#old man rants on the cloud

[spearxwind]

i think every game that makes flying the focus (and theres veeery few of those) should have a map with a lot of verticality to it. Yes we all wanna fly a dragon over a vast landscape but when youre high up everything is indistinguishable, the sky is empty, and that gets boring real quick. A flying game should have verticality in a way that lets you explore heights that are really high and places on the map that are overlaid with each other would feel more alive and give you so much more space to work with. In a way, itd be like the inverse of the subnautica map. The original map was amazing because it made the ocean feel so huge. "What do you mean theres five biomes underneath the earth?? what do you mean theres just vast caves under here?" and everything felt super interconnected too. There should be more things in the sky than just you too. Enemies, prey, companions.... etc.

my fave flying game is called 'aer memories of old' and it doesnt really have that verticality but its a good flying game imo because its got a map thats so rewarding to explore, there is a PURPOSE to flying around just beyond what the game wants you to do. The lore of the world is out there for you to find and piece together, and the map is filled with life and details. And recently theres been an uptick in developers trying to make flying dragon games but none feel like flying has any purpose at all other than be really showy and yeah it looks awesome but without a purpose for flying its gonna get boring for the player!!

"This is the dragon game you've always wanted" and its another purposeless multiplayer mmorpg with an insanely huge completely empty map and they focus so much on the five fucking billion dragon cosmetics (and god forbid theyre all free btw) instead of making a game that is fun to play and just put the responsibility of having fun on the shoulders of the player. "omg u can make any dragon in this game the models look so cool!!" ok but what about the game. can you tell me if you game is fun? is there anything to do? oh, just material gathering shit and crafting? and an mmo where you have to play with others for there to be any semblance of life in the world? ok

idk im just sick of seeing games advertised as a dragon survival game where the only survival aspect is like. 'find food' 'find water' 'find a mate to have an egg' repeat. repeat. repeat. surely theres other things?? what about migration? territorial disputes? becoming the apex predator? being a local tyrant or a benevolent protector? there is so much that could be done with dragons but all every dev wants to dip their ass in is multiplayer nonsesne with the most basic hunger and thirst and a basic as fuck combat mechanic and call it survival so that people can choose to kill each other. its so lazy

[sunderwight]

Thinking about Lan Qiren being online and I'm pretty sure that he would fall for the Smooth Sharks Fallacy like every single time.

People would try and explain it to him and it wouldn't matter. He would still keep trying to bring academic articles into pie fights.

[markscherz]

I clicked on that wikipedia link you posted for H. fleischmanni and was surprised to see that the section talking about the frog’s natural predators was titled “enemies” instead of “predators.” The word “enemies,” at least to me, seems strange in this context because it seems to anthropomorphize the frogs, which as far as I’m aware is something zoologists try to avoid doing with animals. Is there a scientific reason for “enemies” to be used here, as opposed to “predators”?

Regrettably, a huge number of problems of this kind have been built into Wikipedia by the Wikipedia Education Foundation-supported courses. Students carry out an 'assignment' that involves a dramatic expansion to a given wikipedia page based on any literature they can find. That revised page is then subjected to 'peer review' by their classmates. But because they are unfamiliar with (1) the literature, (2) the contents of other wikipedia pages, and (3) how wikipedia actually works, the resulting pages are often full of misinformation, redundancies, and weird formulations.

You have accurately identified one such idiosyncrasy. 'Enemies' was a very common formulation for 'predators' in the 1800s and early 1900s, but we have largely left it behind, for precisely the reason you say, and hence it sounds jarring to our ears. In this case it is a minor problem (you should have seen how the Paroedura masobe page looked before I cleaned it up), but irksome nonetheless.

[horreurscopes]

omfg found the catch with spotify audiobooks being included in your subscription and it is that at some point you are out of "listening hours" (unlike other audiobook apps, it does not tell you how many hours you've listened to and it definitely doesn't tell you how many hours you have left, or even how many audiobook hours total you have been granted unless you go looking for it)(it is 15 hours) and when you hit the 15 hour paywall they graciously inform you that you can "top off" your account and buy extra audiobook listening hours (no you are not warned this would happen. when you start listening to audiobooks it seems by all accounts that it is unlimited)

and i was like okay, fine, for convenience's sake i'll fall prey to their scheme this ONE time so i can finish this damn book, thinking it'd be like, $5, considering the monthly subscription is $10.99+tax. but

you have to pay THIRTEEN DOLLARS! FOR TEN HOURS OF AUDIOBOOK! that will get you one full airport paperback novel or self-help book. most of everything worth listening to is longer than that

for that price you're much better getting a scribd $11.99 subscription which although it comes with its own faults, it will at least let you listen to a handful of complete books before it starts getting choosy

or better yet, get your audiobooks from your local library app. libby my best friend libby and her girlfriend overdrive would never do this to me

[thedreamsofgalaxies]

People really need to stop claiming Viktor was dead when Jayce hexcored him. He was not. The rules of what kills you or not are vastly different in the Arcane universe. He was not dead. Jayce literally says Viktor was bleeding out. The later claim about "my partner dying in this room" is so obviously metaphorical. It's a thing people say when someone is so utterly changed from who they used to be and we need to stop pretending Jayce was having some revelation there.

Here are some facts, since people are gonna scream at me for this:

1. Coming back from the dead is huge fucking deal even in the Arcane universe. Singed has been trying to do that literally for decades without success. If Vik was dead and arisen, it wouldn't have been such a thing when he did it later.

2. He was amp'd up with shimmer and hextech at the moment of the blast. Those are two of the most inhuman super power juices Arcane has, both giving it's user endurance, healing, and power.

3. "But his spine was broken" - sure, maybe? (Let's just add that that image is an artistic expression and probably not in the script.) That in itself isn't an instant death. Especially with shimmer in your body. There are plenty of deadly injuries in the show which don't end up being nothing more than a flesh wound.

Would he have died, like, very soon, without Jayce? Yes, most likely. But he wasn't dead yet. It wasn't a fucking necromancy.

[ganondoodle]

as i was awake in the middle of the night for like 2 hours bc i felt sick i had more somewhat random totk thoughts

one being that i really hate how raurus response to concerned zelda is, after sonia died in that almost funny how little impactful it was way, "im sure you are here for a reason" (actually, i hate how often this sentence is used in general to .. idk i guess its supposed to be inspiritational???)

bc what does that mean actually? him saying that to someone who got there absolutely by accident really just sounds like "i dont care go figure it out yourself bc i dont want to think about anything concerning you or your troubles lol" i guess its meant to sound like OOOOH fate has BROUGHT you here bc you have to furfill a role you dont know yet (spoiler its being a sacrifice girl with no personality) and besides me hating the 'inescapable fate' trope in general (at least the way its usually done in these games, which is not to struggle against it but willingly accept whatever you are told and pretend thats good) its really jsut goddamn boring and is really only an excuse to well .. ignore her and her trouble; shouldnt you, if you were actually such a cool guy like the game wants me to believe so bad, do everything in your power to get zelda back to her own world before shes pulled even further into the war you caused now that her only ""mentor"" that could help her get more use of her pretty much useless sudden powers is gone too?? i know shes basically dead wife sonia replacement (can of worms ugh) but it still grinds my gears whenever i think of that cutscene, bc i cant help but hear it as the lamest excuse in existence to not care about her and just kinda .. see what happens which in this case means leave zelda completely on her her own since both rauru and mineru die as well (honestly shouldnt rauru have thought about like .. any plan to defeat gan besides dying himself, given hes the oh so cool and goodest guy king whos only mistake was not stabbing gan the second he stepped into their kathedral castle thing, like even if you had a plan it can still fail but it seemed like he just kinda went in with a handful of people that didnt seem to know each other at all, never got names or faces -or unique voices for that matter- to fight gan face to face inlcuding the girl that came from a different time and had nothing to do with any of this conflict and couldnt even really control her sudden new powers just seems pretty stupid)

thought 2

how totk really feels like botw but for the people who didnt like shiekah tech, its not a sequel, its botw again, but version of only sonau, its like a pokemon game that had two versions but one has weirdly incoherent story and acts like the other never existed jsut as a whole its like retreading the same points but worse, all shiekah tech that was so integral to the world and had such a long history just vanishing and no one caring about any of it like it never happened, HELL the titans were called divine beasts in english but i guess they werent divine or important enough to keep around LOL champions WHO and isntead a never before seen or even heard of race for that matter showing up and planting their ass in every place the shiekah were before, dare i say it feels weirdly manipulative, like either them or some outside force erasing every fact about the ancient shiekah and replace them with sonau stuff bc they are the hot new shit now

this is a point that just doesnt stop bothering me, how the shiekah tech seemed so carefully designed and integrated into botws world and story, its a difficult to keep balance after all, integrating high tech stuff into a medieval setting, but they made it work! and then totk comes around and throws a bunch modern day tech into it puts some vague greenish stone filter on its exterior and call that even better more ancient tech; why did they even bother to make pottery inspired laser shooting spider legged robots so well integrated when they throw a car and rockets into the next game without a thought and call it a day, what was the fucking point

it feels like someone was dead set on having a set of legos thrown into the game it had no place in, if you want players to build whatever they want make a building game instead!! especially if you are just gonna throw it in with seemingly no consideration how out of place it feels togehter with the fACT THAT YOU ALREADY HAD AND ANCIENT HIGH TECH CIVILIZATION WITH A VERY DISTINCT AESTHETIC THAT WAS ALREADY WELL INTEGRATED INTO THE WORLD YOU ARE PLANNING TO REUSE WITH ALOT OF MYSTERY AND UNKOWN STUFF ABOUT THEM TO EXPLORE FURTHER YOU COULD HAVE USED!! but i guess they just "didnt want to play with you anymore" and that so much so that they went out of their way to erase every trace of it, i dont think the words shiekah tech are ever used in the game, and the purah pad and her towers just drive me more isnane bc they are the same shit but called different and also much worse, liek the purah pad isnt some more developed shiekah stone, no its a glorified camera with a teleport function and thats it

(i know i said this before but i really cant stand how obsessed every single NPC is with sonau shit, you get told to your face every second line of dialog that they are so cool and are so mysterious that it just makes me annoyed of them even more, the game is obsessed with shoving them everywhere and telling you over and over you too should obsess over them, they werent weird like that about the shiekah stuff in botw?? the biggesst talking point in botw was calamity ganon ..... which makes sense and in totk its like ... gan is mentioned what, in a newspaper article??? once???and then not even by name i think???)

aside from that big point which will never let me go, its also just .. its not moving forward anything, it actively walks BACK the progress that was made in botw, call me dumb but i dont really count moving one step up in the social roles of each race as a character development (for the side characters like the champions desc- ahem SAGES) but mainly zelda ... god how dirty she was done, totk pretty explicitely makes her regress any development she made in botw aside from she likes link uwu and some people like her too, but also not enough to notice that that weird zelda being all evil and weird isnt her (INLCUDING THE CHAMP- SAGES WHO YOU ARE SUPPOSEDLY FRIENDS WITH??? you dont have to be a genius to pick up on that my god, were you all given the mc dumbo potion or what)

she gets put back to square one, back into the little itty bitty princessy maiden role forced upon her by her royal parentage, this time rauru edition, back into a white little dress, back into the scared puppy eyed teenager, back into a situation she cant handle, back into losing everyone around her (tho honestly botw made me care more about rhoam than totk did about rauru), back into being forced to do a big sacrifice- but worse actually

in botw she went to FIGHT AND HOLD GANON IN THE CASTLE SO LINK HAD TIME TO RECOVER AND IT WOULDNT DESTROY THE LAND!! and you are telling me in totk rauru takes up her botw role and she bascially killed herself to ... restore the mastersword.

......... she ... she did that only to be a glorified version of the stone pedestal in the forest. and then she gets returned to normal itty bitty girly no problem via magic sparkle beam at the end and

DOESNT

EVEN

REMEMBER.

it really is just botw but worse, you even get yet another ghost king of hyrule to guide you around (rhoam did it better fight me ... we dont talk about the questionable choice to make himself darker skinned when posing as just some guy)

i honestly dont think i was ever truly taken aback by anythign that happened in botw, while in totk, the further i played, the more i had to fight with myself to keep the feeling of unease, disappointment and betrayal down

its such a god damn shame, totk should have stayed a DLC, i will forever mournfully dream of a game that explores more of the ancient shiekah, doesnt erase integral parts of the world, developes characters more instead of making them regress back and make them end up even less developed than at the start of the game, dives into buried secrets and mistakes of dark pages of history without giving into a weirldy nationalist(imperalisitc?) narrative and lets characters have some agency for once

if it werent for the yiga i might have actually considered refunding the game, just to be at peace with myself

anyway, aboslutely incoherent word vomit.

[irlkokichiouma]

ghdsfkjghdsf is that a common thing?

I don't really get how he'd be misdiagnosed anyway; it would need brain scans, especially since it's so rare at his age, and if anything it would have been misdiagnosed as other conditions for a while. Only going off cry-stars here- I have no expertise myself- but she's said that can happen and there was a recent case in Japan where a young guy's dementia was mistaken for depression for ages.

If we doubt Komaeda's FTD it can only be via doubting his honesty imo (but I still think he's telling the truth). I also love seeing analyses of him through the lenses of other disorders as comorbid instead of alternative diagnoses- especially autism, but I've seen interesting takes wrt OCD and BPD too- but canonically I feel like bvFTD, extreme post-traumatic stress and political radicalisation adequately explain his issues.

TO BE FAIR it probably isnt As common as i think it is, i just saw one reddit post thst explicitly claimed the FTD was a misdiagnosis and that it totally makes way more sense for komaeda to have autism and bpd, and a surprisung number of people... agreed? for some reason??

which i need to state for the record a) i am autistic myself and b) have absolutely zero problems with headcanons, even if they arent ones i ascribe to personally

what i DO have a problem with is people erasing canon neurodivergencies and/or erasing traits CENTRAL to a character in order to square-peg-round-hole the headcanon THEY have as the most correct one

"nagito has ftd and was autistic before that?" cool! neat! seeing how those two disorders being comorbid with each other could be really interesting!

"nagito does NOT have ftd, the devs were wrong, they actually wrote an autistic character and didnt realize it" stop talking.

this is very like, misanthropic i guess but after SO MUCH SHIT ive seen it just speaks to an unwillingness to empathize with or relate to anyone that isnt exactly like you. and you cant just headcanon real people around you with Misdiagnosed Autistic (most.... times....) so this pops up in fiction

like. i am autistic! i also have two (2) personality disorders, and neither is bpd. this has led to a non negligible amount of autistic people completely stereotyping my other disorders as evil in order to prop themselves up ("i thought i was a narcissist/sociopath, which wouldve been awful, but really i was just autistic! phew!!" with implicit, sometimes EXPLICIT value judgements being made)

i have had a friend i had in real life, to my face, say he didn't believe i had either personality disorder and really i was secretly just autistic

...if we had been better friends, maybe he would've known me well enough to know that that's almost... comically untrue. lol

so in my opinion there do exist a certain minority of autistic people who see autism as the only neurodivergency that Matters, or at least the one that matters the most. and the only way they can feel any sympathy for anyone else is if they are also autistic

and i know this is a minority! and i just see it a lot because i am an autist in fandom and a lot of other autistic people are also in fandom! AND that this is a mindset prone to ANY minority- most people think their Problem is the Worst Problem, it just... happens. however i am just as irrational and prone to biases as anyone else and ive chosen this as my completely irrelevant hill to die on

that one reddit post made me so goddamn mad bc of All This PLUS its double insulting when someone says "i have a special interest in psychology!" as a way to say theyre extremely knowledgable, and doing genuine analysis with the lens of "i am looking at the text and trying to make an objective diagnosis" and then STILL DO THIS!!! because they have this veneer of "im just a guy asking questions" before diving right into a weirdly consspiratory subset of "everyones an idiot about mental health except for ME"

...which tbf i dont think that about myself. i am very good at writing a wide variety of mental illness due to a combination of research and life experience BUT i could really only tell you like. actual non-surface level FACTS about aspd and to a lesser extent, npd. because thats what i chose to focus on. there are far and away lots more people that know more about me about other things, and im fine wit that

i am however also aware of this extremely hyperspecific social phenominon. and thus it is my burden to bear. my mountainous molehill.

also r/danganronpa just fucking sucks like in general. every time i see a kokichi opinion there i get a little closer to pulling the trigger. i think the real moral here is reddit is garbage and should not be used for anything other than product reviews

(also fwiw i agree w ur personal take at the end, with a lil bit of ocd tendencies that like, started off manageable and nowhere near diagnostic level badness, since things he might do to manage his cycle and even the constant thinking about it are very much reminiscent of obsessions and compulsions. but ftd in of itself can cause ocd symptoms so after that it got... worse. thats my personal take on it ^^)

[queenlua]

On the ground level, [the Pantheon is] just a moderately cluttered and tacky church, but the ceiling is an unparalleled feat of engineering — a huge dome, with no internal infrastructure or supports. Contemporary investigators literally don’t know how they achieved it. And on this trip, a retrospectively obvious thing dawned on me: for most Western Europeans for a thousand years or more, that was how it was with essentially all Roman achievements. Often modern people look down their nose at the so-called “dark ages” as an era when people were obsessed with the past, seemingly arbitrarily. But they were physically surrounded by infrastructure and buildings erected by the ancients that they couldn’t build if they wanted to. The engineering know-how, the access to resources, the sheer ability to organize and structure a labor process — it was all gone and there was seemingly no way to recapture it. We could say the same for the intellectual achievements of the ancients. Medieval people didn’t rely on them simply because they were lazy or unimaginative. They lacked the intellectual infrastructure — not just the traditions of education, but often the physical documents themselves, which had to be copied afresh every generation or so. They assumed that Galen was smarter than any contemporary doctor not only because he was such a genius but because he was in a position to know much more than any current-day investigator. You can’t just rebuild that intellectual infrastructure through sheer force of will, certainly not as an individual. The most gifted person in medieval Europe simply could not get as far as a person in the Hellenistic era would have been able to get. Medieval Europeans thought the ancients were better because they were, and it took centuries for them to get to a place where they could seriously think of themselves as surpassing their achievements. My big worry is that we are currently experiencing a process of decay that will leave future generations living among ruins [. . .]

boldface emphasis mine

[gamerwoman3d]

The "Walk."

Video by Jalynne Dutton

It isn't just that it's "knee" bends as it "steps" forward: It's that you can also see her "hands."

To give you an idea of what I see/sense when I look at this: Here's Gramaw.

Now. I don't want to stir up anymore "Native American Legend = Dead Man Walking Tornado" misinformation. I will say many native cultures believe that storms are intelligent "Entities" of some sort that can be spoken with and reasoned with. Some don't believe the same. Many believe there are spirits in the sky and that storms are either part of that spirit, a spirit of its own, or are caused by a spirit (such as Red Horse or Thunder Spirits / Frog Medicine.) And some natives even do believe that "If you see a man in a tornado you are about to die" because they were taught as much, but taught so after someone with authority came into contact with that misinformation and co-opted it.

But to believe there are spirits, entities, beings, or even "man" in the clouds/in the sky/inside storms/inside twisters, is not a set of beliefs that are totally outside of the scope of all native belief systems.

I for one think if you *sense* an entity in a storm, you should take cover. If it feels like the storm is watching you, if you get that eerie feeling, just get underground. Even if you don’t believe in spirits or supernatural things, understand that That feeling is produced by neurochemicals, and those neurochemicals had about a billion more years of "experience" with surviving natural selection at any point. So listen to that feeling, because the ancient people that didn't develop that neurochemical reaction to bad storms probably didn't survive and reproduce like your ancestors did. Trust your neurons.

Part of a larger series- Edited Jalynne Dutton video clips also shown at link below.

[siryyeet]

Looking up the twelve tenses and then being hit in the face by people saying there are linguistically (? I think) only two (past and non-past) and then other people saying that a lot of theoretical tenses aren't counted into the twelve and then someone else saying that there are 16 tenses. Please fucking kill me. Why do you have so many tenses

[grimprocrastinatrix]

Small vent

I hate that people constantly say "You GOTTA BELIEVE IT/IN YOURSELF". Life isn't fucking (dub) Naruto-

And Naruto ended up being a nepo baby in the end anyway.

[willtheweirdrat]

Nahhh cause transphobes are some of the dumbest people on EARTH and it shows. I'm a trans man. Say that I have a cis boyfriend and we have sex. DO you genuinely think that he will not be able to tell that I have a vagina? No, tell me. Put on your nice little thinking cap, read this post word by word, and think a bit. Just think. You want to say I'm a straight woman with a fetish. Well, what if I am? Being a "straight woman with a fetish" is my G-d given fucking right, and I won't have random internet strangers tell me otherwise.

TL;DL: I couldn't care less about what you have to say. You mean as much to trans people as a dog shit on the street.

[soulbeastdragon]

Man, I feel like I'm the only person on the internet who still relies on forum posts, and sadly most forum boards have stopped updating/being active between 2017-2022

Really aggravating when I have the same question as another person who asked it, and they get the shit reply of "they have a Discord for that! Ask there!"

I don't want to join 1000 random Discord servers just to get 1 clear answer. My attention span can't handle more than 1 person spitting replies at me, all trying to give me an answer to a question, only to leave me more confused than I initially had been.

Look, if realtime answers work for you, cool. But for me, the person who takes the time to research and compile a good post that more than answers my 1st question and subsequently answers more I might've have down the line helps way more.

And in turn, that 1 post can help others who had similar questions. And the great thing about forum posts is that, if it's outdated, the original poster can update it, or someone else can work off it and update it. Like a continuity book where pages can be easily take out and re-added with new info.

To the people who used to write cohesive forum posts (and wiki pages), thank you for being the true pillars of online communities. Your posts have helped me so much and I really miss that.

[haystarlight]

Hey am I the only one who thinks the Bat Queen can't be the Titan's palisman because of the simple fact that we have no evidence that Titans used palismen at all?

Like, hear me out. I think palismen are only a witch thing. We have no evidence of Titans using palismen too.

If the Titan's magic is like the stuff Titan Luz was doing, then it's mostly glyph based and it seems each individual Titan has their own glyph language unique to them but they can also learn each other's glyphs (seen as how King learned his dad's glyph language).

So like, what's the point of a Titan having a palisman?

Witches mostly need their palismen to fly and, son of a gun, Titans have wings!! They can fly by themselves!! They don't need palismen to fly!!

And like, the Bat Queen is big but she's not THAT big. I don't think she's big enough to have been the Titan's palisman.

I will die on this hill. The only one that can change my mind is Dana.

Palismen are a witch invention!!! Titans did not use them!!!

[planeswalker-umbral]

Characters used to only get second cards when character progression occured. (A hat is not Character Progression)

[thedreamsofgalaxies]

I need a professor jayvik AU where Jayce isn't socially awkward mess who blushes all the time and fumbles with his words, and where Viktor isn't cold and mean power-trippy asshole.