#Balancing Goodness and Effectiveness

[hinamie]

inflict

[mrablogger]

Machiavelli's Wisdom: Balancing Niceness and Effectiveness

Learn how Niccolò Machiavelli challenges conventional notions of goodness and effectiveness in our quest for positive change.

In a world where goodness and effectiveness often seem at odds, the 16th-century Florentine political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli challenges conventional notions. His perspective, as outlined in “The Prince,” delves into an uncomfortable truth: that the so-called wicked often triumph over the good. Why? Because principles unburden the wicked. They employ cunning, deceit, and violence to achieve…

[glitchgh0sty]

AhHA! Finally gotchu! *quietly slides mimics au sketches across the forest floor* 🫶^u^

Extra sneakiness ✨:

- Hey Glitch,, whatcha. *cough* Doin over there??

- ,,Keferoning … - I think.

[stars-n-kites]

this reference in the graphic novel crystal kingdom recap made me realize like. kravitz really didnt do anything in that arc huh? kind of a failguy. just got beat up multiple times in a row, didnt collect bounties on any of the people he was there for, lost high card draw, and got dunked on for his fake accent. at least hes pretty.

[lemonadewine]

Dol Amroth and their Swan Knights will never not be funny to me. Because yes, swans are elegant, of course the famously noble, very Numenorean family would have that as their banner. You know what swans also are? Territorial and absolutely feral if you approach their home and nesting site. (Mute swans are particularly vicious, many swans are just aggressively defensive, mute swans are actively dicks.)

I love the idea of of Imrahil and his family meeting important people and they're so put together and regal, and then you see them in battle and they are... so scary. I love a Lothiriel who seems so smooth and demure and then will absolutely punch the throat of anyone who touches her without permission, no hesitation, you should have known better than to the touch the Princess of Dol Amroth. I love this family of beautiful noble people who defend their home so viciously that they can bring the most troops of the principalities. What? Like it's hard? A family that will not hesitate to cut you but they'll also be the symbol for nobility and honour, with a Prince that even elves know is a pretty impressive person.

Give me the family of Dol Amroth who are loving and calculated and cold and deeply efficient at dealing with threats. Ones who surprise their enemies by being three steps ahead at all times, but 'Elphir could not have done this, he is so noble,' yeah buddy, but you hoarded grain during a siege so I hope you have fun in the Dol Amroth prisons until after Morannon when we can be bothered to deal with you.

Turncoats? Hard to turn a coat without any of the correct information and each and every one of your sources rounded up before you can warn them.

Slimy advisors? Eaten for dinner, Denethor; sad but we planned for this, Mordor and certain death? Sure, not a part of the plan but our knights are renowned for their battle prowess, let's go and tear Sauron a new one.

Give me noble, coldly efficient, wildly territorial and very slightly feral Dol Amarothians. I beg you. Make their swan a symbol of their absolutely unhinged defense of their beautiful, elegant home.

(But like wild oceans and massive mountains? I have a whole post about how this also gives us insight into Imrahil and his kids, or like, my version of them. Water and stone, commanding oceans and navigating massive peaks. The children of Dol Amroth grow up walking uphill both ways, their knees are scarred and bloody from slipping down sharp mountain paths and they are honed to their lands.)

[xenodile]

There's a quest line to get a legendary cloak in Mists of Pandaria that midway through demands you win a pair of battleground matches. This sounds very easy in practice, but in reality is completely RNG.

I've spoken before about how MMO pvp is inherently unbalanced and badly designed, right? Well that's based on my experience playing WoW back in the vanilla through Wrath days, and playing on this MoP private server, I see literally nothing has changed. It is still a matter of who has a higher number, and more importantly, the *correct* number, because there's an arbitrary PVP only stat that affects how much damage you deal and take in PVP, and how long player based crowd control affects you. So you essentially need an entirely separate weapon and armor set to play PVP, all of which is acquired exclusively through doing PVP, because the only way to win in PVP is to have played more PVP in totality than your opponent, and thus have a bigger number than your opponent. Your power level is directly tied to how long you've been doing this specific game mode, with nothing to balance or equalize things. And because people have a need to inflate their egos, this gets translated into being "good" at PVP.

Additionally, the battlegrounds themselves are horribly unbalanced by virtue of completely randomized respawns. When you die you're thrown to the nearest compatible graveyard, and an NPC automatically revives everyone present every 30 seconds (closer to 32 seconds because of a delay between casting times). So you can die, and revive near instantly, or you can die and have to get there a second to late and sit there for 32 seconds, with nothing about the state of the match itself actually determining what that timer is.

Not to mention that the game is rife with genuinely unbalanced mechanics, like the ability to chain stun or immobilize a character non-stop for 10+ seconds, with the only tools to escape these effects often on minute long cooldowns or longer. Like, some classes and specializations are legitimately just better at PVP than others because of the exclusive abilities they have access to. Paladins have forever been PVP gods because they have an on demand invulnerability and an instant, off global full health heal. Rogues and Warlocks have been menaces in PVP since the game launched due to how many debuffs and crowd control effects they can stack up near instantly. Frost Mages are able to permanently slow and repeatedly root or stun a target without sacrificing any damage.

And pointing out how fundamentally broken this is at any point gets people who have made PVP their entire personality coming out of the woodwork to defend it and say it's balanced. Because they've put time into it, and thus have more gear, they win more often. This obviously they means they are "good" at PVP and any time they win it is fairly earned, while anyone that loses is just "bad". All without any capacity to define what "skill" actually means in this game mode. Because there isn't any. You win by having a team comprised of people with better numbers than the other team, and getting luckier with crits and respawn times than the other team.

So I'm just sitting here, queueing for battlegrounds, hoping I get eventually get put on the winning team, so I can stop playing this game mode I don't like and don't want to play, and get the non-pvp reward at the end of the quest.

[thankchaosforspellcheck]

SPOILERS FOR DELTARUNE CHAPTER 4

"the place where it rained" has some really interesting implications for Sans specifically, tbh.

This is the theme for the night when he clearly had a fantastic time. He's having a blast hanging out with a cool older lady, getting drunk & dancing to old records, and is implied to have had a great evening out with her before that.

It's the kind of evening you might be nostalgic for, one day.

One day, in the far-flung future, when you finally have to face all the problems that built up when you weren't looking, that the kids you & her left to fend for themselves were dealing with in the whole town's stead.

The kind of evening that was a dream for you, and a nightmare for someone else.

[narfin-frood]

what you said in the tags of that post about struggling to keep the tone in check is so real. I have my own woy swap au and as tempting as it is to just straight into The Horrors tm or make it like, super edgy, it's not really what I want to do with it. For my own villain!Wander I wanted the tone to be like, oh its very silly and goofy and a bit surreal and cartoony and while it seems fine at first glance, there's an sort of undercurrent of like, a sense of wrongness or offness to the whole thing. Yknow what I mean? Like there's horrors, but it's subtle. Hope this ask makes sense lol.

oh yeah i'm real bad at keeping the tone in check. and your au seems really fun! it's hard not to get carried away when the temptation to make things as evil as possible is so strong. it's so fun to write!

[secret-maker-of-great-holes]

A long trail of thought brought me back to my ever-boiling one-sided feud with Black Library writer and 40k loremaker extraordinaire Dan Abnett. This isn’t about that, except it is, because it made me remember how in Saturnine John Grammaticus learns the Emperor’s original name and is like “what, that’s it? Kinda disappointing”. You would think an immortal assassin like himself would know what happens when you throw rocks from a glass house.

John. Johnny. My boy. My dysfunctional little plot tumour that you are and were since the day an editor forgot to tell mister Abnett to kill you at the end of “Legion”. Have you taken a look at your surname recently John. How about you stop talking shit and contribute something meaningful to the plot for once.

[thatscarletflycatcher]

The thing is, I do love a cranky, sarcastic, clever, old man writer. I delight in Alasdair MacIntyre, and I have the time of my life reading Etienne Gilson too, even the times I disagree with them.

And then there's one Gilbert Keith Chesterton whom I find insufferable to read most of the time, unless it is fiction (The Man Who Was Thursday my beloved).

[polarmoon]

have some unedited screenshots while i mess around with reshade

[ssevenneedles]

isat speedrun bad touch%. new game+ (dialogue skipping allowed) but no other exploits. grind the house, beat the king four times in a row, watch the event, time ends when you equip the memory.

is this anything

[heartsbreaking]

i got a lot of bad vibes here rn and i probably still will but fuck that, this is a love letter to everyone who lets me send them increasingly stupid reels during my pre-nap scrolls, everyone who sends me pics of their pets (and lets me send them pics of mine), everyone who has received one of my late night large blocks of text with somewhat incomprehensible plot ideas, everyone who likes my ooc posts, everyone who supposedly keeps a list of every show/movie i rec to them, everyone who's listened to me ramble about ocs/shows/ships/characters they don't know the source material for, everyone who sends me twitter posts about stuff i'll probably be excited about cause i won't see it otherwise, everyone who's recommended stuff to me: i love you, i love you, i love you 💙💙, you make me feel seen and loved and none of my complaints are ever about you.

one day my brain will be so functional that there will be many less complaints only love, but for now i must balance out the haterade with lover energy. i love youuuuu 💙

[tqtc-art]

doing some color scheme experiments with Taako as my muse

[moregraceful]

many things i have been keeping under wraps at work, such as pronouns, but also, very critically, age. bc i got that ageless mixed race asian swag where i am very clearly not an undergrad but also??? they just don't know. and it WHIPS and it is so funny to ME because all the managers and shift supervisors are like damn this girl in her mid-twenties is so easy to talk to, it's like talking to a peer. surprise bitch i'm older than you. and maybe this means i'm performing psychological experiments on cis men, but i am ngl if i hand you a two page resume that you don't read, it is simply none of MY business if you think i am in my mid-20s. they are going to be so mad when they find out lmao

[whatwwwwwww]

anyone here got any chill TV show/movie reccs?

nothing aimed at children please