WestphalianPeace
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User ID: 184
WestphalianPeace
2yr ago
I just beat the game. Depending on when you acquired some of your companions you might be locked into a class-path that isn't intuitive.
I respec'd Karlath and Shadowheart, eventually running the following party Main Character: Gale: Evocation Wizard Shadowheart: Life Cleric Astarion: Assassin Rogue Karlach: Berserker Barbarian
It's not complicated, but it gets the job done and lets you experience the game for the first time so that you can have fun making weird party compositions for your next run after you feel like you've got a strong handle on the game and know what to expect. Karlach is an HP tank that eventually becomes a khorne-tier murder berseker, Astarion does regular sneak attack damage, Shadowheart eventually becomes an high AC heal tank, and Gale give you the CC & sheer damage you need. Fireball solves everything.
Fought every battle normally and had a great time. With one exception. The True Soul Nere fight. Save scum. plant barrels. do whatever you have to do. That fight was an absolute nightmare and you can get screwed on spell slots due to its time restricted constraint.
WestphalianPeace
2yr ago
Military History Visualized depicted this disparity in production quite well.
And although the difference in battleships & carrier production is stark I find the immediate and ever increasing disparity in Escort Carriers and Destroyers to be the most damning.
WestphalianPeace
2yr ago
I will reaffirm reading War Nerd's version of the Iliad. The novel format communicates the humor, frustrations, and desires very clearly for anyone who isn't already intimately familiar with a more formal translation. It is simply fun to read.
WestphalianPeace
2yr ago
I'd recommend Ross Douthat's book "To Change the Church" to get a good sense of that. Either in text or audiobook. It's really quit the engaging read, even for a non-Catholic or even non-believer.
Rather than an outright schism a soft coup looks more like manipulating public opinion through journalists ignorance, manipulating bureaucracies hiring (your ideological allies) & firing (or doing the catholic equivalent of "promoting" someone to Siberia), using ambiguous statements that motte (castle) in the text but bailey (field) in public understanding until the lay public is so unaware your old bailey (field) wins the battle for assumed public opinion. Use edge cases to create extreme exceptions to a long standing principle, then expand that principle to other comparable but less serious edge cases. Then after enough time has passed don't talk about the long standing principle at all and instead explain that it would just be hypocritical to allow exceptions for these extreme edge cases but not to those more common cases.
As an example of how long standing doctrine can become completely irrelevant to the common believer until that new generation forms the next generation of deciding authorities, see American Catholic Opinion on Birth Control. A mere 8% of American Catholics believe birth control is morally wrong. If you point this out to those other 92% of Catholics they won't explain in detail why they humbly disagree with the Church. They'll claim there is no disagreement! The most common reaction will instead be an aghast disgust over your bigotry in claiming something so ridiculous as that the Catholic Church opposes contraception. And the coup is complete.
Nearly half of Catholics don't even know Catholicisms distinction regarding the Eucharist. Athanasios may stand like a rock against the world. But the average member is not Athanasios.
To pull off a coup as Pope you have to make it look like you never pulled off a coup. Everything has to be continuity. But with the right voters added here, the right ambiguous statements added there, you can pull off a coup. You can alter unchanging Dogma because you convinced regular people that you never actually altered anything. It was always there the whole time.
WestphalianPeace
2yr ago
would definitely be very interested. even just spitballing the German fraternities part and then doing the modern day later would be fine.
WestphalianPeace
2yr ago
I don't mean this to challenge. merely to ask. do you remember that exact newspaper? I'd love to have that saved for posterity when arguing about this in person in the future.
WestphalianPeace
3yr ago
People of all races reduce people of other races to flat cheap characters in romance novels or pornography, and imagine dating that flat character when you ask them about interracial dating.
I think its worth making explicit that Asian women are also the thinnest grouping in 'racial group broadly defined'.
Asian women are vastly less obese than the non-asian population of the United States.
There is this idea that white people (and weebs in particular) think of Asian women as this old practically Victorian Era submissive 3 steps behind the husband trope but I contend that that's not the primary appeal of Asian women to White guys.
In an American context Asian women are far more likely to be
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Japanese, Korean, or Chinese descendent
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roughly speaking are thinner than white women by 30 pounds, hispanics by 40 pounds, and black women by 50 pounds
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more likely to be intelligent as well as college educated
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less likely to come from a family that's undergoing social breakdown from fentanyl/drugs.
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match speech patterns/accent to the local White population if they grew up in a predominately White area instead of adopting a distinct dialect of opposition.
If the Hispanic population in the US was small, distinct, and had the same level of thinness and educational attainment I maintain that Hispanic girls would have a similar highly desired status as Asian women today. Imagine a situation where the US was 4% Chilean, Argentinian, and Uruguayan with the same traits as expressed above. I guarantee if you talked to a random white guy he'd go 'oh yeah. hispanics are cute. I love hispanic girls'. But hes just using physical features as shorthand in order to estimate an what is overwhelmingly an expression of body type & compatibility. It's not a desire to obtain a lifestyle of tropes from old media and/or pornography about what "foreign women" are like.
WestphalianPeace
3yr ago
I've been meaning to read On the Nature of Things for awhile now. Having read it would you stick by the prose translation or advise looking for something else?
WestphalianPeace
3yr ago
As a Delaware Valley Quaker with a Scots-Irish best friend that book was positively eerily familiar. I was expecting interesting facts and instead simply felt uncomfortably seen. The audiobook also perfectly recreates the rhythmic cadence of a proper silent meeting.
WestphalianPeace
3yr ago
Unity of Command 2: Desert Fox DLC - Rommel's North African campaign with 2 alt history scenarios (One for taking Tobruk and one for failing Tobruk but taking Malta). A lot of fun to play the opposite side after the Desert Rats campaign.
Victoria 3 - It's not polished but I played way too much Vicky 2 and it's just satisfying to maximize the Standard of Living for my pops
Darktide - 40k Horde-shooter. Dreamed for a long time about a game like this finally coming out.
Persona 5 on PC - JRPG's at their best.
Anno 1800 finally came out for steam so I'm hoping to finally try the anno games for the first time.
And at some point go back and get around to actually reading Chaos:head Noah.
WestphalianPeace
3yr ago
Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East - David Stahel
1/2 through. Makes the case that Barbarossa started shitting the bed in the opening weeks, not just at the gates of Moscow. Casts a very harsh light on the Minsk and Smolensk pockets in the immediate opening stages of the war. Very critical of Halder & Guderian.
Money- Emile Zola
1/4th through. Realist fiction of the moneyed classes in mid 19th century Paris. Absolutely hilarious. The main character Saccard is a delight of failure & ambition. The audiobook for Zola's 'Germinal' was very good and made checking out Zola's other works seem worthwhile.
WestphalianPeace
3yr ago
I personally tend not to comment unless there is a topic I'm passionate about , I've encountered a 'someone is wrong on the internet' issue, or a topic comes up that I feel uniquely able to address.
So if there is a topic you are passionate about or something you think you have unique knowledge about, then write! Make getting down your exact thoughts on a topic its own satisfaction. Take pleasure in manipulating the rhetoric to try and hit just the right note for what you're going for. Focus on the act of writing itself as whats enjoyable.
Bonus points if at any point you edit your comment to be more in line with the sentiment of charity and exactness. Shoot for that Actually A Quality Contribution Ribbon! Or, alternatively, make it clear to yourself that you just have a simple comment or idea and stop yourself from overthinking about the issue. Easier said than done, but I think either approach is reasonable.
And keep in mind that a lot of comments here are Pareto's of Pareto's. Once the blur of names start to become more clear you'll notice the same names over and over. These are people who are extremely comfortable with posting. By the mere fact of post regularly they are unusual people. So your case is likely far more normal.
WestphalianPeace
3yr ago
https://tracingwoodgrains.substack.com/p/on-mottes-and-mythologies
It's motte-adjacent but directly relevant. TracingWoodgrains writes on why this place exists in the first place, what it's appeal is for those drawn to it, and then how it relates to his own personal crisis of faith within Mormonism. It ends with a very moving declaration to ensure others get the same charity & respect that he was given.
Many motte posts are interesting for their esoteric takes or niche knowledge. But tracingwoodgrains post captures the feel of the draw itself to this place. Of the frustration with an external world of fear and polarization. Of the drive to challenge oneself and find 'opponents' worthy of respect. Of remembering that often people's closest beliefs come from a point, not just of a model of what is true, but of a very intense personal relation to who they believe themselves to be. Of the two futures in front of one each time you encounter 'someone wrong on the internet' - to try to destroy them, or to try to live in peace with them.
WestphalianPeace
3yr ago
I've always found the existence of the Mu'tazila tragic and fascinating, but I never knew their influence on Maimonides and Christianity. Can you direct me to where I can learn more?
WestphalianPeace
3yr ago
Going from pure lurker to attempted effortpost-er can be intimidating if you aren't a natural writer. But if you have a subject that you are passionate about then that passion will carry through even if you find the idea of be awarded an AAQC to be challenging to imagine.
WestphalianPeace
3yr ago
Don't forget, you're here forever
WestphalianPeace
3yr ago
The forgetting about the Comey letter and the anthony weiner peripheral scandal is really quite incredible. There can be a great deal of discussion about why Trump or Clinton got the first 98% of their vote totals. But it's worth remembering just how weird and unlikely it was that specific scandals happened at exactly the worst possible time for Clinton.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/
In a way this is normal. People find it easy to remember grand sweeping narratives and easy to forget week by week minutia. For a lot of people Trump wasn't just supposed to lose, he was supposed to experience a hilariously crushing loss. So for many people, especially people who didn't pay attention during the race because they thought it was a preordained outcome, it's engaging to discuss how Trump (an unthinkable outsider) got so close to/exceeded Clinton (the Heir Apparent) in the first place.
You will be judged by normal people not on your accurate assessment of the truth of the matter, and appropriate weighting of the variables therein, but rather in how well your own opinion aligns with the worldview of the person you are talking with. Or, if you disagree with their worldview, how defensible your worldview is within their worldview. But bringing up how the Comey letter constitutes that random always possible weather event that could swing the election one way or another will win you points with neither side.
Act 3 is absolutely the weakest act (although it also had my favorite Boss). I did not encounter any bugs but there are so many parts of the narrative being kept track of that Act 3 is where something would show up. I've heard of bugs showing up regarding Oathbreaking Paladins in Act 3, but i never had one.
If you've already sunk your teeth into the game into Act 2 then it's worth it to see it through to the end.
My biggest complaint with Act 3 isn't the devs politics but rather that there are so many plot threads that need tying up that the Act doesn't have a strong "Do X then Y then Z" narrative structure. Instead it feels much more like going down the checklist of plot points that need to be wrapped up. A bit of a "wait remind me who this is?" issue.
The best part of Act 3 is that you really get to feel like your party has come into it's own. Everyone is levelled up. End game equipment starts coming into play. You feel like everything you've been building towards has really come into it's own and you can bask in the fruits of your labors. But the game really simply isn't balanced at that level 12 and the solution of 'add more enemies' tends to make some combats a slog.
It's a Larian CRPG so the illusion of choice is precisely that. Most conversations are more about the tone/flavour of how you respond than an actual diverging choice. But there are still real choices in how you want to approach the ending and i'm satisfied with the path I took for (in my eyes) a maximum Good ending.
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