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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • It is the same thing as sea sickness and car sickness. But you have way more control over when you start and stop. So you can either go with dramamine or you can go with controlling the variables to train your brain that it doesn’t need to protect you from “the poison berries”. Motion sickness is caused by your eyes and inner-ears disagreeing with what is happening. Which for most of human history meant you were hallucinating from eating something poisonous and vomiting would be a good way to save your life.

    But, the brain can be trained to lessen and even completely forego this response. If you immediately stop as soon as you have the first minor symptoms, usually warm face, and then wait an hour or so and go back in. You’ll steadily increase the amount of time you can play before feeling symptoms. Your brain will subconsciously reinforce that it doesn’t need to protect you, whatever is going on isn’t life threatening. But the opposite is also true, if it keeps going far enough that you get most of the symptoms or even do vomit, it’ll reinforce to your brain that it is indeed saving your life and the response will get faster and faster.

    Dramamine can artificially slow down the response and buy you way more time to start with, which would make training it away even easier, and it’s usually a very important part of training it away for sea sickness since you generally can’t immediately stop being on a boat, and helpful for car sickness if you can’t just have the car pull over for an hour when you feel it coming on.

    There are also usually settings in most VR experiences to reduce how much they might trigger that response. For racing games, a “lock to horizon” option can really help. There will still be some milder triggers, but getting rid of that one can buy you a lot of time… For other games, avoiding movement that isn’t coming from your body in the real world pretty much eliminates VR sickness causes. But if the game really needs artificial movement, there are settings like vignetting and having more static graphic elements added to focus on during movement.

    Eventually, with successful training, you won’t need the comfort features. You’ll be able to play any game for any amount of time.



  • A lot of it is the difference between learning practically and learning theoretically. You don’t have to understand the underlying mechanics in practice to know how to keep getting the same result. Your brain doesn’t have to be doing any math, it just has to have shaken a bottle enough times to have a good comparative basis formed.

    Learning to calculate the current remaining volume in a container when observing someone else shake it… that would use all that theoretical knowledge and math.

    It’s like knowing how hard you have to throw an egg at a wall for it to break instead of bounce off. You do it 100 times, you just get a good feel for it. Doing all the math, and then trying to learn it practically is barely gonna affect how quickly you learn it in practice. But if you wanted to make a robot that throws it exactly hard enough without wasting any energy, practical knowledge will have almost no value, and theory and math will be incredibly valuable.

    This is coming from someone who does indeed have the whole “passive trajectory analysis of every moving object around me” thing. I can’t do crowds or drive at busy times. But, for moving through a minor crowd while reading a book, or pulling into a tight parking space while other cars are moving around near me, it’s very helpful. I have good spatial awareness in general, like parking in my garage with only an inch of clearance on the far side of my car has never been an issue in 14 years so far. Or when doing it with someone else’s borrowed car every now and then too. When I shrug off the difficulty of doing something like that, people seem to be amazed. Otherwise, I would have assumed it was normal, feels normal to me.




  • Careful with alarm fatigue. It’s unfortunately something your brain does without your permission. If you ever find setting lots of alarms stops being helpful, that is likely what happened. Basically, since you will end up brushing off a decent portion of those alarms as you are either still on task or don’t need to be on task yet “this time”, your brain will slowly think of those alarms as less important, no matter how important you want them to still be.

    It can help to set as many different alarm sounds as possible. Sometimes, that can make it feel like each alarm is different, and they won’t all be lumped into the same category in your subconscious.


  • They are a very handy shoe when it comes time to clean them. Especially nice for jobs where that is every day, or multiple times a day. And honestly, despite being so cheap, they don’t lead to foot problems anywhere near as much as other shoes, even at twice the price.

    They may not have much respect, but they are a useful shoe.