Beef Flap Meat and a Cucumber Tomato Yogurt Salad.

I'm so spoiled being in Glendale and having several incredible Armenian butchers with trimmed, marinated, ready to grill (air fry in my case) meat that's just incredible.

Sliced lean meatballs over salad. I've been doing this long enough now that I've reacclimated fully to eating 2-3 meals a day without a pasta/rice/potato/bread thing. Honestly feel so much better this way (which I repeatedly forget)

Was it even a high note? I feel like the folks in charge of this entire era of trek so fundamentally misunderstand it, despite the recipe being so incredibly straight forward (stage plays about enlightenment values). Everyone inherited JJ's 'reskinned star wars + amplified character drama' instead.

One can look back at many moments in the past and think of them as points of no return.

The one that stands out in my mind though... is the moment many years ago when grocery stores started selling flavorless mini runt Roma tomatoes as 'Grape' tomatoes, supplanting Cherry tomatoes.

SHARE THIS KNOWLEDGE PLEASE

Home made Poke salad for lunch. Ready for a nap after this.

Breaking the engagement cycle cold turkey end of last year and just focusing on work with my team was revelatory. Roughly 4 months of online time where basically every interaction was encouraging, constructive, and interesting. Made me realize how hollow my feed-time was by comparison.

Time away from the feeds really drove home how much I'd allowed high conflict habits to consume me for years, and how much they'd been self reinforcing anxiety drivers.

To whatever degree I end up engaging online at all going forward, I'm really trying to just lean into patient kindness.

This game is much more forgiving. You can have multiple corpses on the ground at once. Making a new respawn point is trivial. I suggest you play it on easy maybe. Combat on normal difficulty is pretty difficult.

It's Pirate Valheim. If you liked Valheim, you will love this.

Playing Windrose, and I can't get out of my head, while experiencing its high fidelity beaches and oceans, how the historical worlds we simulate are bounded by our perception of our ruined current transposed upon the past.

We make oceans and forests bereft of life, unaware we killed it all.

Man are there like... any store driven fps games anymore? Can't find anything to play.

I mean I've been making my game for 10 years now. This is more recent-ish thing. Maybe past year or two.

I don't know when this happened, but I realized recently that I don't really part of any 'fandom' anymore, be it any active tv, movie, or game series. All the 'ips' that I used to be into, certain comics, warhammer, star trek, etc, I don't really feel a general connection to anymore. Not sure why.

Good news! In between last night and this morning, some seller put up more of it! www.amazon.com/Underwood-Ra...

Yup. Looks like another secondary seller set a batch live. Just bought some. Grab it if you ever want to try it!

The thing I love the most about Arc Raiders is that it presents a post-apocalyptic world that's actually convincing. People working together. A combat context that's as narratively close to 'year people aren't randomly killing each other' that a PvPvE game with guns can have. Just the whole vibe.

For sure hot -_- (im going to miss it)

Just found out that Underwood Ranch's Sriracha has been discontinued (several months ago). Stock's all gone.

Just gutted. This is my last bottle of it.

-_-

No one standing up to Visa/Mastercard has already answered the question on whether games get to be art.

Something I'm really learning from bringing in a professional trailer guy for an upcoming announcement:

However much footage you think you need to shoot to make a great trailer, you probably need 10-20x that much footage.

I'm not a fan of parametric finger curling. Hands are like human faces. Incorrect/unnatural curling that's off by single-digit amounts looks instantly VERY wrong to us.

I wonder how much a framework would really help. The stuff we're currently working on is SO custom, and so tied to the specific way physics interpolation occurs.

I will say just a hand pose authoring suite, with previewing tools, save/load/mirror/reset bones/etc. goes a very long way.

With respect to their engineering prowess, a complex toolchain used by a studio of dozens is not necessarily indicative of something that will bring production costs down for a small team.

I wish I enjoyed playing it as much as I enjoy looking at it.

And like... don't get me wrong, I like GOOD VR hands. The issue is that ACTUALLY GOOD VR hands are much more expensive to execute than people realize, and that cost goes up linearly with the number of objects and interactions in a game.

The situation we currently have is as if every first person or third person indie game needed a fully rigged, physics-aware, character model, and bespoke animations for the character interacting/using every single objects in the game, which isn't even true for many AAA games.

This just cuts out most small to medium projects (unless the main dev is somehow great at all of this).

Non-VR indie games don't have this problem. You can make something SLICK looking with 1-3 total people in many genres of flat game.

The same is rarely true in VR (IF you have hands).

Doing REALLY smooth hands, efficiently produced for a game with lots of interactions, requires:

- A solid animator
- A tools person who knows how to build a great pose management system
- A tech artist coder with enough understanding of phys/animation to make 'pickups' and transitions look good.

Hot Take: I think the switch from 'tomato (object) presence' to 'hand presence' in VR has legitimately impaired the development of/market for VR games, due to the baseline volume of resources required to make that actually look GOOD.

Non-VR peeps see whacked-out hands and think 'cheap/jank'.

But..