No shit, my big long comment up top there? Was very nearly just “Fuck Manticores”. 3 Manticores in a row on the way to the Necronomicon can get stuffed.

My experience so far with Queen’s Domain:

Pre-game - “I loved Lunacid and people say this is like Lunacid. Hell, Steam is giving me a discount since I already own Lunacid.”

Phase 1 - turn music down to .1

Phase 2 - Remember what kind of game this is, set expectations. This is a Kings Field and Kings Field moves sllllloooooow.

Phase 3 - “Oh wait, wow I have a lot of combat options”

Phase 4 - “Air Dash Sword go Brrrr”

Phase 5 - “Holy shit, how do I get all the way over/up/down/across there?”

Phase 6 - “This Mimic is going to haunt my nightmares forever”

Phase 7 - “Is this Boss a Blue Whale on armored chicken legs?”

Phase 8 - after climbing Tower of Knowledge “Wait, the map is HOW BIG?!”

Phase 9 - What do you mean I’m less than 10% done?

Phase 10 - Holy shit is my GOTY going to be a retro throwback to a game I never actually played?

I understand this perspective, I believe. Greed, dehumanization and prioritizing profits over communities are some of the worst elements of the AI situation and hardly unique to it. That suggests AI is just one example of a larger political problem.

But AI is also uniquely bad on its on terms. It is a fundamentally unreliable technology. It is rooted in plagiarism and requires unethical practices to build, to maintain and to use. It is environmentally disastrous. It is mentally damaging, creating cognitive debt in those that use it for many tasks. It is damaging and insulting to artists. It creates a specific, if not yet fully understood, psychosis in certain at risk individuals.

LLMs, and more accurately the corporate drive for its sudden mass adoption, is exemplary of corporate greed and reckless companies trying to stick working class people with the bill for their terrible bet. It is exemplary of the eternal folly of people to want confirmation of their own biases rather than actual info. But its also a technological dead end built from shady and unreliable practices at the expense of our world and the people in it.

And I find 20m easier to say than 65.61ft? Sorry, am I missing a joke? Sometimes it’s hard to Poe’s Law the Americanisms.