netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
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netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
Hot take: the Infinity Engine games also play like ass.
That doesn't mean they're bad games, but they have the same kind of confusion about timing and positioning and resources which plagued cRPGs well into the 2000s. Plagued ttRPGs, really. Even after 3E D&D staked out its own niche, designers couldn't decide if they wanted combat chess or charop playgrounds. At least Baldur's Gate was early enough to avoid the WoW craze.
There are lots of good reasons to enjoy all those games anyway, but the same can be said for ME1.
I agree that BioWare was a walking husk before Veilguard.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
"Why anybody wanted a competent FMC to begin with". As though we, collectively, sit down with a book carefully chosen for its "competent" FMC and then ensure that the character meets every requirement on our checklist before continuing. This is an NPC's way of approaching art.
The steelman is that dropping a book doesn’t require a checklist. People pick up books for different purposes, and sometimes they don’t actually suit that purpose. You don’t click on RoyalRoad expecting Raskolnikov.
The reality is that people do go down checklists looking for things to be upset about, then complain about them online. You see it with feminist critiques, family-friendly scorecards, DEI complaints, you name it.
I submit that there is a technical mode and a genre mode of reading. Essays like this occur when someone applies the former to works intended for the latter.
When Tom Clancy introduces characters, he likes to spew out a few paragraphs about how they’re the best-trained gun/radio/vehicle operator in the area. This is part of his genre, in which the hypercompetent, hypermasculine heroes navigate a violent but meritocratic landscape. If he avoids a “competence tax,” it’s only due to the general lack of women.
This isn’t usually an issue, because most of the people reading Patriot Games know exactly what they’re looking for. On the off chance that someone picks up a Clancy novel, gets a few chapters in, and realizes “hey, all of these characters feel like they came from an alien planet”—it’s okay if he puts the book down. The spell is already broken.
To be a complex character (i.e. not a "flat" character, the exact phenomenon she claims to be opposing) is to have weaknesses and face adversity. But she immediately claims that a female character whose weaknesses are too prominent will be seen as "wounded", and readers will start to "worry" for her.
There’s an obvious middle ground here: weaknesses should be prominent, but not too prominent. Kind of like the tits. I know that suggests a motte-and-bailey where “too prominent” depends on the author’s social status. But any more strict technical standard will fail to generalize across genres.
I have an inkling that a hypothetical Female!Shinji would fall flat and fail to resonate, particularly for a female audience (regardless of political persuasion), although to be honest I'm not entirely sure why.
An excellent example. Evangelion has an extremely weird overlap between trauma psychology and teenage boy psychology. The former works because Anno was genuinely having an awful time, but the latter relies on having a teenage boy protagonist in a teenage boy genre. I bet there’s shoujo which manages an f!Shinji equivalent, but all these suggestions are pretty unfamiliar to me.
this is part of what explains their preference for repetitive generic girlboss characters.
I submit that most readers of certain genres have a preference for repetitive generic self-insert characters. Most technical readers will not. Again, applying one standard to the other works starts many a squabble.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
New fish just dropped. Well, technically it was discovered twenty years ago, but they couldn’t find more samples until just recently. I for one did not know a pipefish could look like that.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
2d ago
My radio is several years older than that and shows no signs of digital awareness. It doesn't even have the RDS thing which tells you the call sign.
How could you tell which mode yours was in?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
2d ago
The U.S. has spent a lot more than six man-months on that problem over the past eighty years. It’s not a doctrinal problem. Planes remain unable to occupy territory.
Hegseth’s cronies aren’t going to find one weird trick to rout the Iranians.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
3d ago
This sounds like the results of an Aella survey
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
3d ago
AI music enthusiasts: has anyone been experimenting with on-demand solos?
The other week, someone raised the possibility of real artists moving away from click tracks to signal authenticity. That got me thinking about one of the classic ways to stand out when recording a standard. There are a thousand versions of Jones Girl but only one with, you know.
Even though the industry no longer uses that model, instrumental solo sections are still found at the 2/3 mark of many rock, country and folk songs. Some groups use this to show off their technical chops or to personalize live shows. But others have it as a sort of auditory filler before the last chorus. Backing off completely in that window would kill the energy; a good instrumental maintains it and ramps into the finale. (A great one just ends the song.)
AI is very good at generating filler. I’m imagining recordings that leave a background-only section where the solo would be, then fill it in when a playlist is generated. Or even each time the song comes up, if people crave just enough novelty to keep them awake.
I was driving, this morning, and either my radio or the local station was malfunctioning. I swear it was skipping a tenth of a second ahead once or twice a minute. While I would suspect my ancient radio before I’d suspect the regional station’s hardware, I don’t know any way that a normal receiver would accumulate lag, so I wanted to confirm that the beat was inconsistent. Before I knew it I was at my exit.
I think procedural or AI solos are close to artistically bankrupt, but that doesn’t mean they’re without uses.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
4d ago
Correlation, causation.
The people taking a Homestuck community survey in 2025 are clearly selected for a willingness to hold socially ostracized beliefs.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
4d ago
The flyers I get on the regular suggest that would probably earn more Republican votes.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
4d ago
Linked under a discussion about Scott’s AI messaging: Politics is not interior design. Don’t feel bad about skimming the first half, which can be summed up as
Most people vastly overestimate their ability to predict second- and third-order effects of anything, including strategic speech.
The part I wanted to share comes near the end, when he asks why this keeps happening. Selection bias, sure, but also:
It is gratifying to see yourself as a subtle navigator of opinion dynamics, and less gratifying to admit that you are mostly guessing. "This would be counterproductive" is often the most prestigious available way to avoid saying something costly.
Our society really likes countersignaling. Fashion, politics, Internet debate clubs. Historical conspiracy theories. I think a lot of contrarian, edgy statements can be discounted because of this dynamic. Especially when it comes to social media.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
4d ago
Hmm, I guessed that was the girl from Deathloop.
But hasn’t she been in that series since the beginning? Does giving her hair make that much of a difference? It’s not even blue!
Compare Overwatch, a game which I would put on the forefront of DEI technology. Every new character draws flak for being too gay, disabled, Japanese, whatever. Why? Surely they know what game they’re playing by this point.
I think nomenym is being melodramatic. Launching new franchises with inclusion bait is not the same thing as adding inclusion bait into existing ones.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
4d ago
Man, this sounds…batshit. I want to take that bet. I want to promise you that we’re not getting a one-party state in this election or the next, and probably not in our lifetimes.
It feels obvious to me that the negative feedback (in the electronics sense) which has kept each party from winning a third term since Bush I will continue to whip back and forth. I remember watching the 2012 results come in and thinking, naively, that the modern Republican Party was over, that they were going to have ditch the obstructionism and the conspiracy theories and play nice. Instead we got the Trump train. That should be proof that institutional interests and social opprobrium can’t keep the backlash out of politics.
I don’t know. What would it take to convince you that the Democrats aren’t going to seize power, Weimar style?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
4d ago
Rust, the game, or Rust, the programming language?
The latter makes more intuitive sense, but I could believe either.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
4d ago
The PS4 and XBOne released in November 2013, so Tomb Raider definitely had more horsepower to work with.
I’d count Bayonetta as stylized, but I see your point. There are plenty of good- to great-looking characters from the period.
Maybe it would be more accurate to say that lighting and animation for everyday scenarios (like close-up conversations) were really hard up until that next generation?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
4d ago
Almost every time, huh? Sure, I haven’t been keeping up with the latest in bro-shooters, but which ones do you have in mind?
Also, that’s not what he asked.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
I bet it could be done. Xitter really, really rewards playing up a stereotype like that.
But I am very much not willing to wade in and check.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
did not develop it
Are…are you suggesting that white people should only make games about their own race? Is this bait? Forget historical or fantasy shit, Call of Duty is going to suck if they can only shoot up rural towns.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
“Removing gameplay” probably peaked with the QTE craze, but it was never as clear-cut as the OP suggests. Sometimes games which wanted to blow the budget on set pieces and titty physics chose to “remove gameplay” as a consequence.
“Easy modes” are definitely more prevalent now, and unlike the former, people will show up to defend them on ideological grounds. Equity and inclusion, you know? But games are still a product. If adding easy mode generates 5% more sales at the cost of “degrading” that guy’s “achievements,” well…
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Kratos kind of had that meth-head look for a while. I swear he looked older before he got into dad mode.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Or ‘cause of the uncanny valley.
2010 games had enough power to make models detailed but not enough to light and animate them consistently, IMO. The best-looking characters had to be more stylized.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Well, there’s Miriam from Bloodstained.
But this is a series which has dabbled in horny witches and bishounen vampires for decades. Nothingburger.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Hypothesis 4: defenders like the games and project that fondness even if a part is weaker. You know, the halo effect.
Hypothesis 5: defenders could take or leave the characters, but would rather personally behead every single person in the world than give a smug bigot like you a single microgram more stupid self-satisfaction than you’ve already got. This is the standard operating mode of Twitter, a site where there’s no such thing as good publicity.
Disclaimer: I couldn’t tell if the protagonist was a girl and I couldn’t care less. This drama is dumb.
Would you count the above as direct harassment? @RandomRanger is a veteran user with no shortage of polite, eloquent QCs. As far as I can tell, he handled this discussion exactly like he was supposed to.
For what it's worth, I'm still not inclined to give out permabans for crashouts. But I think this one would meet your criteria.
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