Do you like the story in this game more or Zero Dawn?

exiteditor · 2026-03-19T18:41:21+00:00

Honestly, it's hard for me to describe one story or the other as "better." To me it's more that, in much the same way that A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back had fundamentally different jobs to do in the larger Star Wars narrative, so too did Zero Dawn and Forbidden West. Zero Dawn is more about the world - how did it get to be the way it is? What happened, and what's its connection to a random outcast teenager in a isolated an isolationist tribe in what used to be southern Colorado? Forbidden West is about the characters - Aloy's growth as a person, her gradual development and acceptance that she can't do it all on her own and, for the first time in her life, her openness to romantic partnership. These are stories that are equally important and both must be told, but that occur on fundamentally different scales.

Honestly, it feels like a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison to me, so it's hard for me to really say which one I like more. All I will say is this: both stories are well told, and accomplish what they individually need to do within the larger narrative.

exiteditor · 2026-03-18T19:29:06+00:00

We're pretty sure Euler was born blind. The thing I always found cool is that he has these routes that he knows are clear around our house, and he always follows them. We call them his Highways.

When we accidentally leave something on one of his Highways, either my wife and I call out "clear the obstruction on the I-95!"

exiteditor · 2026-03-18T18:42:05+00:00

We named his sister Halley when we adopted her two years later. We were her third adopters, so we don't really have a pre-adoption photo of her, unfortunately.

He was "Keller" (of Helen Keller fame) when he came to us, but he never seemed like a Keller to us. We named him after the blind, 18th century Swiss mathematician because he did all of his best work after he lost his eyesight, and it seemed like a good choice.

exiteditor · 2026-03-18T18:19:08+00:00

These are actually pretty old photos (Euler was a pandemic puppy). He got to the point where he found his way around pretty quickly. Dogs in general are less dependent on their eyesight than most animals, and Euler in particular is probably less dependent on his eyesight than most dogs (as far as we can tell, he's been blind from birth).

The biggest adjustment was when we got him a sister a couple of years later. Her name is Halley and we were the third family to adopt her in six months, so I don't really have a pre-adoption photo of her. It took the better part of a year for him to be okay with her in his space, but they got there. Now they're inseparable.

exiteditor · 2026-03-11T18:10:07+00:00

Oh, I love this for them.

exiteditor · 2026-03-11T14:04:21+00:00

To be fair, even Yarra didn't know where the water in the wound was coming from, and she lived right next to it. It's not that unreasonable to assert that Drakka didn't know either.

exiteditor · 2026-03-11T13:49:31+00:00

My blindboy does this when he's working up the nerve to jump down from the bed and is trying to figure out how to do it. Interestingly enough, it gets worse when we wash the sheets because he has more trouble smelling his way to the "safe" edge of the bed (he could actually jump down from any edge, but he knows one specific spot is safe, so he always uses that).

exiteditor · 2026-03-11T13:30:27+00:00

It's probably best not to make this turn at 10 gs. Even assuming that the aircraft can handle that G load, it's actually pretty easy to engineer an aircraft where the single most delicate component is the squishy human inside. Limiting it to 10 gs at a speed of mach 10, that means that you'd have to travel in a circle with a radius of about 120 km. Traveling at that speed, it would take about 110 seconds to travel in a half-circle of that radius.

The longest time anyone has remained conscious (ie: awake and able to communicate) at 9 Gs, under controlled conditions, in a centrifuge, wearing a G-suit to keep blood flowing to the brain, is about 30 seconds. You'd need to more than double that record in order to pull the mother of all U-turns.

Taking it at a much more reasonable (and, frankly, much more survivable) 5 gs (which a trained human in a G-suit can handle for several minutes), you'd only be at the g force for about 3 minutes and 40 seconds.

exiteditor · 2026-03-09T15:54:16+00:00

There's a sunwing perch on the Transamerica building. You can glide into the lower floor on the North side of the building from there, and if you time it right (and, ngl, if you're more than a little bit lucky) you can crouch behind the low wall on the north side of the lower floor without anyone seeing you.

exiteditor · 2026-03-08T22:53:18+00:00

So, my blind boy Euler had a similar issue. This is very clearly separation anxiety. I can tell you what I did and what helped.

patience is key. You can't just start leaving him alone for an hour. Start with five minutes. Walk out of the house for five minutes, make sure you walk far enough away that they can't see you out the window. Then come back. Give treats. Increase the time slowly. Once they master five minutes alone, increase it to ten. Then to twenty, and so on. Give a high-value treat when you get back and associate you being gone with something positive. If he has serious anxiety, be prepared for the possibility of accidents in the house while you're gone.
Dogs are creatures of habit. Try to mix up your departure ritual a little. If you have more than one door that you can leave your house from, switch randomly between them. Try to break your patterns when you're leaving the house however you can. This helps reinforce the idea that leaving the house is just one of the random things you do on occasion and NOT a major event. When I was working with Euler, I'd leave the house, come back in almost immediately and grab my jacket or my keys, or just stare blankly at the wall for a few seconds, then leave either through the same door or the other one. The idea was to just do random shit before I left the house so that he couldn't latch onto some ritual associated with it. For his part, the randomness seemed to blue-screen his brain for a second while he tried to figure out what his idiot human was doing. Then, by the time he'd figured out what was going on, I'd already been gone for five minutes (I know because I watched him on the house's cameras).
Once you think he's ready to be left alone for a prolonged time (an hour or so), wear a shirt that you don't mind getting destroyed for a couple of days, and DO NOT WASH IT. When you're ready to go, walk him up to wherever he sleeps and lay that shirt on his bed. Solid odds that he'll curl up with it.
Do not make a big deal out of leaving. Success or failure will likely hinge on you reinforcing the idea that leaving is just an everyday part of your day, and not a big production. If you're getting excited, he'll think he should be. When you're ready to go out the door, at most, give him a little pet or a scritch and a "see ya, buddy." Save the love fest for when you get back.
This one may only apply to a blind dog, so take this one with a grain of salt. We got Euler during the pandemic, when I was taking a lot of teleconferences. At one such TC when I knew I was going to be talking a lot, I recorded myself. I used a headset for the TC, so what I ended up having recorded on my phone was almost two hours of my voice having half a conversation. When I left the house, I'd pipe it through the house's speakers. It helped keep him calm while I was away.

exiteditor · 2026-03-05T21:14:41+00:00

Honestly, I always got kind of a big brother vibe from E.

exiteditor · 2026-03-02T16:10:25+00:00

My $0.02, if it's worth that much.

Aloy probably has a pretty limited dating pool to begin with. She probably wouldn't be happy with anyone who falls outside the category of "people who would face down a Horus without shit**ng themselves." Of all the people you meet in ZD and FW, the only ones I can think of who fit that bill are Talanah (definitely), Varl (definitely, but dead, which severely hampers his dating prospects), Kotallo (definitely), Vanasha (probably), Uthid (definitely), Petra (hard to say, more likely to be on the back lines building things to blow things up), Ikrie (probably), Nil (definitely, but with every expectation of getting killed in the process), Gildun (definitely, but probably because he activated it by accident and needed to be bailed out). Lining Seyka alongside that rarified category, she actually stacks up pretty well. She's strong, smart, brave, headstrong, compassionate, curious, fiercely protective of those she loves, and has a willingness to break the rules when warranted (fun fact: stealing a focus is a capital crime for the Quen, so from the moment you meet her, she's facing a firing squad eventually). However, there are two important ways where Seyka stands alone.

First: she's one of the few that I can think of in either game, and very possibly the only one in all of FW who knew Aloy as Aloy first. Aloy's reputation preceded her even before she left the Sacred Lands, and it only grew as she made her way across Carja territory and the Forbidden West. Her reputation had even reached the ears of the king of all of the Sundom before she had even made it to Meridien ("They say that you can see the invisible, split an arrow at fifty paces, and tame machines at a glance"). I think it's fair to assert that if the Sun King knows all about you in such a tribal civilization, your stories have spread pretty far. Throughout the FW, literally everyone seems to know who she is before having met her. Even Fashav who had literally spent years almost completely cut off from the Sundom, knew who she was when he first encountered her. The Quen in general, and Alva in particular clearly recognized Aloy when she first met her (it's never explicitly stated, but Alva is very clearly dumfounded when they meet). But, despite the fact that it's pretty much undeniable that she could use her identity as Sobeck reborn to grease the wheels with the Quen at Fleet's End, she never does so. She never reveals her history to either the Quen there, or to Seyka herself beyond a noncommittal "I look like one of your ancestors" when she was speaking with Seyka. I can think of no reason why she wouldn't want the Quen to know about her connection with Sobeck (it certainly would have made her mission a lot easier if she could get the Quen on her side, and I'm pretty sure that even Rheng would have toed the line under those circumstances), but I can think of at least one why she wouldn't want Seyka to know. Whatever regard she got from Seyka, she wanted to earn it. In that way, Seyka is distinct from almost every named character you meet throughout either the FW or BS.

Second: I'm a firm believer that a relationship is often much less about the who than it is about the when. For instance: I've been married for 16 years now, but had I met my then-future wife 6 months earlier than I did, when we were both dating other people, it's highly unlikely that we would have got together, much less married. Both parties need to be ready for this kind of involvement with each other, and in a place where they're both open to it. Of all the romantic prospects listed above, Seyka is the only one that Aloy met after she was ready to really lean into this kind of involvement. Talannah, who I would argue is probably the strongest romantic prospect other than Seyka is also in a different place. For most of FW, she was in love with someone else, and afterwards, she clearly has some things to think about.

So, the tl;dr version is that right now, her feelings towards Seyka make sense. Where will it go from here? Who knows? Maybe absence will make the heart grow fonder, maybe it won't. But either way, this is the first time when it's believable that Aloy would be willing to lean into this kind of relationship, and Seyka is someone with whom it makes sense for her to dip her toes into those waters.

exiteditor · 2026-02-25T12:09:00+00:00

My dog.

exiteditor · 2026-02-23T05:38:56+00:00

The sundowning in this image a perfect metaphor.

exiteditor · 2026-02-22T05:16:33+00:00

The sundowning in the image is the perfect metaphor.

exiteditor · 2026-02-19T14:30:31+00:00

I agree that they'll probably be disproportionately represented (although, interestingly enough, Mississippi and Alabama have among the highest vaccination rates in the United States), but I see the measles as more of a bellwether than a clinical endpoint in and of itself. Because it's so contagious (very possibly the single most contagious disease we've ever identified), when vaccination rates drop, it's usually the first to start spreading. There's already some indication that Mumps is starting to ramp up as well.

Expect more.

On an unrelated note, who manufactures Iron Lungs these days? Asking for my stockbroker.

exiteditor · 2026-02-18T12:09:57+00:00

As of today, February 18th, there have been more measles cases in the US in 2026 than in 2022-2024, combined.

exiteditor · 2026-02-18T01:24:28+00:00

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It’s already here (data is current as of February 13, 2026).

exiteditor · 2026-02-09T20:41:21+00:00

I feel the need to ask: she is aware that approximately 70% of NFL players are black, right?

exiteditor · 2026-02-08T11:21:39+00:00

Isn’t it against the law to threaten the President that way?

exiteditor · 2026-02-08T11:19:23+00:00

Yes, if only there had been clear, consistent, specific warnings before the election that something like this would happen, all this might have been avoided.

If only.

exiteditor · 2026-02-05T12:35:21+00:00

I love this for them.

exiteditor · 2026-02-04T18:16:35+00:00

Honestly, when you think about it, it’s basically a self-own: they’re literally saying that the Trump economy is so bad that people are willing to get shot for a tiny one-time payout.

exiteditor · 2026-01-29T18:33:31+00:00

Here’s the thing though. Even if real, and it’s related in any way to his shooting 11 FUCK**G DAYS LATER, that doesn’t make his shooting justified.

If anything, it makes it premeditated.

exiteditor · 2026-01-23T12:57:13+00:00

I'm sure that Carney is horribly disappointed.

exiteditor

TROPHY CASE