pixelscript

"Stop doing what I told you to do and start doing what I want you to do!" has been uttered in my office a few times.

I'm a software developer. My default explanation to people who don't know what that means is, "I whisper to computers, and sometimes they do what I ask".

Either:

• continuing to languish in obscurity with its rough-around-the-edges UX that fails to draw in anyone except self-sufficient computer savvy types who smugly proclaim they like it that way while impatiently tapping their feet and glancing at their wristwatches waiting for mainstream socials to collapse already, or
• wildly thriving, but dominated by an oligopoly of major breakout platforms that dominate the rest of the ecosystem, subtly altering it over the course of many small, tolerable nudges to the point that it hardly resemble what anyone who is currently here liked about it in the first place.

My money is on the former.

I would say the defining characteristic that sets Breath of the Wild apart from its contemporaries is its "chemistry engine", as they call it. That meticulously programmed system of interactions where absolutely everything in the world affects everything else in ways that are intuitive. Wooden objects burn, lightning strikes metal things, fire will melt ice, electrified objects will conduct through metal and water, etc. That, in tandem with its cel-shaded artstyle, minimalist piano flourish soundtrack, and general lonely, somber vibe in a mechanically lush but socially empty world. That's the identity of BotW.

I haven't played Genshin Impact so I don't know how deep the similarities are. It sure superficially resembles BotW if you squint and look at it from a distance. Big open world, vibrant cel-shaded graphics, live in-overworld combat, you can climb walls and soar with glider physics, they got the high fantasy plus inexplicably advanced magitech thing going on... definitely some marks on the bingo card, but not really things particularly unique to BotW, either. I have no idea how much Genshin Impact actually resembles BotW up close.

Stop threatening. Commit. Take the leap. A lot of us here are already on the other side and we'll help you find your footing.

I thought his name was Alec, not Alex.

Well, you know what they say. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it interested in learning about the water cycle to have a deeper understanding of why the river flows in the first place.

"Anymore"? I've never met a single soul who knows this is even possible. I myself don't even know how to do it if I wanted to.

I do use NoScript, which does this on a site-by-site basis, but even that is considered extremely niche. I've never met another NoScripter in the wild.

Pokémon Sun. Basically Hawaii with better healthcare. I'll probably survive.

I'll be homesick for the extreme four season climate I'm used to before too long, though. I just got back from a trip to Hawaii, and even just a week of it was bordering on too long.

At any rate, happy to answer this question today rather than two weeks earlier. I'd be better off in Alola than trying to survive alone shipwrecked on Nauvis.

Hawaii is exactly the place that made me write this comment.

Kind of a lame example that depending on who you are may make you go, "Uhh... yeah? Duh?" but...

Y'know how Hollywood has been using the same library of stock sounds for like half a century? Wilhelm scream tier stuff? Like, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard one of those stock baby noises, or that ape screeching, you know the ones, I'd have a good chunk of change by now.

And if you ever encounter real world examples of some of these things, they never sound quite like those recordings. This is in large part because Hollywood loves pairing sounds of specific creatures or objects with footage of completely different creatures or objects that in reality sound nothing like that (e.g. no, bald eagles do not make that noise at all). So these sounds become reified in your head as "the sounds fake shit in movies make". The acoustic equivalent of what fruit flavored candies are to actual fruits. Does that make sense?

All this to say, it's really disorienting when you encounter things in the real world that actually make these noises. Particularly if you aren't regularly used to being around them.

For me in particular, it's roosters and horses. My mind is conditioned to assume that the stock noises for these creatures I hear in films and the like are, I dunno, extremely cherry-picked noises from some specific breed or species of the animal that aren't the ones I'd commonly find around me. Not the case! They really do sound like that! To a spookily accurate degree, too. Being around them feels like someone is pranking me with a soundboard, I almost can't believe it's real.

It's a bit depressing that sound design of film has disillusioned me to the point I'm shocked to hear that roosters in real life actually sound like roosters in movies and on TV, but nonetheless here we are.

For me, multimedia is a non-negotiable part of the web experience.

Yes, I get as annoyed as the next guy when I want, say, a simple tutorial written in a couple paragraphs, but the only ones anyone seem to want to make are eight minute long videos filled with fluff. That sucks. But purposefully excluding it from your protocol because it burned you a fee times is a gross overcorrection in my view.

I appreciate the Gemini project, I respect its goals, and I am happy that it meets the needs of several people such as yourself. But for me, and I think for a great majority of people who would be potentially interested in its broader goal of simplifying the web but are dealbroken by lack of multimedia capabilities, Gemini will never be anything more than a toy. A quirky little curiosity that will never expand beyond a tiny clique of people who accept Gemini for what it is and are content to only ever see content from that same small pool of people.