Your comment feels like it’s trying to simultaneously agree with me and vaguely correct me at the same time. I’m not really sure what to make of it.
The Last of Us had the best story in gaming in quite a while. That’s my opinion, backed up by the huge amount of media coverage and acclaim at the time. Yes, other games had stories in them, but they mostly sucked. They don’t suck as much anymore, because that game made publishers and developers and players care more. That’s my point.
It’s good historically. Publishers and developers didn’t really care much about story in their games before then (2013). “Video Game story” was often horribly bad, like porn acting; but more often it was just forgettable. Like mandatory lubricant to keep the gameplay going, rather than a feature to make good. Think, Far Cry 3, Borderlands 2, Dishonored, etc. They’re ok, but they don’t make you really “feel” something. Mostly you just go around killing everything until it’s done. Heck, speaking of which, even Doom Eternal (2020) has a coherent storyline and lore.
After The Last of Us, publishers suddenly realised that people actually really like it when their videogames have good stories, that make sense narratively, have twists, low plot holes, emotional investment and climax, etc. Now we have even better stories like Ghost of Tsushima, Expedition 33, Baldur’s Gate 3, etc.
It’s a bit dated now, but 13 years ago gaming was very different. It’s actually expected nowadays for games to have a reasonably good story. Today, I would probably recommend the TV show instead for most people, or maybe a Let’s Play.
What happened to the enhanced privacy bill earlier this month? Or is the gov exempt from that?
The emoji keyboard on my phone keeps track of that (Gboard). Discord also does if you use that.
This is how wyverns were made
Lémmoji 😉
🤌
Your personality is Italian
Not just married, but a specific type of married.
True that. But I feel like you can at least glean something from what pictograms they choose to express themselves with. Like how you can with the posters they choose to hang in their room.
Yeah it seems to happen quite often…
I looked into it a bit. ABC did a documentary on this, and found that at least Coles have very strict time limits and schedules for packing online deliveries. They’re timed while gathering items for orders and have “pick-rate targets”; for example 200 items per hour (3 per minute). So if you order, say, 6 things that are across the store from each other, they might decide that walking across the entire store multiple times would hurt their numbers too much. So, to avoid punishment, they just mark it as unavailable, send it off incomplete, and move on to the next order.
No idea if this applies to other stores, but it sounds hellish enough that I’d believe it in 2026. Somehow they designed a system where literally everyone suffers. I feel like I can’t really blame the picker for working within the bounds of a system like that.
Man I would love to be able to specify specific substitutions. That sounds so good.
I usually use the official Coles app for delivery because they have refrigerated trucks. I’ve had bad experiences in the past where e.g. uber delivery does my order last; by then the dairy and frozen foods have been out of the fridge for 2 hours. The nearest shopping centre is a bit over 6km away (3.7 miles) so it gets a bit awkward sometimes. Feels like managing groceries and medications is a full time stocktake job.
I understand you perfectly now
Thanks :) yeah I got a refund for the non-supplied items. It was more like the store didn’t have stock at the time my order was packed. Still sucks though.
I wonder if they just can’t be bothered fully completing my order sometimes. Often if a family member goes in person afterwards, there’s stock on the shelf. Can’t claim to know how Coles operates behind the scenes though.
And yeah sometimes substitutes are really bad… like hotdog buns instead of wholemeal bread, or Coke instead of coconut water. I often disable substitutions when I’m burned on a item-by-item basis.
Kangaroo is good too. Very lean though, gotta add a little fat to it
You’d have to defeat the native emu population, though. Good luck with that
Same boat. I was increasingly exhausted from pushing myself and masking who I was for decades. I decided one day to just be myself, I couldn’t take it anymore.
Lost almost everything: Job, life-long partner, house, etc. Those things simply weren’t compatible with the new me. They tried to cram me back into the box of conformity, but I don’t fit anymore. I think at some level I knew that, which is why it took me so long; I was clinging desperately to the life I had. Had to throw it all away and jump into the abyss.
Hard to call it a good decision, but I’m still here, and I’ll do it better this time.
Edit: realised I forgot to answer your main question. After a long time of having nothing, I started discovering things about myself. Oh, I like this. I hate that. X feels more like me than Y. Illegal thought crimes for my entire life, that I’m allowed to think about now. After a while you figure out who you really are, not who you had to be.
And you said
You’re still being vague. I assume you’re implying that the existence of games like Final Fantasy 7 (1997) having a good story for it’s time, means that no other game from then on can have a story that’s revolutionary for it’s time? It’s nonsensical. Technology improves, storywriting gets better, game mechanics get woven into the narrative.
Good stories in games back then were the exception, not the norm. Listing a few exceptions doesn’t counter anything.