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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Hehe yeah, we played it once as a family and of course died right away. Almost everyone was done there and accepted that as the end of it… so me and my sister just went and played the rest ourselves.

    I get their mentality, choose your own adventure, see where your choices lead and that’s the ending you get… makes sense with alot of content like this. But in the case of that specific adventure and the ending they got, it was pretty clear you are supposed to try again, not accept that ending. Ah wells. Consequently they thought it was stupid. And me and my sister loved it.

    But this sort of stuff is doomed to fail no matter how good it can be, cuz there is way more of them than there is of us. So it doesn’t make enough to justify it’s cost. And that is of course the other problem, “money” is the most important thing to too many people right now… good art can’t exist when its financial cost needs to be justified.




  • I noticed early in my 20’s that my social anxiety had gotten to a point where I couldn’t casually chat with random people. So I made an effort to do it anyway even though the results wouldn’t be favourable for a while. It took a few years before I noticed it didn’t take much of a push any more to start. I’m 40 now and while I still don’t enjoy talking to strangers, especially when just making meaningless small talk, I at least don’t have a wall of pre-dread anymore to climb in the case that I do need/want to talk to a stranger. Like if they dropped something, or if I want a product in a store that is not currently stocked on the shelf.



  • Most people still play it on a monitor, but yeah, it’s great in VR. There can be a bit of a learning curve on monitor. Kind of like the difference learning to drive rally on a monitor versus learning in VR, you can just tell when everything is going right without having to train yourself to notice little signs, you just feel it intuitively. Having said that, I still recommend going through all the training, and when you are done the training, stay with the free beginner sudewinder for a while. Make sure you can afford your first ship a few times over before you upgrade, so you have a cushion if there is anything important to learn.

    You don’t have to be good at elite for it to be fun. And you won’t be good at it for a while. But you will eventually be good at it, and it will be all the more fun then. The first time you slip an agile ship into dock in a smooth motion, amazing feeling.


  • I think it won’t be quite as existential, despite how well they make it all feel rooted in reality, it’s still pretty easy to keep in mind that it is a videogame. And with default settings and leaving “flight assist” on, the space ships handle more like planes. You can always disable flight assist, or have it on a toggle, or “disable when button held” setup too. Or, enable when held, if you want to be free flying most of the time, but still have a “stop” button when you want to cancel out your inertia, or more accurately match it with your current frame of reference.

    Basically, by default, you don’t have to think about your frame of reference. The fact that it is a videogame basically takes care of that. It’s a convenient way to hide that the instance you are in is faking(incredibly accurately) everything else that is not in your current frame of reference. Despite space travel feeling pretty seamless, it’s just cuz they hide the load screens and instance transfers as just part of navigating space. Any time you are unable to touch the controls, that is a load screen. Even if it otherwise looks the same, most notably when entering or exiting a planets frame of reference and switching between the “space” graphics of the planet to the “terrain” graphics. When approaching a planets gravity well, you basically do an uncontrolled glide that transitions you from space appropriate speeds to surface appropriate speed. That speed transition is the loading screen.

    Probably the only thing that might give a similar sense of existential dread for a few seconds is if you jump to a binary star system at a time when the star you aren’t jumping to just happens to be in the same direction you just jumped in from. It will look as though you flew through that star. The odds are pretty low, even full time explorers rarely see it, but it is something that can happen.


  • Oh yeah, I’ve played pretty much everything over the past 10 years in VR. In your same vein, I would recommend Elite: Dangerous. I played it for about 3 years with just mouse and keyboard, then another 3 years with stick and throttle, I still never got quite as good at combat on stick and throttle, but the game was more enjoyable to play overall that way. I haven’t tried the expansion yet. When it came out, it didn’t run great in VR, and part of its features weren’t VR capable. It should run good in VR now, but I don’t think they plan to bring the on-foot stuff to VR.

    The base game without the expansion is still fine to play. And with the expansion, the on-foot stuff will just be played on a virtual flatscreen instead, still fine, better than not having access to it, I suppose. But I just kept holding out, hoping it would be integrated with the rest of the otherwise amazing VR experience the game is. If I play the game again, I’ll probably just buy it. I still haven’t tried it since Quest 3 and my new computer upgrade. It’ll probably re-blow my mind.



  • For me, it was a Quest 3. The first VR headset to cross my personal threshold. My main requirement was that when I wasn’t playing actual VR games, the headset was worth using as a virtual computer monitor from the comfort of my recliner. While Quest 3 doesn’t quite have enough pixels to truly display my 4k screen at a 1:1 ratio, it is close enough that with the perceived clarity boost from the micromovements of your head meaning the same set of pixels is never sampled twice in a row and the headset running at 120hz, my 60hz real life 4k screen looks exactly as clear in real life as on the headset.

    I also have a supplemental completely fabricated virtual 4k 120hz screen in the headset that I use for any games that are easier to run and benefit more from framerate than perfect individual frame clarity. The screens are 20 feet away, but each take up 80 degrees of field of view, twice what is considered comfortable, but I have always preferred what I guess in that context can only be classified as “intimate?” distance from my screens. I only use one screen at a time, the other is stored just out of sight up above. I can still look at it comfortably, and there is a button to swap the monitor locations when I want to change which one is being primarily used.

    I also have my real world surroundings in the headset. So the screens are just floating within reality. I can still engage with my family, and thanks to the clarity of the passthrough cameras, I can watch TV with them too. Clearly enough to read the closed captions. The TV screen is about 30-40 degrees of my field of view, and is thus only represented as about a 720p screen, but with that same “temporal antialiasing” the clarity is boosted up to about 1080p level.

    So, with all that, I spend about 14 hours a day in my VR headset now. Wirelessly, with a magnetic battery swap every 2 hours. Sometimes standing up and playing real VR games, sometimes reclining in a super comfortable chair playing desktop games. With the bobovr system, or whichever option you prefer, the headset is comfortable to wear for an infinite amount of time. And when I visit my real computer monitor now, I just leave my sit/stand desk in stand mode and no longer have a computer chair.

    It has basically replaced every other screen in my life, except my phone. Which is still a main sticking point of VR. They will concievably replace the phone too eventually, but there is alot of software and hardware infrastructure needed to get there. At least Quest 3 is finally a headset clear enough to use your phone without taking it off or peeking through gaps. But only just, a phone tends to take up about 20 degrees of your field of view when used comfortably, even holding it twice as close as that is only 720p(temporally upsampled to 1080p) so holding the phone closer is still only about half the resolution of your phone. Assuming you run your phone in 4k normally. It’s probably fine for people without a gaming phone that likely already only run it at 1080p, then they might have text large enough to resolve at a comfortable distance in VR. But anyway. It’s not too bad now, so hopefully next headset is enough to completely solve that too, while we wait for it to not even be necessary eventually.

    I’m basically retired, built up a big enough money ball that my passive income from it slowly increases, so this is the rest of my life. Slowly getting better and better VR. And while it started at Oculus DK2 for me, all the headsets before Quest 3 were only fun toys that I played with alot. Steadily increasing in capability, but not crossing the threshold into permanent screen replacement. Quest 3 did it, it crossed over that line. While the size of screen I use to represent my 4k TV is only actually physically covered by about 1440p worth of pixels, the free temporal upsampling makes it as good as 4k(2160p).

    Though it will take double the current resolution for people that want a 4k screen at 40 degrees of field of view, for now people that like that distance (most people) would have to make due with it looking 1080p. Which might be fine for most people, it is still the most widely used screen resolution.

    Edit for plugs for anyone that wants to do this too:

    Outside of the Quest 3 itself, I use the third party comfort and runtime mod “M3 pro” from BoBoVR(dumb name, quality company), and Virtual Desktop software to stream my computer screen and create the better supplemental virtual screen out of thin air. I also use Virtual desktop to play my PCVR games when not just running something natively on the headset. Having a good network setup is pretty important too, especially in my case where the aforementioned recliner is on a different floor of my house than my computer. I have a background in networking, so in my case I’m able to setup my router in such a way that I can comfortably stream VR while we have 50 other devices on the router. But for most people, either a second dedicated router or specific VR streamer is going to be a better route. My router was 600 dollars, these bespoke units can be as little as 100 dollars and give you almost the same experience. Plus they are pre-configured specifically for VR streaming. Otherwise there can be alot of configuration changes needed.

    I apologize for my verbosity, I hate to leave any details out, even though someone could just ask if I forgot to cover something. I am, unsurprisingly, Autistic. Communicating clearly is a common problem for us. Never know what knowledge I have that isn’t common and needs to be conveyed. And I don’t change mental gears well, so I like to get everything out once, if possible, to reduce the likelihood of having to get back into this mental space again later.



  • Religion is pretty hard to believe if it wasn’t the one you were raised into. And it’s often times pretty hard to get out of the one you were raised into.

    But outside of religion, a pretty common fictional view is that heaven is the extreme end of order, and hell is the extreme end of chaos. Neither one can harbor any middle ground, and thus they would both suck to be stuck in.

    Inside religion, whatever your religion’s version of heaven is, usually depends on what “your people(local and as a whole)” would want it to be. It changes over time and distance to better fit. But never bring up that it has changed, as it has always been this one and true correct way of depicting it, to question that is some kind of sin… and hell of course is similarly fluid despite having always been “this” way.

    In truth, they have both been depicted every which way imaginable.





  • When most of the temperature scales were made, they didn’t even know yet that there was a zero, I mean, theoretically, they likely knew or assumed. But they had no way of practically measuring it yet, at the very least.

    I do think that as much as it would be weird for a couple of years, it would help a lot in the long run to widely adopt a temperature scale that starts at 0.

    Because honestly, the percentage of adults I come across that have no idea how temperature works or what it even is conceptually beyond just “a nice day or a bad day” or “this is the number for cooking this thing” is astonishing.