jadagul

[jadagul]

Stuff like Hades is off the table because I'm getting it with a voucher; it has to be a full-price game.

I'm much more of an RPG guy but I haven't actually played a 3D Mario since Sunshine and I hear lots of good things about Odyssey and I do kinda want to check it out. (And I've stayed mostly spoiler-free so far!)

So I have a Nintendo Switch game voucher that's going to expire soon. (Was really hoping the next Pokemon game would come out before it expires, but sadly no.)

Should I get:

Super Mario Odyssey

Paper Mario: Origami King

Mario 3D World

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX

Something else?

#video games

[jadagul]

So I have a Nintendo Switch game voucher that's going to expire soon. (Was really hoping the next Pokemon game would come out before it expires, but sadly no.)

Should I get:

Super Mario Odyssey

Paper Mario: Origami King

Mario 3D World

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX

Something else?

#video games

[jadagul]

Matched with someone getting a PhD in clinical psych. Asked about her research, and it turns out she's "exploring the connection between astrological birth charts and possible treatment planning".

Excerpts from dating profiles I swiped left on:

"If you're a white man who's lucky enough to match with me, make sure to bring offerings".

"I heal my ancestral trauma by dominating white men and making them do things that improve the environment."

(These were two different profiles, seen within the space of a day or two.)

#feeld #tinder #online dating #astrology cw

[jadagul]

When do you typically wake up?

Generally between noon and one!

[jadagul]

Because variety is a pleasure of its own!

That's also why you try things you know you're not going to like. (And then sometimes I'm surprised! The spicy negroni variant I had on Saturday was pretty good even though I hate both spicy drinks and negronis. I still don't understand how that worked.)

That neurodivergent feel when you are ordering food/going to a restaurant and you are like "hmm what shall I order today" but then every time you wind up getting exactly the same thing you ordered last time.

Not because you are dedicated to sticking to the same food mind, but because you are optimizing for the same criteria as before ("tastes nice") and after running that procedure through their menu you realized that you've come out to the exact same result as last time and so you never end up eating anything different, lmao.

"Why not just have something different then" but then I would be having something that. Tastes less optimally nice why would I do that

#food cw #alcohol cw

[jadagul]

tandagore Unconditional support is pretty much always a horrible idea. I'd say in general student protests have a higher hit rate then most other groups, which obscures the issue a bit

Yeah, like that's a plausible claim. But I've seen multiple people repost this:

And okay, I suppose if you construe "student movements" and "the ruling class" in a sufficiently narrow way and also are extremely leftist that's maybe true because you define them to always be wrong or something.

But like, sometimes students are wrong! I'm sure I can find examples of pro-USSR protests; I'm absolutely convinced there was "a student movement" in favor of the USSR. Hell, there was a student movement against nuclear power.

Now I have no idea who Jeremy Flood is, and it's possible he'd say that shows I'm wrong for opposing the USSR and supporting nuclear power. But like...I'm not.

sigmaleph that is insane but also not very surprising as a belief people hold

But this is really what I'm responding to. It's the sort of thing that sounds and feels good to say, so you say it, without thinking about whether the idea you're expressing actually makes sense. Politics as affect and self-expression, not as analysis.

And this is why I don't talk to my IRL friends about politics.

I mostly avoid discussing politics with my friends in real life; I save that for here.

(I follow people on tumblr for being good at discourse. I make friends with people IRL because they're fun to have at a party or dances well or look cute in that skirt. The two sets of criteria are not especially correlated.)

But sometimes I do follow my IRL friends on social media. (Mostly Instagram, which is a great place to follow people because they dance well and look cute in that skirt.) And that means I do, unfortunately, occasionally learn what they think about politics.

And a sentiment I've seen expressed by a few different, unrelated people recently is that if you ever find yourself disagreeing with student protests (and "agreeing with power") then you know you're in the wrong. Regardless of what you think about the current protests, that's fucking insane, right?

#politics #protests

[jadagul]

I mostly avoid discussing politics with my friends in real life; I save that for here.

(I follow people on tumblr for being good at discourse. I make friends with people IRL because they're fun to have at a party or dances well or look cute in that skirt. The two sets of criteria are not especially correlated.)

But sometimes I do follow my IRL friends on social media. (Mostly Instagram, which is a great place to follow people because they dance well and look cute in that skirt.) And that means I do, unfortunately, occasionally learn what they think about politics.

And a sentiment I've seen expressed by a few different, unrelated people recently is that if you ever find yourself disagreeing with student protests (and "agreeing with power") then you know you're in the wrong. Regardless of what you think about the current protests, that's fucking insane, right?

#politics #protests #social media

[jadagul]

I have thoughts about this that I (ironically? Aptly?) have some trouble articulating.

On the one hand, yes, the words are part of the expression of the idea, and even in semi-formulaic genre fiction I will often sit and let myself enjoy a phrasing. (A lot of the semi-formulaic stuff I like is full of banter, which is largely about word choice!)

But I also find a big part of my experience of reading, especially in the context of non-fiction, is of trying to extract the idea words are trying to express and leave the words themselves behind. This is an important engine to my speed-reading habit; it's part of why I found early GPT texts so disconcerting, because the words were fine but the "idea behind them" clearly didn't exist and so this process didn't work.

And that all makes me basically sympathetic to the concept of "being interested in the ideas, not the languages used to express them."

(But on the other hand, I think that's less apt for fiction than for other things...)

I have some pretty fundamental disagreements with the ways many people in my circles on here talk about the role of prose in fiction. There's a tendency to neatly divide prose from the substance of the text, the plot, characters, setting, and especially the ideas, and to disparage the nebulous category of literary fiction for being excessively concerned with the former to the detriment of the latter.

This is straightforwardly not how language works. The words in which a proposition is stated obviously matter for our reception of it, and this becomes even more clearly the case when we're talking not about propositions but about the murkier business of narrative and (fictional) human experience.

Mostly people will grudgingly admit that things like character perspective, unreliable narrators, and the like can be interesting, and that there may be ways in which novels can do things of value and interest that splatbooks can't, but a lot of SFF fans seem not to grasp that this extends to the words authors use to tell their stories. There's a sense of words as just a layer of irrelevance to be gotten through as expeditiously as possible in order to get at the ideas in the story, whereas in fact those words can amplify and complicate those ideas. (For one prominent example, consider the way character voices serve to express aspects of characterization even and especially when those aspects are things the characters don't verbally acknowledge.)

#fiction #litcrit

[jadagul]

quantumofawesome What ancient egyptian bread?

This bread.

Also, this bread:

The ancient egyptian bread has a really interesting flavor.

#food cw #bread #baking #egypt #history

[jadagul]

It feels like being sick gets rougher on me as I get older.

And on the one hand that's an incredibly mundane "no-shit" sort of observation.

And on the other hand it keeps surprising me. I don't remember colds being unpleasant or making me tired!

[jadagul]

I feel like you're re-inventing attention checks for Mechanical Turk.

Everything is Lizardman

Did you know that people who believe in Lizardman are likely to be taller, more likely to be transgender, to have a low IQ, to eat ice cream for breakfast, to be convicted felons, and to watch Matlock reruns?

I made that all up.

But I do believe it's true.

Well, I don't.

I believe it's a measurable effect.

The Lizardman effect is probably multicausal: malicious responders, bad reading comprehension, tiredness causing your finger to slip, insane people who believe in Lizardman.

But think about it. What kind of person "doesn't know" what Coca-Cola is? What kind of person is 7 feet tall, transgender, born in 1931, and a veteran of the Iraq War? It's the kind of person who believes in Lizardman, or maybe it even is Lizardman.

You could just throw out all the responses that say Lizardman is real. Maybe that's not the best approach. What if you try to control for Lizardman? You can look at all the correlations between Lizardman and other variables, and all the correlations between two other variables among Lizardman responders. Maybe there's a pattern.

[jadagul]

I thought Heinlein in Time Enough for Love demonstrated some admirable self-awareness about this. His self-insert actually says "yeah, I'm in favor of bisexuality in theory but I grew up on Earth in the 30s and I grew up being taught to be straight so I'm kinda stuck that way.

And then the entire book proceeds to pretty much only be horny about male-female pairings, and by god is it horny about those. We don't see any bisexuality really, although it's extremely explicitly canon that people are being bi all over the place off-camera. (There's a couple who agree to hook up before being aware of each other's gender, and then one expresses pleasant surprise that it turned out to be a het pairing.)

But honestly when the author comes out and says "Yeah I'm all in favor of gay stuff but I personally just can't get into it, sorry about that" I have trouble, like, holding that against him? (Especially when this was in the 70s.)

Iain M Banks: What is a weapon? What does it mean to use a weapon? Can a person be a weapon? Is there a difference between using a weapon and being a weapon? Is this difference meaningful? What kind of person would choose to be a weapon?

Also Iain M Banks: Here's a sapient starship with a scat fetish.

#litcrit #heinlein #time enough for love #culture #iain m banks #robert heinlein #banks

[jadagul]

the real stick in the eye is that this game was not only reviewed well, it was reviewed glowingly when it came out. which is bizarre to me!

Huh, I'm prepared to be wrong but my memory was that everyone was mad about it!

(Maybe it was just the grognards I was interacting with at the time.)

i fired up civ 5 recently bc i wanted to see how it compared to my memory of it, and if anything it's actually much, much worse.

one unit per tile just... does not work with the idiom of the civilization series! units are not like armies in a GSG, they're like units in an RTS game: grist for the meatgrinder. you build them and throw them at your enemy and if they lose combat, they die. they don't retreat and recover morale, you don't get a chance to reposition and try again, they just go poof. but now in addition to that, you can only fit one unit of a type on a given tile, which means combat is forcibly spread out over a huge space. it's slow, slowed down further by the fact that it now takes a couple turns to fully resolve a fight--i guess the idea is that you can have your injured units fall back, except because of the way units get blocked in now, no you can't!--but you still need tons of units to take cities.

which means they didn't get rid of doomstacks. doomstacks are still logistically necessary to win wars! they just made them really fucking annoying to move around the map.

and on top of that, because OUPT applies to all units, it means you are also constantly having your scouts and workers and other civilian units being blocked in by your own units of the same type, or other players' units of the same type, meaning if you sign an open borders treaty with the AI you are frequently signing up to having your own units' movement being jammed up in the worst way by computer players. and on top of all THAT the units cancel their movement orders if the destination tile is blocked, even if the destination tile is on the other side of the map and you can't see it--which means, basically, any long-distance movement order is liable to be randomly canceled if an AI unit ends its turn on your destination tile.

it feels janky at every single level. the worst possible fix to something that wasn't even really a problem--and if they really wanted to they could have implemented some kind of very basic attrition mechanic. or some other kind of soft cap.

and and and on top of all that, it makes roads and railroads substantially less useful, bc frequently you cannot actually fit all your guys on one road or railroad--but you can't just carpet your territory in roads now like you used to do, because roads cost maintenance per turn. just. ugh. fractally bad decisionmaking! like different people were working at different ends of the design doc and not communicating at all!

the global happiness system means expansion is soft capped early in the game, which makes it feel less like an empire management game than a game of managing four to five cities. since very many units are now hard capped by resource availability now, and expansion is limited, AFAICT in most normal games this means you get like.. two swordsmen? ever? mainly it's strong attack units that are capped in this way, but their defensive counters are uncapped, which means actually playing strategically with your army composition is more annoyance than it's worth. in practice, what this incentives is just building the best trash unit you can afford en masse and throwing them at the enemy, but, of course, see the problems with OUPT.

they took out civics and replaced them with Social Policy trees. but everybody has the same set of social policy trees. and there's a bit of a tradeoff here in which trees you choose to fill out first, but you never then switch those old trees out for new ones like civics. they're just permanent bonuses. so there's no sense of, like, choosing your government type.

and then in BNW i guess they realized people missed that, and created Ideologies, which are just a bonus extra-big social policy tree where you get to pick between liberal democracy, communism, and fascism. but of course there's only three. and this isn't unlocked until the late game.

what they really should have done is added more civics and rather than just having you progress from early game civics to late game civics made all civics contextually useful. and maybe given you some extra civics that were unlocked early in the game so you could strategize around them.

as a part of this change culture is now more load-bearing, but cultural victory is just... weird and stupidly complicated. you have to build tourism, and do archeology, and build wonders that provide slots for great works that your three different kinds of great artist create, and all this other crap. versus domination, where you just conquer the other guys. or science, where you just build your spaceship. it's dumb and bad and awkward.

there's no conquest victory now. only domination. but because of the way domination works, it's now not possible to move your capital manually. this is awful and i hate it! let me move my capital, damn it!

buildings no longer go obsolete, which means that if i am founding a city in the year 1973, i still need to build a City Walls in it before i can build a Military Base. this feels ridiculous. and the series already kinda has this problem where it feels like late game it takes forever to get a city really up and running--don't make it even worse by making me build shit from classical antiquity before i can build modern facilities!

the AI is not very bright. they don't expand very much. on big maps, most of the map will remain empty most of the game, at least up through mid-level difficulties i usually play at (that are supposed to be "standard", so I assume the game is balanced around them)

diplomacy is irritatingly primitive. there are few ongoing agreements. declarations of friendship all last a fixed amount of time. the AI is constantly interrupting you to tell you it doesn't like you or it does like you or you and another AI player all like each other. just expose an opinion modifier and be done with it! harun al-rashid and i don't need to pass notes like it's grade school!

they nerfed the range of air units and especially nukes. which feels really weird. the 20th century saw the invention of strategic bombers that had a range of thousands of miles. why can mine only reach cities right next to my own? why do my nuclear missiles have a pathetic range? sure, sub-launched nukes are a thing, but they're only one part of a proper nuclear triad. there's no MAD anymore!

especially because the world congress can order you to stop building nukes and there's nothing you can do about it. you can't defy world congress bans and suffer a penalty. international law has some kind of magical force that even if you are the undisputed hegemon you cannot help but obey. this is very stupid! especially because they could not think of anything interesting for the world congress to do, so it's all shit like banning random luxury goods.

all the stuff i do like--the city-states, the hex grid, the core idea of the trade route system--is swallowed by annoying bullshit. to take the trade route example: you can make money by setting up trade routes. it can be quite lucrative! and you have to protect your trade routes from bandits and shit. but the menu for issuing trade route orders is a mess--way too much scrolling, you can't sort by lucrativeness of destinations, you have to constantly re-issue trade route orders, and the last trade route a unit was on isn't highlighted, or sorted to the top or anything like that. so it's lots of scrolling around, it's very annoying, and it's repetitive as hell.

the real stick in the eye is that this game was not only reviewed well, it was reviewed glowingly when it came out. which is bizarre to me! yes, it looks nice. the art is good and the music is pretty. but it feels awful to play! it is on almost every single metric less fun than civ 4! civ 3 is more fun, and civ 3 was terrible. i hope to god firaxis was bribing people left and right for good reviews because the only alternative explanation i can think of is that everybody who was reviewing strategy games in 2010 was also in the grip of a brutal glue-sniffing habit.

#video games #civilization #civilization 5

[jadagul]

Now, I do understand that that "that that" that post complained about was upsetting to people.

But personally, I think that that "that that 'that that' that" that that "that that" post inspired was woefully insufficient.

Rather, I think that that "that that 'that that' that" that that poster posted should have been "that that 'that that' that that" instead.

#language #english #shitpost

[jadagul]

The choir-brained part of me is surprised by the idea that you might only know songs in one language.

If you count remembering a single verse or chorus, I know songs or other vocal music in: English, Latin, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Sanskrit; and at various points I've also sung in Russian and Tamil, and probably some others I'm forgetting.

Submitted by @sky-the-snail-fanatic

#music #classical music #choir

[jadagul]

"No enemies to the left" is a bad political principle.

"No friends to the right" is much worse.

#politics

[jadagul]

I realize this isn't entirely fair of me, but I always get annoyed when I tell someone I'll respond to their email "tonight" and I get an email at like 1:30 AM saying "hey, I haven't gotten a response yet!"

Chill out, there's like three more hours left before I go to bed.