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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   616 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 26, 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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Ugly custom house update

DateInvoicePayment (k$)(% of contract price)
2025-03-05Design commitment2—
2025-07-24Contract signing2210
2026-03-02Commencement of work3315
2026-03-18Completion of groundwork and foundation3315
2026-04-01Completion of framing, roofing, windows, and doors4420
2026-04-08Completion of rough plumbing, electrical, and HVAC4420
2026-04-24Change order for replacement of torn-up govt. sidewalk2—
2026-06-23Completion of interior finishes3315
2026-07-06?Final completion and walkthrough115

Photographs:

In theory, under the draft zoning code that I mentioned two weeks ago, I could add a 428-ft2, 0-bedroom ADU (accessory dwelling unit) in the backyard of the 858-ft2, two-bedroom primary house. But in practice (1) renting out a property to someone sounds like a major hassle, and (2) I don't have the money.

~220K for custom construction? That actually sounds really cheap, are you in a LCOL area?

The city closest to the construction site is Scranton–Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Just wanted to share a funny culture war adjacent Red Letter Media moment from a few weeks ago. https://youtube.com/watch?v=0TKH8-FOgbY&t=855

"coming on the the the tail end of the me too movement. You do not want to have a cartoon show where a man yells, 'I have the power.'"

But it is also interesting to remember that, yeah, we were in a time a decade ago where this shit was controversial, having a show about He Man without having an minority spotlight take on it would have been controversial. And now, it's kinda not anymore. Not that I think it's gone for good, I'm sure woke will come back in force within the next decade and a half.

Woke 2, same great taste, now with extra Palestinian flavor!

I’ve become a (possibly very bad) scalper.

Console prices are shooting up. Microsoft just increased the Series X/S’s price by like $150 across the board. Sony increased the PlayStation’s price by a similar amount recently.

There’s chatter that retailers are struggling to get stock for the anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI boom, which is going to sell a ton of consoles to people who never upgraded from last gen because they had no need to (I looked this up, and the *first current-gen-only Call of Duty is this year; the first current gen only EAFC game is also this year).

I had an Xbox for a while, but it broke, and I had a PS5 but it was lost / possibly stolen in an apartment move. GTA6 isn’t on PC, so I need one of them. So I went to a physical store about an hour ago with a minor (like 10%) discount on the window price for PS5s and I thought, on a whim, that I’d buy out the 4 other units and keep them all in a box until November, then sell them.

I will report back with my win or loss.

GTA6 isn’t on PC

Console players are getting the beta version, and the PC version, a year later, will be the real release.

With some luck, by the time the PC version comes out, generative AI tools will be such that hobbyist modders can mod in the type of content from the older games that's almost sure to be missing in this one, including actual AAA-level cutscenes with voice acting.

I can’t help but watch the conventional wisdom on GTA6 and shake my head.

  • GTA6 will sell more than any other game in history
  • Rockstar can charge whatever they want and people will pay it
  • There is the huge crowd of casuals who only play GTA and they’re all going to buy it
  • We won’t have enough PS5s to meet the demand
  • There are millions of people ready to spend $700 to play gta
  • The most hyped game off all time.

This reminds me of the 2016 “Hilary will win” crowd. People just repeating conventional wisdom and confusing that for analysis

In your case, it’s probably not a bad move given your points on COD and FC.

But as far as GTA goes, I fully expect it to not meet expectations for impact on gaming or sales. 13 years since its last release is more than enough for it to be out of the general zeitgeist. All of the original creators are long gone. Rockstar announced they’ve excised the juvenile and frat house humor. And it was in peak development during the years where developer trends were at their worst - and we are now fully seeing the ramifications of those trends.

I just don’t think it’s culturally relevant to anyone under 20 years old. I played my first Grand Theft Auto as a PC CD-ROM demo from PC Gamer (I think). I played the hell out of that game with WinAmp in the background and Sublime MP3s playing music. GTA3 was every bit of the revelation people say. And there was continuity for nearly 20 years between Grand Theft Auto and GTAV. 6 will just not hit that same way. For a lot of reasons.

Just my opinion though. I can’t wait to see what happens.

Aside from the preorders point, I'm pretty sure that GTA5 is still constantly showing up in top sales charts even today, more than a decade since the original release.

It doesn't even need to be good - and it won't be, given Rockstar haven't made anything good since San Andreas - because all the kids play GTA online, and they just need a good sandbox, more up to date sandbox to play in.

In regards to current gaming trends I can safely say that all of my predictions are wrong recently.

I thought RE9 is most mediocre game in the series and even worse than RE8, yet even after two months since release everyone keeps telling me that it's masterpiece 10/10. Mediocre location that very heavily borrows from RE2 two-wings police station but smaller and almost no back-tracking, with puzzles that can be solved in the same room, and dumbed-down crafting mechanic that gives mountain of resources is apparently enough to "wow" the players so they can say "this is the best RE evaaaah!!!".

Pragmata is even worse, since that game has no adequate enemies, just victims waiting in line for you to complete this weird mini-game that feels completely unnecessary.

Which just gives me an idea that current gaming market is just vibes and marketing. GTA6 will break records.

Recently I was speaking to a friend about this and his interpretation of current games can be summarized as such:

Because contrary to what most people say, the common player does not want good combat. They want the illusion of good combat. Snapy moves, fast pace, easy controls, flashy, and short. They want easy wins but with the game pretending it wasn't easy. Dopamine without investment of time.

That's why we went from "slow but tactical" combat to "everyone is a DPS" combat to "just do your rotation" combat to "you only have 4 buttons, they all invoke a cutscene" combat.

Anon, it’s already crossed 4 billion gross revenue from pre-orders alone.

I read this earlier and said, “hmm. Maybe I’m wrong”.

Then I got curious because I had not seen this news that pre order revenue was released. I looked into it. It looks like a bunch of people repeating information they heard in a big game of telephone. The original source is some dude posting info he found in an investment bank (piper sandler) research note that said something to the effect of “46 million pre sale units sold or $3bn rev would not be surprising.”

I’m not familiar with piper sander, but in not a banker (though I do work somewhat related to m&a). But I think it’s uncontroversial to say that these sort of research notes are mere an analysts informed speculation. And they’re usually motivated by something other than “reporting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”.

I remain skeptical.

FWIW, Kalshi is showing about 20% chance that Take Two announces more than 5 million preorders before July 4. There's the factor of the odds that Rockstar announces this before July 4 that's multiplied by the odds that they get that many preorders, so it's hard to figure out what the odds of the actual preorder count being that are. But I'd personally bet against it being 50 million as of today.

Rockstar announced they’ve excised the juvenile and frat house humor.

Red Dead 2 excised this first (the first game still had a lot of it, as did Bully and to some extent even Max Payne 3) and it was much better for it.

I definitely wouldn't say the first RDR had a lot of juvenile humor, or even any that I can think of. Unlike GTA, RDR was never meant to be satire.

In your memory no, but I played it again a few months ago on the Switch and it did, most of the missions are actually classic GTA humor/goofiness, even if the ‘plot’ isn’t and there are moments of greater depth - although the same was true for GTAIV which people remember as a ‘serious story’ even though probably at least half was classic GTA.

Still, I think it’s true that 5 aged worse than any of them, and even at its release was very dumb. Vice City still has a lot of great jokes, gags, clever innuendo, and 4 is a great time capsule to 2006-2009 era New York City. I don’t remember the plot to 5 at all, it’s just a bunch of barely related dumb shit that involves a few heists and some funny moments. I remember the torture scene caused some controversy. I remember the choice at the end, I remember the guy from the 4 DLC getting killed.

I also played it a few months ago, so my memory is as fresh as yours is. I completely disagree that the game was full of GTA style goofiness.

To me, Armadillo is very goofy and Mexico has plenty of goofiness. Even Blackwater does although it’s toned down considerably. The last third of the game is played broadly straight. Stuff like the medicine man fraudster and a lot of the interactions with the factions in Mexico are pure GTA and played for laughs.

I'll give you West Dickens as a comic relief character (though in fairness RDR2 has those as well), but I can't for the life of me see how you would say anything else in Armadillo or Mexico is played for laughs. None of that stuff struck me as trying to be funny.

Yeah but RDR2 wants to be taken seriously as literature. I wouldn't expect that from GTA6 and if it's what they're doing it's a bad move.

That is also why RDR2 is a huge step down from the first. Rockstar lost sight of the fact that they are making a game, not a movie, and that games need to be fun to play. RDR2 had its moments but overall it was a real let down and I had to force myself to finish it.

I expect that gamers will say it's overrated and be firmly overridden by the actual masses of players. Rockstar doesn't seem to have lost a step, have an absurd amount of money to work with and aren't afraid to take their time.

The normies who play few games except Madden and CoD are going to go wild.

Look into the amount of money GTA online has made, it's absurd and that's for an experience that doesn't seem interesting at all.

Do you really want to deal with second hand buyers just to make a small amount of money?

I sold a bunch of clothing on Vinted and eBay last year because I didn’t like the idea of some awful thrift store employee reselling it, and it went pretty well. One person was unhappy with their item, but to be fair to them I had probably not described its condition as well as I could have. Put it in a box (which I don’t need to even do this time, since I can reuse the boxes they’re shipping them to me in from the store), take it to the post office a three minute walk from my house, send it.

I think it’ll be fun is my thinking, I guess. Plus, if I’m right and scalpers go crazy with limited demand (and the crazy woke but also well informed users of Resetera seem to think there’s a big supply crunch) and these shoot up like GPUs and memory (which is really all they are) then I think the margin on each one could be big, and I might make $1000 for an hour’s work, and also feel good about my foresight, which is a far bigger prize.

If not, I can probably still sell them at close to cost.

One person was unhappy with their item, but to be fair to them I had probably not described its condition as well as I could have.

How did you handle the complaint?

Refunded it and they sent it back, was very civilized.

Fair enough. Low risk entry.

I didn't think of the possibility of just shipping them off, which I guess you can do at acceptable cost even though they're big boxes. That would make things less uncomfortable than meeting the cretins. Last time I tried that, I was handed obsolete bills (outdated by decades).

Yes I’d never do the Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace thing, too many petty thieves and hustlers out there, and a few people much worse than that.

Is London such a shithole that you run the risk of being robbed during a craigslist meet?

Probably not, but it still seems like a lot of effort.

I say the following in good humor: it’s probably a genetic impulse.

It’s the first time I’ve done it!

Soccer fans, something that has bugged me for years: how does soccer manage to combine low scoring with highly predictable outcomes?

In most similar sports, low scoring and low margin of victory correlate with unpredictability. But soccer is the most predictable sport in terms of finishes, very rarely have we seen real surprises at the top of the table or at the end of a major cup. It's the same few teams winning the big 5 leagues, the UCL, the world cup.

Across every other sport, one score games are so close to a coinflip in luck that much of analystics consists in softening or removing one score games from the data. In soccer a one score margin is completely normal, two scores is high, three a murder.

I think it's because of the length of tournaments. Soccer has huge upset potential in single games, we've seen that already at the World Cup, but that variance gets evened out over the course of a campaign. Winning a competitive domestic league is a grueling slog, even though you do occasionally see a Leicester or an invincible Leverkusen (I'd dispute "most predictable sport", given some of the surprises we've seen, but maybe you have stats I don't). A knockout tournament also goes through a lot of rounds, including two-legged ties where you need to keep a lead across both matches and potentially extra time.

It's also worth noting that, for fans of most teams, the ones that aren't at the top of the money league, it's not really about the trophy, because seeing a trophy is a once-in-a-lifetime experience - it's about getting into Europe or avoiding relegation, or, for national teams, making it to the World Cup and getting into the knockouts.

the ones that aren't at the top of the money league, it's not really about the trophy,

As an American fan of the sport who is homeless and doesn't have this investment that's always fascinating to me. I follow the sports teams of my birth city through thick and thin, but I'm not happy if it is a down year (or cough cough decades). Soccer fans seem totally down win or lose. Getting the title isn't the thing. That's nice.

That's the beauty of Pro/Rel, everyone has a peer to look up to and a peer to look down on. The clubs that are in danger of relegation have near-peer clubs around them that are a league below them, so just by scoring enough draws to stay in the top flight (or 2nd etc) you've achieved superiority to someone. Where in America a last place team is just a last place team. This is helped in Europe by density, the biggest distance in the EPL is less than the distance between Philly and Pittsburgh, which are in-state rivals in the USA, so no one is ever really bereft of top flight football (which is why pro/rel wouldn't work in the USA). This is also why I support instituting a modified version of the Gold System for draft picks.

Yeah it doesn't work for America but by golly does it work well for England. I wish more Europeans got to experience and enjoy both models but in most countries Football has nearly all the mind share (which admittedly is a large part of how the whole thing works).

Obviously no-one's happy if the team sucks. The local football team I follow is going through a bad season (Finland plays summer leagues in football so the season is on right now) and no-one's happy about it, or some of the absolute shit games we've had to suffer through as supporters.

I think what the comment you're replying to meant that it's still interesting, since the battle is not only about winning but also avoiding relegation (or, if we're really lucky, winning the Finnish Cup and making it to Europe that way). The team's performance has improved but relegation is still not completely out of the question, so every game is still a part of a greater project to see whether we're completely out of the danger at some point.

I mean the amount of love that I see in Europeans for a local football team that sucks and always sucked is far higher than what Jets fans can put out.

Soccer is predictable - most leagues have zero parity and zero financial parity (and I think this alone answers most of your question) and the same teams finish at the top every time. The predictable super teams make it to things like the Champion's League every time.

Yet.

Soccer is unpredictable - a lower ranked team can often draw (see this in the World Cup all the time) and sometimes even win. In some ways it is the most parity of ANY sport a lower ranked team, or a team from a lower ranked league can actually win.

If you ask gridiron football players they will tell you that an NFL team will beat the college football team 1000 times out of a 1000. A shit soccer team can catch someone sleeping, score a goal, and then hang on through teamwork and familiarity.

So in some ways I reject the premise - I think soccer outperforms most sports in variability, but the structural pressure of the game towards variation (driven as you note by its low scoring nature) is balanced by the complete lack of financial parity and the things that are downstream of that. Bayern is just that much bigger than everyone else in terms of talent acquisition, resources and so on. That counterbalances a lot of structural stuff.

The parity would completely change if they did 5 or 7 game playoff series. Yes you can catch someone sleeping but you won’t 7 times.

My gut says a pro soccer team would rarely lose in 1 match to a top level developmental team. But it may be more than American sports.

Notre Dame has lost to Navy which was sort of semi-pro versus completely amateur but it’s in a 1 in 40 event.

World Cup in many ways is like the first game of the year in football before teams develop chemistry and figure out strengths weakness and adapt. So that adds variability.

So I think a lot of the variance you describe would disappear over bigger samples and after teams have played more games together. Alabama might beat Jacksonville if Alabama was in mid season form versus Jacksonville playing essentially their first preseason game (a month of training camp).

I don't think you're rejecting the premise, that conflict is the premise. Why does all the structure of the sport lean toward variability, but the result toward predictability?

While I hear you on the financial aspects in regular season league play, it doesn't explain the world cup. We see very few upsets in the world cup knockout stages or UCL knockout stages, relative to the NFL playoffs or NBA playoffs, which are just single games. The draw creates an illusion of regular season parity, but disappears in elimination rounds.

And the finances don't explain all of it, expensive MLB or NBA or NFL don't dominate cheap ones in the same way game-to-game, though they show similar advantages over time.

Structurally the sport trends towards variability - most performance in a match doesn't show on the score line and the whole sport is hard to moneyball. You win by being dominant in performance and grinding away the whole game (in the way you see in true mismatches), you get lucky (and lucky holding it), or you pick at the margins by being slightly better.

The league table in the premier league is longitudinal and you really need longitudinal performance to tell what the best teams are, any given game is not helpful for the reasons above.

Except the Champion's League has regular final games as does the World Cup (as opposed to basketball style series) and it's usually a usual team who wins?

What gives?

Well superstar players don't matter as much. Individual player skill doesn't matter as much as chemistry and vibes. And context. Messi is in a retirement league, but he's killing it right now (but for how long?). Teams make runs see Leicester. Teams outperform by non-selfish play and playing in internal leagues with a lot of familiarity with each other (see: Iran). This makes it confusing.

Soccer is hard from an analytics perspective because of these harder to track metrics.

You can easily paint some of the discrepancy you are noticing as something like "okay this team doesn't really play together normally and later in the World Cup that absent chemistry is built by being together for a month." Or because the group stage (as opposed to knock out) rewards more conservative play, or because you can't tie in knock out and greater skill and more star players usually shows in extra time or penalties.

The lack of surprise and upset in the latter parts of the knockout doesn't nullify the fact that Spain was 2 or 3 in the rankings and drew with a team outside the top 50. If you tried that in American Football people might actually die. Basketball? Baseball? Total blow outs it's just not possible.

Soccer involves intangibles (moral, chemistry, "creativity") and skill as much as physical gifts. Large swathes of the big three American sports have been drilled down into pure athleticism, Aaron Donald's moves aren't nearly as important as the fact that he's a total freak. Obviously Messi has terrific intangibles and technical skills but physically he's much closer to a normal human being - absurd body control, spatial awareness, and reaction time is easier to overcome than me trying to block Donald at the line.

Circling back to American pro sports the ethos is really one of profit sharing through parity for the most part. The NFL really actually has parity - any given Sunday plays out. This is financially enforced. Bad ownership is legit what holds teams back not coaching, location, or the team itself. The MLB and NBA aren't as good but still do much better. This is by deliberate design and the structure has good parts and bad parts (for instance relegation doesn't make sense).

I don't know how much you know about the way salary caps work in the various sports but if you aren't familiar that's a big missing piece.

Anyway sorry I think this turned into a bunch of disconnected thoughts that had a minimal through-line.

Do I wake up when I need to number 2 or do I need to number 2 when I wake up? This important philosophical question hit me this morning. Does waking up turn on a lot of biological systems that leads me to the bathroom approximately 10 minutes after getting out of bed?

The latter. You have a semi-separate nervous system of sorts in your gut, called the enteric nervous system, which orchestrates the entire digestive process (including peristalsis) and has a sleep-wake cycle of its own regulated by your circadian rhythm. It's a large collection of neurons that's about as sizeable as a cat's brain, and can operate by itself if disconnected from the rest of your nervous system.

The real philosophical question is whether such a thing is independently conscious to some degree, but that line of questioning leads nowhere good.

I believe the latter. Physiological arousal triggers a bunch of stuff, as does the first drinking/eating of the day.

Video game thread

What are you playing this week, and what games are you looking forward to in the remainder of 2026?

I played a bit of Moomintroll - Winter's Warmth lately. It's very wholesome.

Thinking of starting a playthrough of either a solid CRPG or a first person RPG like the Gothic 1 Remake.

I never got around to playing the Wolfenstein sequel, so grabbed it for the low price of £3 and started the game.

I remember there being a fair bit of culture war furore around this when it released, but based off my surface impressions I always thought it was just typical blown out of proportion bullshit, particularly given the febrile atmosphere at the time.

But starting it out and... maybe the chuds had a point. God this is a terrible opening. Awfully paced, with a ton of cutscenes before you do anything, and the most eye rolling, stupid scenes as evil backstory man berates your child self for being friends with a black girl and beats your mother for being a jew. And to be clear, this is not a wolfenstein nazi character, this is just your american father.

I replayed Doom 1 with the Unseen Evil mod, which makes it look like Doom 64. It added an impressive psychological depth to the techbase levels of E1, but I felt that the slow descent into Hell in the other episodes was marred by the subdued colours. You can't really tell that the pool of blood is a pool of blood, nor can you tell the flesh textures apart from rock. It did give E2 a somewhat interesting gothic feel, but you never felt the slowly increasing spiritual fear that it invoked in me the first time I beat it. For E3, only Mt. Erebus was creepy.

In the original, the high point (or the low, depending on how you look at it) was House of Pain, with the tortured humans which may have been a Mussolini reference- effective, because up till that point the tortured sprites made one fear that it would be your fate too, but now one sees it from the outside, as witnessing someone who might have deserved his fate. In the mod, it was quite dull.

They also altered the end text, which meant that the theme of apparently eternal suffering was lost. Though I consider the end of Doom 1 to be in a strange way a good ending; once you reach Earth, it poses a question: has your soul been tormented enough that you give up just when the proof that you're not dead (ie. your continued existence on Earth, rather than the afterlife) is right in front of to you? The entire game was about wondering what you did to deserve this. If you're alive, you still have a chance to turn back...

Great mod nevertheless. It might make Doom 2 interesting, if I ever get through it.

Still on my second Cyberpunk playthrough. I did finally get mantis blades! They aren't necessarily any better than a katana or something, but they're fun, which is what matters. I am not yet an unstoppable death machine, but I'll get there. I figure I'll pick up sandevistan for time slow down, as well as more armor because right now it's pretty easy to get shot up in the thick of things (I'm playing on hard to get a bit more challenge, so stuff hurts).

I also started a new playthrough of Coral Island, because back when the game came out I wanted to romance this one character and she wasn't an option. But they just put out an update adding her as an option, so it's time for a new playthrough. Game is much improved from when it first came out, I have to say. I left a negative review back then because even though it was 1.0 the game was a buggy mess, but they seem to have fixed most of the bugs, as well as added some more content and QOL improvements.

Mina the Hollower, little by little.

Absolutely brilliant progression design and exploration. Lots of built in mods to drive the difficulty in either direction; I’m awful at it (bad reflexes, some Souls experience, next to none with platforming) and find the default difficulty just about on the border between frustration and joy.

Great game!

If you are struggling it's easy to make the game easier by gear hunting, the difficulty is very front loaded - once you have more options it's easy to break the game if you want to (without touching modifiers).

I’m 100 hours in to Trails of Cold Steel III with SoftBrilliants Difficulty Mod. Probably another 400 hours to go to finish Cold Steel IV.

One of my all time fav genres is turn based command battle in jrpg. People usually dunk on this gameplay as being retardedly simple and boring. The issue is that almost all developers fail to tune their difficulty high enough - often or requires a mod or romhack to fully shine.

On max hacked difficulty. Every single battle is a puzzle. An inexperienced player will probably wipe on the first 2 turns of any given fight. There is always a certain combination of builds and commands that can clear the fight, sometimes in an extremely elegant manner. Finding that sequence is the fun.

Another great series/run like this is Xenoblade 2 on Max Custom Difficulty. That game has DLC that gives you difficulty sliders. Put them all to max. I reckon most people will find the first boss 5 min into the game unwinnable. But it’s not.

When there are actual stakes in these fights, it’s quite fun. And makes the narrative shine.

Honestly, the only thing I've played for a while is online Scrabble, which I have become very good at for no particular reason. There is literally no practical use to knowing things like "what are all the admissible two letter words in the American Scrabble dictionary" and yet I continue.

Still playing, and enjoying, Cyberpunk 2077, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Do you know whether I can go straight into (or close to it) the Phantom Liberty expansion? I hear it's really good. I've yet to really play Cyberpunk, only put a few hours in.

edit: nvm, was answered.

You can, but if you haven't really played before I recommend playing the beginning of the game.

How many hours approx is what you have in mind for 'beginning of the game'?

It's based on the progression of one of the main story quests. If you beeline just that stuff, I would guess somewhere between 10-15 hours. I looked it up and it's all of act 1, plus 8 missions in act 2. The reason I suggest starting the game normally is because IMO, act 1 is one of the strongest parts of the game and worth playing if you haven't before.

Darktide has a new DLC character, so I've been killing in the name of the machine God for the last couple of nights.

Just had to point this out:

I looked through alternatives to my fav strategy game Civ V, and thought back to Humankind which I played for a bit a few years ago. The promo pic/logo is so on the nose. So woke. Ferocious white woman leading a male black doctor by the hand into the future. Female flintlock wielding revolutionary. Common.

Do you play Vox Populi? I find it really is necessary and is the only civ game that is sufficiently difficult after 30 years of playing civ. I tried to get back into IV but struggled to find a good balanced difficulty. And relearning the systems wasn’t easy after being away so long.

All this is to say, i think modded civ is the only real alternative to civ.

I played a few games in VP before tiring of it. It's too different. I don't like how they went full overhaul. Yes the AI is much better but that turns all the wars into real slogs, forever wars.

I use Lekmod now. It's different enough and balanced enough for my tastes, while sticking pretty close to what makes Civ V, Civ V. If I set the difficulty to Immortal, I can get a challenging experience without tearing my hair out.

It’s probably a me thing, but I just can’t get engaged with a video game at this point without tear your hair out difficulty.

Female flintlock wielding revolutionary.

At first glance I thought they're trying to go for WWII Italian Partisan (often portrayed as female, fair enough in my mind) by the outfit, but the badge on the hat is French colours, so I suppose it's the French Revolution?

Civ IV is the best Civ.

Broke Take: Civ IV is the best civ game
Woke Take: Civ V + Vox Populi is the best civ game
Bespoke Take: Civ VII is the best civ game.

Fight me...

Civ IV has bad graphics and a doomstack problem, terrain is pretty much pointless. It requires little in the way of tactical knowledge. If I wanted to play something with randomly deep systems and a bad UX I'd play dwarf fortress. Most of the problems Civ V has also applies doubly to Civ 4.

Civ V needs a mod to make it playable. Enough said. Base game has huge problems with wonder-spamming and cities being pointlessly stacked much like Civ IV's armies. Later Civ's actually made city location and building placement meaningful beyond just "build it here for the resources it hits". The culture traditions are basic as hell and pretty much do have optimal choices leading to a massive reduction in build diversity.

In Markdown, you have to add two space characters at the end of a line in order to create a line break.

Thanks bae.

I really wish that there was an easy way to change Civ 4 to 1upt (there is a mod I've seen, but I couldn't get it working on Linux so I'm not sure if it's good or not). It's so hard to go back to stacks of units, they're just so boring to play with. Otherwise yeah, Civ 4 is supreme.

Does the AI still carpet their territory with units on higher difficulties in 1upt? I found that as annoying, if not more annoying than the doomstack play in IV. At least it's easy to chew through a doomstack with a few sacrificial catapults or other units that do collateral damage.

Honestly not sure. I only play on King. Was going to move up to Emperor once I played all the leaders once, but that turned out to take me forever so I still haven't done it.

My nigga.

Civilization IV is the greatest strategy game since chess. Twenty years later I still play in on a regular basis.

Pfft. Not gonna bite.

Civ wasn't what I wanted to bring attention to here, and I said 'my favorite' while you claim 'best.'

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


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