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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2740 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 12, 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.

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Games.

Almost finished Blood West. Shooter with soulslike characteristics, with decently sized map open to exploration per chapter, emphasis on stealth and looting, very retro feel. The setting is cool and well executed - wild west under a curse, roamed near exclusively by various monstrosities. Narration is minimal but compelling (intro features a native american blaming the white man for the curse, but that angle never comes up again), voice acting surprisingly nice. Quests amount to pointing you in the general direction of the next thing to find, but any order works, so you can explore freely.

The oppressive atmosphere is a highlight, both aesthetics and gameplay. Enemies are fast and hit damn hard, combat is bursty - you either get those headshots in (supposedly 5x damage, but not stated in-game afaik; feels like 5x) as you methodically clear an area, or you're in a desperate fight for survival. Highly satisfying gunplay, great feedback on the shotguns. A lot of weapons/consumables to pick up, inventory tetris abound unless you can resist the temptation to hoard.

Only minor complaints. Could use some "elite" enemies scattered around. Some balance issues. Too few artifact slots to permit more elaborate builds, and one slot is all but reserved for the pocket watch that stops time when you open inventory.

Random hallucinated connection: the "barn + house + tiny field + ghouls + nothing around" locations could well be lifted directly from Western Plaguelands.

Highly recommended. Put the first points into +experience perk. You can toss rocks on X, took me half the game to realize.

one slot is all but reserved for the pocket watch that stops time when you open inventory.

My pet peeve: degraded-by-default UIs that cost in-game resources (often substantial amounts of them) to partially fix. Most recently, I could spend a perk point on zooming out farther in Star Valor (top-down spaceship game) so I didn't get sniped from off the screen, and install an armor module in Outer Wilds that highlights interactive objects at a longer range so I can tell them apart from decorative objects.

My other pet peeve: High-speed menu navigation as a mandatory minigame.

Played it when it came out, and then the other two chapters as they released. My chief takeaways:

  • It's competently made.
  • Except for the writing, which is trash.
  • The old voice actor was better, but nobody will remember that because the new one is more famous.
  • The final boss fight of chapter 3 was so annoying I quit after my third attempt.

Five years ago I tried playing Deadlight, a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer set during a zombie apocalypse, originally released for the XBox 360 in 2012. The PC port was hopelessly broken and routinely freezed and crashed, so I abandoned it after half an hour.

I was curious if the devs had finally got around to patching it in the interim, so I reinstalled last night and was pleasantly surprised to find not only that they'd done so, but it's surprisingly absorbing and fun, to the point that I played about two-thirds of it in one sitting. At times the graphics are so stylised and the camera zoomed out so far that it can be difficult to discern exactly what you're looking at, resulting in unforeseeable deaths and trial-and-error gameplay, but the checkpoints are distributed so generously I didn't really mind so much. The player character is vulnerable and can easily become overwhelmed if there are more than two or three zombies, leading to moments of panic when you're trying to leg it and hoping your stamina metre will hold out long enough for you to scale a fence to safety. Cracking stuff.

What really lets it down is the writing. I've never really cared for zombie movies as a genre, and even the ostensible pinnacles of the genre rarely seem to transcend their fate as a collection of the same handful of tropes rearranged in subtly different patterns (I recently rewatched 28 Days Later and found that it has major pacing and tonal problems, with a flabby, aimless second act bookended by an iconic opening and strong conclusion; the only reason Train to Busan received the acclaim it did is because of people who want to claim they watch "foreign films" without actually venturing outside of their generic comfort zones; I will grant that Night of the Living Dead is a legitimate classic of indie cinema). But even given this remedial standard, Deadlight falls short, by virtue of being set in the US in the 1980s and yet very clearly having been written by a non-native English speaker who never bothered to ask an American-born person to spot-check his dialogue for idiomatic incongruencies. There's a bit where a character called the Rat Man asks the player character to rescue his son, in exchange for which the Rat Man will help the player character information track down his missing friends, to which the player character replies "an eye for an eye, huh". For fuck's sake — "an eye for an eye" does not mean "quid pro quo".

Update: having now finished it, it was serendipitous that I mentioned 28 Days Later.

I have been playing Hollow Knight Silksong. God damn, I agree with pretty much all of the criticism - it's brutally difficult and more of an expansion for hollow knight (gameplay wise) than a sequel. But I love the shit out of it. The visuals are great, Hornet makes a great protagonist, the story is intriguing and it is packed with cute and interesting npcs. And the music is just phenomenal, absolutely gorgeous. But yeah it's hard to recommend to anyone who doesn't already froth Hollow Knight. There are enemies in the second biome who do two masks of damage a hit, meaning you are three hits from death and there is a buttload of pogoing necessary for progress, and since hornet's pogoing is different to the vessel's (diagonal instead of straight down) you have to learn a new system - and forget the muscle memory of the old system. But if you liked hollow knight you should definitely play it (although you probably already are) and if you haven't played hollow knight but like metroidvanias or souls likes, get on it!

Yeah I had to take a break in act 2 cuz I was tired of being brutalized. I’ll probably pick it back up later.

Yeah I'm bouncing off I think the final boss now, good God what a fight. Previously when I was starting to tilt I'd whip out my threadolin and go play it for someone new (everyone reacts to it, singing along, including enemies. Trying to play it for bosses is a good way to learn their moves, because you have to play it for a few bars, you can't just hold Y and trigger it.) But I've already played it for everyone now and I just keep dying to this damn boss. At least in Elden Ring you spawn outside the arena instead of having to get back to it each time. I know it's a pretty minor inconvenience, but it gets frustrating after a while.

If you're a Gundam fan, you should be playing Gundam Battle Operation 2!!! In what other game can you play an RGC-80 GM Cannon (1 2) and have an ultra-fun battle against an RX-78-1 Prototype Gundam (1 2) in the middle of an abandoned city? Or beat down an MSN-02 Zeong (1 2) with an AMX-011P Zaku III Psycommu Type (1 2) as you dodge and weave between asteroids?

Example pulse-pounding gameplay:

The game can be played FOR FREE on PC (try to play during hours when the playercount is high), PS4, and PS5. Some MSes are available only through a gacha system, but the game definitely isn't pay-to-win, and even the gacha-only suits can be purchased with non-premium currency after a few months.

In-game power levels range from 100 (e. g., level 1 GM) to 750 (level 4 Zeta Gundam or level 1 Gundam F91) in theory, but in practice matches don't go lower than 250 or 300. Personally, I'm not a big fan of high-power battles and space battles, and stick to ground battles in approximately the 400–550 range, with occasional forays into 250–350 and 600 if no other matches are available. My most-used MSes are Guncannon Heavy Type D, Jegan Heavy Equipment Type, Dom Cannon Multi-Gun Type, and Galluss-K. (Yes, I love shoulder cannons, how could you tell?)

Sounds like my cup of tea, wishlisted.

Last night I gave Prey from 2017 a try, playing it for a few hours. It wasn't bad, but I agree with some people who argued it's so beholden to its immediate influences (System Shock 2 and BioShock) that it maybe doesn't really have much of an identity of its own. I like immersive sims, but the very fact of their relative open-endedness sometimes makes me feel a bit overwhelmed: I feel anxious that I'm playing them "wrong" unless I meticulously search every single drawer and container.

I like immersive sims

I don't like that someone decided to call them "immersive sims". What does it simulate? Why is it immersive? I know it's "just a name", but MSFS with VR is a much more immersive sim. Why can't people call them "simulationist action RPGs" or just "shocklikes"?

Immersive sims simulate a virtual environment with a high degree of systems-oriented internal consistency, and unlike most games which do this (e.g. SimCity) they attempt to immerse the player in this simulated world by having them control a specific individual therein (typically from a first-person perspective), as opposed to having them observe the virtual environment from a God's-eye-view.

In general I vastly prefer genre tags which offer some kind of description of the game's mechanics: genre tags of the form "games that are like X" are useless because they presume familiarity with X, which is an intrinsically more insular naming convention than just describing how the game plays. Does anyone seriously think "Doom clone" is preferable to "first-person shooter", particularly when most FPSs have so little in common with the original Doom? I'd love if someone could come up with a better name than "roguelike" — I'd hazard a guess that the majority of people who use the term are unaware the term is a reference to a specific game, never mind having played it.

In the case of Prey, however, I'll grant that, based on the two or three hours I spent playing it, "shocklike" is a perfectly accurate description.

“Procedural dungeon crawler.” Maybe squeeze in the word “permadeath” if you’re worried about people confusing it with procgen-as-compression like Elite.

I don’t think -like and -lite merit different terms. If adding a jump button or RPG stats doesn’t keep a game from being an FPS, adding metaprogression still leaves you with a PDC.

-Like and -lite marks the difference between audiences who want to complete the game eventually through piling on upgrades and those who want to play a game they might never complete.

That doesn’t seem right. FTL barely has metaprogression at all, and it’s a definitive roguelite.

Besides, why should expectation of completion deserve a separate genre? “FPS” doesn’t even distinguish between single-player campaigns and uncompletable multiplayer lobbies.

"Permadeath highly-variable X" and "permadeath highly-variable X with metaprogression" for roguelites respectively? Not sure how to make it not be a mouthful when "roguelike" is already a pretty specific modifier genre.

Is Minecraft survival mode an immersive sim, then? High degree of systems-oriented internal consistency? There's nothing but systems there. Immersing the player in this simulated world by having them control a specific individual therein? Absolutely.

As they have explicit win-states, I consider immersive sims a genre of video games, whereas sandboxes like Minecraft are more akin to software toys, per Will Wright's distinction.

I'd also dispute whether a game whose environment is wholly procedurally generated can be classed as an immersive sim, as the genre typically involves the simulation of a specific space rather than the simulation of a kind of space. System Shock 2 takes place on the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker, not on a generic spaceship whose constituent spaces can be arranged in any arbitrary order.

I would argue that No Man's Sky is an immersive sim (if not a very realistic one) and not a software toy, and conversely that Star Citizen is a software toy (no end game and progression exists almost entirely on player-defined axis) and an immersive sim (it has a defined world with specific spaces where they player exists entirely within a single avatar facing a systems-coherent simulation, makes you feel paranoid that you're missing out on lore/material if you don't search every corner).

I'm honestly not sure where I'd put Space Engineers there.

Minecraft has had an "explicit win state" since year 2011.

Yeah, but even at that point (and definitely since 2016) the win state has been just another toy to play with. The area with the end boss is literally called "The End", but after the final victory text the game doesn't actually end, or even restart from scratch in a "New Game +" sort of mode; all persistent world and character changes remain. As of 2016, "winning" spawns a portal that makes it easier to reach new areas that are practically inaccessible otherwise, with monsters and treasures that don't exist elsewhere in the game. To make it easier to reach more of those new areas it's recommended that you re-summon the end boss and defeat it again to spawn more portals; wiki says you can get up to 20 of them.

At least in vanilla, you're usually better served by exploring the outer islands directly instead of refighting the dragon -- a lot of the intent for multiple summonings is to handle multiplayer servers. That said, yeah, there's a lot of players that literally never do it, and another number that consider it where the game starts (since Elytra and Shulker boxes, both post-Ender Dragon, are incredibly useful for creative builders).

Modded can change that pretty aggressively, and it's common to lock 'end-game' or specialized crafting material specifically around the End Dragon's death (either as a direct drop, like old Tinker's Construct end dragon scales, or indirectly like Quark's Biotite). But then again modded will also have other end states, some just checkboxes (GTNH's final Stargate is literally useless by the time you can make it), and some more serious (completing Blightfall's last quest involves purifying the entire pregen map; you can still explore, but it's an entirely different style of play from what you were doing before).

Can this win state be reached from survival mode?

Yes, and it rolls the credits and everything.

Yes.

The player can "beat the game" in Survival mode by defeating the ender dragon in the End.

Prey from 2017

I had it in my backlog for a while, but I am a little shocked it's that old. Time flies.

I feel anxious that I'm playing them "wrong" unless I meticulously search every single drawer and container.

Tell me about it. It's embarrassing, I can't be assed to grab pencil & paper and go after the proper secrets in these games, but will obsessively, tediously loot every nook, and will get nervous about accidentally progressing. And it's rare that these games push you to use everything you find (can't expect everyone to play that way).

Trades stereotypes:

Welders: not the brightest

Drywallers and roofers: in areas near the border, none of them are here legally. In the upper Midwest, they’re the guys who get paid last in the company- if they have any money in their pocket, they skip work to go to the strip club.

Ironworkers: welders are stereotyped as barely literate. Ironworkers are stereotyped as barely verbal. Very good at drinking and fighting though.

Electricians: like HVAC techs, usually a bit better at fancy book learning than the other trades. Kinda introverted, big egos, keep to themselves. Electricians have separate unions, boards, etc. They haze their apprentices worse but have more in-trade solidarity more.

Plumbers: fully generic in the trades, a few of the specializations are in the ‘book smart’ category like electrical and HVAC. Known for having multiple ex wives.

Carpenters: Hispanic but the legal kind that still doesn’t speak much English in places where Hispanics aren’t unusual. In places where they are, kinda generically lower class.

Elevator guys: they got the money. Lots and lots of money. They do take risks though.

HVAC: residential techs are used car salesmen. Commercial techs are aggressive personalities that it’s hard to tell if they’re racist or just misanthropic. Career installers are all jailbirds. All of them are the types that would have been better at school if they didn’t hate it with such a burning passion.

General construction: there’s a stereotype of them as crackheads, but recent trends make that unfair- they mostly do meth instead.

Truckers- heavily black, always about to quit. Like their prostitutes. Petrified of an accident.

Concrete guys: alcoholics recruited from the general pool of hard laborers in the area; around me thats illegals. More likely to have their immigration fraud actually done than roofers and drywallers, who mainly just hope nobody checks.

Oil field workers: they got the money, well they did before they spent it all.

Hot side tech(restaurant equipment): baby mamas, plural. Probably can’t pass a drug test, thé boss agrees not to impose one unless there’s an accident. Spends money like theres no tomorrow, but doesn’t earn enough to.

Painters: permanently acting high from all the fumes. Real oddballs because of it.

Pipe fitters: always looking for the next gig- because they’re employed for the job, not necessarily for the company. Broke a lot.

Millwrights: another ‘book smart’ trade, these guys actually liked school- lots of them have degrees in something related. They have a lot of parts on hand and don’t know what to do with them.

Maintenance- as in internal guys: these guys are the first level of what’s possibly three or even four layers of subcontractors. Good ones have breakers mapped out, roof access memorized, keys to everything located by person who has them, etc. Bad ones don’t know any of that, and they don’t know what they don’t know either. Most are somewhat in between, but all of them are fat.

Truckers- heavily black

Have things changed that much? The last time truckers had any kind of impact on the culture, in 1976-77 with Convoy and the CB radio fad, truckers were almost uniformly white working class, usually from small towns.

Very high pay for the skill level is almost uniformly much blacker than the general population these days. They're not as black as the stereotype suggests but there's definitely an overrepresentation.

General construction: there’s a stereotype of them as crackheads, but recent trends make that unfair- they mostly do meth instead.

Around me, that's the stereotype for roofers. Even the "calm" roofers I know go through 4+ energy drinks a day.

Glaziers?

That tracks with the HVAC and Electricians I've known.

What are the best completed cultivation novels in your mind? I started reverend insanity off the rec of @self_made_human but wasn’t feeling the evil MC vibe.

I’ve read coiling dragon, I shall seal the heavens, cradle, and mother of learning and liked em all. Tried out Warlock of magus world but it’s a little too silly for me so far.

Any thoughts?

Path of Ascension for space cultivation. It's not finished, but there are a few arcs that make for good stopping points.

Elder Cultivator has a kind old man as the main cultivator. Story eventually starts to drag, but I got like 1000 chapters out of it before I dropped it.

In racking my brain for other cultivation stories I've read and coming up blank. I'd say learning how to quit a story is a useful skill if you are gonna start reading cultivation stories. And not just quitting books you immediately didn't like, but quitting a story you've enjoyed for 800 chapters, but the last two hundred haven't been good and the trend is in the wrong direction.

Meng Hao walked into the McDonald's. The cultivator taking his order gave a derisive snort, but Meng Hao did not really care, because he had repressed his aura down to the Single Patty Realm, and a fool would not be able to tell his true level of burger eating.

"Give me... a Happy Meal!"

The cultivator's face flickered before he finally regained his composure and laughed. "You couldn't afford a Happy Meal. Get lost! Don't you see that there are Double Quarter Pounder Realm eaters waiting behind you?"

Meng Hao slapped his bag of holding and threw 80 billion spirit McDonald's coupons onto the counter, causing an earthquake which demolished half of the restaurant. Everyone dropped their jaws. None could see how this was possible!

"I'll take that Happy Meal with a side order of fries, " Meng Hao said. He was as calm as the ocean in a painting of an insanely calm ocean. "And let me see your manager!"

The cashier cultivator coughed up a mouthful of ketchup. He simply could not handle Meng Hao's killing intent, because he was only at the Quarter Pounder with Cheese realm himself. Even though Meng Hao had suppressed his aura, because he had cultivated the Heavenly Burgin' Qi, this was enough to kill people a few levels higher if he truly wanted.

It was then that another man which a much more fierce aura stepped forward. "You dare make trouble here?"

"P... Patriarch Hamburglar!"

Patriarch Hamburglar was 99 cents of the way into the Big Mac Realm, plus tax! Meng Hao was pushed back two feet, knocking over a soda machine. Powerade Mountain Berry Blast geysered outward, killing several onlookers.

Of course, Mayor McCheese saw all this happen through the window.

Meng Hao coughed up a mouthful of blood, snorted, constricted his pupils, and then his expression went calm. He unleashed the aura of 64 patties, condensed down to a 2 patty stack that could fit into his mouth!

Mayor McCheese coughed up a mouthful of cheese. His pupils constricted.

"Is this... Seeking the McRib stage??"

Meng Hao had the gentle air of a scholar, but it wouldn't stop him from killing several people in a McDonald's.

"Burger Devouring Scripture! I'm Lovin' It!"

With the first keyword of the Burger Devouring Scripture, everyone below the early Quarter Pounder With Cheese stage exploded into purple mist. The light of the immense heavenly burger shone down with the contours of a golden arch as 9 illusory burgers floated around Meng Hao's body, which is probably an important xianxia number that matches the number of lakes in some sacred Chinese province I've never heard of. But that was only a fraction of Meng Hao's power. He waved his arm, bringing forth thirty more cultivation techniques that hadn't appeared in over 400 chapters!

"Heavenly Tribulation Fries! Eastern Everburning Egg McMuffin! Fruit Smoothie Guillotine! Soul McCafe Mocha Incarnation!"

Meng Hao's expression was the same as ever as he slapped his bag of holding, and brought out his karmic ketchup packet, Fry Cook Lord medallion, seventeen different wooden time spatulas, a five-coloured resurrection coupon, the silk burger wrapper, various souls of lightning McNuggets that he may or may not still have, and his mask of the legacy of Ronald McDonald. Oh, and the image of a flying Chicken Snack Wrap dragon appeared. Remember that? It was basically his Main Thing at the start of the novel, but quietly faded into irrelevance. Until now!

All of this takes some time to describe, but actually happened in the space of only a few breaths.

"What! Impossible!"

Meng Hao wanted to summon the parrot as well, but it was too overcome with eroticism by the purple fur depicted on a nearby poster of Grimace, and was busy drilling out a glory hole straight through the poster, and the wall it was pinned to, with its strong parrot erection.

But it was more than enough. The Hamburglar's soul flew out and was absorbed into his mask! He screamed as his body was destroyed completely.

Meng Hao brushed off his robe and swept up his spirit coupons and everyone's bags of holding which probably didn't have any cool sh*t inside unless I write him into a corner later, and anyways, don't worry about it for now. He surveyed the rubble that was all that remained of the McDonald's.

"Guess I'll be taking that Happy Meal... to go!"

"It's okay, Anna. You'll make a great cauldron."

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

LOL this made me laugh almost the whole time reading it. Amazing. I was dying at the mouthful of ketchup part. And the Powerade!!! Ahahaha.

You forgot to add that he sighed contentedly with strong emotion after wreaking such havoc, though!

Lord of the Mysteries may or may not qualify as cultivation depending on what you're looking for, but it would be my favorite cultivation-adjacent thing I've read. It has a cultivation-inspired sort of progression framework but not the typical cultivation setting or powers or advancement methods, instead it's more occultism in a Victorian-inspired setting. This site seems to have a decent epub version if you don't want to put up with the official site.

It being my favorite isn't a terribly strong statement, since a lot of them (like Coiling Dragon) I've quit after trying and getting bored, but I guess I'd say it's of similar quality to the average published western fantasy novel? Which is high praise by webnovel standards. Note that it has a slow start. (Conversely the currently-airing donghua adaption went too far in the other direction in rushing through and skipping things for the first few episodes, to the point that some non-novel-readers were complaining of it being difficult to understand. Nice animation though.)

Nice animation though.

I bounced off it because i thought it was poorly directed, even though parts of it were well animated.

Would you recommend powering through or just reading the novel?

The show skips and compresses enough stuff (setting, time with less important characters, less vital plot elements, explanations of what's going on) that I would regard the novel as the "full" version, plus according to the timeline it'll take until 2035 to adapt it all. The main question is whether you also bounce off the novel's translation/writing-style/slow pacing. So I would say give it a try and see how you like it.

cradle

I just posted a comment recommending Cradle. Good job me. Since you've already read Cradle, I agree with FC that Beware of Chicken is extremely funny.

As for another... I enjoyed listening to an AI audiobook of Release That Witch, despite an embarrassing pseudo-harem element. It's an isekai where a chemist bootstraps an industrial revolution in a magical setting; the "progression" is more Civilization than Amazing Cultivation Simulator though.

Very interesting how Communist theory seeped into the Chinese author's depiction of a state planned economy.

have you tried Beware of Chicken? My wife and I love it.

I saw it recommended but idk man! Wanted something a bit more serious. Perhaps I could check it out.

Only read the first volume and then stop. Once it wrings the humour out of the situation, it descends to absolute trash tier

It's got a lot of silliness, slice of life humor, and it's, eh, I guess the way I would describe it is sorta the opposite of grimdark. Very optimistic, but not generally in a flippant way. It takes itself seriously most of the time, but Berserk it ain't. I consider that an unalloyed positive, but YMMV.

It also isn't completed. Although it is closing in on the end and I don't really think it matters much.

The first novel is pretty much self contained and arguably even works better as a standalone, so it doesn't have to be a big commitment to read it.

...it's closing on the end of the series? I'm not current, but from the general arc of the story it seemed like it could go for a while. By the end of the snowy north, he's only broken rocks in vol 3 and diverted waters in vol 5, so I'd expect another couple of volumes at least before we wrap the series up.

Things could of course change but he has said that he planned for 6-7 volumes (and has repeated that recently) and he just finished the 6th.

I don't think there's much of a plan. Just vague motion to keep milking the cashcow while he stares longingly at the Harem Option.

Does the Motte have any recommendations if I want to educate myself on formal logic?

I'm considering getting this textbook, but just because some random youtube video recommended it, I don't really know what else there is on the market.

My college course on formal logic used Language, Proof and Logic, which I liked. The physical version came with software that would check your proofs, so you could write things like

  1. A
  2. A->B
  3. Modus Ponens on steps 1 and 2

And it would automatically fill in step 3 with B, which was a nice way of constructing my proofs so they were actually correct.

I really like Boolos and Jeffrey's "Computability and Logic", although that would probably count as a second course. What level of background knowledge do you already have?

I have very little background in it currently. I've dabbled a little bit in some analytic philosophy which uses it and after I got a degree in a humanities field I learned to code and got a job which exposes me to a little bit of CS every now and then. Basically, both in philosophy and CS I've come across use of formal logic a bit, but I've never actually had to do anything with it myself. It did however produce a lingering interest in the topic which is why I'm now intending to get a proper understanding of it. So I reckon I'm probably better off starting with an introductory book, but I'll take note of your recommendation in case I am motivated to delve deeper after working through an introductory book. Thanks for the recommendation!

The preface says: "Computability and Logic is intended for the student in philosophy or pure or applied mathematics who has mastered the material ordinarily covered in a first course in logic and who wishes to advance his or her acquaintance with the subject. The aim of the book is to present the principal fundamental theoretical results about logic, and to cover certain other meta-logical results whose proofs are not easily obtainable elsewhere."

I find the style to be more chatty and less dry than most mathematical texts, presumably to cater for the philosophy students. The main prerequisite is an understanding of first-order logic. The Wikipedia page for "First-order logic" looks pretty good.

Thanks, it certainly seems like the book deals with precisely the sorts of things I'm interested in.

Occasionally I'll see a comedy bit which I don't agree with, but which is executed so well I can't help but crack a smile: https://instagram.com/reel/DM0ZSGfu6dk/

Meh. I can try to imagine it would be funny if you were a leftist and actually believed people it was parodying existed. But comedy needs to be relatable in some way, it requires some level of suspension of disbelief, and all I see here is playing into stereotypes the left has about the right with no bearing on reality.

But even then, I'm not convinced it's all that good even if you did believe the right were crypto Nazis. Like, watch something by Babylon Bee. They do stuff like this all the time mocking the left and even when I agree with them in principle they're not funny. It's very low-brow humor to take something someone believes at a 3, dial it up to 11, and then make fun of how ridiculous and extreme it is at 11. It's not clever, because you're just beating up strawmen.

I remain unhealthily obsessed with designing houses. How large do you think a bedroom should be? (Reminder: 1 ft ≈ 0.305 m and 10 ft2 ≈ 0.93 m2.)

Under the IPMC, which is binding in many US jurisdictions, the minimum is 70 ft2 for one person or 50 ft2 per person for two or more people. But no actual rationale is given for these numbers.

The Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction suggest an 8 ft × 2 ft closet "for adults". Obviously, that can be replaced with two 4 ft × 2 ft wardrobes or shelving units. But is that intended to be for a single person or a couple? It isn't clear from the text.

Let's imagine that the typical person wants his own desk, wardrobe, and shelving unit. Each of those items is 4 ft × 2 ft, to which we will add a 4-ft aisle in front. (The AGSRC minimum for the chair in front of the desk is 3 ft, but we want to accommodate a 3-ft door to the bathroom, plus 0.5 ft on each side of the door.) We can arrange these furniture items on opposite sides of the 4-ft aisle, for a total room width of 8 ft. Then, at the end of our 4-ft aisle and perpendicular to it, we add a 7 ft × 3.5 ft twin XL bed or a 7 ft × 5 ft queen bed, with up to three bunks, plus another 4 ft of circulation space in front of the bed. (The IBC minimum for an aisle is 2.5 ft, but we want to accommodate a 3-ft door to the corridor or the dining/living room, plus 0.5 ft on each side of the door.) Voila—we have a bedroom of 8 ft × 13.5/19.5/25.5 ft (108/156/204 ft2) with a twin XL bed or 8 ft × 15/21/27 ft (120/168/216 ft2) with a queen bed. (I'm assuming that a shelving unit can be split in half to fix the unevenness of the furniture in a one-person or three-person bedroom.) This can be paired with an 8 ft × 10 ft bathroom to form a suite.

That's a bigass bathroom. My usual sizing for a master bathroom is 6x10 ft or 180x300cm: 80cm for a full-sized bath, 80cm for a toilet, 140cm for a double vanity.

How can you fit a queen bed into 8 feet? That leaves just 1.5 feet at either side of it. Are you designing it for crab people that will edge sidewise into bed?

That's a bigass bathroom.

A while ago I figured out that the smallest permissible "type B" bathroom under ICC A117.1 seemed to be 5 ft × 10 ft. Here, I just rotated that design by 90 degrees and expanded the 5 ft to 8 ft. I agree that those dimensions are a bit large, but I don't think that a smaller design is possible within the "type B" accessibility constraints.

How can you fit a queen bed into 8 feet? That leaves just 1.5 feet at either side of it.

Whoops, I forgot that a queen bed is supposed to be accessible on two sides rather than just on one side. Ignore that and use the twin XL dimensions, then.

The Charlie Kirk shooting has also given us a truly cringe moment:

Kash Patel: "To my friend Charlie Kirk. Rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I'll see you at Valhalla"

To provide some context, "we have the watch" or "end of watch" is often used in police or military organizations when someone is killed in the line of duty. The "Valhalla" part emerged in some but not all GWOT veteran circles who would invoke that element of Norse mythology after the death of a comrade.

Obviously, the first layer of cringe is that Charlie Kirk was an outspoken Christian who would probably want to be assumed to have gone to a, you know, Christian concept of the afterlife. Second, neither Kirk nor Patel have any military or law enforcement experience, so there's also the cringe multiplier of framing yourself as a kind of very online wannabee badass.

But, Friday's gonna Fun, and Some of the memes are chuckle worthy.

Second, neither Kirk nor Patel have any military or law enforcement experience, so there's also the cringe multiplier of framing yourself as a kind of very online wannabe[] badass.

I wonder to what extent military slang and terminology and such like changes over time as it drifts into public use by non-soldiers. An in-joke starts as a status symbol telling others in the know that you had seen the elephant, then becomes known to the public and becomes a symbol to everyone, then begins to be used by members of the public to signal support, then drifts out of use with soldiers.

Kind of the same way about half of men's fashion starts with elite units in the military, then regular infantry units adopt the look from the elite units, then veterans continue to wear it as a symbol of service, then it just runs into civilian use.

Kind of the same way about half of men's fashion starts with elite units in the military, then regular infantry units adopt the look from the elite units, then veterans continue to wear it as a symbol of service, then it just runs into civilian use.

It is what it is, y'know?

I think your spot on. And, like all fashion, the user / wearers have to have some level of self-awareness. It's one thing to wear some digital camo pullover with a sports logo over it or something. It's quite another to show up all tactical gear'ed out to go on a cub scout 3 mile hike (ask me if I'm referring to personal experience here :-) ).

Charitably, I think patel probably had decent intent. But he seems like kind of spaz and may be one of those guys who kind of gets military / law enforcement / bro culture but is also not quite adept with it. If he had stopped with "Rest in peace, we have the watch." It comes across as salutary perhaps a little overwrought, but mostly fine. Throwing in "Valhalla" is deciding to unironically wear some of the shirts you see on /r/iamverybadass.

It's on a spectrum, right? Starts as Military, becomes try-hard, moves to normal, then to cosplay. I wore an m65 field jacket from the army navy store through most of boy scouts, and while it was military-coded no one thought I was pretending to have served in Vietnam. A modern camo version would look more like pretending; a WWI era military jacket more like cosplay. Then I suppose a tie has lost all association with Croatian mercenary light cavalry from the thirty years war.

An army-navy surplus store jacket is fine because it's not indicative of going out of your way to find a particular article of clothing. You're an outdoorsy or vaguely military-style-ish kind of guy. Rolling down to your local surplus store happens in the same trip as buying a drill at Loews / Home Depot.

But if you're rocking Crye Precision gear at the local fudd Rod and Hunt club firing range, you're fucking up. Patel didn't go full autist and like, render a salute and call for 'present arms', but his valhall-ing is pretty the same as the guy who shows you his 6.5 creedmoor while saying, "Yeah, it's actually the only round SEAL snipers use now. The rest just don't cut it"

Then I suppose a tie has lost all association with Croatian mercenary light cavalry from the thirty years war.

Do go on!

Do go on!

The word Cravat comes from Croat, and the neck scarf comes from a scarf worn by regiments of Croatian light-cavalry mercenaries during the Thirty Years War, who were famously fierce fighters.

In 1660 a regiment of Croats arrived in France — a part of their singular costume excited the greatest admiration, and was immediately and generally imitated; this was a tour de cou, made (for the private soldiers) of common lace, and of muslin or silk for the officers; the ends were arranged en rosette, or ornamented with a button or tuft, which hung gracefully on the breast. This new arrangement, which confined the throat but very slightly, was at first termed a Croat, since corrupted to Cravat. The Cravats of the officers and people of rank were extremely fine, and the ends were embroidered or trimmed with broad lace; those for the lower classes were subsequently made of cloth or cotton, or at the best of black taffeta, plaited: Which was tied round the neck by two small strings.

-- Le Blanc, H., Esq. (1828). The art of tying the cravat: Demonstrated in sixteen lessons

The Croats were famously fierce fighters, mothers all the way to the early years of the 20th century would supposedly frighten their children with stories about the Croatians depredations at the sack of Magdeburg. Croat regiments for a time became a generic term for light cavalry, comparable to hussars, and many adopted the Croatian costume.

So an elite, famous, fierce military unit shows up in Paris. The fashionable men of Paris immediately cop their style, to imitate the masculine devil-may-care mystique of the mercenary. Soon the Cravat was de rigeur for formal dress. Charles II brought it back from exile on the continent, and it became part of English fashion. From there the cravat evolved into the bow tie and straight tie and I guess the bolo tie of today, and the once military cravat became the faggy ascot that a costume designer puts on a character to inform us that the character is some unspeakable mix of wealthy and homosexual.

I will say, a lightweight scarf is really a pretty functional piece of dress for a life outdoors. I'll occasionally wear one despite the aria di frociaggine if I'm on a long hike or a bike ride. Keeps the sun off your neck, keeps the chill off without too much weight while being easily adjusted. The Croats had it right.

Thank you. This was wonderful.

I will now do my utmost to somehow PsyOp Highly Online Navy SEAL bros into wearing ascots.

some unspeakable mix of wealthy and homosexual.

Perish the thought! The wealthy should be straight as hell or asexual lizard people, the way God intended!

I want to do a simple socioeconomic Mottizen survey: what class are you and why do you think that?

Born rural low/middle class. Parents are mailman and daycare worker, in a time/place when those were perfectly fine jobs to hold long-term and could afford you a house & kids. From my father's side, my ancestors all seem to be lower class employed menial workers, while my mother's side were farmers (though lost/abandoned the automation/upscaling race) and upper middle class artisanal workers owning their own store. Fittingly, one maternal uncle gifted me a book recording the lives of several generations of my maternal heritage, while my paternal side has maybe a few old fotos where my dad knows the names of most but not all people.

On paper I've moved upwards substantially - my parents didn't finish high school (and older generations barely even did elementary), while I'm a postdoc researcher at a reasonably prestigious but small university, and my wife is as well. Most would consider that upper middle class. But especially compared to my mother's ancestry, it does seem like a move downward in practice. We don't own anything (not our apartment, certainly not our work place) and nor do we even earn that well. Maybe we'll cobble together enough to buy our own house. Though yet otherwise, we personally know world-leaders in certain fields, so I guess you could say we are effectively just paying for the privilege of having a serious shot at the very top.

Even though I've only had office/clerk-type jobs, I consider myself working class because I don't have an ambitious bone in my body. I have no interest in climbing the ladder. I'm not willing to bust my ass 60 hours a week or more; it's 40 and out. I'm no leader; I don't want the headaches of managing people; I haven't got the drive to succeed; I'm essentially passive.

The only ambition I've ever had is to keep myself in a decent standard of living. A roof over my head, a few beers every evening while playing HOI4 or Stellaris, weekends spent in the nearest university library reading up on anything that catches my fancy.

I'm doing all right so far; I inherited my home from my mother, free and clear with no mortgage; got a tidy chunk of change socked away in an investment account (though nowhere near enough to pay for a nursing home should I ever need such; in that eventuality I plan on self-euthanasia, with a clear conscience since I've never had a romantic partner or kids).

middle class

I'm doing webdev programming, 25 with some halfway finished uni which I still haven't dropped out of, with above median income for both the city and country I'm in.

Solidly upper-middle by birth and culturally, lower-middle by income. Every male parent and grandparent was pretty successful, and held an advanced degree and/or a position of responsibility.

Downwardly mobile due to complete lack of work ethic, little ambition and no natural affinity for the subjects that allow people similar to me in terms of personality to get ahead in life (computer science, engineering).

Definitely not upper, as I have to work for a living (there are no additional cultural requirements in Russia, as we have spent 70 years as the USSR).

Not working class, either, as I have a CNR job.

Lower upper middle, I guess? There are always UMC people richer than me (business owners, senior managers, corrupt public officials), that can buy a house with cash, but I can buy a new car with cash.

In all seriousness, can you genuinely not tell whose great-grandfather was an aristocrat and whose was a subsistence farmer? Or is it just no longer relevant / not considered polite to notice?

The number of people with aristocratic great-grandfathers is vanishingly small. I'd say 99% of the upper class left Russia during the civil war, along with a sizable chunk of the middle class. The ones that remained had to start from zero, as their property was confiscated. Or less than zero, as Soviet affirmative action discriminated against them.

In the 90's the nouveau riches started looking for their noble roots but realized that was fake and gay. The best roots a Russian can expect to find are all in the 20th century: a military hero, a party functionary, an NKVD officer, a scientist or an engineer working on a strategic project.

I’m sure people can still tell, but Former People by Douglas Smith makes the case that by the slow opening up of Soviet society in the 1970s the actual, titled aristocracy had been so totally destroyed as an identity by so many successive periods of purges, internal transfers, re-education, the gulag, the war and intermarriage that it didn’t really exist any more outside of maybe some early emigrant families who left in 1917-1921 that keep or kept a vague recollection of it as a cultural thing. Kulaks and gentry (and to some extent minor urban and provincial bourgeoisie) were obviously much greater in number and their descendants are still relatively powerful and disproportionately overrepresented in the Russian and Chinese elite. And Smith does end with an anecdote about the descendant of one princely family whom he meets in early 2010s Moscow making a fortune in the oil business or something like that.

Working class because my income mostly comes from labor and not investments.

Am I doing this right?

Don't worry, everything is made up and the points don't matter.

Hereditarily upper middle, although not truly in the fifth or whatever generation continental European way (a little less common in the Anglosphere, where the haute bourgeoisie has a more fluid cultural and economic relationship with the more mobile upper middle class).

My father grew up small town upper-middle class and my mother something slightly above (or maybe just more urban than) that, although both families had a lot of rises and falls. On my father’s side a big industrial fortune was lost in the Great Depression; his own grandfather was a husk the rest of his life, a New Jersey accountant and business manager for other people when he had been groomed to be a Manhattan titan of industry, always struggling with money and in debt. There are no famous rabbis or scholars in my lineage, so on the Ashkenazi bloodline hierarchy we’re pretty mediocre, a mix of Latvian, Ukrainian and German-Swiss Jewry maybe.

My parents went from NYC upper middle class to wealthy when I was in high school, which was interesting, and I think I’ve written about that before. In England all professional Americans without specific signifiers (very strong Southern yee-haw accent, for example) are grouped into the same social class status, which is about as good as it gets as a foreigner other than the special privilege afforded to Kiwis and Aussies. Your accent, politics and culture will get made fun of, but you are considered competent, professional, relatively intelligent and are a viable dinner guest or party invite most of the time.

In England all professional Americans without specific signifiers (very strong Southern yee-haw accent, for example)

I knew a Texan lawyer in London with a deep, deep Texas drawl. Liked his cowboy boots in the office, a lot of expansive mannerisms, etc. Apparently did wonders for his career - he was a fiercely talented guy and would run rings around the Brits and Euros as soon as they underestimated him.

I'm probs a minor aristocrat. On the basis that I've been to events hosted in spaces named for my family.

Opera house, high school sports facility or small events room at a local church?

Closest to one and two, but not three. Curving of course for living in rural Pennsylvania, hence the minor. I don't think we've ever donated more than casually in kind to any church. My family is religiously conflicted: my father was raised in a conservative religious cult and left it, my mother is Catholic. My father can't let go of the cult well enough to embrace or respect Catholicism, but neither will he pick anything else.

Culturally I am suburban middle class. Economically upper-middle. Though I live in a working class neighborhood which isn't particularly a suburban middle class thing to do; I should live in the nicer neighborhood. But I am cheap and not at all into conspicuous consumption (and my husband is culturally working class and distrusts the middle class, especially suburbia). Paul Fussell would argue with where I place myself culturally.

Lower middle class. I have never made double the minimum wage for Albuquerque, though I make more now in raw dollars than my dad did by his retirement. I have had three cars since 2000, each lasting a decade.

Socially lower-middle class, economically upper-middle-middle-class, intellectually upper-middle-class. I'm from a low-density part of flyover country, and religiosity is as normal for people I grew up with as liberalism is among university professors. Even the feminists described themselves as Christians. My parents are both college graduates, my father has a post-graduate degree and is a teaching professor at a religious university and my mother is an administrator at a small company. (Guess who makes more money?) I grew up in a lower-to-lower-middle-class neighborhood, and it was a frequent drama in my childhood that kids I tried to befriend saw me as a piggy bank because my parents were better off than most of my peers and occasionally tried to steal from me. I'm a college graduate and work in IT.

I once wanted to go to graduate school and had multiple professors who thought I'd be a good fit for it, but I didn't feel that I would fit in well with university culture because of my conservative views and interest in religion, and I felt the career prospects were extremely limited. When I attended formal events at the university I always felt horribly out of place and embarrassed myself a few times by acting uncouth. More than that, it was a massive culture shock when I attended university and met people from cities for whom hookup culture, party culture, underage drinking, and drug use were normal parts of youth culture. I had some crises in college because I struggled to fit in, and I often felt like I didn't belong there. My favorite part of college was taking classes. I think I got inculcated into the intellectual habits of the upper-middle class -- albeit without adopting most of their views, but I can speak their language to criticize them -- but got shoved down to the middle class based on my social habits and unrefined tastes.

In the UK everyone from unemployed philisophy graduates to the children of millionaires are middle class, so that I guess. Although that's really just a weakness of our definitions than anything.

More usefully, my salary is more or less the exact median for the country, so middle income, although my parents earned more than me and my wife do.

In the UK everyone from unemployed philisophy graduates to the children of millionaires are middle class, so that I guess.

Some insist they were working class.

Some would say otherwise.

For practical purposes, lower middle. My family background spans doctors and engineers at the upper end to car mechanics and carpenters at the lower end.

Upper middle (civil engineer with salary just barely in six figures) → undefined? (early retiree)

Upper if we're talking top 20% nationally.

Not falling for that doxxing attempt. Nice try, FBI.

It's SVR, actually.

When I was born: Middle class By the time I was preparing to move to the UK: UMC, maybe lower upper class In the UK? Uh.. Working class? Maybe? It means something subtly different here, I'm hardly flush with dough, but I don't have to worry about my bills. This might change with a +1 or kids.

NHS doctor is practically gold standard middle class.

I think class isn't entirely or even mostly about one's salary.

Compared to other people in Paraguay: Extreme upper class, much more educated, top 0.1% wealthy, well connected. If I imagine myself spending the next 30 years there, my economic impact is probably pretty large, and I could shape this country, and be shaped by it, a huge deal.

Compared to people in my native Spain: Maybe upper class, but realistically well-to-do bourgeoisie. I do speak three languages and have a good, if incomplete education, but noble blood is now several generations behind me, and I'm not particularly well connected to the Spanish economic or cultural elite (though both the queen and the PM went to my highschool, XD). The term for this would be Indiano

If I compare myself against the average american, e.g. imagining I moved there: I'm doing ok, aspirational middle class. My class would really depend on my eventual wife; if she is equally well off we might end up in the upper middle class after a few decades of work, if she were more of an artsy type I'd fall down to middle middle class.

Economically: Middle-middle.

Culturally: Hobo in the woods.

Grew up in an upper middle class family (to parents who grew up as literal peasants themselves), currently living as what I can best describe as "expat class". Earning money that would make me upper middle class in this country easily, but without easy access to most channels this normally opens up in life.

Middle class. In my age range, I have a salary that's around the 80th percentile in my country, but I do live in big city which skews it. I rent a relatively large 2 bedroom apartment in a safe, quiet neighborhood. Though our finances are stressed from doing so while trying to maintain a middle class lifestyle, I am able to support my wife studying full time. Inheritance aside, on my own, I would be able to afford an unimpressive house in the exurbs. With my wife's help, assuming she has a 50th to 75th percentile salary, we would be able to buy a pretty nice house in the exurbs or an unimpressive house in the suburbs. While I don't have a higher education degree (college didn't agree with me), I fit in culturally with people who do. My parents had higher education degrees, my mother a college graduate, my father a university graduate. My job is in the same field as my father, and I would estimate my career level to be roughly comparable to his at the same point in his life.

Culturally middle class, economically upper middle class.

My wife is solidly, multigenerationally, UMC and I can feel the difference.

What sort of differences do you feel?

It's a million small things. Everyday values, behaviours, interests, language used, food eaten, what is high/low status etc. It's in every aspect of their lives, just like my culture is in every aspect of my life.

It is hard to sum up because it's all pervasive and at the same time not that big of a difference. The middle class and the upper middle class are not worlds apart after all.

A lot of it comes down to being less confrontational and more dignified. Also, they spend more time and effort on social signaling and maintaining a social network, outside of closer friends.

The difference I see in upper culturally is how much they dont do themselves. Cruise through their neighborhoods any weekday and they're packed with service workers.

On the lower edge of middle. My salary is low for my occupation, and working class who hustle a lot can readily earn more.

I think I'm culturally Middle class but economically working class.

The former because of my family background, which is solidly middle-class by most definitions I've ever heard. The latter because I don't own anything but a car and I live paycheck to paycheck with no prospects of improvement and too many responsibilities to quit.

(Because it's the friday fun thread)

Dirtbag upper class? Details shaky for doxx-paranoia reasons, but I made some money in a tech-adjacent thing over the past ten years. Not "own a helicopter fuck you money" but "I can take ubers while my Hyundai Sonata is in the shop for a few days and not care about it" money.

Still playing Silksong. Still getting rekt. I'm now stuck at the Last Judge, but at least there's more to explore now than when I was stuck on Moorwing. That was horrible hah.

I'm mid Act 2, and got distracted by tons of sidequests and new areas in old areas that got opened up by some upgrades I recently got. It feels like the game started pretty linear but has continued opening up and branching more as I go. Very much enjoying myself, even if I'm sometimes frustrated by what feel like unfair difficulty spikes on certain bosses.

Silksong Act 2 for me. Love the game so far, exactly what I wanted from "more Hollow Knight". Last Judge was fairly easy for me, good telegraphs and I was able to heal in between attacks.

I agree though that act 2 is great compared to act 1 so far lol.

I am very lost on choral chambers. Explored everywhere I saw and am kinda stuck. ALAS! I want to look stuff up but would hate to spoil more.

I have not gotten stuck yet (though I don't remember the names of all the sub areas in the Citadel, so don't know if I've cleared that one yet or not). Without any spoilers, I'd recommend spending a bunch of time doing sidequests and/or exploring old areas since a lot of new stuff seems to have opened up in the Act 1 areas after you reach Act 2 and do some stuff there.

I stopped playing Silksong after I bought a 5070 Ti last Sunday. Thought it would be weird not to play something 3D. Clair Obscur has been bought, downloaded, but I haven't launched it yet.

I've been cyberhumiliated by The Talos Principle: Reimagined. It has one new DLC compared to the original. The first puzzle I solved was kinda tough, the second one I spent 15 minutes on and decided to come back to it later. Ditto with the third, the fourth and so on. T_T

The DLCs for The Talos Principle 2 are much easier in comparison. The first DLC promised extra-challenging puzzles, but they are all designed around conflicting beams. As soon as you grok the idea, they become straightforward.

I also tried Cyberpunk 2077, but it didn't let me fully switch to ESDF controls, so I had to ragequit.

I stopped playing Silksong after I bought a 5070 Ti last Sunday. Thought it would be weird not to play something 3D. Clair Obscur has been bought, downloaded, but I haven't launched it yet.

Clair Obscur is amazing. Cyberpunk was kinda cool I guess, but idk I couldn't get that into it. Played it for a while but never finished it.

Clair Obscur though, that game is a work of art man. Seriously once in a generation. Do it.

Ironically I put Clair Obscur on pause when Silksong came out because I got excited by new shiny (and I kind of needed a break). Definitely a fantastic game, but the combat and timing things seems to stress/tire me out more than RPG combat usually does and I have to be in the right mood for it, and can't really binge it.

Dude yeah I've been playing a lot of Silksong but I totally agree that it's stressful. Not like the original Hollow Knight where I was able to just braindead run at a boss over and over until I beat it.

It's still fun but yeah, a different approach needed.

I've been playing a shit ton of MW5: Mercs again. Haven't gotten to any of the new DLC content yet, but it's close. Jumped right into my old save, and been knocking out high value missions and Arena contracts. Now it's 3049 and it's getting so close. Can't fucking wait.

Also, finally got my favorite 4xAC/2 variant of the Mauler. But then I found a Bullshark for sale with 6xAC/2's! I fucking love infinite dakka out of my mech nipples.

Ok, dude. I've been binging this DLC since last night, and this morning the Clan Invasion finally started. I fly off to do that campaign, and on my first stab at the mission, the clan invaders get through armor crits on my cockpit killing me 3 times across 2 attempts at the mission. That sucked. A lot. Not fun at all.

I don't know what sort of RNG fluke that was though, because the next 3 missions weren't nearly as pants shittingly terrifying. There was a repair station in one of them to help service my fancy 6xAC/2 Bull Shark. Gauss is super effective against them. But even so, I only have about 10 or so assault mechs worth fielding, and 2 of those are Annihilators who are slow as fuck and a bit prone to shedding their arms and losing all their firepower. I'm just barely staying in the field, since it 1 of my mechs can be repaired in time for the next mission, 2 will usually be ready for the one after that, and the 4th might be repaired yet another mission or two after that. But so far I haven't seen a single clan assault mech either.

I went to put a C-ER PPC, C-MP Lasers and extra Clan Double Heatsinks on one of my mechs, and that refit is going to take 90 days!!! Not even sure I'll get it back before the campaign is over. We'll see.

Honestly though, this is quite possibly the best Mechwarrior experience I've ever had. MW5: Mercs has come a long way from it's launch. Almost 10 years ago now. As a platform, it's nearly perfection. The perfect canvas for any Inner Sphere adventure you want to have.

As with netstack, haven't gotten Silksong yet.

Trying to veg a bit with Star Citizen. It is, to skip to the punchline, an awful game, made all the worse by the staggering amounts of time and money that have gone into it. It's been in development over a decade and has yet to complete (or even seriously implement) a single gameplay loop, nine months into the 'year of playability' the server infrastructure still panics over moving boxes into the wrong location, and anyone who plays the game for long develops a paranoid fear of elevators; calling it half-finished is too complimentary by halves. I bought in back during the original kickstarter at one of the lowest tiers, but the game has increasingly focused both its marketing and its development on megaships marketed to whales, often to pretty ludicrous ends (eg, you can't buy an Idris even if you had a thousand bucks to waste, and even if you could, it makes absolutely no sense to own even as a way to grief people).

Which makes it all the more frustrating how good the core of the gameplay can be. The whole bit where you seamlessly blast out of a docking bay, start warping to a mission destination, leave the pilot chair to prep gear and a light motorbike in the bay, hear the decel as you get into orbit and drop out of quantum travel, fly down to the surface and land 20 klicks out dodging turrets, jump into the bike and go off to start busting heads with a rifle, and head back when done. Or you sculk around the edges of a pirate and PVP-heavy point-of-interest in your undergunned salvage ship, carefully managing ship power to avoid spiking anyone's sensors, to crack apart and chew down salvage left behind by their battles. Or you're on a ground mission and have to take quick cover because someone else is fighting a massive space battle and you can't risk eating a golden BB. Even just hauling cargo, tedious as it can be, still feels a lot more engaged than the standard Freelancer/No Man's Sky/Elite.

And then the mission system can't count to five, or you get killed by drinking a bugged soft drink, or you fall through two different floors of your ship at superluminal speeds and fuck your entire cargo and a few hundred thousand credits as it goes 50 gigameters that way. Or you do all that turret-dodging and crack a half-dozen heads, grab a mission objective, mount your hoverbike, and it shoots into outspace leaving you behind and literal hours of travel to get back to your ship. Or you look at your cargo run and realize that you're making fewer credits-per-hour than you would with VLRT missions, and this route involves dodging PVP pirates in heavy fighters while you're armed with a handheld tractor beam.

The technical implementation is challenging enough that some of this can be excused or handwaved: this giant scalable dynamically moving pile of microservices is probably necessary for the game's intended final scope even if it's almost exactly the sort of hypothetical I use to argue against the microservice of everything. But then there's other bugs that are incredibly simple model or stat errors and take literal months to fix, or parts of gameplay loops that just need a (client-side-only!) UI update. How do you have five hundred people working on a space game funded by selling ships and not have a way to sort ships in-game after ten years?

Space Engineers is my other mindless space game, as a more build-em-up. Recently dropped a survival gameplay update with some other decent tech fixes. There's some stuff to criticize -- combat is still hilariously floaty-feeling, whether two spacesuits with handguns or big capital ships, and the end-game prototech gameplay loop still feels kinda dumb a year later -- but there's still some amount of enjoyment in designing and building out a decent light frigate.

I keep hearing how the enemies in Silksong are obnoxiously spongy. But I also wonder how much of this is an effect of starting off under powered. I can't remember how weak I felt when I started Hollow Knight, but I know after a sword upgrade or two, it felt awesome. Perhaps so awesome I forgot how weak I began. Have you noticed upgrades helping with the hit sponge feeling I keep seeing people talk about in Silksong?

The first upgrade barely changes anything. You still take the same amount of hits to kill most enemies. Kind of a let down compared to hollow knight.

Idk about the second upgrade, you have to finish act 1 to get it and im still working on the last boss.

Silksong, from what I can tell, seems to be explicitly designed to avoid much of the power creep of other metroidvanias, including Hollow Knight, hence the paucity of damage and health upgrades. But it may be that I am very dumb - I got through almost all of Hollow Knight before realizing that the nail upgrades even existed. (I do have the first needle upgrade in SS; getting the second seems like it requires quite a bit beyond merely beating Act I, which I have done.)

Since I haven’t played silksong, I guess I’ll hijack this as a general video game thread.

Nebulous: Fleet Command is a sci-fi naval tactics game modeled after Cold War/modern hardware. You equip your fleet in the editor and then take that list into battles. Right now, that’s almost always 4v4 against other players, though a campaign mode is coming with the next big update.

I like you get to build towards a particular strategy and then try to play it out. I like that the micro has a relatively low floor; ships and weapons are unwieldy enough that you generally have to commit to your course of action. I think the visual design and the sound effects are great. And I particularly enjoy the existence of a game which cares about ELINT and RCS. For professional reasons, of course.

I just picked up a couple of games on the recommendation of people I work with: Hell Is Us and TMNT: Shredder's Revenge. TMNT is great, albeit pretty challenging (the third level is a huge difficulty spike and I got frustrated enough that I haven't played since). But difficulty aside it's exactly what you would want from a modern take on the TMNT arcade game of old. They added a decent bit more depth to the combat and a ton more characters to play (Splinter, April, Casey Jones, etc), plus the pixel art is beautiful.

Hell Is Us is... yeah IDK yet. My colleague pitched it to me as having a lot in common with the puzzle solving in Tomb Raider, but it doesn't quite feel to me like it has that vibe. There is puzzle solving, but so far the most prominent element has been the combat and the creepy supernatural horror atmosphere the monsters add. The basic premise is that your character is trying to navigate a world torn apart by religious civil war and see his parents, when he runs into the otherworldly monsters and... that's about it so far. I'm only 2 hours in, and the storytelling is very sparse. They seem to be going for a minimalist Souls approach to storytelling, which is very much not my jam. The game is also very proud to not have any sort of navigational aids - no markers, no map, just a compass you can consult to see which direction you're going. I can understand why they do that, but that is also not really my jam (in particular the lack of map, which I do not like at all). But all the same, I've been warming to it slowly and we'll see how it goes.

Though both of those games are getting set aside in a week, when Trails in the Sky 1st comes out. If you're unfamiliar with Trails, it's a moderately well known, long running JRPG series (like 12 or 13 games at this point) which is known for all the games having an interconnected plot. They have their smaller arcs so you can just play one arc without going balls deep, but it is kind of special to play since the very first game and see returning characters and plot threads from that far back. It's also unashamedly traditional JRPG fare, and it's become my Final Fantasy replacement for that reason (because FF is too busy trying to appeal to new audiences to bother making games their long time fans enjoy, and yes I'm bitter). Anyways, this game is a remake of the very first game in the series, and by the demo it looks to be a very faithful remake (exactly how I like them). So I'm looking forward to that one a lot, and all other games are going to get dropped when that comes out.

"The entity is the same, but its proficiencies and goals and attitude are all completely different. It feels less like a Venus and more like a Hecate."

"Can you and will you keep the faith after you feel certain the faith has failed you? In other words, does this sensation go beyond your ego, when 'you' (in quotes) feel certain it's been extinguished? Does your resolve go far enough outside your ego that you will continue when 'you' feel totally certain it's over? And when I say you feel totally certain it's over, I mean you wake up in the morning and you feel on every level like it's done. Including on that outer level. That's the fucked part of it. You will feel abandoned. You will feel certain you're defeated on every level. Does that sensation or that trust in this deity go far enough that you will remain at your post after you feel totally, pragmatically and mystically, certain, that there is no more post? Or another way to think of it, are your instincts stronger than your instincts? Will you continue to believe after you've stopped believing?"

Weird how worlds collide.

Towards the end of Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton, there's an extended section on the realities of monastics who have spent a long time in the practice - and they feel quite similar to this.

Court opinion:

  • In 2007, a municipal "construction official" issues a notice that a particular building is "unsafe", since a water-line rupture has caused it to lose electrical power. In 2011, the construction official issues a second notice, noting that the roof and walls have begun to deteriorate. In 2017, a third notice points out that the roof is full of holes and the walls are failing. But the owner does absolutely nothing to fix the building.

  • In 2019 the construction official finally files a complaint in municipal court, charging the owner with the administrative offense of maintaining an unsafe structure. The municipal judge finds the owner guilty. No fines are imposed, but the owner is given a week to prove that he has 50 k$ for repairing the building. The owner fails to come up with the money, so the judge orders that the building be demolished. The owner's lawyer fails to file the appeal properly, so the stay pending appeal expires and the demolition is completed before the appeals panel issues its ruling.

  • The appeals panel finds this situation to be a comedy of errors. (1) The owner should have appealed the municipal construction official's unsafe-structure notices to the county's "construction board of appeals". Since he failed to do so, he had no right to a trial in the first place. So, at first glance, the municipal judge's order should be affirmed. However, (2) the municipal construction official should have filed the complaint in the state's full-fledged "superior court", not in municipal court, whose very limited jurisdiction does not encompass ordering the demolition of a building. So the municipal judge's order cannot be affirmed, and instead the complaint must be dismissed. (It may be that the building posed sufficient danger of imminent collapse that the construction official was empowered to order demolition on his own, without resorting to the judicial system at all. But that question is beyond the scope of this appeal.)

New Jersey's judges have been slacking lately. They released only four nonprecedential appellate decisions in this entire week! Maybe they're busy with some mandatory training.

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