Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
7hr ago
There's no thrill of permadeath whatsoever in fighting a quokka, most derived undead, something you outlevel significantly, or whatever (a rule of thumb for me is "can I safely melee this as a caster? trash fight"). Though you always have to watch for anything walking onscreen while you're tabbing the quokka. What I don't like are the situations where, for instance, your character is at a point where you can mindlessly melee a komodo dragon or a troll one-on-one almost all the time, but suddenly a series of rolls go differently and now you're scrambling to escape this one scrub (early game is awful for this too but that's WAD I guess, early game is supposed to suck). Tying GDR to AC instead of body armour was a big improvement, and I suppose the converse is that characters can escape when they should absolutely die due to the enemy rolling low. My thinking on DCSS's design is that many enemies are meant to be unchallenging one-on-one, depending on your character, so that they can create interesting challenges when they show up in combination with each other, without those group fights being impossible to overcome without luring.
More generally, and I know I always bang this drum, I think a game which can accidentally double player damage without anyone noticing, during a tournament needs to take a long hard look at its philosophy around damage rolls. It also creates a pretty boring version of optimal play (and I say this as someone who can win pretty often, currently have an MDFW tearing up Zot), where you are focused on minimizing your exposure to 1% chances of death. Honestly I don't think you need to play like that to win regularly, just to play as well as the best players, but the devs seem obsessed with taking away boring tools for optimal play without ever asking "why does our design philosophy push players towards this path".
Bartender_Venator
17hr ago
Wow. A true Hegelian - you are quite literally the only person I have ever seen call it the Lord-Bondsman dialectic instead of the Master-Slave dialectic (following the translations of Kojeve, Lacan, etc.). Though I would say, that, at least through the prism of my Kojevean reading, any honest interpretation of this dialectic for the present has to put capitalists and workers on the same side (as the Slave) against the State.
Bartender_Venator
22hr ago
To be fair, lab ethanol probably will make you puke (eventually).
Bartender_Venator
22hr ago
"He's a bastard, but he's our bastard, and he'll be a bastard to our enemies" is as old as time, and I can promise you it existed in the golden age of machine politics - probably more prevalent then. Physical harm of women and children is just a different ball-game and people react to it differently.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
This is what I find annoying about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: the incredibly swingy damage formulas mean that a trash fight can become a captcha fight and even a challenge real quick, so the optimal way to play is to treat encounters that 99% of the time are trash as if they are about to kill you. The trash/challenge fights both work well (autofight is very quick, and the challenges are good), and it's often the case that multiple trash monsters create combinations that you have to take seriously, but imo the game would be much better if the RNG variance was toned down so that the types were more clearly distinguished.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
The two are related. Almost every Big Guy soccer player is perennially injured - the torque that big muscles or even a big frame puts on your joints really adds up over the levels of sustained work that a soccer player's body is expected to put in just to be competitive. The only exception is the old-fashioned big striker who hangs out up front and doesn't run all that much except to try and score a goal, and those are only fielded by low-ranked teams.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Given that people tend to be somewhat looks-blind across race, my personal standard for black actresses is "if I were swiping on Tinder in Cape Town or Dar or Dakar, would she stand out", and Lupita Nyong'o fails that bar. But she fails it in a very particular way - she's a white liberal's idea of an Attractive But Strong (But Not Too Attractive) black woman. A couple decades ago and Hollywood would have dolled her up in a perfectly spherical afro.
Personally, I suspect she was cast because some extremely canny publicist identified her as ideal to cause controversy to drive marketing metrics, but most people aren't ready for the level of conspiracy theorizing you need to actually understand Hollywood (Mulholland Drive was a documentary).
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I've got some news for you about the average American of beer-drinking age...
This is basically entirely correct. And I feel very bad for the guys who are too autismal or not experienced enough to get it. You can actually just emulate an entire reddit leftist in your head as easily as your laptop can emulate a gameboy advance (the apolitical normie you meet at the dive bar pool table is much more complex and difficult to emulate than the redditor with his Interests and Hobbies), it's not that much processing power, they're not exactly ClaudeGPT Grokopus 69.420 one zillion parameters, they're just basically normal people who are a standard deviation dumber than the average motteposter trying to do what they feel is socially expected of them to be good. They want to be good people. Their rules of being a Good Person are not particularly difficult to understand, emulate, and manipulate, and if you consider yourself a right-winger this should be table stakes to show your face in public alongside not being fat and knowing how a sport jacket should fit.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I have two fond memories of European Starbuckses (Starbucii?) - first, a heatwave in Nuremberg, where the Euro lack of air conditioning meant that the local Starbucks, with its fan and tiled floor, was the closest thing to relief and, secondly, coming to the end of a two-month backpacking trip and finding a Starbucks on the Asian side of Istanbul, and the strange relief of knowing that at least one thing today would be the same as it always was.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I thought it was half a maB of hefeweizen
Interesting, in my experience watching American football I'm basically unable to tell when the action will resume in a given space of milling around. I assume you pick that up fairly quickly.
In my experience, women go for soccer very quickly, but they only remember the good-looking players (I have an American friend who still occasionally asks about Olivier Giroud) or the villains of a given team. It's easier for sports-agnostic women to experience sports as personal drama between men - see also the explosion of F1 interest.
I think the connection to baseball is a meaningful one, even if cricket is probably closer than baseball to the abstract idea of American football you're portraying. American sports are, generally, optimized for ultra-intense fan engagement with lots of statistics, whereas old-world sports tend more towards "may the best man win, old chap" with relatively less structure around that. Personally, I sort of appreciate that the stats wonks in soccer aren't really that useful, but it also means that there's very little to actually think about beyond watching the games and scouting transfers. Tactics are incredibly important to a team, but you've discussed them to death by Monday.
I can see the Fire Emblem metaphor, though I think the "war simulator" thing has been tortured to death (I could also give a spiel on how soccer and rugby are closer to small-unit infantry tactics - let alone that soccer fans engage in much closer activities to war than any professional athlete...) and we should accept that the war-related psychological inheritances that sport activates in us have almost nothing to do with what happens on the pitch.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
I think a lot of people are basically pretending they have social lives now but in fact spend all the time they can bedrotting with a screen. The men you just don't hear about, they drop out of the offline world completely, but many women still accept invitations from friends, go on dating apps, etc. when they're as stuck inside as a junkie in a traphouse.
I suppose so. Though there's a lot of coaching and player specialization involved in other sports, it's just the most extreme in American football because there isn't the need for players to fill other roles (even in cricket, you occasionally get the equivalent of your big guy needing to kick a field goal). Do you feel that the emphasis in ultra-specializing players physically is good or bad for that chess-style of watching?
Personally, I simply cannot understand the appeal of a sport where you sit around watching largely unimportant nonsense for almost all the time in the hope of catching 30 seconds of action - I already have my girlfriend for that.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
Cuba has an estimated 5.5 million tons of nickel deposits (for reference, Indonesia has the most in the world, at 21 million), but produces less than 50,000 tons a year. They have the third largest deposits of cobalt in the world. I wouldn't be surprised if they have more minerals I don't see on a cursory google, since the Caribbean is a mineral-rich region. They also have chrome, copper, gold, zinc, etc. and possibly offshore oil. Not enough to fully bootstrap your economy off (Jamaica might get >80% of export value from bauxite, but you want to do better than Jamaica), but a good start for developing domestic industry in a non-Communist context.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
It's not really American football vs soccer. The reality is that, if you haven't grown up watching either rugby or American football, and then you were exposed to both, you'd never choose the latter as a viewing experience. The rest of the world has their own version of American football, but more free-flowing, more naturally physical, and less advertisercucked. Even the Japanese play rugby.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
And yet, after drawing with Cape Verde, Spain won the tournament, holding the world champions to a single shot. The nature of football is that it evens out over the course of a campaign, without being boringly predictable. (Also, with regard to your second point, football players use their upper bodies a ton when competing for the ball - to keep balance, hold space, know where the other player is, control their movements, etc. You don't notice it, because it only becomes really obvious to a new viewer when it turns into a foul. There's a reason the players don't look like cyclists).
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
I agree. The perfect sport is one where both teams show up to the pitch, the computer decides who is better, and the victory is awarded to the superior team. You don't even need to get your cleats dirty.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
Sure, I agree with the points you're making. I'm just trying to say that these prospects come and go every year, every top club's fans are hyped up about their academy players, or some other academy prospect they want to sign, and the majority of them go the Januzaj route. Some are cut early, some make it into their early twenties and then go to Bremen or Getafe or Tottenham, and a few make it to be stars, but always far fewer than fans expect in a given season.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
It's a numbers game, modulated by the attractiveness of your pictures and your standards for looks.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
Then my guess is that you're scaring the hoes in your logistics messaging somehow. But, also, women are just inherently flakey, and luck blows hot and cold in all aspects of life. Sometimes it'll be a string of "haha something came up sorrrrry", sometimes you'll get a "lol im so drunk can i just come over" and sometimes it'll be "lol im so drunk can i just come over" and she comes over and loses her hearing in one ear mid-makeout and you have to take her to urgent care at midnight because she has a pierced eardrum. This shit's weird, man, all you can do is dial in things on your end - including uncomfortable reflection on your technique - and then ride the waves as they come.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
You know ball. However, I would say that in football, there's a constant pattern of youth players who are physically dominant on U-16/18/21 teams (black, white, and hispanic) failing to kick on after that peak. It's kind of priced into football youth development in a way it isn't in American football. Also, breaking through early and playing a ton of minutes is a recipe for being an injury disaster in your late 20s, as the example of Rooney (or Jack Wilshere, or Gareth Bale - btw I disagree with your assessment of Rooney, he went to United at 18 and was their top league scorer in his first season) shows; late-blooming players often have much longer peaks because by the time they reach that peak of game intelligence their body is still able to handle it. Helps if you're in Spain/France and thus doped to the gills, of course.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
Saka (starboy), Madueke, Eze, Rashford, Ivan Toney, Marc Guehi, Nico O'Reilly, Reece James, Djed Spence, Jarrel Quansah (red card lol), Mainoo (why), and I think I'm missing some. The England squad is very black, particularly London players.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
I think we've talked about Chicago before, but it's a tough city when it comes to dating. If you're looking for a tradwife type (under 300lbs) you're SOL. My strategy for assembling a roster in Chicago was pretty simple: decent photos, signal class/exoticism, hide all hoe-scaring interests, take her to a wine bar near a park on the first date, go "stargazing" in the park after, kiss her, have a line to get her back to your place with a modicum of deniability. If you want a girl who isn't extraordinarily boring, swipe on service industry girls or wannabe art hoes. Establish rapport and then quickly move to date logistics, never talk politics or sperg out, brush aside any of that with jokes.
Quality post, may Allah curse Universal Culture. However, I have become painfully aware that this process is happening almost everywhere, at different rates; America is just ground zero for postmodernity. America has lost much of its Americanness, but Britain has lost an awful lot of its Britishness, Turkey has lost some of its Turkishness, even Africa has lost a bit of its character. I look forward to revisiting Ukraine sometime, to see if the antidote to postmodernity is in fact brutal trench warfare.
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