Went looking for that article out of curiosity. For what it's worth, I think the original commenter expressed a fair opinion politely, but the "author has issues" commenter was unnecessarily unpleasant.
Neither of those should prevent you from writing how you want!
If you've got the ability to play the original, it still held up fantastically when I last played it properly (2-odd years ago).
I tried emulating it a few years before that when I didn't have any workable screen for my PS2 and that was not so good. A game that pushed the original hardware to its limit also pushed the emulator past its limit. Might be better with more powerful hardware than mine?
However, I've heard the remake is perfectly good, and surely easier to play with modern PC hardware!
I wrote a response to this, but then I realised I was responding to the claim that modern media was more derivative, rather than what you actually said, which was that modern media is more _meta_.
Can you go into that a little more? Do you have specific examples that make you sad?
The first example that comes to my mind is the show Community, which I really enjoy, and which doesn't make me sad at all.
P.S. an article I linked to in my original response was https://www.filfre.net/2025/01/the-crpg-renaissance-part-1-f... which I mentioned as it talks about a historical standout in the genre but puts it in the context of the copycats and the schlock. It's now irrelevant to my comment, but I'd like to link to it anyway.
Not OP, but there is a wide chasm between what Community does and what OP was referring to.
Community's thing is that it is a meta show. It uses the meta it references to get a point across, make a joke, or provide a spectacle (a good example of spectacle are the Paintball episodes)
What OP referred to, and what I've noticed, was that media nowadays is just a mashup of what came before with little to say about it. Or to put it in other words: not transformative. The creator likes something, and they put it in their work because it's cool. There's nothing wrong with doing just that, but when you start seeing the same thing over and over again in different works, it gets tiresome.
We're so obsessed with filling every waking moment with something that we don't allow ourselves to have the "a-ha!" moment any more, so we default to "what if X and Y?" where X and Y are thoughts on the surface of our mind rather than two unrelated things that somehow click when the default mode network activates. For example: what do archways in a Shinto shrine have to do with a fox piloting a starship around? Absolutely nothing, and yet for Miyamoto that thought made sense.
Ah, thank you very much for this reply, because I haven't watched Community myself so I didn't realise the confusion between a show that's intentionally about a meta situation vs. ... well what you've written explains my meaning exactly.
You should watch some episodes, even if you don't watch all of it. There's a reason why it influenced popular culture (even if no one remembers it doing so).
I don't know if I have a good argument for it myself. I have seen a lot of people saying specifically that they based their {thing} on {prior thing} rather than something from life, but I haven't exactly kept a list. Beyond that it's mostly a feeling.
The very brief (and bastardised) summary is that we're cutting ourselves from what is real, so we base our art on the fake reality that we're experiencing.
I'll never forget when one of my teachers asked: "who has seen a sheep?" The entire class put up their hand. The next question was "who has seen a live sheep, in front of them?" more than half the class put their hand down. We all know what a sheep looks like, but not because we've been near one.
Yes indeed, I'm aware of it, though I admit I never finished the whole thing. It did make me notice this situation even more acutely.
It's funny that the part everyone quotes from the book (namely the Borges fable and the 'desert of the real itself') is in the introduction. Makes me wonder how many others didn't actually get through it. :)
I can only think of memory usage during compilation. That’s why I had to precompile binaries, which means cross-compile. Then if you add cross-OS, bundling a properly linked or statically linked binary is not that easy.
> that foo which accepts a bar, frobnicates its internal state, and emits a mutated baz
Tangential, but that reminds of the Haskell "hoogle" tool which allows searching for functions _by type_ across a large database of libraries, even by abstract types. So you might wonder "hmm what's that function that has a type structure like `t a -> (a -> t b) -> t b`?" and it'll happily tell you that it's monad `bind`
Boy that unc/uncer looks tantalisingly close to modern German uns/unser. Wiktionary seems to have it descending from a different PIE root, n̥s vs n̥h -- I'm not at all familiar with PIE though.
n̥ is just the "not" prefix. The "ero" is the real root. The prefix applies to the root first, and then the other pieces have their meanings, usually. (Its a reconstructed language. There are both exceptions and things we don't know.)
"n̥-s-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-plural "mine" >.
So, plural-(invert mine). Or roughly close to "we".
"n̥-h-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-inclusive-plural "mine" >.
So, plural-(group (invert mine)). Or roughly close to "us".
But both are pretty close to the same meaning. High German maintained a lot of PIE, and is very close in a lot of ways. Though... Welsh is closer.
Curiously, Old English unc is actually not related to German uns, at least, not after the Germanic language family had already formed. Old English at some point underwent a sound change[1] where the -n- sound disappeared before fricatives (sounds like s, f, v, z, sh, etc...). So "us" comes from an older common form "uns", which German inherited basically unchanged. This sound change also explains other correspondences between English and German where the n is missing, like mouth-Mund, tooth-Zahn, other-ander, goose-Gans or five-fünf.
As a born German, now more native English speaker (left at 8), I agree. But, unless I'm very wrong, uns/unser in modern German is not restricted to 2 people either - it can mean 2 or more, as in "unsere Gemeinde" (our church, referring to something shared by hundreds of people)?
That was my first thought too! So many things in old-english are very very close to modern German, so it's sometimes surprising to see these false-friends.
Based on the page you linked, they pretty clearly are false friends: Old English unc is unrelated to modern German uns, it is related instead to Old Germanic unk (while modern German uns is just Old Germanic uns).
I think this is straining the meaning of false friends. They are derived from closely related forms and differ only slightly in meaning: "to us two" versus "to us all". I guess if you see that as a significant difference, but a more typical example would be English parents vuersus Italian parenti meaning kin.
I would argue that parents / parenti are also closely related meanings and closely related forms (and Italian parenti ultimately derives from the exact same root as English parents, the Latin parens meaning either parents or more generally ancestors). In contrast, uns and unc derive from separate PIE roots, while the semantic distinction was important in both PIE and Old Germanic.
A friend suggested a bottom-hinged door like that on a garbage chute, though well sealed, and as wide as the fridge, so the sides of the door don't get in the way of storing long objects in the fridge.
They seem to have mixed up horizontal and vertical, and if they did, then my reading is that they're saying the cost of the extra floor space (and the loss of the "shelf" space on top of the fridge) when using a chest fridge makes the economics unfavourable for people in dense urban areas, even with the energy savings.
At least, I'm hoping that's what they meant. If they really meant horizontal and vertical in the way they used it then I've got no idea either.
I didn't get it until reading your comment, but I think perhaps they meant 'vertical' as in 'it opens vertically' (chest freezer)—i.e. they didn't mix them up exactly, just used them differently than we expected.
Yeah, I understand your first sentence, but the last part of their comment was
"Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge."
Don't they mean a horizontal fridge is a chest fridge? Which would make it sound like they want their whole comment to be in support of a chest fridge? Which is why none of it makes any sense to me.
That's what makes me think they've simply mixed up horizontal and vertical, because you can't (conveniently) store things on top of a chest fridge, but you can store things on top of a vertical fridge. Basically I think they've got a coherent point if you swap vertical and horizontal throughout their whole comment.
Gorgeous photos. One point of feedback: I went to your shop to view prints, and while it was nice to see them "in situ", I couldn't see the actual images because of how they small they were in frame!
reply