domain:papyrusrampant.substack.com
Soteriologian
20hr ago
I got back into Elden Ring a few months ago, fairly hardcore (lvl 1 challenge runs, etc.). The addiction didn't last too long, but it was pretty strong for a solid two months.
People say GRRM was just there to have his name on the tin for marketing, but I don't know how anyone literate can conclude this. The lore of Elden Ring has the most profound aesthetic depth I've ever seen in a video game, and that depth is simply not there in Dark Souls 3 or in Shadow of the Erdtree (the former felt like the Walmart version of Elden Ring, and the latter like the Hobbit compared to the LotR trilogy). To me it's clear the big-brain behind the magic is Martin himself, and, in his own words, "when the sun has set, no candle can replace it."
Mechanically, the game is challenging for casuals, but it's fulfilling to play well. The defining design principle is that actions should be deliberate and if you get hit, it is your fault, and there is something you as a mortal human (ie., not Serral) could reasonably have been expected to do to prevent it.
The challenge that baited me into learning the game seriously was "Can you beat the Tree Sentinel as a lvl 1 wretch?" It's available right from the start of the game, and at first it seems impossibly hard, but it actually isn't once you learn the fight. At first, you'll die over and over again in the first ten seconds, and the challenge seems like something only a demigod could do; but with a bit of practice, you start to notice that all the attacks have predictable behavior, and eventually, not only does it seem doable, it feels downright easy.
The story is not told in a traditional fashion, and if you wait for the game to tell you the story, you'll miss it entirely, because the game never does. Rather, you're expected to pay attention to the detail of the world by piecing together snippets of information you retrieve from item descriptions. This sounds annoying, and it is until you get used to it. But once you get used to it, you'll be like "huh, I wonder what that Shaded Castle is all about. I never paid any attention to the items or people there, I wonder if there's anything interesting?" And there is! (If you want to know, the guy who's supposed to be ruling the castle is a weak simp who's been booted out of his own palace, which is now ruled by a foreigner who threw all the beautiful artwork in the trash, and the entire place is now flooded in poison and overrun by screeching subhumans. Gee, what could the game have been trying to tell us? Everything in Elden Ring is like this, and you can absolutely waltz through the game without noticing any of it if you don't pay attention.)
Finally, Elden Ring is one of the only games I've ever played where I genuinely believe the team's visual designers are more cognitively gifted than its programmers. I don't mean the game is has Realistic Graphics, which I don't care about (I usually prefer stylized graphics to realism, e.g., the Persona series). I mean the visual design itself is absolutely stunning. For example, the Church of Vows is aligned such that when you look through the front, you see Rya Lucaria Academy, and when you look through the rear, you see the Erdtree, because at this church were married the leaders of these two factions to resolve a great war. Once again, you can play the game and be totally oblivious to this sort of thing; but the game is saturated with this sort of high-IQ, intentional design. It is beautiful, and I have the highest respect for it.
My biggest criticism is that the game is bad at explaining how to play. This was my first souls game, and at the start I found the mechanics frustrating and counterintuitive, and the game's hints are worthless ("Did you know you cannot ride your horse indoors?" Yes, thank you for that profound insight, now how do I use the skill in my right-hand weapon?). And even aside from that, there are a zillion small design issues and bugs. But these problems fade into irrelevance in the light of the glory the game achieves. Its heights are so high. It is the only game I've ever played that feels like it successfully transcends the middle class nature of video games and ascends to the same tier of artistic achievement as good literature.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
20hr ago
I would posit the GM share ownership was as a result of a huge exigent circumstances, which Intel is not facing.
They were already facing it; this is a follow on from their taking of CHIPS Act money. Intel is in trouble; x86-based architectures have lost to ARM at the high end, they don't have a GPU design, and their foundries aren't state-of-the-art. They can either try to build down and compete only in markets which don't want the cutting edge (defense, aerospace, automotive), or build up and try to get themselves out of the hole they are in. They probably are simply too big and have too much debt to do the first without bankruptcy, and it's simply not clear how they can do the second.
How would you feel if the Dems started buying equity shares in solar panel manufacturers because "the climate is an urgent crisis we must address"?
About the same way I felt about Solyndra. My point isn't that this isn't bad, it's that it's not some new sort of badness.
JTarrou
20hr ago
Of course it is. And with competing nationalisms and versions of the religion. Point is, they all happen within Islam. When Europe was "Christendom", they had thousands of heretical sects, competing secular governments, nobles, clerics, etc. They still had some more powerful ideology serving as the tent under which all that was "united". Neither Islam nor globohomo is any different. We're all in globohomo, whether we like it or not in the same way Iran is part of Islam, even though they are hated heretics by the rest of Islam.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
20hr ago
"What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong."
Talk about brand dilution, this is fucking embarrassing lmao
I adore the concept of the "shining city on the hill" and I admire America's national mythos.
I actually like the concept of this initative.
But mortgaging America's brand to leverage your own? Cringe
roystgnr
20hr ago
China seems a likely contender, but I don't know what they have going on.
In space, China's performance these days (whether measured by launches or satellites put in orbit or upmass) beats out the entire rest of the world (excepting SpaceX) combined. SpaceX outdoes them by somewhere between 200% and 900% depending on how you measure, though whether that means "the West is fine" or just "the West got really lucky" is less quantifiable. China's shooting for their first manned lunar landing around 2030, which doesn't seem likely but does seem possible; if Blue Origin continues to move glacially (though they've reached orbit now, good for them) and if Starship continues to have teething problems (the v2 ships have been tragedies so far, though catching two boosters and reusing one already was impressive) then China might beat Artemis 3 (still supposedly 2027? that is not going to happen).
China's current lunar plans are basically Apollo-style "flag and footprints" missions, vs US designs that ought to be more sustainably affordable and carry more cargo (or "much more", if Starship gets working smoothly), but China has 3 companies with Falcon-9-scale partially reusable launch vehicles currently in testing, which puts them way ahead of most of the competition. China's Starship-scale fully reusable plans are currently at the "Powerpoint slides of what we say we'll do in the 2030s" stage, so may never happen, but even that feels like a step up from e.g. the UK (current motto: "The sun will never stop setting on the British Empire") or continental Europe (also armed with 2030s-target Powerpoint slides, but for a mere Falcon 9 competitor).
I'm skeptical of making a real go at Mars colonization, especially as Elon's star has fallen so far recently.
Starlink is up to 6 million subscribers now, so even if Elon's irrevocably pissed off both parties at this point they've still got enough non-federal revenue to keep going. If he goes full Howard Hughes and starts trying to redesign Starship from birch or something then all bets are off, of course.
Their next Starship flight test (scrubbed yesterday with a ground systems issue) is going to be attempted this evening. No exciting booster catch attempt this time (this flight and the last are trying different angle-of-attack flyback trajectories, to get data and push out the envelope on that, and they don't want to come back near the tower in case they push too far), but it should still be tense. Everybody's waiting on pins and needles to see whether they've fixed the last of the new v2 ship problems or whether Turks and Caicos are about to get another unintended fireworks show.
quiet_NaN
20hr ago
For what it is worth, the government taking direct control of key industries is not a leftist-only thing. Historically, fascists were also big on dirigism. If the Fuehrer wanted German car manufacturers to build tanks, he will tell them to focus on building tanks, and they will comply, or else.
From what I can tell, Intel foundries are basically in the third place after TSMC and Samsung for 3nm processes. Also, it seems that the foundries -- the only part of any strategic importance -- are perhaps 10% of their business.
Personally, however little I trust CEOs to be aligned to the long term interests of their companies, I trust the USG a lot less. I can totally see Trump wanting the ability to fire CEOs when they report weak quarterlies for making him look bad, I just don't think that this is going to make companies more competitive or serve urgent national security needs.
georgioz
20hr ago
Britain already has history of shipping various prisoners and undesirables to inhospitable places in name of expansion. Who knows, history could repeat itself.
I got into Anno 1800 (pro tip: you can get the base game cheap and cream API the DLC for free) about a year ago and Holy. Fucking. Shit.
I haven't had a game touch my dopamine receptors like that since I was a teenager first getting into gaming.
It was un-ironically as close as I've ever gotten to wire-heading. The temptation to play at the expense of food, sleep, work performance, sex, socialization was intense.
What made it so addicting:
The production chains being complex enough to be challenging while not so complex as to shut down from overwhelm.
Ship logistics was a ton of fun, getting better at that and seeing it pay off was sweet.
The Victorian aesthetic I find really compelling, and the tense action against the other AI (who you later realize are absolutely useless at the game) makes for a really fun juggling balance and tension.
The different areas provide variety and a steady march of new challenges to wrap your brain around.
Each phase of the game has a distinct feel, and is fun on its own merits. Desperate economic balancing when you're on an island or two. Balancing wide/tall expansion with conflict in mid game. And finally hyper-optimizing and paper-clipping in end game once you've wiped out everything else.
I finally stopped playing incredibly suddenly once I was at about 150,000 investors and had just started the final production chains for the higher level skyscraper goods. The level of optimization required at that point (my goal was 1,000,000 investors) meant I was largely following templates I found on the German (lol) template sites, including their researched specialist stacks. At that point I wasn't really playing anymore, I was just following digital Lego instructions. I was also getting mildly tired of having to raze and re-design suboptimal islands repeatedly as I got better/learned how the game worked. I guess I could have continued to play blind and try to get to 1mil myself, but that would have taken so long, and required even more "raze and re-design" moments, so I got bored and stopped. Sucked a good couple hundred hours of me before I did though.
How do you feel in the midst of that mechanic:
Fucking incredible, it was the perfect level of challenge and the challenge level contributed to increase at a pace that allowed you to skill up perfectly in sync with it.
It was seriously so compelling and so fucking fun.
It was basically an instant drop into flow state on command, it was magical.
The sudden end was kind of surprising to me. I went from being so compelled to play it to basically 0 interest over night. Other games I adore (civilization, paradox games, battlefield) I have played for decades and will continue to play for decades. Anno was a whirlwind romance in comparison.
Highly recommend.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
21hr ago
Thank you; that does indeed clarify what was previously too vague.
BahRamYou
21hr ago
"At 660,000 square miles, the territory is about eight times the size of Great Britain"
Huh! That's interesting. I had no idea the UK had that much territory in Antarctica.
Still, I can't imagine them actually going through with such an ambitious plan, or that all the other countries would stand by and allow them to do it.
For your original question, it seems like Saudi Arabia is still working on the line. I'm not sure it will actually get finished, or whether it'll be any good... but there's a decent chance it will amount to something big.
TheBailey
soapy mop
21hr ago
Losing your car to an uninsured hooligan sucks a lot, disrupts your whole life, and happens once in a blue moon. It's happened once so far to me, and has happened multiple times to almost every responsible adult I know. Even if there must always be some "house edge", I'm wanting UMPD coverage just to take the edge off the impact to my life.
What I resent is paying the additional premiums for full Collision coverage which also "insures" me against my own irresponsibility, at a premium based on the responsibility of my demographic peers. Even if there were 0 house edge, that's still a bad bet for me because of the massive behavioral component.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
21hr ago
You don’t think Islam is riven with a ton of internal ethnic division? Huh that was my impression.
The fundamental problem with Trek is largely the same one as Star Wars (and to a lesser extent the MCU) - it's running on fumes. It's got a huge fanbase of aging nerds who loved it when they were 12, but a franchise can only live so long on nostalgia, and both Trek and Star Wars are having trouble pulling in the next generation. I think this is something we are starting to see with cape movies as well. How many Zoomers are invested in 60 years of Superman or X-Men lore? Will alphas even read comic books at all?
That's not a fundamental problem. It's something perfectly manageable, and something that was managed competently in the past - there's a reason it's called TNG. All these franchises, in all their media forms including comics, deliberately turned hostile on the kinds of people that enjoyed them, and are now doing a surprised Picachu that the next generation is not picking them up.
He's being forced to insure the value of his own car
No! That is not the case. Per my original post, I'm only being forced to buy Collision coverage if I buy UMPD coverage in Alabama:
I've contacted 5+ insurers trying to purchase an auto insurance package that includes UMPD without Collision, and they all alleged that Alabama bans the sale of UMPD-without-Collision.
Every insurance company is happy to sell me a plan that only includes Liability and (at my option) UM/UIM and Medical; and several reps commented they'd be happy to sell me UMPD-without-Collision if I were to move out of Alabama.
(presumably) he is prepared to replace it out of pocket in the event of an accident
That's exactly it. I'm happy to eat rice and beans for 6 months to rebuild the emergency fund if I break my car due to my own stupidity (which is the risk that Collision coverage defrays), but I'll be damned to do it again because local deadbeat Micahal Rayshone Taylor was driving effectively uninsured because his worthless mother lied to the insurance company about who regularly drives the car (which is the risk that UMPD coverage defrays).
In the latter case, I'm not a squillionare yet so reducing the variance is still worth the middleman's fee; but every insurer claims that Alabama law forces them to bundle these coverages together. But I couldn't find such a law (and obviously the insurance reps don't know shit), so I'm trying to figure out what exactly I need to ask my Alabama State Legislature rep to do.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
21hr ago
I understand a few people on this site really abhorred RF Kuang's 2023 novel Yellowface. Freddie deBoer has a tremendously bitchy article today taking Kuang to task for her perceived false modesty in her New Yorker profile, which doubles as a very harsh review of Yellowface itself. It's transparently written from a place of envy and spite, deBoer barely pretending to mask how much he covets Kuang her literary success in comparison to his own meagre book sales, but entertaining for all that, and I'm sure that any of you who disliked Yellowface will find much to agree with in his critique.
(Without having read Yellowface I can't comment on its literary merits or lack thereof — but its author is pretty cute and I would.)
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
21hr ago
Yeah, I'll just move it over there.
FtttG
21hr ago
Usually goes in small-scale, although it's arguably a better fit for this thread.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
21hr ago
It was remarkable for Lewis to be devoutly Christian and write a space trilogy specifically as apologetics against those who said that God can't care too much about Earth due to how large the cosmos are.
You ever play with the vox populi mod?
It actually makes it the 4x GOAT imo, civ5 with VP may never be topped
Easily the highest quality mod overhaul I've ever had the privilege of playing
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