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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2374 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 17, 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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Just finished reading this feel-good fanfic on AO3, and it has my erisology circuits buzzing. What if Foggy Nelson, law partner of Matt Murdock the Daredevil, started doing social work law? The Angel of Hell’s Kitchen has some CW themes but isn’t about the fighting, it’s about the morals.

Why does the site constantly prompt me to add the Motte as a Web app shortcut to my android desktop? How can I get it to not do that?

I had that issue and spoke to Zorba (on Chrome for Android). Logging in and out with cookies cleared fixed it for me.

  • A leftover from the Drama codebase, I guess
  • Custom CSS, or an adblocker.

Not really fun, but is anyone else noticing the site loading extremely slowly the past few days?

I'm in the Balkans right now and trying to load the site when Americans get up to post during their morning coffee shit is, well, messy and unsatisfying.

Particularly on mobile, yes.

@ZorbaTHut looked into it a few hours ago:

odd. it seemed like a memory leak, so I've rebooted it, and it's not coming up. trying to figure out what's up

alright, I think it was just a rapid increase in bot traffic for some reason. I've done some stuff to fight the bots back, and while it's not perfect, it does seem improved

adding proof of work tests for bots (Anubis) might be in our future

If they could replace ads with a proof-of-work miner, I'd be glad to spend a cent (or even two!) on most web pages I visit. It's tons more than typical ads, too.

Online cryptocurrency miners are considered malware by firewalls, and adding one to a website will cause that website to be blocked. 1 2

See also haproxy-protection, which Kiwi Farms has been using in modified form with much success for the past two years.

Was going to ask the same. iOS here too but I don’t think I’ve upgraded anything. Using Firefox, but I get the same effect on Opera.

I thought it was just the latest absolutely retarded iOS update

I haven't even updated yet and I still get the joy of Telegram adapting to the new Liquid Glass paradigm. It looks so bad.

Yes, and often getting 504 errors.

I was wondering if it was just me. I updated Windows and Firefox a couple of days ago and have been battling a bunch of weird browser behaviour since.

Didn't want to be the first to bring it up, but yes: I am also experiencing this.

I was literally about to post this after waiting like 45 seconds for this thread to load

Some time ago (years?) either here or on reddit (on the motte or ssc) someone had posted about daily affirmations inspirational/motivational quotes that their mother packed into their school lunch. These passages seemed to have a profound impact on their life, even if received with eye rolls at the time (C'mon mom, don't be so lame/cringe).

They were (all? mostly?) quotes from an athlete (not Yogi Berra). I really thought they were down to earth and insightful/deep, but I can't find them or the athlete in question anymore.

So, daily quote thread. For your kids, for your self, friends, enemies. Do they work? Any good ones to share?

If you're looking for motivational sports quotes, look no further than John Wooden. For those unfamiliar with the Wizard of Westwood, imagine if Mr. Rogers coached basketball. Quotes by John Wooden (Author of Wooden) https://share.google/6MP6IwmcK6yWPTzkb

Some favorites:

"Never make excuses. You're friends don't need them and your foes won't believe them."

"If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?"

"Players with fight never lose a game, they just run out of time."

I particularly like returning to Wooden because of how amazingly wholesome he was outside of sports. A WWII veteran and devout Christian, his wife of 52 years was the only woman he ever kissed.

this was it, thank you!

One must avoid not only the useless actions, but also the useless thoughts. -- Marcus Aurelius according to my notes.

If nothing matters, what do I chose to do?

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” - Heinlein

Life is not a highschool exam; you don't have to solve it on your own.

"The cup is already broken" https://www.themotte.org/comment/216921?context=3#context

the fear was always worse than the reality

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

"Nobody 'makes you mad.' Nobody 'makes' you do anything. Don't make excuses for how you choose to feel and what you choose to do."

t. my mom (paraphrased)

As a kid I hated it, but as I became an adult I realized she was so very, very right. I'm endlessly amazed at how very many people age 30+ still blame others for their own emotions and choices.

I remind my kids of this frequently, and my wife occasionally. Very important to maintain an internal locus of control, especially in such a highly externalizing society.

Sage advice is what I look back upon to think "Yeah, sure would've been good if I had listened.".

It's never drilled into you with the sledgehammer it deserves.

"Never take life advice from someone who smokes."

That's not really a quote; I made it up. But you deserve some kind of response.

Music thread

The song is more than 30 years old now, the activism of the band looks quaint in $CURRENT_YEAR, but it's still a bloody good one. Probably their best one.

I have been loving Julia Wolf for a couple years now. She was just featured on a Drake song so it's not exactly a deep cut, but while a lot of her music sounds similar it feels like something unique to me.

My favorite of hers is probably Chlorine, a track from 2019 that invokes the powerfully nostalgic vignette of a surreptitious late-night pool crash. It's similar to 2022, another song where she's "just" featured but still feels like she's contributing a lot to. Her latest album has stepped up the amount of grungy guitar, with Kill you Off feeling a bit like sleep token. In my room has 21m plays as a semi-acoustic and slower track, but was introduced to me as a clubby remix.

I saw this silly meme (/images/17607111449663641.webp) attributing lyrics to Taylor Swift that she didn't write.

By coincidence, my brother sent me the actual song the lyrics came from and it's even worse than "Y'All Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack".

It's now Spooky Season, for which I will be using these threads as an opportunity to write about scary movies I've (re)-watched over the next two weeks. If you've watched some good (or bad) horror movies lately, feel free to reply to this comment with your thoughts.

Last night I watched Snowtown, a dramatisation of a series of vicious murders which took place in Salisbury North (a suburb in the greater Adelaide area in South Australia) between 1992-9. Going in I was expecting a horror film: what I got instead was a social realist crime drama in the vein of Shane Meadows, which is more interested in kitchen-sink scenes of people smoking in grotty tract housing than the mechanics of murder and body disposal. The violence, on the rare occasions it's shown onscreen, is excruciating, but like Meadows, most of the film's copious discomfort comes from the implied threat of violence, when the ringleader John Bunting seems superficially friendly and yet there's a constant lurking sensation that he might blow his top at the slightest provocation.

Recently, notorious child rapist and former rock frontman Ian Watkins was murdered in prison. I'm not unhappy he was killed, and yet some of the crowing over his death and how he got what was coming to him makes me uncomfortable for some reason I found it hard to put my finger on. Perhaps the most provocative scenes in Snowtown depict John Bunting and his neighbours sitting around a kitchen table discussing their frustration with the authorities' refusal to properly deal with sex offenders and child molesters in the area, and how they ought to take the law into their own hands. And indeed, many of Bunting and co.'s victims were people he claimed were paedophiles and child molesters (also homosexuals and at least one trans woman, though the film doesn't dwell on this quite as much), often on the basis of extremely flimsy evidence or baseless hearsay. The obvious implication is that Bunting had extremely violent urges which he rationalised away by claiming that he was channelling them into pro-social ends, but that when the demand for "paedos" exceeded the supply, he simply invented new ones. Paedophiles, homosexuals, trans people and junkies were seen as deserving targets in the social milieu in which he lived, so he targeted them: raised in another environment, he would've targeted communists, apostates, witches, whatever.

The less obvious implication (and I have no idea whether the historical record would bear this out) is that one reason Bunting and his gang evaded capture for so long is not because they managed to intimidate anyone aware of their crimes into silence, but because they managed to persuade them that all of their murders were really vigilantism, meting out "justice" to those deserving.

Last night I rewatched one of my favourite psychological horror films, The Mothman Prophecies, with which I developed something of an obsession during Covid. Still holds up, even on probably my ~fifteenth watch. I've ordered the book on which it was based, curious to see how it compares.

IME the book was even freakier than the movie and I'd be most interested to read your thoughts after you finish reading it!

I'll be sure to send you a DM.

Watched Les Diaboliques from 1955, having heard it described as a psychological horror.

If it was made today, it would be called a psychological thriller, not a psychological horror. Well shot, well acted, well edited, but alas I called the twist ending in every detail about an hour in, meaning the remaining ~forty-five minutes were just an exercise in killing time. Check it out if you're less genre savvy than I am.

Half Life 2 RTX redoes Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt with top-of-the-line lighting and atmospheric effects and the results really are stunning.

Last night I rewatched Lost Highway, having not seen it for years and having recently heard it described as a psychological horror movie (which is certainly not how I remembered it). Having watched it a second (third?) time, my thoughts on it are largely unchanged and pretty much the same as everyone else's:

  1. The first forty minutes or so, before Balthazar Getty's character is introduced, are as atmospheric and chilling as anything else in Lynch's filmography (especially the first scene with Robert Blake), to the point that they overshadow the rest of the movie. This section is the only part of the movie that can be described as "horror": everything after that is a noir pastiche or a psychological thriller.
  2. Robert Loggia steals every scene he's in. They should show the tailgating scene in driver's ed, it would get a great laugh.
  3. Lynch was attempting something big and ambitious here, and didn't quite pull it off. He attempted something similar in his follow-up Mulholland Drive and had more luck there (I might even put that movie in my top ten). It's hard to put my finger on why Mulholland Drive is so much more effective than Lost Highway. It might be because all of the silly slapstick scenes in Mulholland Drive are near the beginning, whereas in Lost Highway they're in the middle, after forty minutes of steadily escalating tension and paranoia, which is tonally jarring. Both films involve characters transforming into other people, but in Mulholland Drive Naomi Watts is the leading woman throughout: having Bill Pullman suddenly become Balthazar Getty without explanation robs us of the sense of psychological continuity we'd have if it had been two characters portrayed by one actor. And four years later, Lynch had learned that the only thing worse than using a Rammstein song at the dramatic climax of the movie is using the same Rammstein song twice.

My main takeaway from this movie is that, in her youth, Patricia Arquette was fucking gorgeous. She has several nude scenes in this movie, but even just in close-ups of her talking while fully dressed, I was utterly transfixed. Normally when a movie introduces a female character that we're supposed to find beautiful by lingering on them in slomo, I'm underwhelmed (particularly if they're played by, like, Drew Barrymore). In this case I had no trouble understanding why Getty's character would risk it all for her, even knowing that she's a violent gangster's moll.

As you can probably tell, Lost Highway is my favorite David Lynch film, although TBF I've really never given Mulholland Drive its due and I really need to see it again and on the big screen before I'll feel like I've done that. Anyway, a nearby theater did a David Lynch Retrospective after his death earlier this year and I took the opportunity to see Lost Highway again on the big screen. Like you, I hadn't seen it in decades, and despite agreeing with just about everything you say, the entire movie just clicked for me from start to finish. Each and every scene, and in fact each and every beat of the movie felt sublime, flowing inexorably into the next one and the next one, ultimately building to its intense climax and conclusion. It's like I had that same spellbound feeling that you did when Patricia Arquette was onscreen except I experienced it for the entire movie. I left the theater that night feeling like I had fully grokked the film itself for the first time, almost three decades after initially seeing it in the theater. That being the case, I'd quibble a bit about whether or not Lynch pulled off what he wanted to pull of in Lost Highway, because I think he did, and say instead that the issues that you point out are all genuine and ultimately make it much less accessible than a lot of his other work.

Interesting, I've never heard someone refer to it as their favourite of his films before. For me, there are definitely parts of it that work, while other parts felt like a slog.

Totally understandable. For me, I think the reason that I love Lost Highway so much is that so many of the themes and archetypes that it plays with and explores connect with me on a personal level. I could wax poetic about it, and still might if you're interested, but for now I'll just say that I think your first post put the finger directly on the beating heart of the movie: the characters of Renee and Alice, and more specifically, how they drove Fred and Pete each to their respective extremes.

but because they managed to persuade them that all of their murders were really vigilantism, meting out "justice" to those deserving.

I find that even in medicine I usually have to give a lecture about how it's our job to heal no matter the person when someone odious shows up. Students these days (and I think it has worsened) can't even treat someone obviously racist without losing their minds. A pedophile? Absolutely no.

This is with tolerance and acceptance baked into applications and course work at all levels.

Someone gives them the ick and they are no longer good doctors.

I can't imagine how much less professional fields without selection for this are (like the police).

Cops at least are on the radar and aware of the hypervigilance of anything resembling overtly ___-ist behavior and the repercussions that face them should they violate the Rules. Teachers on the other hand have essentially free rein to sanction, downgrade, or otherwise penalize students exhibiting (via essay or otherwise) views that they find personally repulsive (almost always this means anything right-coded.) Anything blatantly suggesting racism (imagine a well-written essay on Human Biological Determinism, without any use of epithets or slavery) could feasibly get a student reported to admin. There's a level of acceptability (I dislike using currently popular terms like Overton window) where things of this sort are treated the same as if a student were to write about the strategies in rape, or how to build some device that goes boom. I suppose a classroom is a relatively low impact environment, until of course it isn't and generations of like-minded groupthinked kids start waving flags and blocking traffic. Or worse.

Edit: I've strayed from the point.

edit 2: Sorry to sully the fun thread.

Classrooms are not low impact though. If you want to have a white collar job you’ll have to get some sort of educational certification and teachers especially in late high school and in college can tank your chances pretty quickly. And so kids either learn to fake the right opinions or actually hold them if he wants that kind of respectable job. Most kids end up holding the positions because they learned to ape them so well that they don’t bother to question it.

I think the way teachers have been in the last few decades is often on most of our minds, no worries.

The “BD” in HBD is Biodiversity, not Biological Determinism.

Indeed, I should have specified "however one parses the abbreviation HBD." I only changed it because it was once mentioned, though your spelling out of the abbreviation is probably the more accurate and common.

I have to come clean and admit I'm a big scaredy cat. Spooky stuff of any kind is my kryptonite. I have to plug my ears when I go to the movies because they always have to play a trailer for some supernatural horror movie with screams and loud slams. What's worse, I once read about the two girls that went missing in Panama before bed when I was home alone and had to psych myself up to go to the bathroom afterwards. Which was not in Panama at all, but a few meters down a well-lit hallway.

The less obvious implication (and I have no idea whether the historical record would bear this out) is that one reason Bunting and his gang evaded capture for so long is not because they managed to intimidate anyone aware of their crimes into silence, but because they managed to persuade them that all of their murders were really vigilantism, meting out "justice" to those deserving.

If you read through the wikipedia article on the murders, their entire social environment seems to have been extremely dysfunctional. Drug abuse, several mentally disabled individuals AND several schizophrenics, even the non-illegal relationships involve frequent partner switching and large age differentials (including with the mentally disabled and schizophrenics!), even the people with no directly mentioned issues somehow collect pensions for unclear reasons ... The article also directly acknowledges at least some of Bunting's victims actually being sexual abusers. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the authorities just didn't want to get involved because, as the old saying goes, "just put all of them in a sack and randomly swing a bat at it, you'll always hit the right one". Not to mean that they all really did what was alleged, but that the extreme level of dysfunction in the general community made the accusations so plausible that most just didn't want to get involved in the mess.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the authorities just didn't want to get involved because, as the old saying goes, "just put all of them in a sack and randomly swing a bat at it, you'll always hit the right one". Not to mean that they all really did what was alleged, but that the extreme level of dysfunction in the general community made the accusations so plausible that most just didn't want to get involved in the mess.

When writing Chinatown, Robert Towne said he was partly inspired by a conversation he'd had with a Hungarian vice cop, who claimed that there were so many competing ethnic groups and dialects in Chinatown that the police had no way of knowing whether their interventions were helping or hurting the exploited — so their policy was to do "as little as possible".

Interestingly in real life, the trans woman who was murdered (in the film exclusively referred to by their "deadname" Barry) had previously been in a sexual relationship with one of their killers. They shot a scene for the film making this explicit, but it was cut.

Court opinion:

  • Haley is rear-ended by Kruti.* Haley suffers severe neurological symptoms, and is diagnosed with concussion and cervical and lumbar disk herniation.

  • Haley sues Kruti. Kruti concedes liability for the crash, leaving for the jury to decide only liability for the injury and damages resulting from the injury. Due to evidence issues, the judge excludes past medical expenses from damages that can be awarded, but Haley's expert witness estimates future medical expenses at 393 k$. The jury decides that Kruti caused the injury, but awards to Haley future medical expenses of only 16 k$, and awards absolutely zero damages for Haley's pain and suffering.

  • The appeals panel affirms the award of 16 k$ for future medical expenses, but vacates and remands for a new trial regarding pain and suffering. It is against the weight of the evidence for the jury to find that Kruti is liable for medical expenses but not for the pain and suffering on which those medical expenses logically must be predicated.

*It isn't clear from the names, but they're both women. (Should I have typed Haley (♀) and Kruti (♀) instead of adding this footnote? I think I saw somebody suggest many years ago that such a practice might be preferable to specifying pronouns. ;-) )

Btw - why juries are allowed to dispense sentences in civil court, but not in criminal and vice versa. There is absolutely no logic that I can think of.

There was a case in Allegheny County earlier this year in a similar vein, though it wasn't of the type to result in an opinion. A woman with cancer sued Johnson & Johnson claiming that their talcum powder contained asbestos. Plaintiff's counsel is a highly aggressive national plaintiff's firm out of Texas who regularly engage in questionable practices just to piss off defendants. They drive a hard bargain and aren't afraid to take a case to verdict. I actually sat in on this one for a few hours while I was at the courthouse attending to another matter, but I'm not familiar enough with the evidence to speculate on how the jury reached their conclusion. Anyway, per the verdict slip, the jury found that J&J's talcum powder did indeed contain asbestos, but that the Plaintiff had insufficiently proven that exposure to the powder caused her illness. The jury accordingly awarded $0 in compensatory damages. However, because they still thought J&J acted poorly, they tacked on $16 million in punitive damages. Unfortunately for the Plaintiff, since you can't receive punitive damages if the defendant isn't liable, she walked away with nothing, and the aggressive Plaintiff's firm who was used to winning just blew a couple hundred grand litigating a defense verdict that would have netted them millions if the jury had awarded a dollar for compensation.

The case you posted is an interesting one because it illustrates the difference between the way a case looks on paper and the way it presents in the courtroom. Haley was in an accident that the defendant unquestionably caused. She testified that the symptoms started immediately after the accident, sought medical treatment within a few days, was given a diagnosis, and has continually sought treatment over the succeeding years. There are objective diagnostic findings. The defense put forth incompetent experts. The plaintiffs got the testimony of treating physicians (rare), and had experts who were able to testify as to damages.

Yet the jury only awarded a fraction of the damages the Plaintiff asked for, and didn't award anything for pain and suffering. I looked Haley up, and she is a somewhat large young woman. I'm guessing she presented on the stand as overly dramatic, and that the jury didn't believe the damage evidence that she played sports in high school and worked out regularly and was depressed that she couldn't do these things anymore. There was also the testimony that suggests it was a relatively minor collision and not of the type where one would expect serious ongoing medical problems. They probably felt like since she wasn't at fault and obviously experienced some kind of injury she should get some money for the aggravation, but not enough to really mean anything, and they just skipped the pain and suffering part because, as the opinion notes, the jury doesn't have to award pain and suffering for the typical kinds of aggravation everyone experiences. In other words, girl gets in minor car crash, claims major injuries, okay, the other person was liable, but seriously? Except they don't know how to properly express this on the jury form and they end up giving the Plaintiff another bite at the apple. If they had awarded $12,000 in future expenses and $4,000 in pain and suffering then the verdict would be much harder to challenge.

I'm pretty defensive of the legal system here, because it usually works better than people give it credit for, but I'm not so in the bag for it that I don't realize that a system run by lawyers and judges gets us a system that works well for lawyers and judges. We spend so much time immersed in this stuff that it's easy to forget that people out in the real world don't have a clue about any of this and will do things that make sense to them but not to the court, which is a big problem when we're relying on them to make important decisions. I wouldn't have a problem with instructions that explained to the jury that yes, this can be second guessed by a court, and here are the reasons a court will second guess it. Saying someone suffered injuries resulting in thousands of dollars in medical treatment but didn't experience any pain and suffering beyond what is comparable to being sore for a few days doesn't make sense, and a court won't let it stand. Saying that the defendant didn't cause the plaintiff's injury but the defendant did bad stuff so they should pay anyway doesn't make sense, and a court won't let it stand. We fight over these jury instructions so much that we end up with something that might not make sense.

Vidya thread.

I finally finished Clair Obscur this week. Well, I didn't beat every optional boss, but I'm too old for this shit. I must say, my earlier criticism about the game's incongruent mood has been invalidated when the game provided an in-universe explanation for it.

Now I'm looking for another game to use my shiny new GPU with. Something I can beat before EU5 comes out in November. Any recommendations?

I beat Hades 2, at least the main/normal ending, not the whatever 100% completionist ending that's going to take another 50 hours if I decide to stick around.

I'm going to be vague to avoid spoilers, but overall I liked the direction it went. It was not enough to fully make up for the decrease in quality since the first game, but it was a partial recovery, better than expected. I don't think they did a great job of leading up to it, which could have made the earlier game better. My overall assessment of the game doesn't change qualitatively: the gameplay mechanics are better, the story/atmosphere is worse, and since it's a roguelite game which is primarily about the gameplay mechanics rather than the story, overall I think it comes out ahead of Hades 1. I'm more confident on this conclusion that I was in my previous post when I hadn't gotten to the ending yet. Still disappointed that it wasn't as good as it could have been, but it's fine. Get it if you played and liked the first one.

Now I'm looking for another game to use my shiny new GPU with. Something I can beat before EU5 comes out in November. Any recommendations?

The really obvious one is Baldur's Gate 3. A new mod that aims to fix the "aesthetic" problems of the game came out recently and looks pretty impressive.

Other suggestions that jump to my mind are all the recent Resident Evil games. 7, 8 and the remakes of 2, 3 and 4.

Helldivers 2 is pretty cool with friends but the installation features a mandatory rootkit.

Elden Ring is a "love it or hate it" type of game that came out relatively recently. I personally liked it, with the exception of the toxic fans.

One thing that made me roll my eyes at Nexusmods was their decision to remove a BG3 mod that replaced the default narrator (female) with an AI generated track of the wise old man from Civilization 5 voicing all the lines. I heard a bit of it on youtube and it seemed to work well. So I wanted to try it, but couldn't because it was removed almost instantly for, I guess, its horrible misogyny!!!

Is that mod (or similar) available anywhere now?

Yeah, same site. A lot of the "forbidden" mods end up there.

Thanks for the link. Do you happen to know if it works? There are posts calling it outdated (in the newer thread too).

No, sorry, I couldn't find a newer version. And I can't test it because I don't have the game installed right now.

For your future reference: I haven't tried the Civ5 narrator mod, but I'm using the White Wizard (Saruman) 1.1 narrator mod now, and it seems to work fine with the latest GOG version of the game. At least in the tutorial area, haven't played further.

A new mod that aims to fix the "aesthetic" problems of the game came out recently and looks pretty impressive.

With only a few exceptions, androgynous, purposefully made plain-or-ugly, Kara-Turan or Chultan heads were replaced.
https://f.rpghq.org/rH4UBq34Ajtg.gif?n=TIEF-BOTH-GIF.gif

Yeah, right, now everyone looks like they have an Instagram. A plague o' both their houses, I say.

God forbid fantasy races don't precisely meet the beauty standards of The Most Boring Fantasy Race(tm) aside from the superficial non-boring parts.

Does anyone play racing games on the PS5? I've had a PS5 for about a year, primarily as a 4K Bluray player, and recently I got the hankering for a good-looking racing game to play on the big TV in the living room, likely caused by me playing FF7 Rebirth & enjoying the Chocobo racing minigame a lot.

On Playstation, Gran Turismo is the gold standard for racing sims, but I noticed a lot of fans complaining about poor QOL and poor design for the single-player experience in the latest, GT7. Instead, it seems to have gone the way of Live Service Slop, with seasonal events and limited time cars that you have to buy and such. I enjoyed GT3 a lot on the PS2 back in the day, and GT7 definitely looks beautiful, but I'm not sure I want to spend $35 (on sale right now - normally $70) on a Live Service Slop game.

I also noticed that Ubisoft's The Crew: Motorfest was a big racing game on all the consoles, and I did enjoy playing the demo a bit, but also, I fucking hate open world in a racing game. I want either actual tracks or closed loops set in real-life locales, I don't want to be navigating city blocks and "immersing" myself into the world. Graphically, it doesn't look as good as GT7, but certainly not bad.

I also saw that Forza Horizon 5 was on PS5, but that one's also an open world racing game. I also saw reviews saying that it had terrible progression in single player gameplay, since it gave the player top-of-the-line cars right at the start. Doesn't seem like a bad thing, but then again, the whole Career Mode feel of getting better and better, going to higher and higher level matches, has added enjoyment to my playing of racing games in the past.

Those are the big 3 that I looked into, and none of them seemed to really nail the sweet spot of what I was looking for. If they just graphically upgraded GT3 and added more cars and tracks, I'd probably buy that for $70 easily, but I don't see that in the market today. I was just wondering if anyone has more experience with this and knows any hidden gems or qualities of these 3 games that I missed?

Most people I know who liked Clair Obscur also were big fans of Metaphor: ReFantazio (AKA fantasy-Persona-with-adults-and-HieronymousBosch). I've played the latter but not the former, so I can only recommend it on its own merits.

I'm currently trying out the Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era demo via Steam's NextFest. My initial impressions are that it feels like someone made a modern version of Heroes III, which is of course the best game in the series and one of the greatest of all time. The biggest flaw so far: it seems like it isn't designed for hot seat (at least in the battles), which... I get it. It's the Year of Our Lord 2025. Hot seat isn't a thing anymore. But it's the principle of the thing, dammit!

I've tried the demo of ReFantazio, and I hate-hate-hate how sluggish the camera is, it's practically unplayable for me. I've pulled every sensitivity slider to the max, and it still feels like I'm stuck in glue. The list of games I've bounced off grows longer and longer:

  • The Ghost of Tsushima (don't like this style of combat)
  • Spehss Marine 2 (ditto)
  • ReFantazio (terrible controls)
  • CP2077 (no real reason, might have to try again)

I would suggest Devil May Cry V but I doubt you'd like to play it on KB/M.

How is Metaphor? I'm a Persona fan (3/4/5), but when I tried SMT5 I didn't like it at all. The battle system was mechanically better and had more depth, but everything else was worse. Much worse. In particular, the constant echo-y audio drove me mad. I stopped playing after the first chapter and haven't returned.

Metaphor has the press turn battle system from SMT, with a job system for party building a la FF, and the social link/calendar systems from Persona. It's pretty good, though I don't personally think the story was as strong as P4 or P5, nor were the characters. I think it's worth giving a shot based on what you said.

How is the story/characters? One of the most off-putting things about SMT5 is it didn't feel like it had any characters at all. I don't even mean they felt cliché: they felt inert, like mannequins. I'd happily take a stereotypical JRPG hero over the Nahobino/whatever-his-real-name-is any day.

Significantly better. Unlike SMT5 which is basically pure gameplay with only the bare minimum of story to support it (I bounced off myself for that very reason), Metaphor has an actually pretty interesting story that it tells, and the characters are generally pretty interesting to spend time with. It's very much like Persona in that sense, not at all like SMT. Like I said I don't think it pulls those aspects off as well as the best of the Persona games do, but I think it gets a solid 7/10 on story and characters whereas I'd give SMT5 a 0/10.

I also quite enjoy that the protagonist in Metaphor isn't silent like in Persona. He's a real character who has his own thoughts and will speak up on things, even if you do have some player control over his opinions.

Thanks! Sounds worth a shot, will pick it up sometime.

I found Olden Era to simply be way too hard, hah. Partly because I'm a noob at the genre, not having played it since Heroes 2 or 3 or something, but I saw a lot of complaints about unfair AI strength when I took a look at the steam discussions.

From what I've seen, the AI is still too weak to pose any challenge to competitive players, but it can no longer be baited with single-unit stacks in combat. They are still useful if you need them to block off your shooters or to eat a counterstrike, but you no longer can lead enemy stacks away from your shooters by offering them a kill this turn.

I recall they promised to add hot seat in the release version.

I got myself Daimon Blades, a game by Streum On, the studio who made the legendary meme quarry, E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy.

E.Y.E. was effectively a janky Source Engine mod that took the brakes off of gameplay and covered it all in obscurantist faux-symbolism and incomprehensible French dialogue that had had an English dictionary briefly flashed at it. It was horrible in many ways, but it also had a lot of ambition shine through.

Daimon Blades is a janky Unreal Engine game that took a bunch of fancy 3D models and slapped on some code that I assume the devs stole from a handful of UE5 demos. The resulting game is horrible in many ways, and has a lot of laziness shine through.

Worst of all and entirely unforgivably, unlike E.Y.E., it's just plain not fun.

It's a trash fire, cannot recommend.

YOUR LEGS ARE BROKEN

I LOST BROZOUF

Attempted multiplayer Rabbit and Steel recently with a friend.

Rabbit and Steel is a game about cute bunny girls fighting several bosses in a row that's marketed as "FF14 raid experience without having to level and grind". You go in, fight the bosses, get some items that increase your DPS in various ways in between the fights, and that's it. The fights themselves are akin to bullet hell games, but with emphasis on zones - some zones you have to stay in, others you have to stay out of. Dealing damage is not automatic, so you have to pay some mind to pressing your abilities in a specific order to maximize DPS.

The game can be played solo, but it shines in co-op, as most boss attacks force players to interact in certain ways. Instead of merely having to stay in a circle, the boss may center the circle on one of you, for example, or the ever-notorious "spread out" attacks (the name speaks for itself).

A major downside is that it just becomes plain diffucult to figure out what all the attacks are when there are 5 different areas of effect in various shapes (and one color scheme) on the screen.

I've long had a soft spot for Rockstar Games' controversial stealth/survival horror title Manhunt from 2003. The premise of the game sounds like it was tailor-made to get Jack Thompson's knickers in a twist (to the point that even some of Rockstar's own staff found it objectionable1). You play as an inmate on death row called James Earl Cash who has his execution faked by a mysterious benefactor, who then forces Cash through a gauntlet of urban environments patrolled by violent gangs actively hunting for him. Cash is hopelessly outnumbered, so must resort to the game's core mechanic of "executions": he can sneak up behind gang members and stealth-kill them with a melee weapon, whereupon the camera shifts to a grainy pseudo-VHS perspective. For, you see, Cash's benefactor directs snuff films (for which purpose he's installed CCTV cameras all around the city), and wants Cash to be his "leading man". And these films aren't just a way of making ends meet, but very much a "passion project" for the director: if Cash murders a gang member in a particularly gruesome fashion, he will commend Cash in his earpiece, or even moan orgasmically. (The fact that the director is portrayed by the wonderful Brian Cox lends him a great deal of seedy charisma.) And in spite of the PS2-era graphics, many of these executions remain positively revolting to watch, aided by the game's impeccable sound design.

It's a tremendously fun game that makes you feel tense and anxious while playing it, then dirty and ashamed afterwards, aided by the game's meta, self-referential qualities (the player character is being "controlled" by an overweight creep sitting in the dark in front of a computer monitor, who orders him to viciously murder people for no better reason than his own sick amusement — no prizes for guessing who he's meant to represent). I've played it several times before, but always on the normal (or "Fetish") difficulty, for which the UI includes a circular "radar" which shows the position of gang members in your vicinity, which way they're facing and how alert they are. I'd read that this radar is disabled on hard ("Hardcore") mode, which I assumed would make the game practically impossible (even "Fetish" is plenty challenging). I recently completed my first playthrough on "Hardcore" mode, and I quickly realised that it's the purest way to play the game. It's not a "deconstruction" of stealth-based games, but it's clearly aiming for a more grounded, down-to-earth approach to the genre than is typical (and it still feels refreshing to play a survival horror game with no fantastical or speculative elements whatsoever). Cash isn't a Sam Fisher or Solid Snake with an array of hi-tech gizmos at his disposal: he's just an ordinary guy thrust into a situation beyond his understanding, with nothing to guide him but his wits and whatever weapons he can get his hands on (you kill your first enemy by smothering him with a plastic bag, and even in the late game shards of broken glass are invaluable tools). Without the radar, you have to proceed cautiously and play close attention to the direction the enemy chatter is coming from, just as Cash would. It's a very effective means of putting the player in his shoes, and makes an already tense and stressful game positively nerve-wracking. Highly recommended if you've never played it before, and a suitable game for spooky season. But if you're trying to persuade your loved ones that video games are more than disgusting exploitative "murder simulators" — well, maybe don't show them this one.

1 "It may sound surprising, but there was almost a mutiny at the company over that game. It was Rockstar North's [the Scottish branch of the company] pet project — most of us at Rockstar Games wanted no part of it. We'd already weathered plenty of controversy over GTA3 and Vice City — we were no strangers to it — but Manhunt felt different. With GTA, we always had the excuse that the gameplay was untethered — you never had to hurt anybody that wasn't a "bad guy" in one of the missions. You could play completely ethically if you wanted, and the game was parody anyway, so lighten up," Williams writes.

"Manhunt, though, just made us all feel icky. It was all about the violence, and it was realistic violence. We all knew there was no way we could explain away that game. There was no way to rationalize it. We were crossing a line."

the game's incongruent mood

Could you restate your criticism?

The presence of childish elements like the gestrals and Esquie next to literal mounds of corpses, surreal monsters and the justified fatalism of expedition 33.

For those who don't plan to play the game, the world actually was created by a young boy as a fantasy to play in, and it's the deadly parts that are foreign to it. The boy died in a fire, his mother retreated to this world of his to mourn him, his father is covertly trying to destroy the world to get her to come back, his older sister populated the world with monsters to speed up the process, the starting party are clueless NPCs caught in the resulting crossfire, thinking they are their world's last hope.

Ahh man, such a beautiful and heartrending story. I predict it will stand as the most incredible video game artistic accomplishment of the early 21st century.

I think Disco Elysium still beats it.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is pretty good if you don't mind some wokery that snuck its way in.

What gpu did you get? Just curious.

What RenOS said, and I noticed the somewhat sympathetic portrayal of the gypsies.

Good idea. It's a first-person game, IIRC, which is a bonus.

I got a 5070 Ti

Yup I considered that you're a purely kb/m player when I thought about what to recommend. You could also play Cyberpunk 2077 if you haven't already done so. It looks fantastic with all the bells and whistles turned on.

For some reason I just can't get into CP77.

Could you elaborate on that? I normally bounce off of mainstream games, but Cyberpunk 2077 actually got me good.

I don't know if I can. It just didn't grip me.

Okay. Hmm. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is one of the best looking games I've ever played. Try that. :)

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is pretty good if you don't mind some wokery that snuck its way in.

This always mystifies me, one of the selling points of KC:D 1 was that it used an unapologetically realist approach to the portrayal of medieval life. Not that it actually is perfectly realistic, but it at least tried to avoid the modernist left-wing lens. The author also took a clear stand against some ridiculous demands.

... And then for 2 he completely changes his tune. Henry and Hans gay, is already funny, but a coming out scene to his (by then dead) parents and they accept it. Musa lecturing the player on women's right and the player just has to take it, that's just lol. Women repeatedly outdoing the main char. Literal quote from the CEO:

Vávra made some unfortunate statements about the absence of black people in Bohemia when releasing KCD1 because he lacked PR experience.

Just why, you're already sucessful, why sell out so blatantly? It makes no sense, yet it happens repeatedly.

I mean, I think the main story of Battletech is cheesy and stupid, so I just play the sandbox mode. But nobody feels the need to defend it by "well it's optional, you can just play the sandbox mode!". Playing a game at all is, strictly speaking, optional.

Furthermore, Hans in KC:D 1 was more a specific person, not just an amorphous player insert like in, say, Skyrim or CP2077. In Witcher 3 one of the arguments against gay romance was this - the MC is Geralt, Geralt isn't gay, all the options for the player have to be broadly in alignment with that character. That wasn't very controversial.

The same goes even more for Henry; Even if pretending that Hans is just a player insert and so his optional choices do not reflect the character you're playing, the mere option of gay romance with Henry implies necessarily that Henry is now gay, despite no such indication in KC:D 1. Not to mention that the behaviour by everyone else ingame around this topic is extremely obviously anachronistic.

Just to be clear, I had no such issues with the gay romance in, say, CP2077. Even though having exactly 4 characters to cover all bases for all possible relationship patterns definitely felt very current-year, the characters themselves were mostly fine and consistent, and the portrayal of the relationships felt appropriate for the setting. What I really hate is fucking up a setting or character and breaking suspension of disbelief just to get some hobbyhorse in.

Is that crap unavoidable or merely a possibility ?

Just why, you're already sucessful, why sell out so blatantly? It makes no sense, yet it happens repeatedly.

Publisher forced it. KCD1 was financed by a local patron, some middling real-estate investor (150 million $ worth, ultimately invested $12 million into the game which isn't really peanuts). KCD2 wasn't.

Vávra hates that crap and is quite active on social networks so Czech 'liberals' really hate him, mostly around censorship where he's against the euroatlantic statist bullshit around 'disinfo' the EU loves so much but he also torches wokes regularly, it's unlikely he's responsible. The nice thing to do would be release an 'anonymous' mod that'd would just get rid of these forced changes.

That sounds reasonable, although sad. On the topic of unavoidability, see my other reply to Lazuli.

Dude, tag the spoilers. I knew about some of this already but others might not have.

Now I'm looking for another game to use my shiny new GPU with. Something I can beat before EU5 comes out in November. Any recommendations?

The ancient abandonware platforming game Claw is suitable to be played on a keyboard by a controller-hating curmudgeon such as you.

shiny new GPU

Let me reiterate this requirement. I have plenty of retro games I can play, I am looking for latest-gen graphics.

Games with shiny graphics all basically suck bc the investment is so gigantic that to recoup it, it has to be market to morons. At best games with marginally decent writing but gameplay completable while near to blackout drunk.

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