iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Silksong is Team Cherry’s Dark Souls 2 …is what I would say if I was trying to be controversial and hyperbolic I think they just tried to make a game for the people who mastered the first, and ended up making it so compelling I wish it didn’t require mastery to have fun

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And it does suck, because a lot of the non-difficulty changes make this game feel made to sink into. You’ve got hubs and quests and more RPG elements. It’s beautiful and has a much stronger narrative But the difficulty just turns any attempt at investment into stress and tedium

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Enemy spam. Significantly more annoying runbacks. Double damage from what feels like everything It’s a massive difficulty increase for no real reason, often from no real mechanical change. You just have effectively half health throughout the game. How is that not a troll?

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Some of it is fair and balanced mechanical progression. The diagonal pogo, increased enemy and boss complexity, etc. But so much is just… trolling? I can’t find any better word for it

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Mind you, I completed a 100% run of Hollow Knight the day I started, so I’d say I went in well-prepared. And yet I STILL felt an immediate spike in difficulty that seemed intent on angering me

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lextorias @lextorias.me · 10/09/2025

I… kinda agree with this? I’ve talked about difficulty and praised hard games a ton, but a lot of design decisions in Silksong seem made purely to fuck with the player I just couldn’t stop imagining how much fun I’d be having if the game didn’t have a grudge against me

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ngl the difference in response on these two apps is very telling

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It’s certainly been happening for a while. This is from one of my favorite articles on the topic, all the way back in 2015 www.engadget.com/2015-12-02-p...

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the budget is actually just for all the cocaine the producers will be doing. 70s cinema is back, baby!

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“What artist thinks they deserve $100?” = “I would feel bad paying/getting paid more than $100” “Artists honestly deserve way more than $100” = “I would feel bad paying/getting paid less than $100” That’s it. All discourse does is possibly drive other people’s ranges up or down to meet your own

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Comms (like most transactions) are oppositional Commissioners want to pay as little as they can get away with. Artists want to get paid as much as they can get away with. The final price is just where those two overlap Arguing about how much artists deserve is just rationalizing your price range

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I’m not playing Silksong, but I just want everyone to know I could beat it really easily if I wanted to. I can tell everyone complaining about the difficulty is a worse Gamer than me

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lextorias @lextorias.me · 08/09/2025

game developers when something good happens in the industry: here’s why this thing is bad and will ruin my life, actually

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Restricted Mode has existed since 2010, is off by default, and YouTube says it only accounted for 1.5% of views in 2017 It’s likely not the problem here, but I did do some research into how it might be related

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Reposted by lextorias

Hell-a Bambust 🏳️‍⚧️ (alleged transsexual)(spooky) @ela-bambust.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

"the real game starts after the credits" well too bad, my adhd put a little tick mark next to it with "task completed" written in crayon so I'm never gonna touch it again

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TL;DR: Restricted Mode has existed since 2010. YouTube said only 1.5% of views are using it. However, their teen content filters seem to be identical, and it’s only after they started forcing age verification that views went down for everyone

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This is all just coming from a couple hours on my phone though, so take it with a grain of salt It’s a lot of speculation based on some weird coincidences that I don’t have any better theories to explain. All I really know is that something fishy’s goin on

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At best, minors are having their algorithms fucked with to “protect” them At worst, every person under 18 or on a public network is having guideline-compliant videos hidden from them and deprioritized without their knowledge That could certainly explain a drop in views

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It does seem strange that it’s around the same time YouTube began implementing this new AI restriction overhaul that many big creators started noticing an immediate dip in views, seemingly correlated to what videos are hidden in Restricted Mode

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If this is not literally just Restricted Mode, it is certainly using the exact same AI filtering model. And now that YouTube is forcefully “protecting” accounts that don’t pass age-verification, I wonder if they aren’t opting them in to some of these content settings

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See, part of the buffs to those supervised teen accounts I mentioned earlier are these conspicuous “content settings” that filter videos separately to YouTube Kids These various age range options will completely remove even non age-restricted videos from view Sound familiar?

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Now comes the recent censorship drama, during which YouTube stated that they will use AI to verify a user’s age, and then automatically restrict their account if under 18 They explicitly say this will reduce recommendations. But what I’m curious about are those other layers

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They have a whole vague post about how chill their manipulation of the algorithm is, and how it’s only an “additional layer of protection.” (the extent of the other layers, I do not know) “Portrays delinquency” is my favorite though. Sounds straight out of the Hays Code

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Starting in 2019 (most likely due to SESTA-FOSTA, watch my latest vid for context) YouTube then posted a LOT about its features to protect kids This includes buffs to YouTube Kids and supervised teen accounts, but also, notably, using AI to “reduce recommendations”

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Per another post about this controversy in March, YouTube did say that only 1.5% of viewership came from Restricted Mode, though I have not seen any updates to this statistic since then If true, and nothing changed since 2017, then it doesn’t sound like a major issue. However…

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From this blog post all the way back in April of 2017 you can see people had problems with their videos being unnecessarily restricted (especially LGBTQ creators), and YouTube had to step in to tweak the automated system and clarify how it worked

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So, to clear things up, Restricted Mode has existed since 2010. It’s turned off by default on user accounts, but it is controlled by network admins. Meaning most public wifi & computers probably have it on With it on, certain videos are hidden and you can’t see comments

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