abraxas @ abraxas @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

It fucking sucks, more because a lot of providers don't (or didn't. They've been getting better) take seriously. They'd treat you like a baby or a hypochondriac, right up until you scare them half to death by WHAT YOU SAID WOULD HAPPEN happening.

The stopping-breathing thing is super-rare, so even people expecting that "complely calm-seeming patient" pass-out are shocked when that same unconscious patient starts holding their breath and shaking.

I think it's a matter of expertise. I am stuck dealing with people who write Javascript/Typescript like it's C# because they're C# senior devs. It's not world-ending until issues of speed, scale, or other "why we use best practices" raise their ugly heads. Then it is world-ending. I can only help with so many design standards when you still see everything show up in a classes-and-subclasses mindset with hard-to-catch concurrency bugs. I actually caught a developer trying to spin up a child process to wait on a socket response.

So in FinTech, I can imagine it becomes a bigger deal faster.

Yeah, I really can't imagine. My wife (who works in the medical field) tried to help me "get used to" needles and I didn't make a single lick of progress. With my kind of issue, it's common that the issue gets worse and not better if you get shots more often. Something about my subconscious forming a feedback loop with my reactions to create worse reactions over time. I didn't stop breathing from shots when the symptoms started when I was 8 or 9, just got dizzy/lightheaded and passed out.

Sure. But that's a different topic.

Quantitatively, Starfield simply has more hand-crafted content than Skyrim. More and bigger cities/settlements, hand-crafted dungeons, and handcrafted quests. In the map-size cases, it's only slightly more, but in terms of quests, Starfield has about as many hand-crafted quests as Skyrim and Fallout 4 combined.

Now, if you don't enjoy exploring in Starfield, you won't find a lot of those quests (same as Skyrim). Heck, if you don't enjoy the quests themselves at all, that's a thing too. There's a neat hand-crafted quest around every corner... if you're not so bored you just rush the main story. I for one really liked the Neon Street Gang quests and (haven't finished it yet) the Crucible quest chain. Both of them I completely missed in my first playthrough because the game didn't hold my hand to find them.

This is the first criticism of Starfield I 100% agree with. In line with other Bethesda games, the intro is a real sleeper.

I'd love a "Skip Intro" in the NG. Lucky we get to skip it in NG+ (minor spoiler I guess)

There's more to full sedation than just "scared of dentists", but it's a start. Anyone who needs substantial work can get it done in 1 day on full sedation instead of a dozen shorter sessions. yes, "needs substantial work" often relates to "scares of dentists" (or relates to "was too damn poor for dentists")

And I'm with you on hyper-hypodermic-phobia thing. People don't realize that "fear of needles" does not manifest as a phobia, but as an acute body response. Getting a shot ruins me for a week, and often involves a doctor's time because my vasovagal symptoms tend to need a little more expert observation. About 1/3 of the time I stop breathing for a short time. I've never needed life-saving measures, but they need to make sure that's the case (lol).

So for doctor's offices, it could easily become savings for them because of people who have responses to needles.

I got through the 2002 burst that kept me un(der)employed for 3 years. Then the 2008 economic crisis.

Happens for blood draws as well, even small quantities. Happens if someone pokes me with a lidocaine. It's a vasovagal reaction where my body "overreacts to certain triggers". My blood pressure and heartrate plummet (to scary low levels. I've freaked out nurses on a couple of occasions). It causes me to feint in a comically dramatic way because the bloodflow to my brain gets too low. To be even more fun, I sometimes exhibit false "seizure" symptoms when I'm down, tightening up all my muscles at once and stopping breathing. During my first COVID vaccine, my breathing stopped for almost a minute, which is why 2 doctors were overseeing me when I came to. My wife explaining the situation is the only reason I didn't end up in an ambulance. You shoulda seen the nurse, she looked as pale as I did!

In theory, this could kill me, and there are confirmed ultra-rare cases of people dying from vasovagal syncope. In practice, I'm far more likely to die of a car accident on the way home (with my wife driving me because I'm in no state to drive after that). So long as a competent medical professional is watching me, I'm basically completely safe. But absolutely miserable.

Honestly, it makes me feel like I'm some kind of drama queen. But it's entirely made up of unconscious responses in my body.

And the weird thing is that it's not thinking about needles. It's my body's reaction to the feeling of a needle entering it. That sad little "prick" feeling that is maybe a 1 out of 10 on the pain scale? I have no idea if it's "trickable" because I have absolutely no problem digging out a splinter with a knife. I keep wanting to find out if getting a tattoo would trigger that reaction or not. I just want to get a tattoo anyway lol.

Lol, it's true. But if we were meant to be stabbed we wouldn't have a completely unique dangerous (occasionally it kills people) reaction to it that doesn't resemble most phobias.

I think it depends. I went to an ER once that threw me into a wheelchair when the world was spinning post-blood-draw and dropped me off in the hall saying "You'll be fine!". That hospital will never get an Ultrasound injector.

When I got my first COVID vax, however, I took up 20 minutes of the time of 2 on-call doctors and a nurse because my passing out often resembles a seizure. And then I took up one of their very few "just in case" beds for close to 90 minutes. Someone else with a problem with needles waiting for a vax had to wait for the bed to open up. They'd have killed to have said ultrasound injector for people like me.

That's weird. My heartrate and blood pressure go down before getting a shot.

Then I go down, and feel like death for a day and like I'm in rehab for a week.

Funny thing, I'm not really getting woozy talking about it (a little, but more sympathetic memory of it).

A blood draw ruins my week (not exaggerated). If I were diagnosed with diabetes I would end up dead. For me, anything that avoids a needle is worth it.

For people like me who go down for a half hour and feel like a train wreck for 8 hours when they get stabbed a little, I'll take a 1.5min one.

If you told me I needed to run on a treadmill for an hour while the ultrasound worked, I'd STILL take it over getting stabbed a little.

Just in sheer quest counts, Starfield blows Skyrim out of the water.

Settlement counts as sizes? Ditto. There's only 4 Major Cities, but there are non-city settlements as big as Skyrim Cities.

And New Atlantis is Massive.

relatively little to no content

It has about as much handcrafted content as Skyrim if you count all settlements, crafted-quests, dungeons, etc. Just because it has a ton of procedural content with a ton more random missions than Skyrim doesn't mean it has less handcrafted.

I understand why some people say it feels like Starfield has little to no content because they swim (or fact travel) in an ocean of procedurally-generated stuff.

For me, each playthrough I'm discovering at least a handful of big new things I missed the previous playthrough.

To get to brass tacks, estimates have been showing Starfield has approximately 400-500 named quests. Skyrim vanilla has 274.

So if you think it won't last as long as Skyrim because you think nobody likes it, that's defensible from the Mixed reviews. But it's not due to lack of content but (arguably, because I like it) quality of content.

Definitely worth playing it if you can play it "for free".

I've had nothing but fun from it. Yes, I'd probably have been willing to pay $60 for it, but IMO it's more fun played than watched.

It's polarizing, a lot like many Bethesda games. My unpopular take is that I've been having an absolute blast with it and am on my third playthrough. It's the only game I've played for months and the only one I find myself wanting to play.

For me, what I love is that it's Skyrim in Space in so many ways. It's what I hoped/wanted for gameplay when I bought Outer Worlds. And Outer Worlds really disappointed me there.

Is it balanced? Hell, no. Personal and ship weapons are as much of a mess as I always felt weapons in Fallout 4's were. I have this badass heavy weapon that I have to fire on full auto for 30 seconds to kill a random enemy... Or I fire one shot from this other weapon. RPGs love to make automatic weapons do shit damage to keep them feeling balanced, and ultimately they often end up being a waste.

Ditto with the build system. The ship builder makes you dream of a badass build experience, but does admittedly fall short. But nobody else gives me that feeling the way Starfield does, so I find myself letting Good be enough for me when Perfect isn't available.

Again, I'm sure plenty of people are bored and hate it, but I consistently feel like Bethesda gave me exactly the game they promised me. And as much as I want more, it's still my favorite and most played game of 2023 by now.

Also the Rocky Horror Picture Show 2 that everyone forgets was a (pretty decent but not cult-level) thing.

It doesn’t matter that much to me, I won’t go out of my way to shut down a vegan extremist, I don’t care enough.

I've got a few close to me, and they go out of their way to shut down other people close to me. I've lived around and been involved in various ways with people in the various meat-related industries. It hurts them, and I care about them, so I care about the issue.

I don't expect everyone to feel that way. But it's like the difference between "internet atheists" who are a dime a dozen, and "that guy you actually know that thinks it's appropriate to treat non-atheists as absolute morons".

cutting animal product is easier than picking the local farm meat so it’s what I choose

I can respect that. It's a band-aid solution in my opinion, but if I look at how I tolerate half-ass government actions, I have to honestly accept that a band-aid solution should not be faulted too much.

the most important part is stopping the torture on animals

I think we'd diverge here, but that's ok. To me, sustainability is more important than animal comfort any time we can't feasibly have both, so long as a farmed animal is generally better off than the same species in the wild by some agreeable metric - which both cows and chickens generally are (except liberty, but few non-human species put any QoL value on "freedom").

I hate the mentality that if it’s not perfect we don’t do it, it’s the same for vegans hating on vegetarian.

1000% percent. Vegans are not "going to win" and have a kumbaya utopia (dystopia) where people across the world are forbidden to eat animals and harshly punished when they try. And they're sure not going to get a world where the masses choose veganism. But there's a LOT of even ranchers and hunters of all people who would stand at their side for better regulations on humane treatment.

As @conciselyverbose@kbin.social said, streaming works.

Unlike him, however, I've had a fair bit of luck streaming (on my computer. The Deck is my Christmas present from my wife). Starfield of all games. Good framerate, usually low controller-latency. That streaming thing is finally starting to improve. Finally.