domain:rifters.com
Lizzardspawn
45m ago
Every wartime economy is planned economy. Make what you want out of it.
Glassnoser
52m ago
If they're getting something in return, then it's not a subsidy.
Glassnoser
55m ago
This seems backwards. By their nature, private businesses tend to be focused on the long-term, since their value is equal to the net present value of all future cashflows from now until the end of time, whereas governments tend to focused on the short-term, since they just want to win the next election.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1hr ago
Hmm. In the case of Tarkov, the game just got continuously worse. Content came out at a glacial pace, the AI oscillates from aimbot to Helen Keller with an HK every six months. I would play the game if there simply was anything to justify it, such as a new massive map or other content of similar scale. I also refuse to play it solo, so I'd have to build a new social network of like-minded gamers to enjoy it.
The Warhammer branch of Total War killed my interest in the historical titles. They just seem so... boring, when you have tanks shooting at dragons. I played the hell out of those historical titles back in the day to boot.
I've been chasing the dragon on both for a while.
Might I suggest a return to Skyrim? You can't take a shit without one attacking your outhouse.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
with very long-term focused horizons like governments.
Is 4 years really that long?
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1hr ago
First, one must move out of Somalia or Inner Mongolia, or at least unstick one's self from the nearest toilet. There are 1.4 billion of us in India, and even sex-selective abortion hasn't prevented half of them being female. You might find a sample near to home, we seem to get everywhere.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
If LucasFilm wasn't run by idiots, they'd have caught on and the Obi-Wan movie would be a Yojimbo pastiche with spaghetti characteristics instead of the tepid and lame saturday morning cartoon the tv show ended up being.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
It's also annoying because women aren't exactly better at writing men. I've seen some truly awful caricatures of what women think men are like (mainly from books my wife reads, and then asks me "is this accurate"). Yet the "men writing women" complainers act like this is a uniquely male offense. They don't seem to understand (or perhaps don't want to understand) that it's simply hard to get in the head of the opposite sex.
pigeonburger
1hr ago
"The Mandalorian" worked because the female appeal was Pedro Pascal plus baby Yoda (and I understand the female lead was not actively terrible in a Girlboss mode, so of course Disney bounced her for badthink) while having enough of the SW lore to appeal to the guys.
I like to think it worked because it (well, at least the first 2 seasons) was a freshly brewed batch of the original Star Wars recipe. Instead of reheating in the microwave the same old moldy batch of samurai/western (same thing) tropes with pulp sci-fi trappings from the originals like Disney did with the sequels, Jon Favreau took the recipe but made it with fresh tropes. Western/samurai tropes that were not part of Star Wars yet, starting with the premise taken straight from Lone Wolf and Cub.
zoink
1hr ago
It's not too unusual in Europe for strategic companies like Airbus and VW to have this.
And Germans are poorer than Mississippians.
Crowstep
2hr ago
What are some examples of "girl" stories that aren't cringe pandering softcore-relationship-porn wish fulfillment only (lame) women find appealing?
Depends what you mean by girl stories? Stories with female protagonists, or stories that girls/women like?
If it's the former, I remember enjoying the Old Kingdom series as a kid. The stories all (or mostly?) had female protagonists who were recognisably women, but they weren't romantasy books, the focus was on the magic and the fantasy elements. The author is male but I think he just preferred writing female protagonists.
DiscourseMagnus
2hr ago
Contrary to modern female character design, every character page has a "bad points" section as long as her "good points" section, and this is probably one of the reasons it had such a strong following in its heyday.
An important distinction here: "modern female character design" does still produce characters with lots of bad points, but not on purpose.
Grant_us_eyes
2hr ago
Susan Cooper's 'The Dark Is Rising' is pure young-adult adventure fantasy and done very well.
CS Friedman's 'Crown of Shadows' series is a personal favorite, and a twisted mix of sci-fi and fantasy and also done very well.
Hell, even the penultimate male-fantasy young-adult book 'My Side of the Mountain' was written by a woman.
I always considered it a bit weird when people bitched about the lack of female writers in fiction, when I turn to my bookshelves for 1970/80s fantasy and flip through female after female writer. If anything, it's the men that are lacking, not the women.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
2hr ago
Have you heard of The Matchless Kungfu? It's practically beat for beat what you're looking for, even if it's closer to Wuxia than Xianxia:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=o-4snPeCyWw
Another game of potential interest, Amazing Cultivation Simulator:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wJxM3POU92w
Warning- Sseth's videos are both incredibly funny and incredibly NSFW.
Why haven't we seen other major media cater to girls-but-also-boys in this way, instead of the torrent of flawless mean-spirited girlbosses that we did get?
Because someone mentioned it above: the flawless mean-spirited girlboss is a religious thing, and most show writers are, if not necessarily that religious, encouraged in that direction by the suits. Problem is, of course, that because their religion is a religion of hatred, people need to have some other motivation to watch it.
The best example of a Western show post-MLP (or at least, post-Lauren Faust-directed MLP) to not be outwardly religious in this way is Gravity Falls. I don't think Alex Hirsch is particularly religious in that way (or at least, he isn't in a way that negatively impacts his work, though there are also signs that he understands what I'm about to talk about below).
given the bronies of the 2010s, perhaps it worked a little too well
Oh yeah, about that. The boys that persist in watching it are also [at least sometimes, if not most times] doing it for that reason, just like they were with Sailor Moon back in the '90s (and is part of why the post-woke MLP [G5, the 3D era one] designs look significantly less attractive, like dogs), and is why slice of life anime with all-female casts tend to have significant male followings.
(What that reason is... is more complicated; smarter men than I have tried and failed so I'd have to think about it more. I'd say 'moe' as a first pass, but that's not any less dense.)
I firmly believe there is a good number of strong female characters that western/American male audiences have been fans of. Even in the action-centric genres, Ahsoka from the the Star Wars Clone Wars tv show, Katara from Avatar, and Vi from Arcane, Gwen Stacey from the newer Spiderman are all examples of very well received female characters.
How can you write such list and omit The two strong women in western action movie canon: Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor? Zero girlbossing, 100% believable authority, Significant Relationship Stuff, all while exhibiting classic female traits. I’ve never heard a single guy say anything bad about either character.
What made them such great and believably strong characters is that they were strong women instead of being "strong" teenage girl romantic fantasy protagonists. A show vs tell difference. Anyone who's seen a mother on the warpath for their children knows they can be really fucking scary. That's the energy channeled by Ellen Ripley at the end of Aliens and Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. That's what made them both so believable for teenage boys because which teenage boy doesn't know a mother (their own or some friend's) whose wrong side you really don't want to end up on?
It really is a shame both movie franchises ended after only two movies.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2hr ago
Started playing Project Highrise. I was a big fan of SimTower as a kid, and this is the best spiritual successor I've played yet. The mechanics are more interesting and complicated than SimTower which is nice as an adult. It's very sandboxy, by which I mean the difficulty levels are not scaled -- in easy mode, it feel like you just get infinite free money (even with "infinite money" turned off), where normal and hard actually require you to carefully build a flywheel before you can start building financial momentum. The different types of tower you can focus on (residential, commerical, hotel, office, mixed use) makes things strategic and rewards multiple playthroughs.
Overall, good value for money if you like sim games.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
The amount of content in Genshin Impact is absolutely staggering. I know everyone thinks of it as just a gacha but it's gigantic compared to full-price open world rpgs too.
It's got a huge map with lots of verticality and ambient content, puzzles and regional features. It actually looks pretty, unlike Skyrim. A tonne of characters with their own unique abilities. Mechanical complexity beyond just stacking on more attack.
And the story just goes on and on and on. There's a fair bit of BS they put in like 'you NEED to sit through endless tedium with Zhongli gathering ingredients for this ritual before you can go to not-Japan', clearly they want to do artsy character-development and worldbuilding stuff rather than just gacha moneygrabbing. That's just the main story, which is well over 100 hours at this point.
Then there are heaps of character side missions which are also long and voiced. And then dozens and dozens more area missions which are unvoiced but are still long with plenty of cinematics. Or just exploring the huge map, that would take ages.
There are more limited-time events than you can shake a stick at. Player housing. A card game. Really the only things missing are deep endgame like Path of Exile's mapping system and proper modding.
There is however a grindy element to it, you have to kill a bunch of bosses over and over again and pick huge numbers of flowers to level your characters and advance through the story. Surprisingly it seems you can't even skip this by paying, which seems odd to me given it is gacha. You're supposed to pay to get the character you want, not to skip the grind. I refuse to pay either way.
But WTF were Starfield devs doing with their 400 million if the Chinese can make something so huge for 800 million, get whales to pay for it all and have it actually be good too? Does Call of Duty Black Ops really cost nearly that much to make?
Apparently Genshin Impact is second only to Monopoly Go in cost, the latter is pure marketing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop
In 2025, the game surpassed $1 billion in marketing spending since its launch.[12] The game generated $5 billion by April 2025.[3]
What a sad state gaming is in, Monopoly Go makes considerably more money. There's always sloppier slop.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
2hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
A day of minor discoveries:
-
There do, in fact, exist trains that get one from Scotland to Manchester in a reasonable amount of time. I thought they were a myth. I also discover that the demographic most likely to strike up conversations with me are middle aged to elderly women, is it my honest appearance? I do enjoy talking with them, but I wish younger women would try. Maybe they have daughters, next time I will strive to ask.
-
I should go find a job in hostage negotiation. Why? When I first settled in the UK, I was quite dismayed to find out that my extended family here don't really get along (well, except with me, but I haven't been here long enough to piss anyone off, nor do I intend to). "Not getting along" is an understatement, certain branches have refused to speak to each other for almost as long as I've been alive. I'm beginning to think my parents sheltered me from such news in my youth. Seeing this, I kinda took it upon myself to mend bridges. The current agenda is to get a cousin to talk to two great uncles, one great-aunt, and another uncle. He's a good guy, and while it's his dad that caused things to devolve into a Cold War, I've ascertained or elicited the fact that nobody else seems to hold it against him. Most haven't seen him since he was the height of my knee, and apparently I'm the first to share any pictures at all. Primary tactic is to point out to my cousin that I get along with him, and that our uncle gets along with me, which, assuming transivity, implies they'll get along with each other. They definitely share a fondness for the most ridiculously loud suits I've ever seen, though one raids Vinted and the other Temu. If I had a wife, I'd leave this to her. Alas, wishing I wasn't single doesn't change things, and apparently my own grandma was great about keeping a boisterous family from going for the throat, and so is my mom. Maybe the inherited gene is X-linked.
-
I ended up here, visiting one great-uncle at the behest of another. Unfortunately, it seems the latter was rather vague about what he planned to do with me. I find myself with no clear plans for the weekend, but making quite pleasant conversation despite the age gap, though I discovered that they also have the world's loudest burglar alarm when I tried to tiptoe downstairs to retrieve my headphones.
-
I was arguing with @Fruck about the correct way to initiate absolute novices into the productive use of LLMs. I used the example of my own dearly departed grandma, but here, I hope her very much alive sister-in-law and her husband will suffice. Telling her to anthromorphize ChatGPT as "almost a human" and telling her that "it's very smart" seemed to capture intended behavior and convey the desired lesson. "Where does he live?" She asks in suspicion. "Probably in a computer a few blocks away", I say, eliding details unimportant to an 85yo lady. I taught it to speak to her in her native language by default, I taught her to use it to find the weather forecast, her husband to do... something. They were immensely shocked to find out that some women fall in love with it, by the sheer competence of the voice mode, especially after I used it to debug a printer old enough to vote. I would have, given the time, figured out that the print queue had about 500 pages of junk in it, or that the despite my great-uncle replacing the printer cartridges, the blinking red light did actually mean they weren't seated correctly. But I value my sanity, and fixing printers isn't the best way to keep it. It also probably saved them a decent amount of money on the technician they were trying to call (the bloke was enjoying a bank holiday), and I didn't even charge them more than a very delicious Indian dinner.
-
No, a model of iPhone 12 years old will not run ChatGPT. No, not even in Safari. I saw error codes no man was meant to see. He says he will buy a new one, or at least a model launched this decade. His wife quickly points out that he is lying.
-
A 4yo Android will. Even if it runs Android Go, and takes a good 10 minutes to reboot. Even if the keyboard encourages thoughtful typing by running at 5 Hz. The far older iPhone is still far zippier, and I hope Google takes note.
-
My great-uncle was a GP. His stories are wild. The early NHS is nigh unimaginable. Many stories of incredible amenities, like midnight snacks for doctors, or almost as believable, free housing. He was paid £60 starting out, he told me. "Per hour?" I asked. "No, each month". I heard tales of medical malpractice that boggles the imagination. A GP they knew tried to prescribe adult doses of paracetamol and some antibiotic to a 3yo child. It was caught by a pharmacist before someone died, but the lady kept working for a good few years longer before a bloke from higher up showed up and politely told her to resign within 24 hours.
-
My own actual grandpa used to teach my great-uncle back in med school, charging a modest rate. The latter did not get a refund after marrying the former's sister.
-
Do not grow old in a distant land. If you find yourself in such a position, it is very sensible to sell property you bought at around £20,000 for about 200 times that much (not inflation adjusted). Your friends will grow old too. Your family, if you have any, will move to the big city. Come home, to the Third World that was your first, and live the last of your days in nigh unimaginable luxury.
-
Should I buy a 20 year old BMW with less than 50k miles? Apparently the stories of cars lovingly maintained by grannies who only drive them to the shop are - sometimes - real.
-
Business class tickets give you a 100+ kg luggage allowance. I do not know how two senior citizens managed to transport half their old home to an even older one while availing of this, but I do know they miss not having the fine china at hand for their honored guest.
-
There was once a time when you actually couldn't get Indian food in the UK without accosting kindly strangers and navigating shady alleys. Now? Can't throw a rock without knocking the tikka butter masala out of someone's hands.
-
I need to marry someone who is a good cook. From their stories, social bonds with friends, colleagues and neighbors were sparked by the aroma of excellent Indian cooking, and cemented unshakably for decades once they got to actually taste the food.
cjet79
2hr ago
I believe there is like some form of gamers depression, where a game that is too good can truly ruin a gamer. And its not too good in the sense of like "oh my god this is my dream game and the best thing ever".
But more that its like "oh wow this is the perfect feedback loop of addiction, skill up, and reward" and once you hit that game, or a few of them nothing ever scratches the itch quite right ever again. Kinda like a first hit of heroin it ruins everything else. My game was EVE online and Skyrim. The first burned me out on teamwork based online games, and the second burned me out on personal skill up type games. I've been chasing the dragon on both for a while. I think you got burned on Tarkov.
SkoomaDentist
2hr ago
The terminator.
cjet79
2hr ago
Dream game recently has been something I've thought about making.
A mix between the Wuxia genre and the Heroes of Might and Magic overworld mechanics. Instead of controlling a civilization and multiple heroes. Its just one hero, or not really a hero, but a cultivator. The cultivator you control is trying to advance in realms. An end goal of true immortality and full unkillability. Massive world to explore.
Thoughts on fun/cool features:
- World is only randomly generated once, and then hand populated with a bunch of cool features. World is large enough that a single playthrough would only let you see 1/100th of it. But online guides to cool spots, or the joy of finding your own cool spots could carry over in different playthroughs.
- Game is about cheating. I always love wuxia stories where they have cool "cheats". An absurd ability to make money, turn back time, or gain stats that no one else can. Difficulty mode at the start of a game is chosen entirely by how many "cheats" you want to turn on.
- Roguelite option. One of the cheats could be resurrecting with similar character stats in the same starting place (or stats that improve based on past lives).
- Areas or parts of the game are brutally and stupidly difficult. They are possible to avoid with knowledge about the world. Or possible to beat with some of the cheats. Or are endgame challenges.
- Reactive world. Over one very long life or multiple lives watch as the world evolves. Demon factions take over if not stopped. Cataclysmic beasts destroy wide swaths of land. Beast tides sweep through human cities. Humanity paves over and extracts the hell out of all available resources in their area.
I just have this feeling that the lore of such a game could be like Dwarf Fortress adventure mode. A kind of cool organic story telling. I've thought about making the game as a dwarf fortress mod rather than its own standalone thing.
Its one of those true dream game ideas where it just keeps growing way out of proportion and obviously its a pipe dream cuz I just keep stuffing so many features in it. I likely wouldn't even be able to enjoy it that much if I made it, because someone would have to know the secrets. But part of me wants to find a way to use AI in the creation of it, and have it modable enough that I could build the system of the game, and then just input an AI mod folder that makes everything new and fresh for me.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
My dream video game is to get a Final Fantasy VII remake which is actually good. :(
Actually, this is why I'm hoping AI gets good enough to build complex software. I can never build something like that myself (I can program but I can't do music, 3D modeling, etc), but it would be neat if I can have AI build something like that for me someday.
I also read the series as a kid, and while it wasn't my favorite, I enjoyed it.
I also haven't seen anyone mention the book that was my favorite read as a kid — enough I wore out my first paperback copy and had to buy a second — which also had a female author and was first in a fantasy-with-some-SF-elements (some might call it the other way around) series (not to mention more than one less-than-good film adaptation by Disney): Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.
(I still get a chill rereading the passage when Meg finally sees IT.)
More options
Context Copy link