utopologist

+1 for Chants of Senaar. For anyone reading who hasn't heard of it, it's an isometric puzzle game based on linguistics. You control a person trying to climb this megastructure where each level has a different culture and language and so you have to figure out the various writing systems and syntaxes to find your way

I feel like if you're using twitter at this late date, this is sort of what you're signed up for

When my ex and I got married, we picked a new surname that we both liked but didn't have any connection to. We're not together anymore but I have no plans to return to my original name b/c I still like it and basically all of my friends and colleagues know me by the current name

This is goodposting. Yuri Gagarin should be a hero to every human. The fact that the first of us to leave Earth, to go from the soil to the stars, was a worker, the son of a carpenter and a milkmaid from the first workers' state, is fucking amazing, and no matter what happens to us as a species, history cannot erase the fact that for a minute, we too could fly, and it was because for a little while, socialism allowed us to stop being animals and start being human beings

I'm not defending Gagarin being a philanderer but you have to look at him in context: after his flight, he was forbidden from ever flying or going into space again (b/c of his ideological value as the first human in space) and got schlepped all over the world to be photographed and manhandled when he originally signed up to be a pilot and fly. By all accounts, he developed a bit of a drinking problem to cope with the pressure of his new role, and I'm sure that definitely contributed to making bad decisions like this one

The criterion of having to be in the craft when it touches the earth again came exclusively from the West realizing that Soviet craft would most likely come down onto land because of how large and how far from the oceans the USSR was. Since US craft could come down into the ocean and the astronauts could be easily recovered, they basically got the international aeronautics body to add that little detail in there. Absolute bullshit

Hoist with your own petard 😔

I think Elden Ring would be a good place to start since it's the one that lets you customize your difficulty the most. You can use spirit summons (both other players and NPCs) and vary up the order in which you do things, so if you get stuck on something, you can go do something else and then come back with more experience and better equipment

In my experience, it can be any 4 people, doesn't matter who. Awful game. There were a few years (2013-2014 or so) where every time a group of adults in their 20s hung out, they had to play Cards Against Humanity

vague claims about the incompleteness of reality?

If I remember right (and I could be totally talking out of my ass here because I didn't read the book, only some reviews from after it came out), his book Less Than Nothing was supposed to be his magnum opus ultimate last word on Hegel, and in it he says that reality itself isn't "complete" and is full of contradictions and gaps at a fundamental level (quantum physics, indeterminate probabilities, etc).

I'm not arguing anything about Zizek here one way or another, I've just had that bit of trivia stuck in my head for years

When I was a kid I wasn't allowed to do any stuff with Pokémon because they evolved (and presumably weren't intelligently designed)

The photos we have of thylacines fully opening their jaws are super unsettling to me for whatever reason