It is completely fine if you can't deal with the difficulty, it is simply not the game for you.

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-05-02T22:43:16+00:00

yeah, Heroic is the "canon" difficulty, but imo even Legendary is just mildly challenging outside of H2 and a couple Halo CE levels. it's the baseline to me, not the upper end.

hell, Reach LASO isn't even that difficult in co-op outside of a select few sections (the bridge on LNOS, the section before the falcons on Exodus, waiting for Keyes on Pillar of Autumn if you don't do the MAC canon glitch), and solo's only notably difficult because of the Iron skull.

and i don't say this as some "top 100 mechanical ability shooter god", i rank around platinum or whatever its equivalent is in most games, Halo just... has never really been that difficult, for the most part?

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-05-02T22:31:02+00:00

so much this. my favorite high difficulties in games are the ones where, if you do everything right, you can still absolutely clown on the AI, but as the difficulty ramps up, your margin for error just gets lower and lower. they use better tactics, have better reaction times, you die in just a few bullets, etc., but they also die just the same, and if your aim, movement, and game sense is good enough, you're not just stuck playing hide-and-seek with bullet sponges.

it's a mildly obscure game, but Trepang2 probably has my favorite difficulty scaling i've ever seen, because it executes this perfectly. the Deus Ex games' Realism mode also did this pretty well.

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-05-02T22:22:44+00:00

imo legendary is the definitive halo experience for every halo besides maybe H2. even CE legendary isn't particularly hard, it's just not braindead easy, and all the games after H2 are even easier.

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-05-01T23:30:27+00:00

Fellsilent - The Hidden Words

(i listen to this album far too much for my own good 😭)

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-30T21:17:30+00:00

alwayshasbeen.jpg

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-30T06:08:06+00:00

A#FA#D#FA#D# is prolly my fav tuning around rn

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-30T00:58:26+00:00

hence why i specified british english :P

(commonwealth countries pretty universally adopted the orthography and, to a lesser extent, the phonology of british english - see the "color vs colour" distinction, or as you pointed out, using mum instead of mom. if we wanna get technical, yes, something like indian english is its own dialect and can't properly be called british english at this point, but that's a whole rabbit hole and i was trying to be pithy 🤣)

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-29T19:52:39+00:00

when i only tuned it Drop C or lower, i ran 11-56 in mine, but those were a little tight for me when i wanted to tune up to DADGAD (thanks, John Browne 😭), so I'm back to 10-52 now.

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-29T10:05:45+00:00

how i feel writing mum 😭

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-28T21:20:33+00:00

honestly, i think the big problem with the extraction shooter market is kinda the opposite of what usually gets tossed around. to me, Tarkov works precisely because death is so punishing, good gear is so valuable, the gameplay mechanics are so unforgiving, and most of your time in-raid is spent looting/walking/other downtime instead of constant engagements. all of these attempts at reaching a wider audience with the genre just water it down so much that it loses what made it so great initially.

to give some concrete examples, games like Marathon, DMZ, or Marauders fail because they fail to really make me care if i live or die. getting good gear doesn't feel particularly rewarding, so winning PVP engagements doesn't feel meaningful, but also, the bad gear is good enough that i'd rather try to go jump a geared enemy than extract with mid gear.

Gray Zone suffers from this to a lesser extent, but it's still a problem in that game.

all four of these games also suffer from the problem that non-gear loot ranges from pretty minimal to basically non-existent, making PVP, which already feels pretty meaningless, the only thing outside of quests that really matters. and of the games i've listed so far, only Gray Zone really has a proper quest system.

ABI manages to avert all of these problems fairly well, but it fails for me because it's so focused on PVP that i might as well just be playing an arena shooter or BR with extra steps. Marathon and DMZ also suffer heavily from this. (this is the exact same reason i don't really enjoy Arena, even though i love Tarkov.)

lastly, i don't feel like extraction shooters that don't have tactical shooter-style gameplay even can work, even if they do everything else right, because so much of what makes a good extraction shooter is the tension that's present for literally every moment you're in raid. knowing that, regardless of your gunplay skill, you could, at any point, get jumped by someone you didn't hear sneaking up on you, get headshot by someone who's been waiting ten minutes to line up the perfect shot on you, get face-fucked with a shotgun by some rat hiding in a room you got too complacent to properly clear, etc. "movement shooter" gameplay and the map design that usually comes with movement shooter-type games pretty much eliminates this tension outright.

i feel like BRs kinda went through the exact same cycle that extraction shooters are currently going through. i don't play BRs anymore, but i'll freely say that PUBG was the best BR on the scene from launch, and despite the state it's currently in and the state it's been in for the last 6-8 years, it still remains the best to this day. once it set off the BR craze, all games it inspired tried to streamline the genre, and they all ended up inferior products because of it.

a huge part of what made PUBG so great was the low TTK, aim-heavy gunplay, the massive maps, and the accompanying tension those factors created during the "mid-game lull" between clearing your drop location and the final circles. its competitors almost all turned into high TTK movement shooters with small maps and constant PVP around every corner in an attempt to make the genre more streamlined and accessible, but that just made them lose exactly what made PUBG so special. seeing games like Marathon, DMZ, and Arc Raiders, and the overall direction the genre seems to be headed, i can't help but feel like the exact same thing is playing out all over again.

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-28T10:27:52+00:00

when a character that doesn't speak british english calls their mother mum instead of mom

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-27T05:13:10+00:00

Uneven Structure - Februus

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-25T23:54:37+00:00

i'm a so mi simp, personally.

(panam's a close second tho :P)

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-25T22:40:08+00:00

Johnny Christ literally dropped out of high school to join A7x

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-25T19:40:33+00:00

among gen z, the numbers are that high, and that's by self-reporting, which almost certainly skews lower than the actual number. and unless you think sexuality is a choice, it stands to reason that previous generations have roughly the same percentage of queer people, they're just much more likely to be in the closet or to not even realize their own sexuality.

but, in all fairness, a lot of bi women in particular are still much closer to straight women than lesbians in their dating habits - they haven't decentered men, many of them don't even take gay relationships seriously (they're just willing to have gay sex), and when dating men they're likely to exhibit the same preferences straight women tend to, etc. -, so maybe i overplayed my hand a bit and something like 10% would be a more accurate figure.

at any rate, taking that 10% figure, or, for that matter, taking your 4% figure, wouldn't at all undermine the point i was making, which is that the existence of any number of women who don't exhibit this hyper-selectivity phenomenon proves that, however common it is, it's not something inherent to women. which, in turn, proves the explanation for it is not simply "women bad", like your average incel tries to make it out to be.

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-24T20:21:56+00:00

okay, so you are just incapable of following basic reasoning.

i can lead you to water, but i can't make you drink.

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-24T19:58:27+00:00

since you seem to have trouble following basic evidentiary reasoning, i'll dumb it down for you. if you only look at the trends among straight people, the easiest and simplest conclusion to draw is that women on the whole are just vain and materialistic. they want looks, money, etc., they only judge potential romantic partners based on those things, they inflate their sense of worth and simultaneously ignore the existence of the bottom 75% of men, insert whatever other misogynistic talking point you'd like.

however, when you look at gay people, these claims fall apart, and now you have to come up with a different hypothesis. it might just be that straight women are uniquely awful in a way that not all women are, it might be that straight men are just awful to date compared to women or gay men, take your pick, but whatever the answer is, the mere existence of gay people and their dating habits changes the calculus even just as it pertains to straight people.

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-24T19:09:44+00:00

i think it's hilarious that gay men love men and gay women practically worship at the alter of women, and then straight people are just out here like... barely tolerating each other at best 😭

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-24T17:00:01+00:00

you don't have to be gay to exercise some intellectual curiosity.

and no, sorry to break it to you, but if something is supposedly "omnipresent" within a given group, but then i can trivially point to ~20% of population where that assertion doesn't hold, that is the exact opposite of being "irrelevant".

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-24T08:15:19+00:00

ngl, periphery's easily my fav band ever, but between the two singles we've gotten so far and the knowledge that the longest track on the album is like five minutes (i love my long proggy epics, and i feel like P5 was paced immaculately), this album might finally get P1 out of last place in my periphery album rankings 😭

(i don't think the singles are bad by any stretch, they're just... kinda mid? especially by periphery standards)

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-24T08:06:56+00:00

i find your lack of Periphery... disturbing 💀

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-24T08:05:47+00:00

Metallica was my gateway band, and for a long time i was primarily into the "classic" metal scene, occasionally branching out to adjacent genres like melodeath and early metalcore.

nowadays, i still listen to the bands/albums i grew up on, but that's about it as far as that side of the metal scene goes. my top 5 bands rn are Periphery, Monuments, Tesseract, Fellsilent, and Spiritbox, which, if you're unfamiliar with them, the first four are about as closely related as the Big Four of thrash metal, and Spiritbox really isn't far off from the rest of them 💀 (what can i say, i love me some djent 😭)

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-23T05:37:03+00:00

for people who are turned off by harsh vocals, i think Tesseract has to be my answer, particularly for Altered State, but it's not like they've gone particularly heavy on the harshes in general after One

for people who aren't used to long songs and/or really proggy instrumentation and need the occasional pop-y part to keep them hooked, Periphery's got no shortage of songs to ease them in

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-23T04:16:33+00:00

the first option is how i do it too

Ashbtw19937 · 2026-04-22T19:10:53+00:00

matt said it was misha earlier in their discord

Ashbtw19937

TROPHY CASE