OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
51m ago
Hunters are a tougher enemy, certainly, but the hunters you fight in Halo are all the standard model. There's no Halo equivalent of, say, the Makron in Quake II, or Mohc in Dark Forces, or the titular character in Kingpin.
Later Halo games have named bosses - Tartarus in Halo 2, Guilty Spark in Halo 3, and so on - but the first one always avoided that. Wiki does not list any bosses for the first game, if that counts for anything.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
I suppose the implicit heuristic I'm using is something like "knows how to use a computer". I'm thinking of co-workers who do fine with the systems they've been taught but the moment the computer does something they didn't expect, they call for IT or ask me.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
Huh, I really thought that link was going to the Torment Nexus. I have never seen that comic before.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
My experience with normies, mostly co-workers, is that there's mild awareness of AI, but mostly in a "oh no, are management going to make us learn this as well?" kind of way. It sounds like yet another annoying thing that management might require everybody to learn and use, when we'd really all prefer to just get on with our jobs.
Managers themselves are interested in it and moderately enthusiastic - the most recent pitch has been for an AI tool that's supposed to listen to conversations and then accurately transcribe them, thus improving accountability and documentation - but that enthusiasm is not mirrored on the ground at all.
Absolutely nobody knows who Sam Altman is, or what 'AGI' stands for. Nobody.
My impression overall is not that people are dogmatically anti-AI, or have some strong ideological stand against it. It's just another instance of stupid computer bullshit that the bosses are going to try to make us deal with. Nobody likes it, but nobody likes any of the digital systems that get promoted from above. It's just plain old more of the same.
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
The Flood are indeed the weakest part of Halo, and it's a shame because what they suggest to me is that Bungie didn't realise what made Halo good. The Covenant are the best part of Halo, because they constitute a small range of interesting enemy units, with good AI, that can be remixed together to create combat challenges. They use basic tactics and feel fun to fight.
Swapping from them to the Flood, which only have three types of unit, all of which do nothing other than run directly at you and attack, is crushingly disappointing. The first mission where you meet them is a great little Aliens spoof, but... ugh, the Library. They get old very quickly.
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
Man, I did love the stormtrooper rifle in Dark Forces, though I don't know how much of that is because it perfectly captures the feel of the rifle in the films. I can't imagine that hurt, at least.
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
I remember one of the things that really struck me about Halo in its day was that it didn't have bosses. It had a small selection of enemies, and it then remixed them over and over in different scenarios, but unlike most earlier shooters, it did not have boss monsters, or specific boss scenarios.
Halo also, to its credit, mostly dispensed with exploration or keycard-hunting as a core mechanic. If I think about classic 90s shooters, the Dooms and Quakes, the combat in them was often repetitive, or just an obstacle while the core gameplay was exploring a maze of near-identical corridors and getting keys for doors. In Halo you always know where you are going (and you usually have an NPC voice, Cortana or Guilty Spark, ready to remind you). The challenge is getting from Point A to Point B in the face of determined opposition.
It's not unique in this - I suppose you're right and Half-Life had an earlier form of this, and then I guess F. E. A. R. did it even better - but it was done quite well for the time. The infamous 'four seconds of fun' idea paid off. If the basics of gunplay against the standard enemies are fun, you can re-use and remix those gameplay elements over and over to create consistently compelling scenarios.
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
Okay, that's absolutely a fair point. Counter-Strike was the Defense of the Ancients before Defense of the Ancients, and that was incredibly influential in creating PC multiplayer shooters as we know them today.
So, the organic story telling in first person, with the camera NEVER leaving the protagonists head, was arguably something that was specifically native to games and genuinely felt new.
Maybe this is just tedious nitpicking, but... was that actually new? Did it feel new?
I cannot recall ever leaving the protagonist's head in Doom or Wolfenstein 3D or Marathon. I don't seem to recall that happening in Descent much (I guess short cutscenes of your spaceship escaping?), or in System Shock. Quake doesn't take you out of the marine's head, and Dark Forces never breaks up its gameplay. All its in-level storytelling is environmental. I don't think you leave Bond's head much in Goldeneye. Maybe I'm crazy here, but seeing the entire game from the first person perspective seems to me like it was industry standard in 1998. Games after Half-Life seem to have been the same, to me? 1999's Aliens versus Predator does the same thing; it's not until 2001's AVP2 that they introduced story cutscenes. If anything, I feel like it's leaving the player character's head for a cutscene that was the innovation!
Are you counting a text screen introducing the mission before it starts as 'the camera leaving the protagonist's head'? Because thinking back to the time, I don't remember feeling like Half-Life did anything new with the camera, and looking back today... I'm sorry, I just don't see it.
I am trying my best not to be biased. I admit that I don't like Half-Life and, no insult to you intended, I find the praise profusely heaped upon it somewhat irritating. Of course, whether or not I like Half-Life is a completely different question to whether it was an influential game, and I am probably subconsciously motivated by just not wanting a game that I didn't enjoy to be important.
Even so, it is nonetheless true that even doing my best to set all bias aside, when I think about the shooters that were popular in the years immediately before Half-Life, and I think about the shooters that were popular immediately afterwards, I don't feel a big difference.
I do see a difference between what I think of as the early shooters, through the 90s, and then the post-2000 modern shooters. I can see the difference between, say, Quake II (1997) and Doom III (2004). Something changed in shooters around the turn of the millennium, and the two most famously influential games in that transitional period are Half-Life (1998) and Halo (2001). I suppose I'm just, in the end, not sure that Half-Life was the cause of this transition or of it was one among a number of games experimenting with the genre (because, let's be honest, the shooter genre had gotten pretty stale by 1997), and it was the most famous in hindsight.
Subjectively from my end, the key thing, I guess, is that I remember playing Half-Life in the 90s, getting bored after a level or two, and thinking, "meh, that was whatever". It felt to me at the time as just another one of the interchangeable shooters in a genre that seemed increasingly out of ideas. But then playing Halo in 2001 felt like playing something from the future. It seemed revolutionary to me. Now, maybe that's just because of the X-Box, or because something had changed in me in the years 1998-2001 which made me receive it differently, or some other alchemy of chance and circumstance. But for better or for worse, that is what I remember.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I think Halo has a genuine love for people who, out of a sense of principle, heroically place themselves in the way of danger for the sake of their people. The potential for sympathetic Elites, therefore, was there from the very first game. Elites are pretty obviously to the Covenant what you are to the humans, so even if they are on the opposite side, they are displaying the virtues that this game esteems - courage, discipline, self-sacrifice, honour. Once the lies were exposed, of course they became co-heroes.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I hear sometimes gamers talking about how Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were these seminal games and huge steps forward for what was possible in shooters, especially in terms of story. I don't know about that. I never finished either game. I remember trying Half-Life in my teens, finding it boring, and quickly giving up.
But Halo...
Halo was magic. I first played it on a friend's X-Box, and it was captivating. My experience of shooters before that were games like Goldeneye 007 on N64, or Wolfenstein 3D and Doom demos that we installed on all the school PCs, or Aliens vs Predator at home. Halo felt like a step into another world. It felt like it wasn't just awkwardly trying to evoke a setting I knew better from elsewhere. Its gunplay flowed smoothly and its enemies felt capable and intelligent. Its world felt real - there were characters, and there was atmosphere. I eventually badgered my parents into getting me an X-Box and I spent a lot of time playing it.
One of Halo's big innovations, which I'm not sure it gets enough credit for, is having a narrator or perspective character giving you voiced feedback during gameplay. Half-Life gets credit for in-engine cutscenes, but firstly those actually predate Half-Life in shooters, and secondly, even in Half-Life, those were moments where you stopped and watched something happening. Moreover, Gordon Freeeman was a silent protagonist, so it felt like just watching a cutscene only you can move the camera around. Whatever.
The Master Chief is also more-or-less a silent protagonist, but it doesn't matter, because the real first-person-narrator of Halo is Cortana, and it feels like Cortana is constantly talking to you, the player. And she talks during normal gameplay. She usually shuts up during gunfights, but before and after the fight begins, she comments on what just happened, on where you're going next, and on what this mysterious space station might be for. Cortana's feedback lets you know how to emotionally react (she goes "ahh!" at scary things, "wow!" at impressive things, "aww..." at sad things), while also keeping you on mission by constantly reminding you where to go next.
Most shooters felt very lonely, prior to Halo. Explore an environment, kill everything. Halo puts a little buddy in your head, and that created a sense of direction, investment, and storytelling through gameplay. Go somewhere, Cortana sees what you see, she helps you interpret it. Nowadays the mission control character or intercom girl is a cliché, but I think it worked really well in Halo. The missions where you don't have any commentator buddy feel silent and threatening because of it; the missions where you don't have Cortana, but have 343 Guilty Spark instead, feel slightly off. They use the dramatic device for all it's worth.
In shooters before Halo, environments felt artificial, and like just stages for killing things that you wandered around. Halo made every place you go feel purposeful. You are raiding this facility to retrieve a map. You are assaulting this alien spaceship to rescue a prisoner. You are exploring this swamp in search of a missing team of marines. You have objectives.
It felt like an animated world I was actually inhabiting. I give it tremendous credit and think it was a huge, paradigm-shifting step forward for shooters.
And yes, its story, though very basic (and I recommend ignoring people who tell you all about the Halo EU and the Forerunners; it's all so much garbage), was good and effectively appealed to what every teen boy wants to be. Halo is a story about being a soldier-explorer. It is about being this powerful masculine figure, on the front line or even behind enemy lines, resourcefully overcoming obstacles, and standing in between danger and the people you care about. And it does it with total, unapologetic sincerity. Halo does have some comedy in it (oh, grunts, you silly little buggers), but that comedy never comes at the expense of the protagonist. Halo believes in the Master Chief, which is to say, Halo believes in you.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I certainly don't think it's an absence of imagination on my part - I was an atheist as a younger man, after all. I don't mean to generalise that all atheists feel the same, nor was I suggesting that atheists have no intellectual knowledge of Christianity.
Nonetheless I do think it's fair to say that ideological or religious alignment/difference with a text affects the way one receives it, and therefore that atheists and Christians will respond to authors like Lewis or Tolkien differently. In the same way I'm conscious that my own reaction to Pratchett is different and conditioned by my own background. I am speculating a bit about atheist responses to him, with what I hope is empathy born of my own experience of atheism, but nonetheless I am in a different position now. To the extent that I appreciate Pratchett today (and I'm not actually a huge fan), there is a level of imagination involved, putting myself in the position of someone for whom the world seems very different to the way it seems to me. The same thing, mutatis mutandis, for ex-Christian appreciators of the Christian authors.
There's probably another effortpost to be written one day about the atheist appreciators of Tolkien specifically. That is for another day, though.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
One of the things I think Pratchett has in common with the earlier Christian fantasists is a genuine affection for the parochial, and a corresponding opposition to the impersonal, enlightened, or rationalist.
I mentioned Death. The Auditors might be more efficient, but Death is a small farmer. We want to be collected by the sympathetic local. "What can the harvest hope for, if not the care of the reaper man?"
But we see the same pattern over and over. The Unseen University faculty are a bunch of self-important short-sighted buffoons, but Pratchett has a real affection for them, and their dumb feuds. You can imagine a story about an enlightened, politically engaged busybody coming in, determined to mobilise the university for the cause of social justice, or even just making the wizards do their damn jobs, and you know that Pratchett would be one hundred percent on the side of the wizards. The witches likewise. Pratchett likes the local. In the post below this I cite Carpe Jugulum and the pay-off to that story was that the locals like the 'traditional' vampire lord, the one who kidnaps the bosomy young maiden and always gets staked by the strapping young hero, whereas the modernist who wants to rationalise vampiric predation is the villain. In Ankh-Morpork, all Pratchett's sympathies are with the beat cops, not grand visionaries.
That's something he has in common with the earlier writers. Tolkien loves the Shire, and hates Saruman's mind of metal and wheels. Lewis praises tradition - the bit in Prince Caspian where the children are liberated from the Telmarine schools is a moment of pure, unbridled joy. Chesterton's hatred for regimentation hardly needs to be recapitulated. Pratchett lacks their religious conviction, but something of a stubborn English spirit persists in him, as it did in his literary forebears.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Certainly for me, as a Christian, one of the things that made Pratchett not-intolerable was his sense of genuine sympathy for those who want to make sense of the world and do right. If you sincerely and humanely asks those questions, Pratchett is on your side.
'I feel I should thank you,' said Oats, when they reached the spiral staircase.
'For helping you across the mountains, you mean?'
'The world is... different.' Oats's gaze went out across the haze, and the forests, and the purple mountains. 'Everywhere I look I see something holy.'
For the first time since he'd met her he saw Granny Weatherwax smile properly. Normally her mouth went up at the corners just before something unpleasant was going to happen to someone who deserved it, but this time she appeared to be pleased with what she'd heard.
'That's a start, then,' she said.
Pratchett himself is not a believer, but his worldview allows for believers who are genuinely good people, whom he regards as friends and allies.
I'll take this as an opportunity for a longer effort post, so pardon me if I go a bit beyond the brief.
I think Terry Pratchett is the atheist version of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien.
Lewis and Tolkien are authors that young, nerdy, or fantasy-inclined Christians, especially those from an English cultural background, read while growing up. They often make a very strong impression on us. I know that I was moved and a lot of my worldview, as an adult, was shaped by these two seminal authors.
Sometimes atheists read and appreciate them as well, and with all appropriate grace and charity, while I'm glad that others read them too, I don't think they make as much sense for atheists. The Christianity is too foundational - too much of Lewis and Tolkien's writing is impregnated with faith - for them to make sense otherwise.
Pratchett, however, was an atheist, and I think his work is, just as much as Lewis' is with Christianity and Tolkien's is with Catholicism, impregnated with atheism and skepticism. Pratchett is in his own way a very cynical author. Yes, there are gods in Discworld, but they are not particularly worth worshipping, and the religion he is most sympathetic to, the Omnians, are portrayed as nice but nonetheless engaging in a kind of sympathetic self-delusion.
Pratchett's real heroes are existentialists, like Sam Vimes, or Granny Weatherwax, or Death. Death admits openly: "There is no justice. There's just me." Vimes is a man who is fully aware that the society he lives in is corrupt, unjust, and miserable, and yet, grumbling all the while, refuses to submit to nihilism, and makes the world a bit better. Weatherwax is a woman who dismisses religion and faith with, "I've already got a hot water bottle", and yet nonetheless spends her life trying, in her own irascible way, to make the world a little better for the people who live in it.
Often I find, when I read a lot by an author, that author has a kind of general tone or mood. Lewis has an erudite yet common-sensical decency to him. Tolkien is wistful, and lost in memory. Chesterton is delighted by paradox. Adams is wrily amused at the absurdity of the world. The mood I get from Pratchett is, surprisingly for a comedian, anger. Pratchett writes with this white-hot anger at injustice, at unfairness, at a world where stupid bullies tread all over ordinary people just trying to enjoy the good things this world offers. More than that, I think Pratchett has a kind of moral outrage at God. God refuses to even do us the decency of existing so that he can be properly accused of neglect!
Lewis or Tolkien look at the world and they see something there, a divine wellspring to creation, a loving creator who fashioned us, in whom we live and love and have our being, and to whom we will return. Pratchett looks at the world and sees none of that. It's not there. The world may be full of powerful beings separate from us, but they don't really care, and they can't give meaning to life. So what do you do?
I think Pratchett's Discworld books are, in their core, about how to be moral in a godless, meaningless universe.
Yes, he writes comedy. That's the other big difference between him and Lewis/Tolkien. The Christian authors are funny sometimes, but they're saying something sincerely. Pratchett is trying to make you laugh, but he's always, I think, got this really sharp bite aimed at all the absurdities and injustices of the world. Pratchett thus has sympathy for the idealists - consider Sergeant Carrot, or the good Omnians like Brutha or Mightily Oats - but ultimately he's closer to Vimes or Weatherwax or Susan Sto Helit. The world is frequently garbage and disappointing. There is no avoiding that. But this is the one you've got and it's up to you to do your best anyway.
There is no justice other than what we make happen ourselves. So we had best get to work.
Put charitably, this is what I think the "atom of justice" speech is trying to say. Justice isn't a metaphysical constant; it's not out there, it's not written into the fabric of the universe, and there isn't a god coming to make it happen for us. We have to do it ourselves. If stories about gods or spirits or hogfathers have any virtue, it's that they train us to believe the impossible, to go on seeking justice, despite the emptiness of the universe we're in.
Suppose you were a young, teenage atheist, and a fantasy fan. You like people like Lewis or Tolkien, or even their lesser imitators like Robert Jordan, or Weis and Hickman. However, you cannot share their faith, or make that connection. What can you do? Pratchett comes along and writes equally entertaining stories, in an equally expansive mythos, that addresses this question for you. Here's what you do if you share these values, but can't believe in their metaphysical commitments. You acknowledge this godless universe and then set out to make justice happen anyway. More than even that, Pratchett's theory of "the little lies" actually helps contextualise the Christian authors - perhaps Narnia or Middle-earth are lies, but they are lies that help prepare you to believe, and fight for, the big ones.
(Compare Lewis' Puddleglum: "...I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.")
So, all that said, why do I hate the "atom of justice" speech?
Well, mainly just for the reason I said. I think it doesn't work because it's a straw-man. Nobody believes that justice comes in atoms, or mercy in molecules. Things that aren't elemental particles are not lies, or any less worthy of being valued or loved. Death's rebuttal of people who believe in justice does not land, and because I know Pratchett was a brilliant author and extremely capable fantasist, I believe that Pratchett could have come up with a metaphor that worked. It is not beyond his imagination to make the same point in a more artful way. After all, most of his other books make the same point, often more successfully.
Maybe I am just an intolerable pedant. But I hope it comes through that I'm saying this from a place of appreciation for Pratchett.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
The Avignon papacy was from the 14th century. That's all it means.
It is probably my least favourite Pratchett passage - it may not be objectively the worst, but I think it's a terrible argument, and people citing it as inspirational drive me crazy. I want to yell, "It's not inspirational! It's stupid! It's very, very stupid!"
But I might be a little unfair.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Dangit, now I'm embarrassed that you got to the Pratchett comparison before me.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
It's conceivably possible that Colby overreached, or used heated rhetoric that others in the administration would not have signed off on.
I'm skeptical that the administration would have explicitly decided to try to threaten or bully the Vatican, but it would be pretty believable than Colby was told to be as persuasive and forceful as possible, and that in line with the generally bullying, thuggish culture of the Trump White House, that turned into a threat. Someone like Vance could discover that and sincerely feel appalled.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Human rights are fiction created by the state and existing only trough the state.
This is very much not consensus.
There are, I think, broadly two schools of thought on human rights.
The first is what I'll call rights realism, and it's the older, more traditional one. Rooted in natural law, it is objectively the case that different beings carry with them different moral duties and obligations. Understanding what something is implies certain normative principles about what can or must be done concerning that thing. In this specific case, humans, simply by virtue of being human, possess certain moral rights and imply certain duties. This is the theory implied by documents like the US declaration of independence ("...the laws of nature and of nature's God..."), and the Abrahamic religions tend to be quite keen on this. 'Human rights' are thus an attempt to recognise and codify these rights and duties. Any given legal regime is almost certainly flawed, even more so in the implementation, but is nonetheless commendable to recognise and try to protect the natural rights of every human being.
The second is what I'll call the constructivist view, and it says that, though rights don't necessarily exist in nature in a direct way, rights language represents a communal decision. It an aspiration - the universal declaration of human rights, say, is a declaration that we as a community have decided that human beings must be treated in this way. Human rights in this sense are a social fact, but no less important or binding for that. Note that the constructivists do not require the state. Social realities can exist outside of and prior to the state.
I note that your rebuttal fails to move both of these schools:
And it is easy to prove - take any human, do the thoroughest possible vivisection on them and you won't be able to find a single right.
This is like Death's 'atom of justice' speech, and it's wrong for the same reason. Neither school is saying that human rights are physical things. The realists believe that moral rights and duties exist objectively despite being non-physical. They are not materialists. And the rights constructivists fully understand that they're talking about a social reality.
Even a determined materialist isn't going to be moved by your argument, or by Death's. Materialists do not believe that nothing that isn't a physical object exists. Things can be properties of states of affairs. Death is wrong because justice or mercy are attributes of states of affairs, not elementary particles, and no less real for that. Some configurations of molecules are just and other configurations are not, the same way that some configurations correspond to living things and some configurations do not, and Death's entire existence is premised on that distinction. Likewise some arrangements of human beings are humans-rights-respecting, and some are humans-rights-violating. It is coherent to say that a torturer vivisecting someone to look for the 'rights' organ is violating a human right, even though he will never find such an organ.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Not if you want to be re-elected.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
That's my first impression, at least. If this is roughly the shape of a status quo that holds, Iran pretty much won.
But at this point I know better than to assume that an agreement that Trump agreed to is worth very much. We will see if anything holds.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
To be unnecessarily nitpicky, it's inter regnum, and regnum means 'kingdom', 'reign', or 'authority'. As Etymonline notes, the term was used in the Roman republic, to mean a time between consuls. As such, though it is etymologically related to rex, 'king', I think both the Romans and ourselves validly use the term to mean any interruption in political authority.
Constitutionally, the American system is designed to never have an interregnum. If the president dies, the next person in the line of succession instantly becomes president - the office is never vacant. Western monarchies often work the same way - "the king is dead, long live the king". The throne is never empty. The presidency is the monarchal element of the American constitution (America being a Polybian mixed constitution), and it too is never empty.
That said asdasdasdasd is clearly using the term more informally, to just mean something like 'interruption'.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
And progressives haven't progressed anything, what's your point? :P
More seriously, I think it depends on the time-scale you look at and who you think counts as a 'conservative', and I'm also inclined to think that it's unfair to judge a movement for not necessarily succeeding overall. Movements tend to name themselves for their goals - we understand that it's not really that fair to criticise American libertarians or communists for not having restored liberty or brought communism, because those are small parties. How small is 'conservatism' as a movement? Over the last decade or so there's been plenty of writing trying to distinguish 'conservatives' from 'the right', with the understanding that actual conservatives might be a significantly smaller tribe than was realised.
Anyway, if I look at the last two hundred years so, I think that conservatives, in a broad sense, have achieved plenty of things. Not everything they wanted, certainly, but I wouldn't say their efforts were wasted. Eugenics and communism stand out as probably the two biggest issues that conservatives were on the winning side of.
My recollection is that most of the Halo novels are what Warhammer fans refer to as 'bolter porn'. I remember liking The Fall of Reach, which was a perfectly adequate and entertaining page-turner, but then looking at The Flood, Contact Harvest, Ghosts of Onyx, and so on, the quality decreased quickly. Greg Bear's Forerunner trilogy is by reputation decent, but it also has pretty much nothing to do with Halo.
I think it would be fair to say that the Halo series is about gameplay, first and foremost, and its extended 'lore' is pretty forgettable. I know they try to do something interesting with the UNSC being evil, but as far as the games are concerned (or at least the original trilogy), "humans good, aliens bad" is all you need to know.
(The UNSC does have to be pretty sketchy if they were the kind of people who kidnapped children in order to make brainwashed surgically-enhanced super-soldiers to put down a colonial rebellion, even prior to contact with the Covenant. In the original game manual, it is not clear whether SPARTAN-IIs predate contact with the Covenant or not, and you can read them as being a desperation project in the face of repeated defeats at alien hands. But the novels put paid to that. I bring this up because the top-level post praises Halo's moral clarity and lack of ambiguity, but in terms of the EU, it didn't even make it through a single novel - technically released prior to the original game! - before telling us "actually the human government is evil too".)
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