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Dan

Daniel Moore

Fremont, California, United States

Thanks for dropping by my profile! I accept all friend requests!

I have a website [danielmoore.us]!

View more info

Thanks for dropping by my profile! I accept all friend requests!

I have a website [danielmoore.us]!

View more info

Currently Offline

Links

For Gamers

DualSense Wireless Controller [direct.playstation.com]
DualSense Charging Station [direct.playstation.com]
DS4Windows [ds4-windows.com]
XDO Long-Range Bluetooth Adapter for PC [www.amazon.com]
Steam Achievement Manager [github.com]
WeMod - PC Game Cheats [wemod.com]
Vimium - Chrome Extension for Mouseless Browsing [chromewebstore.google.com]
Xogar - Launch a Random Steam Game In Your Library [github.com]
Humble Bundle [www.humblebundle.com]
WoWroMs - Download Retro Games [wowroms.com]
Project64 - Nintendo 64 Emulator [www.pj64-emu.com]
Dolphin - Wii/GameCube Emulator [dolphin-emu.org]
PCSX2 - PlayStation 2 Emulator [pcsx2.net]

More Fun

Rotten Tomatoes Movie Theatrical Re-Release Calendar [editorial.rottentomatoes.com]
Super Mario 64 Dunkview
Sonic Mania Dunkview
Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games
Super Mario Galaxy Director on Getting Stories Past Miyamoto
Metal Gear Solid Explained
Dad walks in on you playing Kingdom Hearts
What Getting 99 in Runescape Feels Like
If Hollow Knight: Silksong was made by Ubisoft...
Questions for Cowboys [tevisthompson.com]
The Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of The Last of Us Part II [www.vice.com]
Is a 100-Hour Video Game Ever Worthwhile? [slate.com]

For Poker Night Players

Are the Poker Night Games Rigged? [gaming.stackexchange.com]
Thursday-Night Poker: How to Understand, Enjoy, and Win [www.goodreads.com]
Poker For Dummies [www.goodreads.com]
The Things Poker Teaches [www.nytimes.com]
How AI Conquered Poker [www.nytimes.com]

For The Witness Players

Connections [archive.org]
Gangaji - Simply Stop Looking
Jonathan Blow AMA
Software Is in Decline - Jonathan Blow
The Development of Braid [en.wikipedia.org]
Soulja Boy Provides His Thoughts On Braid
Mario Is Too Mainstream
We Play The Witness with Jonathan Blow
The Witness Noclip Documentary
The Witness Video and Audio Logs
The Unrelenting Science of The Witness [killscreen.com]
The Art of The Witness
Architecture in Video Games: Designing for Impact [www.gamedeveloper.com]

For Spelunky Players

Spelunky Noclip Documentary
Spelunky Classic [spelunkyworld.com]
HTML5 Spelunky Classic [tinysubversions.com]
Spelunky No Gold Pacifist Hell Run
How Spelunky 's Level Generation Works [tinysubversions.com]
Spelunky Creator Derek Yu Builds a Super Mario Maker Level
Spelunky (Boss Fight Books) by Derek Yu [www.amazon.com]
Derek Yu's Website [www.derekyu.com]
Spelunky 2 : Reinventing Perfection
Spelunky 201: The Cosmic Ocean
Spelunky 2 Turkey Speed-Run
Do You Like How I Walk? (Caveman Spelunky 2 Meme)
Overlunky [github.com]

For Papers, Please Players

Papers, Please BAFTA Acceptance Speech - Lucas Pope
Cramming Papers, Please Onto Phones [dukope.com]
Lucas Pope's TIGForums Account
Lucas Pope's YouTube Channel
Why Lucas Pope ‘Didn’t Market’ Return of the Obra Dinn [www.gamedeveloper.com]
Ho Feng-Shan [en.wikipedia.org]
Ikiru [www.hbomax.com]
Disciplined Minds [danielmoore.us]
The Office [www.peacocktv.com]
The Gervais Principle [www.ribbonfarm.com]
The Oral History of the Greatest The Office Episode Ever [www.rollingstone.com]
Valve Handbook For New Employees [assets.sbnation.com]
Richard Geldreich on Working at Valve

Deep Thoughts

"Has everyone heard of Jack Handey’s 'Deep Thoughts' [philip.greenspun.com]? The joke is that it’s a stupid guy trying to say deep things, like 'I’d rather be rich than stupid.'"
- Clayton Schwartz, "2 Arms and a Head" [www.2arms1head.com]

Something inside me dies a little when I perform a trivial action in a video game and see a little congratulatory achievement pop-up. (Famed game developer Jonathan Blow once noted that "achievements make it impossible for games to be about anything serious".) So I like to give myself all achievements prior to starting a game. The only downside of this is that I then no longer have a timestamp commemorating exactly when I managed something cool, but this is better than never playing games out of fear of cringing too hard at stupid achievements.

Living space, foreign vacations, daylight leisure time, cooking, long-term romance, and sports are now luxuries reserved for the rich. The poor get roommates, long commutes, fast food, alcohol, high-THC weed, porn, televised sportsball, and video games. Multiplayer games especially feel like a sad substitute for real-life friendship (single-player titles are just an artform like movies).

In general, the poor are being steered toward virtual experiences (streaming sites where content is served up by opaque algorithms, AI doctors and teachers, black hole job portals where every position receives thousands of AI-generated applications, social media infested with bots and mired in perpetual race wars). This is an absurdly bad deal, like trading away gold for gold-painted sh*t. What will the world look like in 10 years? Probably Black Mirror [en.wikipedia.org].

On social media, I only get engagement when I'm trolling or being inflammatory. When I try to be sincere and engage in good faith, everyone just ignores me lol.

This is obviously a deliberate consequence of the algorithm, which conditions users to engage in bad faith by continually presenting them ragebait from dysgenic (short, ugly, stupid) male losers. Kids who grow up thinking this is just how the world works are at a huge disadvantage.

It's gotten to the point that I've stopped engaging with dysgenic guys in real life. Half the time I strike up a conversation with an Uber driver or a short/weird younger male acquaintance, I end up subject to insane political drivel straight from the bowels of the Internet. Men are going off the deep end because they spend 10+ hours a day sharing racist memes on their phones. The entire platform of Twitter is now basically a millions-strong group therapy circle for ugly short white guys.

(In the interest of fairness, women aren't escaping all this unscathed either. But their violence is mostly turned inwards. It's much more fun to deal with obese promiscuous tattooed girls than hateful white supremacists/Islamists/Khalistanis.)

China is basically India with a bigger economy. If you don't think India is a superpower (it isn't), neither is China.

China's economy is denominated in U.S. dollars, it relies on U.S.-controlled waterways for its fuel and material inputs to continue running, and it is rapidly losing steam as the Chinese population declines because of the one-child policy (probably the most stupid law in the history of mankind).

So China claiming to be a superpower because of its large economy and bullet trains is a bit like some random high-level player in, I don't know, World of Warcraft insisting that he's superior to the game's developers because of his high level. Also, the player has terminal cancer.

China is, however, the only potential superpower. If they start and win World War 3, they can, unshackled from the parasitic Western financial system, possibly stave off their demographic collapse by heavily subsidizing their own people. I'm curious if they have the balls.

Achievement Showcase

290,762

Achievements

607

Perfect Games

99%

Avg. Game Completion Rate

Achievement Showcase

290,762

Achievements

607

Perfect Games

99%

Avg. Game Completion Rate

Screenshot Showcase

A royal flush?!!!! This event is so rare that they didn't even record a voice line for it. GLaDOS calls it a straight flush!!!!

+ 2,471

Review Showcase

Hollow Knight: Silksong

21 Hours played

I'm definitely on the "filthy casual" side of the casual/pro gamer divide. I don't find any deep purpose or existential fulfillment in video games, and if I find myself spending too much time on one, I tend to start wondering why I'm not focusing on my job, personal relationships, or physical fitness instead. Or, you know, any other hobby that isn't just mindlessly consuming media made by weirdos. (Think about what kind of person spends a decade obsessively developing a game which may very well sell zero copies if culture has shifted enough by the end of development.)

Especially as I get older (I turn 30 in a few months), my tolerance for tedium has plummeted. So as a casual Hollow Knight fan who barely reached the easiest ending of the first game and then quit triumphantly, when I realized Silksong is 10x more difficult (and much more poorly designed in many ways), I knew I had three options - "git gud" (at the cost of hundreds of misspent hours), quit (at the cost of missing out on some beautiful art and atmosphere), or cheat. I chose to cheat.

After 10 or so hours with WeMod cheats enabled (infinite jump, health, dashes, rosaries), I can confidently say I love Silksong. I'm definitely not getting the experience developers Team Cherry intended, but frankly, I just don't care. It's just a game. Life is short. You don't get a prize for wasting your time on learning better ways to mash buttons while eating Doritos. Do your friends/girlfriend/family a big favor and put the controller down.

"Git gud" at life lol.

View all 1 comment

Review Showcase

What Remains of Edith Finch

1.5 Hours played

A morbid, bizarre walking simulator where you view the deaths of an entire extended family through their own POV over the course of 70 or so years as they earnestly believe themselves to be victims of a family curse. I was only able to stomach playing it for an hour or so, but I watched most of the highlights on YouTube, so I get the general gist.

The game's writer and creative director, Ian Dallas, is a white guy from Washington State, and like most popular media produced by whites since the 1960s (e.g. Harry Potter), it has an unhealthy fixation on death.

I think the meta-reason for this is that World War 2 and the Civil Rights Movement basically gutted the whole idea of race, which was the founding myth of most nation-states for maybe a thousand years prior (e.g. England for the English, the U.S. for whites, Japan for the Japanese, Germany for the Germans, etc.). Then after segregation ended, white Baby Boomers had two choices -

1. Join hands with non-whites and build a new post-racial American culture, embracing a beautiful future built on shared values and endless innovation, culminating in a new destiny in the stars.
2. Retreat into suburbs, outsource all productive enterprise to Japan/China/etc., mentally block out non-whites and cling to outdated myths of racial superiority, run up a massive deficit to pay for it all, then try to die before the bill comes due.

Depressingly, they chose option 2. So white Boomers (and their children/grandchildren) functionally live in a simulation where nothing they do at work is connected to reality in any sense (it's just nonsense symbolic manipulation on Excel or whatever), they watch movies/read news that misrepresent the rest of the world as being backwards and subhuman, and they quietly await the end (which they believe is because of non-whites, but is actually willfully their own fault).

I appreciate you staying with me this far. So how is any of this relevant? Well, What Remains of Edith Finch personifies the above mentality as a game. If you're white, you're likely to find it profound but be unable to explain why. If you're from a foreign, functional culture (my parents are Hindus from India, a country which has many issues but isn't terminally ill like the West), you will likely be staring in bafflement at how self-absorbed and stupid every character is.

They're all just awful! They all act like they're the main character in some tortured drama, when really they're all just overfed narcissists who need a good spanking so they stop wallowing in self-pity. There's a way of properly writing this sort of premise as a satire, but Dallas' insistence on playing it straight implies he doesn't really get the joke himself.

Just terrible stuff, and very likely to mislead impressionable players into having a worse life by encouraging their learned helplessness. Don't waste your time on this game, and definitely keep your kids away from it.

EDIT: Removed ChatGPT link from end. I no longer trust statistical AI models. Being validated by them is meaningless.