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
20d ago
Anyone playing any tabletop games?
I'm a year and a half into a heavily modified 5e campaign I've been running. It's going well, but I've been itching to be a player in something longer than a oneshot for a while now. Two of my players have talked about interest in running Traveller and Cyberpunk 2020, respectively. My fingers are crossed on at least one of these panning out, as I've been itching to play something that isn't 5e for ages.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
20d ago
Very true. I didn't prioritize Kawakami and even skipped Chihaya in my first run because I was so peeved about getting scammed by her, and this time around knowing who to prioritize made things go much more smoothly for me. Jose and Ryuji's reworked instakill make it trivial to farm money and XP. I'm not complaining too much as I like having the money to fuck around with Persona crafting, but I wish there was a way to only get the money so I wasn't overleveling the content so much.
The scenes introducing the new characters could be awkward, but I can accept why they had to be inserted in like that. Maruki was handled much better than Yoshizawa so far, and I agree with you that her scene in the casino was goofy and makes zero sense. For me, all of the followup phone conversations tacked on to every confidant or how the Phantom Thieves start a new groupchat every day to gush about how evil their current target is wore very thin.
Makoto was one of my favorites originally, but she really gets on my nerves now. She becomes the main character once she joins, and I wish the game didn't feel obliged to pretend that Joker is the leader since she it's so clear that she is. The way the Phantom Thieves are so thoughtlessly cruel to Mishima rubs me the wrong way too, since the narrative never acknowledges how hypocritical it makes them look. I still love Haru, Ryuji, Yusuke, Akechi, and my favorites from the first time around though.
I have high hopes for the new semester. I was spoiled ahead of time on the direction it takes and it seems quite interesting. I did follow a guide to make sure I wasn't missing any of the triggers for it, though.
Haha, I fused Izanagi and Kaguya in the early game before I realized how busted all of the DLC personas were and dropped them. It's a shame, because they have cool designs, but it feels like cheating to use them for combat or itemization. If they were a bit weaker it'd feel better to use.
My main squad is Jack Frost, Pale Rider, Titania, Seth, Bugs, and Alice. I'll say that having the means to keep personas you like relevant past the dungeon you fuse them is a great mechanic. Theorycrafting their movesets to cover every situation and going through the steps to get the builds online scratches a certain itch. I'm thinking of adding Metatron or training up Kaguya now that her ability isn't gamebreaking, but they won't be necessary to finish.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
20d ago
I'll have to see how Royal handles the original endgame content post-Shido to compare. I don't remember the original endgame being that bad, but the ideas in it definitely grabbed me so I could have overlooked any pacing flaws it had.
It's all the stuff Royal added to the original game that makes the pacing suffer for me. Like those pointless followup phone calls every confidant has where they repeat the ideas you just saw two minutes ago. The extra scenes for Kasumi, Akechi, and Maruki feel a bit out of place, but I like those characters enough that I don't mind too much.
Persona 5 Royal. I played the original game in 2019 and liked it quite a lot. This time around I find the writing much more laughable. The extra scenes and dialogue added by Royal probably don't help, as they bloat the game to its breaking point. So many conversations simply repeat what was just talked about in the last scene, or add absolutely nothing.
The game is also much, much easier. A lot of it comes from quality of life improvements — the game doesn't arbitrarily take as much time from you as in vanilla, so you have more opportunities to max out your social stats. The fusion alarm is straight up broken, though, and makes it trivial to snap the combat over your knee. A few trips to the gallows and your persona is going to be far stronger than anything you ever might fight. I'm having a lot of fun using all the mechanics to craft my optimized team though, so it's not all bad.
I'm nearing the endgame of the vanilla game, which I remember being excellent, with everything in Mementos being particularly haunting. Hopefully it holds up. And I am still coping that the brand new semester will be good, as I've yet to play that before.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
29d ago
They often hamstring a good sucker punch twist by foreshadowing what's going to happen before you start the story. If they come packaged with a tagging system like on Archive of Our Own though, where you can search by the most granular of details to find the story you want, I can get behind that.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1mo ago
Seeing as so much of the AI Safety field turned out to be, in practice, simply ensuring the AI Overlord agrees with progressive dogma, I'd prefer to just let it rip at this point. I'll throw in with the /acc types and take my chances with Clippy over having these ideas be enshrined in the AI that will mold the thoughts and lives of future generations.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
4mo ago
Try running Stable Diffusion. It's open source and you can find a specifically-trained model for whatever you want. If you can't run it locally, you can find a million services online that can do it for you. You don't need to deal with content restrictions or it adding diversity to all of your prompts. I use a site called NovelAI, which runs its own version of SD trained off of an anime booru. They recently put out a new version of the image gen and it's really good. The progress made since just the last year is astounding.
We could have easily been in the timeline where the big three image diffusion models (Dall E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney) all kept it locked down, but since one of them broke ranks and made it open source, it's opened up a world of potential for everyone to use image generation how they want.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
6mo ago
Usually 6 classes a semester, in addition to AP credits and 1-2 summer classes. I graduated in three years, which was bittersweet since college was a ton of fun and it took a while to get over missing that last year. On the other hand... tuition is expensive, and I'm glad to not have that year's worth of debt hanging over me.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
7mo ago
It’s kind of sad yet hilarious that it was somewhat of a plot twist and subversion of the current zeitgeist that the handsome cocky blonde guy was actually a loyal, genre-savvy, and courageous ally to the protagonists all along.
That really stood out to me. I remember hoping he would show up to help at the end and was quite pleased at how it turned out. It was notable because that kind of character is usually made the villain.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
7mo ago
I plan on it, but I'm waiting a year or two for the unofficial patches, DLC, and good mods to get established. I'm hoping I enjoy or can at least stand the game design and writing, because it will be a big portent for how the next Elder Scrolls will turn out.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
7mo ago
Before going into Maverick I thought it would be a "legacy character passes the torch to the young, diverse successors" plot, as these sequels tend to be. The movie even teases this for a long time before surprising you with the opposite. One could say it... subverted expectations.
Tom Cruise movie trivia is always a hoot. In Mission Impossible: Fallout, he memorably broke his angle filming a stunt, but pushed through to finish the scene in absolute agony so as to not ruin the shot.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
7mo ago
I'm certainly staying put even if they started taking recruits for the Mars colony tomorrow. But I don't mind taking the office job route you talked about, and I plan to get engaged soon. The pot is sweet enough in America that you can just coast if you're a certain type. That said:
all you need to do is study computer science and learn how to program (trivially easy) and you can make a comfortable living and essentially enjoy an easy and materially prosperous life. America is a place where trivial email jobs pay $100k a year. The young man doesn’t leave because, by being born an American, he has already won the lottery of life.
Come on. This is not trivially easy. It's easy if you have a high enough IQ and can put up with school and office life for 80% of your life. Even if we're talking about email jobs, that still selects for a certain level of agreeableness and conscientiousness. There are many people who simply lack the cognitive horsepower for this kind of work, and there's a large group of people for whom this is a living hell. I don't mind the work, but you must agree the modal office environment is very feminine.
My college friends are all capable of and okay with this route, but I have a lot of other friends from different backgrounds that this is not a viable path for. In any society, there will be people unhappy with the current order, but the rising trend in sexlessness and radicalism indicates that there are more unsatisfied people than normal right now. If there were a compelling alternative path, I think there'd be a lot less societal stress from men with unfulfilling lives.
Yeah that's a fantasy, and there are many good arguments for why space can't be the escape valve for those people, but my point was that such space aspirations were a frontier fantasy, not a utopian fantasy as OP was saying.
But very few Irish or German peasants in 1850 who emigrated to the US became wealthy or anything even close to it.
Their earnings potential was much better in America, no? That's why they came. They wouldn't die rich by the standards of landed European money, but they'd be wealthier than they ever would have been had they stayed in Europe. There was a legitimate reason to go, because there was a lot of "unclaimed" land and opportunity to die with some land and money, not a landless serf.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
7mo ago
More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock?
It seems reductive to call the desire for a space exploration age utopian. It's not a utopia people want, it's a frontier. Somewhere a young man with little social standing or assets can risk his life to make it big in new, unknown territory. The demographics of people who would sign up for a one-way Mars colonization trip are the same as the people who try to make it big gambling on stocks and crypto. Crypto is a sad excuse for a real frontier for many reasons, but it's the closest thing I can think of in the modern day.
People want more space to spread out and get away from the current social structure. A lot of the most disaffected or persecuted people in Europe were able to do this with the Americas, and right now we lack this kind of physical release valve. I think a lot of social problems would solve themselves if people who were unhappy with things could just go... somewhere else.
It's very possible that space travel looks nothing like that, and will only take highly skilled and educated individuals. Still, most frontiers are inherently dangerous, so I'd bet there is some place for those with everything to gain and nothing to lose to find their fortune.
Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.
The space race generated/improved countless technologies that vastly improved quality of life back on Earth. A new wave of interest in space would almost certainly result in new material gains here. If asteroid mining is possible in the long term, it could solve a lot of resource problems and lead to an explosion in wealth gains like no other. If by utopia, you mean spiritual transcendence, then yeah this probably wouldn't help with that.
I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.
My issue with transgenderism is the "point deer, make horse" of social pressure to affirm that someone who is clearly not a woman is a woman, and of pushing dangerous, irreversible medical interventions onto autistic and underage people. Philosophically, I'm not against the concept of changing your body and hormones to be the same as a woman's, were it possible to actually do so. I'm not willing to bet that medicine will ever figure this out 100%, but if it does, that's a good thing.
Sex change isn't your thing, but are you against other forms of bodily modification? Do you have no issues with your health or vanity that you'd be willing to medically fix/improve if it were cheap and easy enough?
I guess ultimately I might have a different definition of transhumanism than you. At its core, it seems like the concept of using technology to overcome failings of the body. We've been doing that since we first picked up a walking stick. If in the future, the cure for blindness is to install vat-grown eyes, I don't see that as much different than LASIK, or even from wearing glasses. In all examples, your genetics or life circumstances led to you having the bad hand of poor eyesight, and you're relying on an unnatural intervention to overcome that.
I admit it looks pretty silly when you look at Yud talking about Cryonics and living forever. I wouldn't recommending holding out for technology to fix everything as an excuse to ignore your physical fitness. I'm not holding my breath for space travel, extreme body modification, etc. But at the same time, if you were to tell a man with poor eyesight from 100 BC that in the future, we could fire lasers into his eye to reshape his cornea, he would probably dismiss that as magical thinking in the same way that you are with some of your examples. These things don't always pan out how we want them to. But sometimes they do.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
7mo ago
I feel you. Covid saw my job switch from wasting two hours of my life a day in commute time to fully remote. I suddenly got 8-10 hours of my life a week back. I moved out of state and took advantage of the extremely cheap flights to hop around the country visiting my family, friends, and (at the time long-distance) girlfriend. I could skip town for a week at a time without needing to take time off, since simply bringing my laptop was enough to work uninterrupted.
I’m still remote, but looking for new work and a lot of the places want hybrid employees. It’s hard to give up…
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
7mo ago
I listen to most of my music through Youtube. It often shows me interesting new music in my recommended and in the automatically generated playlists.
Also, sometimes random other media will send you down a rabbit hole. I discovered They Might Be Giants when I was younger from them doing a partnered event with an MMO I played. The event’s story featured the band members and their music would play in the relevant zones.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
7mo ago
Go figure. It's very noticeable for a lot of properties, like League of Legends, but I always wondered whether it was an unspoken thing or explicit rule in these companies to always be showing certain types front and center. I'm in a different field, but I have received explicit instruction in the past to request diversity from the graphics team when I have ad creatives made.
I suspect this is why you aren't allowed to change the race or sex of your character in Battlefield One. You're gonna have to swallow your pride and accept playing as a black woman fighting for Germany in WW1.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
8mo ago
The movie is primarily aimed at nostalgic millennials, not the young girls the toys are made for. It markets to people who grew up with the toys, but is more interested in using the toy brand to sell a film, not the other way around. Movies made to sell toys look like the ones on this list this list. They are animated, have child-friendly ratings, feature the toys center stage, and have a point of view that is neither critical nor deconstructive of the product featured, unlike the 2023 film.
To say the themes of the movie are only there due to the director just making the motions downplays the intent and artistry of the director, Greta Gerwig. Gerwig is known as a feminist director and earned a fair amount of buzz for Ladybird back in 2017. Regardless of how you feel about her work, looking at the three major films that she wrote and directed shows she has a point of view. The themes of her movies are not incidental or accidental, regardless of whether or not they're attached to a Mattel product.
Barbie is especially interesting due to the casting of Ryan Gosling, a masculine icon of problematic young men, as Ken. This has led to the film having a crossover appeal to both women and the incel and sigma subcultures of young men, who are attempting (successfully IMO) to co-opt the film's themes into their own thing with all the Ken memes. There's a lot to see here, and dismissing the movie as a Mattel commercial is reductive. People are not wrong or misguided to analyze a cultural product like this.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
8mo ago
I'm not sure about the programming side, but a tool like LOOT could help you detect those issues. If users report conflicts between mods, it will flag your load order to warn you about them. Of course, if you're just looking to get your feet wet with some technical work then there's nothing wrong with giving it a go yourself.
It's also worth learning how to use the Skyrim Creation Kit as well. I used it to spot patch a few mod conflicts that didn't have patches, for example removing a barrel placed by a city overhaul mod that a boatman was sitting in, or restoring some missing pieces of terrain like you've had issues with. If you're looking for an excuse to learn how modding works, it's a great tool. I would also use it to create custom modded companions and it taught me a lot.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
9mo ago
This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right?
The mainstream journalistic reaction to this movie is full of handwringing and non-arguments. But they're not doing it because they're secretly pedos or want to cover for them. Circling the wagons, even if purely on instinct, is natural when you sense that someone is attempting to build an ideological superweapon against you, which Scott described in Weak Men are Superweapons. The whole post is worth reading if you haven't; it's one of his best and quite brief. This passage is most relevant though:
I suggested imagining yourself in the shoes of a Jew in czarist Russia. The big news story is about a Jewish man who killed a Christian child. As far as you can tell the story is true. It’s just disappointing that everyone who tells it is describing it as “A Jew killed a Christian kid today”. You don’t want to make a big deal over this, because no one is saying anything objectionable like “And so all Jews are evil”. Besides you’d hate to inject identity politics into this obvious tragedy. It just sort of makes you uncomfortable.
The next day you hear that the local priest is giving a sermon on how the Jews killed Christ. This statement seems historically plausible, and it’s part of the Christian religion, and no one is implying it says anything about the Jews today. You’d hate to be the guy who barges in and tries to tell the Christians what Biblical facts they can and can’t include in their sermons just because they offend you. It would make you an annoying busybody. So again you just get uncomfortable.
The next day you hear people complain about the greedy Jewish bankers who are ruining the world economy. And really a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish, and bankers really do seem to be the source of a lot of economic problems. It seems kind of pedantic to interrupt every conversation with “But also some bankers are Christian, or Muslim, and even though a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish that doesn’t mean the Jewish bankers are disproportionately active in ruining the world economy compared to their numbers.” So again you stay uncomfortable.
Then the next day you hear people complain about Israeli atrocities in Palestine (what, you thought this was past czarist Russia? This is future czarist Russia, after Putin finally gets the guts to crown himself). You understand that the Israelis really do commit some terrible acts. On the other hand, when people start talking about “Jewish atrocities” and “the need to protect Gentiles from Jewish rapacity” and “laws to stop all this horrible stuff the Jews are doing”, you just feel worried, even though you personally are not doing any horrible stuff and maybe they even have good reasons for phrasing it that way.
Then the next day you get in a business dispute with your neighbor. Maybe you loaned him some money and he doesn’t feel like paying you back. He tells you you’d better just give up, admit he is in the right, and apologize to him – because if the conflict escalated everyone would take his side because he is a Christian and you are a Jew. And everyone knows that Jews victimize Christians and are basically child-murdering Christ-killing economy-ruining atrocity-committing scum.
You have been boxed in by a serious of individually harmless but collectively dangerous statements. None of them individually referred to you – you weren’t murdering children or killing Christ or owning a bank. But they ended up getting you in the end anyway.
Depending on how likely you think this is, this kind of forces Jews together, makes them become strange bedfellows. You might not like what the Jews in Israel are doing in Palestine. But if you think someone’s trying to build a superweapon against you, and you don’t think you can differentiate yourself from the Israelis reliably, it’s in your best interest to defend them anyway.
The whole situation is a big culture war W for the right because it's a bad look to get so upset at a movie about a guy fighting child trafficking. But most journalists pushing back against this movie aren't thinking "I'm going to try to suppress this because I'm secretly a pedophile." They're more likely thinking of all the posts on Twitter and Facebook they've seen about the Satantic pedophilic elite, the ones that argue they control most of society and salivate over filling them full of lead.
While most journalists would agree that pedophilia and sex trafficking are bad things, they definitely don't buy into the idea that vast portions of society are controlled by pedos. But they do know that the person who believes this considers journalists as a class, at best, complicit, and at worst, in on it. So when they see a movie about hunting down child traffickers that the kind of person who posts about Satanic pedophilic elites seems to like... The incentives are all there for journalists to use their narrative-setting power to slander it however they can.
I remember there being a similar, but obviously less widespread and institutionalized, uncomfortable reaction on the right to the game Wolfenstein's "Punch a Nazi" ad campaign. This led to a similarly easy gotcha — what's the matter? You don't think Nazis are good, do you?
This kind of statement puts you on bad footing, which of course is entirely the point. But you don't have to be pro-Nazi to notice that the person fantasizing about violence seems to have a much broader definition of the term than you do, and that their definition includes you. Staying silent while they attempt to normalize extra-legal action against you might be ill-advised.
I'll say that I despise the seemingly complete capture of journalism as a field by activists who see it as their duty and right to use their platform to set a progressive agenda. I know a few people in real life in and adjacent to the industry, and they have a genuine antipathy for middle-America, whiteness, religion, etc. The widespread loss of trust in the industry is well-deserved, in my opinion. But I think the "they're all pedos/covering for pedos" line of thinking is either dishonest or misinformed, and may prove to be dangerous down the line.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
10mo ago
Everything since MAPPA took over making the show from WIT aka the “Final Season” which has pretty much been 3 seasons of content. Barring a few amazing scenes I really dislike what it did with the characters and themes of the story.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
10mo ago
I finished Divinity 2 this week and quite liked it, though I’m not sure I would rank it among my favorite RPGs yet. I loved the Red Prince though, he was a great companion.
My favorites include New Vegas, Three Houses, VTMB, Mass Effect (ME1>ME3>>>>>ME2).
The Elder Scrolls series is my favorite though, with Skyrim being my favorite game of all time. For all their faults, no RPG really offers what the TES games do. Witcher 3 has reactive storytelling, but in exchange for that you will always play Geralt with a preset story. In Skyrim, if you turn left out of Helgen you can have a whole play through without ever becoming the Dragonborn.
Granted, I mod Skyrim to its absolute limit to fix all my issues with it and revamp the mechanics. Oblivion also needs mods to fix the horrible leveling and item scaling situation. Morrowind ironically is the most playable unmodded, all you really need is a visual overhaul and bugfixes to dig into it.
Attack on Titan, though I wish it had ended at the end of season 3 instead of turning into what it is now. Whenever I show it to someone, I tell them to stop watching before season 4.
PF2e looks really fun. It seems like it was made by and for people tired of 5e's lack of crunch. What do you plan on playing?
We're all on Virtual Tabletop as well. I don't know if it'd be my first choice, but there are a lot of advantages to it over in person, like presentation, handling rolls, etc. If a campaign takes advantage of the online tools I think the switch is worthwhile, but when the GM doesn't do that it always feels worse than in person.
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