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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • On the flipside of this, I’ve been kicked from games because I know how to prefire, and a lot of players see that and just assume you’re wallhacking. Nobody pays attention to the 70% of the time that you prefire at air, but when you guess right and instakill someone holding an angle, it’s easier to say “cheater” than “i’ve been holding this same angle for the past 5 rounds, perhaps I’ve become predictable”


  • This comment will include a lot of spoilers for the yokoverse. Continue at your own peril.

    Anyway, just to give you an idea of how little any of this matters to Yoko Taro, here’s how his stories have developed:

    Drakengard: Ends with absolute apocalypse, total destruction of the world, no coming back.

    Nier: Let’s go ahead and change the name and say that all the Drakengard stuff has now entered a new dimension. Our dimension! The story technically goes on, and THIS time we’ll have the absolute apocalypse of OUR world.

    Drakengard 3: Where do we go to continue the Darkengard name? Make it a prequel! Ezpz. Also we already did interdimensional stuff so let’s add time travel why not.

    Nier Automata: Okay the world basically ended for humans, but who cares? Just make it all about legacy of humans.

    You know what, we can do even more already. Why not pepper in some mobile games, like Nier Reincarnation and SINoALICE (yes, this is still Nier universe). Why keep it to games? Let’s write light novels (YoRHa, Drakengard 1.3) and a stage play (YoRHa Boys). I am not even the biggest Yokostan so this list is probably incomplete.

    My personal take is that this methodology is all very intentionally tied to the main theme of the Yokoverse, which is that no matter how dark and hopeless the situation may become, there is always a future; a new opportunity.





  • You are underestimating the type of people this law is targeting. Nobody who is just stressed out is going to be forced into an institution (although I agree the law should be carefully written to guarantee that). This is meant to get people who are full-on batshit insane off the streets and in an environment where they at least have a CHANCE of getting sorted out.

    For example, I have a friend who is psychotic. No, I’m not misusing the word or exaggerating, this is a person who is sincerely and obviously psychotic, diagnosed as such by a psychiatrist, sees and hears things that are not there, believes that the government is all rape-demons from hell that are out to harvest our sanity.
    When unmedicated, that is.
    Once medicated, she is like “holy shit clarity thank god, keep giving me the medicine.” But if there’s ever a lapse, we go right back to the rape-demons from hell trying to force pills down her throat and the only way to save her is to, essentially, violate her by being the rape-demon from hell that forces pills down her throat. Which is of course very illegal but people care enough about her to do it anyway.

    It would be very nice for it to NOT be illegal to save people from the rape-demons from hell, to have a support system in place aside from what is basically a secret cabal of friends and family as a safety net should this person end up somewhere alone and unable to access their meds.


  • You’re missing the scale.

    Everyone knew BG3 would “a success,” but it hasn’t just been a success, it’s been a nuclear bomb of a success.

    Optimistically, people were expecting to get around 1 million in sales. Total. THAT would have been a GREAT SUCCESS. Today I think it has around 10 million on Steam alone, 10x the “hope we get there” number.

    Imagine taking a job and hoping for a $10,000 bonus for good performance, and then your boss drops $100,000 on your desk. It’s that level of joyful shock.



  • Flash drives are not a lasting medium. You’d need something like a quad-layer blu-ray, which is not cheap and has slow read speeds compared to solid state storage. Also nobody has blu-ray readers anymore. Also blu-ray publishers are tiny. Also the expense of distributing physical media.

    So we’ve arrived back at the beginning - you can have this cake and eat it too, but you’re going to have to eat the expense yourself. Imposing it upon the entire consumer market is selfish and wasteful.


  • I’ve already said that I appreciate your efforts. I’m not going to block you, your work is valuable. I’m just explaining that you ARE going to be criticized for what you choose to post, and you shouldn’t act surprised. If you really don’t care about whether or not the stories you are propagating have merit, then just ignore anyone who pushes you on it. Consider attacks on “OP” to be the original author of the article, not you.

    Or, be more selective about what you post, if the approval matters to you. Consider it constructive feedback.


  • You post a lot. I see your name come up non-stop. That is great! It is really appreciated. I’m certainly not doing that work.

    You also post quite a bit of inflammatory clickbait without having any personal knowledge to back it up. That’s a bit confounding. At the bare minimum, you need to be prepared to accept criticism for that.

    I can personally say this is the second time you’ve posted a FF16 ragebait article and gotten offended when prodded about the fact that you yourself haven’t even played it. Why are you spreading information that you don’t even have the ability to evaluate?


  • As a fan of souls games and mech games, I wouldn’t be TOO worried. OP is overstating the problem. I sympathize, because this is indeed a different Armored Core, but it’s nothing at all like a souls game. It’s still a mech game and a good one, but it’s not as technically deep as previous AC games while also being dramatically more difficult.

    I would say in older AC games having a terrible build vs a great build meant the mission was either literally impossible or braindead easy. In AC6 a terrible build means the mission will be much harder, but still perfectly doable, and having a great build means the mission will run smoother but may still be quite challenging since threats are generally a lot more deadly than they were in previous titles.

    I can totally understand how that can kill the vibe for someone who wants to seek victory in the build screen and enjoy the rewarding power fantasy during the mission, but it’s still a great mech game with a lot of meaningful variety.

    Proof of this is that while, yes, AC purists are upset that this game is more action-y, there are just as many Souls fans who are mad that the mech building game they bought is - get this - actually a mech game and not just Robo Souls.


  • AC6 is both more and less accessible along the same lines. It’s a simpler game. The space given to customize your make is smaller, you can’t go into debt by making stupid builds, and in exchange bosses will wombo-combo you from full AP to dead even with a heavy build if you get stunned at the wrong time. There’s a person who experiences that wombo-combo, says, “this is bullshit” and puts the game down forever. But there is also a person who tries AC2, fails a mission with an expensive loadout, realizes they can’t afford to make the build that failure inspired them to make, and say “no THIS is bullshit” and put the game down forever.

    Likewise, Elden Ring is both easy and hard because it gives you a ton of freedom. There are more solutions than just “git gud” which is refreshing for someone who can’t tolerate banging their head against Iudex Gundyr for a couple hours. But it’s obnoxious to someone who sees Tree Sentinel and doesn’t want to “have to explore” to find level appropriate content.





  • Xfce is a great example of how solving a problem in the best way results in low adoption.

    People tend toward extremes. There is something in particular they really want, and they will gravitate toward the product that gives them the most of that thing.
    I want total control over configuration: KDE Plasma
    I want maximum performance: LXDE
    I want something that looks good and I don’t want to think about it: GNOME/Cinnamon

    Xfce isn’t on this list! It’s not the best at anything. But it’s pretty good at everything. It’s an overall best (in my opinion) but because it’s not beautiful, nor lightning fast, nor incredibly flexible, nobody will ever take it as their first choice. And the majority of people make a first choice and then never change, as whatever they start with is probably good enough for them. I’ve tried all of the DE’s listed above, but I’m the crazy guy: that’s a lot of work and churn! Any and all of them work well enough, why bother installing 5 separate environments?

    If you want to develop something and have people adopt it, then your goal is to have a killer sexy feature at the expense of all else, rather than to be satisfactory in every metric.


  • It reeks of immaturity in general, or maybe more cynically, the perception of a bunch of nerds that have never had a sex life. There are so few games that handle sexual and romantic relationships realistically, and now that we have one nobody knows what to make of it.

    Some characters take things slow. Opening up gradually, sharing some wine, holding hands and enjoying a single kiss on a night alone together. Eventually this ramps up naturally.

    Some characters on the other hand are like, “you ready to fuck? I’m ready. Love? Never heard of it.”

    Both of these are normal and it’s cool to see both represented in the same world.


  • Looking at each piece in isolation it’s hard to see the real world value. You have to put it all together. Let’s do the airline ticket example.

    Real world today, the information involved in purchasing a ticket is controlled by three parties: The customer, the airline, and the financial institute (assuming you didn’t walk up and pay cash). Anybody involved here screw up or be malicious. You lost your ticket. The airline had a database malfunction. The bank/creditor improperly recorded the transaction. All parties are aware of these potential failures, so there are contingencies in place in case of a missing ticket, a ticket that can’t be found the system, a bad or missing financial transaction. But these backup plans also open the door to fraud, so there need to be even more plans on top of the backups: How to verify the integrity of a seemingly real ticket, protocol for re-verifying a financial event, etc.

    It’s simple because it’s familiar, but it’s really ridiculously complicated and error prone.

    Let’s introduce NFTs and blockchain.
    You buy the airline ticket and the following things happen:
    The bank performs the transaction and records it to the blockchain, which is decentralized and owned by no one, so it is verified by all parties before anything else happens. Bank errors are now impossible.
    You and the airline perform a mutual authentication, which generates an NFT proving existence of the ticket and attaches it to your identity. From your perspective, this would be unlocking your phone and clicking “approve.”

    Now you approach the airport kiosk and there’s a problem.
    Airline has no record of purchase - well, the blockchain does, so it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
    Airline can’t match your ticket to their database - You show them your NFTicket, which their system verifies is a valid, unspoofable, immutable ticket for what you say it is. Again, it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
    Conversely, you say you have a ticket for today, they say it’s for tomorrow. You inspect the ticket, it is in fact for tomorrow. You fucked up, no further argument.

    The only way any of this goes wrong is one of the following:
    Multiple forms of your identification are stolen - phone, password, biometrics. Obviously a lot harder than nabbing a CC number.
    Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.
    State-level villains sabotage the entire system. Possible, sure, but this is an apocalypse-level event and probably an act of war.

    It’s effectively impossible for someone to steal or fake a ticket or transaction in this system, and because of that, anybody who has receipts is automatically proven right and you don’t need to jump through any more hoops or threaten to sue anybody. It’s complex behind the scenes but it makes life for businesses and consumers braindead simple. There are so many layers of trust in action that no individual party can reasonably claim something did or did not happen just because THEY messed up.


  • It’s not the cryptocurrency itself that prevents fraud, it’s the surrounding technologies such as blockchains and NFTs.

    Using NFT to own the address to a PNG is hilariously stupid and worthless, but what it’s actually great for is receipts. If I buy a donut and get an NFT proving that I now own the donut (along with metadata about where and when I purchased the donut) and months later I am on trial for murder, I can prove to the court with absolute mathematical certainty that I couldn’t have killed anyone at that time because I was eating a donut halfway across town.

    Using blockchain similarly is great for proving your transaction history. Maybe I somehow faked that NFT about the donut? Well, I couldn’t have, because it was months ago and blockchain history is cryptographically impossible to spoof.

    These are obviously contrived examples, but when applied at scale it becomes an extremely powerful way to verify truth. Yes, I did in fact buy those tickets, here’s my NFT, now let me on the plane. No, I did not spend $3000 on knock-off accessories, here is my blockchain. The odds of someone being able to fake these is extremely low.

    But, again, this will never come into practice, at least not in the near future. As @beefcat pointed out, implementing these systems would be expensive for the established financial institutions, and would present new challenges for them to create new processes for handling. An awful lot of work to create something that is stronger and safer when there is little motivation for them to do so.