site banner
PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   692 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 16, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Video game thread. What have you been playing?

Posting mine in a response to this because it's long and I don't want to derail everyone else.

I got in a dozen hours of Helldivers 2 over the last week, mostly because the flood of new mods piqued my interest.

Now that I can actually enjoy the game and grind at the same time, I've built up enough in-game premium currency to buy a warbond. Maybe two. The upcoming one is sniper-themed and has a massive fuck-off anti-everything gun that interests me (and gives the existing anti-materiel rifle size anxiety).

(I also found that the highest difficulty level isn't just so brutal that you don't have the time to hunt for rewards, but that there are fewer premium currency drops than at the lowest difficulties. I can literally see that, with a mod that marks spawns on my map.)

Still, taking the same shit in a slightly refurbished toilet gets old. I'm waiting for the full release of Rimworld's 1.7 update, which comes with a complete change of game engine away from Unity to something made in-house.

Which would be impressive enough, but it also comes with massive performance improvements and is mostly backwards compatible with older mods to boot.

A Christmas miracle. And I'd bet good money on it being a mostly vibe-coded Christmas miracle. The lead dev, Tynan Sylvester, has always had a keen interest in AI, and even my superficial knowledge of game dev tells me that this would be a herculean undertaking for a studio of their size.

I'm not complaining. Now I can install more mods (I was already at 500+), and play a save for longer before TPS-death.

To digress: as recently as a few months back, you'd see people wondering aloud about how all this new-fangled AI hadn't shown obvious benefit to software actually used by consumers. Well guys...

Epic Games declared that they vibe-coded their new launcher for a significant performance boost. People are making pass-through mods that mash together completely unrelated games in schizophrenic ways. Halo 3 was modded to have 128 player lobbies and maps orders of magnitude larger.

Good times. I've always complained about never finding video games that quite hit the spot as often as I'd like, and we're not very far from any random autist auteur rolling their own large-scale product in a few months.

What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats