domain:parrhesia.substack.com
MathWizard
Good things are good
16hr ago
I generally share your assessment, though I don't think I hated its flaws quite as much as you and stuck it out slightly longer, getting halfway through Act 2 before dropping it.
The permanent gear does get a tiny bit more creative in Act 2 with occasionally having an affix, or having a different boost (a belt that increases the duration of your status effects instead of boosting your max damage), so there are tradeoffs. But with no storage for it you kind of have to commit to a build long-term since swapping can only be done when you find a new piece, which is stupid and makes the game more repetitive (which it already was). They should have stuck to the main skill tree for straight stat upgrades and used the Relics as gear.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
16hr ago
My apologies, I was going to make a joke about confusing it with Penn State but they have a 50%+ admit rate so nowhere near the same league. An easy enough mistake to make. The names of US universities are very weird and eclectic and hard to remember, you can replace UPenn with Rice and the point would still stand.
The worst offender for an American university name has to be Colgate, to me Colgate is what I brush my teeth with...
Totalitarianit
16hr ago
Yes, of course. Condemnation in the "strongest possible terms" is no match for the "nothing but" barrier. I'm finding no evidence, video or otherwise, of Trump performing seppuku either. I stand corrected.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16hr ago
If somebody doesn't like your party or its platform, then the problem can't be that your platform is lacking - it can only be that the person is unaware of how fantastic your platform really is.
Or, alternately, that the person is an evil Fascist bigot who hates all good things because they're so evil and hateful.
Pongalh
16hr ago
The more important point to me is the privacy part. How many of us would really come out unscathed if all our private convos were unearthed? (In general too many people want to chalk up to extra horrible malice what is better explained by the new information environment.)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
16hr ago
You do know that UPenn is also Ivy League, right?
Pongalh
16hr ago
That Brooklyn lefty campaigner guy who was killed on CCTV with his girlfriend nearby, conservatives were very much "welp, hoisted by his own..." as in this is the result of his own views on crime. A smug schadenfreude was palpable, but I didn't see overt celebration myself.
striker
16hr ago
Democrats lose because they are lame.
This – perceived lameness – is pervasive across the west. The sad thing (for democrats in the US, or progressives or liberals or lefties or whatever they’re called elsewhere) is that in general they are compassionate people, with empathy towards others, especially those who have fallen through the cracks, and they’re interested more in civic society than in individual gain, but online media has no proven way of effectively showing the OTHERS whom they have compassion for. Which makes them look lame. Whether they are or not is largely irrelevant because perception creates reality.
In contrast, online media does a great job of showcasing and promoting individual gain, thereby attracting all those who are primarily driven by it.
But even more importantly, because all humans are a jigsaw of mismatching parts, and nobody is either 100% compassionate or 100% individualistic, this means you get the strange phenomenon that even people who are 25% individualistic, say, are exposed to a lot more content (and a lot more compelling content) that is individualist in nature, and so the prevailing wind is that those people gravitate slowly from “left” (compassionate) to “right” (individualistic) by dint of the air they’re breathing in online settings much more than carefully thought out worldviews and philosophies.
TLDR - liberals look lame online, therefore they are lame, therefore most people gravitate towards conservatives over time.
Rosencrantz2
16hr ago
nothing but
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
16hr ago
They also appear not to have considered that if they want young men to vote for them (especially young white and Asian men), they should probably offer them something other than scorn. Which, as far as the culture war goes, they do not. Even when the Republicans express their disgust for young men watching porn, that's better than being disgusted with young men for being men.
This is posting rather than lurking and on top of that these true brexit geezers used their personal email addresses.
Among the donors were several associated with email addresses traceable to police and other public officials.
If you're donating to the Rittenhouse Foundation under, essentially, your real name, you are wasting money on that VPN subscription.
TheFooder
17hr ago
You want a jihad but you don't want it to be stupid? Methinks you demand too much good sir!
TK-421
17hr ago
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Because the trio of a criminal, violent illegal alien, and teenaged religious extremist murdered me and used me as a skinsuit.
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Yeah, this was the real shocker. No jokes, no exaggeration, this is where the rhetoric has led. As best as I can tell, this is the very edge of the verbal Overton window in deep blue spaces. I have zero concern that she has actually begun to do so, could or would in the near future, and I'd definitely be aware before things got to that point. This is the very front line in the shit testing AOR.
It's possible I've been unclear in some post but that doesn't mean I condone these statements or the general atmosphere of acceptability of wishing for harm, I'm merely a traveler reporting my experiences. Data mines are different from other types of mines because you have to fill them up first, all I've got are a couple pebbles.
Having tired of Hades 2 for the moment and stirred by mentions of Synthetik and Ruiner downthread, I tried Hell Clock to get my ARPG/top-down action fix. The premise seemed solid enough, and the Curse of the Dead Gods-esque artstyle feels fresh.
About 6 hours in I must surmise it is... not good, i my humble o. In brief, Hell Clock feels distinctly like a game made by someone who really likes ARPGs generally and PoE specifically (with a touch of Hades, ironically), with zero actual understanding of what makes these games work.
Un-briefly:
+ I found the artstyle quite nice, although the levels themselves are fairly barren and the style makes projectile spam really blur together as a side effect.
+ The character controls well and movement is responsive, Hades-tier is the highest praise I can give it. WASD really oughta become the new standard for ARPGs going forward.
+ Voice acting sounds good, although a language I do not understand.
- Its most glaring con is that many game systems were evidently made by someone who does not understand how roguelites/ARPGs and metafaggotry optimization works. Examples galore:
- The levels are static, never changing throughout runs. It actually took me a few runs to nootice because that's like, the most basic expectation for a roguelike, but once I noticed my enjoyment fell off a cliff; I have no idea how you sustain interest in such a game without at least a token effort at procedural generation. This alone is a black mark on the game in general.
- The starting skill variety is far too limited, and more skills only open after beating Act 1 (which took me most of the ~6 hours), at which point your interest may or may not be gone. Mine certainly was.
- Gear is permanent and you do not lose it between runs, but the only things it gives (as of Act 1-2) is flat stat bonuses - HP for body armor, base damage for weapons, movement speed on boots etc. There is no variety, every slot is literally one stat, and the only upgrade is number go up. For an ARPG this is a fatal shortcoming; they even know how to do it, Sanctum relics (your other kind of equipment) are properly random and roll affixes! Maybe this gets better later, but with no actual stash for gear (how?!) I highly doubt it.
- The skill tree contains passives that increase dismantling yield and make upgrading relics/gear cheaper - forever dooming your autism to respec every time you upgrade your shit or clear out your stash if you want to make the most of it. For extra aggravation, the only respec option is to reset your tree entirely instead of deallocating points one by one.
- [cw: autistic rage] Mechanics are extremely hit or miss, due to the limited skill variety you are more or less corralled into a few working builds early on. Bleeding specifically is an outright scam: the mechanic is lifted straight out of Last Epoch so I quickly figured out how to work it, but I noticed I am not doing nearly as much single-target damage as I expected to. Bleeds just didn't seem to stick to bosses despite gazillion small hits per second, and at the Act 1 boss (and after a bit of googling) I finally realized why: bleed damage is unrelated to the hit that applies it, but bleed chance somehow still directly depends on it - bleed chance is greatly reduced the less damage you deal relative to total HP! My only damaging mechanic is directly countered by an affix-less wall of HP, the kind that bleeds are supposed to be good at killing in the first place! Spending literally 15 minutes to plink the boss to death due to my main damage source ceasing to work was the final straw, I alt-f4'd out of the game shortly after.
This actually gave me painful flashbacks so if any mottizen ever makes an ARPG, carve this insight into your psyche: any damage mechanic that can plausibly be played as main DPS must never be entirely negated by things outside the player's control! Leave damage immunities in 2000 where they belong! None of that "500% bleed resistance for undead" muh realism bullshit! Even Chris fucking Wilson Jonathan fucking Rogers, the king of player-hostile game design, figured out this part immediately following PoE2's release!
- The admittedly novel setting of 19th-century Brazilian badlands appears to mostly cash out into incessant glazing of the Canudos, victims of the eponymous massacre. I suppose alt-history is a perfectly cromulent narrative device, but by the time I encountered... checks notes Head-Cutter (in actual, literal hell!) I completely checked out of the narrative, it is impossible to take seriously. This kind of hamfisted political narrative never fails to give me the ick regardless of subject matter; I know nothing about the Canudos but I will be entirely unsurprised if they were actually some sort of horrible militant sect with plenty of chips on their shoulders that required direct gov't intervention to root out.
((Out of curiosity, does somebody know of a game extolling the virtues of jingoistic imperialism and brutal colonisation? Off the top my head I only recall Broforce and New Vegas: Sneering Imperialist edition.))
In short, I did not entirely hate Hell Clock but it wore out its welcome remarkably quickly and I am glad I picked up the uh, extended demo version from the high seas instead of buying it. Just play Tiny Rogues or something instead.
TK-421
17hr ago
Corvos is in the right here. We’ve managed to re-derive the desirability of one legitimate bearer of force in society at a time in just a couple posts - excellent work speedrunning the rise of civilization team.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
17hr ago
A lottery would be far better than the BS system the US has at the moment. It would also completely destroy the value of the Ivy League as now the people in Harvard aren't on average much (or at all) better than the people going to UPenn, they're just luckier and so the cultural cachet of a Harvard degree goes away almost entirely.
Name one instance where someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation. Name one.
How much research did you do before you made this comment?
Corvos
17hr ago
This was actually my suggested solution for solving faculty disputes in my old university. It would be so, so much simpler and more friendly than the backstabbing and politicking that goes on, and everyone's too scrawny to do any real damage.
Lizzardspawn
17hr ago
All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.
The democrats are doing their darndest to not make that happen. Their progressive wing has dug in and doubles down. I wonder if it will manage to cost them third presidency in a row.
DelendaEst
17hr ago
I will be fine with rearresting all of the Jan 6 people once about 100,000 BLM rioters have been arrested, tried, and sat in jail for as long as the median J6 rioter did before being pardoned. Until then every time someone on the left brings it up all I hear is "rules for thee, but not for me."
And I really do mean it, I will be fine with that. I do not support the J6 people and do want them punished, all rioters should be. But while the feds under Biden spend years making sure every one of them was punished other dems have turned an intentional blind eye to their own thugs, a pattern that persists in DAs refusing to charge lefties who punch pro-lifers on camera. I want rioters punished, but I will not accept ONLY right wing protestors being punished. Pardoning them was wrong, accepting second class status is worse.
So I agree, be the change you want to see. You guys put 10,000 heads on spikes is a good first step.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
17hr ago
Circle of equals! All the legislators form a circle, and the two have to fight it out bare handed until one submits.
How much research did you do? On Saturday he makes his famous "many sides" comment. On Monday he releases the prepared statement you linked to. On Tuesday he doubles down on what he said Saturday:
As @Rosencrantz2 points out, you can cherry pick a few sentences out of each incident to make it sound like he's offering nothing but condemnation, but I specifically said that he can't help using these events as opportunities to dunk on his opponents. His Tuesday remarks made it sound like the white supremacists and neo-Nazis were a small minority of people who just happened to be at the protest and not the organizing force behind it. He says the left is just as bad, if not worse. And then he goes on to put Confederate generals in the same league as the founding fathers, just so you know whose side he's really on.
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