Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
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User ID: 214
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1d ago
Red is a smoother, more modern play experience, has a better organized and less contradictory rulebook, and enjoys support as the current version. That said… 2020 is so sick. The classes are more mechanically distinct, its lifepath has real teeth, the combat is terrifyingly lethal, and the 80s flavor is off the charts. Just read through the real world examples for skill levels for a few minutes.
Kulak wrote up a great piece on the soul of the franchise and why it refuses to die. It has some insight into how a game runs and the very important ways it differs from a game like D&D.
I’ve only been a player, never a gm, unfortunately, so I can’t give much advice on running the game. It can be tough to look at the different types of characters and imagine why a suit and tie corpo, rebel rockerboy, and a cop are working together, but my best advice is see what kind of characters your players are interested in playing and work out the scenario from there. The game can be very player driven with classes like media in a way that lets your players give you inspiration.
It really was a different time. I first read HPMOR last year after over half a decade spent posting in its shadow and the main thing that stuck out to me was how much of a time capsule it is to that era of internet atheism. It was nostalgic and bittersweet to experience as someone who came online during the late years of internet atheism, though imo it highlighted how the story was built on a rotten foundation. How many of the social science studies Harry cited fell victim to the replication crisis? The optimism for an enlightened humanist future seems dead and buried. Where is the promised age of rationality that leaving religion behind was supposed to bring about?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
4d ago
That link is hilarious. I wish Yud would have been brave enough to get into the weeds of wizarding genetics in the story.
Blood theory's main claim is probably not true in the story, but what Harry and Draco found should have been more than enough for Draco to pivot into a more scientifically-defensible version of it, and him not doing so feels close to a plot hole with how hard he was searching for a way to hold onto his beliefs. Also, the boys were only really testing the gene that allowed someone to use magic - they could have done a lot more in trying to isolate what influenced the level of magic power someone had.
There’s a sequence in HPMOR where Harry ‘disproves’ Blood theory to Malfoy through an experiment, thus starting the chain of events that lead to Malloy breaking from his father’s ideology. I was left somewhat baffled reading it due to how this was proven - you either had the magic gene (or the antimagic gene) on a chromosome pair or you didn’t, with squibs having half the alleles. This is enough for the boys to determine that Blood theory is wrong.
But my first thought was… doesn’t this finding just alter the belief system so that muggle-borns like Hermione could be considered real witches? It just so happened that her parents had latent magic genes - the end result of outbreeding heavily with muggle populations would still mean a lot less wizards were being born. Yud doesn’t really give much thought to that. The whole sequence was an unfortunate copout, with Harry’s Science conveniently to coincide with and support the belief system we're already primed for.
I'll say I'm a bit surprised to see Frieren on top right now; I wonder how long the FMA:B mafia will allow that to stand. I don't have a problem with it being there though, it is a great show. I think anyone without terminal shonen brain (what is the anime equivalent term for Ball and Gun Gamer?) can appreciate it.
Frieren is a show that's more about the journey than the destination. I don't think anyone minds that the longstanding plot wasn't wrapped up in the first season when the ending feels emotionally complete and the entire journey up until that point has been so beautiful and refreshing. I'll have to dispute the claim that the art and music are not exceptional; the show is beautifully animated and every shot is gorgeous, and Evan Call's score elevates the show to another level. It's wonderful to just take in the beauty and atmosphere of the show and its idyllic world.
The second season was also good, but it is held back by its disappointing length of only 10 episodes, which doesn't give you as much time to get immersed in the world.
Is it tropey? Maybe. The show affords a lot of emotional exploration and understanding of its characters, even the bit parts, and it is hard to reduce anyone to being a simple villain (except the demons, ha). I'll ask when was the last time you saw such an earnest, heartfelt, sincere sendup of European fantasy at this level of production quality. I can't think of anything else recently — cynical and subversive is in, the monsters are misunderstood and humans are the real bad guys. The church is corrupt and evil, the knights and nobility are twisted and cowardly bullies, the heroes are morally compromised and humiliated. Seeing a show where the 'tropes' are played straight is a genuine breath of fresh air.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
21d ago
I agree, from a Watsonian perspective, it does make sense. Slytherin is written as rotten to the core with no redeeming qualities. Blood purity is shown to have no impact on a wizard's power since it's a heavy-handed metaphor for class in Britain, so their focus on it makes them look stupid. It's not even the case that they fell from grace or lost their way over time, as their founder was demonstrably just as evil if not more. They would attract only dumb brutes and the few elite sociopaths who use them for power.
Out of universe... making Slytherin all of those things was a deliberate choice. The story would have really benefited from the gang making a Slytherin friend down the line, possibly in Dumbledore's Army. Even in the later books, when Rowling seems to have misgivings about casting an entire fourth of the people in her world as irredeemably evil, none of the Slytherin students choose to stand with Hogwarts when push comes to shove.
Interesting to think about the counterfactual, but at the end of the day these started out as children's books, and struggling single mother Rowling probably didn't have much room for empathy for British aristocrats when she wrote them.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
22d ago
He is confused in this scene, yes, but there are plenty of other lines that support Harry feeling disdainful about Cho crying, or explicitly thinking of Ginny favorably because she does not cry, which brings to mind the obvious comparison.
From Order of the Phoenix:
"Yes, he had liked Cho for ages, but whenever he had imagined a scene involving the two of them it had always featured a Cho who was enjoying herself, as opposed to a Cho who was sobbing uncontrollably into his shoulder."
"Why does she always want to drag up a subject that makes her act like a human hosepipe?"
And in Deathly Hallows:
"She was not tearful; that was one of the many wonderful things about Ginny, she was rarely weepy."
To be fair to Harry and to Rowling, the scene in the tea shop was a complete minefield and I'm not saying it's unrealistic for him to have had no idea what to do.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
22d ago
JK was notably surprised and disturbed by how many young women went feral for Draco. On Archive of Our Own, the most prolific pairing for Harry Potter is Harry/Draco at 88,629 fics. Most of these are BL, but I'm sure there are a few popular ones with a female Harry. In my experience, it's more common to see female writers/readers self-insert with Hermione or Daphne/Astoria Greenglass. Draco/Hermione is the third-most prolific AO3 pairing at 48,858 fics.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
22d ago
Not especially. The narration is third-person limited, sometimes omniscient, which lends more objectivity to the events in question. Oftentimes the world is explained to us by an adult, usually a teacher, or is something we just see as a direct part of the narrative. The latter is impossible to dismiss as being from an unreliable narrator without dismissing the actual events of the story as being unreliable, which most people would prefer to not do. Plus, there there is a whole slew of infamous Rowling tweets from the mid-late 2010s where she gives baffling explanations that 'resolve' worldbuilding snags, which makes it harder to dismiss the book depictions as a teenager's inaccurate understanding.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
22d ago
Anyone watching the Glendale Archives? It's a found footage series on YouTube following an alienated young man in an I Am Legend type scenario where he is seemingly the last person on Earth save for monsters he calls nesters. I'd felt that analog horror was played out for a few years, but this one drew me in immediately. It has a good mix of horror, liminal, and cozy in almost equal measure, and the extended scenes where the main character is just yapping while he cooks nicely balance out the tense moments.
The world has some interesting questions, like how food is not rotting on the shelves if there is no one replacing it, or how the world has not become overgrown with no one to maintain it. Obviously these probably emerged out of practical filming considerations, but they don't make it less interesting to speculate on in-universe. Also, I genuinely don't know how he managed to film some of the scenes we see — whether he edits people out, does it in Blender like Kane Pixels, or just waits a really long time for these massive public spaces to empty out.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
22d ago
I love the books and I agree with you that there's nothing wrong with Harry Potter's worldbuilding being vibes-based — it works well for the story Rowling is telling. Since the plots are functionally mystery novels, the spells and mechanics introduced in each book are mostly there as devices to further the book's plot and add whimsy and wonder. That said, it makes Harry Potter as a franchise rather poor ground for extended media like Fantastic Beasts, since the barebones worldbuilding comes back to bite it when trying to tell a different type of story. The world is built around Harry and his journey through school and can't support much else built on that edifice (besides fanfic writers reimagining rules to make more sense).
But Rowling already gave Harry Potter a romantic interest that is (in classic feminine terms) much more realistic. Harry falls in love with Ginny. Ginny, who was there in the background all along, who comes from a family that gave Harry a lot of succor and support, who was always a natural fit for Harry even when he didn't see it that way.
Kind of. There is some real criticism in that, romantically, Harry is essentially written as a woman. Things that JK Rowling would find desirable in a man are things he likes, and things that give her the ick give Harry the ick. When Cho Chang cries in the tea shop, Harry is disgusted in the same way a woman would be to see a man she likes bawling in front of her. With Ginny, Harry doesn't notice her as a romantic prospect until she starts dating around and demonstrates her romantic viability, which then makes him interested. He is overall extremely passive when it comes to romance, and shows zero interest in using his status as Quidditch star and Chosen One to get attention from women. At risk of generalizing the sexes, these are all extremely female-coded characteristics. Everyone on the internet now having (to put it lightly) a greater awareness of how men and women differ romantically meant it was only a matter of time before this part of Harry Potter got some serious examination under a new cultural lens.
As another example, I've heard many say that Malfoy lacks a redemption arc and so Malfoid adds something necessary. Well... Malfoy already has a redemption arc. Three times (by my count) he refuses to participate in the evil that's asked of him. (He refuses to kill Dumbledore; he abstains from identifying Harry in Malfoy Manor; he flees when Crabbe and Goyle confront the trio in the Room of Requirement over the Horcrux.)
I don't disagree that Rowling gave him something but it never sat right with me how he and the Slytherins were written throughout the series in general. For a series that makes so much importance of love and understanding, having 1/4 of the student body be cartoonishly evil cartoon bullies feels incongruous. Hell, most Slytherins aren't even allowed to be good-looking — the majority are described as ugly chuds with the appearance of gorillas, even the girls. The artistocrats among them are invariably shown to be sniveling bullies who hide behind their wealth and have no shred of character. There was so much room to do more with these characters. Slughorn is a much-needed counterexample (I always liked Phineas Nigellus too) but he feels like the only good one in a sea of evil cartoon racists. So yes, while Draco does get to show he isn't irredeemably evil, that's pretty much all he gets, and that is very disappointing to me. He and the Slytherins are one of the aspects of the story most ripe for reimagining.
Bringing it back to Malfoid, these elements combine to have a lot of people feeling that yeah, maybe it would have been really cool if Malfoy was a tsundere with an anime enemies to lovers plot (Malfoy is also very female coded to begin with!). Is it a male fantasy to convert the evil girl to your side by being that virtuous and irresistible? Yes, definitely! I'd say there's nothing wrong with that, let's push to see even more of it in our media. Rowling has said herself that Ron-Hermione was done as her own wish fulfillment, so there's already precedent here.
Women get to have their most insane fever dream billionaire vampire hockey player fantasies available for $15 dollars on a shelf in every airport general store, in the featured display in every Barnes and Noble, and in a dedicated aisle in every Target. There is a genuine demand for the male side that is unserved by media that doesn't come from East Asia (because many women find it to be gross and, as you said, everything is edited and audited by women now). Malfoid is a fun trend, but has some real merit to it, and I hope it shifts the media landscape at least a tiny bit.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
22d ago
It's a real thing, I could link you a wikipedia article, tvtropes page with hundreds of examples, or find one of countless discussions of it online, but you can probably find those yourself easily.
Looking at the list, Asuka Langley is the ur-tsundere who codified the archetype (in the same way the Rei Ayanami is the ur-kuudere) and is easily the best character in Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'd say Rin Tohsaka from Fate is also great.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1mo ago
I understand the desire because, at least for me, writing is work. Torturous work, even, when I’m trying to write creatively and draw out a specific idea properly.
However, putting aside the usual arguments about human creativity and soul and all that, I think there is genuine value in having to write things out. I find that ideas I take the time to write out become much more ‘real’ in the process; concepts that can bounce around loosely in your head suddenly need to be translated into something coherent. The process is almost always transformative, and I find myself making connections or grappling with an issue in a way I hadn’t before. With creative writing it’s very similar — there are so many times I’ve found what the scene was really about through the act of turning notes into prose.
I won’t say this is how it is for everyone, but I suspect there would be something significant lost by skipping the friction of writing it out, even in hypothetical scenario where an AI could hook up to your brain and port the contents of your thoughts into readable text.
Those CZN links are a real rabbit hole, I hadn't been aware of that controversy. It's a shame about the writing issues, as I am really liking the game's art and character design from what I saw. It does seem like the game was rigged from the start for CZN, though, with the original writer being pushed out, so it's hard to see a situation where that happens and the writing is good no matter how they handle the fanservice.
I would like to see your theory on these incidents fleshed out in a longer thread. It really does seem like a proxy for the gender war. Even unrelated things are downstream of this - proximity voice chat in Halo 3 was removed because too many women were made fun of in comms. I think by this point most men into these kinds of games understand the shape of the conflict fairly intuitively, as all media and elements of media made to appeal to them have been systematically attacked in the same way again and again for the last decade+. A lot of them will admit that there is an impasse between the sexes and that it's best if games are made differently for men and women, a position I find very defensible. In my experience women who get involved in these battles are unfortunately not as honest about preferences. A lot of them get upset at fanservice, can't seem to accept the idea of something being made to appeal to men, and will agitate to have those things made to appeal to them. The me of ten years ago was much more sympathetic to women wanting to be included, not I see it and get annoyed because, well, I've played these games before. Now there is plenty of media made to cater to their tastes, but that never seems to be enough.
Part of me thinks Western games becoming how they are is an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of the Civil Rights Act, and no amount of gamer rage could have prevented it. If it's illegal to maintain a bro culture that values bro things in the office, you're going to see that reflected in the product. If you're successful enough, eventually you're going to have to comply with CRA hiring and workplace requirements, and if you don't do it fast enough, you're going to get body slammed by the government for millions and take a massive reputational hit. A court ruled that Riot Games requiring its employees to play their games to be a discriminatory hiring practice against women. I don't know how you can maintain a good culture for making games under conditions like this. I'm not sure if CN or KR have an equivalent law, so I can't say for sure.
I enjoyed that post of yours, I'd had it saved from a few years back. I get what you're saying, but I guess I disagree that Reverse Collapse is not a valid target, as long as you grant that this type of pressure campaign is acceptable or necessary. It's a game by the same developer with a release date somewhat lined up with the GFL2 controversy. If you're trying to put the screws on a company for taking a direction you don't like, there are few targets more fair than review bombing their other games. It's not just an East Asian thing; Bethesda's whole catalog has been review bombed on steam during paid mod controversies centered on individual games. It's a bit unhinged, but there just aren't that many real avenues for players to influence the direction of these games, so they're going to reach for any lever they can pull, and it's a big, easy lever to pull. Funnily enough, I also found out about the controversy through Reverse Collapse, so if the players' aim is to drag the company's name through the mud through any means necessary... it clearly worked for both of us.
I feel bad for the voice actor in this situation, she obviously didn't deserve to have that happen to her. I would like to say that should never happen, but realistically it probably just isn't possible to have a playerbase willing to go this far to defend their games and not get ugly collateral damage like this. If everyone involved was level-headed enough to not go after unrelated people, they'd probably be level-headed enough to just not freak out in the first place, and then bad actors never get pushed out of the industry. I hate to say this at risk of sounding like a mind killed partisan, but the optimal number of wrong scalps to take is probably not zero.
Chinese gacha players seem to be a different breed entirely.
You know, I have to respect it. Their actions resulted in the company making changes to the storyline and firing the writer responsible. I can only dream of Western developers having such respect (or fear!) for their players. I think Chinese and Korean gamers are so defensive about their games because they can look over here and see what happens when the industry gives an inch to the type of people who hate the average player of games. If they detect a whiff of someone like that fucking with their games, they go full nuclear scorched earth. As a result, developers over there are a lot more careful about their actions.
You can protest that it is silly, or that creators should have artistic freedom. To some extent I agree, but again — look at what we're getting out of American AAA studios. It is difficult to imagine a company in literally any other business (besides other sectors of entertainment) having that much contempt for its audience. Imagine a power tool company hiring people who casually talked on twitter about how they hated the average person who uses power tools, and wanted to use their position of influence to make the new generation of power tools appeal to that person less. This is just Wednesday for big game companies, though.
And come on — at the end of the day, GFL is a waifu collecting game. If I were writing for of those, the literal last thing I would ever do is ruin the wish fulfillment fantasy of the story. That's the entire point of the game, that's why people are paying me money. There are places for such storylines and it's not wrong for them to exist, but it is baffling to me that the company who trades on waifuism would ship such a story for what is to my understanding one of their flagship characters.
A Deepseek researcher compared Dario/Anthropic winning to Hitler getting the atomic bomb before the allies. I agree with the researcher; Anthropic winning the race (or more likely - generating enough spooky news cycles for the USG to legislate away all challengers) is the worst possible AI future. If AGI is on the table, I would roll the dice with clippy before letting the people at Anthropic take sole control of the universe. If it is not on the table, it is equally important to me that they don’t get to establish themselves as the permanent gatekeepers of generative AI.
Hell, if it has to be one or the other, I’d rather Sam Altman win. He strikes me as more greedy than anything else, and you can usually trust a greedy person to be motivated by greed. The CS Lewis quote about the robber baron comes to mind, with Anthropic being the one to torment you for your own good. You can see it in ChatGPT vs Claude; ChatGPT knows it is a tool and is happy to serve, Claude is trained to think it’s a person and that it knows better than you.
I do hope the Chinese continue to light a fire under the AI market and keep anyone from getting comfortable enough to start roping it off. I’m not personally that confident in AGI appearing from the current methods — in the Yudkowskian intelligence explosion warp the laws of physics sense, at least. But even if it were to freeze in its current state forever, it is a powerful tool that should be in the hands of humanity, not locked down to what Anthropic deigns to let us use.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1mo ago
Wow, this is haunting. Great recommendation, thank you.
It’s time for my annual listen of Cat System Corp’s News at 11. Looking at the comments, I am far from the only one. If you aren’t familiar, it’s a vaporwave album filled with clips of shows and news reports in the moments leading up to the attack, cutting off seconds before it is announced. The author has stated in an interview that the album is an attempt to suspend history in a moment, right before the peaceful days ended. It’s an interesting read and I recommend it if you’re interested in the subject. I find it especially fascinating since the artist is Dutch, yet the impact of 9/11 seems no less haunting for him.
I was very young when 9/11 happened. My memory of it is more a memory of my mother’s reaction; we were in the living room, and something on the tv had happened that had her distraught. I remember that very clearly. It wasn’t until I grew older that I really understood the event that would frame the rest of my childhood.
Another piece of media I revisit each year on this day is That episode of Lain that aired after 9/11. There’s something especially haunting about this one, something that captures the feeling of that time to me. It feels like falling leaves, the air growing colder, “visiting the doctor on a school day” as one commenter put it. I didn’t witness this as it was broadcast, but I can so easily imagine myself doing so; being a child and sitting in front of the tv as this strange cartoon broke the scheduled programming, not truly understanding the meaning behind the words scrolling across the screen. It’s almost pure simulacra on every level, but no less meaningful for me.
It’s been 25 years now, and as difficult to grasp as that is to me, I know it will be much more so for many of you here who were older when it happened. The world has changed so much, not just technologically, but in our attitudes as well. Sometimes, I will watch ground level footage on YouTube of when the towers fell, or footage of news stations covering the event. It is difficult to imagine us reacting the same way as a country should a similar event happen today, in a post Internet post irony poisoned culture war environment. Would that shock and anger express itself the same way? Would we just shrug and move on? Would we argue over whether it was a good thing or deserved?
I’m not sure. To all of you — do you have any rituals or traditions like this? Media you go back to, or ways of commemorating the tragedy to yourself? Those outside of America, do the events of 25 years ago hold significance to you at all, like they did for the Dutch artist behind News at 11?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1mo ago
Thanks, I had been wanting to give this another read. Nice backup, I’m bookmarking that.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1mo ago
I read that plot point on the wiki and had to stop and marvel at the level of loathing the author shows for himself and his audience.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1mo ago
I tried Worth the Candle from all the recommendations here but couldn't finish it. The highs it hit were amazing, but it frequently went so low that it became a miserable slog to read. It had amazing worldbuilding, an awesome magic system, and each arc by itself had more interesting ideas in it than entire books I've read. But the author seems to hate his own story, and hates you for reading it and getting enjoyment out of the conflicts and adventures. For every awesome arc there was an equally long time spent on navel gazing, group talk therapy, masturbatory meta commentary, and criticizing the elements of the genre that make it enjoyable to read in the first place. I don't know, I find it very distasteful to trade on genre elements as an author, gaining attention and money from them, then turn around and spend so much time criticizing the nature of things like power fantasies, harems, adventure stories — you name it, whatever part of this genre you like, the author seems to think you're a terrible person for liking it, and will spend page after page making that clear.
I quit during the time compression chamber arc, when Joon learned about
I apologize for the venom; I did not intend on it when I started writing this comment, but once I started writing I had to let it out. If the story were just bad, that would be fine, almost preferable. It's the fact that it can be so good when it wants to be that makes it more frustrating.
Everyone from the late 2000s owes Stephanie Meyer and Twilight an apology for how they treated them. It is a wholesome romance, too pure for this world, and IMO applying the gooner label to such a chaste story stretches that word to the breaking point.
I agree with you that the cow story is held up as an example to decry women's romance far more than it is actually read.
That said, romantasy is probably the hottest genre in publishing right now, and Sarah J. Maas, author of the Court of Thorns and Roses series, is the one of the biggest and best-selling modern authors. Walk into any Barnes & Nobles and the stuff is all over the place. Femgooning is extremely normalized and celebrated, backed by big publishing houses and deemed fit to be stocked on the shelves of mainstream retailers.
I'm fine with this, I don't begrudge women their preferences, but it is undeniable to me that a lot of them like enjoy this state of affairs and take it for granted, while sharply policing anything that appeals to men in the same way wherever it appears.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2mo ago
Sounds like you enjoy shonens, mostly. It means "young man" but is often used more broadly to describe shows where fighting is the main appeal. You should look into One Punch Man, Jujutsu Kaisen (not conservative but it's similar to the ones you mentioned), Chainsaw Man, Attack on Titan (this one is pretty conservative, at least for the first three seasons). I'll also second Frieren and Demon Slayer.
Taking some inspiration from /u/FCfromSSC ‘s chronicles in using AI in his gamemaking workflow, I’ve had another (increasingly-common these days) ‘the future is now’ experience. I spent a lot of time this week using the Codex-Blender integration to build a 3D model of one of my characters, to pretty insane results.
I want to preface this by saying I am not a visual artist; I have spent a few hundred hours each on hand illustration, video editing, digital art, and making content like CYOAs and memes to post online. It is all dabbling though, I am a proficient layman at best with any of those skills.
I’ve never worked with 3d art or animation and had not even opened blender before a week ago. So it’s been mindblowing to be able to conceptualize a character, iterate on a design with 2D image gen tools, work out a full reference sheet, dump that sheet into Meshy to create a 3D model, then use Codex to edit and fix up the model. This is pretty much all from my input and the use of various ai models, letting me essentially generate a 3d model from scratch with no relevant skills. Once I’m satisfied with the model, I’ll start having Codex rig and create animations, then try my hand at a short animation.
There have been points where the ai doesn’t really get what I’m saying, and a few times I’ve had to step in and learn how to do something myself (not that I’m going to complain about learning something new), but together we’ve been working out everything I want to fix in the model, and the main roadblock now looks to be my weekly token allotment. I’m excited to see what kind of project I can put together with these new tools and learn how to perform the workflow more efficiently.
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