fmaa
5mo ago
Of course it makes sense from the spider's POV, but the final part of the conflict is from Holsten's, and his internal monologue is about rejecting his brutish human nature and meekly accepting his new spider overlords instead of going down swinging at a time where they don't know anything about the spider's plans, just that they boarding the ship and injecting everyone with something making people catatonic.
Like, I enjoy his sci-fi worldbuilding and nonhumans, but I would consider his books extremely obvious in their politics, especially because he has real trouble writing compelling villains that don't come across as political pointscoring. Though Chlidren of Time isn't nearly the worst at this, except the embarrassing opening NUN cameo.
fmaa
5mo ago
I would suspect that they're not mixing up spellings, but are just unaware that it's a separate word instead of a weird way to pronounce risky to make it euphemistic.
fmaa
5mo ago
They are natural errors to make if you learn english mostly by reading, so are a strong sign of a non-native speaker. English spelling is unusually arbitrary and it's very easy to read those pairs as homophones. And otoh mixing up there and they're is a nonsensical error to make if you learned by reading, so are a sign of a native speaker. See also could of.
fmaa
8mo ago
I'm confused why you're putting extra time and drugs into the same category here. He can keep taking the drugs for those billable hours.
In fact, I think being against performance enhancing drugs is part of the same confused attitude to work you otherwise decry. Where there's a "proper" way to study/practice law, and doing it on adderall is cheating. Instead of there being an actual service that he's performing with an output/price ratio.
fmaa
8mo ago
Isn't that a pretty standard proselytizing angle, used especially on criminals and drug addicts etc? It may work on spiritual/culturally christian but nonpracticing people, but why would anyone use that line here? It would be a comically bad misread of rationality-community adjacent atheists to believe they "don't think Jesus should love them".
fmaa
8mo ago
Is there an obvious answer to to that setup? One of the kids loves baseball and seems to enjoy every part of the practice, the other kid's maybe only there because the authority figures in his life are forcing him and does the bare minimum to not get in trouble. We don't get any insight whatsoever into the first kid's agency, and the lack of more open defiance from the second could show a lack of agency, but then that would be counter to FHMs larger point. (Which I think is nonsense, tbf. His entire post seems to be "agency=good, therefore the action that lead to the best outcome must have been the highest agency".)
fmaa
9mo ago
I feel like a transhumanist should really have no problem differentiating between things made through the intentional work of an intelligence and things that arose otherwise. Of which all game settings and rules are the former, so this isn't really a useful word when talking about within category differences. What do you think is the game design equivalent of the mountain range in your analogy?
fmaa
9mo ago
It's 2025, I really expect devs to put more effort into it.
This and the following paragraph imply you think it is a lack of effort, not them choosing not to cater to your specific preferences.
Fuck no. It is a perfectly valid concept. Games that have difficulty settings that only amount to differences in HP scaling or damage dealt/received are lazy, making the player do something as brainless as wailing on a foe for twice the time with no moment to moment change in gameplay is as artificially stupid as it gets. Difficulty that manifests as changed movesets, better AI or the player having to manage resources better is fine.
The "HP/damage scaling is bad and wrong" is another, separate stupid complaint from calling difficulty artificial. sun_the_second already pointed out some of the reasons why this is stupid - those values are what fundamentally determine whether the enemy gets to do anything before dying, and whether you have to care about what they do. This is also often having to manage resources better.
But calling difficulty "artificial" in particular is a deep confusion of what a single player game is. There is no divinely ordained natural difficulty from which any deviations are artificial. It's all artifice and there's no standard by which to differentiate them. Developer intentions are still only someone's specific choice, and for big budget games normal is going to optimized for focus testing appeal, not designer intent anyway.
I've never seen anyone but you complain about this, and I've played all 3 of the recent Doom games without caring. In fact, I prefer it, if the enemy is defanged, in a non-trivial manner, then I'm happy to wait to dispatch them after I've dealt with everything else trying to punch me in the face.
If you don't see the problem with taking two significantly different enemies, each with a rich set of interactions with other enemies and the level geometry, and replacing them with two functionally identical enemies (ok, you have to shoot the revenant's guns twice), which, if you're playing well, never do anything, then I can't really explain further. I just hope game devs continue to disappoint you by making games for other people.
You hate iframes because they offend your simulationist sensibilities, I hate iframes because they reduce combat to timing the iframes. We are not the same.
In general, you seem to have trouble understanding that people don't design or play games only for simulationist reasons. Yes, wounding has immedatiate gameplay effects, which can go against the intended experience and/or make the game worse.
Using the incredibly stupid phrase "artificial difficulty" is also a sign of some confusion.
Edit: an example of wounding making the game worse, from those new Dooms. In the original Doom, arachnatrons and revenants are both fairly tanky enemies with unique firing patterns. The arachnotron's steady stream of plasma prevents doubling back while facing them, but is otherwise easy to avoid. The revenant's homing rockets can be easily outrun but require active attention to get rid of by juking them into an obstacle. Both can be easily used to set up infighting. In Eternal, both of these enemies have ranged attacks that are too dangerous to let them fire, but you can easily shoot off their gun attachments. So in practice for both you just shoot off the guns the moment they appear at which point they kinda shuffle around doing nothing.
fmaa
9mo ago
Not being a child murderer is worth >10m to you seems simple enough. Combined with the same sort of distinguishing between action and inaction that's required for basically any human to function, as otherwise you're killing a statistical african for every ~5k you spend on anything besides lifesaving charity.
fmaa
10mo ago
Except those words would describe Scott, a majority of the SSC commentariat and half the Motte before its evaporation over the past couple of years.
And yet very few if any of these people would agree that TPs description fits them, even beyond the parts where he still couldn't resist more boos ("protects (favored) groups as legitimate victims but doesn't really protect individuals" is nobody's self-description).
fmaa
10mo ago
The horses are meant to be identical to our own. Humans on Roshar are refugees from what is implied to be basically fantasy earth, horses are one of the species they managed to bring breeding populations of over. I don't remember if the first book talks about this much (possibly in the context of axehounds being called that despite no other hounds existing).
An NFT ticket gives an unforgeable token, but this token only means anything as long as venues accept it, which they'll contract out to ticketmaster anyway, and they can revoke any access rights from a token as easily as if it was in their database.
NFT house ownership is a great example of something only useful for weird speculation. Otherwise, property rights only mean anything at all if enforced by violence, generally a state monopoly. But if you trust the state to respect that right, the state can just as well maintain the database. If you don't, the token being secure doesn't make the house any more secure.
Not that an NFT house deed is very secure, since by their nature they're bearer deeds. Which might be a useful concept to have for various legal purposes, but I don't think most people would be very comfortable with their house ownership being susceptible to burglary or 5$ wrench password cracking, since to the extent that they function as NFTs, transactions made under duress should be irreversible by courts.
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