WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
2d ago
And yet those talks, allegedly, were the closest Ukraine and Russia had gotten to a negotiated peace. "The Ukrainians" would have no more to do with ratifying the peace than the average American has in constantly sending them weapons.
WhiningCoil
2d ago
If the Ukrainian army crumbles, is there any doubt that Russia would roll into Kyiv and Ukraine would functionally stop existing as an independent nation?
It beat's not existing at all. Which is where Ukraine's demographics are heading after sending most of their men off to die in trenches and their women are finding new lives abroad. But I guess Zelensky can pat himself on the back, king of the ashes, when the TFR of native Ukrainians is 0.21 ten years after his "victory". Or when their political future is now determined by the flood of migrants which repopulates the region, as opposed to their coethnics in Moscow.
But sure, "Ukraine" would still be an independent nation, even if no Ukrainians are left in it. Not sure why a Ukrainian today should fight for that future though, being cut out of it completely.
WhiningCoil
2d ago
Why do you assume they threatened Ukraine, as opposed to Zelenksy directly? The position Boris allegedly expressed was clear. The West was not ready for the war to be over. You think if Zelensky declined their generous offer for "help", they wouldn't have found someone who would accept it? Or would have even threatened to?
WhiningCoil
2d ago
entirely unaware that he was the leader of the UK and not the US
Yeah, that's clearly the most obvious read there. That I'm completely retarded and can't tell the US from the UK. Not an assumption that Boris was acting on US policy goals despite being a UK politician, with the key quote being that he insisted "The West isn't ready for the war to be over yet". When the US is funding 90% of the war, it's a safe assumption to make that Boris was writing a check the US was going to cash, with their tacit approval.
I didn't bother responding to you then because you taking such obvious liberties with my actual claims, but if you are going to sit back and crow about it like it's some sort of victory, fine, you've gotten my attention.
WhiningCoil
2d ago
This I can get behind, and says better what I was trying to say below about game writing being load bearing. Game writing is, or was, engineering, just like making the rest of the game was. Both on the level of "How much room do we have on the screen/in memory to fit words" and also "What is the greatest economy of language we can use to maximally support the world being built?" Many times a lot of this writing was only found in the manual.
I'm going to riff off Diablo for a minute. Grabbing my ancient manual off the shelf, it has so many casual hints of a greater world. Like King Leoric sending the warriors off in a war against a northern kingdom of Westmarch. The rogue is from a mysterious order, who's purpose is never disclosed. The sorcerer is just one of many mage clans from the far east. And then of course the bestiary and the history, written from the perspective of an in universe character, vastly flesh out the world.
And what is the actual game? 16 levels of a dungeon in a singled ravage town. Unknown "black riders" recently came through devastating it. Lazarus had just lead a party into the dungeon to be trapped and killed by the Butcher. Now go. 95% of the lore in the manual doesn't directly come into play. It just builds a world hinted at. A world, IMHO, Diablo 3 largely ruins. Never bothered with 4. 2 did alright I guess.
It actually reminds me that a lot of my favorite fantasy novels or CRPGs emerge from home brewed table top RPG settings that the creator steeped in with his friends for years before he put pen to paper for the first time. I believe that's how Malazan Book of the Fallen got it's start. I think Record of Lodoss War as well?
WhiningCoil
2d ago
I've heard good things (and am slowly making my way through) Unicorn Overlord - it seems refreshingly straight-down-the-line, and is gorgeous to boot.
Funny you mention that. I'd heard enough positive chatter about it that I bought it on sale and jumped in almost completely blind. I've been very pleasantly surprised, and I'm about 4 hours in.
WhiningCoil
2d ago
With Metzen... man, I just don't know. I never followed whatever the fuck happened with World of Warcraft past the vanilla experience. The cracks were showing in WarCraft III, at least for me, and StarCraft II was heart breaking in how profoundly stupid and masturbatory the story was. Do a thing, undo a thing, redo the thing. I hated it.
I just don't think Metzen's ability to story craft grew with his ambition to be "epic". He was perfectly able to do some rudimentary world building and a pulp fantasy storyline, largely following Carmack's old formulation that story in games was like story in a porno. When he tried to make the story good for it's own sake he fell flat on his fucking face. Maybe he got lucky with StarCraft, probably the singularly good story he did.
I think this is just part of the broader signs that our culture is dying. Nobody tries to tell a tried and true story with any sincerity anymore. Everything is endless subversion. Heal turns, face turns, pointless soap opera drama. I've come to loath all that deeply. It feels like we can't even create stories anymore, much less anything more substantial.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
Two things.
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It's not just video game writing. Writing across the board has utterly fallen apart. Characters lack any sort or purpose or core motivation, and mostly just get shuffled to the next artificial point of conflict/drama. Plots make almost no sense, even on their own terms, with characters acting in wildly unbelievable ways to force it along. Or the plot just regularly breaks the rules or themes of the work because it doesn't know what else to do. And that's not even touching on the fact that literally the only themes worked into anything these days is weird demoralization propaganda focused entirely on privilege/oppression dynamics, often in strictly black and white moralistic terms. Zero awareness of the human condition.
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In so far as video game writing was "good", it was good in the sense that it was load bearing. The dialog could be awkward, the prose could be stilted, but if it supported the world that was being built and created the illusion that the game was a more lived in, real place than was possible to actually create or depict given technical, financial or design constraints, people generally say it was "good". I rarely find this to be the case anymore, as weird current year political bullshit immediately collapses the writing under the load a fictional world places upon it.
I do sometimes try to entertain the arguments of people who claim nothing has changed. That video games always had out of place "current year" pop culture references. Or that they were already political. And I know examples abound. I recall reading about one particular Infocom game that was written out of pure spite for Reagan winning a second term.
All the same, what felt like rare exceptions has become the norm, to the point where it crowds everything else out. It hasn't quite reached the level in games that it has on Netflix, where probably half the dialog is weird current year political references and marxist bullshit, and 3/4 of the characters are nonsensically and almost impossibly diverse for the setting. Which is to say, sometimes you encounter a purely ludic game with almost no writing what so ever. But among any game I've seen that has any appreciable amount of writing to speak of, if it's western, or even if activist got ahead of the translating duties, it's all sorts of shit up with current year nonsense.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
My recollection is that one person mocked Russia as being a gas station, and a second person mocked the first saying it was a gas station with nukes.
Sadly my memory has rotted to the point where I can't recollect whether it was Obama directly who was person one, or a surrogate/policy expert of his. Likewise I can't recall if person two was Romney/McCain or other person in their orbit.
Alas.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
I think this comes down to the neoliberal obsession with GDP. It completely obfuscates strategic importance and control. It's the sort of myopic focus that allowed us to outsource critical infrastructure to China, and then we got bent over when COVID hit. Because to the neoliberal, if number goes up, who cares who controls a thing? Money is power, not actual physical possession of a strategic resource... right?
Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. It's coast are Russia's only warm water port. It's an important strategic buffer between Russia and keeping their enemies less than 2 hours away from their capital. How "poor" Ukraine is, however shitty their stock market is doing, however bad their GDP is changes none of those fundamentals.
Russia itself was mocked as being a third world country with a gas station. That hasn't exactly aged well.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
we would still be as white as South Africa ever was- not as it is today
I'm astounded you wrote that so unaware of the consequences you accidentally baked into your own "refutation".
WhiningCoil
3d ago
South African demographics are simply not in the cards
I don't see why not. The neoliberal solution to 3rd world poverty seems to be to import literally the entire 3rd world. 10 years ago it was only crazy right wingers that thought, or at least spoke the hate-fact, that America would be minority white in our lifetime. The respectable anti-racist who set the narrative claimed that was a "conspiracy theory". A mere decade later I'm supposed to believe "South African demographics are simply not in the cards." after all the lying and gaslighting I've already been subjected to?
WhiningCoil
3d ago
The Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda reported Thursday that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used his surprise visit to Kyiv last month to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cut off peace negotiations with Russia, even after the two sides appeared to have made tenuous progress toward a settlement to end the war.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/diplomacy-watch-did-boris-johnson-help-stop-peace-deal-ukraine/5792502
“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter. The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/01/did-boris-scuttle-talks-between-ukraine-and-russia/
Yet according to Ukrainska Pravda (a pro-Western newspaper in Ukraine) pledging support wasn’t the only reason for Johnson’s visit. “Sources close to Zelenskyy” told the newspaper that Johnson was an “obstacle” to peace talks because he’d brought “two simple messages”.
The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. Johnson’s position was that the collective West … now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to “press him.”
Fast forward to August, and an article in Foreign Affairs by the self-described Russia hawk Fiona Hill claims that April’s talks did yield a “tentative” agreement:
According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.
In the end, of course, no such agreement was reached. But the timing suggests it was Johnson’s visit that scuppered the talks.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
Still beats becoming a vassal state of Russia.
Does it? Does it really? I'm not sure I'd choose being extirpated from the land of my birth and replaced wholesale by a hostile and alien culture, over being conquered and turned into a vassal state by a co-ethnic I share a thousand years of history with.
I mean, it's like asking me, a 90% British American with roots back to the founding of the the country, if I would rather America be flooded by Africans to the point where white people have been virtually extinguished, or a resurgent British Empire reconquer the USA.
I'd pick this baffling to imagine resurgent British Empire 101 times out of 100. Offers more hope for my descendants than genocide.
A shame that's not a choice actually offered me...
WhiningCoil
3d ago
Between this, and the comment below pointing out how most women of child bearing age have fled Ukraine, the outcome seems obvious. We pressured Ukraine into committing suicide. There won't be a Ukraine in 50 years. It will be an economic zone virtually devoid of native Ukrainians. If the world is lucky, it will be relatively well managed by Russian interest (minus the obligatory corruption, not like that is anything new in Ukraine), and mostly function as the bread basket of Europe same as it used to. If the world is unlucky, it will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.
But the Ukrainians are over. The only question in 50 years will be, who was morally culpable for the genocide? Russia for starting the war, or the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace back when their demographics would merely decline slowly, as opposed to fall off a cliff? If NATO had been hands off and Russia had won the war, there'd probably be more Ukrainians in 50 years than there will be now. I doubt there will be a million in 100 years.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
I just put the 4x8 sheets on my SUVs roof rack. There is a pretty simple plywood rack you can easy make with 2 2x4s and metal brackets.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
Finished up a project I'd been planning for a long time, but the weather finally got nice enough to do in my shop comfortably.
A rolling stand with some drawers for my drill press. Went super easy. The frame is just 2x4 construction lumber trimmed down to 3" wide, half lapped at the joints and glued/brad nailed together. It's super fast to put together, and more or less self levels as the glue continues to dry after you put a load on it. In this case a heavy ass drill press. The drawers are just 3/4" cheapo plywood with 1/4" cheapo plywood bottoms. Pocket hole screwed the cabinet for them, then rabbet joints, glue and brad nails for the drawers. The larger drawers were captured bottom, the smaller ones weren't. The rails are just more plywood.
It was a fun, quick build. Probably took me a solid 2 days. Spent one morning a few days back getting the frame of the stand put together, all day yesterday getting all the rest except the drawer faces done, and then an hour and a half this morning finishing up that task. This project was mostly training for breaking down sheet goods with my fancy new Kreg jig. I have to admit, it worked fantastically, and was a lot safer than feeding 4'x8' sheets of plywood through my dinky little jobsite tablesaw. That said, I still think I need to rough cut with the circular saw and do final dimensions on my tablesaw since it's more accurate. Once it was all put together I saw a lot of the cuts I'd made completely with the jig had about 1/8"-1/16" of wobble to them. The quality of the cut was a lot rougher too versus the higher quality blade I have in my tablesaw.
It's bonkers how much you pay for plywood smaller than 4'x8'. Basically a "Hah hah, you don't have a truck" tax. It's fully double per square foot for a 2'x4' sheet versus a 4'x8' sheet.
With that done, it clears the way for the boardgame table I plan on making out of black/rustic walnut. Going to be my first actually pricy build. I computed the lumber cost will come out to around $350. Which is a steal over buying one, which ranges from $1000 to $2000 or more.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
I still wear mine. But I'll never forget a woman in my highschool. Her family was on vacation, got into a car accident, and she was the only survivor. She was thrown from the vehicle because she wasn't wearing her seatbelt.
Still ended up paralyzed from the neck down and an orphan.
WhiningCoil
6d ago
If you are particularly adventurous you can also just replace the whole head unit and get something with all the features you want. Not even that hard to do.
WhiningCoil
6d ago
I do a kettlebell workout, have dinner with my family, help clean up dinner, do the cat litter, take out the trash, put up the chickens, then relax with my wife for an hour or two until she passes out. We're still watching LOST, though we've been reading together a lot too. After that sometimes I get some games in, either Helldivers 2 or Unicorn Overlord lately.
WhiningCoil
6d ago
Guessing, cause once again, I'm stateside, 10k USD used to get you a Civic or Corolla about 6-8 years old, with 60,000-80,000 miles on it. Wouldn't count on luxuries like heated seats, parking camera or remote start though. Also, sanity checking those prices now, that appears to have been solidly in the before times, and it's now 15k USD-ish for a 10-15 year old model with roughly 100,000 miles on it. Which is wild, cause that's verging on what I paid for my 2007 Civic off the lot.
Ah well, inflation's a bitch.
WhiningCoil
6d ago
I'm not sure about Scotland, but stateside it's hard to go wrong with a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla. Even over 100,000 miles you aren't likely to have to deal with any major engine or transmission work. Although on my Civic, before the tree fell on it, I was having to get wheel bearings replaced and things like that. The alignment was also just permanently out of whack at that point, probably my own damned fault for driving it too rough over potholes and the like. The speakers had blown out too, but those were easy enough to replace myself for $100 in parts off Amazon. Aside from that it was regular maintenance and things you'd expect like replacing tires and brakes.
All the same, I drove that thing from 2007 until 2022 or so. I regret nothing and want another whenever the chance presents itself.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
I mean, I'm not against this exactly. I just fully expect it to be another tool of anarcho-tyranny where charges like this are rarely if ever pursued against parents of a politically relevant skin tone because disparate impact, restorative justice, blah blah blah.
Maybe not. Maybe I'll be surprised. A case in my state did see a mother of a political salient identity actually get charged, convicted, and sentenced to two years. They are going after the assistant principal for criminal negligence too, and frankly, she deserves it.
I wish I knew more about the process these convictions go through. I know our Republican Governor and Republican DA have been going hard on our out of control schools, and the bureaucrats who've ruined them. Sad to say it'll all probably get undone lickity split as soon as power changes hands again.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
If we believe this premise, the Indians as a whole are incompetent, self-destructive, and generally pathetic, whereas the Han Chinese, with their statistically higher IQs, should be far more successful. Yet if we do a quick comparison of India and China - it doesn't seem like the Chinese are outdoing the Indians by that much.
I saw some random twitter nonsense about what makes a "genius". And sure, IQ was on the list, but so was disagreeability. You have to be willing to go "Everyone else is wrong, fuck you, I don't care what you say about it." In business, you have to be willing to put your money where your mouth is, and stake your life savings and generational wealth on the fact that everyone else is leaving money on the table that only you see.
I don't have a study about how Asians score on agreeability versus Europeans or Americans. But anecdotally, a buddy of mine moved to Japan with his wife, and his half-Japanese kid was entering kindergarten. The first day involved an hour of speeches all the 4 year old Japanese kids sat perfectly still through. His half-Japanese kid was all over the place trying to play and talk to people. My own kid, who's plenty smart and generally ahead of her peers, would probably be similarly incapable of sitting still for a whole ass hour. We took her to a 75 minute show for kids full of dog tricks, with ample calls for audience participation, and she made it roughly 45 minutes before she simply could not stay butt in seat one moment longer. We were fairly proud of her. But hearing about that Japanese kindergarten class made us wonder, are we retarded or are they aliens?
Are you me? I got yelled at so much in my middle school geometry class for reading the WarCraft II manual instead of paying attention. There were some absolute gems among manuals back then. Blizzard had some of the best, but Interplay and Westwood tried too. I got this Encyclopedia Frobozzica with Return to Zork, had me howling with laughter despite not having played any of the games before. The diary that came with Zork Nemesis that may have been from a version of your character that time travelled into the past and got killed seeded the plot well too.
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