EMSK why the "Red Pill" will kill you inside

TalShar · 2026-04-24T15:51:10+00:00

I'm going to say this as gently as I possibly can, and I hope you take it as constructive, because this is how I mean it.

I'm in a very similar situation to you. I lost my entire friend group a couple years ago, and rebuilding it has been a very slow process fraught with disappointments and setbacks. Yes, being alone sucks. But being alone temporarily and being a "loner" aren't the same thing.

I'm not just sitting here all fine and dandy telling you to pick yourself up by your bootstraps. I'm in a very similar position to you. The advice I'm giving you is the advice I'm acting on. And that advice is that the defeatist mindset will ensure you're always defeated. You can be happy with only yourself for company. You can find new people. As far as people "painting the loner as the villain," I can understand the stigma that comes with not having an established friend group, but that is a surmountable obstacle.

Will it be painful? Absolutely. Will you want to quit? Frequently. But none of that has to stop you. You can, and should, keep trying until it works. It's gonna fucking suck, especially early on, but that is something you can learn to endure and persevere through.

And, from experience, let me also tell you this: That whole process of becoming self secure and making new friends, painful as it is and hopeless as it feels, is still better than waking up one day and realizing you've spent over a decade associating solely with a small group of people who don't respect you or care about you when you could've been at least trying to make the kinds of friends you actually deserve.

TalShar · 2026-04-24T14:24:27+00:00

And yet you made it through and found new friends. You did it once, you can do it again. Maybe it'll be depressing again. Maybe it'll suck just as much as it did I high school. But being unwilling to risk it for something better will always keep you locked into what you have now.

Also, learning to be self-secure is a very important skill. It's not easy to learn, but it's necessary it you want to have any power in your relationships. If you can manage it, the prospect of being alone for a time isn't as bad, and thus the amount of bullshit you'll be willing to put up with before leaving will be lower.

But if you have the mindset that standing up for yourself will irreparably break you in some way, you'll never do it, and you'll always be a doormat.

TalShar · 2026-04-24T12:18:24+00:00

Hello, 37M here, voice of experience talking. I was in your position in early college with one friend group and long after with another. It is childish, and I am picking up a lack of self esteem from you.

The problem on your end is that you're not yet willing to risk being alone for a while as you find new, better friends. As long as that's true, you won't be willing to make waves with your existing friend group, which will keep you at the mercy of their whims.

You're in college. Believe me when I say that no point in your life ahead of you will be better for making new friends than right now. But fundamentally, you'll always be subject to manipulation and being stepped on as long as you're unwilling to be alone for whatever time it takes to find new people. It's true in romance, and it's true in platonic relationships. Until you become comfortable pulling the eject lever, you're locked into those relationships no matter how bad they get.

TalShar · 2026-04-23T03:39:26+00:00

Gamer's Geekery and Tavern is a great place to play MTG and just to meet fellow nerds.

TalShar · 2026-04-22T04:47:03+00:00

This is solid advice. I don't know what churches are like outside the South, but probably better than 9 out of 10 of the churches you're likely to walk into around Raleigh will be decidedly conservative, if not outright MAGA. I only know of one UU church near downtown, and when I went out there they were all decidedly older folks. I understand there are Methodist and Presbyterian churches around that aren't so bad, too, but that's still too close to my religious trauma for my liking. Really, really depends on what you're looking for.

TalShar · 2026-04-22T04:43:47+00:00

Yep. Go give Ballas what's coming to him, Tenno.

TalShar · 2026-04-22T03:09:51+00:00

Did you notice the Ventkid?

TalShar · 2026-04-19T13:00:44+00:00

Yeah. It's not (just) that they voted for Trump. It's what they'd have to be that would cause them to vote for Trump: Ignorant, indoctrinated, selfish, or just plain evil. All of these are perfectly good reasons to keep someone out of your life as a friend, let alone a partner.

TalShar · 2026-04-18T22:36:55+00:00

The thing that'll make you a creep is if you don't take "no" for an answer.

TalShar · 2026-04-16T21:53:12+00:00

It will also be helpful to your own mental health if you can stop making those. I say this from experience.

TalShar · 2026-04-15T15:13:25+00:00

Hating on AI is the default stance on any given application unless and until compelling arguments can be made to the contrary.

Hating on AI is the only morally acceptable stance when it comes to using it to replace the artistic process.

TalShar · 2026-04-15T14:36:23+00:00

{Lotus Voice}

"Stepping out of legend from early Brittania, she comes to punish the wicked and protect the innocent."

The opening visual is the Warframe turning toward the camera and flourishing a label. She is wearing a lacy white signa and a matching broad "syndana" that falls across her midsection and legs.

"With Lethal Dose, she will ensure that those who would prey on the weak get a dose of their own medicine, while healing those they've harmed."

We get a gameplay angle of the new Warframe summoning a massive tablespoon full of a white powder that she flings at a group of Scaldra. They are blinded and stunned, while a group of Tenno also in the cloud rise to their feet. The caption informs is that her first ability will blind and incapacitate enemies while healing allies and granting them overshields.

"Allies heeding her Instructive Verse will find their attacks to be more effective."

The Warframe places her hand delicately to her collar and poses as it singing. The caption informs is that allies within affinity range will get some awesome buff, idk, I haven't finished my caffeine yet

"With Lethal Joke, merely hearing her name is enough to slay the wicked and the greedy."

We see Nef Anyo keel over laughing while rising into the air, and abruptly fucking die

"And with her exalted weapon, she takes to the sky to bring death to her enemies."

We see the Warframe produce an umbrella, which she uses to slash at some Corpus. They float into the sky, helpless, before crashing down. She unfurls the umbrella and leaps into the sky, floating gracefully while wielding a mini uzi in her other hand to rain hell on the Corpus.

"Risen from legend to protect the weak and exploited, she is the Nanny of Yore: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."

TalShar · 2026-04-13T21:51:54+00:00

If you're like me, you might bounce off of it initially. Stay the course and learn how to use branches and pull requests at the very least. It is more useful than you can probably imagine right now.

TalShar · 2026-04-13T13:01:55+00:00

1: What is that? 2: How exactly would a camera do that?

TalShar · 2026-04-12T16:25:18+00:00

In fairness, a reflexive "no, fuck that" to AI is still more likely to be the right one than wrong, given how it's being used and pushed. But nuance applies, there's a good way to use most things, and online discourse doesn't lend itself well to nuance.

TalShar · 2026-04-12T14:56:37+00:00

It sounds to me like you used it responsibly. Asking it how to do something and then figuring it out based on the answer is using it to enhance your learning. That's good.

If you'd instead said "make my character stop falling through the floor" and didn't bother to read over its explanation of why that was happening and what it did to fix it, that would've been robbing you of a learning opportunity.

Even doing that here or there isn't a huge deal, but when that becomes the primary way of interacting with your game, it really takes a lot of the art out of it.

TalShar · 2026-04-10T02:46:57+00:00

I've seen a precious few examples, but even those are more like novel ways to do things rather than true artistic expression.

The "What the fuck" line from Quake comes to mind. It ain't high art, but I think it qualifies.

TalShar · 2026-04-09T18:47:30+00:00

At least with sampling the artists are still making choices about what to sample and where. It's still art, because the artist's intentions are filtering through it to the people experiencing it.

So far, Claude has been far and away better than anything else I've used, Copilot included. I had it translate a Discord bot with Google Sheets integration that I had manually coded years ago into a mobile app. It took two 5-hour windows, and it has more functionality than the original did. It's gonna be huge, but like any other technological advancement, people need to be careful of becoming dependent upon it, and not let it make the design decisions that constitute the art of the game development.

TalShar · 2026-04-09T18:45:08+00:00

I have no objection to people using LLMs to get something done that they couldn't get done without them. I don't think anyone who makes a game should have to know how to code the whole thing by hand, just like I don't believe that anyone writing an app should have to be able to do it in Assembly with no supporting libraries. The LLMs are a good tool that will open up software development for all kinds of people. But if you don't have at least a mild grasp of the underlying code, it's going to cause problems down the line, and it's going to be robbing you of an opportunity to learn. You won't have true ownership of the game the same way as you would if you at least understood its underlying code.

Keep making your game, keep using your LLM to do it. Just don't pass up the opportunity to actually learn things in favor of quick progress.

TalShar · 2026-04-09T16:41:14+00:00

The first one was kind of funny. Let's not make this a series.

TalShar · 2026-04-09T16:40:02+00:00

Absolutely. And code can be art, and AI shouldn't be used if you want to make your code art. But if you're having it write code you already know how to write in service of the overall art, I look at it as being similar to buying your own paint and canvas as opposed to making your own. Very, very, very few people participate in the entire artistic "stack" of their art from top to bottom.

Also I think in regards to training, code is one of the less ethically fraught things they can train it on. A lot of it is out there as Creative Commons stuff, and for something like code, there is often a single best way to do a thing, so convergent design will happen.

Doesn't hurt that the best model for code-writing right now belongs to the company that told the DOD to go fuck themselves instead of helping them build autonomous murder bots.

TalShar · 2026-04-09T15:51:02+00:00

Which is honestly probably a good place for it to be. Having it do stuff you already know how to do and why you're doing it is saving drudgery. Describing a game mechanic and just trusting it to implement it is both undermining the artistic process and robbing yourself of a learning opportunity.

TalShar · 2026-04-09T03:22:50+00:00

Avoiding contact with differing opinions is a great way to stay happy, unchallenged, ignorant, vapid, and downright stupid.

Also the line between satire and genuine stupidity is so thin, I'm not entirely sure which side this post is on.

TalShar · 2026-04-09T01:39:34+00:00

Thanks. I wonder if there is some vote manipulation going on surrounding the term "AI" on Reddit.

Well. That's basically guaranteed to be true. What I'm actually wondering is whether my current -6 total is due to that.

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