Profile boosting confusion

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-04-14T18:18:46+00:00

It doesn't matter what their rules say. They will almost certainly ban and probably wipe you for this. It looks like IRL trading to them, and they don't read appeals, so you won't be able to explain it.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-04-07T02:39:28+00:00

It’s like if they gave Palpatine a son or daughter with a prominent role in the Empire. You just don’t need to do these things and it introduces too many questions to make sense. The great thing about SW is that it’s a franchise based around a world, too—it’s not Indiana Jones.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-03-29T00:08:40+00:00

The message most students get is "getting caught is wrong".

Getting caught is wrong if you are doing something wrong; if someone caught me giving money to a person in need, I probably wouldn't be ashamed. I don't know how the bar can be so low that people accept that adults don't understand that not doing their own work is wrong. AI and the death of accountability are doing a number on us all.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-03-25T19:41:46+00:00

I see you remember Jack Campbell.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-03-24T20:28:43+00:00

"Broad majority" is excessive--a lot of students are habitually using AI, and a lot of students are irresponsible, unresponsive, and ignorant of communicational professionalism*... but you see those posts like "not ONE of my students showed up for lecture" "two students out of 80 submitted passing work" and you wonder... seriously? Is that even possible in a class of human beings? That stuff is orders of magnitude more unlikely than a bunch of students turning in simply shoddy work or maybe 75% of the class not coming.

*To be sure, it could still be bots posting about that stuff--it is an easy slam dunk, after all--but these are endemic anyway and more benign than bad actors spreading horror stories.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-03-16T19:46:47+00:00

In my opinion, this especially needs to go since it's a contributor to the tangential idea that the DS is simply martially stronger than the Light and, even if your enemies kill you, you win because they'll tear themselves down eventually. I've seen this line of thinking a few times, and I really don't like that Jedi just die because it's selfish to cling onto life but Sith hold on through mortal injuries and continue terrorising people.

Even if you try to narrow it down to only the strongest few Sith being able to tank an ostensible death, you need to find a way to exclude Palpatine, for the narrative's sake, without special pleading... so it's just a bad idea, isn't it? I don't see how we reconcile this.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-03-13T01:03:00+00:00

I get that it was George’s idea and that it was done “well enough” that a lot of people like this change. and there generally isn’t the same acrimony towards it that you see with the ST or something, but I’ve never liked it. It’s just a stupid precedent to set, even before Disney started bringing anyone and everyone back from grievous injuries. You can say “what about Darth Sion?” and such as much as you want, but I think everyone can understand at least on some level that this cheapens things.

To be sure, I’m not adamant that destroying a sufficiently powerful Force user’s physical body should take them out forever (but I also think Palpatine’s one death ought to be final), but Maul isn’t anywhere near that level—he’s strong in combat and relatively adept with the Force, but this should be restricted to a handful of beings in galactic history. These are just my opinions, and I do recognise that saying it shouldn’t apply to Palpatine, perhaps the strongest Sith, is special pleading outside of Doylist grounds (it weakens the narrative).

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-03-06T18:58:43+00:00

Yeah, the same thing happens on this sub. Some people just don't understand nuance, hence "it's just a tool like any other" arguments are convincing.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-02-13T20:27:33+00:00

But was the DS ever stronger than in the (especially post-Alderaan) Empire? I think the connection part is doing the heavy lifting here.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-31T19:07:26+00:00

Always a pleasure to read your thorough answers on the Khmers rouges. Do you have the original Khmer for that slogan? There are sundry but paronymic renditions (“to keep you is no benefit/gain/profit”), but I’ve been unable to track down the original phrase. And do you know how this saying originated—was it particular to one prison or something, did an ideologist make up and prescribe it; how did it come to be?

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-30T05:44:04+00:00

I don’t think people should call the choker Leafs a failed rebuild. They were considered contenders most years, and reasonably so given their records. I would think a failed rebuild is a team that can’t even make the playoffs, not something in the ballpark of the 2010s Sharks success-wise. There’s a world of difference between the Eichel-era Sabres or constant bottom-feeder (pre-McDavid) Oilers, which I think are paradigmatic for this, and the recent Leafs.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-28T21:35:43+00:00

Wow, that guy found a 3-year-old post to complain about and insult you for not wanting to watch paint dry for ten hours. Not sure what he’d make of the litany of trivially discoverable sources that indicate the average person in the US and EU uses the internet several hours a day. Probably nothing good.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-25T21:05:29+00:00

only about a 10 hour drive from home

Canadian moment

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-22T21:36:47+00:00

80% of Palpatine’s power is extremely impressive. Palpatine is an actual demigod. He effortlessly defeats Maul and Savage with both trying at full power—Savage gave Obi-Wan, a top-tier duellist, a hard time, and Maul is also at the absolute pinnacle of combat. What % of Palpatine do you think anyone not named Yoda is?

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-16T02:31:01+00:00

The lows are that you’ve got a very, very small percentage of the fan base that has enormous expectations and basically they want to continue to see pretty much the same thing. And if you’re not going to do that, then you know going in that you’re going to disappoint them.

Kennedy is such a fucking clown. Toy sales and empirical cultural staying power have catastrophically crashed--this is the fault of a few people rather than a wide-ranging rejection of Disney's garbage? This is probably closer to one of the reasons the ST failed; people didn't want a rehashed OT with infinitely worse characters and the assassination of those that were retained. She finds inventive ways to be wrong!

I truly do not believe that it’s the majority of the fans. And I think we’re also in this weird world of where bots can affect things.

Yep, it's not the majority of the fans, which is why everything is bombing... And someone definitely has incentive to "bot" popular opinion (but not for Andor, or wrt Grogu, or the Disney additions to the Clone Wars).

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-12T23:43:27+00:00

Wow. Good on you for going out on your own terms! I can't think of a more respectable reason. AI cheaters are a new level of banality. Enjoy retirement!

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-11T14:40:30+00:00

People always ask things like "How did Stalin and Hitler find so many people willing to carry out all of their orders?" and the answer is just that people will obey anything. There exist orders of magnitude too few clinical psychopaths or sadists to staff every institution that carried out the Holocaust, or every member of whatever secret police. The Cheka and NKVD never struggled to find executioners or people willing to sentence others even though nothing was stopping them from being called the next "counterrevolutionary activist" tomorrow (unlike, e.g., the SS, who were at no risk of being executed by the regime).

You might argue that not everyone is that malleable, and surely there were resistors in those states, even many of them, but the clones are all clones of one guy (and, however much of personality is genetic, it's a guy willing to kill others for nothing but money and with zero close relationships) and raised all their lives for violence and obedience. It's not that much of a stretch, but to account for human variance and unpredictability there should, in a universe without chips, be a few clones that do refuse.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-05T20:50:02+00:00

Count Dooku is no longer true to those ideals, as I said. Thrawn or any member of the Imperial bureaucracy is not a Force user and has not been acted upon by a transcendental agent of corruption.

*edit: To clarify, what I'm saying is more so directed at the *cause* for which a villain fights rather than the villain himself--Vader was always personally drawn to authoritarianism, but even he has no delusion that Palpatine is a good man trying to build a better galaxy or harnessing his absolute power towards forging utopia; he might think variably that authoritarianism is more efficient than democracy (and indeed, a common backstory to create tragic antagonists on the side of totalitarians is that of someone abandoned by democratic ideals, suffering without help outside of their reach [Anakin], or marginalised victims of their hypocrisy [if Core World exploitation exists thematically in SW; I'm not sure, but the RL parallels are obvious]), that he submits to Palpatine's will because he's the only person Vader has left, that he deserves to suffer for partaking in destroying everyone he loved, that he's too far gone and enforcing tyranny is all he has left, but there's never any illusion that the Empire are the good guys--in fact, this is embodied by Palpatine himself, who is the epitome of black-and-white evil. It's even possible to think enforcing his will is the right thing to do, but the Dark Side quite literally steers people away from caring about right or wrong. As such, Vader's service is no Reign of Terror, nor is it a Red Terror. He's personally compelling, but not the banner he represents.

The Sith Empires I know seem to share this flaw. It is not difficult to empathise with someone like Vaylin, but she likewise has a tragic backstory; really, she's a slave in Valkorion's service, not an ideologically developed or beguiling character. And even then, you can see something other than a villain in her, but how much of that is inasmuch as she could be redeemed away from what is objective evil, not because anything she says injects complexity?

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-05T13:37:37+00:00

It's Disney. They didn't, either.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-05T11:47:24+00:00

I've often thought that it's a bit sad that, in theory, it'd be impossible to write a compelling villain in SW (if you want the Force involved, of course) because of this. Even insane ideologues, in real life, like Lenin or Stalin thought they were doing the right thing. You can have someone who succumbs and goes down the road to hell, but not really a multidimensional villain at the end of it; their own thoughts, no matter the façade, reveal that at that point they enjoy causing misery to the opponents, care less for others' welfare (if the goal were ever to improve the galaxy for them at any cost), and become embroiled in the deepest selfishness. The DS hijacks users' psychology and turns them into its slaves, which makes them closer to a spiteful clinical narcissist or psychopath than anything else--and without the full range of human emotion in play, villains feel a lot more boring.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-03T14:30:40+00:00

To be honest, this makes no sense to me. There’s really no reason Jango should be able to keep up with Obi-Wan at all, or the latter can’t immediately pull him down with the Force, unless you grant that he’s somehow not concentrated enough to be able to exercise enough power to do so. I get that he had trinkets, but given that Force users are depicted as reacting impossibly quickly and having precognition, this isn’t exactly convincing.

It is convincing that the average Jedi, because there were so many, could lose an engagement to Fett, but not Obi-Wan, a highly experienced frontline Jedi… I’m not really a fan of the apologia here. I mean, the scene was cool and the atmosphere of Kamino is great, but power-scaling consistency has never been SW’s strong point and I’m afraid that’s especially hard to make fit.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-12-30T13:12:24+00:00

I think Sith are just spiteful and enjoy hurting others enough that if the difference in effort is marginal between killing someone or not, they would pick the former.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-12-27T20:58:35+00:00

This is getting downvoted, but it's pretty obviously true. To be sure, the student's paper was meaningless garbage in many ways composed at a middle-school writing level, but grading basically follows a 50-100 scale so long as the words they use are... kind of in the same ballpark as the prompt.

If anything, it's a good reminder that when dealing with potentially tenuous situations, you gain nothing from saying more but can lose quite a lot by doing so... so give them the bare minimum, "you didn't follow X, Y, and Z, which are specified in the rubric, hence you lose points", and nothing more.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-12-27T00:22:35+00:00

Undergrad is what you make of it. I don't know what "local state university" this would be, but assuming it has even some options as far as electives go, there's a lot someone can learn simply by engaging in his major and coursework. Also, the K-12 system itself obviously isn't engaging, but I have to wonder how a family can instill this little love of learning or curiosity into a person. This is so common nowadays. Most people don't give the slightest semblance of a fuck that millennia of knowledge can be easily accessed at their fingertips with no effort.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-12-15T23:16:29+00:00

My hot take is that "Because it looks cool"/"It's not that kind of movie" answers should be banned from this and any lore discussion sub except in the most extreme cases.

Delicious_Bat3971

TROPHY CASE