aCosmicWave

The kind of game you daydream about while at school or work because you can’t wait to come home and play some more.

Assuming our simulation is not designed to auto-scale (and our Admins don’t know how to download more RAM), what kind of side effects could we see in the world if the underlying system hosting our simulation began running out of resources?

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/16204060

As a new father that only owns one console, the PS Portal has allowed me to squeeze in extra precious gaming time into my day.

I pull out my Portal when my wife is decompressing on our single 4K TV. Or when my son cuddles up next to me as he falls asleep in the evenings.

I love the ergonomics of the device, the haptics, the huge screen, and the seamless integration into the Playstation ecosystem (and all of my games). My PS5 is hardwired into our router so I've had absolutely no issues with remote play inside our apartment. In fact, I've been using this thing daily and having an absolute blast.

Alas, I have made the incredibly difficult decision to return the device. The daily threads questioning the value proposition of this handheld have been weighing on me. The internet insists that the Portal is actually not very good after all and I shouldn't be having any fun with it.

I honestly had no idea and will be shipping it back out to Sony while I'm still within the return window.

I often see the sentiment that YouTube and adblockers will be forever locked in a cat-and-mouse game. However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web.

What is stopping YouTube from replicating Twitch’s advertising strategy of embedding ads directly into their videos?

When thinking about the most important moment(s) of your life, do you still feel the full range of emotion associated with that memory? What if you keep recalling the same memory many times, does the intensity of emotion fade?

On the journey to becoming a productive member of society I had to compartmentalize my inner child.

During my early schoolboy years, he waited patiently for the school day to finish so that he could finally resume his creative and playful pursuits.

As the education became more involved, he had to wait a little longer because of homework.

In university, the complicated assignments, group projects, and late night study sessions meant that he would often not get to let loose until the weekend.

The full-time job, commute, technical projects, work politics, and other adult responsibilities really did the biggest number on him though. Sometimes he would go without playing for weeks, or months at a time.

Today it's as if my adult mask has adhered permanently to my face and I can no longer access him at all.

Is it at all possible that instead of being pushed away, we are instead getting pulled toward something huuuuuge via gravity? As if we are falling into something way greater than ourselves? I thought this was a wild idea but after I Googled it I found out that there is such a thing as a “Great Attractor”. Something 150 million light-years away is literally pulling all nearby galaxies towards it but no one knows exactly what it is.

So how do we know there aren’t any other Great Attractors, Greater Attractors, ad infinitum?

I see the human organism as a layering of different levels of consciousness. Each layer supports mostly automated processes that sustain the layers beneath it.

For example, we have cells that only know what it’s like to be a cell and to perform their cellular processes without any awareness of the more complex layers above them. Organs are much more complex than cells and they perform their duties without any awareness of anything above them either. And the complexity keeps increasing with various systems like endocrine, cardiovascular, etc. Then we have our subconscious and finally our conscious.

At our level, we do not consciously control any of the layers beneath us. Our primary task is to keep our bodies alive.

This got me thinking… isn’t it a little too self aggrandizing to think that we have a near infinite layering of consciousness beneath us and then it just stops at our level of awareness? What if there is some other conscious process that exists above us within our own bodies?

When people take psychedelic drugs they often describe achieving a higher level of awareness akin to ecstasy. Well what if this layer is always there actively ”living” within us but we are just the chumps that go to work, do our taxes, and exercise, while it doles out just enough feel good chemicals to keep us going (sometimes not even that)?

Socrates bemoaned those young'ns who had the audacity to read their Homer, instead of memorizing it.

About 3 years ago I dreamt that I was in a downtown Chicago office interviewing for a fancy new job. For whatever reason my mom came along for the interview and was patiently waiting for me in the office lobby. About half way through the interview it began to dawn on me that my mom passed away over a decade ago. This realization effectively transformed my dream into a lucid one. I quickly ditched the interview, grabbed my mom, and we spent the rest of the day enjoying downtown Chicago. I took her out for tea, caught her up on my life, and we made the absolute most of the little time we had together.

The memories from this dream are as vivid as the memories from my real life and I treasure them dearly.