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Southkraut

Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.

3 followers   follows 4 users  
joined 2022 September 04 19:07:27 UTC

All alliterations are accidental.


				

User ID: 83

Southkraut

Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.

3 followers   follows 4 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:07:27 UTC

					

All alliterations are accidental.


					

User ID: 83

I don't really get the appeal of continued biological existence myself, at least when we do get other options.

I don't really get the appeal of a machine with a supposed copy of my mind flying to the end of the universe or consuming the power of a star, when we have other options right here and now.

While some of what you say may be correct, I feel the need to temper your enthusiasm.

German society had numerous problems in the 1920s. It was shaken up by the effects of industrialization, urbanization, unification and democracy, and even more badly so the first world war and the following economic crises. The country was very troubled and not at all self-sufficient. What the national socialists turned the country into in the 30s and 40s wasn't much better. Some problems were solved, yes, and maybe it even was the nazis' doing, but what they made of Germany wasn't a lasting high-trust society but a totalitarian shithole that steadily degraded its social capital - by replacing Germany's formerly durable culture with the artificial crackpot pseudo-culture invented by party ideologues, by pouring ever-more resources and manpower into military endeavors (one can make the case that this was justified, given the Bolschewist threat, but frankly I think a large degree of doubt is merited here), and finally by ruining what was left of the country's international standing and plunging it into the war that almost destroyed it at the time by the after-effects of which are slowly destroying it now.

For all that I know many at the time may have fought for the country proper, or against bolshevism, but on the whole the fight was corrupted in means and in goals and led to the worst possible outcome short of an actual Nazi victory, because let us recall for a moment that the people in power at the time weren't sagacious guardians of Germany's heritage and future but a bunch of unhinged gangsters high on their own supplies of ideology and drugs and intent on transforming Germany from a real country with a real society populated by real human beings into some nightmare caricature. They might have coasted for some time on the industry of the people and the military heritage of Prussia, but Nazi administrative competence was, frankly, not much to boast of. I have no doubts that whatever social and economic capital Germany had at the time, the political leadership would not have failed to destroy it in due time.

So, yes, I guess they wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism or Capitalism...but instead we would've seen a third flavor of cultural self-destruction.

I "have" to feel that the great sin of Germany was what it did to the Jews, Cripples and Gypsies. I do feel that the greatest sin of Germany back then was what it did to Germany and the Germans.

As for those WWI vets, you can validly suggest that they weren't all unhinged gangsters, but I will insist that more than enough of them in positions of great power were, and this includes big names like Himmler, Göring, the non-veteran Göbbles and Hitler himself, and a thousand lesser party barons who managed to escape post-war condemnation only because they lorded it over the Germans instead of bullying foreigners or minorities. Some more unhinged, some more gangster, some perhaps neither but alas the the party was top-heavy with unhinged gangsters and the top had the last word on acceptable behavior.

I'm fine with denouncing the common depiction of the Nazis as fundamentally evil, fine with admitting that they did some good, fine with any claim of there being worse things in the world than Nazis, fine with theories that posit that Fascism may have good points, but not fine with attempts to whitewash those particular Nazis as saviors of the Germany they destroyed in their mania and incompetence.

Look at their mismanagement, the purges, the wealth accumulated by party functionaries, and the ground-level stories of German peasants and tradespeople being bossed around and told to shut up and get with the program or else, and look at the total and utter catastrophe that was WW2. It takes a lot of revisionism to clear them of the blame for that. You can, if you like, completely ignore the horror stories of concentration camps and death squads or any principled objection to authoritarianism - there's still more than enough left to condemn the Nazis in general both for what they attempted and for what they ended up achieving.

And I honestly don't know enough about JFK to answer your question.

Do I need to post proof that I am in possession of a one-way plane ticket to Fairbanks?

I am also still waiting for a picture that proves your irrecoverable unattractiveness.

Yeah, I'd call it uglier. The scene in the painting looks mundane, not pretty but simply normal because it depicts a real situation in a real place, realistically. The scene in the poster is an illustration of an imaginary ideological utopia, so ugly that it needs to be stylicized in order to avoid reactions of disgust.

I've spent many hours discussing this exact line of thought with several people, and no, they insist he's a "failson" who's just short of being literally retarded and his entire business model is a matter of burning daddy's money and causing unmitigated destruction in every field he's active in.

In other words, Musk Derangement Syndrome.

What's policy starvation?

How I dislike CRPGs. So much writing, and almost all of it bad. Planescape: Torment, okay, fairly unique. Disco Elysium, not my cup of tea but I can see there's something to it. But yet another generic trip down D&D memory lane, with all the same old systems, the same old setting that was never much good outside of the tabletop to begin with? The intervening CRPGs that I tried - Wasteland, Inquisitor, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker to name that ones I most readily recall - were all such bad, unrewarding trash that I finished not a single one of them. The gameplay is a stupidly contrived to make a tabletop RPG run without a GM, the dialogues go on forever but if you've read one of them you've read them all and none are worth reading, why even play those games? Many play them, so I'm sure I just don't get it, but do I ever not get it!

Which is too many words to say - I hope you're having fun, but I'm not touching another CRPG until I hear some serious praises sung about both the writing and the gameplay.

That seems like conflict theory done only halfway.

I'd say all weapons will be used by all sides that are capable of using them, with no respect for unilateral non-escalation. Progressives will shame conservatives regardless of conservatives refraining from attempting the same, because progressives are currently in a position to quote that piece of the Melian Dialogue: "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.".

Observing the proprieties while your enemies are biting and gouging is only a winning move if there is some powerful third party who values non-escalation.

If you want to look at the picture purely as an abstract piece of visual art, divorced from its context and implications, then fine, it can get away as being merely not pretty. But visualizing the scene and its constituent elements with some degree of fidelity should present an image that requires some ideological or at least aesthetic buy-in for the viewer not to be repulsed. See some of its elements:

  • Cripples

  • Fat people

  • Squatters

  • Graffiti

  • Transsexuals

  • Piercings

  • Tattoos

  • Antifa

  • Stoners

  • BLM

And I don't mean this as a jab against these categories, but I do mean to observe that someone who is not already inured to their sight would almost certainly feel some level of disgust were he to encounter their average representatives. Certainly those who are already on board will imagine more presentable examples instead, or idealized versions, and the poster is almost certainly simply an in-group signal aimed at them in the first place.

To rephrase: All of the elements enumerated above are, if not categorically then at least with most of their real-world examples, fit to cause disgust, and ugliness is merely description of the visual qualities that lead to the more visceral reaction in the viewer.

To be even clearer: Crippled limbs are ugly. Rolls of fat are ugly. Squats are, most of the time, ugly. Graffiti is ugly. Transsexuals are ugly. Piercings are, if not ugly in themselves, viscerally disgusting. Tattooed people are ugly. Antifa tends to be fairly ugly. Stoners often become ugly. BLM activities tend to be ugly. Yeah, there are probably counterexamples, but I'd wager they're rarer than those examples that prove my point. And yes, ugliness is subjective, so I posit some neutral human observer who sees any of these things for the very first time and has never heard of them before.

American insider baseball? I lack the context to make sense of this.

Edit: Thanks for the explanations, makes sense now.

I bought it because I was somehow led to believe that the Imperium of Man would make a good stand-in for the Total War: Thirty Years' War that I always wanted but never got. Well, to nobody's surprise, not even my own, I was sorely disappointed. I came from Total War: Shogun 2, itself a limited-but-agreeable entry in the series, and what I find with TW:WH3 is a giant mess of a game that I thoroughly hate. I have written a very long, very negative review on steam and I would have many negative things to say about the game if anyone cared to hear them.

We don't do that, though. For all of our national self-hate and perpetual condemnation of all that is German, we do not actually celebrate the day of defeat.

Sadly, yes. I stand by my country because what can I do, it belongs to me and I to it, but it's clearly a sinking ship without a future. Hell, without a present, even.

I'm not opposed to civic nationalism, but the Grundgesetz, that makeshift postwar document cobbled together under occupation, is hardly worth much. What binding power does it have, other than being invoked when someone wants to use it against his enemies? What else is there to mark the German? The language, as you noted, is despised even by those who speak no other fluently. Work is esteemed, those who work and pay their taxes are somewhat rightfully considered productive members of society, but this too is only a flimsy pretense or else we woulf not be so tolerant of parasites, of wastes of taxpayer money, of welfare queens. How can a German even be German, nowadays? By holding on to cultural products of bygone ages, since nothing of value is produced any longer?

In the end there may be nothing left of Germany but the land itself. There yet remain Germans, millions of them, who are clearly German and nothing else, but as you and Ilforte said, their national identity is fatally crippled. It cannot reproduce, it cannot expand, it cannot propagate or assimilate, and it cannot innovate. Whatever parts of are lost to time will find no replacement.

I'd write more but I think duty calls.

I get a QC for what was an explicitly quick and sloppy post without any editing or proofreading. This shames me. Is it the length? It must be true what they say. All that counts on the Motte is the length.

At first I just saw it as very unnecessary, since I had already had covid in the summer of 2020 and it had been harmless. By the winter of that year the vaccines were out but I was still feeling safe without one. Then everyone went crazy as described above, plus the creepy politics and media campaigns, and from there on you might call it principle or just spite.

The whole thing caught me off guard; I never saw the social pressure and the social ruin coming until was already too late. I had mistakenly assumed that people around me were running on mistake theory and that my reasons might matter to them. Silly me, it was conflict theory all along and I had strayed into the enemy camp.

But had I seen it coming, I would have done the same anyways. Only with more firing back right away.

Vaccine safety didn't factor into it for me.

We have had ample proof of nuclear weapons' destructive capacity.

Meanwhile, the actual impact of climate change can, by one so willing, be ignored entirely with little ill effect, and the catastrophe scenarios spun up about it come from people with the air of the stereotypical madman claiming that "the end is nigh".

On the one hand, this is horrible.

On the other hand, I'm glad that we Euros are no longer alone with this kind of horrible policy.

Misery loves company.

One copy-pasted very negative and entirely subjective, making-no-attempt-at-fairness steam review that may or may not be mine coming up.


tl;dr: Heavily overrated, actually a mess.

Aesthetically it's ugly, garish, tasteless. Fans of the setting will be unable to notice this, but all that I see is random colors and nonsensical designs. The setting is shit and it's mildly depressing that CA/Sega made three installments for it instead of giving the Thirty Years' War a shot. But people like it and buy it and review it positively. People who hate history. People who watch superhero movies. People who are many, but have no taste.

As for the setting itself, what's even to be said? It's trash. Trashy trash. Worthless. Unsalvageable. Do you need an explanation why? Then stop reading, reading is not for you.

Mechanically, to be charitable, it's functional. It's also by far the least enjoyable Total War title I've played, and I've played most of them. The TW formula hasn't evolved at all, you're still playing the same basic game as back when, but now it has a bunch of Warhammer-related additional systems slathered on top that don't really add to what the game is actually about. The actual tactical battles are perfunctory, messy and poorly manageable, with none of the elegance and legibility the series had at its peak. The UI has degenerated as well and looks worse than ever. UX is unpleasant.

Strategy layer:

  • Armies now cannot exist without a leader, so no good leader with his full stack of twenty units followed by additional leaderless reinforcements - you will always have multiples of twenty units fighting multiples of twenty units.
  • Logistics, usually largely neglected in TW games, have been completely deleted. You can now just summon new units all over the map. Sure it costs some additional money to hire them, but that's a small price to pay for keeping your force behind enemy lines supplied with top-tier troops.
  • Attrition seems like a major issue, until you realize that you can completely negate it by just going a little slower, or by going a little faster and skipping past dangerous terrain.
  • Autoresolve is far too reliable. You're even told in advance which units of yours will be destroyed. Yes, this is how war works: Perfect information and predictability. Sun Tzu had no idea. You're almost always better off autoresolving a fight, which distributes damage almost evenly across your units, then recovering your losses within a turn or two, than to play a battle manually and risk losing entire units that you would then have to replace with raw recruits. What's more, the autoresolve formula doesn't seem to take unit composition into account at all, so battles that you could not realistically win given your troops and the enemy's will often be easily autoresolved in your favor.
  • Winning a fight usually drowns you in pop-ups and TODOs. You found half a dozen magic items, your commanders gained five perks each from having fought a battle and having been the attackers and from the specific enemies they fought and from having been personally in combat, also your heroes would like you to distribute the skill points they just gained, oh and don't forget to check your inventory to see whether you can do some crafting with the items you found.
  • Quests. Yeah, this is what every strategy game needs: Quests. Quests so misplaced and irrelevant to the game at large that you can just let the relevant army teleport to the quest location. This alone should tell you how stupid an idea having quests in this game is.
  • Forget about large-scale geographic concerns in strategy, because random events will just teleport multiple enemy armies right into what you assumed to be the pacified heartland of your empire.
  • You can no longer raid trade routes. Yeah, that was far too intuitive, interesting and realistic. Instead of the practical limit on trade being your ability to protect it, which neatly interfaced with all other systems in the game, there is now simply a diplomatic penalty to new trade agreements based on how many you already have.

Tactical layer:

  • Do you remember when TW was about infantry, cavalry, and ranged troops, and a general being nearby to provide moral support? That was nice. You could apply a little real-world logic and make like Napoleon, outflanking, picking good terrain, maybe even threaten the enemy general, have little fights for valuable locations like hills or escarpments.
  • Now it's about Infantry, Cavalry, Ranged Troops, Flyers, Giants, Spellcasters, what items you have equipped and what active abilities you've levelled up and which of a million passive bonuses you have picked up during the campaign.
  • Get ready to manually cast those abilities as rapidly as as possible. What, you don't like MOBAs? Get with the times, gramps.
  • Fuck your artillery because flying units will just bypass any defensive lines you have.
  • Spellcasters have no counterplay at all. Yeah they only get a few shots per fight, and it's more spectacle than effect. But given that and that you can't automate your own spellcasters, the entire existence of spellcasting is just a major annoyance on both ends and it doesn't meaningfully interact with anything else in the game at all. It's slapped-on and stupid and adds nothing of value to the game.
  • If terrain matters at all I haven't seen it do so.
  • Maps are tiny funnels on which you don't get to position and manoeuver, you just have the two forces crash into each other right from the start.
  • The option to automate some troops on demand, present in older TW titles, is still not back. Given that this game is micromanagement hell, I miss it sorely.

Eh. It's not worth going into the details of it. The Total War series has gone to shit.

I regret giving them money for this. Everyone who recommended this as "well if you want to play a strategy/tactics game set in renaissance Germany, just play this!" was wrong to do so and should feel bad about it.

Sure, but that's pretty risky. If Russia or Ukraine do it, that's just war, to be expected - if any other country does it, then that's them being willing to blow up other country's infrastructure do destabilize them and to harm their economies. It may be worth it in some strategic sense, but the consequences if found out may be too severe to justify the risk. At the very least they'd need some very believable and reliable catspaw.

I don't know about the Indians, but I've been working a lot with Poles lately, and it's been a thoroughly positive experience. Somewhat better on average than with Germans, even. Similarly competent. Much better than the Turks and Russians - a lot more open to just saying "I don't know, this looks like a mess" rather than "Ah yes, I see, clearly you must do X, Y and Z", only for the entire alphabet to turn out to have been irrelevant to the issue; i.e., they're not faking competence, but are seemingly more honest. And I don't know whether it's due to the organization or a cultural characteristic, but the Latvians I worked with were all extremely unapproachable. Edit: Unapproachable at work. Other Latvians were great fun when drunk at a company party.

What are the best alternatives to the Unity Engine?

I know, I know, the Unreal Engine exists, but it just kills my machine to run it and I can't actually afford the necessary upgrades at present.

I hear the name Godot a lot recently, but I don't actually know anything about it.

Obviously I'll be forced to do my own research and experiment eventually, but what are your quick arguments for or against any particular game engines one could use instead of Unity?

Also, in the spirit of YM denouncing his own failings: Until a year or two ago my approach to architecture was to write all my code with a solid layer of abstraction between internal logic and anything having to do with Unity, and to minimize my reliance on the engine. Then I decided that if I ever wanted to get anything done, I'd need to go all-in for Unity and just use all its features that might promise to speed me along. Now I feel right stupid for that one. Bad choice. It's going to take a lot of work to undo all that.

My wife and I usually speak in dialect. A few weeks ago I spent a lot of time cloistered away at work and she spent a lot of time trading voice messages with a northern friend of hers. The friend does and my wife used to belong to the cultural left that try to distance themselves as far as they can from dialects, using that distance to signal tribal allegiance. After a while, my wife began speaking to me and our child in high german. I was honestly horrified. Our dialect is dear to me, a large part of my home memeplex, and I felt like an utter stranger when suddenly adressed in that artificial, impersonal and politically loaded high language.

It's back to normal now but aua did that sting. Felt like the clammy fingers of the cathedral sullying a sacred space.

I think you're largely correct.

There will be no recognizably right-wing government or establishment in Germany for at least another two generations. The well has been too thoroughly poisoned. And anything that may come later is more likely to be islamic than nationalist.

I have no idea what you're talking about and a quick googling only tells me something about a hacked cryptocurrency platform. What does that have to do with rationalism or EA and why should anyone care?