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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.

    For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.

    I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.





  • Khrux@ttrpg.networktoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAre you a 'tankie'
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    7 months ago

    No.

    This isn’t my standard instance but I do take a look at it sometimes. I’m definitely very far left leaning, I don’t have a label that clearly fits me but I’m probably close enough to anarcho-communism or syndicalism. I live in the UK so it’s pretty common for my views to fall further left of the USA.

    I’m not particularly good at actually adhering to my own views, infact I don’t think I’ve ever done e anything substantial to bringing my ideals into reality. My dream would be for small federated housing / workers co-ops and unions to get a good handle in my area, and then have the stability to grow.

    The crucial reason I’m not a tankie is that I actively oppose top down leadership structures, and I’m actually more against authoritarianism than I am against the right, but I feel that in my country, conservatism and authoritarianism are deeply linked, and a bottom up power structure would do more to actively oppose facism and power consolidation than a far left authoritarian regime.

    In short, No. My principles may make me a commie, but I’m an anarchist first.




  • Khrux@ttrpg.networktoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldLawyer
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    8 months ago

    Yeah is bet this is it. Born in 1785 is the right time to easily still live off the inherited wealth of a founded city, and even more than now, law is a particularly favourable career for members of that class to retain their wealth and enter politics.


  • I occasionally get pulled into the YouTube shorts and hate howuch time I lose to them. Worse was that although I barely use Instagram beyond keeping in contact with friends who only use it, I happened to watch the reels for a little yesterday and they were really entertaining.

    A lot of amateur video creators don’t have the experience to keep their work engaging for long periods of time, half the internet feels like SNL sketches that make their best punchline in the first 20 seconds and then milk the same joke for the next 3 minutes. The way short form content cuts through the crap is actually quite nice. It obviously has a whole bunch of its own issues but that’s mostly due to chasing the algorithms favour, not the short form nature of the content.


  • Khrux@ttrpg.networktoMemes@lemmy.mlsaving lives is hot
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    8 months ago

    Some of my fondest memories and best bonding experiences are from getting horrendously drunk with somebody. I’m not sure if it’s safe for dating because you need to trust the other person to be a decent human being while drunk, but most people are.

    If it’s just the two of you, or you and strangers you’ll never meet again, you’ll end up with a better bond from this shared experience, because neither person comes off worse than the other if you’re both black out.

    Also of course it’s not a cute idea? The post is clearly humourous.


  • This isn’t a perfect example but Cormac McCarthy has been my favourite author for years now, and his first major work Suttree was from '79.

    My all time favourites novel is Blood Meridian from 1985. If you’re familiar with metamodernism, which is basically very modern works that have their cake and eat it when it comes to modernist ideals and postmodern critique, you’d clock that practically every western is either a modernist white hat western or a metamodern “the west is grim and hard, but also fucking cool” western. The only straight postmodern takes on the west that I know of are either Blood Meridian or pieces of work that take direct notes from it, such as the films Dead Man from ‘95 (except maybe the Oregon Trail video game from. 85’). Blood Meridian otherwise is a fantastic novel which meditates on madness and cruelty, religion and fate, race, war and conquest and so many other themes. It also has one of the best antagonists ever written in Judge Holden, a character who I would have called a direct insert of Satan if not for the fact that his deeds and the novel as a whole are closely inspired by true events. I feel the novel takes inspiration from Apocalypse Now, specifically the '79 film and not Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. If you enjoy that film, you’re likely to enjoy this book. The opening and closing chapters are fantastic, but I often find myself re-reading chapter 14. It has some of the best prose and monologues of the entire novel, and encompasses in my opinion the main turning point of the novel.

    His other legendary work is The Road, a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel. I’ll talk on this one less but as our climate crisis grows and our cultural zeitgeist swings more towards this being the critical issue of our time, the novel fantastically paints itself as both a fantastic warning to our 21st century apocalypse and the unresolved 20th century shadow of nuclear winter. Despite this, it hones in on a meditation of parenthood and could be considered solely about that, with other themes of death, trauma, survival and mortality being explored through parenthood. Of course the unsalvageable deatg of the world that make the setting also makes this theme extra tragic. There is an adaptation into a film from 2008 but it isn’t anywhere near as potent as the novel and I’d suggest should only be seen in tandem with reading the novel. The prize of this novel has really evolved to fit the novel too. McCarthy is renowned for his punctuation lacking prose, but where Blood Meridian is practically biblical in its dramatic and beautiful prose which juxtaposes the plain and brutal violence, The Road sacrifices no beauty in it’s language but is so somber and meanders from mostly terse to so florid, while also always perfectly feels like how the protagonists are seeing their world.




  • TF2 source 2 totally makes sense as although TF2 gets no updates, it’s still a popular game and valve can’t totally take the idea of upgrading it to source 2 off the table themselves.

    This one is a shame that I don’t really understand, I wonder if it’s related to the fact that it’s for the GameCube and that’s Nintendo’s territory. I’m curious to see if this activity continues and expands, as even on steam there are remakes of half life in source and basically fan expansions to portal being sold for profit, among other products and projects.



  • They are specifically claiming that they were unaware and it happened due to the artist using the built-in AI aids in Photoshop, which is against their policy.

    I actually trust WotC on this depite despising basically every other decision over the past year that they have made. They have repeatedly made their stance on not wanting AI content clear but individual designers and artists are easily equipped to just ignore that and only get caught when they don’t clean up the obvious AI errors afterwards. WotC need to be fair better at internally vetting their art and I recon they are with card art or art that is making its way to books, but art from marketing and other adjacent areas is slipping through the cracks.

    Initially denying the art being AI generated is actually probably the biggest tell that they didn’t intend it. If they make a policy against it and get obviously caught, it’s totally illogical to deny it and damage their reputation further, but if they trust the artist initially, then they have grounds to deny it until they vet it or the artist owns up, which is probably what happened here.


    Hasbro on the other hand only care about one thing, the line going up to their investors can cum. Currently the only reason that WotC has such a strong anti AI content policy is because the heart of their content is about design, from their artists to game designer, and many of the people who hold these roles are beloved voices in the community and if their jobs are at risk, they’ll be loud and clear about it, and we need to hear them and support them when Hasbro try to encoach on this policy, and make it clear that any cost-cutting from AI generated content will cause enough outcry and boycotting that their stock price goes down.



  • A lot of people have read this question to mean the accurate scientific implications of everyday superpowers which isn’t really in the spirit of superpowers. I’ll try to say powers that feel generally altruistic or built for cute characters that have cruel implications.

    Healing us the classic cute superpower, but if the user of the power chooses to overheal somebody they could probably cause basically mega cancer.

    It’s pretty easy to imagine the the implications of controlling animals, and it’s a pretty good power to sit in the background as a utility power until the user decides to have every insect, rat and pigeon in the city bombard somebody.

    The ability to share memories is hard to be used villainously but two fucked applications would be to beam somebody’s traumatic experience I to somebody else’s head (or an experience that happened to one person that could trigger someone else’s PTSD), or if the user has trained themselves to be able to alter their memories to fictional events on demand, turning what is basically a truth finding superpower into an abuse of perceived honesty.

    Finally the superpower of using Reddit and Lemmy your whole life and generating a very standard way if responding but having the cruel and unusual twist of always sounding like fucking ChatGPT.



  • I’ve seen an explanation somewhere that I likes which is super speed and super reflexes are like tensing two different muscles.

    You can make your body move at 10x speed to run across town (even 2-3 speed makes you faster than the fastest humans and 5* is like a car going quickly), then you use your reflexes 3 times faster to make that superspeed feel like only 3 times your natural speed. You can also seperate them in other ways like buying yourself time in an exam by speeding up your thinking without actually increasing your muscle movement.

    Your mental and physical speed being like tensing muscles also means you can have them kick in like a withdrawal reflex. As the air pressure changes before an explosion or bullet hits you, you involuntarily crank your limit to 50x speed (or whatever is required) to dodge.

    It also has the obvious weakness of being exhaustable. It’s worth mentioning that 10x speed is absolutely enough to do most superhuman abilities, and 3x speed makes you basically better than most humans, not just at running but also dodging and punching, and it’s absolutely up to the storyteller to decide if such a low speed multiplier exhausts said speedster or if they can maintain that indefinitely like the muscles we use to stand.