Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
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.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
6mo ago
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.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
6mo ago
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.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
8mo ago
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.
American insider baseball? I lack the context to make sense of this.
Edit: Thanks for the explanations, makes sense now.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
5mo ago
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.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
10mo ago
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.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
11mo ago
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.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
That certainly fits my anecdotal experience. First-hand. Lots of it. My wife's an overtherapied wreck who spends every waking hour re-heating her anxieties. Only ever gets worse.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
3mo ago
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".
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
5mo ago
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.
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.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
3mo ago
That image just starts at bad and then goes through eight stages of worse.
Southkraut
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7mo ago
at a certain point you’re driving out as many viewpoints as you’re enabling by tolerating certain people.
Might be true, but trying to carefully micro-manage which views need to be pruned to what extend in order to give room to which other views, and deciding which views bring how much value, and having an apparatus in place to enforce all of that...well, it might work on small internet forums where small teams of savvy mods who know their userbase well and actually care to maximize viewpoint diversity (though still - by what metric?), but I don't think it scales at all without devolving into conformity enforcement machinery.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
8mo ago
The optimal level of bike theft isn't zero, given an environment with bike thieves.
Explain yourself.
I just finished watching Dune 2 and took some notes while doing so. Notes, not an essay, so what you get is a jumble of thoughts.
- The Director turned a fanciful book that made little sense into a visually impressive film that makes even less. All visual spectacle.
- Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.
- Soundtrack with people suddenly screaming in fantasy-arabic, ouch, my ears.
- Emperor: A fucking joke.
- Chani, if it weren't rude I'd say she's an ugly bitch.
- Irulan - the acting suited the character, the speech did not, the looks did not at all.
- Margot Fenring, Lady Jessica, Alia, pretty actresses, decent acting.
- Fight scenes: Absolute trash. Ridiculous acrobatics VS completely passive victim-badguys. Harkonnens, Sardaukar, no matter, they just stand around dumbfounded and do some slow-motion waving once per scene, while the Fremen breakdance all over the place. And of course the Fremen have regular guns and use them...from off-screen at impossible angles, but not when it would actually make sense. None of the fighting makes sense!
- Lasers and metal-storm like helicopter door guns looked nice though.
- Sardaukar standing around in the desert sun in triumph-of-the-will formation.
- Worst of all: The boots. Floppily open-topped boots in a sandy desert. Ouch. Luckily it wasn't all of the characters who wore them, but I still pitied the ones who did.
- The Fremen hideouts are...giant highly visible architecture. How stupid exactly were the Harkonnens? Do the people of the future just not believe in reconnaissance? Same for the Fremen having a massive but completely unnoticed troop buildup just around the corner from the Emperor's army. Everything is so damn visible! But then the Fedaykin just dig themselves out of the sand at the feet of the army, so I guess nothing needs to make sense anyways.
- Javier Bardem, I don't know if he's a good actor at all. I don't know. Feels like he's phoning it in, or was never much good to begin with and I overrated him so far because I'm a Cormac McCarthy fanboy. Or maybe he is good, but the movie is such overrated tripe that he falls flat.
- The final duel between Paul and Feyd-Rautha is...meh. Not as bad as the one-sided fights preceding it, but it looks like stage fighting 101, with nothing but flashy, highly-visible moves meant to be easy to counter. Makes sense for a movie, of course, but still looks something in between silly and boring.
- Now, to be fair, Dune is difficult material to work with, because it made little sense even as a book. But this is just...all shape, no substance.
A thousand apologies for a worthless post, worthlessly posted, but I needed to put it somewhere.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
6mo ago
Relax man. My wife bought the same plushie - the octopus that can be flipped inside-out to show a smiling or frowning face - a few years ago because she thought it was a funny way to clarify her mood, i.e., actually angry or just hormonally incapable of expressing anything other than grumpiness.
So I for one actually buy the neurodivergent-people-excuse. And not for love of that meaningless term.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
8mo ago
Brigador. Homeworld. House of the Dying Sun. The writing is short and to the point and qualitatively decent and all of it supports the gameplay or world-building and isn't just wordy padding. Remove any of the writing in those games and they'll be poorer for it, because what little there is serves a purpose and is good enough to be worth reading.
Okay, that was a bit of a joke doubling down on "videogame writing is universally bad" by implying that the less, the better. Serious answer: None that I can remember. Cyberpunk 2077's writing is pretty good IMO, but I really mean that it's pretty good for a videogame. I enjoyed my time with it, recommend it, would happily play and read more of it, but even then it's the whole immersive package that makes it work, and the writing mostly contributes by being above-average for its medium.
So far, whenever I followed someone's suggestion of "play this, it's text-heavy but well-written!", I ended up sorely disappointed.
Game writing tends to be derivative (all fantasy CRPGs, all AAA titles), or excessively pretentious (Sunless Seas/Skies, Cultist Simulator), or just plain low-quality either because the developers barely speak English and saw no need for proper localization (E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, Shadow Empire) or because the writers they hired are untalented hacks (Hunt: Showdown, Destiny 2).
There may be games with good writing in genres that I don't play, but I don't really consider visual novels and the like games.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
3mo ago
There are pots and boxes out in the open and the rug and whatever you call that little piece of cloth on the little table aren't aligned with anything.
By all means, it's not terrible, certainly better than my place, but it doesn't live up to the standards that I was raised to see as baseline.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
10mo ago
Okay. So whom are you murdering today? Or do we already live in the best of all worlds?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
26d ago
I like to drink lots of coffee, and generally I can stomach it fairly well. When I notice that I'm overdoing it, I either cut back or water it down. Sometimes I cut it down to a single cup a day for a few weeks. Sometimes I quit entirely for a few months. If you notice health problems that might be related to coffee, quit coffee. At least for a while. It's just a drink, you can drink other things. And the withdrawal symptoms aren't that bad, in my experience - maybe a mild headache for a day or two; nothing modern medicine can't fix.
Decaf weirds me out. Just like non-alcoholic beer. It's wrong.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
The thought of having a viable insect population in my living quarters, nevermind of permitting its unchecked growth, gives me the twitchy eye and makes me mumble "Hans, get ze Flammenwerfer".
Beyond that, all I can see is "All quiet on the western front: effective altruists have their priorities backwards". Nothing new. Maybe touching grass would help those people, but I wonder about the mental ecosystem that produces such impossible notions of morality in the first place.
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.
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