Carnelian

Bro is taking a minute to reflect on how it’s still worth it to be a good person even when things seem to keep getting worse all the time

I was starting to go that way in my late twenties. Started training in the gym. Thirties now, looking and feeling better than at any other point in my life. I beat my high school time for the 1 mile run by 30s recently, I couldn’t believe it.

I’ve seen people much older than you or I totally turn their lives around. I think for most people, it’s not getting older that is the problem, but rather, being sedentary over the long run is just way more destructive than we realize. Even just daily long walks makes a night and day difference

Come to think of it, I wouldn’t really recommend any books on atheism. Atheism is not really its own thing, it’s just the result of not being persuaded by the claims of theism.

For me personally, I actually became an atheist via reading various religious texts, as well as various acclaimed spiritual novels. So sort of the opposite of what you’re asking for haha.

Recommendations based on science and humanism are okay, since that gives you a place to start looking through the secular stance on the mysteries religions claim to have all the answers for. But that also isn’t quite what you’re asking for. Many scientists and philosophers are religious themselves, after all.

Yet a third thing you aren’t asking for: I would check out Matt Dillahunty. He used to do a call-in show in Austin. Mostly just regular religious people calling in, going through their thought process on why they believed, then getting an atheist’s perspective in response. Looks like he’s still very active on youtube these days

I haven’t listened in years, and if I recall some of the most viewed clips were basically just angry arguments lol. But sitting and listening through full episodes is about as down-to-earth of atheist content as I can think of. Just addressing religious claims one at a time

Same. Was smoking 2 packs per day for a while. Completely switched to vaping. Lowered the nicotine content of the juice a couple times and eventually was able to quit entirely. Been almost 6 years now.

I’m not sure what the scene is like now that all the strong cartridges and disposable devices are more popular. Back when I was doing it most people used box mods and it was easy to find juice in any flavor and strength you wanted. I remember things got pretty wild right around when I quit actually, with many states doing temporary bans and eventually banning flavors and stuff

Aside from the dozens of direct shameless hollow knight clones, more “legitimate” artistic efforts are unmistakably if not explicitly influenced by it in a massive way. I think Nine Sols is probably the apotheosis of this. Will of the Wisps was famously accused of completely copying HK, much to the ire of the devs lol.

It’s also quite complicated because HK and the souls genre share so much DNA. And Dark Souls itself owes much of what makes it great to metroidvanias. So with these three things in mind (soulslikes, metroidvanias, and HK itself) which are all so interconnected, my argument is basically contingent upon whether or not HK is a particularly strong inflection point in gaming as a whole.

I think it clearly is, and I think it’s because it effectively culminated everything about the genre that we’ve come to love while also contributing new things to it. It was made with absolute reverence for the style, with the devs saying more than anything they wanted to create a world where players could get truly and completely lost. The fact that the art and music are impeccable seals the deal for most people

I would argue Animal Well is another such inflection point in gaming, and also probably the best example of a modern metroidvania that strongly diverges from HK

Nah it’s totally different this time around.

For starters Leth acknowledged Nintendo’s tweet about it by retweeting it, and setting his profile background to the new key art (which was provided by TC themselves)

TC also provided four new screenshots of the game to Nintendo as part of a press kit.

The xbox situation was literally never acknowledged by them at all, except for when Leth ultimately posted that it wasn’t happening lol. Apparently just based on estimates that TC had communicated with them privately, and only ever “confirmed” by a single social media person at Microsoft

This isn’t some random Nintendo direct, but rather THE big event for their big console. And also officially and immediately supported by TC this time around. This is 100% an intentional press rollout

On the flipside, I’m a huge metroidvania fan and Hollow Knight is clearly one of the best to ever do it in my opinion. It also totally transformed the landscape of metroidvanias, with subsequent games imitating it left and right.

The fact that silksong has remained more or less the #1 wishlisted game on steam since it was announced speaks to the broader cultural impact of the game. Hollow knight really elevated metroidvanias as a genre

Xbox did that I think in like 2022-2023

100% real btw, they showed new footage and confirmed 2025

No joke! Lots of details in the article, it’s worth a look. The cameras were also rigged via tripwire to hopefully only activate when Nessie physically disturbed them!

What makes you think there are more? The cameras were only ever rigged to take four photographs max

The photos are in the article!