Uh…

I’m afraid you’re going to have to explain that meme to me a bit more, before I can have what I’d call a potentially defensible ‘fan canon’ opinion on that.

If its literally just ‘escape the matrix by poisoning yourself to death, via eating dessicant pouches’…

… then no, thats just suicide by way of being an idiot, I would not think that would … mesh with what the matrix world would seem to define as a viable means of transcending ‘reality’.

Unless there is some kind of…extremely strong, or kind of extremely ‘deep’ belief structure that goes along with this, then probably not, no.

… However…

IIRC… if we expand to include MxO’s character archetypes as potentially valid canon…

Well, one of those archetypes more or less is: you are a paranoid schizophrenic.

So… maybe? Kind of? … ???

Welp I didn’t bother to check that, but … yeah.

Very normal, typical active user behavior right there, lol.

… Unless they functionally constitute a massive, fast moving, kind of net, that anything trying to climb to a higher orbit has to pass through, and hope to not collide with, as showcased by this article we are commenting on.

Anything that’s trying to break through VLEO, well, if a collision happens on its way to LEO, or beyond, some of those debris will be headed to LEO or beyond.

Yes, I would say that a kind of… immense spiritual awareness, or contemplative understanding of the interconnected nature of reality (and yourself) constitutes a kind of very strong belief.

Though I don’t think its explicitly stated in the movies that the ‘spoon kid’ … literally pulls himself out of the matrix…

In MxO, which is I guess roughly ‘secondary canon’, one of the kinds of character archetypes you can play as, is basically ‘zen master’, so yeah I would tend to agree that thats probably another reasonably valid ‘canonical’ way by which someone could escape the matrix on their own, transcend ‘reality’.

Thats true, that is also a thing.

But… usually … the style shift… contextually makes sense, to… emphasize something. A mood shift, a perspective shift, a time shift, etc.

Or sometimes you get a sort of… clipshow type format, but its not actually a clipshow, its … the style is bouncing around all over the place, basically as both an artistic tour de force, and as a sort of meta joke, for that whole episode.

I guess I’m just not seeing anything like that here.

At no point did I mention realism.

Yep.

You’re right.

Realistic open worlds are generally boring, to most players.

Thats why almost no popular open world games have realistic distance scaling.

Skyrim, for example, is a teeny tiny place, compared to how large the lore describes it as, everything is scaled in a kind of exaggerated way, same with all GTA games, even RDR and 2, they’re not even close to being realistically scaled, they’re scaled based… basically on an estimate of a player’s average attention span.

You want realistically scaled?

Go play an ARMA game, and just go on a hike, over a close to one to one scale replication of an actual island or penninsula, for a real world entire day.

Yeah that shit’s boring as fuck to most people.

… But I did not at any point say that a good open world is a realistic world, or anything like that, but thats what you appear to have read, out of what I wrote.

Fascinating.

Anyway, what you should do to make an open world that doesnt suck, is make it interesting, in an actual game mechanical sense, not merely ‘pretty’.

Maybe as you travel, enemies of one kind or another have a chance of spawning nearby and cresting over a hill or emerging from a forest.

RDR2 does shit like this very well, oh I’m just gonna relax, trot along, enjoy the scenery… and … my throat has been ripped out by a pack of wolves, goddamnit.

Or you go for the Bethesda approach and have 500, one time discoverable locations with basically some kind of a mini dungeon or staged scenario you can wander into.

Or you can do the Kenshi approach, no real questlines, just simulate the entire world as a kind of sandbox that tens of thousands of other npcs live in, do their own thing in… with actually closer to a realistic sense of distsnce scaling… and just give the player save states and the ability to fastforward or pause time, by default… and maybe they bumble in to some particularly interesting people, or maybe its oops all beakthings, or maybe you’ve now been enslaved by either cannibals or the Holy Nation, while you were afk for your literal 12 mile hike across the map.

Or you could just make some kind of game where fast travelling requires the player to engage in something on the order of a hacking/lockpicking minigame, to… keep the wheels from falling off or something, I dunno.

Maybe vehicles are simulated in some kind of way that… if you’re reckless and innatentive, you’ll break em, and now you’re fucked, in the middle of nowhere. State of Decay 2 comes to mind, sort of.

Point is… there are many ways you can make travelling itself into an engaging, alternate form of the game itself, or a kind of minigame, or a way to experience some kind of story or plot development, or reward the player for picking up on contextual cues during transit, punish them for missing them…

Hell, make a minigame out of trying to pick a song to listen to that your npc companion doesn’t hate, throw in guitar hero style karaoke minigame, why the hell not? maybe it can boost or demerit your relationship with that npc, land you on different paths of a branching storyline.

… Travel doesnt need to be realistic.

It just needs to be more interesting, rewarding, engaging, than skipping it.

You gotta go to the Seventh Day Adventists, imo, to get some reeeeaaallll hardcore Catholic hate, good lord do they hate Catholics.

(This message brought to you by Corn Flakes: Stop masterbating)

Wait, Mormons appropriated the term Gentiles, from… Jews?

That’s incredible.

I’ll be frank: Mormonism is based on the fan fiction of an easily provable, known at the time to be a serial con artist and fraudster.

… Who then went on to lead a cult of what we would now call domestic terrorists.

He specifically tried to destroy any press outlets that were critical of him.

Like, with violent armed force.

Every element of the origin story of Mormonism collapses under any serious scrutiny from anyone who isn’t a Mormon, its laughable.

He also just appropriated a bunch of Masonic poses and hand signs and such, like, verbatim, without modification in a good deal of cases, and invented rituals to go make use of them.

The uh, what is it, the papyrus he picked up off of a travelling antiquities merchant, that he then declared was “The Book of Abraham”?

He was just bullshitting around his total inability to read actual hieroglyphs… the knowledge deriving from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone was quite rare at the time, so he felt comfortable making up a nonsense ‘translation’.

Then, some decades later, actual Egyptologists get around to reading the original text and the “translation” and uh… welp, long story short, its a copy of a fairly common Egyptian funerary rites text, instructions on how to breathe properly when in the underworld. Has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham, bears no relationship to Smith’s fabricated translated story.

Mormonism is literally a fraud.

But!

That hasn’t stopped other cults and religions from… making it big time.

I mean, a decade ago I would have laughed at the idea of this becoming real…

… but a decade ago, I also thought it was a ludicrously absurd notion that an RGB ‘gamer’ catheter would exist.

And they actually do now.

So fuck it, why not?

The US’s only real remaning cultural attribute is ‘utter depravity/shamelessness’, seems like a good fit to me.

I await my Dunkin Stacking test lol, maybe they can do varying flavors and kinds of filling or jam, like a lipstick party that’s edible.

I’m honestly tempted to think this is some kind of edit.

The art style for both characters, not just the woman, completely changes for the last two panels.

Everything is different, more simplistic faces and facial features, more swoopy, less angular, less detail, both characters become basically ovals or rounded rectangles, when they were first basically polygons… eyes for both characters are now totally different…

Honestly its pretty big femcel vibes, in the sense of the ‘woman who cannot attract a mate to save her life’ meaning of femcel.

Yep, and the exact reason the Founders were such sticklers on a seperation between church and state… on a secular society…

…was that the US was more or less initially settled by a bunch of Christian religious extremists of varying flavors, who all couldn’t hack it in Europe, and they knew that if you let the government start explicitly picking favorites with religions?

Well, then US history would look a lot more like (what was to them, fairly recent) European history.

Aka, a whole bunch of mostly Christians killing mostly other different Christians, with an occasional, quite notable pogrom against Jews, or crusade against Muslims.

… As we can currently see… they evidently did not establish this paradigm strongly enough to withstand just a few centuries of persistent and dogged US Christian Extremeism.

I guess at this point I’m just waiting for Utah to claim its own Greater Deseret boundaries and assert its own independence, maybe when the US is embroiled in just another actual, full fledged land war with Mexico.

Give it about a decade, I’d guess.

Mormons not believing in the Trinity is a pretty solid argument that, at the very least, they’re not Christians in the way nearly all other Christians are Christians.

That puts them in the same bucket as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Unitarians, Iglesia ni Cristo, and Christadelphians.

… thats why most Christians don’t think Mormons are really Christians, that they are instead more like heretics.

Not that I personally have a dog in this fight between the finer points of varying forms of mass shared delusions based on a corpus of hundreds of different texts that have been edited and translated and added to and subtracted from, tens or hundreds of thousands of times, over approximately 2500 years…

… but the idea of the Trinity is a pretty big deal, going back through the entire history of Christianity.

Whole lots of nontrinitarians have been called, and killed for being heretics by whole lots of trinitarians, for… what, roughly… 1750 years?

Yeah that’s a pretty solid historical precedent.

Don’t forget how hundreds to thousands of them routinely fail and/or otherwise deorbit themselves, thus necessitating constant replenishment.

Its basically the least sustainable, most insane space paradigm currently actually possible with our tech and resources.

After all, I’m sure we can just undo a Kessler Syndrome cascade effect.

Right?

Sounds good to me, lol!

Economists have used the uh, “BigMac Index” with an increasing level of seriousness, over the last decades… so why not?

gotta somehow also make it involve matrix transforms, maybe use quaternions, and randomly compare a random array of them, until they result they result in a 10 degree rotation in one realspace vector.

Hah, uh, that kind of behavior is actually a gigantic red flag, not cute in any way.

“I’m either extremely insecure, or need you to worship me, or both!”

Fucking run.

Dodge the bullet, literally and figuratively.

And this goes for any persons of any gender or whatever, mixed into this scenario.

This is not cute.

Yep, pretty insane if taken at face value.

My guess would be the gun is meant as a visual metaphor/joke, but uh… yeah, its not actually a wholly implausible literal scenario.

Probably the author/artist has very little real world experience with firearms, would be my guess.

Bingo.

Fast travel remains a staple mechanic because game devs:

1. Often can’t figure out a way to make travel itself into a gameplay mechanic or experience that is varied and interesting.

2. Keep designing checklists of things for the player to do, with games built around them, as opposed to inverse of that… which trains players to just be checklist checker offers.

There’s no point to having an open world if it is not engaging or interesting, so… when your open world lacks depth, you end up in a nonsense situation where you have a poorly designed feature, with essentially a ‘skip’ mechanic for said feature.

… Why bother with the feature, at that point?

Hell, even the Rockstar games would give you interesting dialogue, in transit… not really gameplay per se, but it is generally engaging, can help with action intensity pacing, and of course, give you the story.

There are so many ways you could gameify or at least make travel itself more interesting.

Do that, and fast travel becomes near totally pointless.

…as well as the consistency and volume of their glazing…