Returning
I'm coming back today from Austin (I went to visit Mom 96.0 and my sister). It was in the 90s every day, which felt like heaven.
I'm assuming the world burned down while I was gone. I'll find out soon enough.
Back to normal next week. Friday Links is queued up to post soon and have a great weekend.
Crimson Desert: Bonkers
I've been following Crimson Desert closely.
The control scheme is almost universally regarded as terrible. There are loads of bugs. Parts of the enormous world are almost empty. Reviews were very mid.
You can pet cats. You can fish. You can use the sun's reflection off your sword to grill food. You can climb mountains. You can ride dragons and use them in combat. There is seemingly an endless number of NPC's to interact with. Players have reported spending 10-20 hours in just the first town and still not doing everything.
Random quotes from a ResetEra thread on the game:
I sold my mining knuckledrill.
Found a forest area where children tranquilize you if they spot you?
Jinro the dog is right at the north entrance into Hernand.
Use a grindstone and anvil before boss fights.
You can buy a Hernandian Banquet Cloak from the tailor merchant in the first town.
Picked up a beehive club from somewhere, when you hit something with it bees come out and attack you.
Its totally bizarre, the arm wrestling for example
You can carry animals on the horse? I've been running them on foot.
It also looks spectacular or awful, depending on your platform and settings.
It's Breath of the Wild and Wither 3 and Dragon's Dogma. On meth.
I still want to play it.
[POLITICS] A Bold New Tactic in War
Has there ever been a war where the attacking country told the defending country to "show restraint?" What's the thought process behind that, exactly?
It sounds like something from a Marx Brothers movie, which makes sense, since the theme of this Administration from day one has been, "Who do you believe? Me or your own eyes?"
[also, I wrote this late last week, so I had no knowledge of what happened the last four days when I made this post.]
Pucks
Eli 24.7 told me that someone in the student hockey organization (a friend of his) was able to get the puck from the Varsity Match.
I didn't even think that was a possibility, since Cambridge won. I assumed they'd take the puck. He has it now, though.
He told me the pucks he's gotten since he started playing for Oxford:
--Finals puck from a tournament his team won in Prague where he was MVP
--Puck from the game where he had his 1,000th Oxford save
--Puck from the game where he became the all-time Oxford saves leader
--Puck from last year's Varsity Match (a 3-2 win where he had 65 saves)
--Puck from last weekend's 101-save game
I told him they'll look great in a trophy case someday, and even though it normally wouldn't be his style, he said he was thinking the same thing.
Friday Links!
Leading off this week, a terrifying but heartwarming story:
‘My dear son’: the Ukrainian soldier who came back from the dead.
The NCAA Tournament
I've been avidly watching this tournament since I was six years old.
Since Eli 24.7 went to college six years ago, though, my enthusiasm has slowly cooled. I don't know why.
I haven't watched a college basketball game all the way through all season, and now the tournament's started and I just don't care.
It feels strange to be disinterested in something you've cared about your entire life.
It's not NIL. I'm glad the players are finally getting paid, and they deserve everything they can get. In theory, there should be far more upsets this year, too, because NIL has distributed talent more evenly than ever.
Still, though, I've lost that loving feeling, as they say.
DLSS 5: She's a Witch, Burn Her!
It's all gotten a bit strange.
Nvidia announced DLSS 5, an AI solution for image upscaling and reconstruction.
The first version of DLSS was launched in 2018. There was no outcry. Multiple versions have been launched since then. There was no outcry.
Yesterday, they announced version 5, and suddenly it was the apocalypse.
AI SLOP! ARTIST INTENT!
What I saw was a way to upscale images from old games (that were created in lower resolutions with less detail), sometimes dramatically approving their quality.
Not all of the image comparisons seemed better. I thought the processing made some worse. On the whole, though, I thought it was a substantial leap forward.
What many other people saw, though, was heresy. As soon as the letters "A" and "I" are capitalized and put against each other, many people have become absolutely hysterical.
I get having objections to AI. We've discussed it here, and some of you had well-reasoned objections. I appreciated it. It's a complicated topic, and anyone who pretends it isn't is kidding themselves.
What's happening now, unfortunately, isn't discussion. A torch-wielding mob comes out every time AI is mentioned. It's reminding me more and more of Gamergate, which turned out to be well-orchestrated.
Digital Foundry, which published the video that ignited the firestorm, said they received death threats. Death threats over a rendering technology? Seriously?
Something seems off, and I could be totally wrong. Maybe that many people go to sleep at night despising AI. The way it's happening, though, seems a bit strange and predictable.
In the meantime, DLSS 5, when it's available, will only be used in games that choose to support it.
The Last Stand
The 108th edition of The Varsity Match between Oxford and Cambridge took place last Saturday.
It was Eli 24.7s last competitive hockey game.
Their best forward had a concussion. The guy who replaced him had a 102 fever and didn't play. The team was incredibly game but as thin as they'd ever been in Eli's four seasons. Plus, the game was at Cambridge.
"It's going to be the highest shot game of my career," he said. "In the eighties, probably. And we don't have much of a chance. But...there's always a chance. Maybe we sneak one in early and then hang on for dear life."
The live feed for the game didn't work, of course, because it almost never does, so I sat through the late afternoon and early evening wondering what had happened. I just hoped he played hard and was able to put one game in the context of a long, wonderful career in hockey.
Fifteen years, actually.
I messaged him to say the feed didn't work and what the hell had happened, and I finally got this response:
We lost 5-1. I wish you could have seen it. Gave it all I had.
Later, when he called me, he told me what happened when he skated off. He was exhausted and broken up about the game because it's the only game of the year that really matters. He was barely moving on his way off the ice and one of the announcers (from Cambridge) leaned out of the box and said, "Eli, 106 shots."
Eli said he just looked up and said, "What the f---?"
"106 shots. 101 saves."
106 shots. Oxford had 17.
Later, he sent me the video link (which worked) so I could watch the game. In the third period, after he'd faced over 85 shots, the score was 3-0 and they still had a chance. They just couldn't score, though, not until the it was 5-0 and they snuck one in.
It was the best game I've ever seen him play. 106 shots and he gave up less than 5 rebounds. He was dialed in the whole time. It sounds counter-intuitive to say he dominated because they lost, but it was as dominant as he's ever been.
On Sunday, he called again.
"Dad, do you know what I was thinking about before the game? That tournament in Dallas where there were baseball fields next to the rink, and we took those long walks and sat in the stands and talked. Do you remember which tournament that was?"
I did. I remember those conversations, too. It was a warm, sunny day, and the weather was perfect and we talked forever.
"Oh, and did I tell you that the last song I listen to, right before I skate out for warm-ups, is the one you had the DJ play for me when I walked into the lobby after winning the leveling tournament? 'She's a Bad Mama Jama.'" He started laughing.
I remember that, and the look on his face when he realized it was playing for him. It was the best weekend of hockey in his life, up to that point. He's been fortunate to have many even better moments since then.
"I think you may be the first goalie in history to have 100 saves in a regulation game," I said.
"No way." He laughed.
"The few times it's happened, it's always been six overtimes or something. I'll do some research."
"I hated losing--man, I hate losing that game--but having over a hundred saves in your last game is a nice way to go out," he said.
I researched, and as far as I can tell, it's only happened once, and had never happened before six weeks ago. A New Jersey high school goalie had 104 saves in regulation, and there were stories all over about it.
That won't happen with this game because it's England and hockey isn't as much of a thing over there. But it still happened. Eli managed, in his last game, to transcend Oxford hockey history and become part of hockey history.
Now he's done.
Here's the box score: Varsity Match box score.
New Desk
I spent this afternoon putting together a standing desk (zen koan: you need a standing desk to help your back, but it hurts your back to do all the bending and lifting necessary to put it together), so my writing window blew past, but I have a special post tomorrow: Eli 24.7s last competitive hockey game.
You will not be surprised to learn that it was really something. I still can't believe it, two days later, and I saw it.
Meta and the Failure of Opportunity
Meta has always had an odd strategy with the Quest line of virtual headsets.
Mostly, it seemed like they just wanted to use it as a platform for their shitty "world" Meta Horizons, which has been around for 4+ years and failed hard in every one of them. Their idea was to use the Quest headsets as a Trojan horse to getting people addicted to the metaverse (and spend $$$).
I say addicted because any Meta product (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) doesn't want users. It wants addicts, and that's made clear through private company communications exposed in various lawsuits.
Now I go to the Quest home screen (when I boot it up to play Walkabout Golf) and see genre-defining apps like "Slap Your Friends." It's an example of how most of the new apps are just garbage as the platform withers and dies. There were some truly interesting gaming apps at first, but now they've been cast aside to promote shovelware instead.
They were so close to having something substantial! What a waste.
MRI
Eli 24.7 finally had his MRI read last night.
No stress fracture of his knee, but his IT band looked a bit gnarly, and the doctor also said he has patellar tendinopathy.
Both were a result of the training he needed to do for the ultra and the amount of steep downhill running he did in the race itself.
The good news is both of those issues are eminently fixable, and he'll do the necessary exercises with his usual level of zeal.
The other bit of good news is that playing hockey won't affect either injury at all. He only has one more game to play this season--the Rivalry game--and then he's unofficially retired from competitive hockey.
In four years of playing for Oxford, he never lost a home game.
