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PaperclipPerfector  5hr ago (text post)   217 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 31, 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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Fifa tries to set up a commercial structure to sell part of the World Cup,entire continents revolt European nations vow FIFA World Cup boycott over Infantino private equity plan, CONCACAF joins in opposition

No idea how this'll go. A World Cup without Europe is worthless but that requires they hold the line on this. Infantino is hoping to just outright bribe the majority of poor countries who have nothing to lose and much to gain.

Video Game Thread

What are you playing? Are you having fun or just killing time?

This week I was able to sink quite a few hours into Deus Ex. I'm going to use spoiler tags because there's always someone who has not yet played the game but might want to do so.

I let Lebedev live. I used the LAM trick to kill Anna Navarre when she came for Lebedev, and now I've got an angry mech (Gunther) on my ass.

During the 'Paul's apartment' sequence I managed to electric prod stun one of the Men in Black mechs, to keep him from exploding along with his loot. Picked up the auto-shotgun and applied a couple of recoil mods to it. I let Paul do most of the killing because he seemed invulnerable, while I, being stealth based and playing on Hard difficulty, can only survive a couple of hits to the chest/head.

I surrendered to the arrest squad and let Daedalus get me out of my cell and onwards to the Armory. Most of my grenades were not kept. I think I had 7 LAMs when I was arrested and only recovered 1 or 2 in the Armory. Oh well. My weapons with their mods were intact. I'm still carrying the GEP gun from the start of Liberty Island, because it's so useful against bots (and cameras, in some situations).

Despite having played almost exclusively non-lethal up to this point, I ended up wiping out most of the MJ12 guards and doctors, because, hey, they know what they're doing is wrong. I let the Mechanic who sells you stuff live though, he seemed alright. While it would have been fun to receive the killphrase for Gunther in Paris from doctor Jaime, I elected to tell him to join me in Hong Kong for roleplaying purposes; gotta keep my bros with me. He was relieved.

Manderley got a rocket straight to the face. Walton Simmons, in the hologram, was unmoved by my lethal prejudice.

I'm now in Hong Kong and have picked up the Dragon's Tooth almost immediately, because I found my way to Maggie Chow's apartment, and then went collecting evidence from the police station, and returned to Maggie's place to find her gone and MJ12 guards swarming out of hidden doors. Turns out Miss Chow is a nasty piece of work. I'll hopefully get to chop her into pieces with the Dragon's Tooth at some point.

I saw Doom Dark Ages was on sale. $32 for base game and new DLC. I know a going out of business sale when I see one.

I don't hate the first two levels. Also runs fine for me on Linux with and RTX 4070 Super. Get about 70 fps with DLSS, path tracing, and medium settings besides that.

We'll see how it goes.

You are making many of the same choices I do.

Not sure if you want advice on cheesing the skill system, but with high enough skill in rifles, you can shoot out cameras. Also with enough weapons: low-tech skill and combat strength, you can start breaking open doors even before you get the Dragon's Tooth. Both give you quite different playthroughs.

Yesterday afternoon I started yet another campaign in XCOM 2. The first few missions went impossibly well: I think I had four or five "flawless" ratings in a row, zero soldiers killed or injured. For awhile I was actually wondering if the game was taking pity on me after so many abandoned campaigns.

Needless to say, it didn't last. I've abandoned this campaign.

I've been a big fan of... is it Beta Strike? The mode where everyone has more health. I find I just like that gameplay loop a lot better than "everything is bassd around not being shot at all."

Seconding a Beta Strike recommendation. I think it works well thematically with the fatigue mechanics to help encourage a large bench while allowing you to develop rookies outside the GTS/Ring systems since they're not made of tissue paper.

Mostly Darktide. My brother only started recently, after it was mentioned on the Motte and subsequently I prompted him to. But he really took to it, and is playing at his usually very high level of time investment, ambition and skill, and I have a hard time keeping up with him! But that's for the better; I prefer being challenged over being able to cruise. Sadly this is leaving our usual gaming buddies somewhat behind; they're of the opposite disposition. I'm trying to get him to play Nuclear Option with me (even gifted him a copy!), but he refuses. His focus on Darktide is unbreakable.

I also gave Civ 5 another try, with the Vox Populi mod, and I'm finding it thoroughly disappointing. There are too many systems that are hidden away in menues, completely invisible from the main view. The main view itself is very wasteful with screen space and player attention. The UX as a whole is not to my taste. City-States are a complete miss for me; I find that they weaken the coherency of the game by introducing a completely separate class of pseudo-civilization that plays by different rules, and their quest-based interactions are straight out of the wrong genre as far as I'm concerned. I'm ambivalent on the wars: They are a slog thanks to a combination of one-unit-per-tile and short movement ranges - forcing players to either commit to wars of attrition in which units are sent into the grinder to inevitably perish and never retreat, or into maintaining a defensive posture in which units are rotated back out to recover. On the one hand, I think this is kinda neat; it slows most wars down and gives players time to actually observe, instead of just resolving in a few turns, and makes offensives a risky gamble. On the other hand, there often seems to be no real tactical solution; the only way forward is to outproduce the enemy and absorb losses. Overall I think Old World (a later successor to Civ4) has done it better, although Old World overcorrects and gives too large an advantage to the attacker. But in the end, I don't really want to play Civ5 in any case because I find it ugly. I'd rather be looking at Civ3, Civ4, Call To Power or Alpha Centauri. Civ5 has very drab, boring terrain combined with cartoonish units, an art deco UI, garish UI representations of units and buildings, and a fatal case of too damn many icons floating around in the map, many of which cannot be hidden.

Today will be the 1.0 release of Quasimorphosis. I ragequit my last mid-to-late-game campaign - a serious time investment! - when a quick trip to the asteroid belt and back gave the npc factions enough time to permanently out-tech me so that all missions became prohibitvely frustrating, effectively soft-locking me out of further progression. But the devs assured me that balancing and mechanical changes now allow players to claw their way out of such scenarios, so I'm carefully optimistic about trying it out agian, when I find the time.

Vox Populi makes the city-state wrangling, and the grindiness of the wars, much worse, FYI. I prefer Lekmod over both VP and vanilla Civ V. Though, it sounds like you just hate most things about Civ V, including the things I love about it, so trying another mod is probably useless.

you just hate most things about Civ V, including the things I love about it

Please explain your view on those things. Maybe I'm just seeing it wrong.

I don't go in for slog wars. I mostly defend. Mostly with ranged units, with melee units being blockers and functioning as the ones taking the enemy cities once they're fully bombarded down to 0.

Graphics: I love how Civ V looks. I like the UI too. Words can't convince you of this. How could they.

Quasimorphosis (no longer available)

I assume you mean Quasimorph.

Yeah they renamed it somewhere along the way. But it's too late; I've already filed it mentally.

Item 1 of 2

  • In year 2011, a tourism-reliant village with fewer than 3000 inhabitants (though, hilariously, it officially is called a "city") enters into an agreement with a developer for the annexation and residential development of a 360-acre property in adjacent unincorporated land. The development agreement allows the developer to start building anytime within the next 25 years at its sole discretion (since "the parties understood that the housing market was slowly recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and that the market was not ready for the project").

  • However, just eight years in, the village govt. expresses its opinion that the agreement that it signed is "outdated, one-sided, and incomplete", and starts ignoring its provisions (e. g., an expedited permit-approval process). The developer is forced to file three separate arbitration proceedings in order to counter the village govt.'s reluctance to abide by the agreement. In the third proceeding, it finally asks for damages. The arbitrator finds that the village govt. has "persistently breached the development agreement", and awards to the developer a "conservative damages calculation" of 22 M$ bearing interest of 12 %/a. (See document 81 page 6 for the arbitrator's decision, document 81 page 1 for the developer's viewpoint, and document 12 for the village govt.'s viewpoint.) The village is unable to satisfy even the interest payments on this penalty, and files for bankruptcy.

  • The developer objects to the bankruptcy. It alleges that the village govt. did not file in good faith; rather, its problems arose entirely from its own bad-faith breach of the development agreement, and it made no attempt to reduce expenses or to increase revenues before filing for bankruptcy. However, the bankruptcy judge rejects the developer's arguments. The village govt. engaged in multiple months of good-faith mediation with the developer, and filed for bankruptcy only after the mediation failed and the developer garnished the village govt.'s bank accounts. The village govt.'s breach of contract does not necessarily imply bad faith. And the judge refuses to follow a decision from a different bankruptcy court under which govt. bankruptcy is a last resort, available only after the govt. has tried to fix its budget by implementing austerity measures (which indeed may lead only to a "death spiral" rather than to an improved financial position).

Item 2 of 2

Fun activity:

(1) Check a government GIS map and find a big rural parcel (1 2)

(2) Sketch it in your preferred CAD program at the correct scale

(3) In the sketched parcel, draw a residential subdivision compliant with the local government's subdivision and zoning codes (or just with the International Zoning Code)

You may or may not care to abide by the stormwater provisions in the subdivision code. For example:

  • You probably have seen some giant grassy ponds (extended-detention basins) used to control stormwater runoff. Well, in New Jersey you aren't allowed to use those any longer, because they remove only 40–60 percent of the suspended solids (i. e., sediment). Are you allowed to use giant vegetated ponds (large-scale bioretention systems)? No. They can remove 80–90 percent of suspended solids, but they still aren't quite good enough to be usable without a variance, for reasons that are not clear to me from reading the linked documents. The only kind of pond you can use without getting a variance is a small vegetated pond (small-scale bioretention system), with maximum catchment area of 2.5 acres.

  • In contrast, Pennsylvania lets you use the giant vegetated pond.

  • Either way, the calculations don't seem that annoying. You just have to make the basin(s) big enough (maximum water depth after the 100-year storm is one foot in NJ or two feet in PA; maximum side slope is 1/4, to prevent errant vehicles from flipping) to hold all the water that the 100-year storm (adjusted to account for future climate change) will dump on the new impervious surfaces that you expect to build (and that you expect the homeowners to build)—say, one foot of rain (the 100-year storm), multiplied by the area of your roads and sidewalks plus X percent of the subdivided lots' area as prescribed by the zoning code's "maximum impervious coverage" figure (probably around 50 percent). If you take the worst-case scenario that the entire non-basin area of the parcel will be impervious, and if for simplicity you assume that the basin has vertical sides, then voila—in Pennsylvania the basin must occupy one-third of the parcel (2/3 of the parcel is impervious × 1 foot of water on the impervious area = 1/3 of the parcel is basin × 2 feet of water in the basin), while in New Jersey the basin must occupy one-half of the parcel (1/2 of the parcel is impervious × 1 foot of water on the impervious area = 1/2 of the parcel is basin × 1 feet of water in the basin). (Disclaimer: I probably have misinterpreted something here. I was a roadway engineer, not a hydrology engineer. Do not rely on these calculations to take out a small loan of one million dollars and buy a bunch of vacant land in Pennsylvania.)

Or you can just ignore the stormwater provisions, and draw your roads and lots with wild abandon. (Note, however, that trying to align multiple rows of blocks while abiding by the recommended block length of 300–600 feet can be more difficult than it appears.)

Possibly the first and only time the phrases "Fun activity" and "You may or may not care to abide by the stormwater provisions in the subdivision code" have appeared together

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