cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
4hr ago
I see your point, I think it is interesting, but ultimately wrong. I do agree that they have changed, but I don't believe the change is bad. Digital distribution has been absolute boon for video game lovers.
I mostly have to go to various poorly publicized indie corners to find what I want
This is not hard? In fact it is often fun and entertaining. The gaming subreddits that follow a niche genre or specific indie game are one of the few places on reddit I still enjoy visiting.
Steam has also made discoverability very simple. They have every imaginable way to discover and filter games on their platform. You can listen to curators who care about the same thing as you, use game tags, look up "games similar to what you already play", see sales, get bestsellers in your country, or best sellers internationally, user ratings, price, etc etc etc.
cjet79
4hr ago
First, because he got caught up in a Chinese Honeypot, then because he obliquely threatened to nuke me.
Same two links for me, but I do remember the second one
cjet79
4hr ago
Endless jugs of fermented grain, huge buns of bread in reserve, the nile delta spread out in an inviting welcome, and countless hard obelisks and pyramids erected all long that river. Egypt is such a slut.
cjet79
5hr ago
I'll second your take. I think it was maybe more that he had a lack of options rather than having some particular thing for this woman.
cjet79
5hr ago
I feel the same way looking at photos of the Chinese honeypot in question. I'm not saying she's ugly or anything, but she seems decidedly... mid? And this is coming from someone who has a thing for Asian women! There are plenty of Asian women who aren't even famous for their looks who are more attractive e.g. Tiffany Fong, Yvette Young, Jia Tolentino. I've personally met Chinese women who were hotter than her.
Arnold's wife Maria Shriver and the woman he cheated on her with Mildred Baena. I feel confident in saying that I'd choose Maria over Mildred.
But I do wonder if the choices for Arnold and the choices for weren't actually as good as you'd think. Arnold might have been in a sexless marriage. And Eric might have been a creepy politician with weird power fantasies that turned lots of women off.
The choice between "will you have sex with an ugly/mid woman or no woman at all" is a lot easier for most guys to understand, and I think that might describe their situations more accurately.
cjet79
14hr ago
It would be a conflict of interest to put someone in jail and also profit from it. We shouldn't be getting anything of value from prisoners except the fact that they're off the streets so they aren't committing crime any more.
Well said, its why the Kids for cash thing was so horrifying.
cjet79
14hr ago
I think they are correct to fight it. Any sort of seemingly soft barrier can be turned into a hard barrier.
"You must look at an ultrasound of the baby before abortion" is how it starts. And then suddenly the state also makes it very difficult to get ultrasounds at abortion clinics. Or restricts and regulates who can give ultrasounds.
Similar things play out in other areas of regulation. "You need to make sure this building isn't harming the environment" becomes 'you need a specialist environmental inspector that we license and regulate into obscurity and the waiting list is years long to see one'. Or "You need to have firearms training before you are allowed to own one" ... and only police or police in training can actually visit the firing ranges where they do firearms training.
The power to tax and regulate is the power to destroy. When the goal of your political opponents is to fully ban a thing it is correct to be suspicious of them proposing a "small" barrier.
cjet79
2d ago
I totally agree with your point about it being a great game and a great narrative.
My dislike of the flood is a personal preference. I just don't like horror games.
cjet79
2d ago
That is the oldest good thing I could easily find. Because it was posted above.
cjet79
3d ago
It works to scare you and make you feel weak in the moment. Which is great horror game gameplay. And I don't dispute that they were good at having that freakout moment. But as an FPS enemy they were shit.
Once you know the flood though ... they suck. Nearly every flood fight is exactly the game. Explosives to soften them up, they won't even dodge them. Backpedal the whole time. Use human ammo/weapons.
Whereas every covenant fight felt like a unique fight. Even replaying the same level and varying the starting conditions a little can make a fight feel totally different. It might turn into a close up slugfest. You might go melee if the opportunity presents itself. Or you are hanging back and exchanging precise fire to whittle them down. Or the vehicle fights! Whole new dimension of combat with the covenant, but the winning strategy with the flood is the same as ever, backpedal and blast away.
cjet79
3d ago
Halo 2 and 3 had levels that seemed to either be entirely flood or entirely covenant, and I just avoided playing the flood levels for the most part. So my annoyance was greatly lessened, but I still felt the completionist urge to beat them all on legendary difficulty.
cjet79
3d ago
Halo had little competition in the "horror game" genre, and the flood is a great horror game enemy. However I believe it was a bad FPS enemy.
I personally hated the flood as an enemy in the halo games. The game basically conditions you to fight the covenant and then does a switcheroo where all the standard tactics and tools backfire when used against the flood.
Covenant weapons that are stronger against energy shields and weaker against flesh. The hardest enemies had energy shields.
The radar was suddenly useless because it was flooded with signals.
Most enemies would engage at distance and if you had worse ranged weapons you needed to close the distance and flank them. The flood just bum rushed you, the right move was always to just immediately start beck peddling.
The flood would resurrect dead bodies. Which works as a jump scare the first few times and then just requires you to bash bodies laying around so you don't get ambushed from behind while backpedaling.
The covenant enemies in the game were perfection though. They'd support each other with covering fire, engage you at their optimal distances. The elites would use cover to regenerate their energy shields forcing you to get close to break their cover or use well timed grenades to finish them off. If you didn't kill off their support units first they'd tear you apart while the elites recovered.
Ammo for any given weapon was often limited enough that long engagements would force you to switch weapons. You start the engagement with a good long range weapon, and then close distance and use a secondary short range weapon and melee attacks to cleanup.
Most covenant weapons were not hit scan, so there was some ability to dodge. But the needler would send a horrifying swarm of tracking needles after you that made finding cover very urgent.
cjet79
3d ago
I haven't tried at this in a while maybe I should just set aside a day and try it.
cjet79
3d ago
Groundhog life is maybe one of my favorites. Or just any games in that vein. Magic Research 1 and 2 are both similar.
https://old.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/115dfw6/collection_of_time_loop_incrementals/
Time loops incrementals just scratch an itch.
I will occasionally go browse game recommendations from /r/incremental_games. I've maybe played hundreds over the years.
I do eventually end up cheating or abandoning them if cheating is impossible. Usually I just cheat to make sure it's not an "idle" game. Cheatengine for speed hack and memory editing, and if that doesn't work, editing the system click and abusing offline bonus time mechanics.
Creature collector games I tend to avoid. And loot focused auto battlers have to be best in genre for me to like them.
cjet79
3d ago
I think I topped out as a writer in highschool and things have been slightly downhill since then. I'm usually pretty happy with all my old writing and some of it seems even clearer than my current stuff.
cjet79
3d ago
The only way I can play Stellaris is as a determined exterminator (not sure if that is the right term, but they are at perma war with everyone). Just feels like all the diplomacy and niceties in the game are unrealistic. I should set one up where all civs are determined exterminators
cjet79
3d ago
Last time you solicited requests for AI tasks the motte crashed for like a full day.
I'd say work on TheMotte bug fixes if I was being perfectly altruistic.
What I personally want is my own personal incremental game, cultivation setting, time loop, etc.
cjet79
4d ago
Things I'm curious about:
- Why hasn't it been re-invented? If it does grant intelligence enhancements, then why only invent it once? Why wouldn't it get rediscovered every millennia? I guess you mentioned them doing it a bit in France. Still seems like either Rome or China would have been willing to test this out at some point. Julius Caesar supposedly had a big head too.
- Head trauma happens. Is there no way this could end up accidentally reproduced with some combination of injury plus acceptable surgery? If it happens enough times I'd think the modern medical profession would notice it.
- I wonder if this is an evolutionary trap. Like maybe certain genes take better to the headbinding than others, and if you enlarge their heads you get smart people for a few generations. But if you ever stop then you have a kid with genes that needs headbinding to be smart, and without them they are even dumber than average.
- Whats the story with why it stopped? If it confers a strict advantage you'd expect it to eventually just spread to everyone in the population, right? If its a tradeoff type of advantage though, then collapse of the practice would make more sense. But what is the tradeoff, maybe they are all smarter and more spiritual but physically uncoordinated?
- When is someone gonna try it on animals?
I hate fake stop signs. Many parking lots are private property and not overseen by government.
Stores just get lookalike stop signs and plaster them everywhere. Dilutes the meaningfulness of stop signs.
cjet79
4d ago
A Return To Factorio
I am interested in doing another factorio run. In October 2024 the factorio space expansion was released and in the months that followed a couple members from TheMotte joined in to work together at completing the game. We were successful in reaching the endgame, building a ship that could survive the rigors travel and ultimately making it to the outer solar system location. xablor was the main co-op player during the campaign. Some other jumped in briefly (or relatively briefly since that time might have still been a dozen hours).
It was mostly a vanilla run with limited mods added. Until we reached endgame and got interested in just adding a bunch of mods, but by then I was a bit burned out and done with things.
I would like to do a run this time with mods. Specifically Krastorio 2 Space Out, and all of the recommended planets and additional mods suggested in the readme for that Mod.
Why a modded Krastorio playthrough?
The main reason is that I am more certain of completing it. I've done a full Krastorio 2 playthrough on factorio prior to the spaced out launch and it is one of only two overhaul mods I've completed. The other one was the space exploration mod (which got converted into the expansion).
Additional reason is that I think it adds more features to the game while mostly leaving the challenge level intact. With other mod overhauls I've found that I quickly get annoyed if it is more difficult than the base factorio game with little added feature content. I don't want artificially more complex recipes that have the same results. If I wanted to gate factorio's features behind more difficulty I'd just up the science costs in the game. Ultimately I like the base game factorio difficulty, and I don't want to add to it.
I also don't want to do another vanilla run through. Even though it has been a year and a half since I completed a vanilla run through, I suspect I'll get bored with all of the same challenges. Unless those challenges are on the path to unlocking new things.
I am open to discussion of other mods being added. With the caveat that if it increases the base difficulty of the game I'll need more convincing.
What/who I'm looking for
People interested in collaborative factorio gameplay. Playing together at the same time would be nice, but is not necessary, we can set up a document exchange and pass the file back and forth if play times don't align.
I'm not planning to start the playthrough immediately. I'll probably post in the next friday fun thread as well to gauge interest. I think it would be neat to have enough players to run this as a 24 hour thing. Five players at a time would be fun and a new experience.
I might also be recruiting from another gaming community I am a part of, a Starship Troopers Extermination light mil sim company.
cjet79
4d ago
Congratulations!
I'm coming up on my ten year wedding anniversary, and we were together for two years before that. So not much longer of a tenure than you. But marriage is different than dating.
My general advice is to go all in. Mix finances, get a house together, have kids, etc.
cjet79
5d ago
I suppose that is fair. It's hard for anywhere to filter out the crap when it's entirely crap.
The early 2010's kind of feel like it was a peak of information availability/quality. And things seem to have deteriorated back to everyone being in the dark about world happenings.
Professional life in America has a weird double reality happening.
One where sex exists, men are horny, and women are using their bodies to advance.
And one where we act like sexless automotons in the workplace and things are determined on merit and skill.
I call it a double reality because both are true, but they are also obviously contradictory to each other and reality at the same time. The sex realism reality is at odds with having a functional workplace. And the merit matters reality is at odds with human nature and behavior.
There are three groups that matter in most organizations (and their comparative name at a national level in parenthesis). Managers (politicians), Employees (staff), and Owners (voters).
Managers tend to like the sex reality, owners tend to hate it, and employees have mixed feelings depending on how much it benefits them.
Owners tend to like the merit reality, managers tend to hate it, and employees have mixed feelings depending on how much it benefits them.
This has served me well for understanding job shit that happens, big government, small government, big corporations, or mom and pop stores. Some things that result:
I wish I could say "if you want to fuck people at work, you are bad and shouldn't do that" but I'd be gigantic hypocrite. I dated a girl from work in high school. Met women at work parties for one night stands in college (I was working on capital hill at the time). Had a sexual relationship with someone in HR at a workplace. Later at that same workplace I met my wife, dated her secretly for a while, and then openly dated before getting married. Can happily say I stopped 'shitting where I eat' after that.
All of that to say I also have no idea what reality looks like in Washington. But "both of the realities are true" doesn't feel wrong to me. There are probably weird sex orgies, there are probably high level government employees cheating on their spouses, fucking hookers, and hitting on underage girls. At the same time it doesn't mean these sexual escapades are running Washington. I'd bet good money that all of the supreme court justices are faithful to their spouses and not getting sexually tricked into supreme court rulings one way or the other. There is probably a large amount of "meritocracy" within agencies. I put that in quotation marks, because it is merit that the agency cares about. But its not so bad to be merit in the sense of "how good is your blowjob technique".
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