I never beat it as a kid either. I barely played it. I thought it was cryptic and punishing, although 9-year-old me wouldn’t have used those words. Just a simple “This game is dumb.” worked.

In fact, I thought it was pretty universally reviled. I’ve since learned that this is due the to fact that a child’s gaming social-sphere in the 90s could be quite limited.

About 5 years ago, glancing across a bookshelf, a certain game cart happened to catch my eye. I couldn’t tell you why it was this particular game cart that my attention ;) but I really started to think about it. I don’t actually know anything about Zelda 2 (other than “This game is dumb.”). So then I thought, maybe it wasn’t for kids. Nine-year-olds are pretty ego-centric. The NES was one of our toys. No adults were playing these things. Did I mention my social-sphere?

It then occured to me: I’m a blank slate. I know next to nothing about the progression, the map, or anything. Of course along the way, I found things familiar, and I knew things like >!Shadow Link was the final boss!< but I didn’t know >!how to cheese the Shadow Link fight!<.

So I gave it an honest, no-help-other-than-the-game’s-original-manual playthrough. Yadda-yadda-yadda, Zelda 2 is one of the best games on the NES, and in my book, that makes it one of the best games ever.

In hindsight, Zelda 1 is cryptic af. “The 10th enemy has the bomb”, “gumble gumble”, “shaka when the walls fell”, wtf? If you’d like to know what the 10th enemy thing is: >!hopefully someone below explains drop counts because I’m sure as fuck not going to!<. How was a kid or adult going to figure that out?

My Z2 playthrough took days, maybe 10, but my memory is fuzzy. I got pretty stuck >!looking for the mirror!< and I wondered around for a full day with no progress although I felt like I understood where the game wanted me to go. About halfway through the next day, I read the manual. I didn’t actually think when I started that I was going to do a no-help-other-than-the-manual playthrough. I thought of as a no-internet-on-an-80s-game playthrough. After the realization that the manual wasn’t outside help, I did use the internet for that. Well as soon as I learned >!hammers can chop down trees!<, I was on my way. The rest of the playthrough went smoothly, apart from being hard as fuck.

I would be careful with the word “always”. A softlock can occur by entering a later dungeon to steal some of its keys. You can use the surplus keys to beat an early dungeon without collecting its item. This locks the item in the dungeon. Hope you didn’t need that later.

the fact that you basically have to read the manual

This is no joke and deserves a bit of emphasis. NES games expect you to read the manual.

I did my first play of Zelda 2 about 5 years ago. I didn’t like it as kid, but I loved my adult playthrough. I will note that this was one of the games that I got stuck until I read the manual.

Another Z2 pointer, to anyone that wants to give it a go, is that you can logically “soft lock” the game with bad key management. It’s unlikely, but if you like to look for unintended orders to do game goals, it could happen.

As far as I know, nothing about AI entered into arguments. No precedents regarding AI could have been set here. Therefore, this case wasn’t about AI per se.

I did bring it up as relevant because, as you say, AI is just an over-hyped black box. But that’s my opinion, with no case law to cite (ianal). So to say that a court would or should feel that AI and fancy photoediting is the same thing is misleading. I know that wasn’t your point, but it was part of mine.

As it usually does. But the court’s ineptitude should favor the defense. It shouldn’t be an arrow in a prosecutor’s quiver, at least.

This was important in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. The zoom resolution was interpolated by software. It wasn’t AI per se, but the fact that a jury couldn’t be relied upon to understand a black box algorithm and its possible artifacts, the zoomed video was disallowed.

(this in no way implies that I agree with the court.)

Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. I’m now thinking about someone going off on a racist tirade alone in the woods. I guess that’s offensive.

But with your example, if you are offended by “listener” then offense exists. The greater community advisory corrective action could be “no action required, don’t even say ‘sorry’ is you don’t want to”. What action is taken does not change the fact that I offended someone. There could be a social-sphere that actually comes down on the other side and says “we don’t use that word here”, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t feel right trying to argue about.

I want to be clear to anyone reading this, no I do not think there is or should be anything like a formal committee. Just the social-sphere you wish to inhabit.

Whether offense exists is more on the listener (or audience rather). Whether any action (a simple “sorry” or more severe) should be expected is the complicated part.

… in response to “feedback from the filmmaking team that wanted the actor’s remarks to be centered on the movie.”

Fuck that. You had de Niro submit a speech because you want to broadcast his words. You tried to make him a puppet and have your words in his voice.

The only thing actions like this cause is that it makes people wonder how many times smaller voices simply just went with the puppet speech.

I can’t believe they asked someone of talent to write a speech and think he’d just roll along with major changes in the voice.

As it’s not released, it’s probably illegal (contractually) to drive it on a public road. This is likely more akin to seeing tech writers with unreleased hardware.

Why is the unity is underrated when its what i use

Everyone is going on about the lack of punctuation; I can’t get over this snippet. It’s like the ideal of an ego wrote this.

If you’d like to know my experience with Unity DE, I thought it felt like a toy and when it was packaged with Ubuntu, it was the first time I left vanilla Ubuntu since the days of Gutsy Gibbon.

I’m glad to hear Unity getting love. The customizability is by far linux’s key strength. So it can give people what they want. For example, it gives me the ability to completely ignore Unity.

Thank goodness it doesn’t have windows.

It’s like they studied at the Kitchen Appliance Naming Institute.

At this point, it’s not even weird. I’m just glad they aren’t tarnishing any look I would miss. I mean, in an alternate universe, I could see myself rocking a Chaplin moustache. But they can have the thinning, wiry, bizarrely-styled blond look all to themselves.

It’s not that I don’t care about local politics. You sending a link that’s relevant to other people’s local politics is completely irrelevant to me. Until the GP option is common on local ballots, not just 5 featured ones, I do not want hear about a presidential run.

By the way, I do commemorate you on your outreach and activism. You’re getting shit on in this thread, and you’re still politely getting your links out. Good work.

I’m a voter, my friend. I can complain about a party all damn day. If you think that a political party is going get a dime from me before they can even convince me to vote for them, you have strange spending habits.

Honestly, I was just hoping it might help him realize how dumb X sounds to everyone else.

And it’s owned by the X billionaire Elon Musk.

I’ll level with you. I only called it philosophical so I could hide behind that as a shield against an actual physics debate. But then I so showed my ass and mentioned the standard model. Thus leaving philosophy. I can’t hide behind unfalsifiable bullshit.

So I hope someone read this and went down some wikipedia rabbit holes. I’ll happily be “Cunningham’s fool”. I’ll give you, weird reader, some more wiki nuggets below.

I don’t think you should let some rando make you doubt anything. I don’t have a Ph.D. in physics. I only have a mild intro this stuff. I was on my way to getting a phd in physics (nuclear at that, not particle) and got distracted by math.

I don’t want to be super specific so as to not dox myself with a research fingerprint, but my research has crossed paths with things like Agmon metrics. Which although feels like I’m doing physics, it doesn’t change the fact that physicists don’t read my papers.

So I do find myself saying “apparently these graded algebras show up in quantum mechanics” and stuff like that. Maybe some day I’ll go back and learn it deeper, but I doubt it.

But I do love knowing that there is a connection even if I don’t see all the details. Like I don’t think I’ll ever understand sentences like “One way to incorporate the standard model of particle physics into heterotic string theory is the symmetry breaking of E8 to its maximal subalgebra SU(3)×E6.”. I need to know about Lie symmetries, but I’m not in physics or algebra. So I don’t think I’ll flesh out this connection, but it really makes me ponder The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

So online, I’d rather play the role of a street preacher spouting things like “nature can’t take a derivative. there is no continuum.” and hoping people read the links when I claim nature solves differential equations by means of weak solutions thereby only integrates. Integration is what nature does. I know that the phrase “nature solves differential equations” is nonsense. But it’s fun. So going deeper, nature can’t take a derivative because the idea of point particles destroys continuity. This is what saves the natural world from pathologies like the Banach–Tarski paradox. Those ideas are kinda basic, but I’m shooting for 1 in 10,000 read to whom the topic is both new and interesting for.

Sorry that you engaged with an internet crazy person. I hope it wasn’t too infuriating.

Cool. I really hate the English use of “you” when “one” is really the word one wants. But when one uses “one” as opposed to “you”, one sounds crazy.

I honestly think a lot of online defensiveness arises from this construction.

I’m saying, it sounds like I’m saying “you need to do blah cuz you’re wrong about blah”, when I would prefer it to be read as reiterating my earlier point of “if one wants to see Green policies enacted, one would do well to ignore Jill Stein.”