Zagorath

Zagorath, 11 days ago

Off topic, but does this show get good? I love her standup, but after watching 2 or 3 episodes of this show I found it painfully unfunny, and not at all like the late-night show that it was billed as.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

If I say no, are you going to pick the next most recent named ancestor of the chicken, and keep repeating until someone says yes?

Zagorath, 13 days ago

I’m not sure that a pathologist or dentist are the kinds of doctors they’re gonna need.

Well, maybe the dentist.

Zagorath, 13 days ago

I can’t help but be reminded of Why Cars Rarely Crash into Buildings in the Netherlands.

Zagorath, 13 days ago

I dunno about “higher level” maths, but there is one bit where you’re asked to solve a simple year 8–level algebra equation (which is still a much higher level than any other RPG I’ve ever played asks you to do). It’s also in one of the more explicitly NSFW parts of the system.

Specifically, you have to solve for y: (BT – 80)^2^ = –4y + 120, where BT is a number arrived at in an earlier step, using (CM / CV/A ) × 100. I will not be defining what CM and CV/A are in this forum in order to keep the comments SFW.

Zagorath, 13 days ago

Part of me agrees, but another part of me says…there are far too many rules in this about sex…including illicit forms thereof…for me to want to play this with anyone I know IRL.

And also no part of me wants to spend the multiple hours this would probably take to roll up a character. I Googled looking for digital character generators, and they supposedly used to exist, but the official FATAL website no longer exists.

Zagorath, 13 days ago

Oh don’t worry. There are a lot of tables in this system.

Zagorath, 13 days ago

Yes to circumference, but no to damage. Ripping is a possibility the book discusses, but this formula is for quite the opposite.

Zagorath, 12 days ago

Well, that’s not exactly surprising…

Zagorath, 13 days ago

I think my most intense one was probably from the very first campaign I ever played (after a couple of sessions experience in a kinda ad-hoc fashion). D&D 4th edition.

We were a rather big group of (I think) 6 players plus DM. The main campaign was fairly standard. DM set us up with some prophecy stuff and we set about fulfilling it.

Everything was going pretty normally, until I got the weird sense that there was something else going on. Outside of session I spoke to the DM to have my character try and investigate. It turned out that weird sense was correct. Another player was setting up their own schemes between sessions. So I started setting up my own schemes, and roping other players into them.

It’s the kind of thing that looking back on it now, most would probably consider a major red flag. There was no Session 0 or any out-of-character discussion about doing these kinds of things. It could have been incredibly toxic. But we loved it. It added a whole extra layer to everything we were doing during the sessions, as well as giving us the ability to converse with the DM and each other to play more of the game asynchronously between sessions.

In the penultimate session, we defeat the BBEG on another plane, and then arrive back in our world. Another week of last-minute scheming, before the actual final session was a massive PvP battle where the player openly turned against the rest of the party. One of the other players unexpectedly (to me at least) turned and joined them, as well as some NPCs on both sides. “Intense” is the perfect word to describe that session and the build up to it. That physical, heart-pumping feeling the same as when you’re hyping yourself up for your first time trying a dangerous sport or something similar.

We ended up pushing back and winning the encounter for the good guys, but didn’t actually kill or capture the betraying PC. They fled, and their player took over as DM for our next campaign.

Zagorath, 14 days ago

!nottheonion

Zagorath, 14 days ago

Neither of the above. The question mark indicates a rising tone (common in informal speech), as a way to reduce intensity and specifically not be a dick about it. It’s a polite and friendly way of letting you know you made a fairly easy-to-understand mistake (it’s basically a mondegreen), and what the correct phrase is.

Zagorath, 14 days ago

I know this is a controversial take, but I really intensely do not like Half Life.

I have issues with it from a narrative perspective. I have no idea who it is I’m fighting or why. It feels like an incredibly forced “oh, we need an excuse to throw some baddies at the player” premise.

But the main problem I had was mechanical. It’s just not a fun game to play. The gunplay was fine, but then it forces itself to throw a bunch of puzzle and platforming mechanics at you, and just…why? It’s so, so terrible at them. Running up to the edge and jumping will more often than not really in you falling because of a misalignment in perceived location and where the game’s engine says you are. Boxes, which you have to move around to solve the puzzling, fly around at a million miles per minute, making the fine control needed to successfully solve the puzzles very, very difficult. And ladders…don’t even get me started about ladders.

I couldn’t bring myself to finish the first Half Life, let alone start on the sequel.

Zagorath, 14 days ago

I’m not a big shooter player. I had played a fair bit of Battlefield 2 multiplayer, the CoD4 campaign multiple times, as well as games like Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the first game with that title…) and Mass Effect (I think at the time I had played only 1 and 2).

I actually thought I had played the Source version of it, but my Steam history says otherwise. I was playing the OG version, in 2014.

Zagorath, 14 days ago

Sure, and I am in no way suggesting that it was a bad game in its day (especially now that I know at least one of the issues I had with it was a bug introduced long after the fact). But I am suggesting that it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as some people like to insist it does. It’s the “Seinfeld is unfunny” trope, except that that relies on the idea that people today don’t find Seinfeld very funny; the difference is that I regularly see people saying that yes, Half Life is still an excellent game if you play it today.

And for what it’s worth, the game I have put the most hours into on Steam (and by 2x the 2nd place game—which is a more recent entry in the same franchise) was released just 10 months after the original Half Life. Granted, I’m playing on a 2019 remaster with upgraded graphics and some new QoL features, but it’s the same basic game, and had a vibrant community still playing on the 1999 version all the way up until the '19 remaster. It’s a game that I think really does hold up very well today, albeit in an entirely different genre.

Zagorath, 13 days ago

Thtat’s the one! (And my #2 is AoE4. AoM is #3, and AoE3 is #5. All these considering only Steam play time.)

Zagorath, 13 days ago

Haha yeah, when I was young I played a fair amount of Age games, but never playing them in their normal intended fashion. A lot of using the cheats, playing the campaigns on easy mode, and some custom scenarios that largely don’t use actual economy management that’s at the core of the game.

Only got into the more competitive side of the game after the DE release in 2019.

Zagorath, 14 days ago

I genuinely think the alignment problem is a really interesting philosophical question worthy of study.

It’s just not a very practically useful one when real-world AI is so very, very far from any meaningful AGI.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

Sometimes it means “I did a thing in the past and don’t recognise the ways in which it has changed over time to become worse today than it was in my day”.

Zagorath, 13 days ago

Kinda reminds me of that messed up restoration of a painting of Jesus.

Zagorath, 13 days ago

I’m willing to entertain the idea that he may not have intended to whistleblow in order to reveal war crimes.

But if that’s the case, why couldn’t the government have relied upon a fair trial to establish his guilt? Even if he is guilty, he is owed due process, and being restricted from presenting necessary evidence is a violation of that due process.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

Interestingly, I’ve just noticed that this is happening on non-LW communities. Here’s one LW comment that just appeared in my inbox today in an aussie.zone community, and here’s another one that appeared today (the one from @Alexstarfire, specifically). In that second thread you can see some comments from LW users which I saw and even replied to on the same day, alongside the one that didn’t show up for 8 days.

Makes it very perplexing.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

Interestingly, I’ve noticed that in some cases a single thread will have some comments which do show up, and others which don’t, from LW users. In this thread you can see some comments from LW users which I saw and even replied to on the same day, alongside one that didn’t show up for 8 days.

Makes it very perplexing.