Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Therefore adult Ciro enjoys only the following types of video game content in video form, so that other people waste their lives playing the games while you only see the highlights:

speedrunning, including:
- tool-assisted speedrun, Ciro's favorite by far
- real-time attack speedrun
meta breaking glitches, including in speedrunning and on PvP-games.
Magic: The Gathering
Video game reviews

The aspect Ciro enjoys about non-PvP games is atmosphere. Not as conveyed by useless story telling, but as conveyed by music and graphics, and the context deep idea. Legend of Zelda and Metroid come to mind.

And too many games commit the sins of dependency of dexterity, no save states, how do I skip this boring part, or jump straight to the beautiful one?

Another important point is; the perfect video game is an infinitely hard one.

It also doesn't help if you are already typing on a computer all day long on your job. Hands get tired. Eyes have an infinite capacity to consume useless YouTube videos however. Medically proved.

As a result, Ciro just watches videos about video games. Notably games he played when he was a teenager and already understand the rules for.

And things got even worse as after Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment, and he started to feel bad about playing any game that is not open source.

Figure 1.
Five year old Ciro Santilli playing NES on a joystick
. He would get really mad because he could not finish those insanely hard games. Desperate, his parents would have to call older kids from the neighbourhood to help out. Pro tip from the future: the classic controller would almost always have been a more efficient controller. Maybe this kind of crap shapes one's future?

Video 1.

Supercut of Doug S02E13 "Doug's Lost Weekend" (1992)

Source.

Ciro Santilli used to watch Doug as kid. Of all the episodes, only this one stuck to his mind as an adult. It really drove the point home. The pain and joy of being addicted to anything really. Thankfully wheneve Ciro got addicted to a video game, he also quickly got tired of it. His last temporary addiction episode as of 2022 was Cataclysm DDA!

It is also so awesome how the episode pictures Dougs imagination while playing the video game, which is much more realistic than the actual crude graphics. The Nintendo hard reference is also clear.

Another great point of the episode is how good it is to play a single player video game taking turns with a friend on your side. Both people have to be fully engaged, and the game has to be hard. Perhaps those days are over now that everyone has their own computer and can each play together... and that is a huge shame. When playing on the couch with a friend, the one who is not playing can act as a copilot and thing more broadly as the other focuses on more specific details of execution. One is also reminded of pair programming.

Another great point is, partially when you are addicted, to play the video game at night until late, or very early in the morning. Ciro has fantastic memories of playing Zelda on the Nintendo 64 on Sunday mornings, or his emulation experiences from late weekend evenings at university: Video "Samba e Amor by Caetano Veloso (1975)".

The followup lucky hat segment is also amazing: doug.fandom.com/wiki/Doug%27s_Lucky_Hat

Looking back, the series is still extremely charming. It is interesting how Doug's best friend Skeeter Valentine is green. Ciro thought he was indian, but doug.fandom.com/wiki/Skeeter_Valentine says he's black.

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Web of Stories Updated 2025-07-16

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www.youtube.com/user/webofstories

Full channel title: "Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People".

1-2 to hour long interviews, the number of Nobel Prize winners is off-the-charts. The videos have transcripts on the description!

TODO what is their affiliation/who is behind it? There is nothing on the website.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_Stories small wiki with almost no citations.

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Lingua franca Updated 2025-07-16

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