Fishin' in the stream of consciousness (all-purpose, no topic chat thread)

The 11'8 bridge, also known as the Can Opener, is being raised eight inches after over a decade of hard work shredding the trucks of inattentive drivers. On one hand, less crashes is a good thing. On the other hand, it's the end of an era. Godspeed, truck fucker.

 

Dragon egg!!! :0c

 

Ohh, okay I getcha now, and yeah the targetting younger dmeographics is definitely a problem, I'm sorta kinda in the age bracket where it kind of surprises me that younger kids even have smartphones, and not yknow, like brick flipphones. Logically I know many kids have and many use apps like this, but i keep being surprised by it.

 

Shroud has now joined Ninja and left Twitch to stream exclusively on Mixer. https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/24/20930647/twitch-shroud-mixer-microsoft-ninja-amazon-exclusive
I've been curious about mixer for a few months now and I checked out the site. There doesn't seem to be much variety compared to twitch. I understand that Fortnite and Pubg are very popular, but that seems to be all people are playing on Mixer. Has anyone used Mixer, and if so how does it compare to Twitch?

 

Still can’t get my computer or my ps4 to connect to the internet so I might have to stream from my laptop. This didn’t go so well because of the technical difficulties, but hopefully they’re fixed. Not too confident though.

Edit: yay my sound issues are fixed since the last time I did a stream thanks to the yeti mic I bought myself. My voice comes through loud and clear.

Unfortunately I forgot to put on the save video option so nobody can watch what I just broadcast which is a shame because I’m having issues recording gameplay still. I can hear the game audio but the screen is black and I don’t know how to fix that.

 

Ok I think I've figured out the black screen problem, but I won't be streaming again until monday I think.

 

I had migraine three electric boogalie today, but on the other hand, the nasal imitrex I got works fast enough that I could still go to work. like, my head was tender and sore the last two days of work, but I could function perfectly well

so I think? I'm gonna be ok if this keeps up? I've been pretty worried that going full time was a bad idea and I'd be letting people down left and right, but yeah like... I'm pretty hopeful

 

Several days later I’m still occasionally thinking about why I dislike this article so much. I mean, beyond it being a long diatribe about... something. So I have written a very long post about it, as is my way. (Sorry for quoting the same post a second time, I just want the link to be easy to find.)

I realized I’m comparing its absurdly cynical take on video games with a book, Everything Bad Is Good for You. It’s been years since I read it, but as I recall, it took the notion that games are work and didn’t stop at “and that’s bad because look at how many unpleasant concepts I can mention, such as Brexit and capitalism.” Or whatever was going on there?

Instead it proposed more or less that media establishes a system of communication with the audience. Media literacy is a real thing that arises from engagement with a medium, which is not a passive activity. You can get better at it through practice. Having a lot of literate audience members allows media to tell more complex and challenging stories, which in turn requires more complex engagement from the audience. Watching a show that asks you to follow multiple plot threads is an activity that draws on many diverse skills. A television drama with a sprawling cast is probably challenging your memory, your emotional processing, your visual attention to detail, your understanding of important words and phrases learned through context clues, and you know, your ability to simultaneously understand multiple points of view and imagine the most desirable future from each one and then be able to extrapolate areas in which they’re mutually exclusive and estimate how much of a problem each might be and why. Yes. And so forth. Basically, there’s no way to be able to undertake tasks that complex without building on foundational skills that will probably transfer well, like remembering and being able to process information about a number of people and events.

A major idea in this book was that video games are not especially fun. They can sometimes be extremely fun, but the amount of fun people seem to assume is far greater than the reality of the fun. Games are more rewarding than they are fun most of the time. A lot of what you actually do when playing boils down to a lot of hard work and struggling. It’s often frustrating. This book is probably fifteen years old by now, which is why I’m so unimpressed by an article that has discovered that games are more work than fun and collapsed dramatically all over the furniture about it. Yeah, we know. And?

The book had an idea about it. It thought that maybe because games require an even higher level of engagement, and a lot of the effort is obviously not going towards immediate payoff in sheer mindless fun, it might be doing what other types of media are doing, but even more intensely. It might be encouraging you to develop skills that will not only improve your skill at one game or even your overall video game literacy, but also much more fundamental skills that can translate to the rest of your life. Like hand-eye coordination. Or Tetris teaching you to imagine the outcome of rotating a shape, which at the very least will probably help you on those math ability assessments where they literally ask kids to choose a possible outcome of rotating a given shape. If that translates the way the test probably hopes into stronger visuospatial processing skills, then party. It’s otherwise sorta difficult to summon scenarios besides bizarre child labor dystopias that might convince a lot of kids to engage strongly with shape rotation.

Maybe this book leans to the overly optimistic side, but it’s inarguably trying much harder and more successfully to come up with coherent ideas about what it means that games are work. Because it’s a book, not an article, the bar should probably be much higher, and there’s surely room for opinion pieces about simple despair in the face of Untitled Goose Game. But acting surprised that video games are like work at this point makes you sound like an alien trying to impersonate a Millennial based mostly on compilations of avocado toast literature. Not a cool scifi alien, either. More of a jerk who happens to be an alien.

 

i cannot get over the 'games is work' bit specifically tbh bc it is entirely antithetical to the school of play-sociology i base my own research out of
Huizinga's definition of play specifically hinges on it not being productive in any way shape or form, it is just for the simple pleasure of playing. therefore something that you consider 'work' is no longer play or a game. The end. Yes this runs into issues with professional athletes and e-sports, but that is, going by the extension of huizinga's concepts by roger caillois, a corruption of play. Yes it is still recognizably the playing we did before, but it is corrupted and cannot fulfill the same societal function anymore. e-sports and casual play maintain the same relationship to eachother as professional actors and children playing house.

 

doesn't society teach us that enjoying work is what we should be aiming for anyway?

 

gonna go do some welding soon for the first time in 6 months! that's good but I'm also very nervous because I've forgotten a lot in that time and some of what I've forgotten is definitely important safety information. just going to take it slow, do some TIG, not get into the cutting torch yet because if you fuck up your gases on that one you don't just get a bad weld lol

anyway wish me luck!

 

ganbatte!!

 

luck!!

 

I just kind of look at that article and go "it must be fuckin' wild to be a person who has never experienced executive dysfunction."

I have to invest my time and energy to engage with a game, as I do with any piece of media. This is, in fact, how it works. If I didn't want to do that, I could spend all the time not already accounted for by my need to feed myself lying in bed doing nothing. This is a thing I have done in the past, and I can empirically say it sucks a lot worse than doing arbitrary tasks that are not necessarily rapturously enjoyable in themselves but give me satisfaction for having completed them. Games are, in fact, less work for me most of the time than say, movies, because the need for input makes the task of sustaining my attention much easier.

(Being a horrible goose just seems like a bizarre hill to die on re: that point, too. In a world of predatory live-service games that exploit addiction behaviors to try to suck up the time, energy, and microtransaction money of the player into perpetuity, this is an open-world stealth mayhem simulator with a to-do list. It doesn't dangle the ephemeral promise of a reward if you sink enough time into chores; it just points you in general directions and leaves you to your own devices. If you look at the social media buzz around the game, you'll see a lot of it is people making their own goals, completely unincentivized, because they enjoy playing with the tools the game gives them.)

 

I also don’t quite get the “if it’s work in any way, it cannot possibly be fun or good” attitude, honestly. Like...art and writing are work. They’re hard work. But I still enjoy doing those things.

(There’s a reward at the end too, a finished product you can be proud of—and the same is true of games in a lot of ways. Maybe you want to completely fill your Pokedex, or 100% a game you loved as a kid, or get an achievement you’ve been excited about, or even something you’ve set for you and you alone, like in the goose game.)

There’s a difference between work that’s enjoyable and work that’s just a pain in the ass, is what I’m saying.

 

The author of that article has written several others (games shouldn't tell stories, games shouldn't have characters) and also created a clicker game, so. Just some potentially interesting other info.

 

Characters and stories have been so important to me since I was a lil babbit playing pretend on the playground.

Squints

 

I don’t understand people who wear sweaters and short-shorts in early winter

like are you cold or not