Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
No bio...
User ID: 214
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I'll recommend the OG Boomer's Gate. What many people enjoy about it is the companion characters you recruit and experiencing their stories while balancing their personalities to keep them happy. I'll admit I've never experienced that; I always make 6 custom characters and play the game with them. For me the enjoyment is purely in the well-written story and the amazing combat system.
It runs off of 2nd Edition AD&D, which is a really cool system and will have some interesting differences for players of modern D&D/CRPGs. Most of the differences are in how spellcasters work. For example, spellcasters use Vancian magic, which means they prepare spells in advance and can only use each spell as many times per day as they prepared that spell. For example, if your wizard knows 5 1st-level spells and 4 2nd-level spells but can only prepare 4 slots of 1st level spells and 2 slots of 2nd level spells, you must allocate a spell to each specific slot. Want to cast sleep more than once per day? Better prepare it multiple times. This is really cool and will satisfy that Batman fantasy. It's a lot for a new RPG player to learn, but an experienced player will really enjoy the system.
The other big difference is how casters scale. They're incredibly weak and fragile early. Most of the time they're slinging terrible darts terribly since they can only cast 2 spells at 1st level. They scale incredibly though - if you play the same wizard from Baldur's Gate 1 to the end of Throne of Bhaal in BG2 you'll watch them go from a weakling who will die to a stiff breeze to a reality-warping demigod. Newer editions try to balance casters to martials at all stages of the game, so playing a game where this is very much not the case is a nice change.
I'd recommend playing Baldur's Gate 1 then importing/remaking your squad in Baldur's Gate 2. Throne of Bhaal is an excellent finale to the series. Play Icewind Dale if you really love the combat system of Baldur's Gate, because there's very little story in that game, just lots of encounters. Ironically I liked the encounters in BG much better, but it's still good content.
I agree with your sympathies especially when it come to cut stuff. On a show you have to cast, build sets, account for the limited ability of your core audience to follow many concurrent plotlines. On a finite budget it’s pretty easy to say “where the hell is this going” to a lot of the book 4-5 plots and cut them, especially when the books don’t have an easy answer to that question.
I’m less sympathetic in cases like Dorne where they built the damn sets and hired actors, just the wrong ones. That felt like the writers just didn’t understand what Martin was doing with Dorne at all and said fuck it, let’s add some girlbosses and put Jaime in it. Give me Arianne back
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Any Fire Emblem people here? A new mainline game was finally announced this Tuesday, Fire Emblem Engage. It's been over three years since Three Houses released, unless you count the Dynasty Warriors game, which I don't.
There have been comments on the main characters' split color look. Specifically, his/her resemblance to the colors of a specific toothpaste brand. The character design has grown on me, but the clowning is well-deserved. The character designs of many of the side characters are more concerning for me, as many look like generic gacha fantasy art at first blush. I'll have to see them in more detail and how they grow on me. The game looks like it takes many leads from Awakening and Heroes, for better and worse.
Notably, it doesn't seem to have a route split, which the last two new (original) games did, and also seems to be rolling back some of the focus on the Persona elements of Three Houses. I'm lukewarm on route splits, since it's often obvious after you've played the routes where compromises in design and quality had to be made to support them. I liked the Monastery in Three Houses, but know it's not for everyone.
I'm also interested in how it will be built around permadeath. If you don't know, it is a staple mechanic in Fire Emblem that if a unit hits 0 HP, they die and are not usable for the rest of the campaign, unless you reload the map of course, potentially losing an hour of progress. You're supposed to play to keep your units alive and if someone is going to die, it better be for a damn good reason, because you won't have them for the rest of the run. Early games in the franchise drowned you with tons of recruitable characters with little personality to act as replacements, though you were still incentivized to keep your best alive as the replacements are often worse.
This mechanic has become more and more vestigial as time has gone on and the games add more RPG elements, to the point where it added nothing in Three Houses and actively tanked its storytelling. In a game with a small cast that puts a lot of focus on the story and relationships of each member, it kind of ruins the experience that only 3 of them can ever appear in cutscenes to account for the fact that the player may have lost them. It's... quite terrible, honestly, and I hope the devs re-evaluate the mechanic if they continue to go in that direction. On the other hand, I have nothing against permadeath as long as the game is built around it. I'm expecting Engage to be like Conquest, which in theory has permadeath but does not design around it at all.
This is the main thrust of it from Matt Taibbi from his statement to congress this month. I don't know why they released the leaks as tweets; it's impossible to find specific receipts for these statements when they're broken up between 20 threads over several accounts...
We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election, where we read things like:
Hi team, can we get your opinion on this? This was flagged by DHS:
Or:
Please see attached report from the FBI for potential misinformation.
This would be attached to excel spreadsheet with a long list of names, whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.
We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.
A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”
Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.
Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense.
But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.
By implied threat of regulation I mean the unsaid thing that would be on these companies' minds when they received a communication like this — what will they do to us if we refuse to comply? These requests weren't based off a legitimate court order, just the government saying "We'd really like it if you stopped this person from saying things we don't like." Right now they're doing the most they think they can get away with, ReportMaxxing and informal requests, so if given increased jurisdiction over content we have good reason to suspect what they'd immediately start doing with it.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Damn, I hadn't heard of that. I feel bad for them, their prices are pretty high but they were the only company besides Stable Diffusion that seemed to actually want to give people what they wanted and not grandstand about keeping the tech away from the plebs or combating social bias.
I'm convinced that the HODL meme is a sociopathic way for current bagholders to get others to raise the price of their investment to the ideal cash out point. Many of the people who bought at the bottom made out with lifechanging money.
A lot of them though, yeah. They're just idiots. I begged my friend to sell his Gamestop stocks at his buy-in price when the stock rallied back up to it, but he held on for the MOASS and is now in the red. I don't know what can be done to protect those types, short of just not allowing them to spend their money on stupid things, which opens up a new host of (worse) issues. As the adage goes, "a fool and his money are soon parted."
EDIT: I may be undervaluing the clout you get in these communities for HODLing and hanging on well past when you should have sold. For some people, the money may not even matter and it’s more about the clout and fun of fucking around with like minded men with a normally serious topic like investing. Again, not my thing, but for some that may be worth it.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
In fact creative people seem to be barely hanging on, against all odds.
They seem to be flourishing. It feels like every day I can find something new and amazing that I'd never heard about before. The problem is that there is too much good stuff out there right now, because as an individual you have limited free time and lots of responsibilities and goals.
Because the less you practice something the worse you become at it, and AI generated art doesn't give you a lot to practice.
I can see that. I still think art as a hobby will be widespread despite it not being economically viable. Art as a means to an end is where things get exciting. To give an example from my own life, I moved for work and started an online tabletop campaign with some friends of mine. This is normally something I'd do in person, but the situation is what it is. Moving online has its drawbacks but also gives me a lot of opportunities to increase the production value of my games with pictures and maps while we play. I'm not great at drawing and it isn't feasible to make that much art myself, but being able to generate it instead of hoping I can google an approximation of what I want to show? That's really exciting.
I just think the kind of people that would use to play music at your local pub, paint, or join a theatre group, increasingly just don't bother anymore, and that AI will only make it worse.
An overabundance of entertainment does make it easier to just consoom, but better tools and more time due to cheap/free labor from automation similarly frees up creatives to create. We'll have to see how it balances out. We used to have to have 9 farmers to support 1 non farmer. Better technology has turned that number on its head, and I would bet on it continuing to do so.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
10mo ago
This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right?
The mainstream journalistic reaction to this movie is full of handwringing and non-arguments. But they're not doing it because they're secretly pedos or want to cover for them. Circling the wagons, even if purely on instinct, is natural when you sense that someone is attempting to build an ideological superweapon against you, which Scott described in Weak Men are Superweapons. The whole post is worth reading if you haven't; it's one of his best and quite brief. This passage is most relevant though:
I suggested imagining yourself in the shoes of a Jew in czarist Russia. The big news story is about a Jewish man who killed a Christian child. As far as you can tell the story is true. It’s just disappointing that everyone who tells it is describing it as “A Jew killed a Christian kid today”. You don’t want to make a big deal over this, because no one is saying anything objectionable like “And so all Jews are evil”. Besides you’d hate to inject identity politics into this obvious tragedy. It just sort of makes you uncomfortable.
The next day you hear that the local priest is giving a sermon on how the Jews killed Christ. This statement seems historically plausible, and it’s part of the Christian religion, and no one is implying it says anything about the Jews today. You’d hate to be the guy who barges in and tries to tell the Christians what Biblical facts they can and can’t include in their sermons just because they offend you. It would make you an annoying busybody. So again you just get uncomfortable.
The next day you hear people complain about the greedy Jewish bankers who are ruining the world economy. And really a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish, and bankers really do seem to be the source of a lot of economic problems. It seems kind of pedantic to interrupt every conversation with “But also some bankers are Christian, or Muslim, and even though a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish that doesn’t mean the Jewish bankers are disproportionately active in ruining the world economy compared to their numbers.” So again you stay uncomfortable.
Then the next day you hear people complain about Israeli atrocities in Palestine (what, you thought this was past czarist Russia? This is future czarist Russia, after Putin finally gets the guts to crown himself). You understand that the Israelis really do commit some terrible acts. On the other hand, when people start talking about “Jewish atrocities” and “the need to protect Gentiles from Jewish rapacity” and “laws to stop all this horrible stuff the Jews are doing”, you just feel worried, even though you personally are not doing any horrible stuff and maybe they even have good reasons for phrasing it that way.
Then the next day you get in a business dispute with your neighbor. Maybe you loaned him some money and he doesn’t feel like paying you back. He tells you you’d better just give up, admit he is in the right, and apologize to him – because if the conflict escalated everyone would take his side because he is a Christian and you are a Jew. And everyone knows that Jews victimize Christians and are basically child-murdering Christ-killing economy-ruining atrocity-committing scum.
You have been boxed in by a serious of individually harmless but collectively dangerous statements. None of them individually referred to you – you weren’t murdering children or killing Christ or owning a bank. But they ended up getting you in the end anyway.
Depending on how likely you think this is, this kind of forces Jews together, makes them become strange bedfellows. You might not like what the Jews in Israel are doing in Palestine. But if you think someone’s trying to build a superweapon against you, and you don’t think you can differentiate yourself from the Israelis reliably, it’s in your best interest to defend them anyway.
The whole situation is a big culture war W for the right because it's a bad look to get so upset at a movie about a guy fighting child trafficking. But most journalists pushing back against this movie aren't thinking "I'm going to try to suppress this because I'm secretly a pedophile." They're more likely thinking of all the posts on Twitter and Facebook they've seen about the Satantic pedophilic elite, the ones that argue they control most of society and salivate over filling them full of lead.
While most journalists would agree that pedophilia and sex trafficking are bad things, they definitely don't buy into the idea that vast portions of society are controlled by pedos. But they do know that the person who believes this considers journalists as a class, at best, complicit, and at worst, in on it. So when they see a movie about hunting down child traffickers that the kind of person who posts about Satanic pedophilic elites seems to like... The incentives are all there for journalists to use their narrative-setting power to slander it however they can.
I remember there being a similar, but obviously less widespread and institutionalized, uncomfortable reaction on the right to the game Wolfenstein's "Punch a Nazi" ad campaign. This led to a similarly easy gotcha — what's the matter? You don't think Nazis are good, do you?
This kind of statement puts you on bad footing, which of course is entirely the point. But you don't have to be pro-Nazi to notice that the person fantasizing about violence seems to have a much broader definition of the term than you do, and that their definition includes you. Staying silent while they attempt to normalize extra-legal action against you might be ill-advised.
I'll say that I despise the seemingly complete capture of journalism as a field by activists who see it as their duty and right to use their platform to set a progressive agenda. I know a few people in real life in and adjacent to the industry, and they have a genuine antipathy for middle-America, whiteness, religion, etc. The widespread loss of trust in the industry is well-deserved, in my opinion. But I think the "they're all pedos/covering for pedos" line of thinking is either dishonest or misinformed, and may prove to be dangerous down the line.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
You're underselling the effect of these things because they're normal now, but we used to live in a world where on-demand entertainment meant picking one of 3 channels on TV whose content was made by very similar people. Hell, there was a world where to even own a copy of a book was a huge status symbol, because we didn't have a way of quickly copying them. The democratization brought by computers, the Internet, new tools, etc. has created a golden age of creativity.
In previous eras, if you wanted to be an artist, you needed a wealthy person to sponsor you. Now, open a Twitter or ArtStation account and get to work. If you are a writer with ideas too weird for publishers, you can get a following on Twitter and outsell most published authors. Musician? No need to sign a deal with a label anymore, just make good music and network. Interested in video? There's YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, etc. Take your pick of media — books, games, short videos, fanfiction — it has either been improved by or invented as a result of new technologies. If your media is too samey, then that might be due to a lack of looking on your part.
My fear is we will turn us into mindless consumers, incapable of creating anything beautiful anymore, or even understanding the world around us.
Why is this? From my point of view new tech that democratizes creation is the best solution to those that would like to gatekeep and limit the range of acceptable thought. If people seem dumber now because of things like Twitter, I'd counter that the average person isn't much of a thinker anyway and you're just able to see them more clearly now.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
8mo ago
I listen to most of my music through Youtube. It often shows me interesting new music in my recommended and in the automatically generated playlists.
Also, sometimes random other media will send you down a rabbit hole. I discovered They Might Be Giants when I was younger from them doing a partnered event with an MMO I played. The event’s story featured the band members and their music would play in the relevant zones.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
It does seem like a case of pathological compassion. Fortunately, there was some debate on the issue in the class. Maybe half to a third of the students, including myself, argued as you did, and this was in a very orthodox left environment. That said, this was a few years ago and things have only heated up in the culture war since then, and it was clear which side the instructor favored.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Criminal justice reform can be somewhat of a snarl phrase because it’s generally used by people who seem to not believe in prison as a concept, or more charitably, are blank statists enough that they believe almost everyone can and should be rehabilitated with enough time and effort.
I’m not really in that camp and think we can and should lock people up for as long as we need if they’re violent menaces to others. That said, prison conditions in the US are appalling and I get extremely uncomfortable when people righteously gloat about how a criminal will be violently raped in prison as retribution for his crimes.
Someone who goes to prison for a minor or nonviolent offense often finds himself joining up with a prison gang just to have protection. Once you’re out, your criminal record hurts your employment chances, but it’s okay because you just networked with a group of hardened criminals… it’s like we designed the system to both maximize suffering and crime.
I’ve seen a few suggestions for reform on here that I really like. One was from a rather controversial user who used to post here named Penpractice, who suggested public corporal punishment instead of jail time for minor offenses. Basically, humiliate and let the criminal resume his life, rather then send him to prison to meet worse criminals.
I like this idea, but since I don’t believe the optics of this could survive for a minute in the US, a better solution came from 2cimirafa, who basically said “keep violent offenders in prison until they’re 60 and give them fast food and video games to keep them humanely fat and sedated.” If that could survive the inevitable Republican swipe of “Democrats want to buy Playstations for every felon in prison” it seems to be a good idea. Keeping violent offenders comfortable and sedated and off the streets should cut down on violence for prison guards, less hardened prisoners they would prey on, and of course the average person.
Obviously, both ideas would take a lot of work from concept to execution, but they seem a lot better than the current system.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
8mo ago
Go figure. It's very noticeable for a lot of properties, like League of Legends, but I always wondered whether it was an unspoken thing or explicit rule in these companies to always be showing certain types front and center. I'm in a different field, but I have received explicit instruction in the past to request diversity from the graphics team when I have ad creatives made.
I suspect this is why you aren't allowed to change the race or sex of your character in Battlefield One. You're gonna have to swallow your pride and accept playing as a black woman fighting for Germany in WW1.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
You're correct with regards to TikTok's content moderation. It's more willing to serve you extremist content than current-day YouTube, but much more moderated than Elon Musk's Twitter. The posts linked are possibly only still up because the algorithm and human moderators aren't looking at MrBeast content with as much scrutiny as they are at Little Dark Age Hyperborean edits.
Still, it's interesting to see the posts up with that many likes. Usually the ban threshold for content like that is tripped before a post or account gets too big. Maybe there weren't enough user reports to flag them?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
You alluded to this in your last paragraph, but I want to stress that Gacha games have penetrated the Western market and are here to stay barring legislative changes. If you aren't familiar with the term, it refers to a type of game that requires players to roll some kind of slot machine to unlock items or characters that they use to play the game. The games are almost always free and allow progression with ingame currency that can be unlocked with time, but the credit card allows for much faster progression and the games are designed to get you to pay. This is often done by throttling progression once a player has invested time but not money. Some games are "better" than others with regards to this, but playing them is on some level adversarial as the developers wage psychological warfare against you in an attempt to get more of your money.
The main incentive to spend money is to unlock new characters. Many Gachas are built off existing IPs with lots of characters and a built-in fanbase, like Fire Emblem or Fate. Newer characters are typically mechanically better to encourage a treadmill of spending and unlocking, but I would say power is probably only half the reason people will try to whale (Gacha term for spending a lot of money) for a character. A large part of the draw is feeding on the emotional attachment a player has to a specific character, whether through waifuism or some other draw. This is also the reason so much Gacha art is highly sexualized.
If you haven't heard of Genshin Impact, it is a Chinese Gacha game with stunningly gorgeous visuals, music, and character designs. To say it is huge is an understatement. It has generated almost 4 billion in revenue on mobile platforms alone since its release in late 2020 — keep in mind this is not including numbers for Playstation or PC. Beyond the money, it's hard to overstate how big this game is right now. It boasts about 60 million+ active monthly players, and the player demographics are also not what one might immediately assume for the genre. In the West, 45% of the players are women, and many of them are young.
Anecdotally, at the last few conventions I've attended, I would say about half the teens and 20-somethings were dressed up as characters from the game, with the next-most popular IP being Demon Slayer. Trends come and go obviously; 10 years ago those same people would be painting their skin gray and wearing orange horns. But it's worth mentioning to illustrate the game's relevance. It's probably China's first true cultural export in the modern age. It also puts to shame the deliberate ugliness in many of our local cultural products.
It's worth talking about Genshin because the game is both an outlier and a portent of things to come. The Gacha genre has a (deserved) reputation for being cheap, tacky cash-ins of existing IPs with little artistic vision or compelling gameplay. Genshin Impact is none of those things. It is clearly a labor of love and has inspired huge swaths of people to get into its story and world, create art and fanworks, and dress up as the characters. In terms of artistic vision, it really puts most of the Western AAA scene to shame. And other companies will be taking notes.
The format is here to stay, and you will see more of the design principles exported to more Western games, whose developers are hungry for new ways to monetize. The Western AAA market has been aggressively pushing monetization for years in the form of money-based upgrades, cosmetic lootboxes,and season passes (the current dominant scheme). Why let your customer pay $60 once if you're going to go through the trouble of developing a game? Why do that when you can make so much more money? The troubled release of Cyberpunk 2077 was likely the last gasp of the old ways for AAA. Games as a live service and money-based progression are here to stay.
So it goes. It's a shame that a game like Genshin Impact can seemingly only be made nowadays using these monetization practices. I have a disposition towards addiction, and my way of managing it is to not allow predatory temptations to enter my environment. Having to treat an increasing number of video games the way I treat alcohol is certainly interesting. There's an argument that modern development costs are so high that you need to fund games this way, but I don't see how that sausage is made so I can only speculate whether this is true or not. For games with ultramodern graphics, this may be the case, but if you're willing to look past that, the AA and Indie game scene is much less myopic. Our local Rimworld dev-turned fearless leader can attest to this.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I was hooked since since he first posted Alex Jones Worsdsmith almost 4 years ago. Now he has the attention of people like Peterson and Scott Adams. I'm quite interested to see what kinds of ideas he will meme into the ether of right-wing twitter if he keeps this up.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I'm running the fourth session in my online D&D campaign today. So far it's gone well, though I've had to onboard a few new players to replace ones who proved to not be able to commit. Right now I have 5 great players and have brought on 2 more that I'll have to test out, and would like to have 8 total. It's a West Marches style game, so 4 players from the wider group do a session at a time (I hate running for/playing with 5+ players). Each player is allowed to have 2 characters and it's given the campaign a really cool sense of scale and continuity having a large circle of players and characters that rotate in and out of missions.
Since we're all living in different locations and have different work schedules, this is just about the only way we could have gotten a group together, but I've been dying to try the format for years. It's a lot of work for me, but very fun.
I spent ages developing systems to give 5e actual exploration and interaction mechanics. I created an in-depth system for downtime that lets players use their character skills to gain different kinds of resources. Each IRL week they can choose what activity they do, though often a player will do a few weeks at a time because of scheduling. There are different downtime activities that use different skills and a lot of goals they can pursue. They can do downtime for both characters they run, so they've had fun trying to optimize the system towards their ends.
I'm very pressed for time, since the session is at 7 and I still have a lot to get ready... along with the rest of the workday. Running a game online lets me make the production values very slick, but requires more input time to do so. It's worth it in my book, but taking the time to write this up may not have been, given the situation...
I am morbidly-curious now that you mention this. I've only ever watched the first season of the anime and I left off in the manga when they introduced the anti-human 3DMG
You should watch at least the first 3 seasons; they really are something special.
I should be able to explain what I mean in a mostly spoiler-free way. The creator of Attack on Titan, Hajime Isayama, binged Game of Thrones in 2016 and got really into it, even saying that the ending of his story would be inspired by the show.
There's a point in the story where the themes and style of storytelling vastly shift and not for the better. This coincides with the split between season 3 and the "final season" and there's an easy visual cue to tell when it happened because a different studio took over animating the show. This also coincides with around when Isayama got into Game of Thrones and it started influencing his writing.
I would summarize the original themes of the show (Seasons 1-3) as RAGE, SCREAM, FIGHT. There is something existential coming for you and it won't leave a single one of you left alive. Your 'leaders' think it best if your people quietly went extinct, and as you learn they are far from the only ones... Fight with your lives and with everything at your disposal, even if it means literally turning into your mortal enemy. There are times when good friends have to fight eachother but the mission is never in question because those are the stakes. This and the military imagery gave the show heavy nationalist themes and the series began to be criticized at the end of season 3 once certain interpretations became circulated online. I found it to be extremely refreshing compared to what I'm used to.
The post-GOT era show has heavy Martin themes. War is bad and you'll be heavy-handedly browbeaten for liking the cool parts with the sobering reality of characters you like dying. Morality is very grey all of a sudden. Killing others is wrong, even if they all want you dead... it feels quite incongruent with the earlier themes of the show, even with the story that the author laid out. These themes may sound better to you as you read this but consider that they are kludged onto a work that was saying the exact opposite things for so long. It's a different bill of goods now.
I should elaborate on the storytelling changes as well. Attack on Titan's narrative framing ties you and Eren very closely together. Later this expands so you get the POV of a few other main characters at times, but the important thing is that you and the characters are almost always on the same page. You know what they know, you discover the mystery together. This was the style of storytelling until the shift I talked about, at which point it becomes basically... Game of Thrones.
Tons of characters. You don't follow characters, you check in with them to see where they are with their story. Your relationship to Eren is completely broken as he goes from being the POV character to someone you don't see the inner world of outside of 4 episodes or so. You're catching up with his plans like everyone else is. This is pretty much exactly how Martin does it and the style has its merits... just not on something that did it differently for most of its existence. This is harder to articulate for most people but I think it's why the new seasons are so jarring.
As for the ending of Eren doing Something Crazy — this is certainly where the show was going from the start. His words to a certain betraying friend are downright genocidal in rhetoric. I think in a world without the influence of Martin it'd be framed much differently by the narrative, which would make for some interesting discourse online.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
8mo ago
Before going into Maverick I thought it would be a "legacy character passes the torch to the young, diverse successors" plot, as these sequels tend to be. The movie even teases this for a long time before surprising you with the opposite. One could say it... subverted expectations.
Tom Cruise movie trivia is always a hoot. In Mission Impossible: Fallout, he memorably broke his angle filming a stunt, but pushed through to finish the scene in absolute agony so as to not ruin the shot.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I've been asking it to generate some new monsters and other content for D&D. I've been adding new enemies to Roll20 and wanted to generate new variants of existing monsters, so I'd say something like "generate a kobold, but it has these attributes and does X, Y, and Z." I'm also working on a growing system as a player downtime option, so I asked it to "generate a list of fantasy plants. Give each one a growing time in weeks, flavor text, and if it responds to X, Y, or Z type of cultivation." I was fairly impressed at what it could consistently give me, though it obviously has a ways to go. It was a great way to fish for inspiration and mechanics before refining them into something usable.
Right now, it's best used as a way to rapidly generate ideas/content before someone who knows what he's doing polishes and fixes it. I haven't seen it output anything that was passable out of the box. This is how I feel about AI image generators too; in the hands of an artist, they have insane potential.
The real strength of the software is its working memory of context. You can issue corrections, prompt it with more information, tell it to adjust something, and it'll do it. That's what impressed me more than the generation itself, I think. The main limitation right now is it doesn't remember anything outside of a session, and it has trouble going past half a dozen revisions or so. This is to be expected since it's a free service at the moment, so I only see this improving.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Shut up and drink the $2000 wine, its good because the label says it is.
OP never says anything like this. They say that there's nothing wrong with generic wine, but that there is a world of wine minutiae to explore if you're willing to get into it.
It does not matter that anyone who watched the show and read the books could identify that they are not related in any way aside from labeling. Labeling, and what it implies is POWERFUL and should affect your experience.
The impression I got was that they are willing to spend a lot on certain vineyards because the wine they produce has qualities the OP finds worthwhile, not that the vineyards are worthwhile because of their brand name.
I'm not a wine person; I don't tough alcohol at all due to a familial history/predisposition to substance addiction. But I do have hobbies, and I understand that with any hobby there are vast differences in the understanding of a layman, intermediate hobbyist, and high-level hobbyist. The same goes for entry-level versus high-end equipment. I'm not an audiophile or photographer, but I can accept that when they drop thousands on top-of-the-line equipment, they're doing it because it makes a difference to them.
That doesn't mean you can't get enjoyment out of things at a laymen or entry level. To be honest, the effort to reward ratio of many hobbies seems better at the entry level, when you know enough to enjoy yourself but not enough to know what you're missing. But I can believe someone when they say the 2000 dollar camera has qualities the 200 dollar one doesn't. Same goes for this subject for me. I don't think this makes someone a slave to brands or whatever you're saying.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I'd love to see nuclear implemented at all, so if we have to put them out at sea then so be it. I'm a layman when it comes to this, but I guess there's the risk of contamination going directly into the sea if things go wrong. That said, we've detonated nuclear bombs over the oceans in testing before so it's probably not an existential problem, and we still run the risk of ocean contamination with traditional power sources via oil spills.
I don't think this will change the minds of many who aren't on board with nuclear already. Most of them oppose it on concerns of safety or the supposed permanence of the waste. I suspect there is a large group against nuclear because it can address power sustainability without fundamentally restructuring our economic and social system, but this is getting close to CW thread territory so I don't want to get into that.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I'm having so much fun with NovelAI. It's basically StableDiffusion but trained on danbooru, which is an anime art booru. The AI has some limitations - you can only really do one character at a time, it has some issues with anatomy, and my god does it struggle with the hands. That said, if you work the prompts and iterate on the generations you like, it generates some really good stuff. It's also remarkably consistent at depicting the same character once you have the prompts figured out, at which point it's a matter of generating until you get something that looks good and doesn't have the typical AI shortcomings. I've shown some of the fanart of characters I've generated to friends and then dropped that an AI made it to near-universal shock.
I'm also using StableDiffusion to generate assets like scenery and enemies for my online 5e campaign, which it has done very well. I'm on the browser model for that since my graphics card is AMD and I haven't had the time to jump through the hoops to get everything working yet.
I'm sympathetic to the issues this will cause for artists, but at the same time these tools are incredible. I dislike the "soulless" description I've seen thrown at the tech. My main creative strength has been with words and fiction. I've tried my hand at digital art and made stuff I'm proud of before, but I've always considered it a massive bottleneck in terms of time, talent, and resources. What I can't depict by hand vastly outstrips what I can depict, so being able to convert words into illustrations is both delightful and mindblowing to me. This isn't soulless AI vomiting images to drown out human intent, this is AI allowing human intent to manifest more easily for many more people.
In short, AI art is very cool, try out StableDiffusion, or NovelAI if you're a weeb.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Now that Order of the Stick has entered the CW thread, I'll say that I always think of Xykon's legendary "power equals power" monologue to V whenever someone on here discusses conflict theory or institutional capture.
Wow, I didn’t expect my first QC to be about Genshin Impact of all things. TY to whoever nominated it
More options
Context Copy link