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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Notes -
Last Friday, I got married. It was fun.
For opsec reasons, I won't go into too much detail about the ceremony. We had a hard deadline on when the certificates of freedom to marry from our respective countries would expire, so we elected to get married abroad. My wife told me that, in her home country, it's not at all uncommon for couples (or their parents) to go into debt paying for their weddings, which was the last thing either of us wanted. We instead opted for a very small civil ceremony, a few photos during and afterwards, and going out for dinner in the evening.
Less than a week later, it hasn't really hit me that I'm a married man, and I still have to remind myself to refer to her as "my wife" rather than "my fiancée" (and I only started referring to her as "my fiancée" less than six months ago). We crack little jokes with each other: "oh, my husband looks after the finances". I'm still not used to my wedding band: as someone who doesn't wear much jewelry, it feels like I'm wearing a plaster on my ring finger.
The other day I stumbled across this thread about things that people have changed their minds about, and it's still surprising to me to be reminded that, as little as thirteen years ago, I was painfully woke; so much so that even some of our resident progressives might have been like "dude, chill out". Pronouns in bio, gender is a social construct, women in STEM, "from the river to the sea", Nice Guys™: the whole shebang. If it was woke, I was here for it. During this period, I often said I didn't want to get married, as marriage was just an oppressive patriarchical construct invented to control women, and that I wanted no part of it. Needless to say, I no longer believe this (horror stories about women getting trapped in abusive marriages aside, I don't think it would be too controversial to argue that women as a group have been net beneficiaries of marriage), and in retrospect this proclamation of mine carried a pungent odour of sour grapes. I'm not sure when I first began saying "marriage is a patriarchical construct used to oppress women", but it wouldn't surprise me if it was a period in my life in which I sincerely believed that I was – no, scratch that, a period in my life in which I was an unfuckable unloveable loser whom no one would want to marry. Under those circumstances, it was far less embarrassing to pretend that my decision not to get married was the product of a principled moral stance – indeed, to pretend that it was a decision at all, rather than a decision by default: it's not as if prospective brides were forming an orderly queue outside my front door.* (I recall @FiveHourMarathon describing a similar dynamic when he was pretending to be straight edge, which really resonated with me.)
During this period, I also said that I didn't want children, motivated by similar sour-grapes coping and also the fact that I was struggling with (what had been diagnosed as) depression – a condition I sincerely wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and which I feared might be hereditary. I'm obviously not the first person to arrive at this conclusion: as I noted a few months ago, it's surely not an accident that people who subscribe to /r/antinatalism are disproportionately likely to subscribe to subreddits like /r/suicidewatch, /r/depression, /r/lonely, /r/bpd, /r/cptsd, /r/latestagecapitalism and /r/antiwork (the latter two of which can be summarised as "I'm an unemployable loser who can't hold down a steady job – but this is a problem with society, not with me").
But a few years ago, I was visiting my friend Alice** who'd just had her first child, a girl. As I was holding her daughter, Alice said to me "you want to have children. I don't even need to ask – I can tell just by looking at you". And she was right: however much I might try to intellectualise and deflect, there was no point in trying to disguise the primitive joy and elation I felt holding a baby. I adore children. Even thinking about children while writing this – not even a specific child, just the idea of children in general – is making me feel a little teary-eyed. Not only am I not an anti-natalist, I'm about as far from an anti-natalist as it's possible to be: I want everyone I know to have children, and soon, and lots of them. It actually aggravates me the way progressives derisively refer to people like Victor Orbán and the policies he promotes as "pronatalist", like it's a dirty word. "Ugh – don't tell me you're one of those people who want to fill the world with beautiful children who make everyone around them happy by their mere presence." Well, guilty as charged!***
A few months after visiting Alice and her daughter, I decided I'd wasted enough time fucking around, waiting for good things to happen to me, and that it was my time to get serious about what I wanted from life and actively pursue it. It was true: I did want children (plural), and I wanted those children to have the best upbringings I could possibly provide for them. A wealth of data from the social sciences indicates that children tend to have the best outcomes when raised by loving married parents. No doubt there's a heavy selection effect (people who get married are heavily selected for being intelligent, responsible, conscientious and so on; conversely, a child borne to a pair of junkies isn't magically going to have better outcomes just because said junkies are married), but the general point still stands. Ergo, if I wanted to have children and wanted those children to have good upbringings, I would need to find a wife. And while I consider a serious romantic partner a terminal goal, marrying that person was really just a box-ticking exercise, an instrumental goal in service of the other terminal goal of starting a family.
And while taking stock of my life, I realised that, as much as I might want children, I couldn't see myself having them with Barbara, the woman I was in a relationship with at the time. Don't get me wrong: Barbara would likely have been a good mother (for all I know, she already is, we're no longer in touch): but I didn't want children with her, and there was no point in wasting any more of either of our time.
So I broke up with her, and set about playing catch-up with the assorted milestones of adulthood I'd put off meeting for years. The next three-and-a-half years were devoted, in large part, to seeking out a wife and mother for my hypothetical children. Not quite as diligently and single-mindedly as I perhaps could have: at times it felt like a case of one step forward, two steps back, and I seized plenty of opportunities to sow my wild oats. Indeed, if you'd been an angel sitting on my shoulder during this period, you probably would have frequently found my behaviour indistinguishable from that of a common-or-garden fuckboy. (Early on in this period, I even went back to Barbara for a bit of sex with the ex, a massive unforced error.) Nonetheless, I met a few women who would surely have eventually agreed to have a baby by me, and women who I wanted to have a baby with – alas, they generally weren't the same women; or they initially were, only for one of us to lose interest, or for me to experience an attack of emotional avoidance.
But after years of rejections, false starts and disappointments (not to mention slow, gradual self-improvement), I finally met my wife. In a period in which I was seriously concerned that I might be suffering from an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, I noticed that I felt completely at ease in her presence. She makes me laugh without even trying to. She isn't afraid to disagree with me or contradict me, something Barbara hardly ever dared do (which, believe me, isn't nearly as desirable a trait as it sounds). After years in which a woman telling me she didn't want to see me anymore would fill me with abject relief nine times out of ten (because it saved me the trouble of breaking up with her myself), my wife was one I felt very deeply I had to hang on to. And so I hung onto her, through thick and thin, and I dare say we've had more than our fair share of thick: there have been disagreements, rows, tantrums, screaming matches, ultimata. But I still hung onto her. Of the three actual relationships I've had, this was the most serious by far, the first woman I've cohabited with. Pretty funny, considering we matched on a dating app and, as she put it, I only went on our first date looking to get laid. ("Yeah, well so did you," I retorted; she didn't even deny it.)
Some months ago we began toying with the idea of wedding. As much as I wanted children with her, I still felt some residual discomfort with the idea of getting married – why couldn't we just have a baby and worry about the marriage part later? But then I remembered: how many times have I criticised couples who've done just that, hitting all the milestones in the success sequence (marriage, children, buying a house), but doing them out of order, purely for the sake of being contrarian? Didn't I specifically criticise my friend Carol's mother, who has been in a relationship with Carol's father for decades and owns a house with him, but refused to marry him (despite his multiple proposals) out of sheer stubbornness? Maybe getting married in its own right wasn't that important (wasn't a terminal goal) for me – but it was for my wife, and it's objectively a sensible thing to do before having children. I just had to remind myself of the decision I'd made years before: marriage is not a terminal goal, but an instrumental goal in pursuit of the terminal goal of starting a family.
And now that we've tied the knot, we can begin trying for a child. (I mean, we started trying a few months ago, but haven't had any luck so far.) I want lots of children: she tells me she wants two, and if I want more than that, I'm going to have to pay for it, which is fair enough. Indeed, the fact that I want lots of children is one reason we're not waiting to buy a house before we start trying – why waste a year (or more) of fertility? It appals me how few Western women are familiar with the term "geriatric pregnancy". It's true that you save money buying a house as early as you can, but it's equally true that you save money getting pregnant before you need to pay for expensive fertility treatments, to the point that it wouldn't surprise me if it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.
My brother has several friends from secondary school who might charitably be described as "failures to launch" (not meaning to point fingers: around the time I met Alice's daughter, it would be entirely fair to describe me as such), all of whom were still living with their parents and all of whom claimed, with varying degrees of credibility, to be saving up for mortgages. My brother didn't believe them: he thought their purported fiscal responsibility was a fig leaf for Peter Pan syndrome, and couldn't stand the thought of all the positive life experiences and maturation they were missing out on by continuing to live under their parents' rooves into their mid-twenties and beyond. Two years ago, he hatched a plot: he invited these friends over for a party in his flat, with the goal of making them feel envious of his comparative independence, in turn motivating them to tear the plaster off, move out, and grow up. The plan worked: since said party, at least two of the friends he targeted have moved out.
I now want to take a leaf out of my brother's book. In our circle of close friends, there are plenty of people in stable romantic relationships, but very few of them have children. They generally claim either to be prioritising buying houses over starting families (a dumb idea in my opinion, especially for the considerable number of women whose biological clocks are on the verge of expiring), or offering bullshit excuses such as children being "too expensive". What I want to do is have a baby with my wife, and then take every opportunity to shove that baby in my friends' faces, confronting them with what they're missing out on. I want every woman in my social circle (and the men, too, if possible) to feel unbearably, intolerably clucky and broody. And I want our child (our children) to go on playdates with our friends' children.****
But that's a secondary goal, a nice-to-have: the primary goal is to start our own family and be on some fuck everyone else type shit. (And my wife likely is my biggest flex.) So: marriage first, pregnancy second, house next year.
Wish me luck, boys (and girls).
*While writing, it occurs to me that if a man declares that marriage is an oppressive patriarchical construct, it's even odds whether he's an unfuckable incel or a fuckboy who wants to put a feminist spin on his promiscuity and caddishness, leading to a rather peculiar bell curve meme. Lindy West should have been paying attention during a shoddy latter-day episode of The Simpsons.
**All names are pseudonyms, obviously.
***People in favour of abortion euphemistically describe themselves as "pro-choice", while people who are opposed call themselves "pro-life". (As someone who abhors euphemisms, I call myself "pro-abortion".) No one would ever dream of describing themselves as "anti-life", and I vaguely recall an old post of Scott's (which I'm unable to find) in which he criticised how certain Republicans characterise Democrats that way, as if they literally pursue death as a terminal goal for its own sake. I found Scott's argument persuasive – and yet there are times when I can't help but think that the progressive coalition contains a sizeable misanthropic faction with no equivalent across the aisle. I mean, when they literally think that wanting more people to be born is a bad thing, they're not exactly helping their case, are they?
****A few months ago I joked that I wanted to buy up cheap property in the countryside and found a compound in which me and all my friends could live, grow our own crops, have lots of babies and raise all of them in keeping with the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. I was joking – and yet, doesn't the idea of a self-sufficient pronatalist homeschooled compound tickle your fancy just a little bit?
Congrats!
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Congratulations my friend, this was heartwarming to read. May you have many years, and many children. God bless you both. :)
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@self_made_human got called out for LLM-assisted writing in the Scott's book review contest. I wonder if this will get him disqualified. :popcorn:
Already being discussed in last week's culture-war thread
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In the shining light of the future, there is only utilitarianism. No other moral system could keep up with the overwhelming assault of pure logic. There are only a few minor disagreements over the details that need to be kinked out by humanity (or rather, agentry, we don't want to be humanist here!) ...
This is a 4X strategy game set in the far future with mechanically extremely different factions. These factions are:
The God King, a utility monster (or at least he thinks he is one). The most normal faction, since the God King deems himself a classical monarch, liking monarchy and doing monarchy things. Humans and many other free intelligent life forms like living in his domain because the God King is mostly unconcerned with them and their happiness, he demands only a relatively small yearly tithe and leaves them alone.
The Adelstein Locusts, an engineered insect-based bioweapon optimized to have the lowest possible intelligence while still being capable of feeling happiness. They are sturdy to almost all imaginable hazards, feel no pain, and take immense pleasure from scouring the galaxy for biomass and replicating, which they do asexually, to avoid divergence from their initial design. Their maker, the eponymous Adelstein, has long been eaten himself, enough biomass to create millions of his Locusts, which was the outcome he considered most desirous to begin with.
The Benatarians, AI lifeforms who feel nothing. They have concluded that real life has too much capacity for great pain, and decided that all intelligent life has to be sterilized, put in stasis and wireheaded into a much better virtual life. Their ultimate goal is to wipe it out entirely without pain.
The agento tortor, a virus-based bioweapon that spreads itself with even just minor contact and re-wires intelligence into enjoying even the greatest depravities. They murder, abuse and torture everyone and everything they come into contact with, which may be a small amount of temporary pain, but should they manage to spread everywhere, pain will not be possible anymore!
Couldn't help it with Adelstein's latest banger at making utilitarianism sound as bad as possible. Other ideas for factions?
These are awesome and I'm going to steal them for my Pathfinder campaign. I've already mostly got the god-king, Moldbug's Fnarigal.
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Wife and I were in LA for a wedding. It was childfree so we ditched the kids at my mom's house (good luck, have fun), flew in Friday morning and out Sunday afternoon. We decided to do some sightseeing Friday in case Sunday was a wash from a couple of hangovers (it was, sorry Griffith Observatory, maybe next time). I had just read a book on the massive 1986 fire at the Central Library so I wanted to see that, and if you never heard of it don't feel bad because nobody else did since three days earlier a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl decided to do a little trolling and that was hogging up all the headlines. My wife wanted to see Rodeo Drive because she likes that bit in Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts tells off the snooty saleswoman. She also likes handbags.
I hate LA for a number of reasons. I don't like the movie industry, the obsession with status and money, but most of all it's the superficial vanity of the people in a land where image is everything. It's a huge city, so obviously #NotAllAngelenos but you're still going to see it around. I mention this because I am predisposed to attribute normal behavior I wouldn't think twice about back home to the pervasive psychic corruption I imagine affects everyone within LA county who has been there for more than a week. And everyone wants to tell you about the project they're working on. In the Uber out of LAX the driver asked us what we were doing there, and after we answered he decided to tell us all about the animal rights activism he was doing. Another one told us about a screenplay he was working on. Another one told us about volunteering at an abortion clinic to keep away protesters. All unprompted. I don't like NYC either but at least the Uber drivers there have the decency not to involve you in their lives.
The library was pretty cool. LA has a tendency to tear down anything old. There's a weird absence of respect for history, replaced by the fetishization of newness. The city feels like a series of McMansions sometimes, and normal wear and tear isn't considered so much as wabi-sabi, but as a defect. We used to build wonderful public buildings in this country and I especially like that Art Deco shit from the 20s and 30s, and LA has managed to save some of its buildings from that era, like the Central Library, City Hall, and Union Station. I'm glad they didn't tear down the library after the fire, though many wanted to. I smelled some older looking books and one of them still smelled like smoke. This is a pattern for us, me dragging my wife to a cool old building with some interesting history, walking around smelling the merchandise while she hides her face from onlookers. Then we do whatever SHE wants while I try my best not to be too snarky.
Rodeo Drive was walking into the belly of the beast; it is a monument to luxury brand everything. I thought Valentino might jump out of the bushes and get me. It's garish, like a retail version of the Cheesecake Factory. We walked past the Tiffany and Co. store ("don't get any ideas, honey, haha") and through this kind of outdoor mall situation they have going on. At the end of it we saw a bunch of people taking selfies and pictures of each other. There were even these photographers kinda hanging around taking pictures of these two very instagram-model types. The ladies had a bunch shopping bags and would walk towards the photographer, then they'd all look at the pictures together for a bit, then they reset and did it again. After that, they handed their bags to one of the photographers and said "thank you".
"My God," I said to my wife, "there are so many people having their pictures taken for the 'gram these guys are doing it all professionally for tourists. Hell, they even have empty shopping bags you can hold like you actually just bought something expensive! I bet they take Venmo. Someone call Xi and tell him to nuke us and put us all out of our misery." Then the models went back with a photographer to the entrance, and the two stood there and kinda rocked back and forth, simulating walking while the photographer took more pictures. I thought, "man these girls really want to be real models don't they. Too bad ladies, you're just a couple of THOTS."
My wife is enjoying the show as well but at least had the wherewithal to google the brand on the bags. It was a fashion company for trendy young women that I'd never heard of. My wife was a bit puzzled because it's not high end. "Maybe it's a marketing thing," I said, "like the Starbucks in Harvard Square that doesn't make nearly enough money for the rent. They've got one on Haight-Ashbury too." My wife googled the nearest outlet. Well there isn't one on Rodeo Drive. There isn't even one in all of Beverly Hills. And come to think of it one of those models looks an awful lot like this one on the store page.
So it turns out while I'm talking all this shit about these instagram "models" they actually are, well, professional models, the kind who get paid to wear clothes and pose instead of the kind who get shit on by Arabs. I hate the city and vapid social media use so much that when I saw a bunch of dudes walking around with $6000 camera lenses taking pictures of a couple of hot girls I thought the girls were paying THEM, not the reverse. They were pretty hot, but there are a lot of hot women in LA so that's not going to tip you off. If this type of scene was playing out in my tier 3 midwestern city I would have correctly clocked what was going on because a midwest 9 is like an LA 6, so imagine what an LA 8 looks like here. Good enough to blow your dick clean off, that's how.
People at the wedding (which was a blasty blast) liked the story because I don't normally get egg on my face this badly and my wife really likes leaning into the dumb husband jokes when she can. I like LA more now, possibly enough to not want to nuke it.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
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Overheard at the gym:
"Can I motorboat you?" ppbtbthbtbhb
"I could run through a train right now." "I want to run a train through you."
(distracted) "Sorry, I saw tits. I love tits."
Home Gym Master Race, eh?
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One of the fantasies I have for a game is some kind of big budget story-game that is set in a truly huge open world.
A problem I find in things like GTA, Skyrim, Red Dead, WoW, Breath of the Wild is that to provide a certain ‘content density’ to the easily distracted player they all have these toy worlds, where towns have ten houses and cities have fifty, where travelling from the capital of one region to the capital of the other takes five minutes by horse but the characters talk about the huge distances in the world. It’s not that I can’t suspend my disbelief, it’s that I imagine sometimes what it would be not to (in this specific way).
I imagine a huge world, maybe fifty or a hundred times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2. The vast majority of it would be empty, the amount of content would probably similar. The major settlements would be mostly the same size, but the smaller ones would be more realistic than a thriving town that has like six buildings. There would be no instantaneous fast travel. You might be able to sail along rivers or the coast, ride a horse, whatever, but these things would all happen without ‘skips’.
Large amounts of the player’s time would be spent travelling, although there would be a lot of dialogue, camaraderie, interesting conversation choices on the road, while sailing, in a caravan, some random events. The game would take the player on a journey around the map, such that you would really feel, when looking at it, the distance traversed. If you wanted to backtrack to a city you were in at the start of the game, it might take several hours of real time to get there, which would require a difficult trade off.
There would be a lot of downtime to get to know companions, or maybe other players if it was multiplayer. You would feel, at times, truly far from civilization, have to prepare for excursions. In remote corners of the world there would be secrets to find that would feel off the beaten track, not like those RPGs where the secret dungeon entrance is spookily signposted fifty feet outside the entrance of the capital city.
Why not just get into bikepacking? It is basically what you're talking about but way better unless VR gets significantly better. Watch some videos of people cycling across the USA or Europe.
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I've spent some time toying with a design for exactly such a game, in which a vast world and long-distance travel (on foot or by vehicle) should feature prominently, and of course the difficulty is in making long travel times fun or engaging. You know, actually making players show up and not check out immediately. What I came up with was:
Obviously this would be horribly unsuitable for most types of game. But it is something that I like to think about.
I think one of the ways this could work is if it has some kind of base building elements on the vehicle itself. So during the travel you can upgrade or just customize the appearance of it.
There's a few survival games with this type of mechanic. Raft is one of them. Starfield also has customization of the player's ship.
Also, I'm pretty sure that Daggerfall also has elements you're talking about. It doesn't have the 3rd point I'm pretty sure, but it does have the rest.
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Yes, I think being able to do other things during travel is important. I remember the original World of Warcraft had ships that you had to take between continents, but they only sailed for a few seconds before the instance cut off and you got teleported to the other zone. It would have been interesting to force, say, an hour’s journey there. You might manage your inventory, chat with your guild, play some kind of minigame of cards or checkers or something with other players, trade stories. Of course, some people would alt-tab to YouTube or TikTok, but not everyone.
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I think the game you're describing is The Oregon Trail.
You have died of dysentery.
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It might be? Never played it.
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I sometimes launch The Hunter: Call of the Wild to walk across one of its massive maps. However, there's a reason why Skyrim is so packed with landmarks or why Firewatch has a tiny map: the walking experience is just not the same.
Modern technology can get your sight and your hearing if not fooled, then reasonably convinced to make the sensations enjoyable. But when you are walking for hours in real life, your other senses are engaged as well:
Without this a long in-game walk will feel closer to Desert Bus in experience.
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I like the concept, but I think probably the best way to make it work is to make the environment itself dangerous.
Just for an example, imagine a space based game. You’d have to worry about resources, crew morale, environmental hazards like radiation or asteroids or gravity wells or something. And that makes the “boring” bits a lot more intriguing. You don’t just travel, you have to plan the trip knowing that if you run out of food you starve, if you break a critical system, you can’t make it, and if you run out of laser battery power or missiles even a weak attack will kill you. So now, instead of traveling being just a boring trip to the exciting parts, traveling is the excitement and planets and star bases feel like oases in a dangerous world.
Regarding the environment itself being dangerous, how about importing Death Stranding's literal-walking-simulator gameplay? On top of being an RPG world with goblins and such.
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Elite originally had Newtonian physics kinda, one of the open source clones has them for real, so the danger is getting your velocity vectors right to reach your destination and not immediately splat yourself into it.
It feels very spread out, for OP if you dont use the accelerated time tools.
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Brendan Greene (the creator of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) has been experimenting with this. Primarily using limited procedural generation. His proof of concept for it Prolog: Go Wayback got to 64 km square, and only foot navigable with no fast-travel. He had plans to try and scale it up to an entire world, but unfortunately the company has recently gone belly-up. Sad, I was watching it with a lot of interest.
I’ve always thought an open world horror game where the dangers are real, but few and far between would be fun. Especially a space horror game like Alien. But like many posters have said, balancing that would be a bear.
Speaking of bears, I'm kinda thinking that the time is ripe for an Oregon Trail reboot -- one where you might get lost and end up in Texas goes well with this!
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Tech has probably reached the point where someone could make a full size map of Israel & West Bank & Gaza.
Then use it to launch the most controversial territory control multiplayer game ever.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a Call of Duty about the Ukraine war yet, it wouldn’t have commercial implications since they can’t sell in Russia anymore anyway because of sanctions, so there’s no ‘the villains can’t be Chinese’ trade off. The war itself had some interesting things happen at the beginning, like defense of that one airfield against paratroopers, even if the current drone trench warfare isn’t very exciting.
Battlefield: Bad Company already covered the material ten years before it happened.
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Back in my day it would have been a mod for Battlefield 1942.
That actually reminds of the Border Patrol map for Team Fortress in QuakeWorld.
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Possibly-relevant video: Can You Play Daggerfall Without Fast Travel?
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IMO the key to good art isn't only choosing what to include, but what to exclude. Too much will overwhelm the player and take away focus from the best parts. Some of the best art is very simple, e.g. Balatro (one of the GOAT), or has a simple core, e.g. Minecraft or Roblox.
What you're describing sounds like a "life replacement" game. It would probably work better in VR, like Second Life or VRChat. You know Mark Zuckerberg spent billions trying to make VR popular and failed, but he was doing it with a big company and boring mindset, and now we have LLMs...maybe, I'm still not sure how much they increase development potential or if they only reduce busy work.
Except slow travel, I'm very skeptical about that. EDIT: it could be interesting to have the player exercise to travel. But most people can't or won't exercise for several hours and others at all, I think it would work only if it was completely optional.
There definitely does exist people who prefer a more atmospheric and slower paced game. Animal crossing, Pokemon Snap, and Firewatch come to mind as fairly chill experiences where the slow pace is part of the appeal. I think a game about exploring the vast areas of a fantasy kingdom and appreciating the scale of it all could work, and that there are ways to design such an experience well.
I think we are unlikely to see this as part of a commercial action RPG though. Mashing these styles together would probably end up reducing the appeal of both to most players. The fantasy of being a powerful main character clashes pretty heavily with the idea of spending multiple real life hours (or days) travelling without defeating a single enemy, or even seeing anything new. And the players who like the slower experience probably don't want that to be interrupted by Draugr or police chases.
That said, I wonder if 2rafa's proposal can't be done fairly cheaply with current technology. Procedural generation is one way, but maybe the simplest would be to create a Skyrim mod where the scale and movement speed of every plant and non-terrain asset is reduced by a factor of 5 in order to make the world feel 5 times bigger without adding anything new.
I think, as I said above, or at least hinted at, is that fast travel really only becomes attractive if getting there is basically a throwaway experience. If I can walk between towns and nothing happens and I experience no problems or dangers, it’s not worth spending time doing that. Skyrim’s slow travel was boring mostly because unless you made a point of going out and looking for something, you really never had to do much more than smack some wolves or low level bandits along the way. And the environment itself wasn’t a danger. You didn have to eat, your weapons didn’t dull or break, and even in blizzard conditions, you didn’t freeze to death (there is a survival mod that adds such things). Making meaningless travel take longer doesn’t help. Making it difficult enough that you’re glad you finally made it to safety helps a lot.
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More relevant in the context of long-distance travel are Death Stranding and American Truck Simulator. Note that American Truck Simulator's map is scaled down from real life by a factor of 20, and the largest of Death Stranding's three maps (across which you literally walk) is only about 2.5 miles × 2.5 miles.
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The challenging part of this is making the game fun enough for a broad enough audience that you can justify the big budget that you want. Most people want to play the game, not walk for multiple days on end. You would likely have to cut corners somewhere.
Like, maybe you make it a survival/crafting game like Minecraft instead. Different biomes, interesting creatures, maybe some settlements consisting of simple NPC's. Multiplayer functionality to let people play with friends. You could have fun exploring and building, at the cost of leaving behind the more complex RPG mechanics present in games like Skyrim.
Or you lower the budget. Make it an indie game specifically for the kind of people like you who find downtime immersive. Dramatically reduce the amount of available content, but make sure what is left is highly polished. With a great artstyle, banger soundtrack, and few but interesting companions. Maybe change the focus from combat mechanics to storytelling, leaning into a more atmospheric and immersive experience. You could have an entire game where you simply travel from one city to another, occasionally running into people along the way who you ca choose to help, hurt, or bring with you.
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How do you reconcile:
and
That would make it painfully boring. It's an idea that sounds good on paper though.
It would just have a lot of empty space. Dialogue is pretty cheap, especially now, so recording three hours of interesting conversation while you wander from one place to the next would be the idea.
Valheim has a very big world and most of it is entirely useless and empty. Lonely place though.
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What are the most remarkable AI awareness/preference cascade/proto-panic artifacts from the past ~2 weeks?
eg:
The committed denialists were more entertaining when there was the faintest cover for doubt, in like 2022. Today they’re like long Covid people who still wear masks in that they’re just mentally ill people and making fun of them isn’t very interesting.
To me, it all seems less interesting than it did a few years ago. We’re just watching what we all knew was going to happen play out. The future is full of terrifying unknowns. There is no real way to prepare. All we can do is try to live life and wait, like civilians in wartime, and hope that nothing bad happens (to us).
Panic, doubt, debate, rhetoric, all just replaced with low-level fear, with apprehension.
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What's the best thing you can build in Tiny Glade, a toylike videogame about making cozy rustic dioramas? It's obviously the II-49 commieblock.
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As I work the repertoire for the band where I'm subbing, I'm noticing something interesting. They do a lot of covers of one hit wonders, but it's not covers of the One Hit.
For example: anybody who was alive in the 90s probably knows Del Amitri, but they're covering a totally different song. It's been fun seeing how a lot of one hit wonders were pretty good musicians who had the (mis)fortune of writing something outside their usual niche.
Do any of you have good examples of that? I'd love to give them a listen.
AI suggests "Tubthumping" and "Don't Worry, Be Happy", but I'm not familiar enough with Chumbawumba or Bobby McFarren to confirm.
I've got to go with "David Duchovney", though it's subtle. Bree Sharp's debut album was all heartfelt cynicism about social atomization, and a story about a spiraling delusional woman falling for a fictional TV character seems to fit that niche perfectly ... except that the delusion is presented in such a funny way that, when shorn of context, it sounds like pure comedy. And IIRC that was her only song that got any radio time, so yeah: zero context.
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It depends on your definition of one hit wonder. Technically speaking, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and Thin Lizzy only had one hit, and I can recommend a lot from them, but that's probably not what you had in mind. Technically speaking, Del Amitri had two hits, and I was expecting you to post this song, which I heard quite a bit in stores when I was working an inventory job in college. I'm also assuming you aren't referring to someone like Bruce Cockburn, whose career lasted from 1970 to, as of this writing, 2023, the "main part" of which extends from the mid-70s to the late '90s. By "main part" I mean the part that shows up in Best Of compilations and that fans yell him to play at concerts. Cockburn is a personal favorite of mine but he happened to have one minor US hit in 1979 called "Wondering Where the Lions Are", which nobody remembers and that fans don't have any special affinity for. I mean, it's a great song, but it's not like his concerts are full of people unfamiliar with anything else from his catalog demanding to hear that one song.
ANYWAY, without further ado, here are my selections taken from the nebulous group of bands that everyone agrees are one hit wonders regardless of whether they adhere to any formal definition of the term:
Blind Melon: "No Rain" was their hit, and their debut album was very good, even if it seemed to be ripping off Jane's Addiction a bit. Their second album, Soup, is an unheralded near-masterpiece. Check out Galaxie.
Talk Talk: Best known for the Synth Pop song "It's My Life" (which became better-known after No Doubt covered it), from 1984. By the time of their next album in 1986 they had abandoned Synth Pop for an artier, more adult sound that was accessible but not exactly chart material. By 1988 they had completely abandoned commercial pretensions and were charting new territory, which in a few years would develop into post-rock but would never reach quite the same heights. They had another album in 1991 that wasn't as good but is still recommendable, and then the band broke up. Mark Hollis evidently felt that there was still more work to be done, and put out a solo album in 1998 which is very good but also beyond the comprehension of most listeners (though not inaccessible by any means). At this point he felt there was no more work to be done, as the album ends with several minutes of silence and he hasn't put out anything since. If you listen to the discography in order this makes perfect sense.
Rickie Lee Jones: Best known for the hit Chuck E's in Love, she's also in the Talk Talk boat in that most of her career is a lot artier than most people would guess. Then again, she dated Tom Waits for a while. Pirates is probably her best album.
The Looking Glass: "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" is the only thing anyone knows them for, and, like true one hit wonders, their career was rather brief. That being said, I was in a bar in their hometown in New Jersey years ago when Pitt still played Rutgers and one of the locals told me that everyone there knew that "From Stanton Station" was the better song, and it got a lot of play on the jukebox there.
Sixpence None the Richer: You probably know "Kiss Me", and you may know a couple covers that got decent airplay, but they had another minor hit with "Breathe Your Name", that expanded on Kiss Me's borrowing of dominant seventh chords from the parallel mixolydian to give it its distinctive sound. You won't hear that in a pop hit these days.
The Verve: "Bitter Sweet Symphony" was everywhere, but "The Drugs Don't Work" and "Lucky Man" were better songs for the waning days of Britpop.
The Cardigans: Continuing the theme of bands that had more success in their home countries than in the States, The Cardigans only broke through here with "Lovefool", but they had an entire career's worth of hits in Sweden. "Carnival" is representative of the sound, which is essentially a more pop-friendly version of Stereolab. The video is complete with conspicuous shots of Enoch Light and Free Design albums, which were very much an iykyk thing at the time.
They got sued for it, too!
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This post is a goldmine. Thanks!
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Jamiroquai is another one. In the states people probably remember only Virtual Insanity which was fairly popular for their trippy music video. Meanwhile in Europe and UK they were much more popular and released album after album of great music. This one might not exactly be a one hit wonder, people might also recognize Canned Heat from the famous dance scene in Napoleon Dynamite. I would say most of their music sounds more like that than Virtual Insanity. They had enough songs to release a greatest hits album High Times: Singles and I think literally every song on that album is great.
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You (least) favorite thot has launched a new site where you rate people's photographs, and it determines who you are attracted to. I rated enough pictures to get a detailed profile and it's not surprising at all. What was surprising is how many women it showed me were fat, trans and/or had septum piercings. And that were, I assume, their most flattering pictures.
/images/17897254087105072.webp
What kind of person willingly submits their photos to a site like this? Hot women already get way too much attention on social media, they don't need a site like this to tell them how hot they are. Knowing Aella, I wonder if she paid women to put their photo up there.
Note that she has used AI-generated images in the past, so some of the images here may be AI-generated as well.
The Hotness Curve
Men's Hotness Scale
Women's Hotness Scale
Some of the images are obviously AI generated, particularly since AI has a problem with generating essentially the same person over and over again.
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I don't think comparing people's looks accurately shows who you're drawn to, especially with these pictures which are mostly unflattering and/or edited (why don't people smile in their selfies? Even I learned to do that).
Around the turn of the millennium there was an excel sheet-like thing doing the rounds which had female celebrities and you did a series of "A or B?" comparisons. I recall it worked rather better than that site.
Wow, that's a throwback. I remember it well: https://i.imgur.com/Mfi0opF.png
My teenage self modified it, turning it from a 64 girl bracket into a 1024 girl bracket. https://i.imgur.com/4uDaDVQ.png
Many an hour was spent learning my taste.
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Relevant Wikipedia pages:
Hot or Not
Elo rating system
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It can be surprisingly hard to force a smile when 1) you can't see yourself and 2) you need to look towards a specific unnatural spot.
That's interesting, are we more likely to smile if we can see ourselves? I think in my case the smile I can summon that I think looks smiley is not at all my natural smile, though it may seem to be for the untutored (fortunate) who don't know me well. I've even had people remark at photos I thought were good: "I hate your fake smile."
My real smile--my genuine one--I think makes me look like an idiot.
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This needs a "not interested in either" So many of these I feel forced to chose between two horrible options.
I think that's kinda the point. There's no alpha in showing you obvious choices (other than to keep you engaged or to calibrate new images), I think it often deliberately tries to pick two photos that have a similar preference rate, but differ along a different axis, like age or BMI or basedness. So sometimes you get one of these "would you rather have sex with a dog that is alive or dead" choices in picture format.
Bro I haven't even finished my first coffee yet.
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I'm enjoying the political face one, I have like an 86% success rate with guessing the more leftist woman by picture. Sometimes its hard to determine which one is the MOST leftist though.
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Is my least favourite thot Aella?
I don't know, is she?
She's EA and rationalist adjacent so IMO it's fairly safe to say that she is.
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The sheer tide of transgenders seems like it would nullify any serious findings from this. I automatically picked the non-trans every time, except in the numerous occasions they were both trans
I looked into the settings and there's now a switch to filter them out.
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The important stats are behind a registration wall. Looks like you can only create an account using Google (lol), or whatever "Glosso" is, and you can "log in with an account created with a password," but they won't let you create those types of accounts anymore.
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Your results mirror what I expect mine would be. I got as far as the register wall and clicked out. The very first two faces said "Which woman do you prefer"? And one of them was 100% a dude, looked like a teenaged boy actually. Weird.
Edit: I did not choose the boy.
You're among friends here. You can admit you chose the Roman towel boy.
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Video-game thread
Batomon Showdown released earlier this week, taking out a lot of my work hours from the following days, I've been waiting for it to come out since playing the demo. It's an asynchronous PvP-ish autobattler in the manner of Backpack Battles or The Bazaar, if you played one of those games you know roughly what to expect; the main difference is that instead of playing inventory tetris, you pick a trainer with a unique passive, deploy a team of up to 6 (hopefully synergistic) 'mons and get matched with another player's team to fight. As the rounds progress, you accumulate StS-style relics that boost your roster in some way, buy and upgrade better and rarer mons, and figure out a way to make number go up to keep up with scaling. Winning gets you a badge, losing takes off lives, amount increasing the further you are into the game. The goal of the game is to win 10 fights before you lose your 11 lives (10 lives + your immortal soul you literally sell to a shady trainer for a last-ditch power boost).
The game's main strength is its relative simplicity compared to other games of the genre; I like Backpack Battles but I hate its late-game optimization which all too often goes "oh great, I rolled a strong item, better spend 10 minutes painstakingly rearranging my entire board so it fits". Batomon has adjacency bonuses too but not all mons have them, and a 3x2 board doesn't leave much room for optimization anyway, so your main focus is deciding what to buy and thinking of how to scale, i.e the actually fun part of this type of games. It's relatively well-balanced, although there are obvious shitmons and some types are stronger than others (Poison/Burn is much more reliable and easier to scale than raw damage, and shields >> healing since you can overshield but not overheal and there are very few ways of boosting max hp), and ranked play does slowly crystallize into metafaggotry as I get closer to Master rank. Also unlike Backpack Battles the scaling is hilariously breakable sometimes, whether that's an upside or downside is up to you.
Its other strong side is the charming pixel art, trainer/fakemon designs are very sovlful (even surprisingly cultured in places) and feel much more faithful to the inspiration than e.g Palworld, although the occasional "ay that's literally just Torterra" overlap is, I suppose, hard to completely avoid 9 generations in.
Main weakness I would say is the relatively small dex, though the type identities are relatively fleshed out - Fire/Electric/Poison revolves around statuses, Rock is all shields all the time, Bugs are cheap and scale with more of themselves, Curio is all about trinkets, etc. I also feel like the RNG fucks you much harder here than in other games of the genre; some archetypes have mons central to the "build" working, and if you burn your entire income on rerolling without a single Dollhime to show for it so all of your trinket generation can actually start cashing out into damage, you are Shit Out of Luck, not to mention greatly behind on scaling compared to opponents, which tends to send promising runs into death spirals. But overall the game is a great time killer and I thoroughly recommend it if you're into the genre or the monster catcher aesthetic.
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People are doing incredibly cool things with LLM integration in Rimworld.
It started off with "journals" where an AI would look at the game state and recent event, and write something about it (RimLegend, RimChronicle). Then came mods that let you "talk" to pawns, taking direction from their personality and relationships (RimDialogue, RimTalk, EchoColony).
That was fun enough, but didn't directly affect gameplay. Well, what I wanted the most is coming to fruition: the AI storytellers the game has being supplemented by actual AI. Or at least significantly more intelligence than dice rolls with various degrees of randomness (RimAI, Rimteller, Claude Storyteller, Tales from the RimWorld). That's somewhere where Rimworld falls flat compared to a much more simulation-oriented game like Dwarf Fortress - your actions have remarkably little impact on the wider world, forcing a lot of dirty scripting to give an impression of responsiveness, and trusting the player to make a coherent narrative out of it.
That means events in the game can be directly impacted by what an external LLM dictates. I haven't tried it yet, but we're about to start a golden-age anytime now, significantly easier in games where you don't need low latency instant decision-making.
No more five quadrillion rabid crows because you made your floors too shiny, or a group of orphans wanting enough medical supplies to stock my hospital in order to ransom their friend (at least in theory). Events can (hopefully) start to make sense in context. Just imagine what you could do in terms of diplomacy - there's already a semi-viral standalone geopolitics sim out there, where instead of a Paradox style interface, you just say what you, as the leader of a simulated nation, want to do.
Or quests that are truly unique. Base building made easier by telling an LLM what to do (RimAgent). Giving pawns a mind of their own.
As always, token pricing remains the biggest barrier, but $/unit of intelligence continues to drop precipitously.
Any particular reason you declined to include a name or a link?
I forgot what it's called. It definitely exists, and uses some kind of token system to ration gameplay.
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The thing I'm most looking forward to are 4X games getting okay LLM AI by default. Doesn't even need to be great, just passable; So many 4X games are imo unplayable beyond the first few playthroughs bc the AIs are just completely dysfunctional.
They'd be a good candidate. Especially when you can get away with an overarching strategic AI that either writes scripts or queues tactical actions for "normal" game AI to implement.
Could be done even in Paradox games, as opposed to more discrete turn based strategy games. "Ah, I'd like to organize a naval invasion, this is the current map layout, order all units to move to X port" and it just happens.
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The Crust went 1.0, playing the main campaign. Lots of elements from Surviving Mars, but with a bit more factory automation elements.
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I've been playing a little early access indie game called Half Sword. It's a physics-based medieval fighting simulator where you use your mouse and keyboard to control individual arms. It's simultaneously incredibly detailed and incredibly jank. I think I'm enjoying the jank more than the detail.
I've been watching gameplay for years (I am too tired to get the actual games), and I get the strong impression - corroborated by most players - that the game is significantly less jank these days.
Like, definitely plenty of jank, just less of it. The physics has improved to the point that people are using legitimate HEMA tactics and finding benefit from it.
I was able to stand on a dead guy and ride him like a magic carpet onto the top of a nearby building.
I can hardly imagine what more jank would look like, but I'm sad I missed it.
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Finished a Distant Worlds 2 campaign. Love and hate this game. It is vast - I'm impressed it still (mostly) works with thousands of automated private economy ships, like freighters, on top of the usual space 4X systems. Thousands of mining stations, too many luxury resources to keep track of, characters, fleets; and option to automate almost all game systems on case by case basis. It is delightfully idiosyncratic - rarely convoluted, just unusual and unbothered by expectations, an oldschool feel. It leaks and reliably crashes on my 6GB VRAM (and autosaves do not help if you just spent 30 minutes paused fiddling with some details; at least it did not ever crash during manual save). It is criminally underbaked, just begging for another few passes filling details in, balancing, bugfixing. There is so many details I can't resist micromanaging a campaign takes unwise amounts of time for me.
Chronicon, very complete, top quality hack & slash. Tons of fun.
I really like the concept of DW2 (and DW1/DW:U, since they're the same game), but the execution has so many issues I end up regretting any time spent on it.
It's ugly as sin. Picking the Stride engine was a big mistake to begin with, and maybe it was even necessary for performance reasons, but visually it's a complete dud. The game looks about as good as Drox Operative, which is to say absolutely lousy. The ship designs that are mostly just tortured pretzel shapes, the races that are fatally tired science-fantasy zoology archetypes, the tech tree that walks through all the generic technobabble, and the combat that's just a hot mess of oversized particle effects...ew.
Diplomacy is absolutely retarded. Playing diplomacy well requires constant busywork and exploits. Raising relations with other empires requires giving them gifts, which are always of a fixed size, and the relationship effect magnitude is also fixed - you're always giving a fixed sum of credits for a fixed relationship change, regardless of how enormous or paltry that sum is compared to your or the recipient's cashflow. So once you're in the mid-game, you're casually maintaining positive relationships with the entire galaxy, and the only limit is the cooldown on gift-giving. But oh! Instead of giving formal gifts, you could also make deals, and barter some cartographic data or technology or an archaeological discovery or a diplomatic contact. And the problem here is that the costs of those things have no relation to their value. You can trade away some archaeological discovery that's completely useless for several times the net worth of an entire empire, and buy out your interlocutor's entire mining sector, or all of the technologies they had ahead of you.
Piracy is dumb. Pirates attack you early on in the game, and you can choose to either fight them or pay them off. You'd think that fighting them off would be the harder way of handling it, but bring long-term rewards of being free of piracy, and run no risk of the pirates jacking up their prices over time...but in actualy fact, it's universally easier, cheaper and more rewarding to just pay them off. Because paying them off means you needn't raise any anti-pirate forces, raises your relationship with the pirates, and eventually they just stop asking for protection money, and and then you can barter and negotiate with them until they become your friends, and then once the endgame hits all friendly pirate factions turn all their ships and stations over to you. And there are tens of individual pirate factions in each campaign, so you need to do all this rote, repetitive diplomacy over and over. Like regular empires, pirates are 100% deterministic in diplomacy.
The UI is not up to the task of helping you govern a large empire. When you have dozens of planets and ports, which you will, the bottom half of your screen ends up filling with icons representing them all. Icons that all look exactly the same. And if that presentation isn't to your liking, you could instead use the menus that offer lists of such objects - but that are bafflingly clamped to only a small fraction of your screen size.
Ship design, if you don't just automate it entirely and resign yourself to using the game's default designs, give or take your stated weapon type preferences, is a lot of unpleasant busywork. You unlock a new technology, many of which are just iterative improvements on older ones (fuel tanks with +20% volume, that kind of thing), and then you need to go through all of your ship designs and replace the old with the new component. And you have to do that using an interface that, to cut it short, has terrible UX.
And many more.
Agreed on most things here.
It's not that bad visually. Planets look nice. Ships, well, I like how busy core worlds can get, no need to zoom in.
Writing is bad, but the race-from-beyond-galaxy total war scripting/framing surprised me positively - they are so far ahead on tech that native empires joining them can actually be catastrophic (but shame you have so little diplo tools available). But again, could do so, so much more.
Teekans talk a bit like Skaven, it's cute.
Many glaring issues, but even at 150 planets, I did not find it too bad. Only maybe a dozen are core. Character and army management is the worst.
I had all state ships on manual design, since you can do a lot better than automatic. Shame you can't do guided auto-design (exclude this, always include that; or did I miss that in the UI?). Components going V1->V2 etc do update automatically now even on manual designs, but what a pain when you get something new, only "Copy as new" then obsolete the previous version works since "Upgrade" treats too many components as same family, pain.
They should open the game source code, it can all be fixed.
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Stride as in https://www.stride3d.net/?Ah, found the blog post. https://www.stride3d.net/blog/distant-worlds-2-development-with-stride/Does it really look like ass? I remember building and running some demos and they didn't look any worse than Unity.
IMO? Yes. if you look at actual gameplay footage instead of carefully curated marketing screenshots, or actually play the game and zoom in, then it's looks very poor.
And yes, it's absolutely possible to make similarly poor-looking games in Unity. And yes, not like I can do any better. But in my personal opinion, DW2 is not really worth looking at for its visual offerings.
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Still playing some Darktide with my brother. I finished all of the Psyker penances that required class-specific activities, and now the only ones left are the supremely grindy mission count ones. 43 missions to go. I'm currently either running a support built that goes all-in stunlocking an entire view cone indefinitely via smite (and which gets inevitably knocked out by something sneaking up on me from behind), or a melee psyker build. The latter really wants to use the Blaze Greatsword, but I already mastered that one, so right now I'm making myself play it with all kinds of other weapons, all inferior. Our gaming buddies almost entirely quit on us. Tired of Darktide, I suppose, and unwilling to accompany us as we go for higher difficulties.
Privately, I still play the odd round of Nuclear Option. I'm actually getting proficient at it, slowly, and I enjoy sinking my teeth into the technical details while still having to make snap decisions based on gut feeling. But now that maintaining stealth, landing without ruining the plane, evading missiles and picking targets are all somewhat in hand, I'm unfortunately free enough to realize that the NPC behavior is entirely too predictable. But playing Multiplayer is not satisfying, on two counts: 1) I can't pause, so in other words I'm certain to eventually just waste lots of team resources by going AFK, and 2) it's all co-op, hardly anybody in my time zone plays PVP.
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The users of 4chan's /v/ (video-game) board often post titillating images (both official and unofficial) of characters from various gacha games—Goddess of Victory: Nikke, Blue Archive, Senran Kagura: New Wave, etc. Occasionally, they also post videos (both official and unofficial) making fun of the rather pitiful-looking gameplay in Goddess of Victory: Nikke. However, it recently occurred to me that I had never seen any gameplay of other gacha games.1 Therefore, I investigated Blue Archive (source of such prominent sex symbols as Ichinose Asuna, Izayoi Nonomi, and Hanekawa Hasumi), and found it more of a game than I was expecting it to be.
The gameplay is mostly, but not completely, auto-battling. You set up a unit of six characters (girls wielding guns), of whom four are "strikers" who traverse the 3D battle map and two are "specials" on the sidelines. (On the battle map, the strikers are represented with chibi/SD 3D models, significantly different from the 2D art that you see in the menus.) The characters have both passive skills that activate automatically and active skills that must be activated by the player.
Each character is a tank, a damage dealer, a buffer, or a healer. Enemies include grunts (rifle infantry, small flying robots, etc.), snipers (they hide in the back and attack the player's damage dealers, encouraging the player to counter-snipe them with his damage dealers' active skills), minibosses (large humanoid robots, tanks, etc.), giant bosses (in certain game modes), and even duplicate playable characters with their own active and passive skills.
Characters and enemies also have weapons and armor (two separate characteristics) in a simple rock-paper-scissors system. Prior to each mission (which, in the main story mode, comprises multiple separate battles on a very simple strategic map—there are several other modes), you get to see what enemies you will be fighting, and must assemble your unit in order to take advantage of this system accordingly.
Outside of gameplay, the interface is surprisingly good for something that obviously was designed for phones. There's no right-click, but left-clicking on any item reveals a drop-down menu listing all the places where that item can be obtained—not just "you can get this item by completing missions", but "you can get this item by completing Mission 4-3; click this button to go to that mission"! Keyboard shortcuts, including use of the Escape key to cancel, also have been implemented.
This game has been accused of catering to pedophiles and ephebophiles. If you care about that:
Nearly all the playable characters explicitly are listed in their biographies as being under 18.4 As mentioned above, during actual gameplay the characters are represented, not with sexy 2D art, but with unsexy chibi 3D models.5 However:
Each active skill plays a fancy animation when you use it. When performed by characters who wear miniskirts, these animations often include suggestive camera angles, all the way up to (non-blatant) panty shots. Additionally:
Some enemies are delinquent students, presumably in the same age range as the playable characters. In that capacity, they show up in battle maps (again, as unsexy chibi 3D models) wearing miniskirts, with (blatant) panty shots in the dozens when they are knocked unconscious.
After 20 hours of play, the game seems reasonably fun to me. But my new-player bonuses haven't yet run out, so I haven't yet had to deal with the stamina system.
1Other than Gundam Battle Operation 2, whose praises I have sung before. Unfortunately, however, that game is PVP-focused, and in that context has so few players on PC that queue times for matches on that platform are absolutely intolerable.2,3 As determined from my multiple terabytes of recorded footage, I played it from 2023-05 (the PC launch) to 2024-08 (when a bug was causing the game to repeatedly crash during matches and then give me a penalty for leaving the matches early), and from 2025-02 to 2026-01. RIP.
2Unless you go out of your way to play only during the narrow daily peaks in player count. And, even if you go to all that trouble, the other players may be filling the queues for frantic high-cost matches (e. g., Unicorn Gundam vs. Kshatriya) and leaving empty the queues for slower-paced lower-cost matches (Zeta Gundam vs. Gundam Mk-II).
3The game also is available on PS4 and PS5, where it allegedly has more players. But I definitely have no interest in buying one of those.
4According to the wiki, the ages of the playable characters (including variant forms of the same character) are as follows.
Therefore:
Or, alternatively:
5Insert obligatory link to community of people who find chibi characters sexy. I hear Lalafells are pretty popular lately among the sexual roleplayers of Final Fantasy 14… Slightly more (but still not very) seriously, see the artistically impressive Deformed 48 Positions (also loosely translated as Chibi Kama Sutra, but actually referring to a separate Japanese concept).
Tangential and not your point, but this is a pretty controversial topic in the game.
At least on the America servers, there is a strong standard against sexualizing Lalafells, and the sexy clothes and nude mods you'd find for every other species are completely forbidden among mod hosting sites and in-game communities. Since mods are all clientside and require a modded centralization service to show up on someone else's client, that's pretty effectively enforced in the community.
There was some brief drama when one of the main centralization services got taken offline after legal action from Square Enix and there was a scramble to choose its replacement from a number of forks, and if I recall correctly one of the more popular options was eventually blackballed by the community due to their position on sexualization of Lalafells.
I've heard from a friend of a friend about some individual ERPers that go for that sort of thing, and even accusations of being associated with such people can be enough to split apart a community. Though admittedly that's as much because FFXIV is an incredibly drama-heavy playerbase as anything.
There's a little more going on in the backstory to Snowcloak/Lopporit Sync. Even back before Mare Synchronous got blammed, Lopporit was pretty well-known as a Schelling Point for both lalafell and 'aged down' character models. Since the underlying tools depend on a transmitting bulk files to every client, there's also a lot more pressure involved.
That said, while my impression in-game is that lalafell Mare Synchronos/Lightless users are rare enough and any advertising basically non-existent (where a male hrothgar with Mare/Light references is not a surprise), from people who are in to the ERP side of things lalafell or Twin roleplayers are something they have to go out of their way to avoid.
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I've heard Girls Frontline also has good gameplay for a gacha game. Watched a friend play GFL2 on steam which seemed to have XCOM style 3d grid based combat but it also had an autoplay mode.
I haven't played it because I refuse to play gacha games anymore but I did play Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery which is a standalone title by the same developers also in the GFL universe. It's a tactical turn based RPG with a pretty lengthy story and time travel mechanics. Despite the graphics looking like a mobile game I ended up completing the game 100% (Steam says I have 140 hours on it). You can consider the story to be told in a similar format to visual novels and the script is 300,000 words long. The prologue cutscene of the final chapter takes 2 hours if you let all the voice lines fully play out. Also the game is considered on the more difficult side even amongst people that play tactical rpgs and some of the later missions can take up to an hour with how many enemies there are so it's a pretty hefty time investment to complete this game. I like tactical rpgs though so it wasn't an issue for me.
Time travel is big part of the game and even death is explained as Jehuty (the female protagonist of the game) sending herself back in time via a "reverse collapse" mechanism. You have to play through 4 timelines (essentially replaying story missions in each timeline but with a twist of having the knowledge of the future which changes what you have to do in the missions) to unlock the 5th timeline which has the true ending.
There was a discussion previously here on TheMotte about downer endings and I'd say the ending of Reverse Collapse would count as one since the main character Jehuty has to sacrifice herself to essentially save the world. There's too many plot points to explain but the ending reveals Jehuty was able to go back in time via mind transfer by swapping her consciousness with Lusica which is essentially a clone. Said clone is instrumental in the bad guys plan to destroy the world, and in the original timeline Lusica was the only entity left alive, which she found was too lonely, so she makes a deal with Jehuty to have them swap consciousness in the past to change the future. Because Jehuty loves Mendo (the other protagonist) and wants everyone else to live she agrees to let Lusica take over her body and to let herself be the one captured by the bad guy instead (there's an in game explanation for why this has to be done this way but I can't remember why). At the end of chapter 5 Jehuty swaps places with Lusica (Mendo and everyone else has no idea this swap has happens). Lusica presumably goes on to live on as Jehuty while Jehuty goes by herself to have one final last stand before she lets herself be captured. T
The final mission plays on this one last stand theme and is reminiscent of Halo Reach's ending where you try to survive for as long as you can but you ultimately cannot win. The enemies spawn endlessly and only get stronger and stronger until eventually you lose and get captured. The mission itself is sort of a mix between rougelike (rougelite? vampire survivor likes?) mechanics where you get bonuses you can pick from every number of turns and the standard turn based gameplay you've been playing for the entity of the game and can be replayed endlessly. I think it's pretty interesting and a gridbased tactical turn based roguelike survival could be a standalone game if that mission had more polishing.
Having played through this game I have to admit it did increase my interest in the GFL lore and universe, although I still refuse to play the two mainline games due to it being a gacha game. Apparently a lot of these gooner gacha games with waifus have pretty depressing storylines and settings. Nikke takes place in a post apocalyptic earth, although the gameplay as mentioned in the parent post seems to be quite something. Arknight (at least the orignal mobile game, dunno about endfield) also takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, but the gameplay here is more like a strategic tower defense, and friend says the game is quite friendly for those that are f2p and that people have beat end game missions with low tier units so it seems strategic play probably has more importance than having the highest tier waifus. It seems to me the writers of these games stories wanted to create some sort of grimdark, post apocalyptic dystopian world but they also need to make money so they put sexy gooner waifus to capture the gacha playing audience.
The game itself has some interesting facts such as it is a remake of a remake. It also has a remaster of the of the remake you can play after completing the game (completely optional and has 0 achievements) which has the much more bland original story (and blander gameplay mechanics). The original game was strictly a visual novel that the developers made before they made Girls Frontline and the remake was a turn based tactics game, and the remaster of the remake is a mostly faithful recreation of the original remaster.
Another fact, apparently Chinese gacha players got angry that in GFL2 a female character has close relations with a male NPC character that they felt they were being NTRed because only the player should have any sort of relationship with their gacha waifus so they review bombed Reverse Collapse instead. Chinese gacha players seem to be a different breed entirely.
You know, I have to respect it. Their actions resulted in the company making changes to the storyline and firing the writer responsible. I can only dream of Western developers having such respect (or fear!) for their players. I think Chinese and Korean gamers are so defensive about their games because they can look over here and see what happens when the industry gives an inch to the type of people who hate the average player of games. If they detect a whiff of someone like that fucking with their games, they go full nuclear scorched earth. As a result, developers over there are a lot more careful about their actions.
You can protest that it is silly, or that creators should have artistic freedom. To some extent I agree, but again — look at what we're getting out of American AAA studios. It is difficult to imagine a company in literally any other business (besides other sectors of entertainment) having that much contempt for its audience. Imagine a power tool company hiring people who casually talked on twitter about how they hated the average person who uses power tools, and wanted to use their position of influence to make the new generation of power tools appeal to that person less. This is just Wednesday for big game companies, though.
And come on — at the end of the day, GFL is a waifu collecting game. If I were writing for of those, the literal last thing I would ever do is ruin the wish fulfillment fantasy of the story. That's the entire point of the game, that's why people are paying me money. There are places for such storylines and it's not wrong for them to exist, but it is baffling to me that the company who trades on waifuism would ship such a story for what is to my understanding one of their flagship characters.
I agree that the Chinese/Korean gacha gamers, united by their schizophrenia, are a memetic force to be reckoned with (I've seen one hilarious negative Steam review in Japanese which went something like "I was told there would be NTR and I'm disappointed there isn't any, false advertising" but I can't find it now). I can even tentatively agree that Reverse Collapse was unfortunate but acceptable splash damage from the controversy, same developers after all. If all you have is a downvote, you need all the power multipliers you can get if you hope to enact actual change. If Western gaymers had 10% of their unity, camaraderie and total shamelessness, Western gaming might not've become a culturally lost cause. I have a fledgling theory better fit for the CW thread, that this and related incidents in games are local eruptions of a larger conflict, that of self-inserters (who enjoy competent MCs) vs. shippers (who enjoy diverse fleshed-out casts), and even more broadly men vs. women (whose areas of interest in gachas specifically run almost directly counter to each other), and the overall state of the gender war in a particular region/country will by itself tell you a lot about the state of games it produces.
Still, the audience having sway over the writing is a double-edged sword: Chaos Zero Nightmare, a Korean deckbuilder gacha, has had its Raymond moment (decent r*ddit summary) literally immediately upon release, and compounded with rumors of internal mismanagement eventually forced the director to make an "Emergency Livestream", a public apology, and a big shuffle at the studio, with the creative lead and some of the (female, as is tradition) writers getting removed. One
obsessed schizocommitted poster dutifully maintains a list of fuckups on namuwiki.The story from that moment on has taken a sharp, almost jarring swerve towards the audience's apparent wishes, every waifufag's desires have been granted to the best ability of the writers (which to be honest is still not much). Most of the girls in the new chapters take an immediate interest in
SKKthe Captain, Chapter 1 in particular (the biggest offender, as the source of the Owen incident) got rewritten entirely - with a new twist of your loyal bodyguard Renoa, previously the butt of reverse-NTR jokes, turning out to actually be some sort of time goddess from the future who is personally and intimately familiar with the Captain, and literally gives him the plot device to turn back time which is a key quirk of the Captain's station and a prominent mechanic of the game. Male characters are almost entirely absent from the new story chapters, and one particular male that occurred in the story before the rewrite was, I shit you not, referred to by female pronouns in the new chapters that came after the rewrite (I'm honestly surprised Owen hasn't gotten retconned into a girl, as Raymond apparently was come global release). Whether KR translation error or actual retcon I'm not sure but uhh... based?All of this is to say that while the KR audience largely got what it wanted, the game didn't actually get better in the story department, and if anything the omnipresent MC wank and the whole new-girl-every-banner dynamic that being a gacha necessitates, all in a setting that was originally intended to be grimdark elder-gods space opera stuff, and still retains the dressing of such... idk, maybe Asian gacha players are built different but even as a waifufag myself I can't take it seriously, it's way too on the nose. The handling of the MC in particular feels to me like the writers are desperately trying to ape the infamously-based GFL Commander, without understanding what makes skk work as a character of his own with a presence in the story despite also driving around a veritable whorehouse of T-Dorks, all of which lust after him to various degrees. Which is a real shame, CZN is another example of a gacha that is actually a good game at its core.
Those CZN links are a real rabbit hole, I hadn't been aware of that controversy. It's a shame about the writing issues, as I am really liking the game's art and character design from what I saw. It does seem like the game was rigged from the start for CZN, though, with the original writer being pushed out, so it's hard to see a situation where that happens and the writing is good no matter how they handle the fanservice.
I would like to see your theory on these incidents fleshed out in a longer thread. It really does seem like a proxy for the gender war. Even unrelated things are downstream of this - proximity voice chat in Halo 3 was removed because too many women were made fun of in comms. I think by this point most men into these kinds of games understand the shape of the conflict fairly intuitively, as all media and elements of media made to appeal to them have been systematically attacked in the same way again and again for the last decade+. A lot of them will admit that there is an impasse between the sexes and that it's best if games are made differently for men and women, a position I find very defensible. In my experience women who get involved in these battles are unfortunately not as honest about preferences. A lot of them get upset at fanservice, can't seem to accept the idea of something being made to appeal to men, and will agitate to have those things made to appeal to them. The me of ten years ago was much more sympathetic to women wanting to be included, not I see it and get annoyed because, well, I've played these games before. Now there is plenty of media made to cater to their tastes, but that never seems to be enough.
Part of me thinks Western games becoming how they are is an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of the Civil Rights Act, and no amount of gamer rage could have prevented it. If it's illegal to maintain a bro culture that values bro things in the office, you're going to see that reflected in the product. If you're successful enough, eventually you're going to have to comply with CRA hiring and workplace requirements, and if you don't do it fast enough, you're going to get body slammed by the government for millions and take a massive reputational hit. A court ruled that Riot Games requiring its employees to play their games to be a discriminatory hiring practice against women. I don't know how you can maintain a good culture for making games under conditions like this. I'm not sure if CN or KR have an equivalent law, so I can't say for sure.
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I have the same response I gave to @Grant_us_eyes - they can go wild complaining about the issues they have on GFL2 reviews and forums, I don't appreciate them taking the drama to another game, the issues they had with GFL2 did not apply to Reverse Collapse. They may share the same universe but as far as I know it has completely different characters from the main GFL and GFL2 games with the exception of a few cameos.
When you see a game being review bombed, it's normal to want to know why. Sometimes it's legitimate, like Silksong butchering the Chinese translation. But when the review bomb is because people did not like what developers did with an entire other game, that's a level of pettiness that I actually don't respect, especially because it's a game I ended up enjoying and almost didn't' buy because of the lower rating. Lower review rating = less sales = lower likelihood another game being released.
I'm someone that mostly only plays games developed by Asian developers and Indie developers and almost never Western AAA games, so I understand their concerns quite well. I even previously wrote about Korean gacha gamers before mostly in their defense. But there is a line between players passionately advocating for the games they want and just being unnecessarily vindictive. I will note that I do not know Chinese so the information that I had access to comes from English sources which naturally will be more biased towards the EN community and against the CN community, but here's a post that seemed to summarize all the drama and has some understanding for Chinese gamers and providing sources and comments from both sides of the controversy:
https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1ifexp8/video_games_the_cuck_chronicles_a_saga_on_the_cn/
According to that post, Chinese gamer harassed the voice actor but there doesn't seem to be any supporting evidence for why they did so other than her being the voice in the drama. This also goes into the entire cancel culture concept, I'm sure it's different in the Chinese community but to me it seems there is a remarkable difference between anger towards someone who has contempt for gamers and lets that contempt seep into the work, and someone who just happens to be in the crossfire for doing the work they were hired to do. I don't see evidence of the voice actor showing contempt for gamers and if there was any I'm sure that context would've been included. Even then, I've never been a fan of cancel culture (in the west typically tactics employed by the blue tribe), so I also don't condone a group of Chinese gamers employing cancel culture tactics to harass people that had little to do with the source of the controversy. It'd be one thing if the voice actor is tweeting anti gamer stuff and egging on the playerbase, but that didn't seem to be the case here.
There's also a difference between wanting a company to change directions to go back to course in the direction you want, versus active wanting to sabotage everything related to the thing you dislike as punishment. Obviously #notallchinesegachagamers, but there was a significantly loud enough group of Chinese gamers that actively wanted to kill GFL2. Here's a funny thing that happened:
Side observation, it also seems like the Chinese gacha gamer communites have their own share of trolls and fans of different games go to war with each other. As an outsider this is the information about the drama happening in Chinese gacha games I get to read about. I don't know how common this type of behavior is but it's quite funny to read about.
But this also lead to an active campaign to kill the sales of Reverse Collapse by review bombing it, which again is a completely separate game, and how I learned about this controversy to begin with. There's evidence on the Reverse Collapse discord of CN players admitting to wanting to review bomb the game, the game actually got reviewed bombed and was at 37% positive at launch before settling at 78% positive in all languages (and 93% positive in English). You can look at the steam reviews over time and the only period with bad proportion of negative to positive reviews is when the game first launched, and if you filter by time played most of the negative reviews have barely any time played, clear signs of review bombing.
A big issue seems to be how different customer bases view the purpose of a review on a global platform like steam. It's pretty common sentiment amongst Chinese gamers that reviews are a way for their issues to be heard considering steam forums are banned in China. We saw something similar happen in Slay the Spire 2, which was review bombed about half a year ago by Chinese players that didn't like the direction the game was going in. In this particular case, since it was issues specific to the game itself, their complaints are legitimate as they saw the game moving towards a direction they didn't like. But for pretty much everyone outside of China, the game continued to have high ratings even with the changes. Steam tries to mitigate this issue by having overall ratings and language specific ratings, but the overall rating is featured first. Cursory reading seems to indicate that a lot of this is downstream of popular Chinese influencers/streamers who play Slay the Spire 2 in a very different way, so the Chinese audience has a different idea of how Slay the Spire 2 should play compared to everyone else.
This seem like one of those situations where differences in culture on how people use a platform leads to friction between player bases. Actually, Chinese players review bombing games is a topic in and of itself, as I previously mentioned sometimes they seem relevant and even necessary, but other times it just seems to be extremely petty and vindictive. Looking around various gaming forums, steam, reddit, it does seem like most non-Chinese gamers have a pretty negative perception of Chinese gamers though due to how many popular games have been review bombed by Chinese gamers, which can also be downstream of the general anti-Chinese sentiment that seems to be part of Western (or mostly American) culture.
I enjoyed that post of yours, I'd had it saved from a few years back. I get what you're saying, but I guess I disagree that Reverse Collapse is not a valid target, as long as you grant that this type of pressure campaign is acceptable or necessary. It's a game by the same developer with a release date somewhat lined up with the GFL2 controversy. If you're trying to put the screws on a company for taking a direction you don't like, there are few targets more fair than review bombing their other games. It's not just an East Asian thing; Bethesda's whole catalog has been review bombed on steam during paid mod controversies centered on individual games. It's a bit unhinged, but there just aren't that many real avenues for players to influence the direction of these games, so they're going to reach for any lever they can pull, and it's a big, easy lever to pull. Funnily enough, I also found out about the controversy through Reverse Collapse, so if the players' aim is to drag the company's name through the mud through any means necessary... it clearly worked for both of us.
I feel bad for the voice actor in this situation, she obviously didn't deserve to have that happen to her. I would like to say that should never happen, but realistically it probably just isn't possible to have a playerbase willing to go this far to defend their games and not get ugly collateral damage like this. If everyone involved was level-headed enough to not go after unrelated people, they'd probably be level-headed enough to just not freak out in the first place, and then bad actors never get pushed out of the industry. I hate to say this at risk of sounding like a mind killed partisan, but the optimal number of wrong scalps to take is probably not zero.
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It's a bit more involved that this; the character in question was from GFL1 and represented the QBZ-14 rifle - which, for those not in the know, is the national rifle of the Chinese army, so there's a bit of national pride involved there. Second, when the company that owns GFL took a look at the matter, resulted in an official statement involving potential corporate sabotage, atleast one fired(female) writer, and a flood of original writers coming back from working on thier side-project Project Neural Cloud and noting a marked increase in writing quality from the early game in GFL2 to the current.
So there's a bit more teeth there than just 'blooh blooh chinese weebs are weird fucks'.
That really doesn't have much bearing on review bombing an entirely separate game. There's evidence on the Reverse Collapse discord of CN players admitting to wanting to review bomb the game, the game actually got reviewed bombed and was at 37% positive at launch before settling at 78% positive in all languages (and 93% positive in English). You can look at the steam reviews over time and the only period with bad proportion of negative to positive reviews is when the game first launched, and if you filter by time played most of the negative reviews have barely any time played, clear signs of review bombing.
I don't care too much for drama happening in GFL1 and GFL2 but I do care people review bombed a game I ended up enjoying which could have an impact on the overall success of the game and subsequent future games beings developed. The EN and CN GFL fans can duke it out or whatever but as a mostly outsider looking in from the perspective of someone wandering why the game got review bombed the information I had access to on explaining why the game got review bombed did not paint CN fans in a positive light, and even if their anger is completely justified and I agreed with whatever issue they had with GFL2 that should not lead to review bombing a completely separate game.
Ah, skimmed over the review-bombing portion. A fair opinion.
I confess to being just a tad thin-skinned about the topic, as I've found people who bring up the entire 'GFL2 Chinese gatcha players' tend to run either toward casual bigotry and/or the kind of people whom would be making fun of nerds back in high school, with a strong whiff of grifting/tourism 'how do you do fellow gatcha players'.
Still, like I said. Understandable, coming from your PoV. Admittedly, I haven't played Reverse Collapse, mostly due to my first exposure being GFL and knowing how, uh... look, I know how these guys go in their writing. It's good stuff, don't get me wrong, but there's only so much existential depression I can take.
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The pictures on these pages are weird. They look AI-generated, but at the same time I'm not entirely sure they are.
Given checks notes ~450k hits on danbooru and the game coming out in 2021 (huh, somehow I thought it was older than that), I wouldn't be surprised if a decent chunk of this game's assets and fanart got into the training corpus for various imagegen models, and as such looks AI-generated because it, among many others, actually contributed to the emerging telltale sloppa style. Back when I was screwing with Stable Diffusion as it was gaining traction (and playing Genshin Impact at the time), I remember plugging "tags" of popular named characters into the prompt - no LoRAs, just rawdogging the base checkpoint with tags like
ganyu_(genshin_impact)- and getting surprisingly close results just from that alone; of course it would mix up clothes and stuff, especially if there were other things in the prompts, but the overall "vibe" of the character generated would be broadly recognizable.More options
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Much of the imagery and audio in this game has noticeably lower resolution/fidelity than one would expect in a PC game, presumably because it was just copied from the original mobile version.
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Item 1 of 5
Article:
A New Jersey legislator has submitted a bill that would ban sex in state, county, and municipal "government facilities", with fines of up to 10 k$. (You may recall the controversy that took place a few years ago regarding the production of sexual videos in a building of the federal senate.) "Any person who engages in sexual activity in a government facility shall be subject to a civil penalty between $1,000 and $5,000 for a first offense and up to $10,000 for a second or subsequent offense."
However, according to a lawyer, the bill's definition of "government facility" is so poorly worded that it would include government-owned apartment buildings! "'Government facility' includes but is not limited to any State, county, or municipal government building or office; legislative office; court room; Board of Education facility; or other building or facility owned or leased by a State, county, or government entity."
Item 2 of 5
Humorous image (source): At what point does a character design become unreasonably overcomplicated?
The original image points to developer Mihoyo as a prime culprit for overcomplicated designs. An edited version popular on 4chan replaces "detailed" with "slop-adjacent" and "complex" with "Genshittification", referring to the popular Mihoyo game Genshin Impact. On the more historical side, I think I have seen at least one online comment pointing out that it would take a very long time for a belt-laden Final Fantasy character to get dressed in the morning.
Are you cool enough to wear an overcomplicated outfit casually? ;-)
See also criticism of overcomplicated mecha. Compare the Unicorn Gundam of year 2010 to the Gundam Mk-II of year 1985. (To be fair, though, 1985's Zeta Gundam also is rather complicated, to the point that its transformation sequence had to be simplified in order to be implemented in an early model kit.)
Item 3 of 5
Police dogs are not trained to recognize officers other than their handlers. Rather: First, the handler announces three times with a loudspeaker that, if the suspect does not surrender, then he will be bitten; then, non-handler officers evacuate the area; and, finally, the dog is let loose to find and bite the suspect.
Following that standard procedure, a dog-handling officer lets loose his 90-pound police dog to find a suspect hidden in a garage. However, upon stepping into the garage, the handler realizes that another officer failed to heed the warning to evacuate the area, and the dog is about to bite the other officer rather than finding the suspect. The dog is 25 feet away from the other officer, is charging forward at full speed of 25 miles per hour, and is not trained to heed verbal commands while on the verge of hitting the target. In order to save the other officer from possible severe injury (and to save the dog from possibly being shot by the other officer), the handler yanks hard on the dog's 15-foot leash, rather than leaving it slack. This maneuver stops the dog a few feet from the other officer, but also tears a tendon in the handler's elbow. (The dog does not have its neck broken, but is "confused and harmed", and "its apprehension intensity subsequently drops".)
The handler's elbow injury is career-ending, so he applies for accidental-disability retirement benefits (73 percent of salary). However, the retirement board finds that the injury was not "undesigned and unexpected". (1) Recalling a dog is specifically part of the handler's training. (2) The handler already knew that he was working with multiple departments of police officers in searching for this suspect, so he should have expected to see some of them in his path. The handler gets only ordinary-disability benefits (44 percent of salary).
The appeals panel reverses. (1) The handling officer is trained to recall his dog in completely different circumstances—with verbal commands in an open field while the dog is 75 feet from the target, not with a leash in a garage while the dog is 25 feet from the target. (2) After previously encountering other officers while searching for the same suspect, the handler gathered those officers together and explicitly reminded them that, for their own safety, they should not get ahead of him and his dog, so it was completely reasonable for him to not expect any officers to be in front of him.
Item 4 of 5
Funny footnote from a judicial opinion:
Item 5 of 5
The Volokh Conspiracy shines a light on some drama in the US checkers (draughts) community.
2002: ICAONA (International Checkers Association of North America) is the only major checkers organization in the US.
2005: ICAONA becomes a member of FMJD (Fédération Mondiale du Jeu de Dames, World Draughts Federation), which conducts global checkers tournaments.
2024: Alexander Rudnitsky, five-time US checkers champion and former vice president of ICAONA, sets up NDF (National Draughts Federation of the USA) as a separate organization.
2024, later: ICAONA claims that NDF forged the signature of ICAONA's president in applying for an NDF tournament to be FMJD-certified, and accuses NDF of trying to supplant ICAONA as the US member of FMJD. NDF denies both accusations. FMJD temporarily removes the NDF tournament from its calendar, but later adds it back after ICAONA withdraws its objection.
2025: Rudnitsky sues ICAONA on ten different counts. He alleges that, in addition to defaming him regarding the forgery, ICAONA conducted an illegal secret vote, changing its bylaws to force all US checkers players to be ICAONA members in order to be eligible for FMJD tournaments (which is a violation of FMJD bylaws).
2026: The judge dismisses one count (breach of contract), but says Rudnitsky wins summarily on six counts (including defamation, tortious interference, and antitrust)—not on the merits, but merely because ICAONA failed to substantively respond to them. Three counts (including infliction of emotional distress) remain to be decided at trial.
This will make illicit bathroom sex in government building even hotter. Approved.
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New word discovered.
It's even in official use here
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Re #1, perhaps the legislator is just a secret eugenicist. Poor people can’t have more kids if they can’t have sex.
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Re #3: Interesting that police dogs apparently function as biological missiles and are sufficiently dangerous that preventing a bite on fellow officer is worth messing up your arm. The realities of police work might call for that sort of training but its definitely not the warm and fuzzy image that gets sold to the public.
I don't think this is true. I don't think he had time to reason "this action is going to mess up my arm and end my career, but the dog bite is so dangerous to my fellow office that I am willing to sacrifice my career to protect him", he pulled to try to stop the dog without messing up his arm.
If dog bites typically created permanent, crippling, career ending injuries, I don't think they would use them in the field like this even against criminals. I'm sure they hurt a lot and probably require medical attention in a hospital, but I don't think most targets end up permanently crippled. This was an accident and a mistake, not a worthwhile tradeoff.
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I've been watching a lot of bodycam videos, many of which involve police dogs, and yeah, the image we're given in the media is that they are extremely smart and obedient, but it seems quite different from that in application. You see the officer yelling at the suspect, seemingly getting the dog excited and riled up, releasing the dog after giving a verbal order to bite in another language (I've seen german often) and then once the dog bites the suspect the handler tries to get him to stop with varying degrees of success. At the very least it takes several seconds, a lot of pulling and repeated yelling in german. The dog almost always look too excited to listen or care about orders and in multiple videos I've seen it switch to biting nearby officers when they assist in securing the suspect.
Now I'm sure the distinction is not because no one thought of training obedient, smart police dogs, or that such dogs are impossible. Seeing eye dogs are capable of calmly completing rather complex (for a dog) tasks in a much more controlled way, but maybe there's something about the expected duty that makes excitable, chaos monster dogs more suited for the job, maybe they're less easily convinced or redirected by the suspect? Maybe the police likes the intimidation factor of a very eager dog vs one that seems completely tamed; they want the suspect to think of what damage the dog the cops barely seem to be able to control will do rather than think of the damage a dog that will immediately stop when asked to can do.
I think most of that is on purpose. The German (or in some cases Dutch) is deliberate as if you train the dog in English, the perp could easily give commands in English that the dog would understand. As a bonus it can’t be confused by other English chatter. The dog isn’t listening for the English words “no” “down” or “stop”, all of which a person might shout when a dog is running at them ready to attack. They listen for “nein” and “fuss”. And having the dog trained to obey anyone on scene is likewise a problem as you don’t want crooks to be able to simply Duolingo some German and tell your police dog to go away.
Yes, the talking in German I understand and it makes sense. It's the "dog isn't trained to be able to stop immediately on-command (in German by its handler)" part that is less straightforward and less true to the image of smart and obedient police dogs the public has.
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Impeccably formatted, as usual.
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