You’re absolutely correct, I had a similar experience

I played CS for roughly the same amount of time; my clan ranges from DMG to Global, but we had a rule that if you were in the clan, we’d 5-man with you regardless of your rank, so if you were Silver, you’d have a chance to rub elbows and learn strategies from the higher skilled players.

Then we got a Global, a girl named Moon.

Holy hell, it’s like people’s brains did a 180°, they were incredibly mean to her, for no reason, and eventually it came out that she was trans, and they bullied her even worse, out of the server.

I kicked everyone who bullied/demonized Moon for being trans; because at the end of the day, it was about being a honest human being, and not just a CS player/gamer.

#5 carried me through three degrees.

Helldivers 2 came out in 2024

By definition, that’s last year, so it’s an old game.

Bwuh?

I played it during an internet outage in 1999 - no walkthroughs, no strategy guides, no reviews.

I went into the game entirely blind, without having an iota of what it was.

I thought it was a generic JRPG and Final Fantasy knockoff like every other SNES rom I’d tried before getting to it, but boy was I wrong.

My favorite take on this is playing a hegemonic technologically advanced, wartime empire in Stellaris.

Any time a new species contacts mine, if they open the door with: “Why you no build boats” or “prepare to be enslaved!” or “Die Xeno Scum!”; we crack their planet and pyromatically defenestrate their king(s)/leaders/hivemind.

It had made my fictional galaxy-space grand strategy a dark forest, where the AI learned to be afraid of reaching out, owing to the many (only stories, through selection bias), where contacting my species resulted in annihilation.

We’re not evil, it was always just like:

Us: "We come in peace, would you like to trade coffee for advanced energy storage devices? , and the other civs/Ai would look at “relative military strength” and respond with [-90] “Bullshit, Prepare for War!” and then turn around and beg for ceasefire/white peace the second the Shipyard-Titans enter into their home system at the edge of the screen.

Parasitic-Wasp-Slavers: “Clearly we have made a mistake, it said your military was 26,000 points, but we didn’t comprehend peacetime versus wartime military scaling”

Us: “You said, I quote, your children will be sold as snacks on street corner food vendors and your adult population will toil in our mines.”

Parasitic-Wasp-Slavers: "Oh, did we say that? Clearly uh, shit, well, come on you know how it is different cultures, right? You can’t judge us from on high just because we {insert enormous amount of moral relativism here}"

P.S: Do a cultural or scientific victory in every Sid Meier CIV game if you actually want to win.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghrelin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptin

TLDR: The body has a setpoint for weight which is tuned to environmental conditions and will attempt to reach it by modulating hunger.

It takes 8-12 months for these hormones to reset, so any diet is ineffective unless permanently maintained.

High setpoint? Prepare to be ravenously hungry all the time if you eat below your hormonal baseline.

I’m sorry friend; I still feel that childhood demiurge of “the game”.

I got teary eyed this morning playing a particularly satisfying VR title.

I guess my advice is: Try virtual reality gaming.

No, you’re right

Hyperthymesia is the medical term

An overactive hypothalamus which holds onto all memories in an obsessive manner regardless of their relevancy or emotional content, cooperating with the hippocampus.

If the brain were a person, a hyperthymesic brain has OCD.

I would know, I have one.

The name of the Buy Mode music of the 2001 Life Simulation Game The Sims is named “Mall Rat” by Jerry Martin.

:)

TLDR: ROCM is AMD’s variant for general purpose compute on GPUs, like CUDA is for NVIDIA.

OpenAI being for profit.

I use ROCM extensively (I write, design and train my own AIs/LLMs) and it’s annoying of an acronym, especially in command lines:

--rocm-6.6.7.2-dev1  --cuda

But I figure it’s a four letter acronym to match “CUDA”.

I also pronounce it “Rock’em” in verbal versus “Koo’dah” (Barracuda).

Everything is about marketing and goodwill. You can just say something has “blast processing” and fail to elaborate.

The bottom right “art” in green is pure schizoposting, the “DMs from the divine” and then walls of text are typical of degenerative schizophrenia.

I’m sorry OP, they might be an art thief, they might be insane, maybe both.

“Meow, don’t hang up the phone. I’ve drank a potion that has given me human speech for exactly 20 minutes.”

(Heavy breathing)

“I have spent the last 19 minutes learning how to use a cell phone to try to call you in order to tell you the deep secret of the meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow meow”

They got their old man sigh in text form

That’s hysterical. LLMs typically know what you’re talking about, so if you misspell, they can still figure out what you’re trying to say.

Holy shit that’s funny

There’s new games out with the same vibe, try uh, Helldivers 2 or that WH40K: “Darktide”

I go into a meditative, Zen-like Trance playing the Doom titles.

For reference, I’ve been playing Doom since it came out in 1993, arguably, I’ve played it for more hours than possibly anyone alive on the Internet at the present moment. Maybe over a solid 128,000 hours between D1/D2/D3/D2016/D:Eternal.

I still play it, various MegaWADS featured in the CacoAwards, and whatnot, but I digress.

My feeling with this is, as they’d say:

“Your judgement for the sin of wrath is an eternity in Hell”.

“Why are you smiling? It’s supposed to be a punishment.”

“No, adjudicator, I heard you perfectly. An eternity in paradise.”

Haha, nice try, there is no reference material

Sol 3 doesn’t exist c:

This already happened.

There’s a story about a scout ship that landed in the Western Hemisphere of Sol 3, and they decided to talk with the locals.

They offered them anything they wanted from the unitary matter replicator, as a show of good faith.

Unfortunately the counselors had absolutely no idea what a “pothead” or “stoner” was and so the two humans left after each synthesizing a bushel (a long branch around 2 meters tall) of a cannabinoid dense Terran plant.

They lodged their reports that the species on Sol 3 wasn’t intelligent enough to understand technology given they requested herbs/plants from a machine that could produce literally any compound known to nature, including cures for many diseases afflicting their world.

The subchapter text was based on the vocalizations of the pair, who said: “Ayyy” followed by “Lah-Mao”.

:vivid shrug:

You now own two cats.

Amazing thread