FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
53m ago
Mechanically XCOM2 tactical combat is pretty good - the stealth mechanics for example are a nice addition.
I thought the stealth mechanics added to XCOM 2 were a bit half-baked and gimmicky. WotC goes some way towards addressing this specific criticism with the addition of missions in which the optimal strategy is to go the whole mission without being spotted.
But the whole theme, plot and writing are superhero-movie-tier trash
Agreed, although I can't really say this is a significant departure from the original XCOM: EU. I actually prefer the grizzled, bitter, shell-shocked Bradford over his flat, clean-cut characterisation in the first game, even if his new haircut looks preposterous. Shen is the archetypal Marvel girlboss Mary Sue, though, there's no denying that.
the character building has gotten far out of hand with mutiple overlapping systems
Agreed, almost everything in the tactical layer is far too cluttered compared to the more streamlined first game, and this is only exacerbated in WotC.
FtttG
2hr ago
I've heard of it but never tried it, I'm curious. Reading the TV Tropes page for it now.
FtttG
2hr ago
I've heard so much about Long War, and having logged more hours in the base game of XCOM 1 than anything else in my Steam library, perhaps I ought to check it out.
FtttG
3hr ago
I was feeling an urge to play XCOM 2 over the Christmas break. When I opened it from Steam, I found that it gave me the option to play the War of the Chosen DLC, which I didn't remember buying. It adds so much new content to the base game that it's a bit overwhelming at first brush, but the base game is so addictive that I got into the swing of it pretty quickly, and I think I've logged a few dozen hours into it so far, having killed my first of the three Chosen assassins.
scissor event
FtttG
17hr ago
I've been deadlifting a lot longer than I've been bench-pressing. I recently realised that I'd been doing Romanian deadlifts rather than actual deadlifts: the real deal is significantly harder, but I can still reliably do 5 reps at 1.68x bodyweight. (Hoping to do 1.7x tomorrow.) I'm really struggling to make progress on the bench press though, and the less said about my overhead press the better.
Was he naive about why someone might want to meet at the toilets? Sure, but even he admits that!
He "admits" to a level of naïveté which I would expect from an adult suffering from Down's syndrome, not from a medical doctor. If he really is as naïve as he claims to be, he has no business working in this capacity and ought to be struck off.
(Paraphrasing) "I met a man via an app which everyone knows is a hookup app for gay men. When he invited me to meet him in a bathroom, I assumed this was because he was concerned about being hygienic and wanted to make sure we both washed our hands (even though he never even suggested that this was the reason for the choice of venue). I had no idea that he wanted to have sex with me in the bathroom – I just use the app in question (which everyone knows is a gay hookup app) for professional networking. Also he wasn't anything like as hot as pics made him out to be but that's neither here nor there..."
I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe a qualified medical doctor can be this naïve. I'm even having a hard time believing that you are this credulous.
FtttG
19hr ago
A comparison could be a child soldier/suicide bomber
Is the adjective "child" modifying both of the following nouns ("child soldier/child suicide bomber"), or just the first ("child soldier/adult suicide bomber")?
I reckon it's probably a case of a typical-mind fallacy. Growing up, these men would have understood that their peers craved sex with women. The first time they had sex with a woman, it probably wasn't wholly unpleasant (after all, it's a bit like having sex with a man), but they may have felt a certain feeling of anticlimax, a sense of "is that it?" But they probably assumed this is what it's like for everyone, and they've heard so much about how sex is so much better when it's with someone you love. After meeting a nice girl and getting to know her, the sex becomes a bit more enjoyable because of the greater emotional intimacy, even if they can't quite shake the feeling that this isn't exactly what they were led to believe about sex. They assume this is what everyone feels about sex. The idea that they could only feel true sexual fulfilment by having sex with a man never even occurs to them, because as far as they're concerned, they have achieved true sexual fulfilment. Having started on the path of the traditional success script, they continue down it: marriage, mortgage, kids. They suppress the nagging feeling that sex with women wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
Then upon reaching middle age, they experience a sexual awakening. Maybe the wife's out of town, they fire up Pornhub and accidentally-on-purpose open the gay section instead of the straight section; maybe they're in a bar, another man makes a pass at them and they feel not repulsed but excited. Whatever it is, the sexual excitement they experience is nothing compared to that when they were having sex with a woman. All of a sudden it clicks: this is what it must feel like for their male peers when they have sex with women. "The internal experiences I've been having all these years are totally different from those my friends were having when they were having sex with women."
Having had this realisation, the morally upright thing to do would be one of the following:
- Acknowledge it, but refuse to act on it. You made a commitment to your wife, and commitments are not meant to be broken, even if you made it at a time when you had an incomplete understanding of yourself and your desires. Divorce would be devastating for your wife and for your children. So you soldier on, performing the role of a straight husband and father, at least until your children are of age.
- Come clean to your wife. Divorcing your wife and children will be profoundly upsetting for everyone, but better to be honest and open about who you are and what you want.
But these men are stuck between a rock and a hard place: desperately wanting to act on their desires, but not wanting to bring scandal upon themselves or their families, and reluctant to alienate their friends with their newfound realisation. Instead of doing the most or second-most decent thing, they take the maximally cowardly third option: not telling their wives anything, but acting on their desires by having illicit trysts with strange men.
FtttG
21hr ago
I suspect that a lot of these men were in denial about their sexuality for decades, and by the time they realised what was really going on they were in too deep. But rather than coming clean, they just pursue anonymous gay sex on the down low.
Sure, lots of gay men enjoy being deviant, no argument here. But I'm curious how many straight men would be as deviant as that, were it not for a dearth of willing participants. I would hazard a guess that most straight men who've watched porn have watched and masturbated to pornographic videos depicting deviant sex acts that they've never had the opportunity to perform themselves. I would likewise hazard a guess that most men watching these videos would jump at the chance to perform these sex acts IRL if the opportunity presented itself. Like, if you were to conduct a survey asking straight people "would you participate in a gangbang if the opportunity presented itself and there was no risk of contracting an STD or impregnating someone/being impregnated?", I suspect the proportion of men who would answer in the affirmative would vastly outnumber the proportion of women (which is appropriate because... well, you get the idea).
Likewise, look at the kind of shit exceptionally wealthy men get up to (Arab princes, Epstein's clients etc.). You could interpret this as proof that wealthy people are all perverted sociopaths, or that power tends to corrupt; alternatively, you could interpret it as evidence that most straight men have fantasies that would strike the average woman as deviant, and only the sufficiently wealthy have the purchasing power to make their fantasies a reality.
I never liked this argument. There are lots of words for things few people (if any) have ever done. We even have standard terms for hypothetical situations which have never come to pass and probably never will.
FtttG
23hr ago
I never claimed that a majority of gay men engage in cottaging. By "perfectly normal", I merely meant that it's a concept that most gay men could be assumed to be familiar with, and which most would consider unworthy of comment if it came up in conversation.
FtttG
1d ago
You might say gay men arranging to have sex with each other in a toilet shows how disgusting gay men are, but I'm pretty sure it shows how much women class up the sexual experience. There would be a 10000x increase in straight couples having sex on oily cardboard in alleyways if women were down with it.
Agreed. Male homosexuality just shows you what male sexuality looks like when it's unconstrained.
FtttG
1d ago
I think that's the modal response from the typical heterosexual of either sex.
Full disclosure: while I've never had sex with another man in a toilet cubicle, I have had sex with a woman in a toilet cubicle within a couple of hours of meeting her. So I'm not really one to throw stones here.
FtttG
1d ago
I experimented with Grindr many years ago and was invited to a toilet cubicle in this shopping centre by an Irishman in his forties, who I can only assume had a wife and children. I decided I'd rather be sodomised for the first time by a handsome Brazilian in an actual bed in an apartment.
My girlfriend and I live right next to a shopping centre. The public toilets are on the second floor, and owing to their relative seclusion (you have to walk down a long hallway, at least a hundred metres from the nearest shop) are a popular spot for gay men to meet up for dogging/cottaging. They're generally used not by out-and-proud types, but by closeted gay men with wives and children who wouldn't be caught dead setting foot in a gay bar. Standard procedure is for these men to find an empty cubicle, open Grindr, and camp until a willing participant makes themselves available.
When I mentioned this to my girlfriend, she was appalled. It never ceases to fascinate me, the kinds of behaviours that are seen as perfectly normal within the gay community, and what straight people think of them when confronted with them. The gulf between the sanitised "love is love" omg yass queen slaaay portrayal of the gay community, and the gritty reality (of rough sex in public toilets between two men who met each other all of two minutes ago, literally don't know each other's names, at least one of whom presents himself as straight and has a wife and children) is almost incomprehensibly vast.
Yes, I think the devs' main takeaway from the base first game was that the mechanics encourage an overly slow and cautious playstyle. Their attempts to address this both in Enemy Within (meld containers that self-destruct in three turns) and XCOM 2 were largely successful and mostly make sense in-universe. It's reasonable that XCOM, as a guerrilla paramilitary force, would have a limited window in which to extract its operatives before their transport gets overrun by enemy troops; it's not reasonable that ADVENT would attach explosives to a valuable asset and set them to blow up after a fixed period of time before they even know XCOM is in the vicinity.
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