site banner
PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   2293 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 20, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

@ZorbaTHut, I've made two pull requests in the repository.

In MMA News: Jon Jones finally retired, now that his attempts to hold on to the belt without fighting the interim champ Aspinall failed. Apparently he asked for a ridiculous payday, got it (which is a miracle in and of itself) and then promptly changed his mind. In the perfect capper for anyone who knows anything about Jon Jones, he had another hit and run right before announcing retirement. In terms of objectively successful prospects who nevertheless blew it by being incapable of staying out of trouble he's up there.

Good news: the division can finally move and Aspinall can actually have a career as champ. Bad news: the UFC is now functionally boxing with its own Joshua/Wilder HW mess despite not having any rival promotions and apparently Jon Jones is trapped in a time loop.

Hope they book Aspinall's next fight ASAP.

Jones is the most overrated great fighter. He would have gotten his ass beat had he fought further, though heavyweights are probably just as bad as women's divisions.

I'm surprised to meet another fellow here who's into mma. There's a new card this week. Topuria, Payton Talbett and Joshua Van are amazing, violent, smart young prospects.

Tom Aspinall is the best heavyweight I've seen in a while. He has the potential to not lose for a decade straight like fedor.

So did anyone else watch the Stanley Cup?

I'm not sure how the motte skews in terms of sports watchers, but I for one was rooting for the Panthers. For those who don't pay attention to sports, the Stanley Cup is the annual championship for hockey. No I don't mean "US Hockey" or "North American Hockey" I mean hockey. The best players of hockey from around the world come to compete in the National Hockey League (NHL). Americans aren't even a simple majority of hockey players in the NHL, heck we're not even the largest population in the league! That trophy goes to the Canadians, who make up some 40% of the league and have seven teams representing the frozen north in the league. I would have said "leafs" or "canucks" but both of those are actual NHL teams (Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadians Vancouver Canucks respectively). There are also Swedes, Russians, Finns, Czechs, Swiss, Slovaks, Germans, Latvians, Danes, Austrians, Belarussians, Norwegians, and one each from France, the UK, Australia, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and Slovenia.

Anyway, the Panthers were playing the Edmonton Oilers. I was, as I said, rooting for the Panthers because the Canadians won the Four Nations Face-Off, an NHL-affiliated/sponsored event where four of the most represented nations in the NHL (Canada, Finland, the US, and Sweden) competed against each other. It was an absolute riot. Some of the best hockey I've ever watched, hands down. But the Canadians won in the end (honestly Finland and Sweden never really had a chance, it was always going to be the US v. Canada in the finals). So I wanted the American team (somewhat, as I said it's an international sport) to bring home the cup.

I got my wish. For the second year in a row the Oilers and Panthers faced each other in the finals, and for the second year in a row the Panthers won it all. Many of the Panthers players are... somewhat controversial. Matthew Tkachuk (and to some extent his brother Brady Tkachuk) is considered a dirty player, to the point where he has been termed the "Rat King"--meaning he's a very good, very dirty player. Another player to hold the title Rat King is Tkachuk's teammate, Brad Marchand who has previously licked an opposing player's face just to fuck with his head. Seth Jones transferred from the Blackhawks to the Panthers three months ago, saying it was the "#1 destination to [play playoff hockey]" which was received poorly by fans as it looked like he was just chasing a payday. The controversy extends to the "chirps" or trash-talking on-ice, with this being called the nastiest Stanley Cup final anyone has ever seen. I could go on, but you know what's boring? Listing hockey players being hockey players. You know what's fun?

Watching the Panthers celebrate. Holy shit it is so much fun to watch these guys just goof off. For those not in the know, it is long-established hockey tradition for the winners of the Stanley cup to go on a week-long rager after winning, and the Panthers are doing it in style. With the cup. That's important. The rager occurs with the Stanley Cup for a full 24-hours. This is officially known as the "Players' day with the Cup" and it always, always gets damaged or abused in some way. Which has of course already occurred. In fact it kinda looks like it got shot but oh well. Damaging the cup during the celebration is a tradition as old as the celebration is. The Cup has had several children baptized in it, been shat in (by a baby, allegedly), thrown from a second-story window into a pool, dropped at least once every time it's been awarded, thrown in the ocean, drunk out of (a very serious tradition, the winning team is supposed to drink champagne from it), had cereal eaten out of it, had dogs eat out of it, been thrown in the dishwasher, and has traveled as far afield as an Igloo in the very north of Canada, to Los Angeles, to the White House, to Stockholm, to Red Square, and it even visited Kandahar Afghanistan where it watched over a ball hockey game on concrete in the Afghan desert. It has been drop kicked, dropped into the middle of a frozen canal (because the drop kick didn't clear the other side), left at a photo studio, lost on the side of the road, had the mortgage papers for Madison Square Garden burned in it (which of course led to the Curse of 1940, causing a 54 year win drought for the New York Rangers), had teeth chipped on it, been stolen by angry fans, been dropped in a bonfire, had a Kentucky Derby winning horse eat out of it, been locked in a bar and had every patron drink from it, etc. etc.

Anyway, how are the Panthers celebrating? By drinking themselves silly for a week straight. Here's team captain Barkov dragging Marchand out of a club. Marchand borrowed a fan's jersey, and then paid $200 cash to keep it (technically less than the value of the jersey but the fan certainly didn't mind). Here's Barkov almost catching a face-full from a smoke machine. Barkov and several team members visited a neighbor by prior arrangement at 5am to show him the Stanley Cup, Marchand has been thanking every team that traded or cut a player that ended up on the Panthers, and here's him giving an incredibly touching (no really) rationale for his instagram stories. Marchand has an odd fixation with Dairy Queen (well not so odd) and so served a bunch of blizzards to fans. No seriously, he really likes DQ. No, he really likes DQ, to the tune of $38000. The team (with cup in tow) visited a strip club, and presumably ran up a huge bill. I know a lot of this is Brad Marchand but he's the Rat King, and he is as hated on the ice as he is beloved off it. Here's Marchand biting teammate Uvis Balinskis' nipple. Here's the team riding down the street in a golf cart with the Stanley. Barkov celebrating with arena employees. Panthers and the Cup celebrating to the Pink Pony Club remix.

I could keep spamming reddit links but I think I've gotten my point across. It's just an absolute joy to watch these guys celebrate getting what they battled for, and I really do mean battled. Matthew Tkachuk had a sports hernia and torn adductor on the same side, Barkov had a gash in his hand that needed sutures, which tore out twice, and Reinhart (who scored 4 of the 5 goals in the cinching Game 6) was coming off a Grade 2 MCL sprain.

This got a lot longer than I intended, so I'll end it here with a simple note. I can't wait for next season.

Great write up

I’m a Heat Dolphins & Marlins fan and I wish I enjoyed hockey

I really only watch Dolphins games and Redzone and only follow the other two online, Heat daily & Marlins on occasion (even tho I like watching baseball the most - it’s the most exciting sport)

I wish I were a Panthers fan - the last three seasons would’ve been fucking insane to watch

I've been a Panthers fan since literally day one. I grew up going to games at least, eh, once a month? 30 years of waiting, a few false hopes, and now we're cruising along as THE team to beat. Surreal. Last year felt like a dream I could wake up from any minute. This year finally makes it all feel real. Can't lie, I would like us to pull off the three-peat and then maybe ease off a bit to let some other teams (not from Canada) have a shot once again.

I'm not really a fan of the 'dirty play' side of things... but at the same time, hockey traditionally gets way more rough than virtually any other sport out there, so you have to let things play out a bit. One guy roughs up your guy, you rough him back. Your star player(s) are targets, so there is a strategic element of protecting them from aggression. As you noted, players get injuries that would get them pulled in most sports, but they slap some bandages on and get back to it.

The one thing I do wish were more honored was "Don't screw with the goalie." Personally I think they should increase the size of the crease by 50% and generally forbid players who don't have puck possession from entering. Or give the goalie a gun.

I would have gone over to the Parade today, but got stuff to do as an adult. Most of my family is out there, though. Its truly great how the league is generally not very stodgy about (non-illegal) player conduct during the off-season, and they let the cup (well, the copy of it that is designated for this purpose) just go with them to celebrate everything.

The sport has truly spoiled me, I can't really get into any other league. I like College Football for sheer chaos, but where else do you get THIS mix of constrained brutality, teamwork, camaraderie, international rivalry, generally gentlemanly behavior during the off-season, and sheer spectacle?

Greatest spectator sport imaginable. It is barely even close.

The sport has truly spoiled me, I can't really get into any other league

It really is hard to beat. I mean football kinda comes close with how hard they hit, but at the same time it's not expected, in the same way it is expected in Hockey, that if someone on the ice disrespects your team or your teammates you drop your gloves and just beat the shit out of them (or at least try to) then and there. No other team sport has that same level of physicality. Sure MMA has more blood, but it's not a team sport. You're not watching a group of guys come together to fight for the win, you're watching two dudes whale on each other. I don't just watch for the fights, to be clear, but the fact that fights are an integral part of the sport does elevate it. It makes hockey special.

And then as you mentioned, there's the off-the-ice component. Where you can see the player's personalities shine, and you can see the sheer joy of what they do shine through them.

Football is really interesting on the play-to-play strategic level. Its absolutely the most 'war-like' of the sports out there.

But the sport is also so heavily optimized its like there's no room for anything but like two workable strategies. Team composition doesn't change much. And if your QB sucks then you're probably not going very far.

And while I enjoy MMA, its exactly like you said. IN the cage, there's no team. Sure they're off to the side coaching, but its not quite as beautiful as watching the coordinated ice ballet playing out at high speed.

Actually, that is one 'con' with hockey. Plays happen so goddamn fast that you can't realize how much just happened until its over.

Hockey teams can't rely solely on one strong player like sometimes happens in baskebtall, but you can optimize your team's skill stack in a few different ways for success.

We saw that with the last two Cup finals, Florida fielding a team with tons of grit and a deep roster of talent, Edmonton with some elite scoring talent that can skate circles around everyone, and each side trying to find the best matchups for its lines. Florida seems to have perfected the science of shutting down McDrai by game 3.

I don't just watch for the fights, to be clear, but the fact that fights are an integral part of the sport does elevate it.

Its hard to explain, snobs might say that its just ungenteel and not sportsmanlike, making hockey a 'low class' sport, but I have to agree, the fact that on-ice disputes can be settled by dropping gloves then and there absolutely elevates the sport. Trash talk is cheap. For the low, low price of five minutes in time-out, you can check a dude's ego or remind them to stop messing with the goalie, keeping some of the 'unwritten' rules of the sport intact.

I'm glad Florida won it because I don't want any other canadian team to have won the Cup before our next one.

I'm a Washington capitals fan, loved watching them celebrate when they won the cup some years back. The DC area is usually a little buttoned up and proper, so it was fun seeing wild party culture come here even for a very brief window. I remember the caps players swimming in public fountains in the middle of the day with cheering fans and confused tourists from other countries standing around taking videos.

Also Ovechkin beat Gretskys goal record this year, which was a decent consolation prize for them losing in the second round of the playoffs. Some of the players that have been on the team since I became a fan are starting to leave or announce retirements. I'm hoping they can rebuild with a great new team.

Ovi also feels like he is from a different era of sports, staying with a single team for his entire career even though he is a star player.

It's weird that "National" refers to the US and Canada together here (the NBA has one, previously two Canadian teams). The last guy to call them one country got a lot of grief for it.

I would have said "leafs" or "canucks" but both of those are actual NHL teams (Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadians respectively).

Canucks are Vancouver, Montreal are the CanadiEns

Whoops, that's what I get for writing when I'm tired.

Happy Solstice! Enjoy some mead-fueled rambling!

Earlier this week I was gazing into one of the endless amusing abysses of the internet when I stumbled across a post that spoke to me, all out of place. It was a brief meditation on aging and monogamy that echoed some of my own thoughts on the topic (tl;dr: a psychologically healthy man should still find beauty in the grandmother of his grandchildren), phrased and pic-related with a vibe I appreciated.

So I looked at the pseudonymous poster. They seemed to be some sort of TTRPG designer, or at least that's what their recent posts were about. A very brief perusal showed hints of extremely grognard-y concern about weapon minutia and a post talking about having bards be the representation of the gods, which were based on historical pantheons. Gave some extremely low (or even no) magic, gritty vibes, but that was a cool thought, using Bards telling stories of the Gods in the place of the more "mundane" divine power of healing and light spells. Felt like something William H. Stoddard would have put into a GURPS: Hyperborea book.

And, oh, cool, this person has an Amazon author page, let's check that and see what else they've written and-

It's Varg Vikerness.

Holy shit, I laughed my ass off. I really should have seen something like that coming. But it gave me a great excuse to remember one of my favorite memes.

And it gave me a good excuse to look up what happened in the Norwegian Black Metal scene in the early 90's, to at least Wikipedia standards of quasi-reliability, instead of just Shit My Punk Friend Told Me Over A Blunt Twenty Years Ago. There's a bunch of overlapping articles, but start here or here.

The overall picture I see, reading between the lines a bit, looks like a classic purity spiral. Euronymous installs himself as the Prince of Norwegian Black Metal because he owns the record shop and label and talks a very extreme game about how obsessed he is with death and nihilism and being maximally evil and hating everything bright and fair. But he develops a reputation as a poseur, a guy using the aesthetic for personal gain or self-aggrandizement. Meanwhile, newcomers are taking his rhetoric to logical conclusions and start taking actual actions, like burning churches and murdering strangers.

Feeling his position is threatened, Euronymous escalates his rhetoric, confiding specific, private death threats at other members of the scene. But he does this so much, to and about so many people, that rumors get out and one of those newcomers responds and kills him first.

It's an interesting look into the psychology of a subculture. And while I do appreciate some of the music and other elements, it just reaffirms how thoroughly I find that kind to evil-maxing to just be utterly gauche. For fuck's sake, kids, even The Crow is a fundamentally hopeful film!

It can't rain all the time!

But it's also interesting to square that nihilism with how Varg presents himself now, as a committed family man espousing a more positive vision of simple living and racialism (for which he was subjected to a Vampetaço).

And as an added bonus to this whole rabbithole, I got confirmation that Kulak is aware of his theme song, which I admit had been bothering me for a bit. You know I don't usually hold with the Abominable Intelligence, but this Imperium Hymn stuff - it's not bad.

Hell, let's be honest. Black Templar's Prayer is a fucking banger, and it's been dominating my gym-time listening for months. I'd shed blood to have Sabaton or Powerwolf fix the soulless bits and cover it.

Finally, hi Chris! Hope you're doing well.

Hm, did not expect to end up sympathetic about the murder part. Can you link the essay?

This. And I don't really find the murder sympathetic. Just more of a "Leopards Eating Faces" situation than I had known or would have expected.

I've fallen down the emulation rabbit hole. Or perhaps it's emulation hardware?

I was looking for a portable and moderately linux-friendly device to host this project that wasn't a stupid phone ... and I'm probably going to end up just using a busted-ass stupid phone, all the non-Apple dedicated 'tablets' are either huge or crap or both, and I had some familiarity with portable gaming handhelds like the Steamdeck and thought 'oh, how hard could it be to figure out one with decent battery life'?

Surely there must be some market between eWaste web browsers and ItCanPlayCyberPunkForFiveSeconds, even if it's a bit of a weird niche--

Who wants to drink from the firehose!

Okay, emulation has taken off. I'd messed around with SNES or PS1 emulators back when they were all the rage, or the GameCube a decade ago, but I'd kinda gotten the impression the late PS2 era had been a brick wall, with only weird specialty projects like Yuzu as successful exceptions that aimed for the low-hanging fruit and getting absolutely clobbered by lawfare. Hardware wise, I'd seen a million different Raspberry Pi compute stick shells, and just slapped the same code on a RaspPi I already had and considered RetroArch checked.

Nope. Gone are the dime-store-3d-print shells. Forget BCM2711s or RK3399 (... mostly). Even the Bricks built for gameboy-level emulation are running on more specialized and capable processors, and some of the higher-end machines can be comparable to desktop machines I would be pretty comfortable playing 2022 AAA-games on. Sure, Nintendo can cost the software developers or website hosts a pretty penny, but you don't even have to run to skeezy AliExpress offers to get giant deliveries of embarrassingly overt piracy... and maybe some software herpes. The PS3, despite its weirdo architecture, seems like it's actually working okay? And on things like the XBox, Microsoft cares so little about it that you can just rip software straight from an unmodded console, with nothing more specialized than a USB spinning rust drive. Who expected the day when M$ wasn't the bad guy when it came to archiving old games?just don't look at their OS. When you can't play something, it's usually a sign of serious software limits some nutjob is willing to work surprisingly hard to solve, or you're emulating a wii game with a prolonged jerkoff joke as a central game mechanic that doesn't translate well.

Now, there's a lot of sketch here. At the high end, you have fun questions like iffy USB-C-PD implementations and driver hell. More often, expect a ton of hardware that cycles in and out in months if not days, from a manufacturer that's apparently colorblind and depending on Kickstarter churn. Even when everything works out fine, commitment to the LGPL is more in theory than practice, and there's a lot of reason to suspect that the Snapdragon8gen2 chips were 'surplus' from conventional projects -- I dislike Qualcomm's resale policies enough to think that's a plus, but from a support and longevity perspective it's a red flag.

And, yeah, a lot of these come with just piles upon piles of piracy. Ostensibly, you could play native games (many newer devices are fairly fully-featured linux/android, albeit with all the !!fun!! involved since most of the cheaper ones are ARM). Ostensibly, you could just rip games you own or collect, and I'm enough of a hoarder collector that I've actually been able to do some of that, but in all honesty? They're built for piracy. You know it, I know it, most vendors are pretty unabashed about letting you pick how much piracy you want and know it, the less graymarket vendors having to explicitly warn you that they aren't doing the piracy for you know it.

There's an optimistic view that's kinda nice. Yeah, it's a little twisted to be so ruled by nostalgia that you're putting as much processing power into a 2002 handheld game as could run a 2022 AAA one. And if everybody could have just bought a 5 USD rip of great games like Grand Theft Auto 3 or Shadow of the Colossus or Okami and run them on their cell phone, we probably wouldn't have gotten remasters of them. But in turn, there's a ton of other games that will never show up again, or where they are remastered get butchered in the process, or get remastered for a console or environment that itself has a shelf life measured in months. The Baptists-and-Bootleggers of Obsessive Weirdos and Literal Thieves haven't just kept a lot of otherwise abandoned games archived and usually playable (oh boy Games for gofuckyourself Windows Live), but they've made a lot of equipment and play options that would otherwise not exist, even if that requires pretty dedicated design and engineering work. If it also means you can get an unlocked Android device that'll accept alternate bootloaders for less than the cost of last generations Nintendo handheld, I'm not gonna complain.

So I dunno. I'm still more of a keyboard-and-mouse gamer, but some of the options are looking pretty good when I'm away from my desk or my documentation or my reading list. And even for normal gaming time, I think it might be worth firing up Megaman Legends or Robot Alchemic Drive again.

I constantly see adds for these cute little pocket emulators, but when I see what is obviously the same hardware showing up again and again and again by different companies with sketchy websites, I nope out hard.

But a part of me is very tempted to take something like a MiSTer FPGA system at the high end, or a Retron 5 at the low end, and put them inside a case inspire by old wooden transistor radios. But that is a project for a distant day.

Yeah, a lot of the gameboy- or ds-form factor devices seem like they're extruded from a press somewhere. Miyoo and TrimUI seem like they're at least aimed at enthusiasts, but most of what actually get advertised seem like glorified ewaste aimed more to be good gifts than good things you'd want to buy for yourself.

That project sounds like it'd be a blast, albeit also a pretty sizable challenge. The MiSTer is pretty impressive tech, if probably more dedicated to fidelity than I could recognize. I've heard far more mixed things about the Retrons, although I do appreciate having something more legitimate than 'tots-ripped-yourself' rom-dedicated machines.

Zephon (2024)

Intro:

Is another C-tier(budget wise) 4x game using some crap Unity implementation(I guess, loading time 20s on a PC capable of 4K Cyberpunk 2077) that gameplay wise is easily on par with Civ V or earlier 4x games in most graphic stuff but the combat AI is actually not that bad and will punish you for fighting fair. Trailer here.. I get good frames but I feel a worse PC would probably suffer.

It's by devs who previously made the Gladius WH40K 4x game. This is a refinement of that game with their own post apocalyptic setting, that of a 22nd century some decades after first contacts came in the form of a surprise genocidal attack that was supposedly self defence. So it is a 4x with all the features of a typical 4x games, and is combat oriented. Even if you don't fight any  player faction, the unplayable NPC factions will definitely fight you eventually and at quite the scale.

Overall, I like the gameplay and combat, the setting and writing of quests and characters is interesting if not that well executed and overall while I like the outline of the writing and the themes, in execution I am mildly annoyed there's that stench of Netflix/tweet chatGPT over some of it and they could have done so much better. But unless you're a literate right winger you may not even notice the annoying crap, I think. The most 'cringe' part for me is the 'forced diversity' part  on which I'll elaborate later in the 'factions' section.

The map/game itself:

Unlike in common 4x games, the  'NPC empires' are an important part of the game and an inextricable part of the story. There's three of them, a retarded Skynet (did not cause the apocalypse, claims to want to help, not that good at R&D), survivors of the of the alien invasion fleet( definitely did cause the apocalypse), and your basic post-apocalyptic barbarian cannibal federation who somehow survived a few decades in a world of constant warfare between said mildly retarded Skynet and the aliens who while looking only mildly disgusting themselves employ biotech instead of most common machinery that looks like something puked up by a particularly sick cat and animated with voodoo.

Aliens and Skynet are perma-hostile to each other, Barbarians try to shake you down constantly. These factions don't really improve and apart from barbarians, don't colonize much and start with relatively strong cities.

Economy:

The economic part is not that complex, mostly standard 4x approach if a bit refined: all facilities in a city are physically visible on the world map and, at 3 per hex, a city of 7 hexes can only have at most 21 of them, though you're going to want multiples of each for later game units of course. Each  facility has its own production and its own building queue, so there are large tradeoffs to make. You can't make planes in a tank factory or barracks and so on.

A city good at expanding itself can easily put up military factories and mothball the productive ones.. but building up that capacity means you delay your military production by quite some time. There's sadly no fun strategies based around slaving or causing refugee waves to exploit! All construction costs minerals, running everything takes energy,  and people need to eat too. Late game units require stable transuranic elements and antimatter, sometimes in ludicrous quantities.

Combat: There's line of sights, terrain effects on cover, but mostly only for small unites (e.g. tanks or most planes don't benefit from forests or ruins providing cover and concealment much).

Weapons have damage, armor penetration, range and number of attacks, whether they're direct or indirect fire. Most units can overwatch so you need recon to avoid running into enemies and getting hit. Or if you move into a concealing tile (forest), they may not see you unless they're directly adjacent.

Units  have experience level, morale, armor value, movement speed, evasion, vantage point (e.g. planes see over most obstacles etc but are also seen), number of subunits in each formation and a lot of less common properties. (e.g. basic human soldiers does 2x more attacks at close range, reflecting the difficulty of hitting anything with a rifle further out)

Most units (infantry) are composed of multiple small entities each with its own HP pool that each attack, so an attrited infantry unit delivers far less damage.

Factions:

There's eight of them in the base game, some of them share a particular native type of tech (so far, three with ~8 units each) but each has different leader and faction abilities. You can in theory mix & match, but as the production facility for each unit type is unique, the gigantic opportunity cost definitely prevents mixing units of the same tier (so 2 infantry types etc, not to mention, in the crucial early game the other faction's units are an era behind) and some resources differ.

Native tech types:

Middle Americans (dudes with body armor & guns, tanks, SPAA, guided missiles, big artillery, nukes, even bigger tanks, brutal air power  and of course space marines with antimatter sprinkled blades that cut anything as pinnacle of infantry). Will nuke you if given a chance. Each faction type has several 'operations', basically a sort of spell of some sort.

Silicon Valley Americans (cyborg under-armed infantry, hover-servitors with plasma guns, purely mechanical spider snipers, some time-cheating  floating beam weapon using AI drone etc). Will cause a small pseudo black hole to appear over your city or army and stay being horrible for a month.

And the very definitely illegal aliens who introduced themselves by gigadeaths and now claim it was all a misunderstanding or necessary or something along those lines and the various humans who've developed an affinity for said alien's ..deity? Not at all clear what the they do, don't feel like playing them.

The 'Silicon Valley' tech tree is natively had by three factions: 'Emulated Mind'- a partly failed upload who is good at logistics and sort of good with some of the cringiest writing(survived death and cancer and won't let the apocalypse stop her), and 'heartless artificer' who is a strictly 'ends justifies the means' type of person and implausibly represented by a pretty indefinable mocha woman with a slight spanish accent.

Whereas, we know it'd be some extremely intense white or asian autist-psychopath IRL.  The special traits for the two are: emulated mind can only build two cities but gets more from random facilities around the map, and the 'heartless artificer' is good at cloning and can also improve production through a 'performance review' called 'fountain of blood' where the lowest performers get the bullet to motivate the rest to work up to 34% harder.

Then there's 'Rogue Operative', undoubtedly an Asian trans cybercriminal who social engineered a little too much and ended up running the remains of a company she was attempting to steal from when the end of the world came. I say trans because it's the 22nd century so I'm assuming gender-affirming surgery has been perfected by then but affinities towards hacking have likely not changed much.

The middle American tech tree  is had by three base factions: 'Fallen Soldier' -a robust looking hispanic guy who just won't die, kind of a like a WH40k perpetual. His faction's special power is just rigorously training their units and also healing charms-pieces of his flesh somehow prevent those who bear them from dying. Also somehow fix damaged hardware but I'm going to overlook that for now. Naturally, people love not dying of common wounds and diseases. He doesn't know why he rose from the dead, but if you wear a piece of his flesh as a talisman you're going to heal much faster.

Then there's 'practical romantic' (not actually romantic anymore) - the most normal human faction out there. Special power- get resources from defeated enemies, can buff morale with influence. Looks Iranian I guess.

Then there's the most seemingly implausible human faction, led by a fat German aristocrat (monocled, too) who spent a few decades in a bunker before getting out and becoming useful. A good administrator(can rush production) and diplomat/trader. German aristocracy, whatever is left of it is led by people who are almost invariably tanned jocks, and if not that, reasonably fit and very good skiers. Although, maybe in the late 21st century being a fat foodie will once more be a status mark? Perhaps it's good writing.

I'm a Fallen Soldier main. That's my guy. Fewer but better units, less micromanagement from that alone but then you also needn't have them spend as much time sitting tight to heal? Yes please. All the other factions can pack up and go home.

Overall I feel like the writing of Zephon (ignoring the race angle for now because I really don't think that's the game's chiefest problem) is just about skin-deep. Maybe evocative of the eerie eldritch sci-fi theme it tries to go for, but in the end it's just empty and highly generic gesticulation that leaves it to the player to fill in the blanks, which are most of it. It's superficial, simultaneously pretentious and not even trying all that hard, and with all that said it's still slightly above average for game writing. Yes, the bar is that low.

Gameplay-wise the game is alright. An improvement upon Gladius for sure, but how good was Gladius? Solidly OK, I'd say. Nothing revolutionary at all, but it works well enough. Zephon is that, somewhat more polished and set in a slightly less used-up setting.

Then there's 'practical romantic' (not actually romantic anymore) - the most normal human faction out there. Special power- get resources from defeated enemies, can buff morale with influence. Looks Iranian I guess.

I chuckled a little when I saw that guy, thinking of the Mottizen of the same name.

He's Algerian ingame, IIRC.

Yeah, skin deep writing. Pretty much. The concepts are fine, but the quests and the unit lore is just .. ugh. Just not to my taste. Almost tempted to rewrite that stuff to be less cringe. Starsector has relatively decent writing that doesn't feel insulting, but that's probably because the game devs are clearly SF readers.

Couple more annoying things: I feel like planes should have fuel / require bases like in SMACX and I just plain dislike titans. Logistically they're just kind of dumb and conceptually don't make that much sense either. And what is even the point where e.g. Praetorians kill various titans without much issue and are air-mobile?

Wonder how hard modding it is.

If roads were cheaper/could be built automatically and supplies were not automatically delivered but depended on accessibility and supply depots/convoys, the game would get a fair amount of depth.

If you could make formations out of units and move them at once, that'd be very good too.

Also, it's nice that each unit has a specific weapon because swapping out those weapons for others same way heroes swap out items would make it much more interesting. I don't get why weapon selection isn't already in the game. Endless Legend had unit builds and it added some depth to the combat..

Nothing revolutionary at all, but it works well enough.

Tbh the combat is a fair bit deeper than in ordinary 4x games, or at least could be with some more options.

Culture war - bro podcast edition.

Sam Hyde was recently on Bradley Marty's podcast where he brought former mma fighter Jason Mayhem Muller. Two whacko wierdos I love who fell off came together after a new resurgence, Mayhem has a history of drugs and likely has severe adhd like me because he wouldn't stop interrupting.

Sam Hyde accepted the anti semite, admitted he was a Christian for the first time and started the podcast with jokes like "Bradley was telling us about 14 this, 88 that". Miller acted like a total dunce, a ie collar democrat stuck in the early 2000s. I was surprised that the podcaster got a quarter million views. Recently Joe Rogan acknowledged his existence after having denied it for close to a decade.

It's nice seeing Sam be famous. He seems a little bitter, yet he was one of the only ones who didn't cuck out back when his show got canceled. Just surprised to find him on a popular podcast. This was unthinkable 4 years ago. He gets Moores Law wrong but hey, Scott and lesswrong gets tech wrong too so won't say much.

Can a bro get a summary of all this? I don't know these people but the drama of former friends following different paths and redemption intrigues me.

Gotta say, though, from what I can see initially, I would be devastated if my children ended up like any of these guys.

Highly recommend you watch it for the lols. The entire podcast is Sam going mask off and Mayhem who he picked up for the podcast 5 minutes ago being the walking MAGA stereotype. Mayhem didn't know Sam 10 minutes before the podcast.

Obviously no one wants to be an e celeb. I despise the entire thing too.

The interesting thing about Sam's resurgence is how, simultaneously, a number of people who were opposed to him are crashing and burning, notably IDubbbz, where Sam legitimately tried to pull him off the path he was on during their dueling documentaries (goddamn that was 3 years ago).

Despite how he portrays himself in his comedy and public persona, he's clearly got his life far more put-together and on a better trajectory than most influencers/youtube celebs.

Sam was willing to stand for something, it did burn him for a little but ensured that long term, he has better odds. I saw the preview for extreme peace and wish to watch all of it soon.

YouTube is worse now than it was in 2010, Sam is a throwback to back when the internet was not the normie saturated place it is now.

Yep.

I've always loved edgy subversive humor... that wasn't entirely built on malicious intent. Check out Doug Stanhope for the purest example.

Early 2010s was a mecca for that, from Newgrounds to early Youtube to 4chan's heyday. Although 4chan went way too malicious, imho. SomethingAwful was never my jam BECAUSE it thrived on the malice.

Sam is like a fucking Coelacanth from that era. Just perfectly preserved and managed to 'come back' from near extinction.

SomethingAwful was never my jam BECAUSE it thrived on the malice.

It's also why I can't tolerate Kiwifarms or rdrama (or Tumblr, or to a point Twitter); those places don't function without it. Honestly I don't find 4chan to have really gone hard over (though that's arguably true of /pol/ and... was probably the reason moot came down on the anti-Gamergate side, though it would cost him everything); what I think happened is that the population declined and you don't have as many teens and twentysomethings to attract in the first place (and media standards rose- it's hard to rip something off when you don't have effective tools to produce that thing at scale). That, and the Moral Majority (which was in significant part a SomethingAwful creation) hadn't evolved into its present state yet, so being a moralfag wasn't as attractive a thing for the teens yet.

I've always loved edgy subversive humor... that wasn't entirely built on malicious intent.

Well... it's childish. To be adult is to know that speaking about sacred topic X is always and definitionally bad, and to ensure that anyone who does is cancelled. People can be childish in some ways but adult in others. When you have an adult that's basically just a big child things get a bit more interesting.

You have to do it completely earnestly [again, like a child would, but by no means their exclusive domain]. Gamejolt is a good place to find games like this (if you're really bored, try out Five Night's at Fuckboys for that mid-2000s Newgrounds feel- there are 3 of them, and they are legitimately very good) that speak to this particular style.

That whole "unburdened by what has been" thing is a right the moralfags claim from time to time, but because at the end of the day they are people of malice, it's not theirs to exercise. (That is why they are called 'moralfags' in the first place.)

I think a factor in depression comes from having a soul like this but not being able to express it for some or other reason, but that's unique to people like this in the first place and not generally applicable.

I’m increasingly convinced Sam is a The Boys from Brazil-style clone of Leon Trotsky.

The combined DNA of Trotsky, Hitler, and Benito Mussolini.

You know, that is true, but also, when you watch Sam & IDubbz competing documentaries, one of the things that jumps out in IDubbz trying to encourage Sam to be more genuine and less of a character. Sam, understandably, believes if he ever did that he'd get deleted off the internet and unpersoned entirely.

One 'uge election victory later, and Sam does appear to be letting his true self come out at least a little bit more. His open letter to Elon was probably as close to an unironic manifesto for what he actually believes as we've ever seen, and is arguably responsible for his resurgence in fame/notoriety/attention.

So, not only did Sam try to pull IDubbz off the path, and IDubbz has proceeded to ignore all his advice and ruin his life, but Sam may have taken IDubbz advice and prospered enormously?

He and Fishtank got mentioned on Rogan recently which probably helped too.

I do think Sam wants to be perceived as this inscrutable, unpredictable character, rather than his true self. I think he lets his true convictions come out and play pretty often (like the Elon vid), but he's made it effectively impossible to know what his 'authentic' personality is. This is what I believe the closest example is, that I've seen.

Then there's the interesting theory that he may literally be a cryptid.

Is it unfair to describe Fishtank as a sort of lolcow humiliation show ?

Nope. But its definitely authentic about it, it doesn't hate the contestants.

So it's a show that selects for lolcows and then allows them to humiliate themselves by their unwise actions?

They add increasingly absurd, uncomfortable and intense scenarios to make them crack, too.

And the audience is able to interact with the contestants directly.

Different perspectives on weather

I was always surprised growing up whenever I would see westerners on TV talk about "Sunshine and rainbows". How can one like sunny weather. It cross 50 degree centigrade, the warm winds kill you and you are unable to do anything in the open at any point during the day until the seasons change. The idea of rains being sad or gloomy never made sense to me. My part of the world is made up of semi arid forets and sand dunes. North India has some of the worst environments. Rains cool things down. It is very common for people to go outside in the rain and its seen as a normal thing. 500 mm per year in the span of 6-8 weeks is not a lot of rain. Beyond the weather, the farming unfotunately is dependent on the rains and since there are no outdors here, you only see any form of green for two weeks post the rains end.

It started raining in the thid week of June here, we had showers today and the weather is nice. I can sit outside and soak in somewhat cleaner air. Apparently due to climate change, the rainy season in India is now slowly changing. The noth west has never been a place that got a lot of rain, with Rajasthan being home to Thar Desert. When I was in Chiang Mai last year, I noticed that the one month long rainy season in my city a lot longer than I expected. This was not a one off. Climate change has apparently, allegedly led to a shift in wind patterns, which means that the Thar desert might contract for real. Jaipur last year recieved more than twice its average rainfall.

This also means plenty of bad things. India, a place that lacks water, has floods each and every year. The roads are all jammed up as the drainage here is non existant. Mosquitos are everywhere so you would be wise to wear trousers and shirts 24/7 to avoid fatal infections. The internet is all shaky, most people, shops and e commerce stores have no clue what raincoats look like. Even during a time when people get to escape the extreme harshness of their environemnts, India finds a way of neutering it.

Which brings me to my real question. What is ideal weather like where you are from? Tyler Cowen talks about the distance from the equator being an important factor a civilization. Lee Kuan Yew called air condtioning a miracle as working productively in South Asian heat was pretty much impossible for most people. Hell, even Digital Nomading pioneer Pieter Levels loved Bali a lot because it had cheap wifii and aircon in most cafes where he would work in.

I have seen people post about Fall, some even like the snow. What times of the year do you like the most weather wise. I prefer spring but the wall of text above was to help others gauge why the subcontinent in particular has a lot of affection for the rains.

I love being at the pool in the summer. I live in Virginia which is hot and muggy in the summer but still snows a few times in the winter. I hate cold weather. Anything freezing and below is too cold for me.

Hot weather and sweat is something I can sort of adapt to and deal with for a few hours. I've been to India in August/September. It's not pleasant if there isn't a pool I can jump into, but I'd much rather deal with that than a cold winter.

Without a pool, perfect weather is just whatever allows me to live outside as if it was inside. Post rainstorm in the summer is pretty awesome, cuz it also tends to tamp down on the bugs for a little bit.

The ideal temperature for human comfort is around 20C, which is why people set their thermostats around there. Anyone setting their thermostats to anything meaningfully distant from ~20C is doing it to save money. If you're outdoors, you maybe want a bit more if it's windy, or a bit less if it's sunny or you're doing a lot of physical activity, but you want the sum of all effects to average you back so your individual subjective feeling is around 20C.

Whatever combination of sunny/cloudy/rainy gets you closer to 20C is the ideal weather for your region.

The ideal temperature for human comfort is around 20 °C (68 °F), which is why people set their thermostats around there. Anyone setting his thermostat to anything meaningfully distant from ~20 °C is doing it to save money.

According to my copy of ACCA Manual J (Abridged Edition), which is used by professionals to design HVAC systems: The target values used in design are 70 °F (21 °C) at 30 percent humidity for heating in winter, and 75 °F (24 °C) at 50 percent humidity for cooling in summer. The heating target actually is at the very edge of the "envelope of comfort" (presumably for energy savings), while the cooling target is right in the middle of the envelope, so only the cooling target should be considered the ideal temperature.

I live in the Middle East (Dubai), so anything below 30 °C is considered great weather here (It gets up to 50C here and its not even peak summer yet!). Winters here are genuinely pleasant. Sunny, temps around 17-22 degrees, and not too dry or too cold.

But yeah, I can relate to being confused at people hating the rain and liking the sun. I can't tolerate heat at all. I'd go as far to say I LOVE the cold.

The most "liveable" weather, in my opinion, is cold (5 to 10 °C) nights and cool (10 to 15 °C) days. With some rain, some cloud, some sun to mix it all up. This was how Stepantsminda, Georgia was during September when I visited last year, and I loved being outdoors.

But being a guy who grew up in the Middle East, there is a novelty factor to cold weather. I loved Tokyo in Jan (0 to 5C for the most part) and NYC in Jan (-3 to 3C) for the most part. Tokyo, especially, was very nice in the winter. It was dry, sunny, and not windy. NYC felt damper and gloomier, but I still liked it.

Sapporo in January (-10 to -5 °C) was a bit uncomfortable, but I still spent most of the day outdoors. Also, if you want a winter wonderland aesthetic (piles and piles of snow, icicles, frozen lakes, daily/hourly snowfall, ski town vibes) like no other, visit Sapporo; it's amazing, and the food too.

I dont like the cold due to the health issues most face, zero insulation and inability to sit outside. Georgia is a cool place.

Haven't seen you in a while. Maybe just different threads?

I've been away, I still read from time to time, but not nearly as much as I used to. Maybe I'll do a pass through once or twice a week.

I still love the motte. But life/work/relationship is a lot of work.

Climate of London (5-25 C for most of the year), weather of somewhere sunnier, like NYC.

I dont get why people dislike Engiish weather. The showers there are not very intense, it is not sub 0 for months either in many parts.

Half the people here have either been to NYC or live there.

Sounds to me like you're describing the Bay Area.

As a whole not really, it can still get hot, SF itself still gets a lot of fog even if it’s less than it was.

But slightly inland in Silicon Valley proper yeah, the ultra expensive places like Atherton, Woodside around Redwood probably have a close to ideal climate-weather combination.

It’s not perfect, though. That honor goes to San Diego.

Ideal weather? Southern to central coastal California. Warmish and dry. Humidity is the great enemy and it is not present here. I'm fine with snowy winters, it is muggy wet summers that are intolerable.

+1 The northern Central Coast (San Luis obispo, Morro Bay) have all time incredible weather. I find it less humid than coastal LA & San Diego.

Well, I've lived in both equatorial Malaysia and subtropical/temperate Australia. Despite growing up around the equator I could never stand the heat and mugginess; my preference is 15-18C, clear skies with some clouds, light breeze. The shoulder seasons in Australia are actually ideal for this.

Personally, I enjoy climates where it doesn't rain often either. Rain is annoying, it stops up infrastructure and makes everything slushy. Petrichor smells like shit too.

18C, slightly overcast, moderate humidity, occasional light breeze.

I like wearing long pants with a long sleeve T-shirt. 18C is right at the transition point where I can roll the sleeves up or down to get optimal temperature regulation so I'm not sweating with light physical activity.

A clear sky is too harsh on my eyes, I end up needing to squint everywhere and my phone loses battery faster because it needs max brightness to be read.

Summer days 18-22 degrees and occasional clouds. Nights 10-15 with maybe light rain. Best is when there are only patchy very high clouds so the sun lights them up through the (very short) midsummer night.

Sky takes up cool hues here during the rains, so its frequently pink and other colors during this time of the year as opposed to any other. Very light rain probably has a lot do with colors in the evening.

The key in the southwest is sunshine and rainbows -- sun showers. Especially the kind where there's rain on one side of the house, but not the other. A key to sunshine with rainbows weather is that the rainbows happen when the light is low and the storms are dense, say 7pm when it's lovely out and smells like creosote, ozone, and petrichor.

How can one like sunny weather. It cross 50 degree centigrade, the warm winds kill you and you are unable to do anything in the open at any point during the day until the seasons change.

I think your perspective is warped here because India is hot as fuck. If you live in a more temperate region of the world sunny weather is pleasant because that's generally somewhere in the region of 60-80F (about 15-27C). I don't know of anyone who would be happy with sunny weather if that meant it was 50C/122F outside.

What is ideal weather like where you are from?

New York–Philadelphia corridor: 70–75 °F (21–24 °C) and sunny

What times of the year do you like the most weather-wise?

The aforementioned temperatures prevail around May and September.

24 is pretty low. Does it ever get warm there?

Climate data (expand the table)

What is ideal weather like where you are from?

Scattered clouds, 15°C and intermittent light breeze is the perfect weather. Not hot enough to sweat when walking, not cold enough to need a jacket, just perfect.

It's also a good weather because you can wear a light jacket if you want to, especially if you're out til night and it starts getting chilly for the few hours the sun is down.

Exactly. While there's something mildly pleasant about hot weather, working in it is sucks and it's only really good for going swimming.

But around 15°C is just the best. If you're inactive and outside, a jacket and trousers will keep you comfortably warm... if it's near freezing you need an entire elaborate set of clothes to feel comfortable being out there and if it's >22°C doing anything more strenuous than walking will lead to sweating a lot.

It took a 35°C heatwave for me to understand what sweatbands are for. The only good thing about summer is that working outside and sweating like a horse is the perfect excuse to keep drinking cold beer to replace lost calories, water and electrolytes. Also the beer tastes much better then. I barely drink any in winter myself..

15 is jacket weather. I like 30-35 degrees as it's not too hot. 45 and up is unbearable.

30 degrees is heat wave where the elderly and sick start dying. 35 is close to record temperature (and would be a new record if it happened in June or August). Most apartments don’t have real air conditioning.

Yeah, I live in Finland.

Living on the top floor of an apartment building I've come to appreciate heat waves intimately. The building is well insulated and barely needs heating if it's >10°C, but the roof volume is not ventilated at all, so during heat waves, that whole part of the building accumulates heat and temperature in my apartment gets to slightly above shade temperature and barely dips during the night.

I am now wondering if 2 months of slightly uncomfortable temperatures (27-29°C) and, on average, one week of really uncomfortable (32-38°C) are worth installing AC.

Or how much difference ventilating the building roof thoroughly could do. A single 100W fan would exchange all the air in the attic twice in an hour. That should be vastly cheaper than AC and depending on how much it'd cut the need for AC, neighbors might even help with funding that.

You're Indian and raised there. To the British and many central/northern European guys, 15°C is shirt-sleeve weather when doing anything more active than sitting outside. If it's 15°C and sunny, I often just go shirtless because after the bloody winter it feels so nice to feel the sun on your skin once more.

Temperature sensitivity is bound to where you were raised, I think. I have seen black people wearing puffy jackets in a thirty degree weather, the kind of jackets I unzip when it's >10 °C because I'd sweat otherwise.

Autonomic nervous system just gets used to some particular temperature..

No one I know wears puffy jackets in 30 degrees, including desert dwellers.

I would have to wear an overcoat to roam around in sub 10 degree weather. Women surprisingly don't feel the affects of temperature when they have to wear revealing clothes. Something funny I noticed.

Women surprisingly don't feel the affects of temperature when they have to wear revealing clothes.

“have to”

Forced by socialization and the patriarchy, I presume.

The female desire to be sex objects outweighs the female sensitivity to the cold. A version of this takes place every day in offices across the world, where chicks will wear outfits to showoff their bodies then complain it’s too cold.

Tbh as long as they're hot, I dont mind. Very few things come close to the female form.

So I got a Switch 2. Because I'll always be a Nintendo kid at heart.

My old Switch was dying. The fan in it was making a god awful racket. So I hadn't turned it on the last few months because I planned on just transferring everything to a Switch 2 anyways. I may replace the fan for fun and practice and sell it now that I'm not concerned about losing data.

First order of business was finally finishing the playthrough of Final Fantasy XII that had about 3 hours left to it. I fucking love this game. Favorite Final Fantasy by a country mile, and the only one I still fire up from time to time. Personally I preferred the original's license board over Zodiac Age's job system, but it is what it is. I generally always prefer things the way I first experienced them.

The game was still as obviously flawed as it was when I first played it in 2006. The first half of the game is way stronger than the back half. The entire plot seems to revolve around chasing McGuffin after McGuffin to no consequence what so ever. Every time you finally get a McGuffin, some cutscenes halfway across the world with characters you never meet happen which move the plot along independent of anything you did. That said, I still love the real time combat and gambit system, the localization is top notch and the accents they gave all the groups really heighten the expert world building that went into Ivalice. Ultimately it's a game that is a work of art despite itself.

The story is a bit cheesy, and takes itself more seriously than is merited given its quality.

But the battle system is really unusual and really fun. I did two challenge runs with it in the past year: gambits only (no issuing any manual commands during combat) and Vaan solo, both of which were challenging enough to be fun but not so difficult as to be frustrating or infuriating.

Don't mind me, just jumping off of you since you mentioned FFs and favorites and I had a pre-prepared ranking. Ahem. The FF series:

1 - one of a very rare few games where I will use the phrase "good for its time" seriously. A bit slow, rough around the edges, probably not a good starter for non JRPG folks. Raised to middle of the pack by stinkers at the bottom.
2 - a very deeply flawed game with few redeeming factors. A stinker at the bottom.
3 - a bit fresh, a bit new, a bit flawed. Eh. Middle?
4 - mostly good, a little great, a couple sticking points. High middle.
5 - yeah, good shit! Top of the middle or bottom of the top.
6 - chef kiss emoji.
7 - chef kiss emoji.
8 - some real question mark choices push it down from where it could've been.
9 - chef kiss emoji.
10 - chef kiss emoji.
11 - N/A, go home and play a single player game.
12 - Fuck you, Vaan. Do not pass Rabanastre, do not Collect Fran and Balthier. To the bottom with you.
13 - Just really weak. (Mostly) nothing to HATE, but so little to love that it can't overcome the flaws at all. Way low.
14 - N/A, pls stop putting MMOs in the numbers kthx.
15 - terrible combat, fun road trip. Low you go!
16 - a spark of greatness, wasted on samey filler and bad overall plot pacing and shaping. Get on down to low tier.
Ranked: 11/14 <<< uncrossable apples and oranges gap <<< 2 < 12 < 13 < 15 < 16 < 8 < 1 < 3 < 4 < 5 < 9 < 10 < 7 < 6

Honestly, though, most of what bothers me about 12 comes from a huge pile of factors almost everybody else considers trivial - they're all just big problems for me and when you stack them all up the experience is incredibly grating.

I played 16 recently based on enjoying the demo a ton, especially the real-time combat. Unfortunately, the full game didn't add a whole lot of depth to the combat, and the story ended up being a major disappointment, going a very well-trodden boring route after the demo appeared to set things up for a really intriguing medieval politics kind of plot. Really sad that what could've been a very bold step into a new direction for the franchise ended up being so half-assed.

I never finished 13, but I still think it has the best combat system out of any FF game I've played, including 7 Remake. Almost as a rule, I have a great distaste for turn-based combat systems, but I found the whole Paradigm Shift system of changing party members' roles in real-time during a battle and spending 90% of the time doing tiny damage to stagger the enemy so that you can deplete 90% of their HP in that 10% stagger window to be highly engaging. A shame about the storytelling, worldbuilding, and hyperlinear levels for the first 20 hours of the game.

I'll always have a soft spot for 8 for being the 1st JRPG I played and blowing me away with its huge explorable world and cinematic cutscenes. Even if the Junction system turned out to be pretty bad, and the story went off the rails near the end. The space base scene and Laguna's love story will always tug my heart strings.

For the ones I've played:

3 - Only played the DS remake; it was ok. I kind of agree with your description, it wasn't terrible to play, but really felt like it had been left behind

4 - This the good shit

5 - Meh, didn't grab me much. Another one where I probably left it too late like 3

6 - Yeah pretty goated

7 - Same

8 - I appreciate a game that tries new stuff but it was just fucking weird

10 - personal favourite

12 - As I posted below, yawn

13 - Can't believe I actually beat this piece of shit instead of giving up

15 - Really a lot like 8, they threw all kinds of shit at the wall but forget to bring it together into a cohesive product. Some of the stuff in here is my favourite in all of the games, but it feels like the designers spent all their time deciding on new foods to carefully render and making fishing minigames instead of completing what they set out for.

16 - Story reminds me of 15, they do a lot of setup then about 2/3rds in I guess they ran out of time so they throw it all away and just rush to the end. Otherwise competent.

FFT - Not as good as tactics ogre

9 is wildly overrated. The gameplay in 9 is totally broken. The animations take so long that everyone's ATB bar fills up at at the same time, so you can never guess what order the turns will happen!

The writing was also lousy. The "comic relief" character Quina is by my estimate the 6th funniest character of the main cast, behind Steiner, Zidane, Vivi, Eiko, and Garnet ("What's that phrase again? Oh yeah! Get off me you scumbag!") and arguably 7th because Freya and Zidane have that bit where he pretends he didn't know her name. Amarant was a wildly underdeveloped and pointless character, and while Freya was interesting the writers just forgot about her halfway through the game (common problem in final fantasy).

Great music though.

I haven't played them all, but of the ones I've played, I guess I'd rank them 12 < 3 < 9 < 4 < 5 < 8 < 7 < 10 < 6.

Where do 10-2, 7-Remake, and 7-Rebirth fall for you?

10-2 has excellent combat. If only I liked the story enough to push it higher... probably lands somewhere in high-mid. 7-remake was pretty fun at first, but eventually I got really frustrated with the way ATB fills for the active vs passive characters and the need to constantly ping-pong control around. Felt like I could never get a groove going on anybody. And then of course the plot gradually revealed that it's not actually a remake. Put those together, plus my dislike of large open worlds, and I didn't bother playing rebirth.

I agree with some of your criticisms of 7-R. I feel like it's so close to my ideal battle system, if they just made the movesets between ATBs more dynamic and with a higher skill ceiling. I kind of like the ping-pong between characters, as it gives a cinematic feel and some light satisfaction from effective multitasking.

I also kind of hate the storyline. My hope is that when it's all done, they go back and asset-flip a "true remake" because the convoluted alternate dimension ghost stuff is just awful.

4 - The best gameplay in the series. Characters were uniquely distinct from each other, with a mix of magic types and unique abilities that gave them deep flavor without being gimmicky, much in the way 1's class system and upgrades had worked. This worked with the linear story to regularly remix your party and keep things fresh from a gameplay perspective; a character dying or leaving the party meant the flavor of the fights changed significantly, and these mechanical changes underlined the story beats. Exploration was significant, because you could find hidden fights and treasures that noticeably spiked the power of your party, especially in the endgame. The characters were awesome, and the story hit hard. Coming from FF1 and from the Dragon Warrior games, it was a complete revelation.

6 - The best story in the series. Kefka had far more depth and menace as a villain, and many of the character set-pieces and story beats were delightful. Amazing mood, amazing music. In terms of gameplay, though, I felt like it was a step down. You had much more control over which characters you used through the game, and every character could learn every spell through the esper system; this was a huge upgrade in terms of player freedom, but a huge downgrade in terms of focused gameplay, because it made the characters feel much more generic and made the gameplay much more open-ended and flabby. They tried to compensate by giving every character a unique skill, but there were so many of them and they all competed with universal magic/Espers, and the end result often just felt gimmicky and pointless; combined with the much longer intended playtime, the gameplay felt much more monotonous by the end.

...The other games I played were downhill from those two. 7 and 8 felt like elaborations on the theme of 6, but each felt flabbier than the last. I never played 9. 10 felt like they were trying to pull things back in the direction of 4, but by that point the bloat seemed terminal. I gave up somewhere in the second disc, and haven't played an FF since.

The series as a whole seems like a monument to the truth of "less is more". FF was the series where I realized "100 hours of gameplay" wasn't necessarily a good thing, like a bit of butter spread over too much toast.

...I've often wondered how much of the above might just be the "nothing will ever be as good as that thing you liked when you were 14" effect, though.

9 is basically a call back to 4/5/6 (but especially 4). Four party members, fixed classes on each character, more fantasy, very final boss that just sorta comes out of nowhere. It's been remastered with some QoL additions, but there have also been rumors of a remake for a while. Someday I'll actually get around to playing it, because my first playthrough came to an unfortunate conclusion when the third disk turned out to have an unplayable scratch on it (the perils of used games).

I always hear people going on about how you're supposed to be eternally in love with your first, and 6 was not my first, so that can't be it.
...though I was about 14 when I played it, so maybe a point for your formulation there.

9 and 10 are hyper GOAT status for me, some of the best games ever made across any genre.

7’s alright, but even back when I played it for the first time as a kid I thought it was overrated.

I enjoyed 8 quite a bit more than you did, but that was probably just due to the spectacle of how much of a fever dream it was, rather than it being a “good game” in the traditional sense.

I think FF8 is a great game. Yeah parts of it are a fever dream that make no sense, but the same is true of FF9 as well (Necron). And I think gameplay wise it is one of the most fun character building systems they turned out. It really rewards mastery of the mechanics in a way not many other FFs do, and on top of that it gives you multiple ways to become strong (e.g. while many favor low-level runs where you junction high level magic, I myself enjoy a high level run where you level up with the stat bonus abilities). And it has the greatest minigame ever, bar none.

Man, different strokes, different folks. I positively loathed Final Fantasy 10. I hated it's VO, I hated it's world, numerous boss fights sent me through the roof with frustration (Yunalesca in particular). I think what frustrated me most, especially towards the end game, was how insanely wasteful with my time the game got. You die in a boss fight, and you are committed to 5-15 minutes of unskippable cutscenes every attempt. It was excruciating. I found Tidus an infinitely more annoying character than Vaan, but that could have had more to do with the VO.

Even the best Final Fantasy are beautifully flawed -- anyone that thinks VII was perfect can shove it up Guard Scorpion's tail. XII's world always struck me as much more interesting than its plot, just as the combat itself seemed more interesting than the gambit system you end up spending more time working around (though I've long been a Tales of fan so I may be judging the gambit system a little too harshly).

Agreed that the remake is in an awkward place. Like X and XI, it's in that awkward early stage of 3d work that's just high enough quality that it can't cruise on retro feel or imagination, but still so low-res that it's painful to watch and not easily vastly improved with emulation and upscaling... while the remaster also screwed around with enough of the systems that it's not a clear upgrade from gameplay perspectives. I prefer job systems in general, since some of my favorite games in the series have been FFXIV and the original FFT (and arguably Legend of Mana, though handwaves), but it definitely moves away from the learn-and-automate feel of the original. I'd guess that it was set that way under the assumption you'd have played the original enough that it'd just be repetitive? But that's not really right, either.

That said, both the original and remaster seem like they've been big sources of Lessons Learned for other games in the series, so well worth knowing just for that (in contrast to something like FFType0).

Hope you enjoy the Switch 2.

See for me neither the combat nor the gambits really grabbed me. The fact that you spend most of the game without having to make decisions about fighting just sort of removes the fun. You cruise through most of the game that way — once you figure out the correct balance of auto commands to get the AI to not be stupid, you could put down the controller and grab a sandwich while the game fought itself. Which then turned the gameplay into moving around the game zones and solving puzzles.which aren’t bad, but are really pretty simple and don’t add much replay to the game. I felt like the entire experience was on rails to some degree. X was extremely linear, but at least you had to play the game yourself.

FF12 was when the series began to die for me. The gambit system is un-fun because then the game is just playing itself, and the game really pushes you hard into using it. I tried to play manually but it sucks because you have to keep switching characters (rather than the game auto-switching when their turn comes up), and it gets too hectic to keep up with that anyway. The writing is kind of a mess too; I played all the way through and couldn't figure out what had happened in the story until I read a summary on Wikipedia. Good characters and world though.

FFXII was such an incredible disappointment after X. Starts off really well, but after 10 hours you realize the only gambits you need are low health > heal and attack, and there is absolutely nothing of interest when it comes to building a character. The licence board was entirely pointless. All that was left was the story, which as you say became incomprehensible very quickly

This is straining my memory some, but I recall the gambit system in the original game being much more finely tuned than Zodiac Age. It only gave you the option of automating poisona for instance, after you'd spent a dungeon manually curing poison in combat. In Zodiac Age you can purchase all the gambits right from the jump, letting you automate everything immediately. I recall the original had this effect of, as soon as a task got tedious, the option was available to automate it. In Zodiac Age the game feels like it's playing itself more.

I did find I was constantly tweaking my gambits, most on account of status effects. Another difference I remember was that with the OG license board, I could give all my characters some low level spells, like Protect or Shell, so the whole party would work together to keep those protection spells up. In Zodiac Age, you tell your single white mage in the part to keep everyone protected, it's virtually all they do it takes so long to cast 3 times in a row, and then it's nearly worn off! Meanwhile they aren't healing or curing status effects.

I donno, I think some of the quality of life features in Zodiac Age actually made the game worse in ways that are counter intuitive.

I did find I was constantly tweaking my gambits, most on account of status effects. Another difference I remember was that with the OG license board, I could give all my characters some low level spells, like Protect or Shell, so the whole party would work together to keep those protection spells up. In Zodiac Age, you tell your single white mage in the part to keep everyone protected, it's virtually all they do it takes so long to cast 3 times in a row, and then it's nearly worn off! Meanwhile they aren't healing or curing status effects.

This was what really put me off the game back when I played the original. IIRC, I had every character basically playing as a red mage, never bothered with skills, and just unlocked the strongest weapons available whenever I found new ones.

Yeah, the original there were a handful of unlock events for most of the status and health level gambits. They could have used a bit more granularity and evenness (why is ally: lowest hp or foe: lowest hp a mid-game thing?), but it did help a bit. And the ones you could get from chests in the original also avoided the whole 'giant list of shit to buy' problem Zodiac Age had.

In exchange, Zodiac Age hide a lot of spells that were previously buyable by putting them in chests. Which, imo, feels a lot worse. Though at least it did fix the damage limit that made a lot of those higher-end spells useless.

My 6 hour train ride down to England just turned into a 9 hour one. Apparently there's a "heat wave" about, with temperatures at 27° C at my part of Scotland, and that's sufficient to cause the trains to breakdown. There was some forewarning, as a foreboding "potential service disruption" alluded to earlier in the day. I just didn't think this was likely.

I'm beginning to think the Indian railway system , for all its faults, has a thing or two to teach its ancestor. You won't catch them melting at anything below boiling point, unlike their playdoh kin.

They weren't nice enough to send out warning before I boarded the first train either, and if it wasn't for my cousin's girlfriend chasing down customer support on Twitter, I'd be up shit creak with a very small paddle. I'm very sleep deprived as is, and was counting on a nap I'm not going to get, what with additional stops and changes.

(I'm going to tell him to hurry up and put a ring on her, she's a keeper)

I've done a relatively exhaustive analysis on male pattern baldness (I have a vested interest). I'm extremely relieved to find out that despite the reflection of the OR lights off dad's head being dazzling, I likely have lower than average odds of going bald.

Relevant factors:

  1. 50% of men lose some hair by 50.
  2. Dad's saving a lot of money on haircuts.
  3. Maternal grandpa has a respectable head of hair past 95. If I'm slightly thinning when I'm crossing my 80s, I can live with that.
  4. Only 1/3rd of my paternal uncles are bald, all of them older than my dad.
  5. I'm teetering dangerously close to 30, without losing anything off the top. That pretty much rules out early onset AO.

I can breathe a little easier, without having to worry so much about turning 30 and finding out that I've lost my hair, alongside my well-founded belief that you immediately develop arthritis and an inability to drink liquor like you used to. The jungles of Norwood seem less daunting, and worst comes to worse, it's time for minoxidil or a trip to Turkey. Going bald might even be good for career progression, just look at Scott!

(I was immensely annoyed by the fact that while stats on the probability of your dad being bald if you're balding are well established at around 80%, the odds of becoming bald with a bald dad are much harder to find. And MBP is annoyingly polygenic to boot.)

Edit:

Here's the final post

50% of men lose some hair by 50.

That percentage seems surprisingly low. My hair genetics are probably very good (top 10% of pretty much all people I know), and I have definitely noticed some slight recession in my thirties. Perhaps I'm more neurotic about it than the average interviewee of this study.

I mean, a lot of it hinges on the threshold for what counts as "hair loss". A single strand? Who hasn't lost one of those? It's more to do with what's noticeable to yourself or others.

You have P(dad is bald | son is balding). If you can find P(bald) and P(born to a bald dad) - assuming the latter doesn’t impact the sex ratio - you could use Bayes’ Theorem instead of searching for P(son is balding | dad is bald).

I figured it out, but with the caveat that this only works in ideal circumstances which are very much not true.

Here's the link to the full post. I'm reasonably confident about the maths.

Awesome! It warms my smooth pate to see Bayes in the wild.

Yeah the genes are carried on the x chromosome so your own father is the one person in your ancestry who has almost no influence on one's baldness.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5308812/

Hmm? That's definitely not true. I'd know, I just submitted an effortpost on the topic.

Even in the study you linked:

Using common genetic variants with a minor allele frequency of at least 1%, GCTA-GREML analysis found that 47.3% (SE 1.3%) of the variance in baldness can be explained by common autosomal genetic variants, while 4.6% (SE 0.3%) can be explained by common X chromosome variants.

Fathers contribute autosomal chromosomes, even if they don't hand over an X chromosome. The relative risk if you have a bald dad is anywhere between 2.5-6x as much!

I would be interested to hear if you've found anything more reliable than the old "best indicator is whether a man's mother's father went bald" (which doesn't seem terribly accurate).

My 77yo father is Norwood 0, as am I in my 40s, so my vested interest is minimal.

You're in luck, because I did in fact decide to begin that effort-post. I've got a 6 hour journey today on abominably slow British trains, so expect something in a few hours or change.

During COVID I had my hair cut really short, like a buzz cutt even in front, just because. I thought it was cool enough but then looking at pictures of the cool guy buzz cuts it seemed my own buzz cut was considerably higher up the forehead. I proceeded to have a moment where I was sure I was beginning the downturn and my hairline was receding at an accelerated pace. Began growing it out a bit. Now I find I still have a pretty full head of hair, even in front, but I probably just have always had a fairly high hairline. Old photos suggest this is true.

Hair is weird for men. You can lose the beer gut, you can build your arms and legs and abs. But you can't diet or exercise yourself more hair.

Hah, I've been pretty convinced that my hair is thinning around the temples for the past 4ish years.

I'd go back and look at photos of me from college and try to guesstimate if I've lost a couple millimeters.

I considered using some kind of marking system to see if there was any retreat. But I'm 36 now, and hair is still pretty thick, so even if I lose a bit on the Temples I doubt its a real concern.

Also, apparently the convergence of techs available now mean that you really can get your hair growing again with some investment of time and money.

It's all well and good to begin succumbing to the recessionary pressures up top once you're already married and settled down. To my (mild) astonishment, women are quite unlikely to abandon the partners they cherish and love, while being averse to going for their less lucky counterparts while single.

But hey, hair transplants work if you can afford them.

Interesting, I thought hair transplants didn't really work once you're a norwood 7. It would probably cost an insane amount of money at that stage, at least.

I wonder what the statistics are on how averse women are to going for their less lucky counterparts while single.

I don't see why they wouldn't work, but you'd be stretching out the transplanted follicles to cover a lot more surface area.

I don't recall running into any studies, but I think it's just an observed fact that's not really in question. It would be good to know the numbers though!

I'm also gauging interest in an effort-post on the topic, so let me know if this something that you'd like to know more about.

Just released is a new house-design simulator, Architect Life. It actually uses lines like proper CAD software, rather than brown bricks like House Flipper and Minecraft. Design your dream house now! (Or just get QCAD for free.)

Court opinion:

  • In January 2021, a person jaywalks across a road. He is returning to his car from a bakery, carrying "a box of custard cups", so his vision is obscured. He trips over a large pothole (4 ft × 1 ft × 2 in or 1.2 m × 0.3 m × 5 cm) and breaks a hip. Accordingly, he sues the municipal govt.

  • The trial judge dismisses the lawsuit. In a different case, a person sued over a sidewalk that for 18 years had been obviously dangerous and near which the municipal govt. had repeatedly done repair work, and that was sufficient to prove that the municipal govt. had notice of the dangerous condition. However, in this case, the pothole was quite small at first and grew larger only gradually, and it existed for only six years. (Indeed, it was genuinely recognizable as a pothole only for two years, according to Google Street View's photographs.) This is not sufficient evidence for a jury to find that the municipal govt. knew or should have known of the dangerous condition, since nobody reported it until after the accident.

  • The appeals panel reverses and remands for trial. Between 2018 and 2019, the municipal govt. made several repairs immediately adjacent to the pothole. And, between 2018 and 2020, the municipal govt. was seeking to get a grant from the state govt. for resurfacing this road, and was actively inspecting the area for problems to be included in that resurfacing project. All this is sufficient for a jury to find that the municipal govt. knew or should have known about the pothole, even though nobody reported it until after the accident.

(The pothole was temporarily patched in March 2021, and was permanently fixed by the resurfacing project in July 2021.)

Bonus hentai:

  • March 2019: A mother notices something strange about her two daughters, 12-year-old "Kelly" and 13-year-old "Taylor". She brings them to the hospital, and is surprised to learn that they are both pregnant. Taylor gives birth a few days later. In police interviews, the daughters do not provide any leads, and deny that the mother's romantic partner is the culprit.

  • June 2019: Kelly gives birth. The police obtain a DNA sample from the romantic partner.

  • September 2019: The DNA test shows that the romantic partner is the father of both babies. The father is arrested and is charged with fifteen felonies, and then is released on his own recognizance (zero bail; this isn't mentioned in the opinion, but is indicated on the docket).

  • March 2021: Taylor gives birth again. Presumably the father made the most of being out on bail.

  • August 2022: The father pleads guilty to three felonies—impregnating Taylor at age 12, impregnating Kelly at age 11, and impregnating Taylor again at age 13. He is sentenced to 25 years in prison (without the possibility of parole).

WHOOOAAAAA WHAT?

You're going to pair "tweedle-dee-tweedle-dum municipal incompetence" with serial kid impregnator? Damn, homie.

While millions of high SES millenials put off having children because it’s “too early” or “things are too expensive,” hood bro just YOLOs it and knocks up a pair of preteen/teen sisters—one of them twice. Offspring that, like their father and mothers before them, will be subsidized by the tax-dollars of said high SES millenials.

*sighs in modern-day natural selection*

In the prosecution/criminal defense worlds, it is not uncommon for the average defendant to be out-reproducing the attorneys by 3:1, 4:1, or even higher ratios. The r/K divide is real.

Did you purposely intend to have that instinctively read in the voice of the Law & Order intro?

Pretty slick writing, if so.

I just wanted to say that I appreciate your curated collection of legal anecdotes, and look forward to them every week. I did, in fact, find this one bleakly funny, but my sense of humor is darker than my complexion.

Okay are you conducting some sort of social experiment where you gradually push the limits of what is considered acceptable in the Fun Thread before people start objecting en masse? Because if you were, I'd believe it. The topics of these legal cases have escalated dramatically week after week.

This is way more off-putting than anything in the CW thread IMO.

Personally, I find it quite amazing and hilarious that hentai plots can regularly be found lurking in real-life court opinions.

Court opinions are the gateway to a (often horrifying) land beyond imagination.

The second one: someone charged in my state with sex with two minors under 15 would be held without bond or with a million dollar cash bond. Released OR is insane. And they would be looking at life in prison with no parole. When I read stories like that from other states, it's so alien to my practice that it might as well be fiction.

They were a protected species. I spent some time googling the name, all the news articles conspicuously avoided his picture, except a particularly spicy one with copious use of N-Bombs, and then this one that finally gave me a mugshot.

There was some random black podcast clip that went around a few months ago where one of the guys on there was talking about his community needing to clean up it's act. He said something along the lines of "We all know somebody that is fucking kids". Everyone went conspicuously silent and started sputtering denials. But if you've ever listened to any black comedy, the family/neighborhood pedophile in the ghetto is an oddly consistent bedrock of bits.

“People thinking I’m this type of woman who didn’t protect my kids,” she added.

Perceptive lady, knowing exactly what I think.

I have worked long enough in the system that, while I wasn't 100% sure, I would've been comfortable betting a $20 on the race of the perpetrator just from the provided summary. I'm sure reading the opinion would've added details to make me even more confident.

The most unremarked-upon abuse (for people outside the system) among the black community is the "auntie" (perhaps a bio relation of the mother or father, but maybe an adult female friend of the family instead) who takes a male's virginity when he's 11-13. It is so common among black male clients that the uncommon scenario is where a client didn't have it happen to him. Really digging into some of these nested layers of dysfunction make some horror novels feel like light beach reading.

Respectful but enthusiastic request for more anecdotes from your experience.

Someone charged in my state with sex with two minors under 15 would be held without bond or with a million dollar cash bond.

New Jersey court rules appear to recommend bail of 150 to 300 k$ for this crime. I don't know what the judge's rationale was in not imposing bail.

Someone charged in my state with sex with two minors under 15 would be looking at life in prison with no parole.

Under New Jersey law, the maximum sentence for this crime (sex with a minor under 13, or with a minor between 13 and 15 by a parent/guardian/etc.) is life with the possibility of parole after 25 years. In this case, the criminal received the minimum sentence of 25 years without the possibility of parole, running concurrently for all three instances.

This second one? Not. Fun.

Particularly hilarious is that the father's three sentences were run concurrently, rather than consecutively—so he did not receive any extra penalty for the third pregnancy (or, indeed, for the second one).

The sentence imposed was pursuant to a plea deal, so one can't make any judgments about whether it's the same as if there were only two rapes.

The minimum sentence under state law for a single one of these acts would have had the exact same punishment. So it's either no effective increase in sentence for the third (conviction for) rape, or someone who committed enough (almost-certainly repeated) rape of two very young minors, after having been caught by DNA evidence, would have been allowed to plea to a much lesser crime than a single one of them.

Which isn't better.

((On the upside, pretty good chances it's a life sentence, no matter what the court decided! Though from a rule of law perspective, not too happy about Kennedy v. Louisiana ending up there, either.))

Maybe it'll have some marginal impact on parole hearings, but I think NJ's 'mandatory minimums' restrict parole eligibility, too.

You're assuming that if there was only one victim, or one act, he would have been convicted of the same crime. It's possible that, had that been the case, he would have plead to a lesser offense.

I'm pretty explicitly spelling out why the alternative wouldn't be judged much better, given the background and details available.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats