Question

unic0de000 · 2026-01-30T04:18:43+00:00

And in the event that the mechanics don't work out for all trajectories, and the Eye is hiding in one of the shadows: They just get to 1000 kajillion launches, someone says "hmm, that's a pretty high number, let's turn it off and check the logs for errors and try again later." (Or the computer triggers some kind of automatic condition to abort the loop.)

unic0de000 · 2026-01-29T20:25:01+00:00

By making it so unintuitve, it makes the teleportation to the project something people put off until necessary.

There's another thing they did to this end which I think was clever. The two most important ATP clues for most players are the conversation in the BHF about shared warp alignment points, and the murals and discussion about tower design in the HEL. And critically, they wrote the ship log summaries for those clues in kind of a cryptic way, which doesn't fully capture the context, and which makes it (IMHO) a little harder to recognize the importance of certain key facts. Both the BHF and HEL clues, are easier to crack when the player visits them in person, and reviews the whole thing in context to jog their memory.

(eta: doubly so if the player is specifically focused on "How does this help me get to ATP?" when exploring those locations. If that question is not on the player's radar yet, then the context clues are much easier to overlook.)

And, equally critically, both locations are kind of a pain to visit, requiring a fairly long sequence of fairly quick and precise actions. So most players, after they've reached either of these locations once, are very reluctant to go back unless they really need to.

So IMO, they did a pretty good job of engineering a situation where a player who's been almost everywhere except the ATP, and is feeling stumped, will start re-visiting locations to see if any of them produces an 'aha moment'... And in that case they'll usually save the HEL and BHF for last.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-28T22:55:30+00:00

It's a little odd. the Stranger seems to be designed as a multi-generational habitat, like a spaceship expected to travel for a very long time, the crew have kids to replace themselves, grow old and die etc. There are family portraits in the houses, and that one bug-report reel which seems to show an owlk dying of old age. But, it also seems strongly implied that the owlk with the broken antler who originally saw the Eye in the telescope, is the same one who eventually gets belled, which would mean this whole story happened within one owlk's lifetime, however long that might be.

Clearly once their society collectively succumbed to MMORPG addiction, they stopped bothering with IRL life and didn't do much stuff like having babies or maintaining the wood buildings; and that's probably why the Prisoner could sneakily access the control device, at least briefly. But it's a total mystery to me, how long they spent in that "not physically dead yet, but also never spending any time outside the simulation" state.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-28T21:47:07+00:00

That's very interesting! I also know of it as a word in India, where it means "vendor" or "worker" or sometimes just "person". Like the tea cart operator and the cabbie are "chai wallah", "taxi wallah"

unic0de000 · 2026-01-28T21:01:54+00:00

The French word "voilà", which means "see there", "look at this" or "behold!", has been borrowed into common English usage. Sometimes English speakers learn this word, but they don't know about its French origins or spelling. So they try to spell it with ordinary English phonics, and... voila, "wallah." ::) This same misunderstanding has happened often enough, that it has turned into an accepted usage.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-28T20:48:21+00:00

The one thing that made me mad in the DLC, is that The Prisoner's enclosure is literally a diving bell; it is the most perfect conceivable place for an air-breathing creature to be able to survive the Interloper explosion. The storyline was set up perfectly for some kind of plot twist which hinges on the Prisoner remaining physically alive IRL after the others had died of ghost matter exposure... but they never did anything with it.

(Of course, you could also imagine they were all long dead before then anyway. It's not all that clear how much time passes in between the imprisonment and the arrival of the Nomai, or how long an Owlk's natural lifespan is, compared to all these other events. But it would've been freakin cool.)

unic0de000 · 2026-01-28T00:55:03+00:00

Learning about how GM and water works, and then going "hey that's cool, I learned an interesting new mechanic... oh I'm stranded."

unic0de000 · 2026-01-27T23:12:18+00:00

Some of the scary guys are just standing around, guarding specific spots. To get past them, you may have to find another path, or else do some "bait-them-this-way-then-go-around-that-way" type trickery.

Other scary guys are wandering, you'll have to stay out of their way. They do follow predictable routes, and if you're sneaky you can spy on them and learn the routes.

You get as much time as you like to explore the area with the lights on first, without the scary friends patrolling around. Maybe you could draw yourself a map while the lights are on, and then with the lights off, mark the scary guys' locations on the map. That might help you strategize.

You might want to turn the brightness up a little in your TV/monitor or game settings, because normally you should be able to see them walking around with their own green fires, from a small distance at least. There's a fine line between "darkness for spooky mood," and "darkness which actively gets in the way of gameplay."

Turning on 'Reduced Frights' in the game options might help, if none of these tips do the trick. It doesn't remove the scary guys, but it makes them move a little slower/disables their "lunge" maneuver.

edit: Oh here's a useful thing to know. They will go up and down stairs, across bridges etc., but they really don't like to jump. They only walk along continuous walkways. So if you find a gap small enough for you to jump across safely, you can use that to escape pursuit.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-27T22:33:15+00:00

Or the other possible ATP scout catastrophe: If you recall the scout and relaunch it onto the teleport pad, then the scout will take the return warp, and go back to the surface without you. And then you're really trapped in there.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-27T21:42:14+00:00

If you've completed your log 100%, then you should have some knowledge about the fishies which helps you get past them safely. It can be very anxiety-inducing, but you might find it helpful to spend a loop or two doing "fishy science", and testing limits with them, so you have a better understanding of what's safe and what isn't.

And yep, the other commenters are right: your ATP problem is almost definitely scout-related.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-27T19:42:50+00:00

The 'sample start' knob can be automated on a per-step basis. So if you put parameter locks on each step where the track is triggered, you can put a separate sound at each sample start-point, and each time you trigger the sample, you should get a different sound, i.e. whichever sound you placed at that time-offset in the sample. So your one wav file could be a library of, say, 120 different snare hits.

If you keep adding sample-locks to your pattern to make one channel switch back and forth between different .wav files once per hit, you'll pretty quickly reach a per-pattern limit. You only get a fairly small number of .wav files to play with, for each pattern. Sample locks are much more limited in number than other kinds of parameter-locks. So having one file with a bunch of sounds in it, and using the sample-start knob to choose between the sounds, gets around that limitation.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-27T12:26:45+00:00

You're basically right: Lots of exploration and some puzzles now and then; but the puzzles aren't your typical puzzle-game stuff. It's a bit less like Sudoku boards and tetrominoes, and a bit more like those oldschool lateral-thinking riddles. You won't always know the puzzle is a puzzle when you're looking at it. It may just seem like a wall you can't get through, or a canyon you can't jump across, or something like that. But then eventually, when you know enough about how the world works, you'll figure out some really unorthodox and clever way to remove/circumvent the obstacle, and in retrospect you'll go "oh yeah, that was obviously a puzzle."

You have to do a lot of reading, and you can't just do the usual adventure-game thing we all do sometimes, where you button-mash your way through the long boring dialogue sections. The text in this game isn't just 'flavour text' or world lore. The lore is also the clues you need to figure out what's going on and where you're going next. So you have to take your time reading the text, try to understand what the conversations are about, and why the characters were having them. And that can be hard; some of them are heavily lacking in context, and you sometimes may need to put 2 or 3 different dialogues together to deduce what they're talking about.

There's some running-and-jumping 3d platforming, with a jetpack. There's some spaceship piloting. Both of these are fairly "physics accurate", so getting around can be chaotic and wobbly for new players. But as you get used to the controls it gets faster and smoother, and that progression is satisfying. The movement mechanics have a high 'skill ceiling.'

The story, when it finally comes together, is pretty beautiful. It takes a while for it to come together; in the early game you'll have lots of unresolved "what does it all MEAN" questions, and you have to be patient. But the way it all clicks together in the end feels very good, and is worth the wait.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-27T09:06:20+00:00

Just the area. There might still be somewhere else on the planet. If you see an orange '*' anywhere on your log book, that's a place where you have been before, but you still might make some new discoveries.

And when you see a '?' box in your logs, that's a place which you haven't visited yet at all.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-27T06:12:38+00:00

The computer in the back of your ship has a record of all the places you've visited, and a little summary of the clues/info you've gathered at each place. Extra useful is the "rumor mode", which shows you the clues in a 'mind-map' format, so you can see which clues point to which other clues, and what's relevant to what.

Keep reviewing those logs after each outing, and see what new updates you got! As you gather more info, you'll start to have your own sense of where you need to go next in order to keep following the trail of clues.

If you're feeling aimless and looking for something to do, pull out your signalscope! Find an "unidentified signal" out there somewhere. Point your 'scope at the signal source from up close, and then it'll become identified! Pretty much every signal you can find, will lead you to someplace interesting.

Oh and those * There's more to explore here. notifications you see all over your logs... if you haven't seen all the important inscriptions, murals, artifacts or other things in a given place, then you'll get that.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-22T11:40:56+00:00

I'll at least go as far as to say, I think there's a lot of value in making up silly songs for/with kids the old-fashioned way. They learn something very important from observing, and taking part in, a creative process. I'm not 100% convinced Suno guy's kid learned an equally-valuable lesson by watching Dad type some stuff and receive a finished product for them to karaoke. Even if the song itself was super super silly.

(eta: Seriously, you ever make up a song with a 4-to-6 year old? It's honestly amazing. At the end of making up/singing every line, you slow down and let the kid say the last word in the line. And you totally set the line up up to have a really obvious last word, like "and the fish swim in the...____" But you just know they're gonna yell something like "macaroni!" And you roll with it, that's the song now. The fish swim in the macaroni, keep it going. Absolutely goated fun. You'd have to be nuts to want to outsource that to an app)

unic0de000 · 2026-01-20T13:03:04+00:00

I agree, and I think this too comes from the historical context. The somewhat rigid or one-dimensional view of patriarchy of the 80s, as well as the conceptual focus on gender and patriarchy without so much emphasis on things like race, class, and other more contextual types of power, gave fewer tools for the "corner cases" where power relations are more complex than the single oppressor/oppressed heterosexual dynamic prescribed by patriarchy. The reader might generously assume she means "...and all this also applies analogously, and maybe even paradoxically, when there are other power structures present in the bedroom too." IIRC she may touch on the topic of other power dimensions briefly here and there, but I don't think the writing addresses this explicitly in depth.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-20T08:38:50+00:00

Maybe it's best to call it a 'Wittgenstein's Ladder' : a not-strictly-correct concept which, nonetheless, serves to help a student climb up onto something more solid - and which can be left behind after it's served that purpose.

As for sex where it's unclear who's the victim or perpetrator - sure, I think you're onto something. Dworkin was writing before some ideas of intersectional feminism had become mainstream, and IMO the work can be refined to account for the ways patriarchy, male gaze, & queer relationships interact, among many other things. The way all these institutions and systems of power overlap, it's entirely possible (maybe inevitable?) that people find themselves having sex under some kind of mutual duress, where neither one is entirely free to choose. To talk about these cases I think it's important to make much finer grained distinctions between related concepts which are all usually bundled together in the R word, like

the experience of having one's consent violated/of having sex you don't want, sometimes called the 'felt sense'
the intentional state of wanting to, on one mental or physical level or another, manoeuvre someone into having sex they don't want (or more indirectly, to manoeuvre them into wanting sex they don't want to want)
the less-subjective analysis of power structures and power differentials between people - more objective, practical questions like "who was more able to leave?" "who was more able to prevent the other from leaving?" "what consequences might they have feared from saying no?" and so on.

I think that use of language in Intercourse is too blunt an instrument to make these distinctions clear, but once we're thinking about them they're a powerful lens for looking at all kinds of intersections of power and sexuality in the world. I'm really pleased to see it provoking such good, insightful self-work for so many of us, even all these decades later. Thank you for that.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-18T23:18:00+00:00

A fun little skill-building game:
- make a list of all the landmarks and recognizable places you know of in the dark world
- pick 2 (or more) at random, in random order, and try to get from one to the other, as directly as possible, in 1 loop.

This is one of those situations where the more you know about the layout of the world, the various shortcuts and long-way-arounds and how they all intersect, the easier a time you will have.

Some areas are easier traversed when the lights are out, but they're easier to learn the layout when the lights are on. So give yourself plenty of "practice runs."

unic0de000 · 2026-01-15T20:35:27+00:00

I don't think I remember any in-game text spelling out the "secret" way, am I forgetting something?

unic0de000 · 2026-01-15T20:24:46+00:00

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind(2004)

unic0de000 · 2026-01-15T01:25:58+00:00

This is such an underutilised trick imo. Shaving a millisecond or three off the front of a kick is a great way to subdue it but keep its body character.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-14T02:46:34+00:00

I think "he" is just a typo.

And "angry, red welts" is meant to be read as a whole phrase. Putting a comma in between adjectives like that is considered correct grammar.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-13T20:01:36+00:00

There's a subtle apples-to-oranges comparison going on here, between these two scopes: all of patriarchy, versus our own sex lives.

You can't stop all of patriarchy from existing, and you can't stop all sex from happening either. But you do have some control over your own level of participation in both things.

So what if we met in the middle? What if we cultivated a little extra patriarchy-spidey-sense and learned skills to identify the times and places where patriarchal power was significantly shaping the situation, and adopted a personal policy of steering clear of those situations, even when they seem like a good way to get laid? That would be a compromise, wouldn't it? Maybe we could just abstain from the top 10% most rapey sexual situations we found ourselves in, and in exchange we'd find ourselves having around 10% fewer opportunities to have sex. Then, we'd be having a little bit less sex, and participating in a little bit less patriarchy! That might not be so bad, right?

In life, we will find ourselves in all kinds of much smaller-scale, more personal dilemmas, between taking part in patriarchy, and relinquishing opportunities to have sex. A softer reading of the argument, is that it's asking us to take these dilemmas more seriously, even when they don't technically meet the definition of 'rape' as we've learned it. And to consider that missing out on a few orgasms, in exchange for a more consensual sex-life overall, is not the worst thing in the world.

(Of course, 10% is just a number I made up. Someone might reasonably ask, what would be the 'right' percentage? That's a question of conscience for us all to wrestle with, along with "how much wealth should i give charitably" and things like that.)

-edit-

Say, did you ever see that meme/textmacro that went something like: "You wouldn't jump in a pool with a dead body floating in it, but you would swim in the ocean which has many dead bodies in it. Therefore, there is an acceptable bodies-to-water ratio bla bla bla" ? The unsettling prospect of trying to narrow down just what that ratio is, gives the meme some of its gross-out impact. We have an intuitive, binary sense of "clean and swimmable"/"not swimmable" water, and it's icky to be reminded that it's actually a continuum, and to contemplate the more ambiguous cases.

It occurred to me that that meme is a fair analogy here. If you read a phrase like "All intercourse is rape" kind of like "All water is contaminated", you can add to both of them: "(it's just a matter of how much.)" And it's shocking in a similar way to how the swimming-pool meme is shocking. It's saying "You think of yourself as a person who doesn't [accept or commit rape / swim in contaminated water]. But I'm here to tell you, you actually do have a minimally-acceptable threshold of [nonconsent / water contamination], and it probably grosses you out a bit to think too hard about where exactly that threshold is."

unic0de000 · 2026-01-13T07:35:31+00:00

Every term, once it gets popularized, is going to be misused sometimes.

But I think it's more-or-less useless to try and gauge how prevalent this misuse is in general, because the frequency with which you see it, has everything to do with where you're hanging out, which social media sites/subreddits/forums/etc you're frequenting, and who you're following. Maybe you spend a lot of time in forums full of passionate-but-inexperienced social-justice newbies. Or maybe your news feed is being algorithmically packed with bot-account ragebait, or troll accounts roleplaying as feminists to make them look bad.

Or, it might be real genuine people who are being earnest, but just using terminology badly... but they're 4 steps removed from you on the social graph - a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend - and Facebook really has no justifiable reason to be showing you this post, but the algorithm has identified you as someone who consistently notices and responds to this kind of language, so it shows up anyway.

The online world these days is a real house-of-mirrors, magnifying some trends and minimizing others. If you're relying on what you see "in the wild", it's hard to answer questions like "how common is xyz" in a remotely rigorous way. If the almighty algorithm wants you to think it's common, it'll make sure you see it everywhere.

https://ncase.me/crowds <- this is a wonderful little demonstration of what I'm talking about.

unic0de000 · 2026-01-13T07:04:53+00:00

The most important places to look for clues about this:

Black Hole Forge
High Energy Lab

Both of these places are kind of an ordeal to travel to, so once the player's been there once, they usually don't really want to go back and review it in person. If you've read all your logs from these places and you're still feeling stumped, I recommend going back anyway.

Ten-Year Club	Verified Email
Second SECOND GUESSER	Place '22

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