domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
40m ago
Minecraft. Mining. Relaxed.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
40m ago
Where does "good deed" end and "codependent sucker prone to being taken advantage of by friends" begin? I've struggled with the latter in life.
That aside, depending on if we're counting friends or just strangers the most recent one was either giving a friend a few hundred bucks to help with immigration paperwork (She's been here for over 30 years but has been stuck in some kafkaesque green card renewal Hell since Biden was in office.) or driving a drunk guy home from the bar I'm a regular at. The latter can turn into a shitshow if they're too belligerent to cooperate or too impaired to give directions but the man in question was just irritated that the bartender didn't want to let him drive, knew where he lived, and it was a short drive. I got a free shot for my trouble and was able to do the bartender (a dear friend of mine) an easy favor.
My greatest deed doubles as a hilariously over the top act of simping. A woman I was very much in love with at the time and who was also crashing on my couch wrecked her car driving to my place, clipped a parked vehicle and ripped one of the wheels off the car. She was just about to pay the thing off and I didn't have the heart to have it towed to her mom's place knowing it would never get fixed and she'd wind up back at the beginning of the "buy here, pay here" treadmill so I said "fuck it", had it towed to my place, and all but rebuilt the front end of her car over the next few weeks. In total I replaced both lower ball joints, tie rod ends, and sway bar links (What wasn't damaged was worn out junk anyway and the parts kit was cheaper than I expected so I just bought the kit.) along with one hub/knuckle assembly, CV axle, strut, and a fender badly spraypainted to match (The latter set of parts were sourced from a friendly local junkyard.). It wasn't perfect (The subframe was either bent or just badly out of alignment due to the wreck/repair.) but I got it to drive straight enough and the repairs lasted the rest of the car's life.
My take on helping people is that if I can I should, within reason. It took me a long time and a lot of money/free labor to learn the "within reason" part. It also took a long time to learn that doing nice things for people in hopes of being liked isn't going to fix not feeling particularly likeable.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
58m ago
What is the most addicting game you’ve played recently, what mechanic made it most addicting, and how do you feel in the midst of that mechanic?
Arma Reforger.
I am somewhat embarrassed to admit I have over 3700 hours in its predecessor, Arma 3. That is almost half a year of my life, and it wasn't all just leaving the game on idle. About 500 in Reforger.
For the unfamiliar, the Arma franchise is what happens when you take Battlefield and force adherence to a semblance of realism. Combined arms on the company scale, presented in either first or third person. Guns are lethal, you're not a super soldier, finding yourself facing a main battle tank in an open field, without effective AT only really ends one way. The maps can be enormous, and they must be, to accommodate the full spectrum of modern firepower.
Your role, in the grand scheme, is usually one of profound insignificance. You are a grunt. You might be a grunt with the keys to a fifty ton armored fighting vehicle, a helicopter, or a supersonic jet, but your fundamental state is that of a small, fragile component in a much larger machine.
To actually achieve anything, you must look to teamwork. You must find people willing to be the other cogs in the larger machine. You will find yourself reading the USMC's small unit tactics manual and applying it to great effect in a video game. In the limit, you could run a West Point course (and this happens, since a variant of Arma is marketed as a genuine military simulation for actual soldiers).
There's no one way to play Arma. You can play it single-player, either in its curated campaign, a wider sandbox, custom missions that push the bar for what the engine allows. You might play multiplayer, where experiences range from hardcore one-life ops with a hundred other human players vs AI, or even other humans, to people RPing a semi-functional society. Remember, DayZ and PUBG both began as Arma mods.
The reason why I have an ungodly number of hours in Arma 3 is a feature/game mode called Zeus.
This mode elevates one player to the status of a god, or more accurately, a Dungeon Master. From a top down, real time strategy perspective, the Zeus controls every facet of the unfolding scenario. They spawn enemies, call in air strikes, change the weather, and narrate the conflict, all in service of providing a compelling experience for the dozens of human players who have entrusted them with their Saturday evening. As a child, I arranged green plastic army men in my backyard. As an adult, I marshaled platoons of real people from across the globe. Among them, a cohort of astonishingly racist yet disarmingly hilarious British alcoholics, who, in a display of baffling camaraderie, adopted a young doctor from India into their virtual unit. I am scheduled to have a drink with some of these individuals in the physical world later this week. The kinds of bonds you can make in the game are sometimes ridiculous.
But Arma 3 is an artifact of a bygone era. It was never a paragon of technical elegance, and time has only magnified its flaws. The player controller is famously obtuse, the performance is inconsistent, and it lacks a constellation of quality of life features we now consider standard. It is, in a word, clunky.
Arma Reforger? It's very much a transitional product. Bohemia Interactive wanted to overhaul the entire game engine, and decided to launch a glorified paid demo to keep players busy till Arma 4 came out. Then, to the surprise of both the devs and cynical older fans like me, said demo blew up, and is now a genuinely good game which approaches greatness when modded.
The critical distinction is this: Arma Reforger is a superior shooter. The fundamental act of moving, aiming, and firing is vastly improved. You are no longer wrestling with an awkward digital puppet that seems determined to glitch through the terrain at the most inopportune moments. Clipping your car into a small rock will no longer reliably send you to space. The graphics, while not at the absolute cutting edge, are entirely serviceable and a significant leap forward. The friction between player intent and in game action has been dramatically reduced.
Alas, this reduction in friction has come at the cost of systemic depth. The simulation is not as comprehensive. The new equivalent of the Zeus mode is a pale, half baked imitation of its predecessor. The artificial intelligence of non player characters is unimpressive, and this is a damning statement when one recalls that the old AI was hardly a legion of tactical geniuses. Yet the core of the Arma experience persists, and a new dimension has been unlocked: the player versus player combat is orders of magnitude better. I now find myself genuinely enjoying large scale PvP, an activity I had long dismissed as a chaotic and laggy sideshow in Arma 3. The smoother, more responsive core mechanics make all the difference. Add to this monumental, DLC quality modifications like RHS, which transports the default Cold War setting to the present day, and you have a robust platform for tactical conflict. Getting a few friends together to engage in a firefight with other human beings is now a clean, enjoyable, and rewarding loop.
In a nutshell, Call of Duty and Battlefield use pretty pictures and the illusion of real world weaponry to sell the fantasy of being a supersoldier. Arma will have you feeling like a real and all-too-vulnerable soldier in the fire of modern conflict.
I have very high hopes for Arma 4 now. While I genuinely enjoy PvP at times, I yearn for the experience of herding human cats through my own campaigns. If done right, everyone has a great time you can't really replicate anywhere else, and you end up with drinking buddies for life.
More options
Context Copy link