Rex
6d ago
On a separate topic. Does anyone know anything about Larry Niven’s Known Space book series? I’m at the end of my Culture reread and need something new.
One reason I reread so many books is that any fiction written after 2016 is completely pozzed. I’ve been through all the often recommended sci fi authors like Peter Hamilton and Alaister Reynold and Simmons. No one ever mentions Known Space. I only just now read about it while searching for the longest sci fi book/series ever written. There was a stay comment of someone saying they like Niven, with the caveat they they know it hasn’t aged well. That piqued my interest.
Turns out he’s some dude from the 1960 who’s written some beloved sci fi books - however he’s a massive misogynist.
Check out this gem of a comment from Reddit:
I don't say this to be rude, I say this with honesty so you have a starting point to gain awareness if you'd genuinely like to do that: if you can't tell Niven is a rank misogynist, you're likely pretty blind to the treatment and presentation of women in fiction. Sometimes when there's observable misogyny in writing, it's part of the universe or a characterization choice. Sometimes, however, it's pretty clearly a general miasma coming from the writer which underlies the way they build worlds and characters. Niven is very much the latter. Ringworld has two sentient female characters. One is too stupid to live, and is basically a sexy baby that the main character is using as a dick warmer in between scolding her, and the other is a manipulative hooker who, like all women according to the text, "enslaves men" with the "tasp between her legs." The other females mentioned in the book are literally non-sentient and used for breeding by sentient males. This is not one but THREE species. It's REALLY blatant.
These Reddit people are so embarrassing. A bunch of dorky guys all patting each other on the back for spotting the misogyny. Fuck these people for ruining the whole genre.
Rex
7d ago
Matter. An odd choice I know as it usually ranks low. I think I just like different things about Banks work. I remember the MC in that was such a boob. I was always amused with his antics. And very cool setting.
Rex
7d ago
Most people find it to be the worst the series. I’d try player of games and if you get a good bit in and still hate it. Call it quits. Player of games is a better book
What’s everyone reading? (Sorry guy who usually makes this one)
I’m 1/3rd through a reread of The Player of Games by Iain M Banks.
I’ve been rereading a lot of Banks this year since I’ve finished most of the sci fi author i think I would like. Before this, I went to reread Use of Weapons and quickly realized I had not in fact read it before! I had always put off reading it for some reason but I ended up really liking it
One of my favorite qualities of banks is that everything is so low stakes, but memorable and satisfying all the same. The plot is at best, a neat device. But there are so many memorable and creative vignettes in his books that it makes him one of my favorites
Speaking of The Culture series, I’m saving the Consider Phelbas reread for last. It was my first culture book and quite contrary to public opinion, one of my favorites. Perhaps because the MC is so disgusted with the Culture. Ever since I read that, I can’t help but notice even in the later book the undercurrent of critique of the Culture. It’s puzzling to me because Banks wrote an essay where he swears up and down that he earnestly believes The Culture is the best possible outcome for humanity and his preferred societal structure. Even after reading that, I can’t help but believe he’s still just yanking everyone’s chain.
Also, I find it very odd how many smart people I know don’t reread good books or rewatch good films or tv shows. Anything that is good or enjoyable the first time around is often just as good or better when revisited. Particularly if what you think of as good includes some decently complex theme or subtext that’s impossible to fully appreciate without knowing where the characters or story is going.
Rex
12d ago
I give my highest recommendation to Valheim. It’s hitting 1.0 in a couple months, but do not miss this. I was in a very similar position as you a few years ago. New gaming pc after not gaming at all for 10 years.
If you’ve followed gaming trends at all you’ll have seen the whole survival sandbox genre explode in popularity. Valheim was one of the catalysts for that. It’s by far my favorite in the genre because it’s carefully designed. Boy just a bunch of shit thrown at the wall or giving players exactly what they say they want. I think the design of that game is a good example of “video games as art”. Certainly more so than the typical narrative I’ve slop that gets bandied about with that term.
Rex
13d ago
I don’t know if it will bomb or not. But I watched a CAM bootleg on my computer this evening. It was literally the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Now, given that it was a pirate copy and most people don’t n ow what that means, imagine someone with a camera on a tripod in the projection booth filming the screen. As such, I can’t really say if the visual impact of the movie makes up for everything else. But since the fidelity was so low, I have to judge the film by its characters, theme, acting, dialogue and plot. I give it a 2, 1, 0, 0, 1 in each category. Overall score 1 out of 10.
I just watched The Return last night. As such the final scene with Odysseus, the bow, and the suiters was particularly horribly executed. I beg everyone who’s watching the Nolan movie to go find and watch The Return. That movie is also flawed, but the final scene is absolutely epic. Watching Matt Damon swing and axe around in a circle like a retard is laughably bad. And watching him play a famous archer and basically hip firing a bow and arrow is so silly.
I saw one good review say it was “Bracingly modern”. With that, I agree.
Are all Nolan movies this bad? I know he’s got some detractors out there, but I recall telling people I liked Oppenheimer. I need to rewatch it to see I was just caught up in the hype of that too.
It’s hard to emphasize how bad I thought a lot of it is. And then to see the critical reviews give it a 10/10. And I’m sure all of the normies will rave about it too. Am I just crazy?
It’s the worst movie Ive seen in quite some time.
Rex
14d ago
I was recently listening to an interview with one of the survivors who was there.
After the ship was hit by a torpedo plane (I think), the ship sunk. Dozens of Americans abandoned ship. The Israeli planes then strifed the Americans in the water with machine gun fire from their aircraft - presumably to kill everyone and keep the story contained.
I always wondered, do people think this is a fake story? Or is it just not a big deal?
Rex
19d ago
Died suddenly after brief illness is such weird phrasing and reporting.
Wouldn’t “old senator found unresponsive after cardiac arrest, dead” make a lot more sense if it was as you suspect?
Rex
21d ago
I’ve got about 30-40 hours left in modded Cold Steel III.
I’ve also been following the slow moving crash of Civ7 on CivFanatics now for past year+. Amazing stuff going on there. It motivated me to reinstall Civ4. I mainly play Civ5 Vox Populi, but for whatever reason I want to give modded 4 a spin now. I found AdvancedCiv mod for 4. A moderate gameplay mod that improves the difficulty curve and does some UI updates. I’m a bit torn though between this and vanilla gameplay. Civ4 is not flawed like 5 is, so ai tweaks being a positive or negative is hard to assess.
I guess my thought process is this: I have 1000s of civ hours over the course of my life. If there is a mod for a 20 year old game that still has an active forum and active development, I reckon they will have it better tuned for my tastes. Better than even peak Firaxis who is still catering to a much broader group than players like me.
Rex
21d ago
I recently had my third child and my much younger brother broke his leg. As a result, I’m spending a lot of time in doctors offices, medical offices, and physical therapy outfits.
For whatever reason I started to notice that every one of these places have these big horseshoe front desks with somewhere between 6-12 women working. They’re generally between 20-60 years old, natural blonde or dye job, mostly slightly overweight or seriously overweight, at least one tattoo, and all of them pretty miserable. These are the working women proles. When people talk about the outrageous healthcare costs, I can’t help but think that it’s all a racket and jobs program. Healthcare companies make a nice margin and get an army of women that toe the line with “public health” and collect a paycheck.
I’m 42. It wasn’t always like this.
I’m saying this all tongue in cheek for Friday fun. But I am kinda curious what people think about the socio-economic-political forces that are driving this.
Is it the same in the UK? In China? I’ve been to a Chinese hospital. That seemed like a lot of young village type Chinese in white uniforms and hats.
What makes these people so miserable? Do people go into this field and turn into this stereotype? Or do the stereotype people get attracted to this field?
Rex
1mo ago
You clearly appreciate Doom at much deeper level than me. Playing old doom with obscure new mods. What is it about doom that is so evergreen? I only played the old dooms briefly as a kid. Never really played them to death or mastery. What’s the pitch?
Rex
1mo ago
Are all the kids playing GTA online? Maybe. I don’t have info either way. I hear about kids playing fortnight all the time. I can’t say I hear kids talking GTA.
My impression of GTA online is that it’s a bunch of old millennials playing RP, the urban community, and third worlders.
People are talking like GTA is going to do historic numbers. Fortnight numbers. I just don’t see it. From what I hear a million concurrent would be way below expectations. I think it could do a million and be on par with other big games this year. I don’t think it’s doing 50 million sales week 1. Certainly not with the urban community and third world as your workhorse to get some alpha over a normal big launch.
Rex
1mo ago
I read this earlier and said, “hmm. Maybe I’m wrong”.
Then I got curious because I had not seen this news that pre order revenue was released. I looked into it. It looks like a bunch of people repeating information they heard in a big game of telephone. The original source is some dude posting info he found in an investment bank (piper sandler) research note that said something to the effect of “46 million pre sale units sold or $3bn rev would not be surprising.”
I’m not familiar with piper sander, but in not a banker (though I do work somewhat related to m&a). But I think it’s uncontroversial to say that these sort of research notes are mere an analysts informed speculation. And they’re usually motivated by something other than “reporting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”.
I remain skeptical.
Rex
1mo ago
It’s probably a me thing, but I just can’t get engaged with a video game at this point without tear your hair out difficulty.
Rex
1mo ago
I’m 100 hours in to Trails of Cold Steel III with SoftBrilliants Difficulty Mod. Probably another 400 hours to go to finish Cold Steel IV.
One of my all time fav genres is turn based command battle in jrpg. People usually dunk on this gameplay as being retardedly simple and boring. The issue is that almost all developers fail to tune their difficulty high enough - often or requires a mod or romhack to fully shine.
On max hacked difficulty. Every single battle is a puzzle. An inexperienced player will probably wipe on the first 2 turns of any given fight. There is always a certain combination of builds and commands that can clear the fight, sometimes in an extremely elegant manner. Finding that sequence is the fun.
Another great series/run like this is Xenoblade 2 on Max Custom Difficulty. That game has DLC that gives you difficulty sliders. Put them all to max. I reckon most people will find the first boss 5 min into the game unwinnable. But it’s not.
When there are actual stakes in these fights, it’s quite fun. And makes the narrative shine.
Rex
1mo ago
Do you play Vox Populi? I find it really is necessary and is the only civ game that is sufficiently difficult after 30 years of playing civ. I tried to get back into IV but struggled to find a good balanced difficulty. And relearning the systems wasn’t easy after being away so long.
All this is to say, i think modded civ is the only real alternative to civ.
Rex
1mo ago
I can’t help but watch the conventional wisdom on GTA6 and shake my head.
- GTA6 will sell more than any other game in history
- Rockstar can charge whatever they want and people will pay it
- There is the huge crowd of casuals who only play GTA and they’re all going to buy it
- We won’t have enough PS5s to meet the demand
- There are millions of people ready to spend $700 to play gta
- The most hyped game off all time.
This reminds me of the 2016 “Hilary will win” crowd. People just repeating conventional wisdom and confusing that for analysis
In your case, it’s probably not a bad move given your points on COD and FC.
But as far as GTA goes, I fully expect it to not meet expectations for impact on gaming or sales. 13 years since its last release is more than enough for it to be out of the general zeitgeist. All of the original creators are long gone. Rockstar announced they’ve excised the juvenile and frat house humor. And it was in peak development during the years where developer trends were at their worst - and we are now fully seeing the ramifications of those trends.
I just don’t think it’s culturally relevant to anyone under 20 years old. I played my first Grand Theft Auto as a PC CD-ROM demo from PC Gamer (I think). I played the hell out of that game with WinAmp in the background and Sublime MP3s playing music. GTA3 was every bit of the revelation people say. And there was continuity for nearly 20 years between Grand Theft Auto and GTAV. 6 will just not hit that same way. For a lot of reasons.
Just my opinion though. I can’t wait to see what happens.
Rex
1mo ago
No kidding. It’s my opinion. How would you suggest we quantitatively prove a relative threat?
Rex
1mo ago
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The have a very effective political lobby in congress that directly affects the candidates running and laws enacted in the country. Whether that’s Americans lobbying on behalf of Israel or Israel directly lobbying them is irrelevant. I think this should be uncontroversially true but examples abound. This influence appears to supersede regular Americans policy and candidate preferences and directly affects me in myriad ways.
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They clearly have the ability to influence our foreign affairs and relationships. Trump carries plently of blame for this war - but again, it seems plainly obvious to me that Israel is the reason we’ve attacked Iran twice now. There were no shortage of people telling Trump it was a bad idea. The Israeli agenda carried the day.
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Israeli concerns, preferences, and agenda repeatedly is shown to be more important than America and Americans. I don’t know what to make of USS Liberty other than that US military seems more concerned with Israeli outcomes than American lives or money.
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The USA and its citizens are reputationally impaired by #1-3.
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Israeli preferences and concerns are privileged in US media. CBS and Ellison seem to have an explicit agenda on this point. And then you have things like the Free Press and Bari Weiss coming from the other angle with “independent media” and podcasts. I put independent in quotes since I’ve seen reporting that she was bankrolled by the Israeli lobby.
I guess those are the big ones but I imagine I could come up with a few more. Additionally:
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People may say that all this is driven by Americans and American preferences for Israel and therefore israel is not to blame. That’s really irrelevant to me. Maybe that gets around the law. But the outcome is the same. And I don’t put it past Israel to be exploiting every tactic available, legal or otherwise, to have their hand directly on the wheel here.
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Chinese and Beijing do not have this level of direct effect on my day to day life - other than our easily manipulated politicians disrupting things trying to counter the Chinese superpower threat - a threat narrative that I find less than persuasive.
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The threat of global jihad and terrorism seems to have been overblown or contained. Again, the only way this influences me is the additional security theater and tax dollar spent on that over the years. Maybe this issue was comparable back in the bush days since our whole society was oriented around terrorism. But I’m also pretty critical of the whole GWOT these days, but that mania seems to have died down thankfully.
It’s a pretty simple equation really. The US is well equipped to counter other foreign threats and none of these other “enemies” have the keys to our house.
Rex
1mo ago
I don’t know what to add to this thread other than to say that when I was much younger, and as recently as 5 years ago, I was always perplexed by anti semitism. I live on east coast so I know some Jews IRL. I was a big fan of Seinfeld, Larry David, Albert Brooks and dozens of other Jewish comedians and entertainers. I thought israel was a pretty badass country.
At some point thought, i guess i just started noticing too many things to ignore. Humans are excellent pattern matchers. Prior to Oct 6, I was already fed up with their behaivor. And I wasn’t singling them out. There’s lots of groups of people that are just so stereotypically antisocial that I’m crucial of.
After October 6 the volume was turned up significantly on their subversive antics. I’ve got zero love or respect for Hamas, but the Jewish and Israeli response to this was outrageous.
Then we get to this Iran Nuclear strikes and this war. Where I am at right now is israel is the single biggest external threat to the USA and my day to day life - bar none. More than china. More than islamists. More than europe. More than Russia.
I can only imagine how many others followed this same evolution. I’m sure there are some good Jewish people that would push back on all of this. And they may have some valid points. But the overwhelming amount of evidence on the other side of the ledger carries the day in my personal opinion. OPs story is just but one example. They are just so darn disproportionate in any response to a real or perceived slight.
Other option: the geo-physical event is coming in the near to medium term and he’s moving to safer territory. At least that’s where my mind went. South America is speculated to ride things out better than North America.
Edit: on a more serious note (not implying the GE is not serious, just less serious), maybe he just realized NZ is a terrible hedge. It seems to me that the commonwealth countries are far more pozzed than the US. It seems hard for me to imagine the government there will be friendly, despite what money can can throw around. As someone else mentioned, if shit hits the fan, they will not let him live the good life while their fake country collapses.
Rex
2mo ago
Fascinating. I love a good conspiracy theory. Something about DarwinismTM doesn’t sit right with me. I’m not a young earth creationist, but it does seem there are a lot of big outstanding questions. And it’s presented to every Westerner as a fairy tale story in school.
Why is this? Well it’s obvious. Politics.
Try bringing this up in typical PMC company and see their reaction.
I have hundreds of hours in VP. I was a lifelong Civ player (started w/ Civ2 when I was 10) up through VI, which I mainly experienced with an iPad. My days with VI was during a 10 year period where I had pretty much stopped playing any games other than a few things like iPad VI and Xcom. VI BNW on iPad I believe was a complete experience. And I was able to win a few games on Deity, at which point I felt like I had solved the game.
When I bought a new desktop pc a few years age I was going on a tear through big mods and came across VP. The attraction there was that it radically tuned up the difficulty, set me back to noble/prince, and became a new puzzle to solve. To me, it still retained the core Civ feeling, but designed for someone with 30 years of prior Civ experience. The complexity was a bonus, not a problem.
I had dabbled with Civ4 Realism Invictus during this period, but I bounced off hard. I was looking for something for Civ4 like VP. Something designed for an experienced Civ player.
About a month ago I got that Civ4 itch again and found Advanced Civ. This is a rebalance mod that keeps 80-90% of the vanilla machines, but add in a much improved AI, UI improvements, and a very slight textures update. I’m now completely hooked on Civ4.
In my current campaign, Nazi Germany (me) just declared war on Rome and successfully razed on city and we’re a few moves into enjoy territory marching on Rome. The Holy Roman Empire saw that I had nearly emptied my garrisons in Munich (border city) and attacked with a 12 unit stack. I reloaded to try again with a smaller warband marching on Rome and delt with Charlemagne just fine. Several turns later I took Rome, but as I did, Gilgamesh attacked my northern city of Frankfurt. I think I need to reload again and pump out more units to defend the rear before taking Rome. It’s unclear to me if the AI is declaring war due to my weakness, or because I’m getting too powerful if I Vasselize/destroy Rome. I’m hoping there is a solution here to salvage the game. This is on Prince difficulty btw.
All of this is to say is that the core mechanics of Civ are absolute pinnacle game design. Expand cities, capture luxury/strategic resources, make GDP/science, war with neighbors. This makes it even more baffling to me how badly Firaxis fucked up VII. I find every entry in series, except VII has value. My biggest issue is that the vanilla AI are intentionally designed to be pushovers when it comes to strategy. Vanilla Deity is the same, just with bigger bonuses.
It’s hard for me to understand how people with a lot of experience with 4x games in general or civ specifically can have fun with the stock difficulty. I need the mods to make the underlying systems become meaningful and engaging.
I can see why it’s not for everyone though. I recall that I found the base game V to be the worst offender from a mechanics and difficulty standpoint. That’s why VP is so meaningful to me.
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