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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • People don’t really like to read the articles before commenting, huh.

    Knowing Stardew was such a beloved game, I knew I had to get context before judging the author because it could be read both ways.

    People who assume games not changing = criticism are telling us more about their own uncharitable view of others than anything else.

    EDIT: That said, if I were to offer criticism, I feel like the author gives too much credit to Stardew as though it invented or pioneered the tight gameplay loop: perhaps at least some mention could have been made to Harvest Moon, the game from which Stardew borrows - and perfects - most of its major systems.

    Also to be fair, it doesn’t go anywhere with that thought that Stardew hasn’t changed. Felt a little low-effort, like a retrospective on Stardew that just basically listed what people liked about it.








  • It’s weird cos you’re the only person bringing up pirating first (others are bringing it up as a talking point you’ve raised), and that’s not the dichotomy - it’s not dubious reselling sites or pirating, it’s Humble Choice, the topic of your post, where the games are already discounted, the developers have decided to opt in, and some money is actually going to charity.

    Even if you bring up your original post as providing “options for everyone”, it was written in the spirit of advertising grey market sites as an alternative to Humble Choice, and therefore it’s entirely fair that others are bringing up the harms of grey market sites so that everyone knows what the risks are between them. I used to use those grey market sites as a kid more than a decade ago before I understood that they were a tool by scammers to make their money, and now I no longer use them. It would only be honest for you to have talked about that in your original post rather than ignoring it because the only alternative to you is piracy.



  • It’s unfortunate that you’ve chosen to focus on a semantic nitpick as the only thing to reply to rather than all the other more interesting talking points.

    It’s also unfortunate that you’ve chosen to condescend throughout all the posts you’ve written, which really makes me want to not rely to you.

    That said, you’ve already shown a brutal contradiction:

    Wikipedia:
    ‘to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments’

    Tutors:
    ‘contribute to an axiomatic system’

    Wolfram:
    ‘a proposition regarded as self-evidently true without proof. The word “axiom” is a slightly archaic synonym for postulate.’

    What these definitions all say that I think you’re wilfully choosing to ignore (or just not reading carefully enough) is that these are all assumptions meant to make a system internally logical.

    It’s also amazing how you can say

    ‘Saying 1 + 1 = 2 serves as foundation for further deductive reasoning […] is generic, imprecise, and worthless’

    when that is literally what half of your definitions also say.

    ‘Saying 1 + 1 = 2 is Axiomatic is like saying Oxygen is an axiom or axiomatic. To further build the periodic table. No, Oxygen just is, a fundamental piece of reality which is also true!’

    You’re still not getting it, which means you’re not reading anything I’ve said at all about human-centric perception (which is a shame given how much time I’ve had to spend trying to parse your poor semantics.)

    There’s a difference between the element and atoms of Oxygen that do exist in our world and the name and observed properties of Oxygen that we have derived and given to Oxygen. The strange thing is that I think while everyone else agrees that the testing, observing, and ascribing of properties to something is science, you think that the existence of oxygen itself is science (and therefore science is truth?)

    To bring it back to your original equivalences, 1 is true in most languages and systems because along the way, humans decided to use 1 to notate a truth value. If we had wanted (and some systems do), 0 could have been used as the truth value, or even a letter. We’ve then decided to build entire lines of logic from that number, and obviously from within the observational parameters of this framework, 1 must be true for any of our observations to be internally consistent. But two things:

    1. These are our observations, not reality per se.
    2. 1 is still an abstraction. Is the concept behind 1 an absolute truth? For all we know 0.99 (recurring) is a much more accurate abstraction for the 1s of the universe. 1 is our human attempt to bring some order to a confusing world.

    Fundamentally your dogmatic clinging to axioms as somehow underpinning some universal truth when they are meant to be convenient frameworks to build upon shows a very shallow understanding of the building blocks with which humans have built our understanding of the world. I highly recommend you take the scientific method to heart and try posting these “deep” thoughts in other places to see if anyone else agrees that they’re deep. If they don’t, I invite you to revise your hypothesis and reassess whether what’s “true” to you really is true to the mathematicians and scientists of the world.

    Edit: Just want to add that I won’t be replying to you anymore as it’s taking a lot of more time and the worse thing is I don’t think you’re even trying to understand what others have to say despite your talk about “no shallow thinking” (lol). There’s no point in talking to a brick wall, especially a condescending one, and I’m sure we both have better things to do with our lives.


  • We can take your axiom, 1+1 = 2, and break it down into where fundamentally one of your biggest misunderstandings is.

    We came up with the equivalence of 1+1=2, and deemed it true. Someone else in this comment section already brought up the idea of axioms, and while 1+1=2 is a theorem rather than an axiom, it is built on axioms that have been defined as fact for the rest of the framework to stand.

    Science (and Math) is a purely anthropic system or framework. 1+1=2 isn’t a universal constant if we look at the fusion of two Hydrogen atoms into one Helium atom (with extra energy being released!) The very idea of what 1 is can change depending on your reference point and may not stay the same between observers. While 1+1 may stay the same in the world of pure Mathematics (and a very robust world it is we have created!) it is much harder to apply them to real life (does this make Mathematics “true-er” than reality?)


  • This is really strange in two ways.

    One, you’re not describing science but existence. Science is nothing if not a framework of knowledge based on the scientific method. To somehow come up with a definition of science that separates it from the scientific method actually removes all qualities of knowledge from science (do you think religious people also don’t define their knowledge as “what is”?) On the whole, basing your definition of “Science” as how laymen define science seems to be a strange way to try to make a supposedly mathematical argument - from imprecision and abstraction?

    Two, to conflate Science with existence essentially is concocting a truism - like when someone asks you to solve for x you’ve chosen to define x as whatever you want then solve it. Science as the sum of empirical human knowledge is an approximation of x, and as a mathematician I’m sure you understand the significance of how an approximation of something is a world apart from the thing itself. You cannot say that science is truth, therefore science is true - that is a pointless statement that completely drops all the reasons why science is more truthful than religious knowledge or any other form of knowledge.


  • “If the story of Adam and Eve wasn’t true and correct, then there wouldn’t be any humans.”

    You have a very binary understanding of what is necessary for something to be true that is almost dogmatic.

    The rules of chemistry need not be true and correct for formulas to succeed. People were doing correct things for the wrong reasons, even scientifically, for centuries, if not millennia. Think about things like surgeons not washing hands, inefficient gunpowder, bloodletting, or the attempts at a unified theory of Physics - we know that not everything is correct, yet the formulas don’t fail at small enough scales/slow enough scales/within certain observational parameters.

    You’re right that science aims for truth, but that doesn’t mean it can attain anything more than our closest approximation of the truth (limited by human perspectives and resources). We believe in it because it is what works, for now. And the beauty of this is that if one day some incontrovertible proof for a higher being does come up, we will recalibrate all our theories to account for it (presumably after very, very stringent checks.)

    Now if your whole point is Science has done very many good things all around us, that is 100% true! But that says nothing about the truth value of Science, beyond that there is a lot of evidence of it working that one time (which is not what you seem to be claiming when you say it exists regardless of belief).


  • If all it takes to make science truth is to provide quotes of famous people calling it truth, then religion is probably truth a thousand times over.

    A lot of the arguments and evidence you bring to the table are circular and only true from the reference point of whatever internal logic you’ve decided to assemble for yourself. Does this mean you’re surrounded by Chinese shills? Probably not, but that is also apparently the truth you’ve decided to believe in, evidence be damned.

    What people are trying to make you see is that epistemologically, absolute truth is a ridiculous bar that, if you set as the hurdle for science to meet, is only going to disappoint you time and again.

    Scientific knowledge does not have any special status or truth value conferred on it beyond the very educated guesswork of scientists and the time and effort and money that goes into verification. It’s an endeavour that relies entirely on empiricism and the flaws that come with having limited human perceptions.

    Does this mean that science is exactly the same as religion when it comes to reliability? Of course not, because the things that you choose to believe in when you believe in science are different, more accurate and reproducible.

    To claim that science has some ineffable attribute that puts it above any other belief, on the other hand, is discounting and discrediting the effort and very nature of scientific knowledge, and ascribing to it the kind of mystic quality that is exactly what makes religious knowledge so ridiculous.


  • I’m thinking about the games I played in my childhood that influenced what I like to play now, so it might be only halfway relevant to the question.

    First monster collector: Pokemon Blue. Digimon World 1 was also one of my favourites, because of how real it felt, like a real monster. The one other monster game I really got into as a child was Dragon Warrior Monsters 2, I think I played Cobi’s journey. It helped that a lot of my friends were playing it.

    First builder: Simcity 3000. Started my lifelong love for city builders, even though I’m not great at them per se.

    Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper 2 were my introduction to management sims and also my favourites for a long time.

    As a kid I absolutely loved this RTS called Warbreeds because of the ability to graft any weapon onto any unit. Nowadays though I just find such mechanics fiddly, but as a kid it felt so sci-fi. In terms of time spent playing, though, the standout RTS was probably Starcraft.

    I also played on a lot of MUDs as a kid. Wheel of Time (but had never read the books), Discworld (but had also never read the books), Aardwolf and I think one or two others. I was amazed at how it felt like I could do so much (even though most of the “free” actions were just emotes.

    My first graphical MMO was I think Maplestory, which was a huge part of my social life as a kid. I think I miss the feeling of being part of a big community than the MMO experience itself, honestly. Nowadays when I try getting into MMOs it feels like that feeling of being a part of a giant community of people is gone.



  • Sorry to be replying so late, (original poster of the post that generated all these comments here) but I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. You’re right that entire families disappearing probably will get more people to sympathise. That was my original point. Hamas wants innocent Palestinians dead just as much as Israel does. Whether they’ll fudge numbers to move that needle up or not is not really important at that point: some people just feel like in the face of that political reality, is it really so unlikely that they’ll do so?