Frank

I saw video of some Hamas soldiers carrying something that reminded me of a Bangalore Torpedo. Bangalore torpedoes are a combat engineering device dating back over a century. Explosives are packed in to a metal pipe. Additional pipes are fitted to the end of the explosive pipe. The pipe is then pushed towards the obstacle to be cleared, with as many additional pipes added to the back as needed. In this manner the explosives can be pushed towards the obstacle without exposing the engineers to enemy fire. The explosive charge is then detonated to blow open a hole in the defenses as well as potentiall clearling small mines. Apparently modern variants incorporate shaped-charge designs to better cut through concertina wire.

IT'S LUKE. HE'S FORESHADOWING LUKE BLOWING THE THE DORK STORE. IT'S NOT ABOUT WHATEVER STUPID COMIC BOOK SHIT. THE FORCE WAS SUBTLE IN THE OT. IT DIDN'T MAKE YOU A SUPER HERO. IT WAS WEIRD ESOTERIC WIZARD SHIT THAT NO ONE TOOK SERIOUSLY. YOU FOOLS. YOU HORRIBLY ILLITERATE FOOLS. YOU HAVE MISSED THE POINT. THE POINT HAS EVADED YOU. IN YOUR QUEST FOR EMPTY SPECTACLE AND CGI VOMIT YOU HAVE LOST THE CORE POINT AND PURPOSE OF THE ENTIRE STORY. THE PIVOTAL MOMENT ISN'T SOME EDGELORD DIPSHIT IN A KORN T-SHIRT BLOWING UP A PLANET. IT'S WHEN LUKE COMMUNES WITH THE FORCE TO LAND AN IMPOSSIBLE SHOT TO ALLOW A SMALL FORCE OF TACTICAL FIGHTERS TO DESTROY AN OTHERWISE INVINCIBLE FASCIST DEATH BATTLESHIP! YOU FOOLS! WISDOM HAS ABANDONED YOU! SOPHIA WEEPS AT YOUR APPROACH! ALL HOPE IS LOST! HUMANITY IS DOOMED! IGNORANCE AND SHITTY SEQUELS ARE THE ETERNAL DOOM OF HUMANITY!

Also; "Why was Vader behaving in ways that are inconsistent with his portrayal in media decades later?"

BECAUSE IT WAS A STAND ALONE MOVIE YOU LITTLE SHITS! THEY DIDN'T THINK IT WOULD BE SUCCESSFUL ENOUGH TO HAVE A SEQUEL! FICTION ISN'T REAL! IT'S NOT INTERNALLY CONSISTENT ACROSS EPISODES BECAUSE IT'S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE TELLING A STORY! IT'S NOT REAL! IT'S FUCKING FICTION!

Unity is a game engine that, for a long time, said "just pay us a monlthy fee to develop using our engine and we're square." then because EULAs and Terms of Service are slippery little bastards that are contracts but only benefit the owner they changed that to "Actually you're going to have to pay us a fee every time someone installs your game lol get rekt".

Lots of people are being about this, but, like, Marx did not fail to consider, and in Capitalism if you don't have a contract you have nothing. Signing a "contract" where one side can alter the terms to whatever they want seems... a bit naive but what you can you do?

A friend is showing me all his cool starfield stuff and I kind of just feel bad for him. A lot of systems seem really stripped down even compared to Fallout 4. It doesn't seem like you can, for instance, lay down foundations and build whatever building you want in whatever shape you want like you could with Fallout's extremely janky settlement system. You have to plop down various NASA white habitat modules and you're limited by how those modules click together. I'm not clear on whether you can layout rooms and workstations within the hab modules and at this point I'm a little afraid to ask.

The armor system in fallout where you had a clothing layer and could then add customizable armor on top of the clothing layer seems to be gone. In FO4 you could have separate armor pieces for your chest, for each arm, for each leg, plus helmets and a few other things. All the pieces could be modded with different appearances and perks. No it looks like you're down to a set of clothing and a space suit with very limited customization options.

Combat just looks appalling bad. Beth has never had good combat, but it looks like for Starfield they tuned the combat AI down to the point where it reacts very, very slowly and doesn't do much beyond stand there and and wait to be shot. I assume this is to compensate for the removal of VATS, which is another inexplicably absent system. VATS was notable in FO3 and FO4 for making the game much more accessible to people who didn't play FPS games and I cannot fathom why it was removed.

The spaceship builder is okay, but it looks very limited in what it can do. Most of the ships end up looking very samey since they're snapped together out of modules. You're not getting anything with a single smooth external hull, nor do you have freedom to define the shape of the rooms inside the pressure vessel. There may be some large interior space modules I haven't run in to yet. Personally I think the "Nasapunk" clean-room aesthetic conflicts with the space opera story framework. It works in kerbal because the space ships behave like space ships, but it looks weird when the space ships operate on space opera rules. Like instead of having the ship vertically oriented for launch to orbit it takes off with VTOL thrusters and then flies away like a plane despite really not being a space plane. When star wars, which runs entirely on bullshit space opera, does it it doesn't bother me because it's consistent with the aesthetic. But having a ship that sorta-kinda is trying to look realistically doing star-wars stuff is a big jarring.

It also suffers from millennium falcon syndrome. You can only control one ship at a time, and "control" is doing a lot of work when all you can really do is point the nose around in a very limited space combat minigame, so your ship has to be able to do everything- cargo, combat, whatever. You can't deploy fighters or call for backup in a space fight, which has been frustrating a few people i know as they get in to space combat but their ship isn't built properly for it. Space combat also looks very basic. You're not going to be doing anything fancy with drone weapons, newtonian maneuvers, or turrets. You kind of just point your nose at the enemy and hold down the fire button until one of you explodes. It's like a stripped down version of X-wing vs Tie Fighter.

Apparently there no space walk/EVA. Which... Why? Why? Why wouldn't you make that a thing?

Bethesda's innability or unwillingness to learn, innovate or really do anything new in very frustrating. I doubt this will make sense to most people, but I've spent so many hundreds of hours under the hood of these games fixing problems, fleshing out anemic systems, and so forth, it feels very disappointing to see that Beth has yet again shipped a bunch of very shallow systems without much complexity or depth.

And who am I to make these criticisms? The last version of a mod I contributed too long ago has had 400,000 downloads since 2016, is who I am. A very minor contribution, but I've been in the guts of these games almost as long as Todd has. And while the mod community has grown and done incredible things Beth keeps shipping stripped down, disappointing messes. I view Beth's games as a process where Beth releases a problem and then the modding community has to fix it, over and over again, and every so often Todd tries to destroy the whole relationship by monetizing modding. without the bullshit of IP and profit motive, if Beth's games could truly be a collaborative community process with open source code, Bethesda probably would have been forced out of the process a long time ago for causing more problems than they solve. The simple fact that the script extenders have to be re-built from scratch for each game and then arduously maintained when they're constantly broken by updates, even after all these years, is extremely frustrating. Beth could just... integrate the script extensions natively instead of making the community hack them back together every time, but they don't. It's rude.

Beth games are an excellent example of how art, creatively, and inventiveness are stifled by property laws and IP.

It turns out the secret was to just forget your guns and high tech missile launchers and the fact that you have legs and just fly towards the thing and punch it in the chin with your laser sword until it dies.

Once I beat the skill-check tutorial boss I've been making some progress. I won my first AC fight, murdering the student driver, and I've been making progress becoming more efficient and skilled with the AC and the weaponry.

About an hour in to the mission I discovered that Nazis are actually kinda dumb and you don't really have to be very careful at medium difficulty.

Also, i don't understand why there are non-lethal options in this game, but I suspect there may be liberalism afoot.

I should note - If I did knock a Nazi out I specifically went back and shot them in the head. Those ten guys were accidents. Would have gotten them if I could.

Space games these days! Won't let you navigate interplanetary space. One let you make your own jump calculations for FTL. It's shameful!

Independence War is a space combat simulator first released in 1998. It was and remains almost unique in attempting a detailed simulation of open space combat that doesn't heavily rely on space opera tropes, WWII dogfighting, or simplified arcade combat. You've got Newtonian flight, two different FTL drives, ships that sustain damage to internal systems and can be repaired by repair crews in real time. It's extremely cool and extremely old. This play through is silent and uses a cleaned up version of the game played in HD resolutions. Worth a watch if you're in to that kind of thing.

Starfield's art direction is painfully boring. I've ben watching friends play. It looks like a totally soulless, characterless distillation of every forgettable science fiction movie in the last 30 years. It sure does look NASA, and NASA doesn't have an artistic vision, they just slap shit together in whatever way won't explode. The menus, the costumes, the weapons, even the planets, just look painfully generic. Like congrats, Todd, you successfully executed the NASA part alright. There's no way you could have made more intensely bland, vague, inoffensive rendition of space. There's no "punk" anywhere to be seen, though.

: p

I can't believe they made this shit instead of TES Six. It's like every 2010s space show that got cancelled half way through the first season.

Note: I'm just a white guy who read the Autobiography of Malcolm X when I was younger and did some additional reading. If I've got any details wrong or I'm wildly offbase please call me out. I have thrown around the Yakub bit myself. When a Hexbear called out the bit as racist I had to do some self-crit about it. Here's a very short explainer to give some backstory on where the bit came from.

The very short version

• Yakub is a figure in Nation of Islam mythology derived from the Hebrew patriarch Jacob

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• In NOI mythology Yakub used eugenics to create white people from ancient black people

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• due to the horrible methods Yakub used and his evil intentions white people are incapable of empathy and compassion and can only do evil

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• 4Chan found out that the NOI exists a few years ago

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• 4Chan created the (CW: 4chan bullshit)
  spoiler

  "We were kings" meme, usually with "we were kings" deliberately misspelled and accompanied by racist imagery
  . This was inspired by both NOI beliefs and Hotep beliefs

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• At some point the Chapos found out about the 4Chan meme and began ironically adopting the NOI position in response, referring to white people as Yakubian devils or variations of that

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• It stuck around on Hexbear

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• It's not appropriate for white people to be making jokes about a black religious and political movement

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• The NOI mythology was created during the 1930s when eugenics was a popular concept. It inverts contemporary white "race science", essentially reversing the roles of white people and black people under a similar, religiously influenced psuedoscientific narrative.

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• The NOI call themselves Muslims. Their religious beliefs are a very idiosyncratic mixture of Christian, Muslim, and original beliefs. They were not closely related to Sunni or Shi'a Islam

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• When the founder of the NOI died in 1975 his son and successor disbanded the organization and re-formed it. The new organization went through several names before settling on the American Society of Muslims. The American Society of Muslims rejected most NOI beliefs, becoming much closer to mainstream Sunni Islam

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• After the NOI was disbanded Louis Farrakhan and a splinter group formed a continuation of the NOI. This sect is notorious for it's racial superiority ideology, anti-semitism, homophobia, and generally being reactionary jerks

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• No one really likes the NOI. They have little mainstream support but continue to have some cultural influence

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• Trivia - Louis Farrakhan probably ordered the assassination of el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, also known as Malcolm X

So, in Darktide enemies all have fixed HP based on difficulty level. Which makes breakpoints extremely important. ie, does it take one shot, two shots, or three shots to kill this trash mob? How many charged plasgun shots does it take to drop this giant armored Ogryn? Weapons have a bunch of stats that determine their performance, and as you level a weapon up it'll get some perks and damage buffs. But the perks, at least, are semi-random. You can have a weapon with perfect stats and bad perks and buffs. You can change the perks and buffs, but only two out of four total. And you can only change the perks to other perks you've unlocked by sacrificing a weapon that has them.

So, you need to get blessed by RNJesus to get the perks that are good. Then you need to sacrifice the weapon so you can put it on another weapon with good stats. Then you need to actually get that weapon with good stats, and level it up, and hope that at least two perks/buffs are good so you can replace the other two.

And all this requires resources that you have to collect by playing the game.

The result is it takes ages to level up weapons assuming you get good rolls.

And it all sucks. I just want to play the higher level content, but that's contingent on getting weapons that can hit important breakpoints. When you're getting swarmed by a hundred unhinged covid deniers the difference between killing in one hit or killing in two or three is life and death. You can do it with less than perfect weapons if you have a good team, but I mostly play with randos so the team quality is in the hands of fate. And even with a good team and perfect weapons it's hard and it's easy to get wiped in seconds if you get hit by the wrong combination of enemies, or someone gets thrown off a ledge by an explosion, or two people get incapacitated at the same time, or you get flanked by flame throwers from two direction, or a billion other things.

If the game was just designed to be balanced so the weapons had predictable performance and you could choose what buffs you wanted from a list you could just... play the damn game. Instead everything has to have RNG and crafting and random loot drops and blah blah blah I yearn for the days when weapons had no attachments and the devs could actually balance the stupid things because no one had invented the idea of manipulating people to make the games addictive.

Tennocon was pretty okay. The cosplays were cool to see. The professionallotus costume was incredible, movie hero costume quality. The amateur cosplayers were really creative. The kubrow puppet was my favorite, though the "trinity" costume that was just a crab outfit was funny.

Good to hear we're getting a re-work of companions. Sounds like they're going to remove permadeath for companions entirely and let you rez them through in game actions. I assume it'll be killing enemies or apply status or something. They also said there are going to be new mods tomake companions more interactive.

I got the baro ticket months ago so i went and stocked up on cool bling and drippy drip. I almost blew all my credits buying pillars bc i thought they were 100k credits, but actually they were 1million! I bought ten but i farmed the hell out of index last time i had a credit booster just for this so i still had like six million left. I had about 5k ducats saved up from a few months of running void relics a few times every week or two.

I did some dog days. It's a neat idea, but pretty basic. It'd be better as pvp but y'all know how touchy the community is about pvp.

Did the gift of the lotus alert for the umbra forma and also got to rank 29 on nightwave, so i got two umbra forma in one day. Idk what i'm going to do with them. I've been building tons of weapons i never used over the years but there just aren't that many that need the umbra melee mods.some warframes do benefit but health and armor are pretty iffy in these days of shield gating and rolling for i-frames.

Finally got my prisma grakata. Grakata has always been my favorite gun and the prisma is a huge step up. I have utterly ridiculous plans for turning it in to an absolute menace. Using brain storm to fire constantly for as long as I can keep making headshots is reallt fun.

The next story thing looks neat. I won't say anything about it except that it looks like it's moving away from duviri. I really don't understand what they wanted with duviri. I thought they were going to use it to break free from the exponential power creep and have a more challenging game mode but with a handful of decrees you can one-shot all the enemies. My best guess i that it's a tech demo for soulframe. But anyway, looks like we're moving away from it to real plot stuff again.

That's all i've got. Looking forward to another ten years of this bizarre game.