climate change so...

At this point, the fight for our freedom is the same as the fight for stopping climate change. The rich and powerful are never going to stop driving us towards that cliff, so we need to do something about them first. I just wish I knew what that even was.

Yeah basically this. My system volume is exactly where it needs to be for anything else I'm doing. Videos, music, voice calls, etc. I shouldn't have to basically mute my system to not go deaf when I launch a game for the first time.

WHY THE HELL ARE GAMES SO LOUD ON STARTUP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????

There are others but this is one I just can't believe is a thing. It's so fucking simple to fix. Just start the volume on the lower end and if it's too quiet I can raise the volume or just give me a volume slider first thing on initial load before any sound is played and let me find the right levels with a test sound before playing any menu music or something.

I guess at the heart of my question is: Why people didn't create new letters to fit those sounds? Sure initially people would have to learn what the new letters are so they could pronounce them, but they already have to learn all these rules and exceptions so they can pronounce the reused letters correctly in the right circumstances. Why can't we have 38-56 letters?

Oh I didn't know the current alphabet came from the Portuguese. I assumed it was from the French when they colonized Vietnam.

The point about the logographic characters being distinct is interesting. I guess if you don't have to phonetically spell it out you have some more freedom in picking what written characters will represent the meanings of the two words. It is still a shame we ended up with those homophones, but I guess that's just a path dependency thing since the spoken words came first. I guess they just had to work with what they had when they converted them into characters.

Probably some other cases too, and im not sure which one applies to the specific sound you're struggling with but a couple of examples

A recent example I came across while doing Vietnamese vocab was several letters being used to make an "Z" or "L" sound in some cases. For compound sounds, there are things like "ng" sounding like an "M" in front of words sometimes in Vietnamese or in English we have things like "th" or "ch" where the resulting sound doesn't sound like it comes from either of the building blocks. "T" is pronounced like "tuh" and "H" is pronounced "huh", (there is a certain irony in trying to use letters to communicate the pronunciation of letters, but whatever.) so you'd think that "th" would be something like "tuh huh" instead of the actual pronunciation. While I was writing this I thought of an example where this is how it works: "tw" gets pronounced like "twuh" like in "twelve" or "twenty"... and then I remembered "two" exists and sounds like "too" (and "to") for some reason. So yeah. It's really hard to come up with a consistent rule for a lot of these.

EDIT: Oh I just remembered another funny exception for "ch": In "Chemistry" the "H" is neither pronounced nor does it modify the "C" to make the normal "ch" sound. It just sounds like there is a "C" there. Like "Cemistry." Except looking at that, that pattern is used in something like "Cemetery" and then the "C" sounds like an "S". I'm going to stop now because there are so many of these I could probably go on forever if I kept thinking about it.

Huh. I hadn't even considered how technology might affect this. Interesting.

I recently had ECT for depression. It didn't work, but it did make me forget about a bunch of random stuff. It's been such a weird experience. One of the more benign things that keeps coming up is I forget if I watched/finished a show or game and even if I know I did, I can't remember much about it. I worry about what else I've forgotten but I don't know yet because it hasn't come up. Like I haven't been able to work because of my depression, but if at some point in the future I finally get it cured, or at least under control enough to go work, I worry that I'll just randomly not remember some important things I learned in school or something like that.

So it's definitely possible to do things that delete memories. I don't see a reason why with more research we could learn enough about the brain to do this selectively instead of it being a random side effect.

As for whether I'd be worried about such a technology: That has more to do with what our society would look like than the actual tech. If we finally reached a society where we are all truly free, then while I might not use it, I wouldn't fault others who decided some memory was too painful to keep. If we still lived in a society like we have today, I'd be terrified that the rich and powerful would have yet another tool to fuck with us.

In that case, they pushed baby formula in an attempt to get mothers to stop lactating, thus becoming dependent on their formula. In addition to this not being as nutritious as regular breast milk, it needed to be mixed with water, which often wasn't clean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott

Certainly wouldn't be the first time. Isn't it great that these companies get to kill people then just stay around and keep doing the same things over and over?

This is nice. I was really worried there would be some last minute funny business with Cuomo, but things worked out for once!

I know the feeling. I even though I kind of want to play some bigger single player games, I tend to put those off to spend hours playing comfort games. More generally, I get really overwhelmed by really complex games. I still want depth, but I want it to come from gameplay interactions rather than wrangling the controls or messing with a giant character build or something.

That's why I end up playing a lot of things like card games, roguelikes, etc. Things that are really easy to start playing, easy to keep repeating, but which still provide interesting, varied experiences. Think about it, if I play something like Slay The Spire, all I have to do to learn the controls is to click and drag a card. There are builds, but those builds are constructed through a bunch of small, manageable choices.

Complete left field recommendation: It's not a repeatable game, but if you somehow haven't played it yet, Portal is a masterclass in this kind of depth without complexity design and perfectly tutorializes what little you do have to learn.