If you look at screens a lot, you might be doing the wrong kind of blinks.

I learned this when I had to be seen at the dry eye clinic, but there’s two kinds of blinks you can do. When your eyes get overly dry or you get something in your eye, the way that you blink is more deliberate or forceful. You can tell if you’re doing this kind of active blink by gently placing your fingertip in the top outer corner of your eye socket, and seeing if you can feel movement there when you blink.

The position for each person is slightly different, so just try different positions for your fingertip and do deliberately strong (but not too forceful) blinks until you can feel the muscles underneath moving. It’s quite subtle. For me, the location is just below the bone of my eye socket, directly up from the outer corner of my eye.

The other kind of blink is more passive, and is what the vast majority of your blinks should be, and people who use screens a lot tend to not do enough of these because they keep their eyes open for too long while using a computer, drying out their eyes and necessitating those big blinks I described above. The small blinks are important because they stimulate the lipid secreting glands in your eyelid rim, which can lead to dry eyes.

Put your fingertip at the corner of your eye like I described above, and this time, try shutting your eyes gently and slowly, as if you’re trying to stay awake but you’re unable to stop yourself from drifting off. If you’re doing it right, you shouldn’t feel muscular movement as you blink. You might need to finetune your fingertip position by a few millimetres, because if you’re too far out, you won’t feel muscular movement even if you’re blinking wrong. Once you’ve got the feel of how to discern between the two kinds of blinks, then you can see if you can do the passive blinks but at normal speed, as if you’re just a normal person and not sitting there with your finger on your eyes feeling silly.

I find that I’m way less likely to get dry eyes if I make sure that I occasionally do “sets” of passive blinks when I’m taking breaks from screens. I do like 20 of the normal speed passive blinks, and then 10-20 passive blinks that take longer, with my eyes remaining closed for a second or so after each one. I’ve found that now that I have the knack of it and don’t need to feel with my fingers whether I’m doing it right, it can sometimes be a fun way to fill the time.

Edit: this will not give you more muscley eyes, but is an actually useful skill to build if you are someone who has unknowingly built a habit of blinking in the bad way

Ooh, I like this

Edit: I think part of why I like it is that it’s evocative of both “construction” and “destruction”, and civil engineering necessarily involves aspects of both. Like, even when there isn’t existing infrastructure to demolish, there’ll still be tasks such as digging into the ground to anchor support structures, which I could consider to be a kind of destruction

A form of wage theft that’s common in the US (and elsewhere) is that workers are expected to still do work when they have already clocked out (such as closing up the shop).

I have a Japanese friend who told me that it’s not uncommon that if your work colleagues are going to the bar after work, you are expected to go along. If you don’t, it shows a lack of commitment to your job. As it’s not a formal requirement, of course you don’t get paid for this, despite it being functionally mandatory. What’s worse is that you can’t just stick around for one drink and then head home — you are expected to stick around at least as long as your boss, even if he (let’s face it, the boss is probably male) is still drinking long into the night. I consider this to be an especially egregious form of the wage theft I described above.

It sounds so exhausting that I would likely be unable to do anything besides pretend to work, and even that would lead to inevitable burn out. I had heard that the work culture in Japan was bad, but I had no idea how bad until my friend shared some first hand experiences with me.

Corporations are not our friends, even when they seem friendly, like Steam. However, they can be useful allies, so I’m glad to see this response from Steam.

Were you running it with the unofficial patch? I don’t remember what it was that was causing me problems, but it’s possible that was it.

"I made a mod that replaces cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine. […] I am incapable of learning lessons whenever it involves corporations, because I fundamentally do not view toy company CEOs or media CEOs as people.

In between working on my game and dying of various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke until its inevitable demise. I will do this no matter how many legal threats, actual threats, black vans with the Mattel logo on them, or severed Barbie heads are mailed to me.

This is because I have issues with authority, particularly authority derived from intimidation. I kicked a lot of bullies in the nuts when I was a kid.”

Idgaf about silly mods like this, but this is iconic

To be fair, the first part of the game is by far the best. The unofficial patch adds back in a heckton of content in the late game, but even then, it feels sparse. I have very fond memories of exploring Santa Monica though. The game felt huge and exciting, even playing it for the first time in 2019.

Damn, I should try install it again. I’m running Linux now, and if I recall, I had some problems getting it working. I should take another crack at it.

The problem is that’s not what they’re doing, even after people who volunteered time to work on localisation have asked for the AI to not overwrite existing human-translated documents. That’s the bare minimum, but it seems like it’s too much for Mozilla

Bad strawman. Teenagers can’t buy paint thinner.

Exactly, and this is why their excuses are bullshit. They know that guardrails become less effective the more you use a chatbot, and they know that’s how people are using chatbots. If they actually gave a fuck about guardrails, they’d make it so that you couldn’t do conversations that take place over weeks or months. This would hurt their bottom line though.

I like how the computational linguist Emily Bender refers to them: “synthetic text extruders”.

The word “extruder” makes me think about meat processing that makes stuff like chicken nuggets.

Man, I feel so much nostalgia over Halo, especially Reach. It was the first campaign I completed on Legendary. My brother and I used to play the Swat game mode a lot, and we made one hell of a team. It was a nice contrast to arguing all the time. I enjoyed when I was in the zone and reacting so quickly that salty people would accuse me of using aimbot. That’s the highest compliment one can receive in an online shooter.

I liked that although Knights of Guinevere was clearly ragging on Disney, it felt like it wasn’t just a cathartic trauma dump from Dana Terrace and crew — it was actually being used to say something meaningful. It’s a good sign when the pilot episode of a show has such a strong sense of themes.

I’d heard a lot of hype when the pilot was released, but didn’t get around to watching it until I randomly thought “I wonder what Dana Terrace is up to nowadays? Hopefully she’s working somewhere better than Disney, because surely there must be someone with power out there who recognised how Disney was squandering her potential”. When I saw that it was her and some of the Owl House team who made Knights of Guinevere, that caused me to immediately go watch it. The only disappointment was that we don’t know when new episodes will be available, but hopefully things will be regular once we do start getting episodes.

Exactly this. I don’t own any Steam hardware, nor do I expect to any time soon. However, I don’t know if I’d be running Linux as my main daily driver if not for how straightforward it is to game on Linux nowadays, thanks largely to Valve’s efforts in this area.

I did dual boot with Windows for a while, but I found that the inertia of rebooting made me more likely to just use Windows. When I discovered that basically all of my games were runnable through Proton, I got rid of Windows entirely.

I feel a lot of gratitude for the Steam Deck existing, because it makes things way easier. It’s not down to Valve’s efforts alone, but providing the solid starting point has lead to the coagulation of a lot of community efforts and resources. For instance, there have been a couple of times where I’ve had issues running games, but found the solution in adjusting the launch options, according to what helpful people on protondb suggest. I also remember struggling for a while to figure out how to mod Baldur’s Gate 3, until I found a super useful guide that was written by and for Steam Deck users. The informational infrastructure around gaming on Linux is so much better than it used to be.

Yeah, exactly, that’s what I was trying to convey. I’m not good under pressure, so I’ve spent most of the game opting to dodge, given it’s much safer. What I like is that the “perfect dodge” notice is a subtle, helpful prompt that’s basically saying “hey, if you’d tried to parry this attack rather than dodge, you’d have succeeded. Back yourself, bro.”

Glad to see People Make Games cover this. They have a lot of reach

I’ve recently been playing it and I’ve been blown away.

I find the parry system not too bad actually. I’m more than half way through the game and I’ve only recently started properly learning how to parry, but I love how easy the game makes it to learn. Context for anyone who hasn’t played the game: when you successfully dodge, you see the words “dodge” rather than damage numbers. When you do a perfect dodge, you see the words “perfect dodge”. The window for parrying is smaller than for dodging, but this dodge system meant that when I started noticing I was somewhat consistently getting perfect dodges, I decided I should try parrying more often.

I find the overall difficulty tuning to be excellent. Even on normal difficulty, it’s definitely challenging at points, but it feels extremely fair. You won’t be able to defeat all enemies that you’re able to access at any given time — there’s so many times that I’ve tried my chances with a big guy just hanging out on the map, only to get my team wiped in one hit. However, the open world and much to explore means I can go away and come back later. Upgrade materials are scattered all over, so exploration is super powerful.

I agree with you that the highlight of the game is how beautiful it is. There have been a few times where I’ve had to stop for a moment and just take in the scenery when it was so soul achingly beautiful that I could scarcely think.

Oddballs who dive into absurdly lengthy calculations of something trivial do it out of a bizarre, joyful compulsion, rather than necessity.

(Source: I’m one of those oddballs)

What does OC mean in this context?

It’s still fairly new research. I think the authors recently won an Ignoble prize for it