I feel like each successive adaptation of The Addams Family is edging closer and closer to making jokes about how Gomez hates his wife.
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tannertan36
we're not kids anymore.

Product Placement
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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@alchemicaldesignquery
I feel like each successive adaptation of The Addams Family is edging closer and closer to making jokes about how Gomez hates his wife.
It's a shame Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is one of those parodies whose author clearly feels the source material is beneath them and thus doesn't put much thought into how they're sending it up because a Regency zombie apocalypse that properly Examines the Implications sounds like a really fun time.
Like, my guy, so much of contemporary zombie media is subtextually really about class that if you're sticking zombies in your Regency romance and completely failing to draw a line between the class-driven subtext the former and the class-driven text of the latter, you are a hack.
Thinking about the "Plague Nobles" who held parties in their elaborate mansions while the peasantry died by the thousands to a rampant disease outside-
-and a group of peasantry who have the right genetics to be immune, stumble on one of the estates, open the doors and discover an impeccably dressed horde, repetitiously bowing and clinking broken glasses at one another in some bodily reflex of their former life.
Just...stumbling through stilted dance steps or trying to kiss one anothers knuckles only to violently rip away from the gesture.
The courtyard has a duel with both swordsmen stabbing at empty air and grunting what might have once been expertly crafted insults.
When the horde eventually notices and gives chase it's because the upstairs filled with masquerade orgy-goers, screams at the windows and comes rushing down the stairs in a head over heels heap, pouring the entire party out into the world they were desperately trying to avoid.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Edited down a long tweet. (x)
Here is a link to the paper: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xlm-a0036577.pdf
The people who insist AI is smarter than a human are doing their fucking damnedest to manifest that
The old-school race science baked into Dungeons & Dragons' implicit worldbuilding is definitely worth examining, but I feel like there's a non-trivial chunk of the indie RPG scene where the main function of that examination is to act as a sort of sin-eater that absolves their own stuff of any need for introspection. "Why does the textual register of your $5 pamphlet game about stupid goblins committing violent crimes involve notably more AAVE than your other publications' authorial vernacular does?" is also a question worth asking.
House made of straw: šŗ š
House made of giant straw bricks: šŗ š
When I was young, I went to a strawbale home workshop to work on a house and learn about the process.
When they say these things do not let oxygen or water in, they aren't kidding. The person running the workshop, told us a story about a wall that got damaged on a previous project and had to be repaired.
When they pulled back the clay exterior and the damaged section of wall, it revealed a mouse that had accidentally gotten trapped inside and asphyxiated. The body was, apparently, desiccated to a husk.
Wild stuff.
Overwatch: Sierra
Sooooo...
I see we're going bland/generic as a baseline now.
There's points around each component of Sierra's design that just sort of...gravitate toward an underwhelming presentation; something that has become the norm with hero design in Overwatch.
General tactical operative with a single distinct component surrounding vague-futuristic military hardware (Soldier 76, Emre, Sojourn, Freya, and now Sierra)
Generic (pre-existing, even) appearance that easily translates into stronger (for pay) cosmetics
Approachable mechanics with heavy emphasis on mobility
There's nothing to suggest this is bad for the playerbase. The approachable qualities and "sameness" (for lack of a better term), allows for a much wider net to be cast in the player base, something Overwatch wants/needs-
-but part of the game's appeal was also the willingness to take chances and deliver interesting concepts.
Large part of this is reflected by the goals of the company now, which are fairly transparent toward Microsoft's goals I.E - profitability. This means that the standards of the game want to exist in a generalized state so that the monetized content can pop that much harder and that much more vividly, luring people to spend.
I couldn't guess at how important these motivations are to the company - might be relatively isolated, might well be the entire package now, but it's there - but the impact on the Design is moving very noticeably, and directly toward systems, heroes, events, and...well, just content overall, being watered down enough that everything can be-
-the word I want to use is smeared...it can all be smeared across the page.
I've been playing a decent amount this first season, returning after about 2 years of not playing, but I'm finding myself not looking to play more than a handful of characters (Winston, Mei, Ana, with decreasing interest in switching), and almost no interest in trying out the latest batch of heroes.
Which isn't new; Junkerqueen's the only one I really got into after initial design explorations, but even now I've moved away from playing her and I've found it's because of this smeared effect. Gameplay feels and runs, not like distinct heroes, but variations of the same archetypes that are growing less and less distinct to tell the difference.
I don't imagine Sierra's going to change much about the game. I do know that getting blown up by a double Emre + Sierra grenade is going to be hilariously unfun for Tank mains who've still got to wait until the end of the year for a new hero, while the other roles get 4 and 5 total in that time-
-but yeah. My early impressions are steadily solidifying into a frank sort of meh that is growing more and more difficult to shake.
Overwatch: Jetpack Cat
Sigh
Ok
It's time
If anyone had asked whether something like this would have made it into the brightly coloured, quasi-cartoonish style that Blizzard is known for, back when it was first talked about, I might well have chuckled and given it's implementation a whimsical ponder-
-and whatever I might have come up with back then, would not have been even close to what was unleashed on the playerbase, this first of seasons for a brand new Overwatch.
Let's make one thing clear:
Whether you love the cat, loathe the cat, throw it at the deep end of the ban pool, or fly into inaccessible spots with the full intention of voice-lining the enemy team into a tilt so deep, they spend ultimates trying to remove you from it, this is one thing clear that I think everyone can agree on-
The Cat is a menace
Freedom of movement + a smaller hitbox that puts her on par with Mercy during Valkyrie, perhaps even better as far as survivability.
An AoE boop with significant healing and some damage
A primary fire with targeted mechanics for healing and damage.
A speed boost on a resource.
Permanent access to the skybox, horizon out of bounds, and underbox of any map with these available.
Significant resistance to most soft CC effects due to the freedom of movement/speed boost.
And a giant AoE hard CC knockdown ultimate that also happens to kidnap an enemy, locking them out of movement/mobility over a significant period of time.
The Lifeline tether is...gimmicky, serviceable for taxiing and ult combos, but feels mostly like a bonus that can be (and is) ignored...just because everything else about her is so demanding of enemy attention, while crucially being independent of allied attention, that it makes Lifeline very easy to dimiss.
Separately, many of these mechanics and applications are pretty strong, but combined together, the sheer volume of value that is extractable at the lowest end cannot be understated.
Just existing in the sky above the enemy and shooting down into head hitboxes, while demanding they look up and away from the rest of the battlefield provides a massive volume of resource protection and management to the rest of her team...
...and you can do this infinitely, while constantly having an escape tool that very few other heroes can punish.
Her healing output is fairly significant on top of it all; hilariously, the only reason she might not have much healing by the end of a given match, is because of how useful and critically impressive the rest of the kit is when used to Duel, Harass, and Disrupt the enemy team at a moment's notice. It's entirely worthwhile to push healing as a secondary priority if you can secure eliminations, disrupt formations, and be a genuine nuisance to even modest effect.
All of these are also easy to learn and difficult to punish, making her a menace at all levels, even professional play. Outside of Competitive Bans as well, she represents a lodestone against which most players are going to need to find some way of navigating around, just for the sake of their own sanity and willingness to play.
All of that said, most of these issues hides behind a design philosophy that, for lack of a better description, hinges on one thing:
Da Cuteā¢
This makes changing, adjusting, or altering any of the above kit a bit of a tightrope, as the community was always going to cleave hard to a release like this that marries the urge for more Oddball characters with the heavy aesthetic cuteness that Overwatch has become known for:
An overpowered monster that is also going to sell skins like hotcakes, needs to be viable across multiple vectors of play.
Throw in hero bans for competitive and there's not a lot of rationale that says "fixing" the above issues is worth the cost.
So What Can Be Done?
Adjusting the cat in anyway has to take into account all of the above issues, while trying to pick apart what can work as replacement. Even then, the aforementioned mountain that is Da Cute⢠pretty much makes any major adjustments, a minefield this Development Team would probably be better off leaving alone.
There is a...single path though, that, despite still being a hardsell, the theory suggests would be a long term solution to both, adjust the cat for a better, more healthy design and...addresses a unique problem in the cast that has been lingering for some years now. In other words:
Turn the Cat into the new Mercy
I don't mean adjust the kit to some significant degree that tailors the cat to play exactly like Mercy; I mean that, at a foundation, she already does.
Much of the Cat's kit, has similar enough tradeoff and skill transference that Mercy players can find a secondary level of on-boarding.
Freedom of movement in Valk, as already stated, has a lot of similarities to the Cat's own standard, while the utility of each Hero's tether is a viable consideration that only really requires a shift in how it's applied to teammates or-
Mercy's Damage Boost tether is a trust exercise that your teammate will hit their shots
The Cat's tether is a trust exercise that the Cat will take a teammate to a useful location where the most, if not more than the most can be done
And both have healing that is very well suited for keeping low targets alive, long enough to reach safety
All of these have enough foundational similarity that they translate in an on-boarding fashion. I might even go as far as to say, they belong in a category together the same way the Devs tried (and failed) to make Lifeweaver and Mercy seem too.
The only off-putting part is the same one that makes the Cat problematic to begin with; her Damage potential.
Which is why the answer is to just remove the damage from her primary fire.
Seriously, that's it.
With no damage on her primary fire, she has no reason or excuse to go into constant Duel, Harass, and Disrupt mode throughout a match and instead spends the majority of her time doing healbot things (important at low ranks/broad MMR, while entirely dismissed at high level play).
This leaves a lot more targeted focus for her Utility when saving teammates, setting up plays, and doing boops on enemies to maximum effect -- the sort of utility that makes Mercy worth choosing, while maintaining survivability at all costs; something the Cat is exceptional at to begin with, due to the Speed Boost resource, Freedom of Movement, and Permanent high ground.
If the Cat's offensive focus is limited to choosing windows to apply her Ult, her Purr boop, and Lifeline (while maybe looking for the occasional low enemy target to boop + melee to death opportunistically), it leaves her open to playing more for her team and looking to operate as a strong glue in a lot of backlines.
Her partner Support doesn't have to worry about the Cat wandering off to Troll nearly as much and leave them to be easily isolated and targeted.
This change also keeps intact, the aesthetics of the character and her popularity. She becomes the new Mercy in all but name, allowing for the skin sales to flow, and the general population to continue to enjoy her without needless reworks or redesigns in the future-
-and, lastly, it serves as an off-ramp for most Mercy players who have been stuck with a truly unique hero and very little transferable skillsets. They now have an alternative option to go with, if things aren't working out on their preferred hero, to switch to and provide a similar, if more dynamic level of Support to their team.
A textbook win/win.
calvin and hobbes
"You misspelled Weltanschauung" is one of the funniest punchlines I've ever encountered.
one of my faves
I know he's still alive but truly the spirit of Bill Watterson lives on across tumblr
https://www.tumblr.com/rathayibacter/764133213454172160/thog-cave-painting-world-no-longer-look-for?source=share
based on this tweet
So, there's been a rising tide (...I'm at that age, it can't be helped, yes I hate it too) of obscurity in how mechanics are conveyed to players in Overwatch since the beginning of the ill-fated '2' was added on.
There were relatively few in the game at the beginning -- Damage Reduction was the biggest for the longest time, with Armour and the more recent Block mechanic that's become (too) popular with the current devs, being the only representative examples with visual indications of when it was active:
This is one of the defining reasons Roadhog is so frustrating btw - he'll run away with low health and the reflex is to give chase and eliminate him, but breather is giving him damage reduction with no indication it's active, buying him time to get hook off CD while healing up to a survival level. The normal reflex is over-riding the danger!
Lately though, there's been a slew of different mechanics with vague or outright confusing visual and audio cues added that, in the heat of a fight, can disrupt a player's recognition and reflexes on what to do and how to react.
Keep in mind:
Most players don't have a photographic memory and aren't doing hours of homework on youtube or in the mechanical codex in game, trying to piece together every single mechanic and what it does. Many (most?) are playing their specific Role and learning about the other heroes in other Roles via context clues, matches played with/against that hero but not as that hero.
This is why visual/audio indications on what abilities/mechanics do are so important.
Wuyang's Ult, Domina's Ult, Lifeweaver's Ult, Baptiste's Ult? These all have bad to terrible visual/audio translation unless you know exactly and specifically what they do.
First Person perspective also doesn't help with this, as the most indication someone gets when receiving these ults, is a vague glittery pattern obscuring their screen that is arguing for the player's attention vs. the dozen other effects going on when they are in the middle of a fight.
Compare this to Nano (which also has Damage Reduction and which can be missed by some players) - Damage Boosts in the game have a collective visual effect and a similar audio effect; an azure blue colour coding, and a charged up whine or buzz sound.
This is significantly better in the translation of what you're expected to do when receiving Nano, vs. a Wuyang Ult's swirly pattern that's meant to indicate a knockdown stun; a mechanic that does not have a universal audio/visual cue.
There is a rising charge up sound when it is active and a literal countdown, but for anyone who hasn't read about what it does specifically or isn't recalling immediately what the few times they'll have seen it being used, does? It can be confusing trying to parse what to do with it. Domina's Ult is even worse for this as it locks one in a bubble, and the expectation is to shoot the cage to free yourself, but-
-the closest parallels are:
Zarya Bubble which...most players are going to try and avoid shooting
a Barrier that the enemy is using which you will shoot but is wrapped around or in front of the enemy
a Barrier that you and your teammates are using, which is in front of you/your team but you can't shoot.
The ult is asking you to fight your reflexes/built-in knowledge to do the thing you're not meant to do, should do but the placement is wrong, or can't do even if the placement is right.
Weird translation, across the board.
If the Dev team had the resources (time, people, money, etc.) which I'm fairly sure they don't at this point (Acti-Blizz is no longer a video game company, but a video game branch inside of a Tech company) it would be a grand idea to go back and do some more fiddling with animations and sound design to clear up a lot of this.
Tidal Blast having a more soap bubble appearance that warbles and threatens to pop! at any moment, might be a better visual/audio cue.
Baptiste's Amplificaiton Matrix, if there were ghostly, translucent, targeting reticles that briefly appeared and disappeared inside the window?
Domina's Panopticon, ngl, I'd love to see smarmy messages or digital warnings in her tone/voice appear across the inside of the bubble ('Bye Bye, Darling', 'Oh look! Caught in my trap!' etc.), warning exclamation marks, or even just remove the explosive damage in favour of the lock out element so at least people aren't unduly punished for the confusion.
Lifeweaver's Tree of Life dropping leaves in the form of Healing Plus signs that flutter to the ground.
The point is that the visual/audio clarity of Overwatch has taken a significant hit over the course of Overwatch 2's lifetime and it shows in the design of the game and the confusion that many have, whether new players coming to the game or returning after a long hiatus, around the mechanics.
TL:DR - Educational systems are incredibly important, folks.
This is the best description Iāve heard for this method, I always thought it was bullshit because I never heard a description that actually explained how to do this other than ātap your head 20 timesā.
I have anxiety-induced hissing, which sounds/feels different from sound-induced tinnitus (which I have also experience). Sound-based tinnitus actually sounds like youāre āhearingā something in your ears, whilst the hissing I have feels like itās āinside my headā, if that makes sense. But this technique still helps!!
Hereās a visual I found because I couldnāt understand the instructions well
My ringing just went away for the first time in years. What is this blissful quiet.
wait wait i gotta try this, i donāt think iāve had Actual Silence since i was like 5
HOW THE FUCK
Reblogging to save a life, and also because, even if you donāt have tinnitus, this is totally worth trying if you like new sensory experiences.Ā Ā
Overwatch: The Roadhog Problem
Giving Roadhog, who already has-
Damage Reduction at a significant percentage, which works against almost all forms of damage in the game.
Transcendence level healing output
Damage on par with many DPS heroes
A precision displacement stun with the longest range in the cast
An 8s long Ultimate that can be interrupted to access all of the above, at any point during the Ultimate which also continues to be active after interruption
-extra damage on primary/secondary fire, additional reduction on Headshot damage...
...AND A SPEED BOOST?
Congratulations Overwatch.
You've officially upgraded one of the most problematic designs in the cast to surpass Sigma for types of Damage Mitigation.
This is Boogieman levels of escalation.
smile, dog!
Overwatch: The New Kids? They Float...
Putting together notes on the new heroes, while also contextualizing their place in the design structure has been challenging, but-
-not...as much as I would have expected.
There's an overwhelming sense of "Floating" among the new cast, where-in they fit into the centre of compositions and float from zone to zone, hero to hero, moment to moment, as a bunch of low-grade foundational additions to an otherwise fractured design space.
The Single Tank Format has, largely, allowed individual heroes to expand out into their own universe of individual options with updates to the core game expanding on this - universal healing passives, heal-hate passives, and a general sense of burst everything.
The new sub-roles and transition of heal-hate into a universal experience have also contributed to this in the most recent update.
A foundation of parts, each sandblasted of it's edges to provide islands for all. Teamwork is (was always) a high level affair, but that has been exacerbated with the overcrowding of mechanics, additional effects off of perks, and a rather egregious level of hand-waving about any sort of On-boarding, Tutorialism, or Educational tools. To point-
The Cat's Ultimate, Lifeweaver's Life-grip, Hazard's wall, and Freya's movement are clear indications of design mechanics meant to avoid permissions, allowances or even reactions. You don't have to learn much if there's nothing you can do.
Now with the new Heroes in the mix, dropping all at once, the immediate effect has been to overwhelm the optimal in an effort to level the playing field for everyone and allow fun and excitement to take over.
It worked rather well.
Lots of folk came back, there's plenty to discover, and there's been a lot of updates for those who might not get nearly as much out of the gameplay as they do the story.
What about the heroes, though?
A lot of them feel like 'glue'; floating between their teammates in order to garner some of the spare resources from nearby AoEs (either their own or others), while doing modest amounts of their Role's purpose. Most are gimmicky, with sections of that grow into the modern Overwatch design space when paired with well-known problems and issues (Damage Boosts, Uber-poke, Excessive Speed, etc.) and the underlying thread I've been getting from most of them, is the sense they are meant to return some semblance of...
Cohesion? To the game?
Most of the heroes provide little to nothing that can't be done better and with years more experience in other heroes, leaving their value to exist more in what I'm tentatively calling "Passive Erosion".
Anran's main design goal seems to be to just keep people on fire and minimize how much low impact healing is allowed to keep people topped up, helped considerably by the new global anti-heal passive.
Emre's just bouncing from area to area, inserting chunks of damage that chip and gnaw at health pools, providing opportunities for teammates (Tanks especially) to follow through pretty frequently, while always ready to pistol his way out of a threat.
Mizuki's much the same with his healing aura, soft-root, reaction-based speed and damage, providing a comforting amount of everywhere support that can be overwhelmed with a modest push.
Domina's a very strong Poke type, but much of that is largely based around the wall-stun that can be triggered off her own barrier, making any ground-based characters very punishable for daring to approach.
Each of these designs leans pretty heavily toward this Erosive quality that is meant to trim away and reduce a lot of the quick, sudden decisions that can turn fights or circumstances without being as overt as the further-down-the-spectrum mechanics that flat out Deny interaction (Suzu, Life-grip, Immortality Field, all the Blocks, Venture burrow, Juno Ult, Hazard Wall...it's a big list these days).
They are, each, a shallow pool meant to simplify the game without being too intrusive on the players; a sort-of-inversion of previous Overwatch 2 designs which brought so much power to the table that nothing else was remotely viable.
It's why most of them feel relatively balanced - even mild. Comparatively, they are.
It's also why my initial gut-reaction as far as Generational Design, was noting a regression across the board from the previous 5th gen nightmares that the game was threatening with Vendetta, Freya, and Hazard.
There's no real good or bad here: giving the game a rather significant amount of 'glue' in the form of new heroes is beneficial. New and returning players can leap onto them and feel like they have impact, even if it is a low-grade simmer of Healing, Damage, or Space.
It's a very solid way to maintain the influx of players and keep frustration to a minimum.
It also highlights the glaring design escalation in previous heroes who are able to just output monstrous value with minimal effort. I expect this will take a few months to settle into view though, so it's worth enjoying while it lasts.
I'll get into deeper breakdowns over time as there's some interesting actions taken here or there, but overall?
It feels like there's a transition happening from Potency as the dominant trait in the design, and back toward a balancing act in hero Texture.
Things are gonna get odd.
Frankly, generative AI is being given too much credit for the devaluation of art and labour. Dipshits who think the Idea Guy is the only one doing any real work and everyone else is a mere technician who should be grateful they're permitted to be involved at all have been a thing for as long as art has been a thing.
(This is why you'll never get anywhere accusing folks boo-hooing about "prompt theft" of hypocrisy, incidentally. No hypocrisy is present if you genuinely believe that Idea Guys are the only people whose labour has value, and a great many of these folks do in fact believe that.)
Part 4 of Dva accidentally fixes up Ramattra AU
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Overwatch: The New Satan
The more footage I see of these bloody heroes, the more I begin to believe in god-
....and just how far we've strayed from the bright path. Damnation in our futures. Damnation for all.
There's a new Satan of Overwatch.