sole (fish) and sole (one) don't but sole (fish) and sole (like on your feet or shoes) do! this one gets used in semantics and other ling courses to introduce various concepts.
This is super obvious in hindsight but today I learned the reason I can't play most horror games but enjoy most horror films is because a film is you being told a story and a game is you being in a story. I'm easily susceptible to even half assed immersion so it gets... Too Real I guess
This is one of the reasons my most common way of experiencing horror games is to search something like "[game name] full playthrough no commentary." It particularly stood out to me watching someone play Prey, because half the game's premise is jump scares (the most basic enemies are mimics that turn into duplicates of objects sitting around), and that was zero problem watching a playthrough, but I knew that jump scares while I was trying to focus on a task would have turned my brain into soup in minutes.
today I learned the term "ludonarrative dissonance," meaning dissonance between a game's story/themes and its gameplay, and I will do my absolute best not to forget it because it's something I enjoy thinking about very much when I play games
Love when a game's mechanics help to reinforce the narrative Love to make fun of when a game's mechanics outright contradict what the story claims is going on
On the one hand, I'm the kind of self-important pain in the ass who goes all, "But is it even meaningful to attempt to separate the ludic narrative and the textual narrative when the means by which the player interacts with the game are as much a part of the experience as the words and images," but on the other hand, sometimes you want a term that sounds more official than "that thing Undertale is good at."
Yesterday I fell down a rabbit hole of paging through PDFs of medieval grimoires for Reasons, and I never found the thing I was looking for (Silent Hill lore), but I accidentally found something much better: a history fact. So, there was this German Benedictine abbot named Johannes Trithemius. He was a famous scholar who wrote a ton of different books, including historical chronicles, books on language, and a book on cryptography, titled Polygraphia, which documents hundreds of alphabets and ciphers. He was also infamous as an occultist, and might even have been an inspiration for the legend of Faust; he was a mentor to one of the most famous and influential occultists of the entire Renaissance, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. In 1499, he wrote an occult treatise titled Steganographia, meaning "sealed writing," which described magical rituals to invoke angelic spirits to communicate secretly over long distances. It influenced a bunch of later grimoires, and landed on the Catholic Church's list of heretical documents for centuries. Except, in 1606- 107 years later- somebody published a decryption key, which revealed that the entire first two volumes of the grimoire were actually in code, and the real contents were a second treatise on cryptography. However, they hadn't found anything in the third volume, and since it references a number of occult texts that are generally believed to be in earnest, some people (occultists) argued that this meant book 3 was still probably legitimately intended as occult writing. In 1998- 499 years later- somebody cracked the third volume. It was more cryptography.
