Removing all clocks from my life made it more enjoyable. There is no time visible to me. I took down the wall clock. I hid all digital clocks on my devices. I never set alarms unless I absolutely need to. I can still access the time if I need it, which is rarely if ever.
It took time to adjust to this. It only really hit me how frequently I had looked at the time when I constantly caught myself looking at the empty spot on the wall where the clock had been. I realized I'd look at the clock to decide if I should eat, instead of listening to my body's needs as I should be. I'd look at the clock to decide if I should sleep, instead of how tired I felt. Etc. Living without clocks has made me more aware of my self.
One experiment I did was installing an app on my phone that vibrates it every 10 minutes or so. It was interesting observing how the passage of time changed depending on circumstance. When e.g. waiting for a bus, the phone took ages to vibrate. When out drinking with friends, it seemed to vibrate constantly.
There are multiple blatantly obvious reasons why text on screen SHOULD be different. For one, IT'S NOT PAPER. Second, you should avoid blasting unnecessary light into your users' eyes. Third, bright screens consume more power than dark ones.
Under cost? My understanding is that consoles cost MORE than an equivalent self-built PC, and that the expectation that sells them is the guarantee that the games will WORK. On an actual PC, there's no guarantee that any software works with your particular configuration. That is, consoles standardize system specs, and include a markup reflecting that.
You're using the term 'adventure' quite liberally. Disco Elysium is, at best, a really drunken, long-winded and exposition-heavy stroll in a pretty mundane harbor area the size of a single city block.
It's not really even that weird of a fiction. Everything is extremely based on reality, with a mere facade of "look we changed the names of everyday things! they are now strange!"
Disco Elysium has a lot of fundamental mechanics in it that are unfamilar to many players - and they are ones I've not seen outside of some very indepth RPGS (text, pen and paper varities).
It is fundamentally less about a story and more about experiencing a world and a character in that world, and in that sense it's a very traditional RPG. One of the reasons that a world builder renames things is to give a clue to the player that things operate differently in a world then they are used to - and that is very true in Disco Elysium.
The physical world in Disco Elysium that we have access to is very small and it forces us to go over the same areas and same characters again and again - because it's not the physical world that changes but our knowledge of it and our ability to interact with it.
There are enough weird things in there, it's possible to miss them, but discovering really changes your whole outlook on the world. Things like: the Pale, the Insulindian Phasmid & the Mega Rich Light-Bending Guy in the shipping container.
Some skills are also kinda magical if you invest enough points, Interfacing & Inland Empire could be explained by your imagination, but it's hard to argue that Esprit De Corps (cutaway to what is happening to Precinct 41) & Shivers (Have conversations with the city of Revachol itself) aren't a bit supernatural.
The game is like an episode of Breaking Bad set in New Crobuzon.
The concept of the Pale is utterly horrifying. It pretty much has no involvement with the game at all and I think that’s a brilliant thing.
The concept is there, lurking in the background of various plot lines, but it’s never actually part of a mission. You are left to your own imagination as to, at first, how seemingly horrific it is.
To later learn that the pale is expanding — at an unknown rate you are led to believe is like a rising tide — and will eventually destroy the world and no one really seems to care or talk about it as an issue that much puts all the other noir detective and soap opera plots and subplots in a fascinating light. The citizens of Revechol are a little insane, we get to guess a bit about why and can also deduce they are in denial.
Someone on gamepedia has pieced together this description from expository dialogue in the game:
What does the pale look like? It's acromatic, odourless, featureless. The pale is the enemy of matter and life. It is not like any other — or any thing in the world. It is the transition state of being into nothingness. Where matter borders the pale, the resulting border is an uproar of matter, rising into the pale. Rolling. Evaporating even, a great vision. The area of transition between the world and the pale is called porch collapse: A grey coronal mist, cold vapour, marked by spores of an opportunistic microorganism.
Pale is difficult to describe and measure, as it's something whose fundamental property is the suspension of properties: physical, epistemological, linguistic. The further into pale you travel, the steeper the degree of suspension. Right down to the mathematical — numbers stop working. No one has yet passed the number barrier since the discovery of the pale and it may be impossible.
In fact, one of the few measurable effects of the pale is that it is expanding at an unknown rate.
Totally agree, discovering what the Pale was, had a real impact on me that I don't think any other piece of fiction has ever had on me, it's like a sinking feeling, like: ow, oh no, this is what the world is?!
It's very cool in a fiction sense, but also mechanically in the game, you start as someone who has lost all their memories, which sets the character on the same knowledge level as the player, and you slowly uncover how the world works through playing. It's close enough to earth that things slowly begin to make sense, and you get lulled into a false sense of familiarity. Just as you think you have a handle on reality, the rug gets pulled away from underneath you and you fall into the Pale, a total break with anything familiar. It recontextualizes everything.
There is a line where either Joyce or Soona tells you about inter-isolary travel where she explains you that you need to aim your path through the Pale really carefully because it's possible to miss your destination and just continue sailing through the Pale forever. Which is supremely horrifying to me.
It seems that both the author of Neverending story and of this game had been exposed to experience Alzheimer in their beloved ones... great children book, but with a lot of dark undertones.
I mostly agree, with one caveat: The Mega Rich Light-Bending Guy is partially an easter egg and, iirc, doesn't really affect the world in any way. At most, it's a commentary on wealth inequality.
The Phasmid and the Pale are fairly core to the world and story, though.
"Well thought out"? There are TWO features listed, some kind of non-straight line writing thing, and the ability to change color. No mention of literally anything else - like, if your notes are stored in accessible format offline or if they are lost when the business goes belly up.
Never, ever take notes into a proprietary cloud silo!
I'm not saying that Clover is incredible or that your "proprietary cloud silo" paradigm is incorrect, but saying the app mentions literally nothing else is a bit of a stretch.
I went looking for these things you claim are there, and you're right! They are hidden in the screenshots without nary a mention!
This is what the website SAYS:
"What if we had a tool that could work in straight lines or… well… not straight lines? [...] We built a new style of text editor from the ground up to better support creative thinking. Clover lets you explode traditional documents and work in a more free-form manner for better brainstorming, mind-mapping, and exploration."
Notice the difference between what YOU said, and what the WEBSITE says? You produced a useful list of features; the website blabbers in incomprehensible marketing-speak.
I also look forward to trying it out :) I'm not committing to taking all my important notes into it, but I'm interested in the product. Maybe I'm naïve, but I think there's progress to be made on the front of proactive note-taking apps, and I'm excited to see what this app has to offer.
Well, Gemini can have links to pictures and clients may render pictures — inline, in separate "graphics" column etc. No one does it yet, as far as I know, but we will see.
Table and math bring more problems. Probably SVG or other images can solve them, but it is a pain for authors. In my opinion, no plain-text markup language today has tables with features even remotely close to HTML (at least colspan, rowspan and alignment) while remaining convenient to both write and read. AsciiDoc is fine in terms of features, but not in terms of syntax:
Looks like 9 paragraphs to me. For comparison, we have MRI scans of human beings orgasming. Most of what we know about wild shark reproduction comes from observing a single population of nurse sharks living in the Dry Tortugas. That's a single population, of a single species, in one place on earth, at one time of year (summer). That's about it.
More likely, an emergence of curated and policed search/indexes [sic] of sites voluntarily subscribing to a particular web philosophy.
Simultaneously, blacklists of domains and browser extensions to scrub viewed pages of any references to sites not subscribing to particular philosophies.
In southern Ontario, Canada, the vast majority of houses are stick-built with complete brick facades on all sides of the house. This is even the case on "cheap" subdivision houses that are 4 feet apart.
> Many parts of the US prefer the aesthetics of brick
At least around here, if you want the aesthetic, you go for wood frame with brick facade.
How does brick work for modern wiring, plumbing, insulation needs? Most of that stuff is traditionally routed at least partially through load bearing walls.
>How does brick work for modern wiring, plumbing, insulation needs? Most of that stuff is traditionally routed at least partially through load bearing walls.
it's not much different other than the addition of a masonry drill bit.
in the case of very large plumbing, sometimes whole bricks are left out and the area filled/finished with a conrete mixture and left to set around the pipe.
Yes. Modern brick buildings generally have load bearing frames and then brick in place of vinyl, but they're still called brick houses :)
External walls being load bearing is generally not a thing anymore since the "invention" of sensible construction methods and steel re-inforced cement / concrete.
It took time to adjust to this. It only really hit me how frequently I had looked at the time when I constantly caught myself looking at the empty spot on the wall where the clock had been. I realized I'd look at the clock to decide if I should eat, instead of listening to my body's needs as I should be. I'd look at the clock to decide if I should sleep, instead of how tired I felt. Etc. Living without clocks has made me more aware of my self.
One experiment I did was installing an app on my phone that vibrates it every 10 minutes or so. It was interesting observing how the passage of time changed depending on circumstance. When e.g. waiting for a bus, the phone took ages to vibrate. When out drinking with friends, it seemed to vibrate constantly.