Anonymous asked:
how do you choose who to donate to? it always feels like such an awful choice, everyone needs it so badly but i can only give to a few people at a time with what i have. how does anyone choose who to help, or how much to give each person?
feluka answered:
gazafunds.com loads a randomized fundraiser for people with this anxiety
you could also buy esims for Gazans or donate to Gaza Municipality Project
i get to see my wife tomorrow yay yayyay
i truly do want to like rain world, there are multiple ways in which it seems like it should be catnip to me, but i'm on my third attempt to get into it now and so far the defining emotion of my experience has been "aggravation"
Turning this into a reblog cause it got too long:
I don't think I have any one source to point at for "mindset to make the game enjoyable," I think I mostly kinda synthesized information from various reddit threads when I googled around to figure this out for myself. But here's the gist of what helped me:
First off: play as the Survivor, not Monk or Hunter
Death is not a big deal. Don't worry about it, don't worry about The Number Going Down-- that's only used for one specific type of thing. If you learned more about how the world works, or explored more of the map, consider that life well spent.
In keeping with this-- it's an ecosystem simulation, a living, constantly-moving world, not a hand-crafted series of encounters, so sometimes a situation that feels unfair really actually just was. Sometimes you just get unlucky some bullshit happens and you just gotta shrug and go "welp, nothing I could do about that one, let's go somewhere else." I think thinking about it almost more like a roguelike helped me a lot. Lives are cheap, time to go on to another run using what I learned from that one.
I highly highly recommend enabling the Remix options if you haven't (it's in the main menu in the title screen). This was huge for me. There's a lot of stuff that tweaks the difficulty in various ways, and you can turn on further assistance (like you can make it so death making number go down really straight up doesn't matter!)
Additionally, if you're playing on PC, there's a mod called Simplified Moveset that makes the movement feel so much better. In the vanilla game there's all kinds of fancy footwork you can pull off if you're really good-- I am not really good and don't expect to be, so instead I use this mod, which makes it easy to pull off those moves, and it feels great and I love it.
If you want guidance on where to go, follow where the little yellow guy is trying to lead you. Like that general direction.
Scavengers are the little bipedal guys you'll encounter sometimes. They respond to body language. If you're armed and rush at them, or jump around a lot, they'll probably get scared and attack you. If you crouch and act unthreatening, they'll usually leave you alone (they do have individual personalities though so this isn't a 100% guarantee). They like pearls, you can give them pearls to make them like you more, and to exchange for goods and services sometimes (you can give them other stuff too but pearls are the big one)
Some lizards will fight each other, distracting them from trying to kill you. Lizards can also be bribed or distracted with food they like to eat.
Just in general I encourage looking stuff up on the wiki when you are confused or stuck, it's been very helpful for me.
hmm. this is all good advice, but the thing is that i’ve already been following most of it? i’m playing as the survivor, i’m not too fussed about karma, i’ve been playing flexibly around the whims of the ecosystem sim aspect, etc. if i push back the boundaries of my map a bit further before dying i consider that a w, which seems to be a helpful mindset.
as for using mods to simplify the movement, i quite like the fiddliness/emergent nature of a lot of the movement tech in this game. in general, i don’t care to use mods on my first playthrough of a game - broadly speaking, i feel that if i have to mod a game to enjoy it on my first time through, my time would be better spent with a game that i like enough for modding to be unnecessary. i will have a look through the remix options, though, that does sound interesting.
i’ve been fairly avoidant of using the wiki, if only because this feels like the kind of game where problem-solving things yourself is quite rewarding, and i think, on balance, that’s probably worked out positively for my experience thus far. correctly inferring that the ‘scavenger toll’ room required me to offer the pearl i found down in the drainage system made me feel nice and clever, for instance.
so, yeah, i’ve adopted much of your recommended approach already and i’m still not finding the game especially rewarding to play. i find the combination of “imsim-like open-ended design that communicates primarily nonverbally and encourages experimental problem-solving” + “methodically paced exploratory platformer with no fast travel” + “all enemies and hazards kill in one hit” to be sort of… i really like all of those elements, individually, but i feel that together they often end up working contrary to one another in some frustrating and counterproductive ways. i’ve also run into some very aggravating jank here and there, deaths that were neither the result of my own foolishness nor the game’s sim-based challenges but just, basic things like the swimming controls not working great at times. again, something that isn’t tremendously painful on its own but that blends very poorly with the methodical pace of traversal and the one-hit-kill health system.
all that said, i do think that it’s a very interesting game, and i have a lot of respect for it artistically and mechanically in spite of my criticisms. hopefully i’ll have the patience to finish it, but i’m in the farm arrays and having a fucking awful time getting the deer-riding mechanic to work, so, we will see.
An update on the campaign for @family-aya
Mo Ayesh (@/el-shab-hussein’s vetting contact on the ground) is currently sick and can’t do the extra vetting process we’d like to get in order to increase Aya’s reach and trust, so until he recovers, I’ve put her in touch with Bees and Watermelons collective on Instagram in hopes they can go through their process with her and add her to their supported campaigns.
In the meantime, my friends at Gaza Thrift Collective who initially asked me for help getting her fundraiser some traction and checked her credentials sent Aya $300 so she can buy some food. But $300 doesn't go a long way in Gaza, where supply is extremely low and demand is extremely high, and Gaza Thrift supports multiple families with their pop-up events in DC and NYC, so even their funds are limited.
Thus, donations are really important for the survival of Aya and her children. To my knowledge, the Rafah border is still closed, so it wouldn't be possible to pay Hala agency for evacuation -- yet. I hope that in the future, when the border is open again (it opens and closes often), we can help Aya's family evacuate, too.
UPDATE: Aya's campaign has been vetted by @gazavetters. It is number 100 on this spreadsheet. Please continue to spread and contribute!!
Stop "adding that to your lexicon" when I say something funny online and start absorbing my other traits. Sweet potatoes are your favorite food now. You have asthma. The line between you and I is beginning to blur.
i truly do want to like rain world, there are multiple ways in which it seems like it should be catnip to me, but i'm on my third attempt to get into it now and so far the defining emotion of my experience has been "aggravation"
now this may seem like kind of a funny thing for someone who really likes fear & hunger, pathologic, etc. to cite as a reason why she isn’t fond of a particular game, to which i would say: it is kind of funny, yeah. beat me. take my blood.
i truly do want to like rain world, there are multiple ways in which it seems like it should be catnip to me, but i’m on my third attempt to get into it now and so far the defining emotion of my experience has been “aggravation”
What we know:
On September 4th 2024, US federal prosecutors file an indictment against two employees of Russia Today, describing in detail how a number of right-wing media influences, including members of a company that appears to be Tenet Media, were being paid by agents of the Russian government in a $10 million propaganda program to further Russian approval among the USA's conservative population and spread Russia-approved talking points, since 2023
On September 23rd, the Commander Rules Committee, a third party unaffiliated with Wizards of the Coast who set the rules of the most popular casual format of Magic the Gathering, announce a ban on four cards, including three cards with very high secondary market value. Being as these cards are no longer legal in Commander, and their secondary market price is based on their status as staple cards in high powered Commander decks, the secondary market value of these cards begins to plummet as owners try to sell them off and recoup losses. Tim Pool, an employee of Tenet Media and know MtG player, posts the following on Twitter:
Hypothesis:
Some unknown amount of money spent by the Russian government to spread Kremlin-friendly propaganda in the United States was annihilated by the Commander Rules Committee.
