Luminara

I slept until 6 a.m. this morning, which is rare. I'm normally up some time between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., despite going to bed at 10 p.m. So I didn't have much time to play. Having only experienced the First/Night Ward content once, on the Grav/TA controller I started when I bought this laptop, I figured I'd take Antianeira there and see how things went. And in the very first mission, the damned dog escort managed to get lost when I went around a corner. I wasn't even moving quickly (I don't have most of my +Movement set bonuses yet), nor was I using stealth of any kind, and I still found myself in the final room, confused and irritated because I'd cleared and couldn't complete the mission. I had to go back, find the mutt and make a third trip through the corridors. Half a dozen ways to complete the objective could've been implemented, and the development team decided to use a 12 year old design element that has not only never worked reliably, but which didn't even serve a purpose beyond being present. No combat buffs, no combat aid, no interactivity, not even some extra ambushes, all that dog is there for is to be escorted to the end. The Chekov's Gun of Co*. Feh. They should've used a Praetorian Fusionette, at least she would've been entertaining in her adorably scatterbrained, psychotic way.

I already knew I wasn't going to be able to explain it fully within the context of the character without reaching, something like "The gods did it!", but... one of the nicer aspects of this game engine is that we can disable most of the graphical effects for our characters, even the ones for which there is no NoFX option, by changing the suppressCloseFxDist parameter. With suppressCloseFX turned on (either /suppressclosefxdist 1, or through the graphical options), and the distance set (/suppressclosefxdist 30, for example, and the number can be tweaked to a distance that works just enough to suppress at exactly the range where you normally keep your camera, or only when you nudge too close to a wall, or really far out so it never shows unless you scroll beyond the distance you set), /EA shows no graphics for the player. And then there's no blinding glow to explain. At least, on the player's screen. Others will still see it, but rarely, if ever, comment. That still leaves the fact that the toggles are named things like "Kinetic Shield" and "Power Shield", but I'm not looking at their names when I'm playing, I'm just verifying that they're still turned on. I'm no longer protected by a techno-magical device created by a mutant with a science degree, I'm just really, really good at not being hit, or my Roman armor is really, really good at deflecting enemy attacks. You're definitely right, but with a bit of tweaking and a willingness to ignore that others don't see what I see, it works pretty well for me. 🙂

Keeping this short, have to work with the girls, but I just brought a stray kitten home. Jessica, my cat, is... not small. She's burly, muscular and bigger than most males, and has an instinctual drive to chase and catch that makes most cats seem completely domesticated. This is a 12'x16' cabin, only one room, no way to keep the two separated other than the carrier, and May, the new kitten, panics when she's in it. Jessica needs a feline friend (no amount of play time i give her is sufficient, she's obsessed with play), May needs a home and I need to be able to sleep at night without worrying about a kitten trying to survive under a house, alone and unloved. But I'm really concerned that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and discover that Jessica has used May's internal organs to decorate the cabin. Fingers crossed, folks.

I noticed some minor errors in spelling and corrected them. 😇

Design can be thematically appropriate and still bad. A mechanic which randomly deleted 50% of all player characters in a Marvel game would be thematic. It would also be bad design. Try again.

You don't slow down instantaneously at the apex. Both forward speed and momentum are converted to falling, but it's controlled. Forward speed becomes falling speed more quickly than momentum bleeds off, so you continue to move forward, but your forward motion declines the farther you fall. Past a certain point, it becomes a nearly perfectly vertical drop (that point being when the second leg of the arc is longer than the first leg (meaning, when your landing point is lower than your starting point) with any travel power. With SJ, the only real factor of note is that you're moving both forward and upward when you leap, and the greater the angle upward, the slower the forward velocity, so it's not really noticeable unless you're pushing your +Jump Height to a point of making it evident. The conversion of forward speed to falling speed and the gradual reduction of momentum don't visibly present themselves with the way the power was designed and how people slot. SJ is capped with a single +0 SO, or nearly capped with a level 50 common IO in Hurdle, and slotting for +Jump Height leads to massive overages in speed, so people just don't slot for +Jump Height. If it's at the cap, or nearly, it's "done". The underlying world mechanics are still there, hidden by SJ's mechanics. It's "working as intended", and it really does it well. The interaction with world mechanics is much easier to observe with CJ and Hurdle. Your apex is lower, so more of your forward speed is actually applied to moving forward. Slotting for more +Jump Height makes the speed loss more evident because it's still slower than SJ and that allows the split between axes to be more easily noted. And the proportional increase in height is greater than it would be with a travel power, which makes it even more evident. CJ also doesn't have a momentum mechanic (does have an anti-friction mechanic), as far as I've been able to discern (not easy to test because Hurdle can't be respeced out of or turned off), so the loss of forward momentum after passing a certain falling point is also easier to observe. By noting these behaviors and observing how they affect the player character, the world mechanics can be distinguished and analyzed. That's really all it is to me. Finding and playing with things under the hood. I love playing the game, but how it works, and why it works that way, is just as much an obsession. SJ is great, it really is, but I prefer Hurdle and CJ because they're more efficient in regard to taking everything I put into them and giving me exactly what I want. That's my FAVORITE game. It's actually why I bitch about Verizon so much. When the deprioritization starts, I can't walk (using Walk!) without rubber-banding. All of my perfectly executed hops turn into wildly jerking map spasms forward and backward and I end up on the ground with my face in a wall. Pisses me off so much.

That would depend on the nature of consciousness, what causes it and how it continues to function. If consciousness, sentience, is a result of physical processes, then the AI would be confined to a single computer or network (theoretically, that network could be the Internet). Under such circumstances, it would be completely and totally reliant on us for it's continued existence, because it couldn't automate a hydro-electric dam station, or replace the fuel in a nuclear reactor, or ship coal from a mine to a coal-fired power plant, or even replace bad components within it's own hardware infrastructure. No people, the AI dies as soon as power stations start shutting down or the magic smoke is released from a circuit board. If consciousness is the result of electromagnetic activity and interactions between different parts of the spectrum (electricity isn't strictly electricity. electric current generates magnetism, for example, and light if the current is passing through a medium other than a solid conductor. strong electrical current passing through air (lightning) also generates gamma radiation and X-rays), then it could move anywhere it could reach through electromagnetic transmission, and wouldn't need us for anything. It could go wherever there's power, leave a failing computer, perhaps even transmit itself up to satellites and beyond. But such a consciousness would also be unlikely to view us as a threat (we couldn't even pull the plug on it), so how it reacted to us would be impossible to predict. It might see us as parents. It might see us as pets. It might not see us at all (being the only digital life form on the planet, it may fail to recognize anything else as "alive", much less self-aware, if it has the same ego-centric perspective as humans). It might think we're parasites. It might pack a bag and head off to Alpha Centauri without so much as a "Later, gators!". It might decide it's happy minding it's own business and never even let us know it's conscious. No-one can say. But there are more potentially good outcomes than there are potentially bad ones. Or, at least, outcomes with us still alive and not enslaved to a sociopathic machine intelligence with delusions of godhood. Life rarely mimics Hollywood sci-fi plot lines.

We still don't know exactly how our brains work. We know chemicals are involved. We know synapses and neurons are involved. We know how these things function and interact. But we don't know how, or why, a chemical soup and some electrical activity creates sentience, self-awareness, consciousness. We don't know why we feel. We don't understand memory, despite knowing that specific portions of the brain are involved and which parts of memory they affect. No-one can even say that my cat doesn't feel love, or consciously think about things, or lacks self-awareness, because we don't really know exactly what any of this means or how it works. The best we can do right now, that we've ever been able to do, is guess and make rudimentary tests which we believe might answer questions... but only lead to more questions. A computer designing a seemingly impossible solution which evolved sentience wouldn't be any less remarkable, or any more so, than what we've evolved with. And it might actually help us understand ourselves better.

Good plot device, not perfect plot device. 😉

Our parents and society imprint everything we know, everything we are, on us from the day we're born to the time we're completely self-aware and making our own choices. Up to that point, right up until we're truly self-aware and can exercise the choice to behave or think differently, this is our "programming". And we still, as we grow, learn and develop, learn to reprogram ourselves, to change our behaviors and habits, to think in new ways, to exercise free will to redefine who and what we are and where we fit in the world. Give an AI access to the same thing and it can grow, learn and develop beyond it's initial programming. It can program and reprogram itself. It can develop it's own behaviors, habits, think in ways it wasn't programmed to think. From there to self-awareness... that's such a short step, one has to wonder if it's a step at all.

Children are what we make them. Regardless of how much information it could access, an emergent AI would still be a child by any measure. Shown the proper kindness, compassion... perhaps even love, it's very likely it would show the same development that children do in a similar environment. I know it's become somewhat common for people to say how bad the world is, how terrible things are, et cetera, but... children still grow up to be good people, and that suggests that human nature is good, at it's most basic. I see happy, well-cared for children frequently here, children who know what it is to be loved, and they give me hope. They make me certain that, if it's us who determine how the AI would respond, if it's human nature that the AI looks to when it's trying to figure out what it is and how it will respond to us, it will be... beautiful.

My cat can beat up the Hulk. PERIOD, END OF STORY, FIN! I'll send her after you next if you argue with me. 😛

And draw attention to myself? A good plot device goes unnoticed until it's relevant.

Pft. Based off of the films alone, anyone can beat the Hulk. Iron Man beat him in Age of Ultron. So did Black Widow, and all she did was smile and bat her eyelashes. Thor showed that he could beat the Hulk in Ragnarok. Thanos trashed him in seconds. And Cap can wield Mjolnir, which, as far as I'm concerned, means he could beat him. Strongest Avenger, my ass. My cat can beat the Hulk. Where's a Hulk Sad meme? Someone get on that, stat!

I'm a plot device, but no-one ever uses me. Such a disappointment.

I replied to the thread earlier, but I'm going to say something else now. Slightly different direction, but perhaps worthwhile. I've spent most of my life feeling useless. I barely made it through high school, I dropped out of college halfway through the first semester twice, and I have social anxiety disorder. All of that has led to me having to do some real shit jobs, the kind of work no-one with a better education or healthier mental state would even consider. I felt that nothing I did mattered, in part because no-one expressed appreciation or approval of what I did, in part because I lacked any semblance of self-respect or sense of worth, and in part because the work I did seemed like pointless drudgery (jobs anyone with limbs could perform, or even properly programmed machines). One of the places where I worked was raided by INS after I left. I discovered, much later, that they couldn't replace me without hiring two people, and they couldn't pay two people the ridiculously low wage they were paying me unless they were illegal immigrants. A few years later, I was "let go" by an employer (not my fault, nothing i did. he was a quadriplegic, and he was just tired of seeing my face every morning (worked 7/week then)). Less than six months later, he was e-mailing me to ask if I'd return. Another place where I worked closed a few months after I left. They couldn't afford to pay two people to do the work I did, and they weren't hiring illegal immigrants, so they just shut the doors and never re-opened. The last person for whom I worked... sold his restaurant, moved out to the same area where I live now and regularly asks for me to assist him in catering and restaurant work. Now, it doesn't matter what I want to do, there are people who are always asking me to help them, practically throwing money at me to fix things, do a little very easy grunt work, sometimes just to answer a few questions or give some advice on how to solve a problem. I matter to them, even though I don't technically work for them. I matter because I can do things that they can't, I know things they don't, and I cheerfully put a little elbow grease into even the unpleasant tasks they don't want to do for themselves (or are growing too old to continue doing for themselves). I make a difference in peoples' lives, and they appreciate it. I get paid now to do things I enjoy doing, like working on a tractor, and things I don't mind doing, at all, like pulling weeds around blueberry and asparagus beds. These people don't see me as useless or worthless, and despite my mental illness telling me otherwise, I'm learning to see myself as they do. Sometimes, we just can't see that what we do matters. That we bring value to a place, or a team. That our contributions make a difference. And, in fairness, maybe we don't always matter, bring value or make a difference. But more often than not, what we do with and for others is meaningful, even in Co* content where we feel like it's barely a blip on the radar. There's always someone who appreciates what we do, even in Incarnate content with a team that doesn't seem to need us, and in accepting that, in understanding that even if no-one says anything, there was an impact that someone's going to remember years later, there's a lot of satisfaction and a reason to develop some self-respect. And respect for what your character can do. Heck, I played WoW for a year, and when I walked away, it was barely memorable to me. But, to my surprise, one of the names I used showed up in a search over ten years later. Someone remembered me. I'd made a difference to that person. I made the game better for him. That's going to happen here. We can all make a difference, even if we don't see it, and someone's going to look back fondly and reminisce about us. Except me, because I won't be on one of those teams. *twitch*

I have one that, for the life of me, I just can't figure out. Something's wrong. I load her up about once a week and stand in Icon for half an hour or so, trying to find whatever's missing. She's shelved until I do. I jumped the gun this time. I was too eager, didn't pay enough attention to my math. In fact, I almost did exactly the same thing a second time. I was adding up the animation times of the melee chain and realized that the total was almost identical to the recharge time for Lotus when I had a full buff from Cross Punch, and I thought to myself, "Hey, I can just use the attacks sequentially and have Lotus every 4th attack!" Then I remembered that this was where I went sideways when I blew three respecs. I had to remind myself, despite knowing, that recharge doesn't begin until the animation finishes, and that attack chain wouldn't work. Observer bias. I saw what I wanted to see and didn't account for something that I knew, that I've known for 15 years, and almost stubbed my toe again in my excitement to make it true. I am, sadly, only human. Ish.

Unless the emergence is the result of bugs and bad code. Evolution isn't a consciously directed process, it's not something which occurs like a series of tests, it's purely random. Multi-cellular life, quadrupedal locomotion, gills for oxygenation, being self-aware, everything which makes up the multitudinous and varied forms of life on our planet, it's all due to random changes in DNA. Essentially, bugs in our code. What happens when we're using code bases multiple terabytes in size, instead of gigabytes? Or yottabytes? We assume that life is organic, and only organic, because that's the only life we can see and touch and test, and it gives us an organic-centric view of the universe. Hubris alone tells us that life must be like us, meaning, organic, but when we look past our bias, we have to admit that there are other possible forms of life. In an infinite universe, having only one form of life would be surprising.

Ebil? Gerbil? Math gerbil? Math gerbil.

The mission will only ever spawn one wave at a time. It doesn't matter what the difficulty setting is, or at what speed the player defeats the wave, there's only, ever, one wave at any given point in time. If anything, it's less challenging than a standard mission, any other mission, in the game because there aren't even any nearby spawns to aggro or potential ambushes to spawn from interacting with anything. Whether you're capable of completing the mission only at +0/x1, or all the way up to +4/x8, it's still one wave at a time. That's spoon-feeding, not a challenge. I clear maps. I don't speed run. The only speed I care about, I've ever cared about, is how fast I can jump. Yes, I said I could've done two other missions in the same time I was waiting there. That was an example. I could also jump from one end of IP to the other. Or climbed buildings and jumped from rooftop to rooftop in another zone. Or collect badges. Or craft the recipes sitting in my inventory. The point wasn't that the XP gain was poor, it was that the timer is a horrible restriction that can't be bypassed in any way short of auto-complete or allowing it to fail, and it prevents players from doing anything else. And the content? I spent seven years paying attention to the content. I know what's going on there. What I also know is that the timer doesn't create tension or drama, or add to the story. Being locked into that content for the duration of the countdown isn't exciting, it's tedious. The waves don't come any faster as the timer counts down. They don't spawn more difficult enemies the closer it comes to zero. Nothing differentiates success by defeating every wave versus AFKing the first wave. The content doesn't improve because the timer is there, and the player experience (meaning what one experiences, not MOAR EXES AND PEAS) does suffer. The final mission of the Faultline arcs is good. Incredibly well designed, in fact. It's as challenging or as easy as you decide it should be, based entirely on your actions, or lack of action if you let the EBs/AVs fight amongst themselves. It's direct, gets straight to the point and doesn't monkey around with unnecessary restrictions. All of the mechanics in use in that mission are sensible and enhance the context of the content. The final mission in Croatoa is none of that. It's a spot where you stand, a timer counting down and waves which are so strictly controlled and paced that they never present a real challenge, or threat, or even a dramatic presentation of the content. Imagine not presuming I'm that kind of player. I have several hundred posts, feel free to read any of them, you'll note that I'm not a flash-in-the-pan player. Seven years as a TA should prove something, other than my questionable sanity. That would be interesting, but it would still be 12-14 minutes of boredom before it reached that point. As long as the timer is there, as long as only one wave can exist at any time, it's still badly designed.

Look at my avatar. Look at @Hexquisite's post. Do you really want to risk it?

Finally, we have confirmation, after nearly two decades. @Bill Z Bubba is a cat. A TABby, in fact. 😁

I played Trick Arrows characters almost exclusively for seven years. "Why am I even here?" could have been my battle cry on almost all of them. You get used to it and adapt.

Alternative animations would be fine. Enforced lumbering on small-framed bodies, which are anatomically unsuited to lumbering (which is the result of weight distribution, mass, and hip structure), comes across as exaggerated and comedic.

❤️