Soteriologian
3d ago
I know it sounds gay, but it really is a loss of civilisational vision. There is no Mandate of Heaven that inspires gifted people to actually build cool stuff.
Part of this is that everything is so myopically chart-driven from the top down. It's one of the things I like about the Arabs: was the Burj Khalifa "worth it" in some strictly financial, bean-counter sense? Almost certainly not. It would have been vastly more efficient to build a bunch of concrete boxes and use the space for the same purpose.
But the Arabs do not have such a severe chart-worshipping brainworm infestation. The Burj Khalifa is badass, and badassery justifies itself.
Soteriologian
3d ago
I do start to worry that we don't have a sufficient supply of competent people
I think this is less of a problem than may at first appear. I think large amounts of human capital is locked up in playing video games. Obviously the median player is basically useless, but there are so many skilled players who don't aspire to much besides playing video games.
I was watching a former world record run of FFVII recently and the guy doing it was the most milquetoast underachiever in life I could imagine. He was talking about how his dream job was to finish community college and get a union job as an electrician. Or take Haelian, a pro Hades player with multiple world firsts in various challenges: before switching to full-time gaming, I think he worked at Walgreens (as a shelf stocker, not a strategist at corporate HQ). As a strong believer in Spearman's hypothesis, I'm confident these people severely underestimate how gifted they are and how successful they could be in mainstream professional work. They're just lowborn, and don't view the professional world as something that's even available to them. And it's not like the cultural class markers even relevant anymore -- this isn't Victorian England, where you have to hold your spoon in the right way or be shunned by civilised society. Musk is off smoking pot on Joe Rogan, and Alex Karp is apparently doing crack before going on interviews. The behavioral standards are not high. If you're competent, you're allowed in.
Soteriologian
3d ago
Russia has quite a lot of nuclear power, which is remarkable considering that, as you say, they care minimally about the environment and have abundant access to fossil fuels. Further, it's worth noting that the more civilised European parts of Russia are the parts with the most nuclear power, comprising around 40% of their generation.
If nuclear power is competitive with Russian fossil fuels, that means it's pretty darn cheap!
China doesn't have much nuclear power at present, but they are investing an enormous amount in building plants, and their forecasts are that it will quadruple in proportion of their energy supply over the next 25 years--and that's with the buildout of other energy sources!
Soteriologian
3d ago
The voters maybe, at least the under-40s, but the blue party is tightly controlled by pro-Israel donors, which is why Kamala quite literally sunk her campaign over the matter. I'm confident she'd have won the election if she'd just given some pro-Palestine statements and made some empty girlboss threats to reign in Israeli behavior (which she could easily backtrack on after being elected. No need to keep campaign promises to anyone who isn't a large donor).
Soteriologian
3d ago
They have AI trained on all our racist group chats.
we will spend our lives in an environment of declining energy availability and increasing ecological catastrophe
We've had the answer to this since the discovery of nuclear fission, we just gaslight ourselves into pretending we don't by regulating it off the board and saying "it just isn't profitable 🤷♂️"
Amusingly, the West may finally come to its senses on this matter as it's under threat of losing the entire game board to China. Civilisational suicide would be totally cool in a vacuum, but when there's a rival, it looks like you're just coping for losing, rather than virtuously killing yourself, which is totally not cool.
Tangentially, this is why I view fusion as basically irrelevant: if we get fusion, we'll just make that illegal, too.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Thanks! Sounds worth a shot, will pick it up sometime.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
How is the story/characters? One of the most off-putting things about SMT5 is it didn't feel like it had any characters at all. I don't even mean they felt cliché: they felt inert, like mannequins. I'd happily take a stereotypical JRPG hero over the Nahobino/whatever-his-real-name-is any day.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
How is Metaphor? I'm a Persona fan (3/4/5), but when I tried SMT5 I didn't like it at all. The battle system was mechanically better and had more depth, but everything else was worse. Much worse. In particular, the constant echo-y audio drove me mad. I stopped playing after the first chapter and haven't returned.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I haven't even updated yet and I still get the joy of Telegram adapting to the new Liquid Glass paradigm. It looks so bad.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
As you say, these actually mostly make the game harder, but they allow you to do content faster if you're good enough.
Well, Bloodboil Aromatic in particular does not allow you to do content faster: it's a huge pain in the ass to farm the recipe and materials! There is no world in which doing a boss 20 seconds faster is going to make up for 15 minutes of farming.
Bloodboil Aromatic, as far as I can divine, has exactly one use: doing nuke build tricks. If they'd make my adaptation and just get rid of the damage-taken penalty, it would have lots of uses! You'd have to do this arcane farming routine, but it would indeed give you a big boost that might help you beat a boss you were having trouble with.
Now, damage-gamble talismans (as opposed to consumables) like Fire Scorpion Charm do have a much more common use: they're good for level 1 challenge runs. If you're going to die in one hit anyway, then it makes no difference if you take more damage, so equipping something like the Fire Scorpion Charm is all buff and no downside. And unlike Bloodboil, skilled players do use it since, it's not a consumable so you don't have to farm it each time you want to use it--you just pick it up once and equip it.
Anyway, I do agree that having a variety of items with weird cost/benefit analyses can make the game more interesting. But even here, what you'd want is "complicated" items for skilled players to not require farming (as good players will just skip it if it does), and all-good-no-downside items for unskilled players to be the sort of thing you'd be able to craft from naturally exploring the world and having an inventory full of materials. Bloodboil is the exact opposite of this principle.
Finally, you have to compare these things not in a vacuum, but to other stuff that exists in the game: compare Bloodboil Aromatic to Flame, Grant Me Strength. The latter is a spell, meaning you pick it up once (right from the start of the game, if you know where it is) and use it as many times as you want, it grants +20% to both physical and fire damage, it occupies the same "internal" buff slot as Bloodboil Aromatic (meaning you can't use these two at the same time), and there's no damage taken penalty!
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Richard Hanania, author of The Origins of Woke, suggests that these sorts of group chats are actually really common among the right wingers he interacted with. In fact his response to this seems to indicate agreement this chat is tame compared to many conversations he has seen.
It is. In a darknet chat, I once saw someone say
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I did not enjoy Infinite Jest. The author is a gifted wordcel: he has nothing worthwhile to say, but he is very good at saying it. It's just Reddit philosophy, dressed well.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
In this context, choosing to join underground resistance group was choosing to die for the cause, soon and often in rather unpleasant way, and it was clear to everyone.
Why would it be clear to everyone? It's clearly false: the war ended within a year, with their team winning. In fact, this resistance leader himself survived the war.
I'm not saying there aren't people with a martyrdom fetish, but that's their problem, not an objective analysis of the situation or even a coherent strategy. In the words of one of the generals on the winning team: "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
Soteriologian
2mo ago
We use shock collars on the employees at all my firms. They’re there to do a job: they receive food and some coins as the carrot, but there has to be a stick, too. I don’t see why dogs should be any different.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
I agree with much of this. My issue is that Elden Ring is saturated with mechanics that compound unnaturally well in favor of knowledgeable or skilled players and are either useless for casuals or actively counterproductive for them. Take Bloodboil Aromatic: it's extremely expensive to make (requiring an Arteria leaf), meaning you can only use it sparingly. Yet it increases your damage taken by 25%! As a casual player, by far your number one concern is bosses killing you before you have a chance to heal, which this item (and many others, e.g., Fire Scorpion Charm) exacerbates. So what exactly is the point of this item? "Well, if you're good enough to not need it, it makes the game a lot easier!" Yay?
If I were the designer, I'd just remove the penalties on these items. Similarly, the Great Rune system is only useful if you're good at the game and don't need it anyway. I'd just remove rune arcs entirely: once you have a great rune, you can just set it and it's active. These changes make things easier for bad players, while not changing anything for skilled players (and if you want to rebalance the game around this by increasing boss HP, the net effect is the game is the same difficulty for casuals, while being harder for good players).
Even potions (ahem, Flask of Crimson Tears) run afoul of this. Good players don't need these at all: just don't get hit, yo. But for bad players, attempting to use a potion often causes you to get hit, as the animation is painfully long and many bosses are coded to input read it. Again, this could be trivially redesigned in a way that's better for everyone: make potions fast or even instant, and increase boss HP to compensate. For casuals, potions would actually feel useful; for better players who weren't using potions anyway, the game gets harder.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the DLC, aesthetically or gameplay-wise, and even the base game's combat often felt "overdeveloped" to me. There were multiple occasions where a boss uses what is obviously a finishing move (e.g., Tree Sentinel raising his weapon and smashing it into the ground) only to PSYCH! ITS NOT ACTUALLY A FINISHER LMAO with some physically-nonsensical follow-up attack to smack you in what obviously "should" have been a punish window. Also, lots of bosses have input reads, where if you try to do anything (in particular use a potion to heal) outside of a designated punish window, they'll immediately intercept your action with a fast attack. I found this extremely crass design.
It feels like FromSoft is annoyed that good players are too good at their games, but the ways in which the developers are trying to raise the difficulty are pretty lame. Though in some sense, I do understand their frustration: Souls games have a skill window that is far smaller than most other games, in the sense that beating them as a casual is quite hard, but learning to play at a near-pro level (in the sense of doing lvl 1 challenges, no-hit challenges, etc.) is surprisingly easy. It really is too difficult to be mediocre at the game, and too easy to be good at the game.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
Elden Ring (and other DS games, afaik) isn't balanced, though! That's my point! You can literally kill the bosses in 1 hit with the right setup (modulo scripted phase transitions)!
And this is especially interesting because the buffs at first glance don't seem like they should be that strong. For example, the Fire Scorpion Charm only gives like +12% to fire damage, and it increases your damage taken by 10% as punishment. Compare that with, say, the Flame Staff in FFXII, which gives +50%. The latter feels much stronger, while the former feels like it barely does anything and probably isn't worth using at all as a casual player.
The reason buffs are so overpowered in Elden Ring isn't because they're so strong; it's because there are so many, and they stack multiplicatively (when they stack at all, which they usually don't). This gives them a synergy that has a net effect far more powerful than the sum of its parts, most of which don't feel particularly powerful at all in isolation.
Here's an example setup: put your stat points in strength, choose a heavy weapon (eg, Giant Hammer), set the Royal Knight's Resolve ashes of war (+80% to the next attack), equip the charge attack talisman (+10% charge attack), set your physick to strength tear and charge tear (+15% charge attack), set an aura buff (e.g., Golden Vow, +15% attack), set a body buff (e.g., Bloodboil Aromatic, +30% attack), equip Red Feather Branch talisman (+20% damage when hp low), wave the Commander's Standard (+20% damage). When you multiply all these out, it's an almost 500% boost! That is a ludicrous, game-breaking amount of damage.
There are lots of variations, especially for fire or holy-weak enemies, and you can freely tweak it around for your convenience -- I mean hey, if you do it suboptimally and it takes a whole two hits to knock the boss into the next phase, will it really ruin your day? You can even do a half-decent version of it using only ingredients from Limgrave (greataxe+6/charge talisman/charge physick tear/determination AOW/golden vow AOW/Oath of Vengeance/exalted flesh). It will take 2 hits to knock Margit to phase 2, which I'd say is sufficient to call imba and say it trivializes the boss.
For what it's worth, the reason this is so counterintuitive is that you cannot just stack buffs arbitrarily, despite the fact that it probably sounds like you can from the above. For example, if you try to use Exalted Flesh and Vyke's Dragonbolt at the same time, this will not work, because these two buffs occupy the same internal "slot" (called "body buff"). To me this is highly counterintuitive, as one of these is a consumable item and the other is a spell, and they don't have effects that are remotely similar. In contrast, you can stack Flame, Grant Me Strength and Golden Vow, despite these both being incantations and having almost the same effects. There is, of course, nothing in the game that explains any of this.
Anyway, my point is the degree of trivialization you get by actually knowing the game mechanics is not normal. Contrast Elden Ring with, say, Kingdom Hearts: there is no amount of game knowledge that will allow you to kill Sephiroth in one hit, or even get remotely close. Knowing the game mechanics does not trivialize the game.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
Yeah, this kind of game design annoys me (although I'm not entirely sure what to do about it). On the one hand, Souls games show you numeric stats -- in fact, you quite literally select which number to increase when you level up, which is a huge amount of freedom in control over numbers. So it looks like you're supposed to care about numbers. But on the other hand, the numbers often behave counterintuitively, and further, the games often hide numbers from you where the value of the number is the only thing of any relevance: e.g., you get an item that "boots fire damage". Ok, boosts by how much? Is it a 5% boost? A 50% boost? Double? It's like the game wants the player to think this is irrelevant, yet even 2 seconds of thought shows it cannot possibly be irrelevant: whether the item is good or not is entirely determined by how big that damn number is!
The especially silly thing is Souls gameplay in particular would be fine with all of this drastically simplified, or even eliminated. The fun part of Souls is learning boss routines and experimenting with new weapons and skills. You could almost get rid of the numbers entirely and still retain what makes the games fun.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
Yeah, the Dark Souls game mechanics are very counterintuitive. In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work. In Elden Ring, you can one-shot (up to phase transitions, which are often hardcoded) every boss in the game by doing the correct buff incantations, which basically renders the entire game trivial. And it's not like this is some glitch or exploit -- it just falls out of basic understanding how buffs stack and doing the obvious thing.
Then again, this is hardly unique to Dark Souls. Basically every single-player game is like this, in the sense that actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower, rather than the baseline expectation.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
I just use extra-strength Tylenol, since it's extra strong. Supplement with Brain Force and a good huff of a helium balloon.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
I haven't tried patch 1.0 yet, but I did play back when the alpha was released.
From what I remember, it's not bad, but I much prefer the vibe of Hades 1. Hades 1 is just very strong thematically - at first you think your dad is kind of a bad guy, keeping you down, but as you fight your way to the surface for your first glimpse of paradise, it becomes apparent that the curse is much deeper than you know: it's in the blood. You were born condemned, to a Sisyphean quest to seek paradise but be denied access, and yet... through your failure, you make lots of friends, realize your troubles may not even be that bad compared to theirs, and well, I won't spoil the ending, but one can almost imagine Sisyphus content. It's a very deep game.
Hades 2 isn't bad, it just... it feels like Arcane season 2 compared to Arcane season 1. It would feel a lot better if its predecessor hadn't set the bar so high. And yes, as you mention, it does feel a bit woker.
Now, admittedly, I haven't played the new 1.0 patch for Hades 2 yet, so I may be missing key aspects of the story that pull things together in ways that make the game deeper. But from what I remember, Chronos sure felt like an actual bad guy, in a very cookie-cutter sense, and there didn't seem to be much thematic depth behind this, like the passage of time rendering the gods increasingly impotent or something (the main character is a witch, after all). It just felt quite shallow.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
Yeah, it's not even a political radical thing. Nikki Haley does it, as does Josh Shapiro.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
That's not how this is going to play out.
At best, you're going to have the ICE data used by megacorps from Apple to Zillow to blacklist these people from ever being employed again; at worst, you're going to have Nuremburg trials for many of the more prominent ICE members (don't worry, they'll be super humane -- no deaths by hanging; that's crass and right-coded. Just prison and felony charges, to make sure you're maximally unemployable).
Given the quality of his manifesto, either it was written by the cops or that $40k/year prep school he was valedictorian of is a total scam. The manifesto isn't even competitive with the median sneedpost on Reddit, much less the median mottepost.
More options
Context Copy link