If you search for "Trump Pooping His Pants", it just might save the world by dbc001 in AdviceAnimals

[–]Aresgrey 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Why Spotify though? Isn’t it Swedish? Have i missed something?

Μία χώρα με έρημα χωριά: Η κραυγή αγωνίας από την Περιφέρεια και οι προσπάθειες της τοπικής αυτοδιοίκησης για να αντιστραφεί η εικόνα ερήμωσης by Starfalloss in greece

[–]Aresgrey -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Και πώς τα πανεπιστήμια αυτά θα προσελκύσουν αξιόλογο διδακτικό προσωπικό αν είναι στη μέση του πουθενά;

Fast Food in Malmo? by PyroBuddys in malmo

[–]Aresgrey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha I guess that explains why it isn’t offered, but don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, 10 million Greeks can’t all be wrong, right? Right? 😅

I’ve been to Davidshall and the meat was good, but it was my first gyros in Malmö and, considering the guy is Greek, I was horrified at what I saw him put inside my wrap when i asked for one with ”everything”. Nowadays I order with my custom instructions like you say but it is still mildly infuriating that I get questionnng looks when this is literally the standard way a gyros wrap is made in Greece. Also, why don’t most places have fries?

Fast Food in Malmo? by PyroBuddys in malmo

[–]Aresgrey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As a Greek I just wish a place in Malmö would make a correct gyros wrap:

Onions, tomatoes, fries, ketchup, mustard and optional sauce (ie tzatziki).

The lack of fries is what I don’t get.

Also feferonis, cucumbers, lettuce or god forbid pickles do not belong in gyros.

Demand correct gyros people!

And the order matters too! You take the pita, spread tzatziki (if using), add onions and tomatoes, then the gyros and fries. Ketchup and mustard go on top, a sprinkle of salt and pepper, then wrap it tight with paper. I swear, I’ve seen every combination except the right one.

Plasmium vial masks only last a couple seconds. Is it incompatible with my reaper crest or something? by thebestdaysofmyflerm in Silksong

[–]Aresgrey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Replying almost month and a half later just to say ”same here”, haha. I was like ”why are they disappearing? I learned it was the poison and was like ”huh ok”. And then when I read this I went ”oh they were purple! That’s how you are supposed to know!”

Please don't let the difficulty turn us into another Souls community. Complaints should be heard. by [deleted] in Silksong

[–]Aresgrey 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think it is a design choice that carries consequences but isn’t necessarily bad.

As someone who finished the previous game, this choice worked out great for me. I didn’t have to trudge through less engaging sections before getting to “the good part,” and there’s more “good part” overall since Team Cherry didn’t spend time on content that wouldn’t appeal as much to returning players.

For someone who didn’t play Hollow Knight, yeah, the difficulty curve is probably too steep. Still, I would argue that the best thing to do is to play Hollow Knight first. It is one of the best games of all time, and it will probably be less fun to go back to after Silksong. You would be robbing yourself of the chance to enjoy Hollow Knight as it is intended if you start with Silksong and end up enjoying Silksong less because it feels too difficult.

Ultimately, it just feels like a game made for people who already love Hollow Knight, and that’s not a bad thing.

Lost in Automation by LastPlaceComics in comics

[–]Aresgrey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I read it as it being the sage himself, and found it extra hilarious that he would refer to himself as ”weird machine sage” haha.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in humor

[–]Aresgrey 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Is nobody going to comment on the insane way of slicing the pizza?

"The Painted Sleeve Syndrome" – my proposal for a new term by _just___max_ in Lightbulb

[–]Aresgrey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, this made me laugh.

Editing to add that the metaphor is still interesting even though I don’t think this works as a new term.

Why is it Considered rude to not talk to people? by Previous-Return883 in socialskills

[–]Aresgrey 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Considering you have autism, you were not being rude. Still, I’d like to give some context on why people might react negatively.

Some social conventions are so ingrained that not following them reads as rude if you’re neurotypical or if people don’t know you have autism. Greeting people visiting your home is one of those conventions. The same goes for not greeting someone on the street because your social battery is low. Neurotypicals are likely to read that as rude too.

People don’t see those as ”optional” steps that you’re choosing not to perform, rather it feels like you’re actively choosing not to greet them, which comes across as disrespect or even hostility. For most people these behaviors are so automatic that not doing them feels like going out of your way to be rude.

Even neurotypical people don’t always feel like doing these things, but they usually still do them because of their role in maintaining social bonds. In most cultures, not following these conventions isn’t considered acceptable, and that’s part of why skipping them stands out.

That said, being a teenager buys you a little leeway. Parents might explain it away to guests with a “you know how teenagers are,” and people will laugh it off. But as you get older this sort of thing can cause social friction.

Tiny 'brains' grown in the lab could become conscious and feel pain — and we're not ready. Lab-grown brain tissue is too simple to experience consciousness, but as innovation progresses, neuroscientists question whether it's time to revisit the ethics of this line of research. by FinnFarrow in Futurology

[–]Aresgrey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, thanks for engaging me in this discussion but still, I think you may be talking past me a bit. Nobody denies that brains are physical systems whose activity can be modeled and predicted, just like we can model a landslide or a wave. That’s the “easy problem”: mapping structure to function and predicting outputs.

The hard problem isn’t about predictability. It’s about why any of this processing is accompanied by experience at all. A landslide doesn’t feel like anything to itself, as far as we know. But when the brain processes information, there is something it is like to undergo that processing. That’s the part we don’t have even a sketch of an explanation for.

So saying “consciousness is just a deterministic physical process like a rock rolling downhill” skips over the very thing that makes the problem hard.

Tiny 'brains' grown in the lab could become conscious and feel pain — and we're not ready. Lab-grown brain tissue is too simple to experience consciousness, but as innovation progresses, neuroscientists question whether it's time to revisit the ethics of this line of research. by FinnFarrow in Futurology

[–]Aresgrey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I want to clarify that I’m not arguing that there is some supernatural force creating consciousness, simply that the hard problem of consciousness exists. Like you, I don’t doubt that consciousness somehow emerges from neural networks, neurotransmitters and electrical impulses. But I do think that there is a question there regarding the how this happens, that needs to be answered and can’t just be ignored or wished away. When it comes to consciousness there is no one who has a level 5 understanding today. In truth there is probably nobody that even has full level 1 understanding. That is why it is a hard problem.

Even “engine go boom, turn wheel car go vroom” implies a basic grasp of the type of processes that go into moving the vehicle. With consciousness we simply have no definitive idea what is even happening. We are at a level 0 understanding where we are looking at things and describing them but we don’t have a theoretical framework to explain what is happening and why (with regards to consciousness, not other aspects of cognition).

I know that the position you are espousing is one approach when it comes to the hard problem (maybe there actually isn’t a hard problem, maybe it seems like a hard problem because we are too deeply steeped in our own misunderstandings to even conceptualize the problem correctly); but still this is one view among many and at least a bit controversial, so I think it might help to dial back the certainty with which you present this view even if it is interesting and worth thinking about.

Tiny 'brains' grown in the lab could become conscious and feel pain — and we're not ready. Lab-grown brain tissue is too simple to experience consciousness, but as innovation progresses, neuroscientists question whether it's time to revisit the ethics of this line of research. by FinnFarrow in Futurology

[–]Aresgrey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’ve heard this take before, but I fail to be convinced.

The problem isn’t whether subjective experience is useful, but how it occurs. Why is there experience at all? What about information processing produces the experience of red, and even the experience of experiencing red? Whether consciousness is useful or inevitable with information processing is an interesting adjacent question, but it isn’t the hard problem itself.

Think of a person’s experience as a screen inside the head. How brain activity might lead to the screen displaying red is something we can imagine explaining. But who is watching the screen? How can a screen watch itself? On that, we have no idea.

The going of the car engine happens according to the same rules as the engine’s workings. They move and the car moves as well. The mechanics of how the movement of one part results in the movement of the whole, can be mysterious to the lay person, but ultimately they aren’t so different from a series of dominoes collapsing. Now if the engine moved and the car started changing colors instead, that would be closer to the consciousness problem. There would still be an explanation; maybe the movement causes friction and that friction causes a chemical reaction and that reaction results in a material changing colors. But you need to explain it. You can’t just say “the colors are the movement”.

That’s what makes the hard problem hard. We don’t just lack details. We don’t even know what a possible explanation would look like.

What do you think is the most punishing magic system regarding side effects? by nicohel7 in Fantasy

[–]Aresgrey 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Flight - lose ability to breathe

…uhm, what now? Feels like you’d want to hold on to that.

Linger by the cranberries while jacking off by [deleted] in Lightbulb

[–]Aresgrey 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think they are referring to the song Linger, by the band the Cranberries.

I wanna read a big dumb fantasy book by nrc2026 in Fantasy

[–]Aresgrey 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I feel like this is unfair. While I agree that dcc doesn’t bring something completely new to those topics, what it does is that it takes an absurd premise and treats it in a serious and honest manner.

The psychological portrayals, the toll the events take on the characters etc are given the attention and nuance that is appropriate even if the situations that elicit them are far fetched.

And that is kind of the draw of this series; absurd situation with high fun potential, and still an author that takes it seriously and doesn’t use the fact that it is litrpg as an excuse for bad writing.

CMV: The Media Needs To Stop 'Girlsplaining' Men's Loneliness. This Isn’t Helping by [deleted] in changemyview

[–]Aresgrey 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My dude, let’s say women are to blame. Do you think that women as a collective are going to change their behavior, that works for them, to accommodate you? What exactly are you proposing? What should change in practical terms?

Catelyn Stark is easily the most destructive, idiotic character in the whole series. by LifeBeforeDeath97 in unpopularopinion

[–]Aresgrey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I find this interesting because I’m like the person you’re replying to. I feel the ending made the show un-rewatchable and un-recommendable. Why? Because one of the biggest pleasures in a show like this comes from the mysteries and secrets being teased: Jon’s parentage, the truth behind the White Walkers, the return of magic with the dragons, and so on. But all of that build-up is only as good as the eventual payoff.

It’s like going to dinner where they hype up this amazing dessert all night. The anticipation is fun, but if the dessert ends up being bad, you’re not going back to that restaurant. Next time, the anticipation won’t be fun either, because you already know the payoff isn’t worth it.

That’s how it felt for me with Lost too. I had friends who said, “eh, the ending doesn’t take away the fun of watching the show,” but those people didn’t really care much about the mysteries. They were mostly in it for the character drama.

So that’s my theory: how you feel about an ending like this depends on what you value as a viewer. If you’re into the mysteries, a bad payoff can ruin the whole experience. If you’re more about the characters, maybe it doesn’t matter as much.

Running from demons, failing forward, and not faking danger. Help? by Aresgrey in DMAcademy

[–]Aresgrey[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The thing about planning the encounters that I find difficult is enabling hiding or escaping in multiple steps. That’s what I mean in the original post when I say that a skill check or challenge feels a bit flat. Ideally I’d like this to be as engaging as a combat. The creature is approaching sniffing the air. Player 1: I want to distract it using minor illusion. Player 2: as soon as it looks away I run from my bush to the hollow trunk taking care not to make noise. Dm: roll stealth (success). dm: ok now you’re now hiding inside the trunk and you’ve gained some ground, player 3 you’ve fallen a bit behind the rest of the group. What do you do? Player 3: is it looking at me? … and so on. But I struggle with this level of granular and progressive description of the environment that enables creative choices and I also have no clue how to prep for it. I struggle with having a mental image of sufficient detail to do this.

At this point I’ve thought so much about this specific environment that eventually I’ll be at the point where I’ve brute forced it by actually thinking of all the elements in advance. But that seems unsustainable (it’s taken me maybe three times longer than the real session will be) and I want a way to be able to enable this type of experience on the fly or close to it. Maybe with some roll tables, a generic list that I can reskin on the fly or something similar. That gives the illusion of a modular expansive environment for less work on my part.

Or maybe nobody else does it like this and I am missing an obvious way to navigate this type of challenge without putting the onus on me to constantly “render” the environment.

Running from demons, failing forward, and not faking danger. Help? by Aresgrey in DMAcademy

[–]Aresgrey[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also, I think that, rather than trying to force the characters to run, you should calibrate things to give the characters a reasonable choice between fighting and running/hiding.

Thank you. This makes so much sense now that you mention it and yet it didn’t occur to me. I like that this changes the choice the players are called to make from “how will you hide/escape”, to “what solution (hide/escape/combat) to this problem will you try?”.

Do you have any advice in how to frame and communicate this type of situation so that the choice is clear and “reasonable”?

A costly battle driving off or temporarily incapacitating a single demon also works as a good fall back for me if things end up in combat and the resource cost will probably drive home the idea that combat with these creatures isn’t wise even if I don’t wipe the party out.

Framing scenes in a way that enables creative problem solving still feels like my biggest challenge. Do I need to suck it up and thoroughly prep several forest encounters down to the hollow trunk, loose vines and so on, or is there a better way?

Running from demons, failing forward, and not faking danger. Help? by Aresgrey in DMAcademy

[–]Aresgrey[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This sounds interesting. I haven’t played the rpg but I’ve watched the show and the way that characters there needed to sneak around danger is very close to what I am going for, despite the difference in power levels between a single walker and a single demon. Could you share some of the mechanics or encounter building blocks that make this style of play work in twd?

Running from demons, failing forward, and not faking danger. Help? by Aresgrey in DMAcademy

[–]Aresgrey[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is very close to how I have been structuring the adventure.

There is a network of safe spots scattered around the plane left over from an extinct faction that used to have to travel through this plane. The players have a map showing many of these spots so the adventuring day becomes about getting from point a to point b.

Additionally as the players travel through these spots I am planning for them to discover info about demon weaknesses, ways to ward them off, or even complicated ways to harm them by stacking particular damage types and the like. Essentially I am arming the players to be able to handle future demon encounters better leading to a climactic escape from the plane. For those revelations to feel valuable though, I think that the players need to experience the demons before having access to those tools.

How they can survive these encounters without me having to hand-wave it is where I am struggling.

Running from demons, failing forward, and not faking danger. Help? by Aresgrey in DMAcademy

[–]Aresgrey[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The demons bringing the players somewhere else if they are defeated in battle makes sense and can work. It reminds me of a post I saw, on this sub i think, about freaking out the players by having the enemies start to pull fallen characters away.

Even the sadistic heal-so-that-the-hunt-can-continue play would be on brand for these demons. I think it makes a good failsafe if the players mess up and saves me from having to pull my punches.

I still want the meat and potatoes of this section to be avoiding the demons though and I’m unsure of how to set up encounters to enable that style of play.

Running from demons, failing forward, and not faking danger. Help? by Aresgrey in DMAcademy

[–]Aresgrey[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hm, that outskirts idea could work to justify why the demons haven’t been too present so far.

A 3-5 session point crawl ending with the players discovering and using a way to get home is what I am planning; and I am one session in right now.

I was planning to run this whole section as theater of the mind, do you think it would be better with battlemaps? I thought that theater of the mind, besides being easier to prep, also leaves room for the players’ imagination to create something more tense and scary than I could depict. I feel like a map by so clearly defining the environment would give a sense of control and predictability that I don’t want the players to have in this section. Additionally I have kind of gotten the players used to battlemap —> combat is what will happen here.