From what I’ve heard, the KMT are weirdly the more moderate and pro peaceful cooperation and commerce with the rest of China party now despite their history, and the DPP are the fully US aligned extreme right party that’s more like the old KMT. AFAIK the KMT are still US-aligned nationalists like they always were, but they’re less warhawkish and just want the status quo to peacefully continue.
Gotta have those big numbers with big numbers of dice being rolled to set off players’ undiagnosed gambling addiction.
Yeah lmao, it’s the only game I’ve played that gives Shadowrun a run for its money there.
vehicles themselves often have high toughness
They have toughness instead of armor now? I’m recoiling in disgust. I liked 5e’s vehicles.
Your strength is either half or less of the target’s toughness, less than, equal to, greater than, or double.
I remember it being a simple equation even in 5e, something like 3+T-S, capped at one and six IIRC.
All of this sounds so much worse. I mean I’ve always hated every TTRPG or wargame edition change from one I was already familiar with, except for Pathfinder 1e to 2e which was great, but this sounds particularly bad. It’s like when I looked at Magic the Gathering 15 years ago after having last played it in the 90s and just hated every change they’d made.
Oh it’s not just that, the normal numbers that they claim to be taking into account for their models are also made up because their models just don’t work in the first place. Like the basic tenets of their economic theory don’t actually work or apply to real world data so they have to heavily manipulate and massage the inputs just to get the “intuitively correct” output that reaffirms their beliefs.
It’s bullshit from the very beginning: it’s not just flawed and myopic it’s actively fraudulent and ideologically driven at its very core. Some of the high priests are in on the con, which is why the neoliberals tend to fall back on Keynesian-lite policies in times of crisis even while otherwise preaching austerity and kleptocracy as the saviors sent by the holy line, but most of its priests are true believers who can only perform the rites they were taught and say what their tenets demand they say while twisting themselves into knots trying to insist that their bullshit is in any way tied to reality.
You can have titans, primarchs, and aircraft in 2,000 point games.
What the fuck. Like I remember flyers being given normal rules in 6e, but the rest sounds wild. Do the superheavies still have X strength attacks or did they at least get reigned in?
If you’ve played any time between 3rd. and 4th., you’re probably familiar with changes not occurring for years.
5e was when I started, but that was all true then too. Extremely slow to update things, with a lot of army lists being one or two editions old at that point. I remember hearing relatively positive buzz about them starting to issue updated army lists in 6e, but never really got back into it.
4-people tweek the numbers to reaffirm the idea
This is also the step before the first. The entire foundation of neoliberal economics is literally built on “well, uh, the real numbers didn’t make the model work so I made up these fake numbers that made it look nice, at least. Don’t worry, they’re intuitively correct!” and pure vibes.
I’m just reflecting on the reality of our current existence, NASA spent a lot of money on rockets, It would have been the best possible outcome if NASA “offered things at the lowest possible cost”. But they didn’t, and our timeline missed the miracle where they did that.
NASA has always been used to funnel money to arms dealer companies who actually make rockets for them. Like it never had its own factories or production pipeline, it was always just big handouts to corporate MIC contractors who were further financially incentivized to delay and drive up costs even more since the contracts let them do that completely unchecked.
It was also kept pretty tangential to what the US military wanted: they wanted ICBMs, so NASA did rocket research for them; they wanted satellites, so NASA did satellite launch research for them; they wanted some nonsense contraption for “space commandos” to steal Soviet satellites with, so NASA had to incorporate that into the Space Shuttle program which was further gutted to the point of barely being functional at all.
What have they changed? I haven’t played since 5e and haven’t looked at the rules since 6e.
My friends, sobbing: “Nooo, build a real house for once, don’t just burrow into the nearest hill like a rodent and dig an inscrutable warren of crawlspaces and deadly pitfalls every fucking time we start a new minecraft server.”
Me, wordlessly humming diggy diggy hole: 
I see it used in books pretty often, presumably because the text editors used for those have autocorrects for special characters like that and the ellipses character.
some liberals overcorrected against “ai” even though there’s plenty of legitimate reasons to not want it around and especially to not have corpos owning the output.
I’m convinced the hyperfocus on generative ai models somehow iNfRiNgInG upon holy copyright protections was entirely a corporate psyop to begin with, because at the end of the day that line of arguing further enshrines the power of corporate property and gives an easy pivot to whitewashing proprietary corporate “not InFrInGiNg” models.
The closest to ethical that AI gets are open source models that can be run locally, and they’re coincidentally the most “infringing” models, while the least ethical ones are the secretive proprietary corporate models being trained on data that’s laundered by corporations unilaterally claiming the right to license it for that purpose.
Like what are the biggest problems? Endless mountains of low-grade slop, mostly coming out of corporate hosted models; companies trying to replace workers with dogshit chatbots, which are 100% proprietary corporate services; media companies threatening to eliminate actors using internal proprietary models they claim they have the property rights to train; etc. Not one problem comes from copyright not being expanded to also cover being able to license and restrict how someone looks at a copyrighted thing, and almost every problem comes from huge corporate property holders with most of the rest coming from petty bourgeois grifters.
Literally more scientific than orthodox neoliberal economics.
Chemicals ≠ chemicals. Some are safe, some are not safe. Some you can have a lot of, some need moderation. Some are artificial, some are not. Those people just can’t not think in black and white.
The bigger issue that a lot of the worst parts of food aren’t really modern, they’re just more accessible in modern foods. Like excessive amounts of salt, sugars, and fat, all of which are fine and necessary in certain quantities but which get used in a very imbalanced way. These preserve food and when used correctly improve its flavor, but in a lot of modern slop get overused in a form that’s specifically engineered to avoid satiation and keep people buying and consuming more well above the level of what they want or need.
There are also additives like dyes and stabilizers that might not be great for people to eat, but which still pale in comparison to the carcinogenic (and other, also harmful) effects of just like chugging bottles of syrup for hydration or relying on heavily salted instant food.
And that’s before you even get to issues like heavy metal contamination and whatnot, that aren’t intentionally added but which show up anyways.
Also, a lot of really effective food preservation today don’t even require chemicals inside the food.
Exactly, like there’s pasteurization and irradiation and sterile airtight packaging which can replace or supplement what are basically just more advanced versions of traditional preservation methods like giving food a PH that bacteria and fungi can’t tolerate, using salts, sugars, and fat to make it too desiccating to spoil easily, etc.
Also basic food preservation techniques are ubiquitous and historically extremely important, and most/all of those involved somehow filling the food with “cHeMiCaLs” so that it wouldn’t spoil (salt, acid, sometimes sugar, smoke, fermentation byproducts, etc) all of which are as “bad” or notably worse than modern food preservation methods.
Their point isn’t just wrong about people doing fine without food preservation, it’s also wrong about them not having similar-but-worse food preservation.
What the fuck, there’s not even a rudimentary firepit to control it and he didn’t even bother to clear flammable debris away from the pile of burning wood.
it was the most boring subject at every level of schooling I received. Turns out it was only boring because they had to strip it to its bones to not radicalize every child and adult along the way.
It also doesn’t help that it’s like the same handful events and people and timeline every time, without ever really going into more detail than just the big pillars of the American civic cult and the sort of “sure [thing] was bad then [gives a highly whitewashed account of it], but that was solved by [Great Man action that was too little, too late, and also didn’t solve it]!” that form a core part of liberal apologia for the US (like “sure we did the most heinous thing you’ve ever heard of a little oopsie whoopsy back then when everyone was doing it, but we’re probably not doing it anymore and anyone suggesting we are still doing it just doesn’t get how divinely righteous we are and how we can do no wrong and also they’re probably a foreign agitator and/or you made them up!” shit). Every class wanted to cover the same few bullet points of the 18th and 19th centuries and then would maybe dabble in a few things from the early 20th century, and then they’d run out of time and the next class would do the same exact thing just as poorly.
I guess the American History class I had in highschool was a bit more detailed, but the details were incoherent and often objectively wrong or just outright lies and most of it was minutia of like 19th century racist economic/foreign policy as it related to the planter class’s desires instead of anything more meaningful or important like how that pertained to actual people or the violence and monstrous cruelty involved in it. Nope, gotta learn why rich landowners were angry and what they wanted, and just gloss over or ignore what effects this had or literally anything real or material.
At one point he was just the typical tech oligarch failson who was sort of just quietly awful behind the scenes while collecting accolades for other people’s work and getting fluffed up by credulous tech “journalists”. He managed to grift some successful contracts using that publicity and his PR team leveraged it into more and more bullshit hype for businesses he owned and he just failed upwards over and over.
Even after he had a midlife crisis and started just doing lots of drugs and showing his whole ass on twitter all day every day he still had all that inertia and machinery of hype and graft behind him to feed him more and more wealth and power despite anything he actually did. He had to actively piss off enough people that that system started clogging and breaking down to even suffer the most mild of consequences. Hopefully it keeps going and everything he had and has falls apart so he can’t just go back to a quietly parasitic existence like most other tech oligarchs.
What about Shikanoko’s Basilisk, which can be bought over with deer crackers?
Great man theory isn’t wrong in that certain people with power and influence didn’t have a huge impact, it’s wrong because it’s just sort of assuming that they’re this a priori source of change instead of themselves being a result of change and broader movements. Lenin did great things and had a huge impact, but he came out of the context of a larger movement that preceded him and existed without him rather than simply manifesting fully formed to create that movement the way liberal Great Man “historians” portray it.
To take this entirely too seriously because “[media] sucks now, when it used to be so good!” is like nails on a chalk board to me: all media mostly sucks and has always mostly sucked, but how much of [given media type] stands out as excellent from the sea of low-grade dregs that’re always being churned out just varies from year to year and for the most part I can’t help but feel the amount of good media in any given year is on average increasing and reaching new peaks more regularly.
So memes aside, I can’t help but feel like “modern anime sucks” is something that’s been being said forever and has at times been true, but currently isn’t. I mean like there is awful slop and there’s consistently been awful slop running all the way back forever, but the past few years have had some of the most gorgeously animated and all around good series ever. Like Sakamoto Days, Dandadan, ZOM 100 (and the same studio is coming out with Witch Hat Atelier some time this year which I am very excited for), Frieren, I personally don’t like a lot of things about Dungeon Meshi but it’s still highly acclaimed and objectively a great adaptation, and so on. Even something like Solo Leveling is mindless slop but it’s extremely pretty and inoffensive mindless slop with an amazing soundtrack.
How many series from the 2000s were as good and memorable? There definitely are some, without question, but I feel like people look at a handful of iconic, lasting series coming out of an entire decade and hold them up as what it used to be like, yet when I go back and look almost all of the stuff that was airing alongside that is all like the worst moeblobs you’ve ever seen, ecchi shit, and bottom of the barrel shonen action slop, and if you go back and watch it was run through with just rampant misogyny and random homophobia and a lot of that was inserted into even the “good” iconic series back then too. I mean that’s still, obviously, a problem but goddamn if it didn’t used to be so much more rampant and worse in general.
Like if Frieren were made back in the early 2000s it would probably somehow be made to be a harem anime centered on Stark who’d be the “real hero” and be given all the big dramatic moments that Frieren has in the real version, and either Frieren or Fern would probably have been given that awful extremely affected raspy mewling voice that the worst anime always makes some female character have that’s supposed to sound “innocent” or some shit and make all the misogynistic otaku hogs squeal and buy dakimakura and vinyl figurines. And also it would be 90% OC filler slop, cut most of the characters in favor of new, worse ones, and completely mangle all the themes and plotlines.