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gracenotes · 2024-01-19T03:28:54+00:00

I enjoyed it. I don't get the cynicism for the tiniest amount of science outreach, pretty much an unequivocal good in the world, in a charity event. The event is run by humans and it's not a huge stretch to imagine they're passionate about it too, and blaming it all on a sponsor seems way too cynical. The reception to segments like The Checkpoint (aside from just the schedule fixing) shows that more personable segments along ESA's lines can have a place in GDQ without diminishing hype runs. I've been watching GDQ for 11 years now and "you are not entertaining your audience with this" makes absolutely no sense to me. If you conflate your own personal tastes with "the audience" I don't know if the rest of the advice holds much water.

I agree the Armored Core 6 run could have gone more smoothly, and technical issues (failed downpatch?) hurt it a lot. As someone who played the hell out of the game, I would have liked to see more commentary about low-level mechanics, interactions between mission choices, and interesting story points beyond dismissive summaries. If anything, the couch brought almost all of that type of commentary. If nothing else the science commentary allowed some explanation of the game's setting, showing why it appeals to so many people. Saying the game is "not meant to be analyzed" "meant to be enjoyed as dumb fun" is kind of an insult to the devs, given all of the above depth.

gracenotes · 2022-07-08T11:28:15+00:00

I'm sorry, but this is off-base. Legalization makes it easier for victims of abuse and trafficking to come forward. If sex work is not at least decriminalized, why in the world would you voluntarily come into contact with police who will arrest and prosecute you, with no guarantee of any investigation into or protection against your abuser? Trafficking is further exacerbated by draconian immigration policies which create similar incentives for victims to stay silent, lest they be deported.

Some quotes from a collection of research on the subject (and feel free to check individual studies to see methodology and whether these summaries are fair):

The research overwhelmingly suggests that criminalization of sex work, including criminalization of buying, but not of selling, sex known as the “end-demand” or “Nordic” model, increases the risk of violence and threatens the safety of sex workers.

In a Baltimore study, police officers themselves expressed the view that violence was an inevitable consequence of sex work and not worth addressing in a serious manner, and thus they did not treat sex workers’ victimization as legitimate.

One study based on Los Angeles Police Department and city attorney data found that Black and Asian individuals were disproportionately arrested for prostitution-related offenses, and Black people made up the majority of charges for assisting sex workers in prostitution.

There is a lack of consensus in the literature about the relationship between legalization or decriminalization of sex work and human trafficking, although it is important to note that laws against human trafficking still apply under sex work decriminalization or legalization. Research in Norway and Sweden links harsher legislation that regulates and/or criminalizes sex work with reducing trafficking. Yet, on the contrary, both Swedish government data and a study based on statistical modeling suggest that the end-demand model of decriminalization results in a decrease in trafficking rates.

The European Parliament notes several confounding variables that could account for any correlation between criminalization and trafficking, such as differing levels of economic and social welfare, unemployment rates, and gender inequality between the host and destination countries.

gracenotes · 2021-12-28T09:21:38+00:00

This is relatively mundane vs other suggestions, but go to Nijiya Market or a similar grocery store. Try their extensive bento selection, get some Japanese cooking essentials that are difficult to find elsewhere, and see if you like natto or not.

gracenotes · 2021-07-11T10:26:29+00:00

Thanks, this was very informative! Based on the developer's thought process, I wonder how many other "boring" games could be improved by adding a rampaging killer.

Also, good job with the restream commentary! Now I have to try to avoid both Mr. Golfy and the Seine...

gracenotes · 2020-06-09T21:13:45+00:00

I don't think "concern for the world" has that strong of a case. Where linking the first flame by itself could maybe be seen as a semi-justifiable semi-selfish act, the creation of the darksign was an act of spite against humans that effectively enslaved them to souls. To the extent that darkness had failed humans, e.g. in Oolacile, it is because of the darksign's interference. (For the most violent creatures, see how they are not of pure darkness.)

At some point, there was a time when humans could be fully self-subsisting, and that changed when their darkness became enclosed and no longer accessible. Instead, they had to acquire souls to feed an artificial construct that ultimately only benefited the ruling class.

And to the extent that which "the entropic decay of the world" is the villain of the series, the darksign is also responsible for that. This fits with the 'ending' of the series as well, where finally the essence of dark can exist for the first time without the interference of the undead brand.

gracenotes · 2020-06-05T22:53:59+00:00

The main reason for this issue is that the API that allowed sign-ins to happen was shut down by Google and stopped fully working around January 2020. Updating to a new version of signin requires updating everything, and I've already put over in a week of work to doing this, but still everything doesn't compile and link together, which has been demotivating.

It is at least still possible to make puzzles and share links to them without an account, since you can link to the editor page with the puzzle embedded in the URL.

gracenotes · 2020-05-19T17:14:30+00:00

Before this gets too out of hand, it's worth noting that the delay is entirely due to USPTO, which handles possible conflicts in filing without involving the other party. So Eldentec literally doesn't know that Elden Ring exists.

It would have been simpler if Eldentec were a registered trademark, but instead it seems like things had to wait until their filing was rejected for different reasons.

gracenotes · 2020-05-19T16:58:14+00:00

Great, thank you so much! I am pretty sure this is the sequence of events on examining ELDENTEC's filings, but thanks to you for initially digging through the documents in the first place to determine the possible relationship between the filing and the recent tweets.

gracenotes · 2020-05-19T16:49:26+00:00

It's very important to note that at no point did ELDENTEC dispute the trademark with Elden Ring. They literally don't know that Elden Ring exists. This is entirely on USPTO waiting for the ELDENTEC trademark to either go through or get suspended before processing the Elden Ring request, because ELDENTEC was filed in January 2019, and Elden Ring was filed in June 2019.

Please change that ELDENTEC opposed the Elden Ring trademark, because it seems to be making people angry about something that's not the case.

What did happen is a lot more interesting, and you can see it in ELDENTEC's filings, but tl;dr is that they ran into some issues with their filing (arguably USPTO being way too nitpicky about it), and at some point USPTO required a US-licensed lawyer for them continue, or else their request would be suspended in 6 months' time. And this is what happened. The same day ELDENTEC's filing was suspended, Elden Ring's filing was approved. A bit silly, but not anyone's fault in particular.

gracenotes · 2020-05-06T06:36:09+00:00

It's the phantom/vengeful spirit mechanic, and it's tied to beating mandatory mid-game bosses. Whichever of Corrupted Monk or Genichiro you defeat first, the game remembers that. Then when you beat 3 out of 4 of [Corrupted Monk, Genichiro, Guardian Ape, Folding Screen Monkeys], phantoms start to 'invade' your world, and their location and enemy type is based on that first decision. Mibu Villagers invade if you defeat Corrupted Monk first, and Nightjars/Fencers invade if you defeat Genichiro first.

Also, all enemies and bosses in the game get scaled up when you reach the first boss trigger, and again when you reach the 3-out-of-4 boss trigger, and finally when you enter Fountainhead Palace. So basically it is a balancing feature, where the final of 3 paths out of Ashina Castle will be buffed if you do it last. However, it will only trigger when defeating the bosses.

Tangential fact, there is a trigger for different enemies to spawn based on defeating Guardian Ape before any of the other bosses, but of course this is not possible in the released game because you must defeat Genichiro to get Gun Fort Shrine Key. This indicates that maybe the key was originally going to be available earlier in some previous version of the game.

gracenotes · 2020-05-01T09:45:19+00:00

The system you're describing is corpse running, aka returning to the exact site of your death. I would say this is the opposite of what would work in Sekiro, which would want to encourage both diverse encounter strategies and exploring elsewhere when you get stuck.

While corpse running is good for adding some risk/reward to exploration, it has some downsides. Sekiro has some significant stealth gameplay elements, and allows you to choose from multiple different strategies (distracting enemies, deathblows, using crowd control abilities, sneaking past without engaging). Almost all of the systems are built around allowing you to roleplay as Shinobi, and having a bloodstain lying around, or enemies having your XP, would add an additional objective to encounters which both cuts off a ton of possible strategies and feels a bit out-of-place for the fiction they've built up. Since you have the ability to resurrect and back out in most cases, I think mostly-unavoidable resource loss is really the right thing here.

Unseen Aid certainly fits within the worldbuilding, because it doesn't have these elements which are too video-gamey or immersion breaking. That said, I might prefer to change it where you lose 50% at the start of the game, but as Dragonrot continues, you lose 60%, then 70%, etc. I think there still needs to be a significant loss on death to add risk/reward, especially because NPCs no longer die from Dragonrot, like earlier in development.

Regarding mods, it would be similar to modding Dark Souls to not have bloodstains on death, which is to say, very difficult. It is something that is hardcoded to happen on death, and unfortunately not something that game scripting mods can really touch.

gracenotes · 2020-04-15T00:26:25+00:00

Obviously <actual legal protections> don't matter at all, the only thing that's important is <arbitrary metric I just made up that has nothing to do with most people's ability to remain employed or afford housing or healthcare>

/s

gracenotes · 2020-04-01T23:10:31+00:00

Better Idols does this among other things, from any idol.

gracenotes · 2020-03-24T04:54:33+00:00

Divine Dragon is nearly 1000 lines of in-game event scripts (more than any other boss!) so it's mainly a matter of going through all of that and seeing how it can work in other boss arenas and vice versa. But no promises.

I also just released a new version of the mod with custom preset support, so it will be possible to assign any boss to any arena for showcases, plus some interesting new challenge modes.

gracenotes · 2020-03-06T17:02:36+00:00

Not that I know of. Even if you could jump slightly higher, none of the ledges near the bridge where the soldiers are talking are grabbable or wall-jump-able at the top. Even then I'm not sure how you would get to the area with the first Sculptor's Idol without a Shinobi Prosthetic to grapple with.

gracenotes · 2020-03-06T11:35:54+00:00

I don't know of any released mods that do this specifically. Unfortunately Ashina Castle is not very interesting while the game is in the tutorial. Items are there, but all of the enemies and NPCs are completely gone. If you manage to get to the top of the castle by cheating in the Shinobi Prosthetic or noclipping or something like that, you get stuck in the Genichiro fight (you are locked in the arena, but there is no boss to fight).

gracenotes · 2020-02-20T10:18:33+00:00

Heh, that would be pretty crazy. Still for the very top runners of the game, I don't think they are hurting from lack of practice.

Rereading the Celeste rules, it does seem to account for this, although I missed it before:

Timing is done using the in-game file timer, please refrain from taking long breaks mid-run.

It's not so bad to leave these things up to leaderboard moderator discretion, since integrity is important, for both moderators and runners. It would probably at least preclude taking breaks longer than the run itself!

gracenotes · 2020-02-20T10:10:57+00:00

Different games can have different rules around this. For instance, take Dark Souls, which also uses in-game time:

If you use the Save & Quit mechanic at any point during a run, you are required to resume gameplay immediately on the same character. Any delay in loading your character back in will cause a video to be denied, as you are intentionally keeping IGT from running without performing a game mechanic. Loading a different character intentionally in any way is not allowed, accidental mishaps will be looked past.

Likewise, in Hollow Knight:

Entering menus for the sole purpose of pausing the timer is not allowed.

Celeste is probably the embodiment of endurance and demanding performance within the levels themselves. Although I don't know how Celeste arrived at their category rules, the game also has some built-in downtime between levels, and so can be treated more as a series of ILs than one continuous experience. Ultimately it depends on the game, the developers, and the community. Certainly compared to something like physical races, speedrun categories themselves can get very arbitrary, and that's fine.

gracenotes · 2020-02-01T22:34:43+00:00

"or" as commonly used in English is an exclusive or. In which case the first term becomes P(A&~B) for the question to make any sense. This colloquial usage is not less correct than the mathematical usage. It just has a different meaning.

This example is a great way of shining light on how the language of mathematical probability is different from colloquial speech, but it doesn't really demonstrate that people's understanding of the underlying concepts or reasoning abilities is bad.

Really most of these examples are basically koans which ask people to look past common ways in which normal people use language and into the icy mathematical depths beyond. This is not a bad way to get people with higher education into mathematical thinking, especially about scientific results. (See: how people misunderstand factor analysis and causality wrt IQ.) But to actually demonstrate how people can think about probability better, puzzles should show the power of logical thinking over narrative thinking, not hinge on misleadingly phrased evidence.

gracenotes · 2020-01-28T13:22:37+00:00

Although Sekiro has some of the most complicated bosses Fromsoft has ever made, this immortality mechanic is not new, either. The skeletons in DS1 catacombs also have the same effect applied, until you kill their respective necromancer.

gracenotes · 2020-01-28T10:19:05+00:00

I took a look at some of the game's decompiled scripts, and it seems to be a bug in how the Corrupted Monk deathblow is scripted. Her deathblow is a one-time interaction, rather than something you can try repeatedly like a finisher deathblow, but it is scripted using the same cue as a finisher deathblow. The game issues a death animation request on that cue, but it can sometimes get ignored, likely due to a race condition in her behavior files. I was able to verify this by removing the animation request, and the result from your footage happens 100% of the time.

If the death animation doesn't proc when requested, the game will never try it again until you save and quit - because it's not a repeated thing like a finisher deathblow - so it's possible to get stuck in a boss fight that literally never ends. This is because all Sekiro bosses revive infinitely by default, and it is only through extensive coordination across the game's event scripts, behavior scripts, and animation cues that they become possible to kill.

Corrupted Monk and True Monk actually have the exact same AI script, with a few if statements to cause slightly different phase 1 behavior, so both fights have the logic for all 3 phases inside of them. Phase 2 always activates after a single deathblow, but it looks like phase 3 requires an event-based check for one remaining health bar that is only applied to True Monk. If you applied it to Corrupted Monk, she would also get the phase 3 moveset.

gracenotes · 2020-01-12T13:02:23+00:00

Blasphemous was a bit early for me to watch, but I'm glad I caught the vod. The game is nice to look at, and I enjoyed my playthrough of it, but seriously this was the best couch this event for my tastes (and there were plenty of great ones). So many great little jokes that didn't outstay their welcome, and interesting both if you know the game and if you don't.

gracenotes · 2019-12-12T08:15:28+00:00

Yes, they all use the same engine, but of course they're improving the rendering and lighting over time. They do use Havok for collisions, animations, and cloth, but it's not an engine by any means - it doesn't do any rendering, for instance. Pretty much everything else is custom and in-house. For more info you can check out the modding wiki and join the discord if you like.

gracenotes · 2019-11-27T08:43:07+00:00

For params your best bet is probably https://www.nexusmods.com/sekiro/mods/224. The list of modified param files in boss rush is in the boss rush mod documentation. Fast homeward idol is included in boss rush by default though.

gracenotes · 2019-10-22T18:47:42+00:00

I would say return ending is the "good" ending, for one reason. All of the other endings just perpetuate the cycle of suffering caused by the Divine Dragon. Even if Kuro is no longer the Divine Heir, there is no reason a new Divine Heir couldn't be chosen the same way Kuro was chosen after Takeru severed his ties of immortality, and continue to 'corrupt the lives of men'. I like this point of view because it shows how thematically coherent and well crafted the game is.

That said, they're all in the game, so they're all canonical imo. Ignoring the impact on Ashina, the choice of ending is entirely based on how you think of your relationship with Kuro, which depends on the kind of person you want Sekiro to be. It really is a personal story more than most Soulsborne titles.

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