#supposedly they’re also a tankie

[shynerdwantscuddles]

I see heritageposts has finally gone full mask off neo-Nazi level antisemitic

[10blue10]

A RANT

You know what really pisses me off? You know what makes my blood boil every time I see it? Hypocritical bigotry. Aka when supposedly ‘progressive’, ‘tolerant’ people spew ignorant and/or prejudiced bullshit about marginalised and oppressed minorities.

Cos here’s the thing. TERFS and Nazis and Republicans and fundies and the like - fuck those guys, but you expect them to be assholes. Trump said something racist? Rowling made a transphobic tweet? Must be a day ending in Y. But the fact that some people have the fucking gall to claim they’re ‘radically progressive’ or ‘woke’ or whatever, only to turn around and go “oh but this minority? This minority that I believe all the stereotypes about? They don’t count.”

I’m talking about left wing antisemitism. If you claim to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum from literal fucking Nazis and you’re still antisemitic, I’m pretty sure you need to reevaluate things!

I’m talking about members of the queer community speaking insults against trans and poly people, or just any other kind of queer person. It’s not the fucking Oppression Olympics, folks! The homophobes aren’t gonna leave you alone just because you turn on the queers you also think are ‘freaks’. As far as the bigots are concerned, we’re all freaks! Stop fucking voting for the Leopards Eating Faces party, or at least don’t be surprised when they turn around and eat your face!

I’m talking about tankies claiming that the CIA is behind the dictatorship in Venezuela. You fucking morons do realise that other people have minds of their own, right? That other governments are capable of screwing over their own people without the US being involved? Maduro is having literal children tortured on false charges of terrorism you absolute fucking gremlins, how fucking dare you try to turn this human rights violation into an ‘um akshually’!

And those are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head! It’s not just the injustices of the world and those that perpetuate them that make my blood boil, it’s the hypocritical motherfuckers who think they’re so enlightened and progressive and morally superior - oh, except when it comes to the most vulnerable people, because they’re not on the right side of the ‘Us vs Them’ line.

Either unpack your internalised biases or Shut 👏 The 👏Fuck 👏 Up!

[wiserodin032402]

The Business of Empire: Military Checkpoints Will Receive More Funds Than Covid Relief, And Here's Why.

tl;dr the US is selling security to other nations and created the largest and most powerful front of logistics and supply the world has ever seen, while the average American suffers under a corprocratic hellscape. You should form a Union.

I have a lot of time on my hands, and I end up falling into a lot of topics. One of my more recent fascinations has been with US Military Logistics. You learn wild things looking into supply lines and logistics, like how those two things are fundamental to winning all wars forever since they’re the basis of strategy.

You can also find heartwarming stories like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zmJ8-uK7m0

Where Ryan here, on an MFO Rotation to an outpost on the border of Egypt and Israel, details the difference between a US outpost and an Egyptian Army Border Station. While the US Station has food to order to the tastes of the soldiers, showers, air-conditioned units, satellite TV, and so on, the Egyptian station is operating out of a 55 gallon drum of water for drinking, bathing, and so on, while on rations of vegetables and rice for the deployment. Ryan finds that there’s a surplus of breaded chicken patties that are gonna hit their expiration date soon, and having grown up poor, Ryan figures he’s gotta do something with them.

His troops don’t like eating them because they have to eat so many, and Ryan remembers the Egyptian outpost and takes the patties to them. They’re grateful, and he learns that even when they’re on base the best they get is substandard meat that’s rejected by their own inspection agency for general consumer production.

And Ryan comes to the same revelation I came to, which is that the true superpower of the US is being able to get literally anything to anywhere in the whole goddamn world. It’s part of how Ukraine is managing to fight Russia, a supposed military juggernaut that has the ‘second most powerful military in the world’ to a standstill.

Granted, the war is far more complicated than that, since a lot of it is just failures on Russia’s part, but we don’t have time for that.

Here’s the important takeaway:

The American Empire is not weak, it is not collapsing, and has powers beyond your wildest imagination

Everyone who claims America is weak or collapsing, or would get beaten by a foreign power is a fucking grifter who wants to sell you their brand of ideology. They’re either a lolbertarian, an alt-righter, a groyper, a tankie, or some other variant of conspiracy-brained crazy. But America has a different problem outlined in a video making the rounds below:

https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_rst2zq5GhG1yicrsp.mp4

It’s a good video, hits on the general attitude of the American worker. There’s supposedly a massive deficit in the workforce that the media keeps talking about, everywhere is supposedly short staffed.

However, as someone who’s been job hunting with multiple IT Certifications to my name, I’m basically finding jack shit when it comes to jobs, and so is everyone else. I’ll apply to places and find that no, actually, that job never existed in the first place and I’m crazy for trying to apply to it.

Corporations reported record profits, people got massively laid off, small businesses went under, and people have become homeless. What happened was a massive wealth transfer, the second one in US history, where the wealth of the average person was distributed to the top. And on top of that, the covid relief checks caused record inflation which caused the general currency to devalue.

What happened is, those big companies pocketed the money and simply figured out how to downsize their workforce, since they’re bound by law to maximize profits for the shareholders. I’m not fucking joking. It’s called Fiduciary Duty, and while everything presented under the legal definition seems fine on paper (I’m using this one right here https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty) you have to account for the fact that companies are operating on fiscal quarters. These are 3 month periods that at the end of which, companies have to pay their shareholders and compile financial reports. Most companies operate like this, not because it’s good long term, but because their competition does this and it maximizes shareholder profits which attracts more shareholders, which is a big part of where companies get their initial amount of money to work with.

That was a huge simplification of a lot of complex shit, and it’s about to get more complex because those stocks are subject to Speculation. In simple terms, if a company promises growth and provides growth, it can increase the potential value of its stock, especially if more shareholders buy in. If a company promises growth and fails to provide it, shareholders sell their stock and cash out, causing the value of the company to plummet, which creates a never-ending spiral of the company losing value and actual money to work with until it goes under and everyone loses.

All of that was to explain why they act like psychos. They’re playing a game of economic rocket tag where one false move will wipe your company off the face of the earth.

That’s why they treat workers as replaceable parts instead of assets, and feel entitled to your work. They’re operating at an entirely different scale to the consumer end of things. They have to min/max profit for their shareholders or they lose it all, and this is enforceable by law.

So how did covid throw a wrench into the works

Covid basically required an economic pause, which is fundamentally impossible. This is not me being a capitalist shill or anything of the sort, this is me pointing out that the way we’ve structured our system implies there will be few interruptions to it. This is actually a relatively sane way of doing things since bar a fucking apocalypse there wouldn’t really be many interruptions to global trade.

Anyways Covid-19 swept through due to a variety of failures on all political fronts from all parties on a combination of bad policy and culture war nonsense.

Please kill me.

Many people are now permanently disabled, like my father. He’s still trying to run his business, but he’s now barely able to work due to not being able to get enough oxygen. Many people died from covid.

And as per the above video, the rest were just completely cut off from their sources of income and told to ‘figure it out’.

This may sound bad, but the Lockdowns are actually a huge part of the problem in the job market. Suddenly companies had a reason to accelerate optimizing jobs out of existence, and other companies figured out how to make proper full delivery into a gig-economy miracle. Any company that couldn’t do these things went out of business.

But Covid-19 also cut a swathe through the workforce since a lot of people were obligated to stay working or get fired, since they were declared ‘necessary workers’ and could be fired for taking any time off. They were simply told ‘figure it out’.

And then...gig work. Revolting stuff, no benefits, no vacation, work that you have to compete with your fellow worker to get, but the hours are flexible and it’s money in your pocket immediately. Most of the people around my town who do it are on welfare anyways, since it doesn’t pay enough.

While we could blame a lot of this economic fallout on Reagan, that’s a tired fucking pastiche at this point, and doesn’t address the immediate problems that the entire covid response caused. 

What I will say is that Reagan is the reason that only 6% of Americans are unionized anymore, compared to 23% before Reagan really took a hammer to them, it’s just a funny coincidence that all those graphs that show everything getting worse because of dramatic neoliberal policies just happen to coincide with him.

Would more unions have solved this? Probably not, but it would have helped cushion the blow for the average American

What do Chicken Patties in an outpost in Egypt have to do with America’s Covid response?

Everything. It’s a show of where we’re spending our money and how we’re prioritizing getting shit done. The US is an Empire. With a capital E, that exports security to member nations of NATO. This makes the world a safer place and stops nuclear proliferation. With every nation that joins NATO, we take a step away from World War III, and means that, coincidentally, the US can spend less on its military.

On the issue of taxes, who gives a shit. The US government is spending trillions of dollars a year at this point. Our budget is big enough that if we took the wealth of the top 10% of earners by force it’d barely be a drop in the bucket compared to what is being spent. Should they be taxed more? Probably. But first we need to actually figure out where the money is going and who’s getting it.

We know various corporations got huge bailouts from the government during Covid, but that’s the least of it.

In 2022, the us government spent 6.27 trillion dollars, broken down like so:

Here’s a big question: Where is this money going. What’s causing it to evaporate up at the top and not make its way to the average American?

Some of this is obvious, like the defense spending. That’s our military budget and so on. But look at how much goes into social security, health, transportation, education, and medicare, and think about how little the average person sees.

Before we consider more government as the solution, we need to figure out what the hell is going on up there, since a combination of government and corporate incompetence is why we’re here in the first place, and we need to figure out how to untangle them.

We need to answer why we can get chicken patties all the way across the world to an outpost but we can’t provide for the people of our own nation.

Conclusion

Usually these things end with a big answer to life’s questions, where the spin comes in. I don’t got shit for spin, sorry. Unfortunately in America you gotta look out for yourself and those around you. Take care of your friends and family, pay attention to the local politics of the places you live in and vote there, since your vote is objectively stronger in local and state elections, and will get you immediate results.

I’m also not gonna call for an armed uprising and a revolution of the worker against the state, because those go poorly. If you can start a union, start a union. If it’s not safe for you to do that, don’t put yourself in danger.

[tlaquetzqui]

When a Marxist says socialism they mean what everyone else calls communism. When a Marxist says communism, they mean what everyone else calls the fucking Rapture.

Communism in Marxist thought refers to the classless, stateless utopia that will supposedly form all on its own once the class war is won and those mean old capitalists are not causing all problems in the world. Socialism refers to the armed camps—worker’s states, dictatorships of the proletariat—for waging the class war.

Hence when tankies say “real communism has never been tried” they reveal they don’t actually understand the theory they are advocating. (When right-wingers say “socialism leads to communism” and cite Marxists saying so, they also fall prey to the fact Marxism uses the words different. There have been non-Marxist socialists, in fact many of them died fighting Red Brigade terrorists in Italy—they’re just stupid, not evil, and their model is just simplistic, not a conspiracy theory. But most socialism has been co-opted by Marxists.)

Almost immediately after the workers’ revolution in the USSR, the Soviet government created the largest system of slavery in the modern world using the people they claimed to be saving from czarism and capitalism.

Just something to think about when you hear people supporting socialism today.

[rolonoise]

I’ve been playing DUSK

I’m 90 minutes in and I feel compelled to make a blog post about it. Here’s my thoughts on Dusk. Dusk is a retro inspired first person shooter game that I’ve linked to previously. It doesn’t pretend to be a Quake-like 90s shooter while really being a procedurally generated rogue-lite. No. It really is a retro-inspired FPS. It has actual levels designed by an actual person, that offer variety, good map flow, carefully crafted challenge, and a sense of progression. It’s good is what I’m getting at. It’s amazing how much secrets they manage to cram into each level; I actually feel like I’ve learned something about level design from playing Dusk. Each level is full of secrets, some quite fiendish but virtually all of them signposted and dangled in front of you in some way. The gameplay feels really smooth but took some getting used to. When I started I was surprised by the sheer speed at which everything moves. It took some getting used to; I initially thought it was too fast, with my character shooting across whole rooms and colliding with walls, but after taking a break and getting back to it, I didn’t have any issues with it at all. In fact the movement is responsive, precise, fluid, and just all around satisifying. Is it because I’d just come out of an extended map testing session using a keyboard only Chocolate Doom setup? Or has it really been too long since I last played Quake? Whatever the case, I jumped back in and had an absolute blast.

Did you know the best way to avoid a scarecrow’s shotgun blast is to sideways power slide while you blast him away with the double barrelled shotgun? Combat feels really awesome.

Levels feel Duke 3D influenced, semi-linear environments made with ‘abstract realism’. They all look like real places but not at the expense of gameplay. There are also some underground sections that feel very Quake-like.

Combat happens in encounters like in Doom or Duke, not in the arena style shooting of Painkiller, Serious Sam or Doom 4. While there are a few arena style challenges these are far from the norm. There are also some miniboss encounters which I found unusual for a Doom/Quake style game, but which are very welcome. Difficulty and Accessibility Let’s talk about challenge. I played the game on Ciro Miede (hard mode, basically) and following the Gggmanlives review I expected it to be similar to Doom’s ultra-violence. Well, it wasn’t - it offered up a hell of a lot of challenge, but there are other difficulties too. Difficulty doesn’t seem to affect the numbers of monsters, it alters their AI and other variables. Lower difficulty enemies move slower and take a bit longer to react. You also start with more health and your armour (actually called morale) is a lot more effective. I really like this kind of difficulty. I intentionally played a lower difficulty setting in a ‘tanky’, non-exploratory style, and did very well. While experimenting with lower difficulties, I felt pleased with the range of abilities it could cater to. Difficulty levels vary from Accessible (for people with reduced mobility) to Ciro Miede (true hard mode) and Duskmare (a one shot kills novelty hard mode). I really think that the different difficulty levels will accommodate any gamer, and Dusk is probably the most disability friendly FPS game I’ve seen.

I find that interesting that Dusk is so inclusionary since most faux-retro indie games try to market themselves as exclusionary - things for high skill people who remember the Good Old Times and not filthy casuals. Dusk though, seems to be made by people who really love 90s FPS games and who want everyone to try 90s FPS games because they’re great fun. It really says a lot about them and their game, which seems to be a true passion project. There’s a wider lesson there I’m sure. When the big AAA games companies try to make games “accessible” they alter gameplay according to narrow focus groups and strip out or water down core features for a (possibly imaginary) ‘casual’ audience. With Dusk, New Blood have made a game able to challenge ‘hardcore’ FPS veterans while also accommodating ‘casual’ newbies without sacrificing the complexity of their design. Story

You wake up hanging on a meat hook underground. A disembodied voice calls out “Kill the intruder” and three huge guys step out of the darkness with chainsaws. You pull yourself off the hook and grab two sickles. It seems the whole town of Dusk has been overrun by a mysterious cult, so you’d better kill everything.

That is quite literally the entire plot, but I look forward to over-examining the level visuals and announcing that Dusk has the ‘deepest lore’.

The atmosphere really is something special. It’s horrifying. Despite being a game about over the top running and gunning, Dusk exudes a bleak, oppressive horror atmosphere. It’s scary.

Dusk is separated into three story episodes. Only episode 1 is available at the time of writing, but buying Dusk gives you access to all three just like the Dooms and Dukes of old. Episode 1 (“The Foothills”) is the protagonist escaping the farms and entering the town of Dusk. It shows influence from Redneck Rampage, Blood, and every kind of hillbilly-themed horror film. Episodes 2 will supposedly have more of a military base or Half-Life theme, while episode 3 will be heavily Lovecraftian and probably Quake-inspired. The protagonist is mute, but communicates via text pop-ups. Everything about them is up to you to decide, but do note that there is a dedicated button for doing tricks with you gun and a secret ‘smoke cigar’ option. The disembodied voice talks to you a few times in episode 1, sounding exactly like I imagine all 90s heavy metal band members to sound like, and he may or may not be the mind-destroying Great Old One waiting for you at the end of episode 3.

Conclusion

To summarize, I’m really pumped about Dusk. The devs have made all the right noises and, even better, they’ve actually followed up on that with decent gameplay and strong map design. It’s clear there’s a lot of love gone into development.

Dusk really is a return to form for the FPS genre.

[nerfdiscourse]

guide 2 fire emblem heroes speed tiers:

39 - lonk. gotta go fast. do no damage. nobody cares about lonk. sorry lonk

38 - Annathena. fast as heck. lots of people trying to get here and they’re just sitting here already, rude. prime desperation territory

37 - speedy mcgee tier. brave weapons and desperation for everyone. a moment of silence for Caeda and her deceased attack stat

36 - Lucina tier feat Linde/Nino. still fast, but coming down to earth. good number to consider for a lot of units seeing how common & powerful nino is

35 - it’s ya boy Ryoma and his friends, Worse Ryomas. also where some peg knights chill out and the fast axe units. sort of the breaking point between ‘try to double’ versus ‘try not to get doubled’

34 - fast cavs and medium mages, also marth. a chill place to not get doubled most of the time

33 - uh oh it’s the danger zone, ninian, azura and olivia are here and everybody wants them dead. pretty much everyone here needs speed buffs to keep working. this is why takumi is heckin’ dead post-inheritance by the way, close counter means he can’t Go Fast

32 - getting crowded in here, and these cats are starting to get doubled by the 34-37 cats. you might want to consider a brave weapon instead of trying to double naturally, if you can avoid dying

31 - Ike is here and everyone else has to contend with being in the Nino Zone

30 - Tiki Tier. It’s time to get tanky like Tiki. you can just be a bad unit instead, like Est and Alm

29 - the wonky speed tier where you’re rather slow but still have too many points in speed? unfortunate

28 - Fae and some wonky ‘not fast but also not tanky’ cavaliers. also mist

27 - It’s nowi and boey, and by now you’re deep in Getting Tanky Territory. sorry florina. Time to break out the -breakers and Quick Riposte

26 - the Tanky Mage Tier, thanks to Julia and Sanaki. you’re now unequivocally out of doubling range except for Sophia

25 - This is the benchmark for the bulky physical units like Ephraim and Chrom. Spring Camilla, Cecilia and Lilina all chill down here in the Going To One-Shot You Club

24 - Bulky cavalry and Hector bringing up the rear

23 - The Your Speed Is Now Irrelevant Tier, because Reinhardt has arrived and he is an slow but angry god

22 - The snail’s pace group. You need to be taking no damage or literally one-hitting people down here, and that’s what Lukas and Effie do respectively. henry and leo also exist, supposedly

19 - Sophia is in this game?

16 - Zephiel, who doesn’t give a shit because he has Wary Fighter and a 55/38/24 defensive spread

obviously all of these speeds are skewed a bit by IVs and skills but you can just add +3 for a +Speed nature [except hector and a handful of others who gets +4 for whatever reason] and +3 for fury / +5 for LaD3 / +6 for darting blow

i hope this stream of consciousness composed mostly of memes was helpful for u!

[moontouched-moogle]

Any tips for Warframe? Decided to finally download it on my Ps4

Well tip number 0 is play it on PC because using a controller fucking sucks, especially after they added new [SPOILERS] inputs. It’s a lot more comfortable with mouse aim and freely rebindable hotkeys.

Only reason to play on PS4 is if you’re deathly allergic to hotfixes or for some reason absolutely HAVE to have the PS4 exclusive cosmetic skins.

Outside of that, here’s a copy-paste of my old list of tips:

I’ll be blunt: if you never play multiplayer, you’re gonna have a bad time late-game. Sorties (except for Spy) and upper level Void missions are monstrous when solo (especially if you can’t tank damage with something like Frost, Chroma, or Valkyr), and doing vault runs in the Derelict without a full house of 4 people just is not feasible because there’s no way of knowing which of the 4 Corrupted Keys you’ll need to open the vault until you actually get to the door and going into a mission with all 4 equipped is completely asinine given the debuffs they place on you.

There’s also the fact that some Warframes are very clearly geared towards team play. Trinity is great for healing the team and providing energy, but she doesn’t have much in the way of offensive abilities. Chroma’s a very tanky survival frame since he can buff his armor, but he also has a radial buff that affects allies within a certain range. Equinox also has a couple of AOE abilities that aid allies too.

As for tips, here are a few:

Pick Excalibur as your starting Waframe. He’s versatile and useful, and can’t otherwise be obtained in-game (barring the Market) until you get to the boss of Pluto (a late-game level 30+ planet) or hit max rank with Conclave (the PVP mode)

You’ll get some platinum (real-money currency) for free upon starting the game, which can’t be traded to other players. Save this platinum for buying weapon/Warframe slots.

Speaking of platinum/the market, DO NOT BUY THE CREDIT BUNDLES IN THE MARKET. They’re a goddamned ripoff and only serve to trick new players who don’t know any better. You can get way more credits for minimal effort after having played for a little while.

While still on the subject of the market, everything that isn’t a cosmetic item can be built/farmed in-game without spending platinum. Granted, you usually have to buy the Warframe/weapon blueprint for credits.

Pay attention to your weapons’ damage types and elements. Different enemies have different resistances and weaknesses, which you can check in the codex after scanning them (or just look them up on the wiki)

Mods can be ranked up by fusing them with other mods endo, which you can squeeze out of duplicate mods and which replaced Fusion Cores. The most efficient way to do so is by fusing them with extra copies of themselves, or with Fusion Cores, which are specifically designed for fusion. Fusing them any other way is less energy efficient (i.e. fusing a Serration with another Serration ranks it up more than fusing it with a Vitality)

Prioritize maxing out Vitality and Redirection first, and then Steel Fiber. These will be your main source of survivability on your Warframe, though Steel Fiber is much less effective if your Warframe has low base Armor or a high Shields-to-Health ratio as damage reduction from Armor isn’t applied to Shields.

Serration, Point Blank, Hornet Strike, and Pressure Point are the base-damage mods for Rifles, Shotguns, Pistols, and Melee weapons respectively. As such, they should also be a leveling priority in terms of damage output. Note however that DE is supposedly looking into weapon/modding balance and may consider removing Serration and just buffing weapon damage globally, since Serration’s position as a more or less mandatory mod discourages build variety.

Certain weapons and features are locked based on your Mastery Rank, a global level that’s essentially a measure of all the equipment you’ve gained affinity with. Affinity for Weapons, Warframes, and Companions all max out at Rank 30, and you only gain Mastery once per rank on an item. If you max a weapon to Rank 30 and then buy a new one or return it to Rank 0 with Forma, ranking it up again won’t give you additional progress toward your Mastery Rank, and if you get rid of a weapon at Rank 16 and then start earning affinity with a new copy of that weapon, you’ll only get new Mastery from Rank 17 onward.

Press M while playing to swap out the minimap for a larger, transparent map on the screen that shows more of the surrounding area. You can also press Z to show a list of your party members, including their Health, Shields, and Energy.

You’re probably going to want to mess with the in-game keybindings a bit. Melee is default to E, both the quick-melee (when you have your gun out) and full melee (when you explicitly have your melee weapon drawn). It’s much more comfortable to bind melee to Mouse 1 while leaving quick-melee on E (since you also shoot with Mouse 1)

Unless you’re totally dead-set against multiplayer, the aforementioned Trinity is a great Warframe to get. The fact that her Energy Vampire allows you to steal energy from enemies and restore it to your allies makes her invaluable for energy-dependent strategies, and her 4th ability is an infinite-range heal that also applies a damage resistance buff based on the highest percentage healed. Having a Trinity modded for Energy Vampire will make you an invaluable asset for most teams.

Don’t fall into the trap of farming levels on Draco. It encourages bad habits and robs you of practical experience with the game’s various features, meaning you can get to the point where your Mastery Rank far outpaces your actual skill or experience. Save the Draco cheese for once you’ve already played for a long time and simply need to get that gun you just forma’d back to max rank really fast. (Draco’s not a max cheese grind node anymore but this still applies in general)

[softgrungeprophet]

Thoughts on PacRim2 !!! Spoilers!

First of all, I had fun! Obvs it wasn’t as good as the first one but it was enjoyable to watch and I liked it

Criticisms:

Mako’s death felt cheap, contrived and uninspired. Obvs an ongoing issue in hollywood and movies at large to kill off female chars and characters of color esp woc in movies.

Would have been WWAYYYY more interested if she had taken nate’s role in the movie (sans the largely pointless, kind of amusing love... triangle...? they’re poly now, it’s law) I would have been really into this promoted, supposedly retired-from-combat Mako joining up with Jake and being his drift partner--still has the drama and injury in the later half of the movie without resorting to just killing her off. She saved the world?? You’re telling me she can come out of the depths of the ocean but not a helicopter crash? PFff whatever. Her hair was cute tho.

Some of the camera work was a little weird? It was mostly fine and I didn’t hate it, I just thought some of it was sort of strange.

Jake and Nate’s jaeger could’ve taken a departure from the naming convention with something that acts as an homage to raleigh, stacker and mako’s role in the previous kaiju war--something like the Kaiju Danger.

I had another thing to say but I forgot it... probably something minor.

Mixed about Amara listing off mech names. As a viewer I found it simultaneously a little confusing and weird, but also a cute display of how she’s obviously super into these mechs and spent a lot of time researching them.

The beginning recap and setup was goofy but i like that they included it and i think it helped set some of the tone

Things I liked:

The characters and their relationships. I thought they were pretty good and fun. I liked that Li Wen was not evil, actually.

The lighting was pretty good imo, lots of nice colors and shadows and stuff...

I liked the moments of humor. I know some people probably feel totally opposite but I like when things are willing to mix fun with their seriousness and I think it worked fine in this movie.

Rad stunts, giant robots, very good. I liked the visual design, esp for the robots, a lot--liked the departure from boob armor for the pilots, but at the same time the armor looks a lot flimsier in comparison to the first movie. But! it also seems to be sort of clear that part of that is due to increased tech--at least with like, the helmets’ visors.... I do miss the yellow-lit, solid visored helmets though :P

The mech designs were really good and clearly evolved from their predecessors in the previous generation while still taking on sleeker, more anime-ass forms. I liked them a lot, Saber Athena was supremely rad, and Scrapper was a great junker of a mech.

The line about Newt’s Mandarin made me laugh. I liked that it continued w/ the multilingual script and diverse cast. Great to see movies with leads that aren’t just white dudes and include women and people of color in prominent positions.

also jake--bi probably? nice.

also i liked the inclusion of a post-endcard but pre-credits bonus scene instead of a fully post-credits scene. I mean I understand that post-credits scenes offer an incentive to watch the credits fully and acknowledge the number of people who made it but it’s always a weird tossup of like, do i stay, will something happen...

I also really liked how the third pilot in the big tanky mech was both a drift pilot AND a gunner, i thought that was a cool approach to a triple-pilot mecha.

Overall, there are definitely valid crits to be had and it was not perfect but it was an enjoyable movie, esp since i’ve been on a mech kick lmfao

Made me wanna rewatch the first one so I might do that.

it ALSO touched on a few things that I’ve personally been thinking about wrt a mech project(s) (i guess?) of my own and wanting to see in mech media in general, like robots with musculature/life, symbiotic/parasitic robotics, junkers vs colossi and that kind of stuff... So that was neat lol

Also watching it, 4 years after the first one, where i know more about my dumb brain really made me start thinking about not just physical limitations--obviously Hermann or other physically disabled people wouldn’t be able to pilot a Jaeger the way they’re designed now--but also about mental limitations and how like, I for example, as someone with probably-ADHD who has problems with avoiding intrusive thoughts or not getting stuck in trains of memory or loops of thought would  be completely incapable of drifting or piloting a jaeger cause of the rabbithole. So it made me think about how people with certain neurological disorders or mental illnesses would also be considered unfit for jaeger combat.

I’m also curious about whether or not they are going to go for a trilogy and make a third movie. Presumably it would have at least a partial focus on Newt’s Fun Little Problem BUT that also seems like a plotline that’s less conducive to high-action giant robot punchies. But I would be interested in a less Major Apocalypse-focused PacRim movie, tbh, and I’m curious to see where the mech designs would go esp wrt Amara introducing single-pilot mini-mecha into the mix... I think it could be potentially pretty neato.

Would also be neat to see the aftermath, and the evolution of the characters.

also the deadpool trailer that played beforehand made me gay(er)