You invented a fictional group of people, got mad at them, then declared what you imagined they did was wrong.
I want you to know that.
Musk came into Tesla as funding. People were trying to make the cars.
With regards to SpaceX, he was looking for people to build rockets to go to Mars. But no one wanted to sell to him. So he hired rocket scientists to build the rockets.
And yes, while there will always be some asshole who says "That won't work", there were plenty of ""real experts"" who were working at those companies.
And the "real experts" left us dependent on Russia for launching a couple capsules a year to the space station.
They could have done what Musk did with Falcon 9 in the 90's. Instead they chose to mess around more with solid fueled heavy lift vehicles, all the while proclaiming that they were the experts/science.
CTE is not just about concussions but any amount of damage consistently over time that accrues.
Current line of scrimmage situation is the worst case scenario. Linemen are a couple feet away from each other and they start from a crouched position. They explode up and hit the opposing line, very often with their helmet/crown, down after down, 60-70 times a game. You could not plan a better way to get CTE.
1) Neutral zone at the line, they start 2 yards away from each other.
2) Have to start from standing position, and/or:
3) First contact has to be arms
It would be a bit of an adjustment like it was for dynamic kickoff. You're never going to stop all head trauma in a contact sport but the mechanics of the line positions are basically designed for it.
Similar to the CFL. Offense lines up per usual with the ball. Defense is pushed back 1 or 1.5 yards (2 is probably excessive) and can enter the zone the second ball is snapped.
There are some side effects (goodbye tush push) but it drastically reduces helmet contact for those 8-10 players every down.
And indeed, disallowing brace against ground is all you'd need to get the standing result.
I think the league would be weirdly resistant to the standing rule. So much of technique is taught from the three-point stance that I can see a lot of position coaches becoming worried that they'd essentially be starting over.
No doubt, it's very deeply entrenched and would face a ton of opposition... Which I do sympathize with. You spend your life mastering the dynamics of these stances/positions and then the rug's ripped out.
The game would change but I don't think it would be existential, more of an evolution. It may even make it more fun to watch. Speed becomes much more important as does general athleticism.
Not the OP but I don't think you can. The issue is you're stopping a moving object with your body. That is always going to cause damage. I think the armor itself also promotes big hits. I truly think that's the reason Rugby is a safer game; the hits are more painful, and you're not hitting each other with a carbon fiber helmet.
Being in a Marvel movie greatly increases your connectedness.
Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Downey Jr. are central to a lot of plotlines in the first 10 years of Marvel movies. With either them or characters connected to them appearing in other movies.
Then you have other franchise connections. If you've been in a Kevin Smith film, you're at most three steps from Samuel L. Jackson by way of Kevin Smith -> Bruce Willis -> Samuel L Jackson. And even if you're not in a film in the "View Askewniverse" like "Zac and Miri Make a Porno", that movie has Justin Long, who was in a movie with Willis.
Every actor in the Fast and Furious franchise is connected through Vin Diesel.
Every actor in the OT and sequel trilogy of Star Wars is connected through Harrison Ford. The prequel trilogy connects through Natalie Portman.
Just between those, it's not too hard to reach everyone.
I was arrested as a minor because someone who was giving me a ride was found with 0.156 grams of cannabis residue in his booksack which was not accessible to me at any point. The other two defendants had parents and accepted pretrial. I was homeless with no parental support or money for pretrial and had to fight it. The driver went on stand and said it was his and that I never had access to it. Half a dozen cops testified wildly different stories.
But, my right to a jury trial was illegally taken from me and the judge simply said, "I think you're lying," without a shred of proof and gave me the maximum allowed 6 month jailtime and maximum fines for a misdemeanor charge given to me as a minor with no prior record. I immediately told my attorney I wanted to appeal due to a mistrial and her failure to make a valid motion to quash, and she looked at me, pointed at the judge, and furiously scolded me, saying, "Absolutely not. That is my boss and he will make my life hell if I allow you to appeal."
The other parish public defender, which they'd pulled from my case due to his desire to actually help me, was so upset that he went to the judge's quarters, screamed at him and then came to my cell to apologize profusely about me getting illegally railroaded. He was never able to fix my case.
His brother... was the DA. Now he is running to replace him as DA since his brother got sworn in as a judge. I'm going to reach out to him and try to get it removed from the system now.
Also, when I got arrested, the DA's dad, the town mayor, personally visited the home of the folks who were letting me stay in their garage so I could finish high school and tried to convince them to put me out on the street so that I would fail my classes and end back up in jail. The fucking mayor.
So many levels of fucked up to that case. Not to mention that the officer who arrested me is a known meth producer, distributor and user. I have personally witnessed her bring a smurf to the pharmacy to buy sudafed IN HER POLICE UNIT so that she could go cook meth while on duty.
And while in court for my own case for 0.156 grams of a material that was never found on my person or within reach of me, I watched a man who was friends with the judge get sentenced to a grand total of 20 days of community service after being found with two ounces of pot in his pockets and a bottle of whiskey while illegally hunting on someone else's land out of season without permits, operating a firearm while basically blackout drunk. It is literally who you know.
This took place 13-15 years ago. Anonymous FBI tips were swallowed up, ACLU was uninterested, couldn't get a journalist to bite. Some of the people involved have already died without ever facing justice.
Write a book. The only thing they hate more than accountability is a tarnished legacy. Disbarment is temporary, the public dancing on their grave lasts as long as the scandal and plot location are known.
I mean, Blow writes single-user software that doesn't have to interop with anything else, persist any meaningful state, or be modified after release.
He has a very limited view of what is required of software.
The problem is that he's not entirely wrong. The JavaScript-ification of everything is kind of a problem. Electron apps everywhere is an issue.
But a lot of issues are also just trying to deal with bad actors. Doing authentication or authorization wrong can have real consequences. And it is incredibly difficult. Because security is in opposition to access. And trying to make security invisible is even more difficult.
Or maybe a better way of putting it... a corrupted save annoys one user who has already paid you the $30 they're ever going to pay.
Compared to if you run a cloud storage company, a corrupted file might annoy a user that pays $1m every month, to store data that they themselves make money on, etc.
For the most part, most games are antagonistic. And that's fine, that's the fun. Goombas are player-antagonism. Dark Souls is antagonistic. But they are engaging you and testing your ability to execute game mechanics with increasing amounts of precision.
Having to sit through a full hour of video to slowly trace a line is pointlessly antagonistic. It only tests a player's desire to sit through your bullshit. Being able to do it does not make you better at any other part of the game. It doesn't even make you better at that part of the game.
You don’t have to sit through it. It just asks the player to slow down and listen for just an hour. If something, it makes you better in general by just listening to a fantastic talk by Brian Moriarty, that’s the achievement.
You don't have to do it though. There is no reward, no achievement, nothing unlocks. It's functionally equivalent to "if you stand in one spot for an hour a special sound effect plays and some lights flash for 2 seconds." I think it's psychologically interesting how many people get angry that this sound effect is programmed into the game.
I consider the witness one of my favorite games, and I fully completed it, but I did not do that because it's dumb. The existence of the thing really has nothing to do with the game.
It's bad game design if it were the game, but it's not the game. You said "that's not a good puzzle. It's not good game design. It's antagonistic to the player in the worst possible way."
But it's not really a puzzle, or the game, or antagonizing you, because there's no purpose in doing it. Like I said, it's just something that exists in the game. It's not the game; it doesn't reflect upon the puzzle design or the game design because it's irrelevant to the actual puzzles and the actual game.
I'll repeat myself: if you stand in one spot for an hour a special sound effect plays and some lights flash for 2 seconds. If that happened in Call of Duty, it would be strange, but it also would have nothing to do with the game design quality of Call of Duty. It would not make sense to say Call of Duty has bad game design due to the presence of this thing.
I'm defending the witness because it's a good game, and this comment thread implies that doing that dumb thing is required to play or finish the game, when it is not. It is a misleading comment that gives an uninformed reader an incorrect impression of the product.
Technically, there's no purpose in any of it. Playing the game and not playing it are the same.
It's a puzzle in that it's a line you have to draw to complete all the puzzles. What's that worth to anyone is what it is. There are lots of games with post-game content that's not technically required to "finish" the game.
But the goal of the Witness is to find and draw these lines. If you didn't find and draw that line, Blow would say you didn't find and draw all the lines.
So, it is a puzzle in the game. It is. It's a puzzle. It's in the game. You don't know whether it's pointless or not until after you complete it. So you can't look at it and say, "Well, this is not needed, I can skip it".
And the overall product is kind of bad. It's overly tedious and mistakes hiding necessary information with being clever.
Like the Witness, Order of the Sinking Star descends into tedium.
You just repeat the same type of puzzle over and over. The Witness is a bit more tedious considering the real “puzzle” is rule-discovery rather than the flow-style puzzles that make up the majority of the game’s interactions.
Like the best I can say about Order is “yeah, it’s ok”.
The Witness was repetitive? Every puzzle set had a lesson, and every set of sets had a gag / out of the box puzzle at the end where something was fundamentally different (a crack or flicker, or an interaction with the environment, or a reference back to something else on the island.)
What I suppose was repetitive though — and where you might be coming from — is the formula itself. The entire island was the same episode format, even if the plot was different each time. Like Knight Rider — formulaic, but I loved the formula!
Like you get presented with a series of grids that uses the rule of the area. You solve the 5 or 6. Which leads you to another series of grids using the same rule. You solve those. Etc.
Finding the puzzles and discovering the rules are the most involved part of the game. Once you know that, the actual puzzles are just ok. But they're line drawing puzzles, there's a ceiling.
Even the environment puzzles are kinda meh. "Oh, that looks like it could be a line. Yep. It's a line."
I still haven’t tried the new game, but I did feel like that about The Witness.
I loved the beginning, the art style, the Myst vibes, discovering new areas and a specific “WTF” moment.
But I really didn’t understand the need of piling up similar puzzles with minimal variation.
You could have slashed 2/3 of the puzzles and the game would have been tighter and more satisfying imho.
Brevity is be the soul of wit (not of the Witness).
Reading that is a “500 hours game” instantly drains any interest I might have for Order of the Sinking Star, heck, there are not many pleasant activities I can think of I would like to do for 500 hours.
Animal well could be called, perhaps, a 500 hour game in that many people will never find all of the secrets by themselves, it took a community effort. Is OotSS a 500-hour game in that the main storyline takes 500 hours, or 100%ing it takes 500 hours?
I agree. There's variety in all the new elements being added to each of the core puzzle types, but it doesn't remain satisfying or engaging for very long, it just becomes repetitive. I was expecting more in the way of a meta-puzzle experience.
Maybe that was never promised and I made up the expectation myself when I heard "500 hours." But it feels like there's never a reward for finishing a puzzle other than, okay, here's the next one.
It seems like because there's just so much of it that people just haven't got to the "meta puzzles" yet.
I'm 20 hours in and starting to see examples of mechanics being generalised in a way I wasn't expecting, i.e. an early games thing turns out works in a way more general way that elevates the mechanic in complexity and feels like a very satisfying moment.
I have a suspicion about another that would completely change my perception of the game if it turns out to be true, so... meta puzzles? Not sure, but certainly there's something more than just the 4 initial rulesets colliding.
I think the other big issue is that you can't get really clever with block manipulation.
Either they present you with exactly what you need to solve the area or they give you more. Giving you more, in most cases, will just break the puzzle and make it too easy. So you know in a general sense what you have to do just by what tools you have available. Then it's just a matter of doing them in the right order.
And, yeah, it's fine. But that's the best I can muster for it.
And I see it's $30, which feels an ok price point. I was feeling more like $20, but $30 is fine.
This is just not true. One of the great things about the game is how each set of puzzles is a new emergent idea. You are required to make a leap of reasoning. You often do not know in a general sense what to do, because once you do the puzzles are quite easy. The difficulty, and the fun, is in discovering emergent behavior of systems. There are puzzles with just two pieces on a simple screen that boggle the mind initially.
If the demo is not enough to engage someone to buy the full product, it is not a good demo.
If a game needs to be played for 30 to 40 hours before it gets truly engaging, it is not a good game.
Entertainment's goal is to engage. There are many ways to achieve that, but no one should have to slog through tedium in order to get to "the good stuff".
Looking at the title, I guessed what this was about.
Finding a decent dentist is fucking hard. I travel 40 minutes to my dentist because he's solid and I don't want to switch if I don't have to.
You want someone who is going to identify problems and correct them, but not try and make everything a problem. Basically, look at where they spend their money and listen to what they recommend.
You don't want a dirty office, but you also don't need crown molding and gold leaf to fill a cavity.
I had a wisdom tooth issue and went to a dentist. He extracted it, said I had a number of cavities, etc. Never scheduled a follow up with him. Went to a different dentist, he said I had considerable plaque, but couldn't really tell on the cavities until he cleaned that up. So I did that and then he said I only had one or two.
They recommended I get a Sonicare. While they sold them, they also said I could get them anywhere, but to make sure I get one as it would help with plaque.
My current dentist had to extract one of my teeth because my wisdom tooth cracked it. He had also wanted to remove the wisdom tooth because the gap could be problematic, but after extracting the cracked tooth, he had to tap out. He told me that my roots are apparently the longest he's ever seen. So unless an actual problem develops, he was going to leave the wisdom tooth. And if I ever need another extraction, he was going to refer me to a surgeon. Other than that, it's just been cleanings and checkups.
So yeah, you really need to vet your dentist. If a dentist ever tells you you have multiple cavities, get a second opinion. Drilling a hole in a tooth and filling it with epoxy is quick and nets them a couple hundred per hole.
I don't have enough sample size to say this is a rule, but a potential strategy is:
Shop around for dental insurance that has good coverage at a low price and find a place nearby, with good reviews, that happily takes that insurance.
The reasoning is that it's fairly easy to do, and it excludes most dentists that are attempting to maximize revenue. You don't need a spa-like guest treatment, or awkward fake family friendliness, etc. You just need someone who is qualified and fine performing their services at a comfortable level of payment.
Makes you feel mighty stupid when you realize the sort of "luxury" place you were going that only accepted an insurance plan that climbed towards $37/mo actually provided worse overall dental services than a place that accepts a (higher-coverage!) $16/mo plan. No, they don't try to put on a facade of being "family". No, their waiting room isn't quite as nice. The cars outside aren't as fancy. But they're more to-the-point about dentistry and the whole thing feels like a more "normal" transaction.
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