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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1709 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 19, 2026

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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I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I kind of liked it? I felt it's written in a very sincere and fearless way and it's nice that there isn't a "moral" to the whole thing. Unfortunately I think McCarthy sucks at writing SF so the apocalypse feels a bit contrived or unbelievable. Not that that is the point of the book whatsoever but it does detract a bit and require at least a bit of suspension of disbelief. The prose was very nice and lurid. I liked Blood Meridian a lot more, I felt that book actually changed me a bit.

I think he does a good job at portraying the evils of a post-apocalyptic world though. One semi-popular Reddit-tier opinion that often gets repeated is that video game writing is really bad compared to literary/book-writing. So what comes to mind here is comparing The Road with the first two Fallout games (the third onwards, while being fun as games, are utter slop on a writing level so I'll discount them. NV could be included). And if I look at the first Fallout game and at least some parts of the second and consider them as what life in a post-apocalypse would look like, I don't know if I would say The Road is that much of a more of a compelling story. Fallout (again, discounting the slop Bethesda written later entries) did a good enough rendition of things like slavery, cannibalism, crime, etc. Not as dark as The Road but video games generally can't be for various reasons. Not as personal maybe (with the whole father-son thing in the Road) but I think as an overall experience I wouldn't say that they stuck with me much less than McCarthy's work. Maybe you could say modern video games have shitty slop writing (and you'd be right to a large degree), but that's also true of most books. Maybe I'd also rate it different if I had a kid. There are definitely a lot of literary works that blow any game out of the water but that's comparing the greatest of the great of a medium that's more than 2000 years old with a 30-40 year old medium. I don't know, I feel like you can feel creative mastery in any medium and it's also quite rare in any medium.

I am also reading Roadside Picnic by the Strugastky brothers. I'm actually really enjoying it so far. The main character going from being a young man with all that entails, i.e. not caring as much about the future, not caring about engaging in daring adventures to becoming more settled as he has a wife and a child is quite relatable to me. I am not at the child part but life at the end of your 20s with a GF is very different to my early 20s. You mostly don't have to care as much when you're younger? It's very nicely written, the Zone is described in a very compelling way and the characters seem real. You notice it was written in the Soviet era but that's charming more than anything. Halfway through but it's very enjoyable. Can see why it had such a long tail as a literary work (the Stalker movie and later games).

I am also reading Roadside Picnic by the Strugastky brothers. I'm actually really enjoying it so far. The main character going from being a young man with all that entails, i.e. not caring as much about the future, not caring about engaging in daring adventures to becoming more settled as he has a wife and a child is quite relatable to me. I am not at the child part but life at the end of your 20s with a GF is very different to my early 20s. You mostly don't have to care as much when you're younger? It's very nicely written, the Zone is described in a very compelling way and the characters seem real. You notice it was written in the Soviet era but that's charming more than anything. Halfway through but it's very enjoyable. Can see why it had such a long tail as a literary work (the Stalker movie and later games).

Notice that in order to be compelling, the story is set in some unnamed capitalist country.

In USSR, "stalkers" monkeying with incomprehensible alien stuff for private profits would not be tolerated, and writing about brave and competent Soviet scientists selflessly exploring the zones for common good just would not be believable in 1972.

They are already not tolerated - stalkers are explicitly violating international law.

Yes, with enforcement akin to any other breach of international law. This figures.

What’s a thing you’d buy if you had $2500 to spare? I want something meaningful but also don’t want to go down another vain trip of shoes/clothes/bags/books

A complete set of longsword sparring equipment.

To replace my mass of shredded fabric and duct tape that keeps making tournament organizers nervous.

A second hand Womb Chair.

Night vision goggles

(Actually a monocular)

A nice, lightweight bicycle.

Go on a weekend trip to Puerto Rico!

Invest in index funds

EDIT: better and more unique answer: if there are any small-time creators with Patreon, Ko-Fi etc., donate to them.

Obviously this, but if the question mandated that I consume something that's not in the regular budget, it would probably be a robot mower. That's right around the price point of the good ones that could probably handle the slope in the lawn.

This is the only correct answer for such a large sum of money.

I forgot also “charity”

24GB VRAM.

How would you keep that cool enough

Noctua fans and a 3d printer for fan shrouds.

A canoe. Got my eye on Esquif's Prospecteur 16.

That’s a cool idea, do you have access to a lot of water around you?

Yeah, and I'm trying to take advantage of that more often now. It was a problem accessing it when I didn't have a car, but now that I do, I have no excuse.

A HK Mark 23.

  • a little bit extra for the pink aftermarket coating

Alton Brown has kinda rebooted good eats on his youtube channel. Slightly less family friendly, due to the lower budget the wackiness is toned down, he seems to assume that unlike 1999 everyone has at least a bit of general food science knowledge - so it is a fine mix between old and new.

https://youtube.com/@AltonBrown/videos

He gets points right off the bat for not titleing every video "IMPOSSIBLE FLAVOR!!!!!!" or "THIS FOOD IS INSANE???!!!???" like every other YouTube channel.

And "the cops showed up" in parentheses and also that doesn't happen in the video

So I'm a software engineer at a no-name startup for nearly 5 years. And recently I suddenly have an interest in learning law. Has anyone gotten on this path or have opinions about this? I suppose in my fantasy future, I would be doing appellate law and someday argue Supreme Court cases, but everything I read up shows that law is a high-stress, singular life. What are pros and cons here? What are things that should encourage me and what are things that should discourage me? If someone wants to pour a basin of water over my head on this whole romantic notion please feel free.

Everyone has already given you most of the standard advice. And you should probably listen to it. But at the same time, those jobs where you argue different juicy constitutional issues all the time and get to feel like you're making difference do exist. They're very competitive and don't pay particularly well, but they exist. I don't want to dox myself more than I already have, but feel free to send me a DM if you're serious and looking for advice.

As a practicing attorney, it doesn't sound like you want to practice law, but to do something exceedingly specific. My own firm has seen several young attorneys leave in the past couple years because they find the cases too similar and the outcomes too unsatisfying. So they move to something they think will be more fulfilling only to find that the cases are just as similar and the outcomes just as unsatisfying. And this is in litigation, which by its adversarial nature is more exciting than transactional work. I did that for a decade, and the final product is a series of recommendations that you give to the client without any concern for whether they're followed or not.

Most cases just are routine and don't involve any juicy legal questions. Either there's liability and its obvious and the only question is how reasonable the settlement will be, or it's obvious that there's no liability and the plaintiff let's you out of the case because they aren't going to waste their time. Even if you're arguing in front of the Supreme Court, keep in mind that most of the cases that go before the court aren't scintillating constitutional issues. Do you want to argue Arbitration Act cases? Tax cases? Bankruptcy cases? If you get a case of great political and social import, are you okay with arguing either side of it?

There are obviously some areas of the law where I'd prefer not to practice (family law, anyone?), but the nature of the job is that your loyalty is to your client and you have to be willing to put in all the grinding, boring work that enables you to make the best case possible. Last month, I spent several hours going through the contents of a filing cabinet that the plaintiff took from his former employer after they went out of business. It was mostly information about equipment and suppliers, but plaintiff's counsel turned it over to us and it was my duty to make sure there was nothing that implicated our client. Everything I've said applies to plaintiff's side work as well as defense, except with defense you don't have clients constantly blowing up your phone.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't do it if you think you'd like it better than your current job; I couldn't imagine writing code all day. It has some intangible plusses. The prestige is one. You'll get a private office and a secretary and paralegals and will never be the low man on the totem pole at any firm you work for. When we get summer associates the boss usually has them do paralegal work and they're tickled to death when one of the attorneys notices that they exist and gives them real work to do.

Don't get me wrong, I like my job, to the point where I don't even mind Mondays, but I also don't have any expectations that every case is going to be a corker. The thing that separates mediocre attorneys from good ones is that the good ones pay attention to the details of the case and treat everyone as if it has the potential to be a corker. Instead of going through the motions, they'll find something to argue about, and don't mind if things don't work out in the end.

Every once in a while, I wonder if I missed my calling as a tax attorney. It's probably mostly just the grass is greener on the other side of the fence (and the ways our cows found to access grass beyond the fence were endlessly creative) but it always seems like tax would be this neverending optimization problem.

Thanks @Rov_Scam, as an aside I'm always looking out for your comments because I know you're a lawyer and have a particular viewpoint on whatever is being discussed.

Don't get me wrong, I like my job, to the point where I don't even mind Mondays, but I also don't have any expectations that every case is going to be a corker. The thing that separates mediocre attorneys from good ones is that the good ones pay attention to the details of the case and treat everyone as if it has the potential to be a corker. Instead of going through the motions, they'll find something to argue about, and don't mind if things don't work out in the end.

So weirdly enough, as you were discussing the job of practicing law, it keeps reminding me of similarities to the job of a SWE. "Hours of going through the contents of a filing cabinet" on the face of it doesn't feel boring to me. It would be similar to when if I change something in an upstream service, I would be responsible to go check on how my change affects all the downstream services. Or I suppose a better analogy is if my boss or higher made a change then tell me to go clean up for them. I suppose the reminder here is every job needs you to be masochistic in particular ways to be successful and you need to choose the flavor of pain you can grind at for years.

it doesn't sound like you want to practice law, but to do something exceedingly specific

You are right. I don't want to just switch from the SWE-ladder to the Lawyer-ladder like some kind of class-change. I also understand that with regards to the default allure of a career in law, the goal is to have a lucrative career. Well I kinda already have a lucrative career (in a relative sense, my household income barely reaches big law starting salary atm, but that's still pretty good compared to the median American household) so "doing something with law" has to really fulfill something else in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs (so to speak), AND justify the opportunity cost (time honing my SWE career path, law school costs, SWE less stressful working environment).

The allure of law personal to me are:

  1. It's an intellectual pursuit of building shared understanding (akin to how "software design is knowledge building"). edit: I realized this is very appellate law specific.
  2. I keep running into problems within the context of law. Politics, culture war, "China is run by engineers, America is run by lawyers". I figure it's better for myself personally to be more than just a layman.
  3. Prestige bonus like you mentioned.
  4. Fuse my SWE background with Law to somehow unlock opportunities that either SWE or Law can't achieve by itself.

I do wonder what you think of all that. If you have any more advice or opinions, I would welcome it.

Your best chances are to utilize your specific characteristics to be relevant to a specific case that might come before the supreme court.

I have a friend that is a historian. His focus was on the 1800s. He wrote a book on Lincoln. He has relevant knowledge of 1800s trade policy. But he is one of the few people with that specialty. So when tariff stuff came up he was one of the few relevant authorities on the topic.

He was suddenly meeting with pence and others to oppose trump tariffs at the supreme court. Felt very big, might be like the dream you have.

That sounds very serendipitous and not something in my control. I suppose the better way to phrase what I want is actualization/making an impact. I suppose post-law-school careers that also seems amazing to me are like Avril Haines or Lina Khan. Not sure if that's even possible for an immigrant (hasn't even gotten my green card yet).

Becoming a world class legal expert on a topic is under your control. The more nuanced or obscure the topic the easier it is, but obviously getting a case on a more obscure topic is less likely.

I still think it is the best shot you have, because realistically you don't really have a shot.

I suppose in my fantasy future, I would be doing appellate law and someday argue Supreme Court cases, but everything I read up shows that law is a high-stress, singular life.

Not always, but by far the best path to that point is to graduate from Harvard, Stanford, or Yale, maybe Chicago, to clerk for a Circuit justice (and then, if possible, a SCOTUS justice), and go to work at a large law firm. The first step is to take the LSAT. If you can score 175+ (less if you are an underrepresented minority) then at least that step is not impossible. But if appellate law is the only thing that really interests you, then you should probably just not go to law school--unless, perhaps, you are extremely well connected. Even if you go to Harvard, the odds of ever actually arguing interesting questions in front of the Supreme Court are quite low. Even arguing in front of state supreme courts is pretty unusual.

If you're sufficiently interested in law to accept a career well short of your fantasy future, then you might as well take the LSAT and see how it goes. STEM majors actually tend to do very well as it is for the most part an obfuscated psychometric, despite the recent removal of the logic games portion. If you do poorly, then you can turn your attention elsewhere. If you do well, then you can decide whether to take the next steps of figuring out plausible schools to apply to. But bear in mind that law careers have a "bimodal distribution" between highly compensated "BigLaw" attorneys and the rank-and-file of family and criminal and liability lawyers who are (often at best) comfortably middle class. You could easily end up spending 3 years and $100,000+ to take a pay cut and spend the rest of your life refereeing messy divorces.

I am a lawyer, but I only practice on rare occasion. I left behind full time law practice to become an academic philosopher. I find it much more fulfilling than law practice, and I get to argue about whatever issues I want with people who are actually a lot smarter than the median SCOTUS Justice. The pay is terrible and it's unlikely I will ever make a meaningful difference on actual public policy, but that would probably be true even if I were a powerful appellate attorney.

I still remember one of my TAs in law school (a step below HYS) almost taking a swing at me at a cocktail party when he solemnly told the group his life goal was to argue in front of SCOTUS, and I gave him the piss-take that given he was Kenyan, his easiest route wasn't through a big-law litigation firm, but to move to some former Confederate state capital and join the AGs office, where he would be a novelty both for the quality of his law degree and intellect and for the color of his skin. Become Mike Huckabee's token black friend and they'll put you up for promotion right away, and those states are always getting into some cockamamie case around wanting to execute a black man that they would love to have a Black Attorney to argue for them.

He said he wanted to do it with integrity, I said that there are only a little over 100 lawyers who argue in front of the SCOTUS any given year, and there are about 1,000 students graduating from HYS every year. There's not a lot of room at the top.

@lollol

Don't become a lawyer to argue about the constitution, unless you are either very rich and connected or want to be a PD and argue about very particular types of constitutional law. Or I suppose if you're a true outlier genius, where getting a 180 LSAT is trivial for you without practice, and you figure to be top of class at HYS given your resume.

It's not the worst thing in the world to do with your time, law school is actually quite pleasant in my opinion, but the industry is about to go through major shifts related to (a new variety of) LLM in the workplace. So it may not be the source of major job security in the immediate future, regardless of how things ultimately turn out.

yeah, seems like the plan is at least try the LSAT once but if I don't get above 170, there's no point.

You need to go to HYS to clerk or be a judge, but if you want to argue a case in the circuit court you just need a plaintiff and a case. That's harder than it sounds, because it takes a lot of money to pay the fees to have a trial, and most civil rights organizations already have their own preferred lawyers.

Still for arguing a case at scotus you'll probably need to network to be in the place to argue appellate cases, and be in the right place and the right time to go to scotus.

From what I've read up, it's HYS or nothing. I have a natural aversion to prestige games but I suppose for the prestige chasers that's just loser talk.

The pay is terrible and it's unlikely I will ever make a meaningful difference on actual public policy, but that would probably be true even if I were a powerful appellate attorney.

I suppose this is what I am missing from my normal job, I don't have fulfillment. I feel that I do a good job and the people around me says I am and the company show sufficient financial appreciation, but at the end of the day it's just pushing text from left to right to get people to buy more stuff. At various points in the last few months I've did various searches on "how can a 30 year old do [research/law school/etc]?" And every time it seems like confusing and non-clear ROI. Nor does it seem like my job then would be more fulfilling, at least on the SWE path there are some pretty clear next steps I can do (big tech/unicorns/interesting startups/open source/anarcho-hackers/etc.). And yes, currently I have to wait for the company-sponsored green card process to complete before it seems like my next chapter in life can begin.

From what I've read up, it's HYS or nothing. I have a natural aversion to prestige games but I suppose for the prestige chasers that's just loser talk.

In the interest of completeness, it's worth nothing that there are other paths up the mountain. For example, one common bit of advice is that if there is a state you know you want to practice law in (and you actually want to practice law, not just be an academic or something) then you should try to get into the best law school in that state. If you can parlay that into a position as e.g. the state's Attorney General then you actually have a better chance of winding up in front of the Supreme Court than if you go BigLaw, and you will have direct impact on public policy even when you're not arguing it in front of the nine aristocrats who actually rule the country.

But yes, the legal profession is incredibly infected obsessed with prestige, which it routinely and wholeheartedly substitutes for genuine merit. In any number of venues there is just no amount of demonstrated intelligence or accomplishment that will make up for choosing a lower-ranked law school, and no amount of idiocy that won't be excused if you've got the right pedigree. Exhibit A is of course the educational demographics of the Supreme Court itself. But I have seen a backwater state legislature reject a state supreme court nominee for the crime of not having gotten a 4.0 GPA at their top in-state law school, while cheerfully approving nominees who went to Yale, which doesn't assign grades. It's a real problem.

I suppose this is what I am missing from my normal job, I don't have fulfillment. I feel that I do a good job and the people around me says I am and the company show sufficient financial appreciation, but at the end of the day it's just pushing text from left to right to get people to buy more stuff.

Are you married? Do you have children?

It might off-topic but fulfillment is elusive prey. "Success" in the workaday world entails climbing to the top of a heap and then defending your position there. But by definition most of us cannot be at the top of any heap of humanity. Modernity treats business and government as the only heaps worth climbing. We obsess over promotion and pay raises and political victories. A single layoff or a single health issue can knock us back a whole decade.

The simplest way to parlay that "financial appreciation" into fulfillment is to take on the long term project of community-building. The paradigmatic approach is to start making tiny humans, whose parent you will always be, no matter what the role specifically entails. Not everyone will have the opportunity to be President, or Governor, or Justice, or CEO--indeed, the vast majority of us never will be. But everyone can be a good parent. The title of "Mom" or "Dad" is available to all, if not biologically than through adoption, and the only promotions available are to "Grandma" or "Grandpa." This is why certain political thinkers are so anti-family--because if you are focused on success within your actual sphere of influence, you are much more difficult to recruit as a single-minded soldier advancing the policy visions of others. Family (along with church and other, similarly genuine communities) competes directly with business and politics for your time and attention and loyalty, but offers you fulfillment on your own terms, rather than the terms of whoever happens to be at the top of the heap.

And every time it seems like confusing and non-clear ROI. Nor does it seem like my job then would be more fulfilling, at least on the SWE path there are some pretty clear next steps I can do (big tech/unicorns/interesting startups/open source/anarcho-hackers/etc.). And yes, currently I have to wait for the company-sponsored green card process to complete before it seems like my next chapter in life can begin.

Sorry to hear that. It's never fun to be waiting on bureaucracy. Good luck!

But I have seen a backwater state legislature reject a state supreme court nominee for the crime of not having gotten a 4.0 GPA at their top in-state law school, while cheerfully approving nominees who went to Yale, which doesn't assign grades. It's a real problem.

cool, sounds to me like i should just LSAT and see how it goes, maybe my score will be low enough that it'll just tell me that law is not for me.

Are you married? Do you have children?

Yes, and will. My wife and I will have children for sure, just not right now. For example, at the moment it's not clear if we have children prior to getting the green card they would be considered an American citizen. I am actually currently reading the book Dad Brain and I am quite excited about the prospect of being a dad. But I also want to be an amazing dad with great personal accomplishments as well. I suppose arrogance comes with being a SWE but I do think I'll be a great dad that will gain a lot of joy and pride from raising the little ones, and I also want joy and pride from my own accomplishments as well. No matter whether a bum or a contender, I'll be a great dad, but I don't want to be that guy in his 50s saying "I coulda been a contender".

Posted about some beginner gardening things last Friday. Currently fighting off some leaf miners on the zucchinis and powdery mildew on the begonias. Starting some basil plants from seed this weekend. Might plant some lavender and some mint if I can find them at the garden center. I'll need to upgrade the irrigation system though. How's my drip?

Spurred on by a recent mention here, I tried LMArena. What is this myrion model that wrote the most adequate fanfic scene from a dozen attempts on the same prompt? Is it that situation where beta versions from frontier labs feature pseudonymously? But when I heard about such events, it was about mysterious strangers dominating leaderboards, and I can't find it in the leaderboard either. Am I hallucinating? Am I an LLM myself?

One of my kids is doing summer swim. As a parent you have to volunteer at the swim meets if your kid is swimming in them. I found out before hand that certain positions count double when you volunteer. So I'd only need to volunteer every other swim meet that my kid is in. The position I got is "stroke and turn" judge. Basically I have to monitor the swimmers and make sure they are doing all legal strokes, turns, and finishes. I shadowed someone at the saturday meet, and then at the monday meet I was on my own.

Ya'll I DQed so many kids. At least 20 if I had to guess. Almost entirely on breastroke and butterfly events.

Afterwards I was thinking that @ToaKraka might appreciate the pedantic nature of the rules(pdf).

One of the interesting aspects of the judging is that you are supposed to give an equal amount of attention to all swimmers. Usually there are 4 lanes to watch for each judge. Which means each swimmer is getting 25% of your attention. Where it gets interesting is that sometimes events are not full. So you might only have 1 swimmer to watch in your 4 lanes. You are not supposed to just watch that single swimmer. They are still supposed to get 25% of your attention. I was standing there plenty of times just watching 3 empty lanes for 75% of the race.

The swimmer I felt the worst for was a girl doing butterfly, but she must have forgotten that for a half second and came up off the dive doing freestyle (or crawl as its sometimes called), it basically violated all the stroke rules for butterfly.

I had the largest number of simultaneous DQs when three of the four lanes I was watching for breastroke were doing a fully extended arm pull (instead of bring the arms back forward before they passed the hip line.) Then two of them also failed to touch the wall with both hands. It was a frantic minute of filling out forms after that race.

That is another thing, the whole meet basically moves at the pace we do. They won't start the next race until we are done filling out our disqualification slips and are ready to watch the pool again.

Stroke and turn for summer is a lot less stringent than year round. It's a good time to learn!

Good on you for doing it. That's a position that always needs filling.

Everyone's a libertarian until they get the slightest whiff of power huh?

Ha!

I guess this becomes a more philosophical question about the purpose of sports, but I've always felt that anything that requires this kind of hawkish officiating over nuanced but artificially imposed restrictions on what types of movements are allowed should just not be a sport. If race-walking, breaststroke, and butterfly are clearly biomechanically inferior modes and their competitions end up being largely about how subtly you can cheat, then what is the point? One of the many things that got me disinterested in basketball was the endless quibbling over replays about whether some slight wriggle made for a foul or a carry or verticality, etc.

I think there is a spiritual argument in favor of precise execution of a specific movement over speed or efficiency. Developing extreme skill in a very limited domain is the point. This also serves to train your discipline and focus. You need to stay present and on task until the competition is over, otherwise you will do the wrong movements.

Besides, sports imply competition and competition implies a ruleset, right? You need to draw the line for what is and isn't appropriate somewhere. Why not do it like this?

I disagree, but I think I see your perspective. Curious what you think about figure skating and gymnastics. Eliminate figure skating and only keep speed skating? Replace gymnastics with some kind of parkour race? In both of those the bio-mechanically more difficult action is the whole point.

My interest in something as a sport correlates strongly negatively to the influence of officiating on the outcome, so I'm not very familiar with either figure skating or gymnastics. I've been told that judgement in both are actually quite rigorous and technical, and not entirely subjective as I assumed at first glance, but was not swayed enough to verify for myself.

I think most of the value in sport is a mixture of being entertained and being impressed. Even with questionable officiating, I get both out of figure skating and gymnastics. Running and swimming sports are generally impressive but rarely entertaining in and of themselves. For things like race-walking where winning seems built upon deceiving officials, I am neither entertained nor impressed.

Additionally, the role of officials there seems to be less about 'is this athlete actually cheating by means of a superior but arbitrarily disallowed technique' and more 'was the execution closer to perfection' in a way that is at least a bit more legible to a casual viewer. We all have some intuitive sense of what it looks like to stick a landing.

end up being largely about how subtly you can cheat

I wouldn't say that. There are distinct local optima that are not just bumping up against the arbitrary constraint blocking the way to the global optimum. In fact, this is arguably the definition of a good constraint: one that induces a non-trivial local optimum.

I'd agree in general, but only in cases where the bounds are clearer and the resultant local optimum is far from them. That seems to be the case for something like backstroke. I could be wrong, but I recall from Olympics time every four years discussions surrounding race-walking and breaststroke in particular, where the optimum really does seem to lie right at wherever the bounds were placed.

In a lot of competitions like this I think DQs are too harsh of a penalty. It seems like it would be a lot more fair if minor and pedantic mistakes were met with time penalties so that people who try hard and give it their best can still be rated and compare and have their speed and number of mistakes still get measured against each themselves and each other, rather than a binary "were you perfect or not?"

My sister in law takes her dogs to agility competitions and there have been events where literally nobody qualifies. What's even the point of having the event then? If someone is actively cheating then disqualifying them seems appropriate. If someone messes up slightly, or does something which if allowed to slide would give them an advantage, give them a large enough penalty that there's no way to possibly abuse it and enough incentive to work on fixing it in the future, while still letting them compete and get a score.

There was a moment in biathlon when some competitors that came from nordic skiing that couldn't shoot for their life just powered trough the penalties and didn't even bother to aim before shooting because they were absurdly faster than the regular players. Probably interesting to observe once or twice, but definitely has potential to degrade the sport.

A good time penalty in swimming in theory is one that gives slightly higher time penalty than the advantage gained. Higher than that - and it is DQ by other means. But then you will have some different types of gaming the system.

Btw - strongly recommend ActuallyVen on youtube for his F1 cheating sketches.

Most common stroke infractions do give you somewhat of an advantage, or they at least just totally change what even you are doing. Most kids' freestyle or crawl stroke is about twice as fast as their butterfly. The time penalties would have to be massive to make up for it. DQs above age thirteen are also pretty rare, so its clear that most kids can learn the strokes and the rules sufficiently to rarely DQ.

It is also somewhat hard to catch minor one time stroke infractions. If I glance over and think I saw an infraction and I describe any level of uncertainty then the Pool Ref will throw out the DQ. Usually stroke related problems are hard to see if they only happen once. Its usually that the kid is doing it wrong the entire time they are in my zone. I felt bad for the girl that did crawl during butterfly because I happened to be looking at her lane right as she did it. She had a 75% chance of being fine, but lost out on that cuz of bad luck.

One example is that you are allowed only two underwater pulls in breastroke off the wall before you are supposed to surface. I saw a kid do three, and that was after I missed him for about 5 meters off the wall. My estimate is that he actually did 4 or maybe even 5 underwater pulls. But I only reported seeing three because that is all I saw, even if I know via simple reasoning that he likely did 4 or 5. In his case if he had merely done three underwater pulls, which is illegal, I likely would not have caught him, because I would have only seen two of his pulls.

Okay that's a good point. The only viewing them 25% of the time adds some probabilistic volatility to things, but on average if someone gets away with 75% of their infractions then penalties ought to be four times as harsh to compensate, and at that point if they get harsh enough to guarantee someone last place you might as well just DQ them. It's not an ideal system, but it seems reasonable given the monitoring constraints.

Benefit of the doubt also goes to the swimmer. So maximum strictness if caught, but chances of being caught for non blatant rule violations is low.

The easiest one to catch is no two hand touch and that's also very easy to comply with.

One thing I always liked about the TV game show Forged in Fire is that if someone didn't make something to specification at the end of the first round, or the second round, or the third round, they wouldn't even get judged. Your first job is to make specifications, then it is your job to see how well you did on that spec.

If someone can't complete the course, it isn't fair to compare them to people who can.

One thing I always liked about the TV game show Forged in Fire

On the day I am pondering whether to obtain 1x30 variable speed for thinning and bevel setting, you had to mention this show ...

Forged in Fire is nearly the ideal competition in my opinion, everyone's working hard, but they're almost all willing to help a competitor who had some poor luck or an early poor choice that lead to unforseen problems.

The bladesmith/blacksmith community is incredibly cooperative and supportive.

At least for competitive swimming you just get DQ'd on that one particular event.

(You don't get booted from the meet entirely, or at least, you shouldn't be- this isn't like competitive shooting where that does happen, but that also only happens for safety infractions.)

The English of this document sounds suspiciously like it was written a hundred years ago.

Confidence can only be attained by studying the rules, attending training sessions and working regularly at meets

this does feel like something that might be in a turn of the century advice or manners pamphlet.

Ya'll I DQed so many kids. At least 20 if I had to guess. Almost entirely on breastroke and butterfly events.

I got DQ'd on breastroke so many times in my youth... it's very easy to get sloppy when you're not dedicated, especially when there's competition to keep the speed pressure on.

For sure, I think breastroke is easier to DQ, but butterfly is harder to physically accomplish.

Video game thread

What are you playing this week?

I uninstalled Slay the Spire 1 and 2. I realized that the games (mainly sts2) took up a lot of time and capacity due to my need to play optimally, without giving me much joy in return.

Started and finished a Civ V game instead. I got around 30 wonders, because I was playing on a more relaxed difficulty than usual.

Tried out The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales (demo) briefly. Dismayed to find it has no ultrawide support. And they call it HD-2D yet all the characters are pixel art style. Might play it in 16:9 on my TV at some polnt. They've priced it very highly, and it has denuvo, so I might wait for a deep discount further down the road.

Just got back into Project Zomboid. The game is so fun when it works, but the pace of development is killing me. I dropped it a year ago in anticipation of NPCs in build 42, but they still aren't here, and I'm playing on build 41 because half the mods I want to use are unsupported in B42. Currently playing a mechanic with the scrap warrior mod on 4x pop no respawn, hopefully it'll be a long playthrough but I'm struggling to clear out a safe zone to even begin dealing with the bigger hordes. The FPS optimization mods are impressive, I went from a stuttering nightmare to a decent experience even when around a 100+ horde.

This week it's been just 4 quick wins in magic arena because I've been on vacation.

Captains of industry, playing an island map. Tried a mod to make things easier by increasing truck capacity but it backfired and the trucks stopped emptying my smallest storage things. Went back to zero mods.

Starship troopers extermination. The group I'm in has been low on participation for the hours I can actually play, which is frustrating. But I have had a few opportunities toead 16 person groups, it's always extremely fun. If anyone is willing to join and try you get special "recruit" status for your first official op and if I brought you in more chances I can be your squad lead or platoon lead.

Playing way too much goddamn Bannerlord inbetween going through the latest version of Voices of the Void.

Bannerlord is annoying in that you can get 13 million denars in to your first playthrough only to realize that your character really isn't optimized to play the way you'd enjoy playing, so you go back and start over from scratch.

I do find it amusing that you can basically play a social monster in a game that is basically about people smacking each other in combat and it works.

Also, I find it hilarious that after pursuing the wife I targeted in-game(tracking down moving NPCs is a goddamn nightmare in this game) and successfully woo-ing her, that she's currently giving me lots and lots of kids to secure my future dynasty.

One time I nicked a castle off a revolting faction and had fun making my villages rich, but I didn't have the influence to get other lords to join so while I mostly was out of the way enough to avoid getting squashed, I couldn't expand either. I need to join a faction and build relationships letting the best lords free after battles a bit more, but I never stick to the solo plan and usually end up on faction goals for the poor lords who don't get enough support.

Then I usually swap to Crusader Kings for a bit.

Warband the last days mod for lord of the rings is still my favorite, even though the graphics are much worse. Prophecy of pendor is great too.

Same. I assume one day that Bannerlord will get conversion mods of that level again, and I'm pretty much waiting for that to return. Vanilla was fine for a few hours but I didn't want to get stuck in the endless grind

It's been awhile since I booted up bannerlord, I always wanted to love the game but whenever I would try to get landed without starting my own kingdom it was nearly impossible. The AI leaders would almost never give you castles or land, and god forbid a city even if you took it in battle. Which itself was bloody difficult because the enemy AI leaders always seemed to prioritize beating me up. And they spammed wars non-stop even ones they couldn't win to the point that maintaining any sort of diplomacy with NPCs in other kingdoms was pretty much pointless. Did any of that ever get fixed or is this just my gitgud moment.

I honestly wouldn't know. I'm still stuck in the 'become Big Boss' stage of Bannerlord where I'm basically running around with a huge mercenary army, grinding up charm, stewardship, and trade so to support said army and clan.

This basically lets me wade into battles when my vassal-state goes to war, tearing through most groups without issue, unless the AI decides to do a fucky-whucky and all of a sudden I'm facing down a horde of 500+ NPCs swarming me out of the blue. And even then...

The above lets me recoup any losses either from troops the enemy AI has captured, or the enemies I've captured and slowly converted over. Donating over prisoners I don't want nets me influence that then turns into alot of cash via mercenary contract.

Once I get trade up to max for that lovely, lovely cap perk, I'll either vassalize and start buying up all the things or start my own kingdom and do the exact same thing.

...say what you want about Bannerlord, but good lord does it have alot of stuff to do. One of the things I stumbled across in my research pointed out that you want to get your dynasty started early, cause your main guy can die of old age, and you want good offspring to take over when that happens.

I'm still playing WoW Classic TBC. I'm more playing it to goof around than anything, so at this point I've started eleven characters and my highest leveled is just now reaching Outland. I'm amazed at the variety of players in the game these days. You somehow have complete morons who have no idea how to play a 30 year old game come on dude, and try-hards who are dead set on effortmaxxing a 30 year old game. In other words, everyone trying harder than me is a loser who needs to get a life, and everyone trying less hard than me is a mouthbreathing moron.

Experiencing the game again, I've played through all the starting zones, and I'm trying to decide if, when designing WoW, the devs/lore team liked the Horde better, or if they did the Alliance first and figured a lot out before starting on the Horde. Because the Horde starting zones are all so much better in basically every way. The leveling experience to 20 is just so superior for the Horde than for the Alliance, and there's no countervailing improvement later. My ranking of starting zones would go:

Undead>Blood Elves>>Orcs/Trolls>>Dwarves/Gnomes>>>>>>Humans>>>>>Night Elves

I just kinda hate the Dranei entirely so I can't really rate them fairly. They're just so stupid that I can't even really put them on the scale, but if I had to there would 500 lbs of whale shit before we get to them.

The routing is better, the leveling process is easier, the early dungeons are better integrated into the questing process, the different races have better access to each other. It's easier and smoother in non-dumb ways. Leveling in the Barrens or Silverpine, you are consistently moving from quest to quest on level and routing smoothly without running into the wrong areas; in Westfall you can't level through without leaving or grinding, and you're constantly routing through higher level mobs if you aren't careful and getting splattered in the dirt. The Undead have a consistent story and enemies, as do the Orcs and Tauren. The Night Elves and Dwarves seem to just noodle around doing nothing in particular, the Gnomes get basically zero lore after one (admittedly great) level 30 instance. The Humans are the worst, the way the game is laid out by nature the "evil" Defias Brotherhood bandits vastly outnumber both player characters and friendly NPCs, indicating that...you're the baddie. You're the agent of an oppressive government striking down a mass peasant rebellion against an out-of-touch elite. The Defias never even really do anything bad, we're just told they are bad and evil because they're building a giant ...Pirate ship? Dumbass storyline.

Back in the day my main was a Night Elf Druid, and I can still hear in my head the ambient music, which was best for Night Elves out of all the factions. Shadowglen -> Teldrassil-> Darnassus -> Ashenvale. Who could forget Moonfall? I mean despite it being parodied in South Park. I was never one of those players who put on death metal or whatever as the music; I always kept the game music, which set the mood. Horde music sucked, except maybe the Undead, which was dark, but eventually repetitive. The music in Stormwind and surrounding was way over-the-top "We are the pure ones" herald horns and brass. I'm sure all of it was done by one guy on a synthesizer but it was all very impressive. Dun Morogh in particular I liked.

Funny, I also raided with a Nelf feral druid back when TBC came out the first time. I liked that on a Druid I could very easily tank, dps, and quest without changing up my gear or spec.

The music might have changed my opinion, but these days I'm playing on the couch next to the quite pregnant Mrs. FiveHour, who wants me in the room with her, but doesn't really want to talk to me right now.

Path of Exile 2. The new patch is just so peak. It finally feels like a true sequel to the first, even with half the character classes missing.

I started a second playground of Cyberpunk 2077 to play the Phantom Liberty expansion. It's been fun, I'm not very far in though. I'm going for a mantis blades build, but I'm too poor to afford mantis blades yet. Soon (TM).

I've been playing Slay the Spire 2 recently, and I find myself simply not having fun, either. I'll get to the end of an act and then get disappointed in starting the next act, and then quit. I'll come back, but it's not the same.

At the risk of culture war outside of the Monday thread, there was a brouhaha over Anita Sarkeesian's name in the credits, and since then I see it everywhere. Why is the only ancient who presents as feminine a man in drag, or trans (look at that jawline)? Why is there no such thing as an attractive woman in this world? Why are the two female characters 1) covered head to toe and 2) a living skeleton? Why is the potion courier "they?" And so on. I'm not blaming Sarkeesian entirely, I think Mega Crit are true believers, but once I started to Notice, I haven't been able to stop.

As for what I've been playing, I'm still trying to keep Mechabellum alive. It's got a new patch, new season, and I play a few games a week.

I've been playing 33 Immortals. It just came out, and is a multiplier roguelite thing sort of like a cross between Realm of the Mad God and Hades. 33 players get dropped into a map, and you shoot monsters and complete objectives, getting randomized upgrades along the way, fight a boss at the end, and then get meta-progression rewards.

I'm liking it a lot so far. It seems way less volatile and repetitive than Realm of the Mad God. Everyone starts a map at approximately the same time, so you're not dropped into a map where everyone is level 15 while you're level 1 trying to grow on your own. And the combat and dodging mechanics are a lot more modern and feel more satisfying and skillful than just pew pew pew. A match progresses naturally from wandering around getting loot, to fulfilling joint objectives in small groups (the chambers only admit 6 players at a time, but several pop up around the map), and then there are three larger objectives on the main map, and then everyone teleports to all fight the final boss together with all 33 (or whoever is left alive).

The fact that the game is balanced around so many people forces players of vastly different meta-progression states together, which can create some balance issues. On the dps side that's mostly fine because even if you're doing twice as much damage as someone else, the tougher enemies are balanced around being hit by lots of people, and the boss expects 33 people to wail on it, so it all kind of averages together. On the survival side it's a bit of an issue. I have not died once in the regular difficult mode since unlocking a shield perk that vastly increases my effective health.

That said, there are harder difficulty modes, but they take longer, largely because enemy healths do not scale with the number of surviving players, so if it's harder and half the people die then the objectives and final boss take twice as long to kill.

The majority of meta progress is in the form of achievements. You've got achievement blocks for each weapon, location, and several subcategories of things you can do. Each achievement gives you 10 xp towards your main level which increases your maximum health, and each block of achievement gives you some major unlock like new features, powering up the relevant weapon, or more stats or perk slots, alongside unlocking the next block of achievements (which take longer than the previous block, causing the meta-progress to slow down in a smooth way).

I suspect that the game will get stale eventually if they don't continue adding new content post release. I have 18 hours in it and suspect it'll stay fun for another 30-40. But I don't think it has enough content for hundreds of hours of replayability. Without that, the player base might drop off, which would be fatal to a game balanced around requiring 33 people to all queue up at the same time. Still, in its new state I have never run into matchmaking issues even when playing late at night, and it's a lot of fun.

Sounds like fun. I played some Dark and Darker for a while, which was pretty punishing, and has the PvPvE element, instead of just PvE as you've described, but it has much of the same issues with balance and skill. This looks a little more like Diablo and a little less like an extraction shooter.

I feel like in a PvP setting the issues would be vastly worse. Being in a squad of 6 people and your teammates just stomp the enemies and carry you is kind of dissatisfying as you get rewards that it doesn't feel like you earned, but you still get the rewards. Getting killed by someone way stronger than you and you lose everything feels way worse, which is why most PvP games avoid strong meta-progression this way and only have small upgrades or let you get through them quickly and max out so the game can be balanced around a maxed out meta.

I have one mission left in Mechwarrior 5 Clans; Wolves of Tukayyid. The most recent unlock was something i'd never seen or heard of before called a Bane-1, which has ten UAC-2's. The clans fucking autocannon mogged a King Crab. So anyways, that's been fun. I also unlocked a Bane-2 which I think had 4 UAC-10's? Fucking madness.

I think I mentioned it before, but the Wolves of Tukayyid expansion is fairly underwhelming. I mean the missions are alright I guess. Tukayyid is exciting for lore nerds, but the lack of variety in the scenery hurts IMHO. They throw in a lot of classic characters if you read the novels. Phelan, Ranna, Vlad, Ulric and the Black Widow feature prominently in the cutscenes. All two of them it feels like. I hear sales of Clans and it's DLC have been underwhelming, and it shows in how they've cut corners in the production of this DLC with far less cutscenes and story generally. Still, the gameplay is there, so I'm not unhappy with it.

Is Mechwarrior still going strong after all these years? I remember staring at the PC box for a Mechwarrior game I desired a long time ago as a kid when I went to Wal-Mart with my father once. Never got a chance to play it but always wanted to.

Mechwarrior 3 was my cybercafe jam in my youth. Pity the game's not around for puchase anymore even digitally.

Also there are strategy rpg variants, like Battletech 2018 (by Harebrained Schemes) with very in-depth fan mods like Roguetech.

Pretty strong, I'd say. There was a long dry spell after MW4 came out, but we got MW5 7ish years ago, and a Clan sequel to MW5 a couple of years ago. Both are still getting DLC expansions every now and then. Honestly it's a pretty good time to be a MW fan.

I think MW5, Clans and Mercs, are likely to be the last, best MW games I'll see in my lifetime.

Started playing deadlock. It’s pretty fun for a moba but worried I’m gonna get addicted again.

Otherwise playing through baldurs gate 3 still.

I don't even watch MOBA esports anymore because of how addictive they are. Casually watching a match with a good commentator can get me thinking, hmm, that looks fun maybe I'll start playing again.

And then you boot up a game and get a smurf, afker, and a Brazilian in the same match and remember why you quit...

DRL, a roguelike themed after Doom. Mechanics are pleasantly simple. No metaprogression outside of recording recipes. Perfect not-quite-mindless time killer with a number of secrets to find.

Played some more Nuclear Option. It's very nice. Went so far as to dig out my old Logitech Extreme 3D Pro for it, and it even still works! It's meditative sort of game. Check the map, see what needs doing in the current situation, buy a plane you can afford, take the right munitions for the job, wait a few seconds for the engine to spin up, taxi to the runway, open up the throttle and take off, and then make your leisurely way to the frontlines. Where I then usually realize that I should have thought in advance about the angle and altitude I want to approach from, and my map knowledge is several minutes out of date, my targets have gone up in flames before my arrival (an especially egregious problem in multiplayer!) and there are all kinds of planes or ground vehicles around that can hurt me while I either brought the wrong weapons to deal with them, or I brought a multirole loadout and I'm frantically fumbling to get the right weapons on the right targets, and then my wings are gone and my engine is on fire, and I vow that this time I shall learn from my mistakes, only to repeat them the next time.

It's fun.

I think the game has huge potential, particularly with the already thriving, somewhat supported modding scene. I'm honestly a little concerned the devs are spending too much time making new planes and not new systems/qol/optimization, because they'll announce a plane in the roadmap (eg. heavy cargo lifter) and modders will spin one out in half a month.

I agree, but it doesn't look like the devs have a more systemically ambitious game in mind. Optimization will surely come in time. QOL, I wish, but I'm not holding my breath - one man's QOL is another's unwarranted handholding.

I take it for what it is, and is likely to become, and try to keep my wishful thinking to a satisfiable minimum.

I've had it on a my wishlist for ages and I recently bought it and I agree it's fun. I've only played arcade flight games like Ace Combat and Project Wingman, and I really like the more in-depth targeting and radar, and how the missiles are just better than something like Ace Combat.

If you have a spare webcam, even a shitty one. I recommend getting OpenTrack with NeutralNet Tracker for Input which you can then use so that if you move your head around, like even turning to the side, it'll move the camera around, so you don't have to do it with your controller or mouse. It's super easy to install, and really immersive.

Works on a bunch of other games too, like Freespace 2 for example.

How I wish Project Wingman were opened up so the community could make maps and missions! It's basically the only game I use VR for.

I tried different tracking software, but liked none of them. Too inaccurate, too laggy, too sensitive to exact head position. Maybe my cheap made in china webcam wasn't up to the task.

I ended up just using the FOV controls to zoom in and out in first person as needed. Put that on my coolie hat. It's not quite as good as freelook, bit it works.

KBM has a much better time with freelook, IMO, where you can just use the mouse for it.

Have you tried like this one specifically? Usually most of these rely on some some kind of IR sensor or a hat or something, but NeuralNet doesn't need anything else. I'm using like a cheapo logitech webcam that I doubt is much better than yours.

It's really nice being able to look around while turning for example, since usually both hands are busy during that.

No, I tried two others, one open-source and the other proprietary, but I recall the names of neither.

But yes, both used a webcam.

I've also been doing some Nuclear Option, and I very much enjoy it. 10/10 game, even if you're clattering away with a mouse and keyboard like myself.

Sounds like War Thunder, but better, which I had a lot of fun with about a decade ago.

Barely similar. You fly somewhat realistic combat planes in both, and there the commonalities stop, as far as I know.

War Thunder is some kind of life service MMO monstrosity with all manners of pay-to-win, a very long metaprogression, complex matchmaking and a fairly unhealthy-looking developer and community, and it tries to jam every vehicle in the history of motorized warfare into its lineup, while farcically pretending that it can also offer fair matchups.

Nuclear Option is a classic self-hosted multiplayer and singleplayer game with no metaprogression, no microtransactions, a near-future setting with a small number of vehicles that each fill a unique niche, with no attempt to balance them against each other. Instead, each faction generates vehicles over time (in factories that can actually be destroyed by enemy action), and pilots can then buy them with bounties they have earned. Or requisition them, if they have reached a high enough rank within the match. But either of them only if enough of the specific airframe remain available! Matches typically last around 1-2 hours, on the larger maps, and players can drop in and out as they like with no penalty other than starting at rank 1 on joining. As the match goes on, as vehicles, factories, ships, defences and airfields are destroyed and possibly rebuilt, both sides slowly escalate into tactical and then strategic nuclear warfare. This escalation is accompanied by a suitable musical score. Also, each plane has its own instrumental track. The music is just generally very fun, in my opinion: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_DsG9JoXUIA63yjzxhE1qoiuVjhGWhfq .The game runs on a potato, is barely over 2 GB in size, has excellent performance. Few bells and whistles, mostly just rock solid core gameplay and atmosphere. The devs are chewing through their roadmap as planned. The community is a hive of degeneracy, but at least they have none of WT's constant drama.

War Thunder is a game that I tried exactly once, and thought it wholly miserable. Nuclear Option has absolutely no barriers to entry and brings joy.

I was never any good at War Thunder, and I got tired of doing bombing runs to get fake money to get not shitty airplanes, but I liked the missions, I liked flying bombers, because I was dogshit at dogfights, so I'll have to keep Nuclear Option on my radar.

I played and beat 1000xResist. Or rather, I watched and completed it, given it's very much a visual novel with limited interactivity or game elements. Good story though. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it from a motte point of view is that it might be the best example of a good "woke" game with a big focus on themes like motherhood, immigration + assimilation, the inevitable sad lesbians, and, as much as I hate the term, 'intergenerational trauma'.

I didn't fully buy into those themes, mostly because I have a bit too much familiarity and found it hard to believe (you're telling me a Chinese family found it hard to settle in 2030s Vancouver, really? I could have bought the high school bully angle if it were all mainlanders attacking the Hong Kong ren instead of a story 25 years out of date), but they did a good job at marrying those themes into what was a fairly classic sci-fi story and world.

If anything, the major weakness in the story was not the woke aspects, but their attempt to shoehorn in an anti-authoritarian message with Chinese characteristics in the second half, when none of it made any sense within the world they had built.

I was finally able to beat deity on the new civ 7 test of time patch. I did the Pachatuchi + Nepal combo for a culture win. The new patch makes the AI bonus on deity much stronger. They city spam really hard and playing wide seems to be the unequivocal best strategy much to my disappointing tall-playing inclinations. I've come close before but this is the first time making it over the finish line in time.

Some friends and I have put together a valheim server, I'm enjoying building viking themed castles in it lately. Really letting my creative juices flow.

I can't get into any civ after civ iv, the last civ with stackable armies. It's just so much more satisfying to walk around with a doomstack, and the map is visually simpler and easier to understand at a glance compared to later civ games.

I couldn't stand the doom stack armies, I wanted that feel of using the terrain and flanking enemies, battle lines like I'm a roman legion, and the "hold the line!" feeling. I hear less of the Civ IV purists these days, its mostly Civ V boosters, which I don't understand because that version was deeply unbalanced around wonderspaming

I consider Civ IV the mechanical high point of the series before it began its slide into bullshit. The main reasons why I stopped playing Civ IV and have since been waiting for the next big 4X are battles and wonders. Battles in Civ IV are, IMO, too hard to follow. Civ CtP had much more legible battles by way of limiting stack sizes, and resolving fights as all VS all instead of sequentially 1 vs 1. And I've never ever liked the win-more nature of wonders.

Speaking of, Civ CtP is IMO the underrated champ in terms of atmosphere and historical scope.

Civ IV has terrain, but it's only used defensively. Main usage was defending against enemy doomstacks with a mini-stack, and it's kind of fun estimating what you actually need to safely hold the enemy back. There's also that wonderful feeling where you perfectly estimate the minimum defense needed and you bait the AI doomstack into engaging your fortified-to-the-teeth city for a total loss.

To get the a good hold the line feeling I prefer the total war series.

Marathon season 2 is an ongoing interest. 007 First Light I imagine I'll be done with shortly (obviously IO knew how to make a real Bond game, they already had with the last Hitman trilogy). I started R-Type Tactics 1-2 Cosmos. It's essentially Advance Wars with a R-Type theme (which I enjoy). Having fun so far.

Is the 007 game actually good? I've seen accusations of blandness, generic linear gameplay, and "not being hitman".

So far, the story missions are indeed more linear than Hitman (though the latest mission I arrived at seems to open up); it's trying to tell a James Bond story, not your James Bond story. Within one mission, it will usually funnel you through all or most of the different "action types" of a Bond movie (social/exploration, sneaking, hand-to-hand, shooting and vehicle chases). Don't worry, though, you do "flow" between these in gameplay too through success or failure. Failing to notice an easy path or to social your way through a situation might force you to sneak, failure to sneak might force you to fistfight. In shooting sections, you can usually also sneak or firstfight, though that is often unreasonably more difficult than shooting, so the expected solution is obvious. Personally I don't find it any blander than Hitman or one of the lesser recent James Bond movies. The gameplay feels fun to me, the combat in particular flows really nicely.

Anyway, if I didn't have trust in IO from seeing how they handled the long-term support for the latest Hitman, I don't think I would recommend First Light at current full price.

Yahtzee liked it, and is usually unwilling to shill.

Tried out The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales (demo) briefly.

I'm playing through the demo myself, and it's alright? It reminds me a bit of Secret of Mana with the different weapons. But if I wanted to play a Legend of Zelda game, there are plenty on the Switch that I haven't even gotten around to, and it doesn't seem better at being The Legend of Zelda than the originals. Better than Breath of the Wild? Sure, but that game and its sequel have their own appeal.

And they call it HD-2D yet all the characters are pixel art style.

To me, there are clearly major differences in art style quality among all of the "HD-2D" games. The trailer for that "Final Fantasy: Resonance" game just looked awful, but I think the "Octopath" games look pretty amazing. "Elliot" looks okay. The designs are clear enough, but I think the ruins are a little too dark. The mix of obvious 3D world with pixel characters/enemies feels very PS1/PSP/DS? I think it reminds me a lot of some of the "Ys" game footage I've seen.

Are there any great rpgs in that isometric 2d style?

I tried Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes a few years ago but wasn't hooked for long by either. Dragon Quest 8 Reimagined doesn't seem to be good enough either.

I'm playing through the Shadowrun series. I wouldn't call it great (words like "wasted opportunity" might even come to mind), but it's pretty enjoyable.

Though now that I think about it, it's actually done with 3D graphics. You can set the camera projection to isometric, though!

I listened to @cjet79 and @urquan and went ahead and started playing Cyberpunk 2077. It's been a compelling enough game that my own tinkering has taken a backseat (and subsequently, the initial "productive" interests that drove my tinkering desires have been rendered unnecessary, so future fun will be strictly for my own nefarious purposes) and now most of my free time has been devoted to playing it. I've finished the first act and I came to love the character of Jackie enough to be sad about his death when the time came, foreshadowing notwithstanding. I've got over 24 hours into it already and I'm going to try and keep having fun with it and not get hung up on every little choice I make in the main jobs.

A more-detailed subdivision design (previous discussion)

  • Road right-of-way: 60 feet (two 10-foot travel lanes, two 7-foot shoulders, two 5-foot sidewalks, and four 4-foot verges)

  • Curb inner radius: 30 feet (sufficient to accommodate a single-unit truck)

  • Pedestrian-alley right-of-way: 10 ft (5-foot sidewalk and two 2.5-foot verges)

  • Minimum lot dimensions: IZC zone R1d (width 60 feet, depth 90 feet, area 1/6 acre)

  • The rectangular lots are 1/5.9 acre. The nonrectangular lots are 1/4.7 acre on the outside of the curve and 1/5.3 acre on the inside of the curve.

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Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


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