Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
No bio...
User ID: 214
Attack on Titan, though I wish it had ended at the end of season 3 instead of turning into what it is now. Whenever I show it to someone, I tell them to stop watching before season 4.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I don’t expect it to be easy, or for them to get it right until at least a few decades are out.
I agree with your concerns. Still, a lot can happen between now and then and I’d hate to reject an amazing breakthrough due to our current dysfunctional relationship with capital and our countrymen.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I follow some ai artists on Twitter but I’m actually not into hardcore/hentai stuff so I don’t frequent those boards.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
There was a comment on the reveal trailer saying "this looks like it will be either an instant classic or feel like a mobile game" and I couldn't agree more. I'm trying to withhold judgement until I play it, but the character designs do leave something to be desired.
I actually got into the series with Three Houses as well! I downloaded it the day before release in anticipation of a 12-hour car ride and was not bored for a second on that trip. I've been working my way around the series over the last three years. You should give Echoes or Sacred Stones a shot if you liked Three Houses and are interested in playing another. Echoes is fully voiced and has some of the best art direction in the series. The story is simple but the presentation and details make it something special. Sacred Stones has really nice art and animations if you like the GBA pixel art. Great characters, solid map design, and good story.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Depends on the game. The shorter ones you can probably finish in 25 hours or so. Most probably clock in closer to 50-60, and Three Houses can take you 90 if you're being thorough. The newer ones have mechanics that let you rewind turns a limited number of times per map to make up for mistakes. If you're emulating, and you will be for most of the older entries, you can savestate scum to your heart's content.
If you're looking to play one, a safe bet would be emulating Sacred Stones, which is excellent. If you like RPGs, start with Three Houses. If you're big on strategy games and don't mind holding your nose during anything story related, play Fates Conquest.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Tactile for me is the feeling of taking off wet socks or of sitting by a fire/bundling up in warm clothes and blankets when it's cold inside. Nothing like it.
I don't know if I'm relaxed by scents per se, but specific scents tend to act as memory triggers for me. The pomegranate Burt's Bees chap stick takes me mentally to early college, since that's what I would use a lot back then. I had bought this white tea and sage candle and had it going while I was playing Elden Ring a few months ago, so now that's the Elden Ring scent.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Even if Trump loses the primary, I don’t think his ego will allow him to not run as an independent. It’s looking like he either wins the primary or nukes the winner’s chances of taking the general by splitting the vote.
So… four more years of a Democrat in charge of the White House or four years of him playing the perfect boogeyman to the left while failing to get anything meaningful done*.
I can accept that in a lot of ways, he was genuinely sabotaged by lawfare and trumped up criminal charges that made it difficult to keep competent staffers. But if there’s someone who can fight back against that, it’s not him.
Trump opened a lot of doors, but I wish he were capable of stepping aside and letter more competent people build on that, rather than forcing it to live (and die) with him. But that’s his whole thing, isn’t it? He does not back down on stuff like this. It’s his biggest strength, but also the biggest weakness of a political movement that is tied to him.
*To be fair, if you were motivated by Roe v Wade, he really did deliver on this.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I was a bit unclear with the "until they're 60" line I was quoting, but I'm fully for locking that type of offender up for the rest of their natural life with no chance of parole. If I related to the victims, I would probably want blood, but there are other considerations beyond personal satisfaction. Locking him up this way ensures he's never able to harm an innocent citizen again and lowers the likelihood of him person harming the people who have to live with or guard him in prison. In a world where we could 100% verify guilt without bias, I have no issue with the death penalty, but for practical reasons I'm against it.
The others probably shouldn't be jailable offences to begin with.
How should we punish comparatively minor offenses? I think we should come down hard on crimes that don't produce a body like thievery and armed robbery since they lower trust and make people feel unsafe, even if the objective harm they have is minor compared to some white-collar crimes. Just because I don't want those people around doesn't mean I want them to face constant prison violence, though.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
The reason you ask for the player to roleplay his speech but not to describe his sword swing technique is because D&D is a game that exists in our heads. It is a real as the group believes it to be. That is to say, it can be very real, but this requires collective suspension of disbelief, engagement, buy-in, and yes — roleplaying. You aren't taken out of the collective fantasy by your fighter's player not knowing how to swing a sword, but you are by the player who is supposedly the high Charisma party face clamming up whenever an NPC speaks to him.
I don't have an issue with such players being at my table, and in my experience they tend to avoid those kinds of characters anyway. You don't need a silver tongue to be able to play a charismatic character, but you need to have some degree of wit and charm. If a player wants to give a speech, I'm not exactly expecting St. Crispin's Day, but he should have something to say.
Persona 5 Royal. I played the original game in 2019 and liked it quite a lot. This time around I find the writing much more laughable. The extra scenes and dialogue added by Royal probably don't help, as they bloat the game to its breaking point. So many conversations simply repeat what was just talked about in the last scene, or add absolutely nothing.
The game is also much, much easier. A lot of it comes from quality of life improvements — the game doesn't arbitrarily take as much time from you as in vanilla, so you have more opportunities to max out your social stats. The fusion alarm is straight up broken, though, and makes it trivial to snap the combat over your knee. A few trips to the gallows and your persona is going to be far stronger than anything you ever might fight. I'm having a lot of fun using all the mechanics to craft my optimized team though, so it's not all bad.
I'm nearing the endgame of the vanilla game, which I remember being excellent, with everything in Mementos being particularly haunting. Hopefully it holds up. And I am still coping that the brand new semester will be good, as I've yet to play that before.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
7mo ago
I'm certainly staying put even if they started taking recruits for the Mars colony tomorrow. But I don't mind taking the office job route you talked about, and I plan to get engaged soon. The pot is sweet enough in America that you can just coast if you're a certain type. That said:
all you need to do is study computer science and learn how to program (trivially easy) and you can make a comfortable living and essentially enjoy an easy and materially prosperous life. America is a place where trivial email jobs pay $100k a year. The young man doesn’t leave because, by being born an American, he has already won the lottery of life.
Come on. This is not trivially easy. It's easy if you have a high enough IQ and can put up with school and office life for 80% of your life. Even if we're talking about email jobs, that still selects for a certain level of agreeableness and conscientiousness. There are many people who simply lack the cognitive horsepower for this kind of work, and there's a large group of people for whom this is a living hell. I don't mind the work, but you must agree the modal office environment is very feminine.
My college friends are all capable of and okay with this route, but I have a lot of other friends from different backgrounds that this is not a viable path for. In any society, there will be people unhappy with the current order, but the rising trend in sexlessness and radicalism indicates that there are more unsatisfied people than normal right now. If there were a compelling alternative path, I think there'd be a lot less societal stress from men with unfulfilling lives.
Yeah that's a fantasy, and there are many good arguments for why space can't be the escape valve for those people, but my point was that such space aspirations were a frontier fantasy, not a utopian fantasy as OP was saying.
But very few Irish or German peasants in 1850 who emigrated to the US became wealthy or anything even close to it.
Their earnings potential was much better in America, no? That's why they came. They wouldn't die rich by the standards of landed European money, but they'd be wealthier than they ever would have been had they stayed in Europe. There was a legitimate reason to go, because there was a lot of "unclaimed" land and opportunity to die with some land and money, not a landless serf.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
9mo ago
I'm not sure about the programming side, but a tool like LOOT could help you detect those issues. If users report conflicts between mods, it will flag your load order to warn you about them. Of course, if you're just looking to get your feet wet with some technical work then there's nothing wrong with giving it a go yourself.
It's also worth learning how to use the Skyrim Creation Kit as well. I used it to spot patch a few mod conflicts that didn't have patches, for example removing a barrel placed by a city overhaul mod that a boatman was sitting in, or restoring some missing pieces of terrain like you've had issues with. If you're looking for an excuse to learn how modding works, it's a great tool. I would also use it to create custom modded companions and it taught me a lot.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
11mo ago
Thoroughly recommend Matt. He used to post on the old site too. His New Epidemic, Enron, Opium War, and Aztec posts are some of my favorites.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
After getting farther in I have to downgrade my rating on the plot from serviceable to actively awful, so I'd say the other review you read had it just about right. I find it increasingly difficult to just enjoy the gameplay when I feel so disconnected from the story it services, but YMMV.
The character designs are pretty goofy, but at a certain point I just got used to most of them. I chose the male main character but am starting to think this was a mistake. He has a lot of feminine character traits that I find very grating on him, and would probably mind less if he were a woman.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
In practice it’s more of a popularity marker. I think Southkraut’s version of the idea is better thought out
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I considered trying other systems, but my tabletop friends have all played a lot of 5e. It came down to teaching 8+ people how to play a brand new system vs adding (a lot of) homebrew to a system we were all already familiar with. I went with the latter option. Maybe if I was running for 3 dedicated players it'd be different, but this campaign is designed for players to be able to jump in and out. Onboarding each new player with a new system was... not appealing.
5e has many issues, but ease of use and range of adoption make it hard to pass up.
If we could produce meat indistinguishable from the real thing at a competitive cost and scale, I would eat it. This seems a ways off to me from what I've read in the thread so far, with the most viable solutions being mere facsimiles of this. I don't eat the Impossible stuff and the current leading synthetic meat seems unappetizing to me. I want to emphasize that this isn't due to fear of synthetic meat per se, but the idea of replacing genuine meat with an inferior product. If we can make synthetic meat as good as real meat, that's an amazing feat and should be celebrated.
Supposing we manage to do this, I'm mixed about some of the second-order implications. I don't like the centralization of food production that would likely result from this. Also, the potential banning of hunting and fishing as you said, or of consuming actual animals. I'd still want to pursue the lab meat. Making more of something for less time, money, and resources is how the species has avoided its Malthusian limits for so long. Any big advancement brings about issues we couldn't have conceived of before, but the tradeoff has almost always been worth it.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
30d ago
Very true. I didn't prioritize Kawakami and even skipped Chihaya in my first run because I was so peeved about getting scammed by her, and this time around knowing who to prioritize made things go much more smoothly for me. Jose and Ryuji's reworked instakill make it trivial to farm money and XP. I'm not complaining too much as I like having the money to fuck around with Persona crafting, but I wish there was a way to only get the money so I wasn't overleveling the content so much.
The scenes introducing the new characters could be awkward, but I can accept why they had to be inserted in like that. Maruki was handled much better than Yoshizawa so far, and I agree with you that her scene in the casino was goofy and makes zero sense. For me, all of the followup phone conversations tacked on to every confidant or how the Phantom Thieves start a new groupchat every day to gush about how evil their current target is wore very thin.
Makoto was one of my favorites originally, but she really gets on my nerves now. She becomes the main character once she joins, and I wish the game didn't feel obliged to pretend that Joker is the leader since she it's so clear that she is. The way the Phantom Thieves are so thoughtlessly cruel to Mishima rubs me the wrong way too, since the narrative never acknowledges how hypocritical it makes them look. I still love Haru, Ryuji, Yusuke, Akechi, and my favorites from the first time around though.
I have high hopes for the new semester. I was spoiled ahead of time on the direction it takes and it seems quite interesting. I did follow a guide to make sure I wasn't missing any of the triggers for it, though.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
7mo ago
I plan on it, but I'm waiting a year or two for the unofficial patches, DLC, and good mods to get established. I'm hoping I enjoy or can at least stand the game design and writing, because it will be a big portent for how the next Elder Scrolls will turn out.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
This is a good point re Pippa. That said, now that more people are aware of her I wonder if she'll be forced to kiss the ring or lose her platform. There are a lot of anonymous or quasi-anonymous people able to stick it to the activists, but they've made it so that if you want to stay on the big platforms, you have to either remain unnoticed or show public deference to them. With people like Hasan spotlighting her on his stream, the former option isn't really there for her anymore.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I do a combo of Roth IRA + the lazy portfolio 3-way split. I'm avoiding looking at the numbers as of late so as not to stress out since they're investments for the very long term. I don't really do individual stocks or options since I don't value my financial predictive ability that highly. I recently broke that rule and tried crypto trading and wound up with universal losses, though fortunately I only used a relatively small amount of play money to buy in. This has only reinforced my personal rule to stick to long-term stuff and not try to beat the market.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Sure, especially if the player is less comfortable speaking in first person, or is performing something like a song that would take a long time to devise. I have a preference to first person roleplaying, but in the kind of example you gave the player is clearly demonstrating engagement and knowledge of what's going on, so it's all good to me. I take umbrage more with doing away with all of that and just rolling the dice in social situations.
Think "my character sings a song" vs "my character sings this folk song with specific themes that he uses to subtly mock the hostile lord."
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
The admin of the Kiwi Farms, Joshua Moon, is blackballed from most credit card payment networks and large crypto exchanges like Coinbase will even block crypto transfers to his wallets if you attempt to send him money through them.
This blacklisting, as well as his site going down for months, is all due to pressure campaigns from activists and journalists, not any legal wrongdoing — he claims to have never been charged with a crime nor has he lost a civil suit.
Bringing cryptocurrency under the same unaccountable bureaucratic blob as our current financial system would further reduce his ability to operate and fund his site. It remains to be seen if the site will even remain up, as this is not the first calm period of things looking stable since the pressure campaign began.
Everything since MAPPA took over making the show from WIT aka the “Final Season” which has pretty much been 3 seasons of content. Barring a few amazing scenes I really dislike what it did with the characters and themes of the story.
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