The same thing happened in France when American GIs were stationed there during WWII. I'd recommend "What Soldiers Do" by Mary Louise Roberts if you're interested in the details.
Readit Newsjamcohen commented on A Brutal Sex Trade Built for American Soldiers nytimes.com/2023/05/02/wo... · Posted by u/karaokeyoga
I think one of the key flourishes of the game has to do with intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. The game never presents a locked door where there is some key elsewhere, and the key goes into your inventory, and now you can open the door. At all times, all doors are openable. But you may not know the rules to the puzzle on the door yet. Once you learn them, the 'key' is knowledge and the 'inventory' is your mind.
If you're keen to this then you will find it surprising how few games work this way.
Outer Wilds does this as well.
I'm rewatching Midnight Mass on Netflix with my wife. They have some very powerful monologues on death. This is one that occurred to me just now, when two characters are discussing what they believe happens after death:
"When I die, my body stops functioning. Five minutes later, my brain cells start dying. But in the meantime, in between, maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT – the psychedelic drug released when we dream – so I dream. I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before because it’s all of it. Just the last dump of DMT all at once, and my neurons are firing and I’m seeing this firework display of memories and imagination.
My mind’s rifling through the memories, long and short term, and the dreams mix with the memories. And it’s a curtain call. One last great dream as my mind empties the fuckin’ missile silos, and then I stop.
My brain activity ceases and there is nothing left of me.
No pain, no memory, no awareness that I ever was.
That I ever hurt someone.
That I ever killed someone.
Everything is as it was before me.
All of the other little things that make me up – the microbes and bacterium and the billion other little things that live on my eyelashes and in my hair and in my mouth and on my skin and in my gut and everywhere else, they just keep on living and eating. And I’m serving a purpose. I’m feeding life and I’m broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled and I’m billions of other places. And my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals, and I am like the stars that are in the sky. There one moment and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos.”
https://adrianvstheworld.com/2021/10/05/midnight-mass-and-th...
And, another moving monologue, this one's a spoiler so heads up: https://www.reddit.com/r/HauntingOfHillHouse/comments/pxw74y...
Either way, this show hit me unexpectedly. One of my favorite "deep watches" in a long time.
I also find comfort in the idea of becoming food after we die. I remember reading somewhere how a beached whale in the arctic can be a life-saving windfall for the scavengers there. Helped me see the positive in something I’d always seen as purely tragic.
Heat capacity is not a straight win, it's a double edged sword. Like you said temp drops less when food goes in, and that can be great in certain applications. However, you also lose a lot in the way of temperature control. The slow rate at which it heats up and cools down means finer temperature adjustments are much harder to do.
In my experience the searing/frying performance of carbon steel is not an issue for the overwhelming majority of things I cook, ergo I don't really care that cast iron has a higher capacity. The tighter temperature control, on the other hand, is always nice.
I still use my cast irons sometimes for things where that heat capacity is really nice (searing a huge steak or something like that), but I use carbon steel much more frequently.
It also depends on your stove. Mine’s electric and alternates the heating element on and off to try to maintain the desired temp. The heat capacity helps to smooth out temperature fluctuations but if I had a nice gas stove I’d probably switch to carbon steel.
I think these CS books should start with a philosophical look at what kind of thing computation actually is, rather than diving straight into UNIX file system structures with barely any context.
But I guess that would be computer science from the top down.
Richard Feynman's lecture is a great resource for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
He proposes a file clerk that gets progressively dumber and faster until they get so dumb that they can be simulated by an electronic circuit.
jamcohen commented on Learnimprov – Just the first improv game site learnimprov.com/... · Posted by u/herbertl
Does anyone know any good improv in the bay?
Pre-pandemic I would go to the 11am text message show at UCB Franklin in LA and it was consistently amazing.
jamcohen commented on Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer blog.eyas.sh/2021/02/unit... · Posted by u/Eyas
I'm a developer making a game prototype (full-time at the moment after being retrenched).
If you're a solo dev I think it's really important to focus on the areas where you don't have any skills. For example art, animation, effects etc. All of these could potentially be a big hurdle, depending on the idea that you are developing.
Learning how code works in Unity (as a developer) isn't that difficult, it just takes a bit of time. Say you need to add more advanced elements, for example you need some form of space partitioning? If you know the terms then searching for existing code (e.g. a good KD-tree implementation) on github is also not a problem, and you shouldn't have any issues implementing it in your game.
But figuring out what art assets you're going to need, how you're going to create them (or source them) and integrate them into the engine can be an issue. As per another comment, "juicing" the game up takes you out of your developer comfort area, you need to really tap into your creative side there.
Definitely agree about “juicing” your game, especially from a visual perspective. There’s so many graphics concepts that I didn’t know about and didn’t have the eye to recognize.
Things like ambient occlusion, bloom, reflection probes, and physically based rendering/materials were totally unknown to me but were really essential to making a game look “AAA”.
Adrian Courreges has a great list of graphics studies that expose you to the space: https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2020/12/29/graphics-stu...
Following technical artists on Twitter is also a great way to get exposure on more one-off techniques (how to make a fire effect etc.)
I’m a big fan of @minionsart and @adrianmendezzg but there’s tons of other indie devs and technical artists sharing their work.
jamcohen commented on Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer blog.eyas.sh/2021/02/unit... · Posted by u/Eyas
For an introduction to Unity game programming as an engineer, I can't think of a better resource than Catlike Coding tutorials:
https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/
They're great for people who are already self-sufficient programmers, and just need to quickly get up to speed on how Unity does some specific things.
Catlike coding is great. I’m also a fan of Alan Zucconi’s tutorials: https://www.alanzucconi.com/tutorials/
jamcohen commented on Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment themouseless.dev/... · Posted by u/thanato0s
For anyone using iterm2, copy mode (https://iterm2.com/documentation-copymode.html) was a big help in reducing my mouse use.
jamcohen commented on Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999) robertcaro.com/interview-... · Posted by u/smollett
I wish it was an audio recording.
A lot of Caro’s responses are included, almost verbatim, in his more recent book “On Power”: https://www.amazon.com/On-Power-Robert-A-Caro-audiobook/dp/B...
Definitely recommend the audiobook if you haven’t heard it already. Caro’s got a thick Brooklyn accent and a manner of speaking that’s really compelling.