Ask me about:
- Science (biology, computation, statistics)
- Gaming (rhythm, rogue-like/lite, other generic 1-player games)
- Autism & related (I have diagnosis)
- Bad takes on philosophy
- Bad takes on US political systems & more US stuff
I’m not knowledgeable about most other things
- 4 Posts
- 10 Comments
10·1 month ago- A privacy-respecting mail service: I use mailbox.org since it follows email standards, but I think many ppl like Proton mail/Tutanota. Recommend because they are privacy-respecting, and self-hosting email is way too difficult
- More of a yearly subscription per-se, but a personal domain from any domain registrar. Recommend because why not? There are so many cool things one can do with a domain: custom email, your own blog, professional website for job, …
- A VPS from Linode (or any reliable provider). Recommend because some things are better done on a VPS… and I want a public-facing IP that is not directly from my bedroom
- I used to have subscriptions to the local arcade. Recommend because I basically get cardio workout on the DDR machine (and it costs less than a gym. And easier to cancel)
This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered… The person is not officially “fired” since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.
This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue’s Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study… close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.
And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn’t find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low… oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.
This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc… one poor girl’s nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I’ve heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits…
Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is… Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from… San Diego State University? Doesn’t seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.
If you are interested in the full detail… here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue’s student-run newspaper
One of:
- none,
- lofi, or
- wild speedcore music beyond most people’s imagination
Although I think options 2 and 3 are more helpful for helping me getting back from being distracted rather than concentration itself…
I’m glad you mentioned this! I completely agree… Which is kinda why I was asking about this in the first place. I was curious what others consider as objectively “difficult” for them, and I got my answer: my sense of “difficult” is very different from that of most Lemmy users…
fake difficulty
IMO I felt a lot of the answers pointed to games that are extremely high on the “cheap” scale… I mean yes cheap games are difficult, but yeah it does feel a bit artificial on the difficulty scale.
Which is also precisely why I didn’t think of most platformers as among the hardest games. Like for example the original IWBTG; is it difficult? Sure it is, but a large part of it comes from the game being cheap AF… Someone with good platforming skills can clear every section with a few tries. And the higher difficulties just reduce the number of checkpoints, not actually making the game fundamentally more difficult… I mean there are genuinely difficult platformers but there are objectively more difficult games out there
so many kinds of difficulty
I’m actually surprised almost no one mentioned any type of PvP games or games that are primarily reliant on competing against other humans… they go insanely hard, but like how much of Street Fighter’s difficulty is you being better than the other person vs just “know how the game works”?
If you want a game that not many people could beat
My favourite genre of games almost universally feature levels that probably fewer than 100 people across the world could beat (not counting customs), so… yeah.
Me infodumping about way too much of my thoughts on this topic, possibly bad takes, probably will influence your answer if you haven't typed in anything
Okay thanks everyone so much! I… wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see in the replies, but I definitely had some other games in mind. I was thinking more along the lines of rhythm games (yes IIDX/SDVX I’m looking at you, no I still can’t consistently clear lvl17 on SDVX), since most rhythm game feature levels that are just downright humanly impossible… but I assume the JP-based rhythm games are way too niche for most people, and Guitar Hero/Just Dance aren’t too difficult in the grand scheme of things
I guess it makes sense that for many people the most difficult game would be some bizarrely difficult game from the 80s/90s since… I thought the rationale for making a video game challenging is to make it more replayable & create the feel of having more “content”? Games back then literally don’t have the technical ability to create a 40+ hrs unique gameplay, so I guess until roguelikes/roguelites became popular it is a good strategy to just make the game really hard (which also coincides with arcades’ need to make more money from ppl failing more). Which I guess makes From Soft games quite interesting since they are challenging despite having no lack of gameplay elements in the games themselves
And speaking of roguelikes/roguelites, I guess if people were to base the difficulty of a game on “how many people could win a run”, “how long does it take to git gud”, or “how consistently can a reasonably experienced player beat a run”, roguelikes/roguelites would top the charts on most difficulty rankings… which I find kind of funny
I also have a personal hypothesis that for any action-based games, people find games with more “abstraction”, i.e. the control scheme is more unintuitive or far-removed from the player, difficult. For example, a 90s platformer would feature you pushing buttons on a controller, which then feeds into your screen character moving while being influenced by game physics, which is an absurdly high amount of abstraction… whereas a game like Fruit Ninja has close to zero abstractions (you literally just swipe the fruit) and would probably be considered quite easy by most. Obviously doesn’t apply to non-action based games but I think they are the minority among all video games
But honestly, I know I’m asking for difficult games here, but I find even just the 1985 Super Mario Bros quite challenging (mostly because of the jank physics engine but more about that another time)… games from that era truly are something else. And this is speaking from someone who had 100%ed or otherwise fully cleared many popular roguelike/roguelites so…
Anyway I think the short conclusion I had is I should play a few retro games that I haven’t had a chance to try yet. Oh and traditional bullet-hells. Just for shits and giggles… thanks!
I’ve really only played Touhou in middle/high school… Imperishable Night was actually a really formative game for me, loved the OST and played quite a bit out of it. Fairly sure I’ve cleared this particular one on Easy, might have made to Stage 5/6 on Normal… Definitely didn’t clear Scarlet Devil on Normal because my motor skills were terrible back then
I should be able to clear Normal/Hard now that I’m older and more skilled. If I have the patience/time that is…
Edit: apparently I forgot how to do math and got the game release numbers wrong
Okay that quickly went from “I think I can do this with some practice” to “what the actual fuck” to me… congrats on clearing the game
I haven’t touched classical bullet hell games since high school so… guess I should give them a try!
Don’t remember the exact date now but I believe I learned about Lemmy either slightly before or during the first wave of Twitter/Mastodon migration… I was trying to find Reddit alternatives, and quickly realized that the only option is a thing that is run by Tankies where the most popular posts only gathered fewer than 100 upvotes each
… anyway the statement did not age well. I’ve been lurking on Lemmy for the past year but haven’t really registered an account so
Not great… I’m not a US citizen yet so voting isn’t possible. Only thing I could do is vote with my feet… so I moved out of Texas for good earlier this year. I think my current location is as safe as it gets in regards to avoiding political violence (since I’m not exactly in a group that the right isn’t threatening) so there’s that
Other than that? Nothing… If the worst happens I’ll just hole-up in the building and ask my boss for permission to work from home