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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”



  • The crux of this is whether Us vs Them is instinctual or learned. I don’t think we yet have a definitive answer, but certainly Us vs Them is so ingrained in our ways of life that removing it would be extraordinarily difficult.

    Again, I may be excessively cynical, but my belief is that some people, maybe even most people, WILL take these mental pathways you describe no matter what, and the best we can do is provide distractions. Bread and circuses. At their best, these distractions channel our self-destructive tendencies into harmless oceans of impunity. At their worst, they are hijacked by ne’er-do-wells to transform the apathetic into frothing zealots of a cause they don’t even care to understand. It becomes the responsibility of those who are paying attention to design a system that is resistant to abuse.

    Presuming I am wrong, that means that there is a path for society to eliminate competitiveness from its apparent nature. I agree that would lead us toward utopia, but I am very skeptical such a path exists, and that those who attempt to follow it will simply be eaten by the wolves they believe they can train.


  • I basically agree, but I think we should also think about this in a solution-oriented way at a large scale, beyond just personally opening one’s own eyes.

    Tribalism is part of our nature. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s fun. It makes us feel good to belong. The sports analogy is frequently brought up and is the example of tribalism being leveraged for entertainment and social bonding. It’s a clever way to us to short-circuit our instinct for tribal warfare and use it for something constructive and fun instead of destructive and tragic.

    Politicians and media outlets have started using this insidiously for their own powergames. Maybe this is too cynical, but it seems to me that the circus has been poisoned. You hear about all these people who “aren’t into politics” but will repeat their CNN and Fox soundbytes. There’s nothing terribly wrong with being personally apathetic about politics, in fact that’s the norm for those people currently benefitting the most from existing policy, but it’s terribly dishonest and destructive to lure such people into the political arena when they have no sincere interest in the impact of their political decisions, but a few powerful people benefit and countless powerless people suffer.

    How do we reclaim our circus? Do we really just need more ESPN and less CNN? Can we punish politicians and news sources for the pervasion and perversion of information as infotainment? Can we educate people to source their identity from their family and culture instead of from their senator?




  • Hijacking to point out to both the dumb lefty lemmies and the dumb righty lemmies that this is an amazing case study in the failure of people to separate their culture from their politics. I apologize for using you as a prop, vector_zero, but you signed up in this thread so I assume it’s all good?

    Here we have a person who believes that are right wing, but lives in a decidedly left wing location. What examples do they provide to demonstrate their right-winged-ness? Gun culture, cooking, sewing, quilting, home projects. Note the absolute lack of policy. When pressed about actual politics further in the thread, we get things like “yeah we need to fix gun violence, healthcare, and the economy, but I don’t think any of the solutions I’ve heard will work.” Essentially we have here a person who is completely disengaged from the reality of politics, but places high value on their culture and identity, having confused one for the other in the process.

    This is all reinforced by the fact that this person lived in left wing area and is active here on a left wing website, where their self-identification as “right wing” earns them demonization, along with some doomed attempts at political discourse. Since vector_zero only really cares about their identity and culture, the demonization is all they notice, internalize, and respond to. It provides a pressure that actually validates and encourages their perceived need to stand up for and defend their cultural values. The political discourse is entirely ignored because vector_zero does not actually care about or understand politics. Meanwhile, the attacking lefties are blind to this miscommunication, characterizing it as “convenient dismissal of the real issues.” No, it’s not convenient dismissal, it’s literally a disability: Our supposed “right wing” friend actually does not have the capacity to see beyond their shoelaces and understand how their emotional reaction to being personally attacked translates into large-scale impact for the rest of the world. So they go out and vote red (or not, since they are “powerless”) without any understanding of what the consequences may be.

    Perhaps the lefties as well are so blind to the importance of identity and culture that they suffer from the same “convenient dismissal” of the content of the discussion that vector_zero values. That’s harder to say, but it’s an interesting supposition. If that is the case, then we’re doomed to go around in circles and continue beating each other until morale improves. But maybe not, maybe one or the other can recognize the tragedy for what it is and learn how to engage with it in a more constructive way.

    It’s painfully obvious to me that everyone involved here actually wants the same things, and there’s a very clear education plan to get us all together on the same track. vector_zero simply needs to be made aware that left wing culture and identity is actually almost the same as right wing culture and identity. That absolutely nothing of themselves would be lost or reduced by voting for a democrat every once in a while. The difference is the policies, and since vector_zero doesn’t actually understand or care about those, there isn’t really any reason for them to hold up the label of “right wing.”

    You can just be a guy who likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day.

    Signed: A guy who also likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day, but also votes democrat every time because I don’t want anybody else to get hurt along the way.






  • 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.