WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I put Master of Orion aside for a little while, and tried playing Nox. I played it for about an hour or two one night, and just couldn't muster a single fuck to give about it. I donno.
I saw Mechwarrior 5: Clans is coming out soon, which motivated me to try Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries again. I was so god damned excited about that game, preordered it and everything. But it was just so... blah when it came out. The radar system was just fucking useless. I think it was barely better than line of sight on release? And enemies could spawn anywhere you didn't have radar coverage. Which meant while I was stomping along at 20 kph in my Awesome, enemies were constantly appearing out of thin air directly behind me on the terrain I just traversed. There was a Better Spawns mod, but it would constantly get broken, and then fixed right in time for another fucking DLC to come out and break it again.
Anyways, the game is done, no more DLC, probably only maintenance patches, I think I can count on mods to work for a while. So I loaded up Battle Spawns 2.2, a UI mod that fixes things on 32:9 displays, and I edited the unreal engine ini file to be hor+ instead of vert-. And let me tell you, the game is finally good. It's finally a Mechwarrior title worthy of all the others. Radar is vastly more functional, enemy spawns are much more sensical, often from drop ships 400m away to give you some time to regroup. I'm all in this time. No more petering out and getting distracted. I might even bust out my HOTAS again and climb that skill cliff once more.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
The ruling class in America wants to put COVID behind them because they got to "work" from home, control others, their investments and homes appreciated wildly in value, and they still got to flaunt the rules when it suited them.
Other people missed weddings, funerals, their children fell behind in school, their mental health suffered and they lost businesses. But they aren't the ruling class, so their concerns are entirely ignored.
But don't mistake the ruling class being "over" COVID with the people who's lives they ruined being over it.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I did Kung Fu for a long while, and while the school was fairly no nonsense, you got a lot of people there into woo-woo bullshit. Once at a dinner, some guy was talking about some "Kung Fu Master" he knew when he was a younger man and he was travelling. The master claimed he could turn invisible and nobody could see him. To demonstrate this to guy at the table, master said he'd walk through a subway turnstile without paying, right in front of a cop, and the cop wouldn't stop him. Well, he did, and the cop didn't, and guy at the table was remarking how amazing it was that "Kung Fu Master" could turn invisible.
Without missing a beat I said "But you saw him."
Poor bastard's brain segfaulted right then and there. Just sputtered, every attempt to speak was just sentence fragments, with some broken syllables mixed in, and then he eventually went quiet.
Probably the singular time I ever called someone out on a woo-woo bullshit story and actually broke them. Normally the flow of bullshit just absorbs and works around any rock thrown into it's currents.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Don't ask questions about group differences if you're going to just turn around and go "but I don't do thing".
Either we understand that we are making generalizations that aren't going to apply to everyone, or we don't.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
IMHO, nearly every question that begins "Why do women....?" can be answered by "They are standard deviations more neurotic and agreeable than you."
Why do women gravitate towards woo-woo bullshit like astrology? Because it can never be wrong, and the wound of being wrong is far worse for women (due to neuroticism) than men. Of course they gravitate towards "knowledge" that is completely unfalsifiable. It's safe, it's cozy, and they can indulge in it as much as they please without ever risking the pain of being wrong about anything.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
There doesn't seem to be. I think recently RLM talked about how Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was officially a Hollywood sellout, and if he's in a movie you should run the other way. I remember when Top Gun: Maverick came out, people talked about how Tom Cruise is the last movie star. The last actor who's name alone can draw people to a picture.
Don't be sad it's over, be glad for all the good movie we already got.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Yeah, I'm not quite that cynical about slightly more complex 4x games. I do still love everything Civilization up through 4. But I can see where you are coming from. But to me, it's not a waste to treat a 4x game like a story telling device. Sub optimal play is fine. Sometimes perfectly optimized play is just the enemy of fun. I'm reminded of the starvation strategy in the board game Stone Age. Or the Halifax Hammer in A Few Acres of Snow, although I'm skeptical how game ruining that strategy actually was as the story behind it, so near as I've seen, is interesting.
It's been probably 20 years since I played MoO3, but I remember the game just sort of ran itself. It was difficult to tell what impact anything you did had on anything, so much was automated, indirect and abstracted. I've been watching Tex play Ultimate Admiral Dreadnaughts, because I love to listen to him sperg about history while he plays. But it seems to be a game of similar qualities. He acts like he knows what he's doing, and these arbitrary decisions he makes in budget allocations and ship design are yielding concrete results. I can scarcely tell by watching it.
I think it's also why I avoid a lot of grand strategy games. Especially the grand strategy games with dozens of different DLC. I remember looking into Endless Space 2, because I enjoyed the first one, and it was like land mines which DLC were good and which break the game with bullshit. And how does a game like that even work after 20 expansion packs worth of modifications? Fucking what? Back in my day, a solid strategy game got a single expansion pack to round out it's short comings, if it even had any.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Moo3 bored me to tears when it came out. I don't know if it ever got "fixed". Galactic Civilizations 2 became my goto 4x after that, then Endless Space. After that 4x just got weird imho. Just endless dlc platforms. I can't stand it.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
So I've been playing a lot of Master of Orion. I simply adored Master of Orion 2, and the pages of Computer Gaming World considered it the apex of 4X games until Galactic Civilizations 2 came out in 2004, where they begrudgingly admitted GalCiv2 was at least as good as Master of Orion 2, maybe.
Going back to the first one, I'm struck by it's simplicity. No more building individual improvements on planets, it's all more abstract with sliders for different production. Tech makes these cheaper, more efficient, etc. Combat is just the one two punch of fleet battle, and then sending in the shock troops. And that's just as easy as hitting the "TRANS" button to send population, the same way you'd shuffle it between your own colonies. No need to build specialized troop transports or anything. I kind of love it. It has a simple, but good enough, system of setting rally points for ships you build. And if you ever get tired of slowly conquering planets and then getting them up to speed and productive, you can just glass them from orbit instead. Easy peasy, no special tech required. You get nuclear bombs from the start, and it seems like all sorts of different weapon tech can bombard planets.
I find the end game to be a breeze, unlike almost any other 4X game I've played that devolve into micro management hell. I remember encountering people who always sword Master of Orion 1 was better than 2, and I think I can see why. In a world where 4X has grown into grand strategy, MoO1 is downright casual, and it's fucking fantastic for it.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Recently Trump's campaign published a massive list of calls to violence against him by Democratic operatives in government and media. There are clips of Democratic operatives on cable news saying someone needs to put a bullet into Donald Trump.
It's old now, but I wonder if anyone remembers the first season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I haven't watched it in probably 15-20 years, but a major plotline from it is that the intelligence services essentially meme an assassination attempt of a prominent politician into reality. They craft this narrative around the politicians inevitable assassination at the hands of an unstoppable and mysterious foe, The Laughing Man, and a "Stand Alone Complex" kicks in and rando's take up the call to be the Laughing Man. And all this serves as misdirection to the security forces trying to protect the politician, because they are on the lookout for a elite assassination scheme, and instead an army of tards attacks.
Anyways, what was I saying?
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Yeah, it was so stupid of JD Vance to use the exact same language his opponents use, ignorant to the fact that they can redefine language at their whim. Just so stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
JD Vance folded, said that he was making things up to get the conversation going.
This is a gross misrepresentation of what JD Vance said. Yes, his exact words were "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do". IMHO though, in the full context of the back and forth he said that, "stories" is analogous to "headline" not "fiction". If some journalist, and he's arguing with a journalist, was having a conversation where they said they created or wrote a story, you wouldn't not assume they meant they were passing off their own fiction as news. "News story" is a colloquial phrase. Almost every news outlet brags about having "top stories". Vance is clearly talking about creating a news cycle, not making shit up.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
it's clear that there would be a lot of collateral damage
How is that clear? How many people, who are not the people holding them, can an exploding pager hurt? Supposedly these were all pagers bought by Hezbollah and distributed to their operators? Sounds like the most targeted strike, with the least collateral damage, that I've ever heard of or could ever imagine.
Yes, i did know id get modded for saying a true thing and citing my sources like you tell me to. It says more about you than it does me.
Edit: You know what, this is getting under my skin. You always tell me if I'm going to say something inflammatory, I need to have citations. I include citations, and you lump actually having the citations you told me to have along with my other "stunts". You told me to include citations. Don't use that against me when you mod me.
Furthermore, you act like they aren't even real. Like they don't even count, without any basis. Just "Nope, you don't get to use citations for that." We doing hate facts now here?
Then you go on to act like I've spent the last day calling Haitians retards all over. "if every time people referred to Haitians they called them 'retards'". Well it's a good thing I only did it once then, isn't it? And came with citations to show the majority of Haitians meet the clinical definition of retard.
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
When your political enemies are sacrificing their children to Baal, I don't know that trying to stop them is a winning long-term strategy.
Turns out when your enemies don't have children of their own to ruin, they turn their attention on yours. It's somehow an even worse status quo.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
But the second somebody goes to do any research to confirm or debunk it, they discover that the actual truth is less bad but... still pretty fucking bad.
Too bad for Trump virtually nobody does that, and most avenues silo you away from trying to. You have the official spin teams like NYT and Snopes somehow leaving you believing a lie while still only telling the technical truth themselves. Then all the actual independents who did their own research get siloed into a "misinformation" or "conspiracy theorist" bucket. And then, if you manage to break through all those barriers, if you try to share what you learned with anyone, they've been so conditioned they'll still act like you are the weirdo for putting that much effort in or caring so much, and discard what you say.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
I tuned out. I literally couldn't take it anymore. Trump wasn't doing fantastic, but the petty and nitpicky way the moderators constantly interrupted or interjected to "fact check" him, while letting Harris get away with both widely debunked hoaxes (Fine people hoax, suckers and losers hoax, bloodbath hoax), or wild fantastical bold faced lies (Like Trump arming China's military with chips). And then watching all the people come away with the impression that Harris was in command of the debate with a better grasp of the "facts". Or the fence sitting "just calling balls and strikes" people saying "If you have to complain about the moderation that means you lost". All it did was make me plan a trip to my local friendly gun store.
I've been skeptical of these claims that Biden's own side sent him out to die during the first debate. I guess I forgot how much the moderators can put their finger on the scale when they really want to. They absolutely could have rescued Biden back then. +1 for that having been a palace coup.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Its hardly state of the art. We just regularly forget it happens virtually every time.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Autocorrect strikes again.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Dropping a literal biblical plague of retards on your political opponents should be classified as a war crime. We need a new Hague.
Citation 1: Average Hattian IQ is 67
Citation 2: An IQ below 70 is considered retarded
I'm not joking, I'm not being snide. That is the literal, object level thing that was done to a once functional community. How is that not a crime against humanity?
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Demoralization propaganda. Resisting is literally unthinkable to anybody who lives there, even the people complaining about it. They'd never dream of arming up, organizing, planning a date, and taking back their civilization. They most they'll do is meekly complain that the federal government should provide more assistance. Even deportation is probably going too far for most of them.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Ending wars was so popular that Biden also basically didn't start any new wars.
Only technically true, in that he didn't start the war in Ukraine. However it has enormously escalated under his administration, and we're basically bankrupting our nation and ignoring every other priority to keep escalating it.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
I know. That's the point. The last year Trump has been terrible at explaining the things he's seen on Twitter. He just blurts out some words that are kind of a sentence, and if you saw the same meme he saw, you know what he's talking about. Absent that, it's a mystery.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
What's happening in Springfield Ohio is punishment for voting wrong. "Great Replacement Theory" might not be the most watertight explanation. But NGOs run by deranged partisans who viscerally hate white rural Trump voters, as can be plainly seen by most of their social media activity, are certainly executing on perhaps a "Minor Replacement" plan.
I feel like this would be the perfect place for that Pawn Star's meme, where flooded Appalachians are begging for aid, and the Federal Government just goes "Best I can do is 100,000, 67 IQ third worlders"
Having just finished volume three of Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire, I'm reminded of how towards the end the Roman Empire was so depopulated by mismanagement and oppressive taxes (there was a specific anecdote about I think Diocletian temporarily suspending the taxes on having children), as well as civil wars, famine and pestilence that they just started letting Goths and whoever else wanted to cross their borders to raise the GDP of the regions. That these newcomers murdered all the locals and pillaged their cities barely seemed to matter. Did they pay their taxes? Uh.... not really... in fact they demanded thousands of pounds of gold as tribute. But a bunch of Roman bureaucrats got to embezzle money and take bribes so it all worked out in the end.
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