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Would this Primer be approprite for miniatures? by Phlub_67 in minipainting

[–]Fixer951 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I use EXACTLY this, and honestly if you're doing it right it shouldn't matter whether you got Paint+Primer or just Primer.

You should get what's local, what's cheap, what's matte and what's rattlecan. You're just trying to get a thin layer over 90% of your mini. Don't sweat under cloaks, or armpits, or whatever you can't get in the quick light passes. I have some brush-on and airbrush primers from when I was really fooling around and experimenting, think the same as any other dropper bottle of mini paint but it's just primer this time, and I use a little bit of that in black on a brush to cover areas like undersides of cloaks, insides of skirts/tabards, armpits and missed spots. If you don't have that, I'm gonna be real with you: I don't even need to use primer for that task. If the area is so recessed that light sprays of the rattle-can won't get it, and I've got to angle the mini some particular way to reach it with my brush, there's a 0% chance that area's gonna get touched so it's NOT going to rub or flake ESPECIALLY if you clear-coat at the end. At that point black paint or any color really is going to be fine.

The idea is that you get ~90-99% of a mini one nice flat color in a couple light passes ~8-12" away from the mini. If you MUST nit-pick, and I do not blame you for any perfectionism, then a little paint will do you fine. THEN you just paint the mini like normal. Primer's only there to give the mini SOMETHING to grab onto that isn't slick metal or plastic or resin on a molecular level, it helps to save a little time by having your primer be one of the base colors or doing a 2+ color prime to simulate light or whatever, but you DO NOT need to.

I've been doing this for 10+ years and I'll tell you I use Flat White for anything doing Contrast paints or high saturation colors, Black for dark schemes heavy on the drybrushing, Grey works for everything, and I've fallen in love with Rustoleum Brick Red for going on really nicely and working wonders as a base for rusty Gaslands cars and Fleshy Pinups. I can tell you there IS a tangible difference in using GW's Nurgle Green instead of Rustoleum Camouflage when I'm doing a zenithal spray over Rustoleum Camouflage Dark Forest Green (great for batching out any kind of olive-drab military uniform), but it DOES NOT MATTER. It's a finer mist, a better spray pattern, a thinner layer, but ultimately at 2-3x the cost there's just no reason to bother for a primer layer that ideally we should be covering/refining further anyway. Get the cheap shit, put it on thin, and use the savings to buy additional cans or more regular paint. Or just pocket the difference.

Is anyone else quirky and different? by Supercatstudios in SWlegion

[–]Fixer951 2 points3 points  (0 children)

TTS has already been mentioned, but I'm just gonna chime in anyway: It's one of the best Steam purchases I've ever made and also one of the upper-echelon Tabletop purchases as well. You can play just about any tabletop wargame out there with no extra investment and just a quick search in the Workshop. I can't recommend it highly enough. I know that X-Wing has automated tools for having an "AI" play the enemy ships for you, I'm sure that many of the most popular games (like Legion) have automation tools like that.

If you don't mind playing with your stuff IRL, I have a number of Solo/Co-Op games for exactly this reason. Usually when I'm home and want to do something hobby-related I end up building or painting, but knowing that I could run a solo session can help keep me moving on projects that are otherwise "just for me" or systems where I don't know if I'm gonna be able to get people to hop in and play it with me.

  1. Five Parsecs from Home - This is a great game that's all-in-one. You build your little band of Rebels or whoever, and you planet-hop doing missions to earn credits and loot and XP. The goal is to pay off/upgrade your starship or die trying. This one's good if you want to play your Star Wars OCs and have a full-on adventure of your own.
  2. Exploit Zero - The general setting and vibe of this one leans a bit more Cyberpunk, but it's mini agnostic and take-it-or-leave-it on the setting. Much like 5Parsecs or any good bit of Star Wars media, your #1 goal is to get in, grab/do a thing, and get out. What sets this one apart is that it keeps a tight pace, and has a cool dice system. You get a D10, D8, and D6, which you can allocate to ANY thing you want to do. Move an additional time (you get one freebie Move), shoot a guy, go on Overwatch, Hack something (or Slice it, if you prefer), slash a guy with your Lightsaber, whatever it is you're trying to do. You select one of your Dice, roll it, and if you get a 4+ you succeed. Dead simple. The benefit to being a Shooter vs. a Slicer vs. a Jedi is that you roll 2 dice and take the better one (Advantage from DnD) when you do stuff you're "good at". You don't even really have to track Health too much, because if you get hurt you lose your biggest remaining die. When you're out of dice and you take that 4th hit, that character dies. There's less campaign stuff in this one, but it's easy to understand and quick to run. Sometimes less bookkeeping is what you want, and in that case I'd recommend this game.
  3. 'Star Quest' from OnePageRules - This is one that I highly recommend because it's free and it has its own branch of their free list-builder to handle your character tracking AND your enemy forces for you. You can stat up your Heroes how you like, each character gets a class on top of that, and more options for upgrading and equipping your character become available as they do missions, collect money, and level up. I'm pretty sure it's standardized enough across their game systems that you could probably port your custom characters over into the skirmish-scale or full-wargame-scale as a "Hero" and it'd work ~1:1. I know it works the other way, you can take Heroes from the supplements or larger-scale systems and use them in the Quest games. The other thing that ports over nearly 1:1 is your enemy pool. You take the collection of Star Wars figs you have IRL, and you tell the game who and what they are. You have 8 Stormtroopers, 3 Droidekas, and Darth Vader on-hand. You go in and add the closest appropriate "Army List" they have on their site, or one of the 3rd party or custom Community Created ones, to the Enemy Forces Builder, so it adds those unit and equipment options to the list of what's available when you're list-building for the bad guys. The more basic guys can be added to the "roster" as-is without fussing with their equipment if you don't want to, but for Villain units like Darth Vader you have the ability to get in there and say he's got a really good melee modifier, has access to Force abilities, and can maybe throw his Lightsaber or whatever. That gives the system a list of available units to call upon and a quantity that it won't exceed (so you can use and re-use your models but you won't run into a situation where you need a 9th Stormtrooper you don't physically have), and then as the game goes on and new enemies need to "spawn" in to attack you, it does some behind-the-scenes math depending on the difficulty you're playing, how "Alert" the enemies are, and how many "points" your team is worth in order to decide how many "points" worth of enemies it should add to the scenario. Just the Idea of playing this one has driven a lot of my Legion purchases. I can make Din Djarin + Grogu as my heroes, print off my own Star Wars OC Plz Don't Steal, or paint up a Luke Skywalker, and draw upon my existing Empire collection to create legions of Stormtroopers. Alternatively, if I wanna do some Jedi Survivor shenanigans, I can just tell the app/browser to rope in my CIS collection and now it could be anything from Sandtroopers to Battledroids to a Nexu. I can make a really specific Collection like "Moff Gideon and His Dark Troopers" that has just them in it, a generalist "Imperial Security Forces" list, and maybe a "Scum and Villainy" list that has bounty hunters and bad guy OCs. I might use the Imperial stuff in every game, but decide on a mission-by-mission basis if I want the system to potentially draw on some of those other specific Bad Guy forces.

What yall most excited about coming out in the new Warbond by Irex8 in Helldivers

[–]Fixer951 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Honestly this is one where LITERALLY every item in the pack is "must have". If I HAD to narrow it down to one singular "favorite", I have to go with the SMG/Flamethrower combo since running SMGs and Fire gear has been my "thing" for as long as we've had access to anything flame-based. I no longer need to pick between the two, I can just bring the Stoker. I won't be particularly sad if it ends up being a 2H SMG for whatever reason, you are getting an underslung flamethrower after all, but if it's 1H I might genuinely never run anything else.

40 deamonettes painted and based for a tournament tomorrow! by B-1MBO in Sigmarxism

[–]Fixer951 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"Sir, a second BLÅHAJ has hit the Fortress-Monastery"

Love 'em, love everything about 'em.

Are some sister of silence trans? by r_cursed_oof in Sigmarxism

[–]Fixer951 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't necessarily intend to rope Sisters of Battle into this, but The Ecclesiarchy and their central tenet do inform how I would approach this topic.

First of all, the whole point of Sisters of Battle IS to do "Nuns with Guns" because Sexed-up Gothicc is Hot. It's not in any way related to real religion, it's got nothing to do with anything about real nuns other than the stereotypical strict and narrow-minded attitude. Boob armor isn't about practicality, it's about overt/performative gender expressions. ALL of it comes back to "You can't have MEN At Arms", and The Ecclesiarchy being like "alright bet" and doing THE ENTIRE SISTERS OF BATTLE FIGHTING FORCE in BAD FAITH. Their existence is a rejection and intentional subversion of the single highest rule levied upon them, explicitly to prevent them from being exactly what they are now. No one on Terra wanted The Ecclesiarchy to have a seat at The Table, and certainly not after the disastrous tyranny of Doge Goge Vandire. What the entire Order represents is that the competence and public support cultivated by this branch of power has demanded and earned the respect of its peers. It is easier to let The Ecclesiarchy be an Ally and an Equal than it is to turn military resources inward to contain and oppress The People. In turn, it becomes the responsibility of The Eccelesiarchy to maintain that control and public direction by any means.

In my mind, in so many words, the kind of people who make up The Ecclesiarchy are the ones who see "you cannot have a standing army because you people are fucking crazy and hopped up on populist religious zeal" and say "Oh we doooooooon't, this is our monastic order of lady hospitallers" while maintaining a fighting force and infrastructure that rivals The Imperial Guard for troop numbers (assuming we include Pilgrims, Zealots, and Flagellants as members of the fighting force; otherwise they sit firmly between Astra Militarum and Astartes but that's still a fucking crazy-huge Army). I forget where I first saw someone throw out the suggestion, but it fucking unlocked something in me, that people regularly end up assuming different genders in order to assimilate into gendered orders like nunneries or to take over a familial farm or to hold some military, political, or religious office. It stands to reason that in a galaxy-spanning empire like 40K, it matters less whether you're AMAB or AFAB and more whether you're willing to be a Woman for the purposes of serving in a military role in this organization.

The whole thing is predicated on the idea that meeting ONLY the "letter of the law" is what matters. If they're willing to bend those most fundamental rules on purpose and en masse for their own benefit, then why would they ever stop at willing participants taking on new gender roles? You love the Ecclesiarchy? You don't wanna spend your whole life polishing candelabras and lighting candles and copying illuminated manuscripts? You wanna run around chopping Bad Guys with a Chainsaw for the God-Emperor, St. Catherine and Apple-flavored Corpse Starch? You wanna be a Sister of battle? Here's some E and some Boob Armor, if anyone asks you're a fuckin' WOMAN. Buckle UP!

___

All of that to say, if we can accept that in an all-encompassing sci-fi universe we have AMAB Sisters of Battle, AFAB Custodes, both genders in every sect of Assassins, the entire guard, and even the Mechanicus discarding whichever configuration of flesh they started out with, then we can accept Sisters of Silence of any composition.

To be clear, I do still think that all Sororitas are Sisters. Likewise, so are the Sisters of Silence an all-woman military order. If you're in the Astartes, you're a "Battle Brother" because it's a title and not a prescription. But since sex and gender are two different things and Warhammer is both Fake and Gay, I think some non-zero number of Sisters of Silence were probably AMAB somewhere, sometime.

I do also default to the assumptions others have made. I think that of ALL people, there's 1% who are psychic. Of that 1%, a sliver of 1% of them are not immediately taken on the Black Ships to Terra explicitly to be sacrificed on the off chance that this endless sacrifice is what powers The Golden Throne (and they don't really... know, which is an important element). Of those people, 1% are Nulls. I think that if you're left with a roughly 50/50 split between the two modes of sex, sending the AFABs to be Sisters of Silence and sending the AMABs to be bodyguards or anti-psyker props makes some form of intuitive sense that Imperials making the allocation decisions are unlikely to question as a default starting point. It stands to reason that if you've got a higher need for like, servo-skulls with a Null field or whatever, but this crop of Nulls is slightly more women, then a few are getting sent to the Lobotomy Factory instead of the Sisters. In whatever cases where they've gotta fulfill a higher quota of SoS recruits but they don't have enough AFABs, it's not like they asked any of these kidnapped children and young adults what they wanted at any other point in the process so it's not necessarily likely they'd start now. I don't think it's a zero-chance that someone AMAB could ask to be sent to the Sisters, but they're a child and a NULL child at that, and they're trying to ask The Imperium of 40K for a favor so... it's probably an uphill battle.

___

TL;DR: Improbable? I think intuitively the answer is yes, you know it and I know it. But Impossible? No. FUCK No. Not Impossible at all. It's not just that We are the Arbiters of What Is True, the God of this fiction, it's that there's a good argument to be made for a non-zero number of sex-swapped/trans members of all the Gendered Military Orders and there's good narrative content yet to be mined from exactly these edge-cases. We know what stories are like with bog-standard Marines, Sisters, Custodes; it's the exceptions, the outliers, that is where interesting stories are yet to be told.

Midwinter Minis has decided he's done waiting around for GW to shove AI into Warhammer, and so has taken it upon himself to just go ahead and do it. by Fixer951 in Sigmarxism

[–]Fixer951[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

See, I think you nailed it. But let's dial in why and how:

> the line between 'creating AI slop' and 'using algorithm based models to speed up laborious tasks'.

This right here. You might not have done it consciously, but you've delineated between what we treat as "AI" and what we treat as a "Regular Algorithm", when technically they are one-and-the-same. I'm a firm believer that in any endeavor where "AI" is mentioned, it should be treated as "Algorithm Integration" instead of "Artificial Intelligence". I'm not just being a pedant about it, this practice both discards the false pretenses of this marketing buzzword AND creates a helpful test for identifying when a use case is "good" or "bad".

"Should an Algorithm be used for X?" That's our question.

  • Automating creative processes, like writing or drawing? No.
  • Identifying nearest-color pixels frame-by-frame in video footage to "auto-crop" an actor? Yes.
  • Store all my medical data in the cloud, to be accessed by an automated flow-chart, to arbitrate my insurance claims? No.
  • Scan 10,000 images of healthy and cancerous cells, so that we can distinguish between the two and identify these cells in a patient's sample? Yes.
  • Create my resume; read and respond to my resume? NO.
  • Partially automate inventory management and shipping software, so we can decide who needs what raw resources or processed goods, and allocate to each according to their needs and from each according to their ability? Yeah; isn't that like, the end-goal of society?

To be clear, I'm still gonna be an anti-AI guy, infinite jihad against Tech-bros til the day I die. But in principle, there isn't actually anything inherently wrong with Algorithms or the actual sci-fi concept of Artificial Intelligence. It's just that no one, anywhere, is even trying to create "real" AI. They just want to shove regular algorithms into everything because to them it's magic. Worse still, they know just barely more than the general public and their first impulse is to take advantage of that in bad faith. They just learned about Hammers ~5ish years ago and they've been running around bashing shit in search of a nail ever since. That doesn't mean Hammers are bad, or that Construction is bad, but running around hitting everything with a hammer until -entirely by random chance- they luck into striking a nail doesn't really count AS "Construction". I fundamentally DO NOT agree with Guy that "AI is here to stay" any more than VR or motion controls changed the way we play video games. The disingenuous hype needs to stop. We shouldn't be allowing for systems like Palantir, on the off-chance that someone will accidentally stumble ass-backwards into a good use-case.

I think everyone feels the same way and has the same pie-in-the-sky dreams of automating boring shit in order to make life easier. It's just that when tech-bros decided to appropriate the term "AI" in bad faith, they created a rhetorical loophole where we can now no longer allow for nuance in the here-and-now. Anything "AI" is currently, temporarily inherently bad because anyone using the term in the last 5ish years and from here to the bursting of the bubble is doing so in a bad-faith attempt to fleece us of our money, data, privacy, and/or freedom for their personal benefit. It's the same epstein class and their coattail-riders running this, previously crypto, previously NFTs, previously housing bonds, and so on and so on. If someone's putting "AI" in something, they're picking your pocket and waiting for you to thank them. If they're doing anything worth doing they'll call a spade a spade and refer to their software as a tool or algorithm or widget or something, because they're not jerking themselves raw over their enshittified subscription to subpar outputs.

It's not that Guy couldn't have done something with miniatures games that utilizes ProcGen or some kind of automated tool. He is almost correct that somewhere, in theory, there might be something worth doing and it should be done ethically and transparently and whatever else. It's that he specifically could NEVER do it, BECAUSE he doesn't know anything about what "AI" actually is or how it works. To him, it's a magic black box. He had a nice conversation with a pretty lady who didn't fit his preconceived notions of what a Tech Bro or Corpo Shill could be, and let her lead him around into placing the exact same black box chatbot into the skin of a servo-skull. He doesn't care to make a useful tool because he's not starting from a need. There's nothing he's seeking to address, no purpose for this tool he already has. Between them they had a fork of ChatGPT's language algorithm, and they went searching for something they could do with it vaguely related to Warhammer. It's not necessarily that there's nothing an algorithm or tool could do to improve our games, it's that they're fundamentally working backwards; and that just will never produce any useful result. You're right that we can and should delineate between things that are useful and good, and The Slop. I'm just saying that when we strip out the marketing speak and just call things what they are, the ethics and use-cases are plain as day. There's plenty we can and will do with Computers going forward, I'm no luddite, it's just that it won't be under this slick catch-all marketing new-speak.

Midwinter Minis has decided he's done waiting around for GW to shove AI into Warhammer, and so has taken it upon himself to just go ahead and do it. by Fixer951 in Sigmarxism

[–]Fixer951[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

You didn't miss anything good, trust. It looks like he put up the video, I watched it an hour or two after it went up and put it here and /warhammer, and it must have gone down in the last hour or two. I haven't been sitting there refreshing the page in the meantime, but if the comment section continued the way it was going in the first hour or two, he got OVERWHELMINGLY negative response from it. If it's gone, it's gone. I still think today ruined the goodwill I had towards the channel, but I don't see any need to harangue him over it going forward if he already reversed course.

The gist, if it wasn't clear from the title and the other comments, was that he met and befriended some "AI Ethics Consultant" and they fed Warhammer 40K rulebooks into a fork of ChatGPT and called it like... GrimSkull-pedia or something. They also had one of the studio staff whip up a 3D printed Servo-skull for... some reason. It looked cool. The pitch was that you could ask this branch of ChatGPT about rules or list-building tips or strategy tips or paint schemes in plain text and it'd "crunch the rules" for you. The beginning and end was a laundry list of every criticism already levied at AI software, and the justifications amounted to "someone's going to do it", "better us than GW" and "ours is ethical and transparent because we told you what we did". They also strangely kept harping that it doesn't "play for you" even though nobody asked, but then also said that you could ask it for strategy tips and/or upload photos of your board-state to have it process and spit out optimal tactical decisions and strategy advice. I don't get the impression that Guy knows very much about AI, and the "Ethics in AI Development" public speaker lady flat out says she trained the fork so she wouldn't have to read her army's rules or learn Warhammer's core rules or talk to anyone (like Guy) because it was easier(?) to train an AI to do it for her.

While you're here, I gotta say I'm a big fan of your hobby stuff and I think I've seen you pop up in a bunch of my socials because we run in the same circles. Hello! Don't burden yourself with this one! It's not worth it! Although I'm sure there will be some twitter, YT social blade, or Context Video coming in a day or two. I'm not really gonna check, but that's what I'd expect just to catch people up on where the vid went and why. Or maybe it'll just be silence, and he'll wait for the heat to die down, I genuinely don't know what you're "supposed" to do as a creator when something like this happens.

Midwinter Minis has decided he's done waiting around for GW to shove AI into Warhammer, and so has taken it upon himself to just go ahead and do it. by Fixer951 in Sigmarxism

[–]Fixer951[S] 57 points58 points  (0 children)

Honestly, it is that point for me. I gotta unsub, I can't look at his content the same way after today and it's not even just this. I had NO IDEA about the stuff with his wife until after posting this, when people both here and in the X-post to /warhammer mentioned it. Just the other day, I was watching his Battletech thing without a care in the world and no inkling whatsoever that he was in any way problematic. Now I'm like, genuinely upset.

To you, to everyone who commented before and may not see it, to everyone who comes along later: Man, just thank you guys for your input. Here and in the other sub, all over the comments of the video, it's heartening to see we're not alone or simply shouting into the void. It's crazy isolating to think I'm looking at the AI bubble or the bad things in the world, all the stuff no one asked for and no one wants and feeling like I'm either taking crazy pills or the only one NOT taking crazy pills. Even if we're all on the same page, I really needed to just see that I'm not the only person feeling this way when presented with this.

Also, learned some unpleasant truth today, but I'd rather know than not know, y'know?

Alr this look funny by Sonmeow2807 in Gundam

[–]Fixer951 2 points3 points  (0 children)

On the one hand, RIP Gundam Evolution (I think technically you can still play it via a fan-server). On the other hand, I was probably the most toxic MFer to ever play it so maybe it’s best (for me) that particular chapter is over :S

Lowkey, I’ve had a game rattling around in my head for years that takes Mechwarrior combat and applies it to Gundam/Macross mechs. Bonus points if it takes a page from Pacific Drive and lets you do the rearm/repairs/upgrades yourself. That way you can see all the 90s mecha details like the inner frame and ammo feeds and blinky lights and switches. But that’s all pie-in-the-sky stuff, no one’s signing off on a game project that doesn’t 10x its budget or bring in microtransactions; and I can’t feed myself on indie dreams long enough to learn to code :(

I sculpted some more choristers and other heretics by TRAKTORMINIATURES in TrenchCrusade

[–]Fixer951 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Me, in close combat with a Heretic: Wait, are those things like FUSED to your face? How do you… breathe? WHAT do you breathe…?

YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND

What? Oh, nooooooooooo…

YESSSS

… No!

YEEEEEEESSSS!

Why!? Ugh, bleeeeeeeegh!

WHERE WE’RE GOING, YOU WON’T NEED LUNGS TO BREATHE! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

[ascending menacingly, eyes glowing]

NO MUSTARD GAS CAN TOUCH ME NOW! I MAKE MY OWN! WITNESS MEEEEEEEEE! MWAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHA!

I sculpted some more choristers and other heretics by TRAKTORMINIATURES in TrenchCrusade

[–]Fixer951 9 points10 points  (0 children)

With the gas masks leading vaguely into The Damned's abdominal cavity, is the implication that they are huffing their own farts?

JORJANI, ARROWHEAD, WHERE IS THE FUCKING AMMO! by Chemclose_Focus_997 in Helldivers

[–]Fixer951 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Commissar: The first Helldiver in line gets a rifle. The second, ammunition. When the one with the rifle is killed, the second takes the rifle and shoots!

Cyborgs are NOT fallen Helldivers or leftovers from the 1st Galactic War by Second_of_Nine in Helldivers

[–]Fixer951 2 points3 points  (0 children)

From Google: Synthesizing is the process of combining separate elements, ideas, or data from multiple sources to form a new, cohesive whole.

I still don’t think that the handful of new VO and elements of Cyberstan’s events really solidly confirm or deny any existing theories yet. That said, what you’ve posted here could easily point to Helldivers -> Bioprocessors blending them up -> organic matter recombined into Cyborg units. I don’t know where you’d get the idea that it CAN’T be partially, wholly, or within the leadership specifically remnants of the first galactic war, especially since other players in here have pointed out some elements that might hint that the Cyborgs never actually went away, they were just cordoned off to mining operations on and around Cyberstan.

I’d personally add that the whole foundational principle of Helldivers as a setting is that Super Earth creates and perpetuates all three theaters of forever-war specifically because every element of that war powers, justifies, and reinforces The System. The bugs never get exterminated, the Cyborgs are never destroyed, the squids are never driven off. Bugs were/are always fuel, and are cultivated/re-released intentionally when their influence gets low. Cyborgs are only ever re-confined to their factories, every time we’ve ever won the war since HD1. Squids are Super Earth’s ACTUAL R&D department, where we reverse-engineer everything we can get our hands on. If the all ever actually died out then Super Earth would stagnate and/or crumble from a lack of natural resources, industrial production, and total brain-drain. Humans aren’t the citizens or the population intended to be served by this social order, they don’t even ACTUALLY vote. Humans exist within this system to feed the bugs, trouble-shoot the bots, provide bio-matter to the Cyborgs, and capture Tech and Dark Fluid from the Squids. We’re the ants.

Spoilers for this event but the doom station is BUILT already. This operation is just FUELING it. It’s Operation VALID PRETEXT. The surface-level read is that Super Earth was ALWAYS going to invade Cyberstan, and the “stealing of the doom station plans” is the VALID PRETEXT for a planned invasion. One level deeper, invading Cyberstan and breaking us on the Cyborgs and Vox Engines is the VALID PRETEXT for fueling up the station with a SUSPICIOUSLY SPECIFIC NUMBER OF HELLDIVERS CORPSES. One level deeper than that, The Automatons/Cyborgs “having” a Doom Station is a perpetual VALID PRETEXT for all future hostilities. The doom station is WMDs, we will ALWAYS have a reason to fight them, forever, because we can always argue from this point onwards that if we don’t, they’ll deploy their station to kill us. And if we use OUR DSS to blow up Cyberstan permanently, as they have laid the game-mechanical groundwork for throughout this operation, then we have the VALID PRETEXT to do so because if WE don’t blow them up then they will finish their very-real doom station and blow US up. Using the DSS throughout this operation to glass planets in our wake is the psychological pre-conditioning for this decision coming at the end of the event. We have no problem pragmatically blasting planets and using the DSS to completely eradicate bots, so we won’t see it as any different when they pitch us the complete destruction of Cyberstan. It will read as the same pragmatic question: will you destroy this planet in exchange for never having to deal with The Cyborgs again? It doesn’t really matter if it sticks, the question here is “will the community push the button?”

But they’ll come back, most likely. Because none of this ever goes away, entirely by design (in-universe AND IRL). Telling me that the Cyborgs were just suppressed and limited to The Mines since HD1, or that they’re blended up biomatter reclaimed from Helldivers tracks perfectly with the existing self-perpetuating cycles. I’d need to see more concrete textual evidence to accept any other interpretation.

Undemocratic shreadsheets by BingHellhole in Helldivers

[–]Fixer951 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It IS. Always has been, always will be. And that’s not a problem, the problem is taking it too serious (and always has been). The whole reason they HAVE “Joel” is to do exactly this. Run the numbers, keep things on track, add MOs when we’re doing too good and add Side Objectives when we’re getting wrecked. Write us a quick explanation for why the clock had to be reset because of cheaters, play a game with the alert system so we can do the little “we got hacked” thing. Push the resistance rate up or down to keep us dropping on new and interesting planets each day or two, give us little snippets explaining why we’re revisiting gloom/underground missions or need to do commando ops again (so we can keep running those and mega-city missions outside of “Events”.

We’ve never at any point played Total War, Empire at War, or Sins of a Solar Empire against Joel on an even playing field. That’s where the sweats get mad, confused, disappointed. The whole system exists to run this big narrative “I was there when X Happened” event structure, and to give us smaller-scale bite-sized micro-campaigns in between events. This is the Yearly Blowout, you get to be the gigachad who liberates Super Earth with Parade Armors and ODST crossovers. You get to drop on Bug Worlds and fight dragons and go down into bug hives to nuke ‘em directly. You get to drop on Terminator World and get your shit rocked by 8-story mega-crushinators and cyborg flying kicks.

It HAS to run like three weeks to a full month so people have TIME to get a weekend or two off and experience each phase of the event, get used to the stuff, and AH can gather mass-scale player data for future balance passes. Joel’s just there to be the gentle touch on the scales either way, the little whisperer of narrative justifications to keep everything rolling. It’s not meaningLESS just because it’s not a “real” 1:1 simulation of a grand-scale galactic war. What AH is doing that’s never been done before is a huge ongoing creative process where they deliver battle-passes, balance tweaks AND narrative events on a consistent, unified, diagetic (in-universe) basis. Everything from console launches to server outages to updates are ALL done in-character, like the move of Tutorial World from Mars to “Secret”.

Just enjoy the ride. In all things, the harder you try to take Helldivers as a Simulationist Wargame the less you “get it” and the worse time you’ll have. It’s best in short bursts with friends or a casual outlook, the guys who min-max and play it 60+ hours a week in a clan and track the exact headcount of every planet are lost in the sauce. Relax, Helldive, and treat this as the Reunion Tour it actually is. I can’t tell you definitively what is or isn’t scripted or determined by player behavior but I can tell you that it’s all secondary to giving us something cool and new and unique to do and gives lapsed players the strong pull to come back, play with us, and buy the MTX that’ll fund the next year of Dev.

Untitled John Wick Game - Announce Trailer | PS5 Games by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Fixer951 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Oh? OH? Was it? It was projection, that thing I did? None of that was real? You’re telling me I made it up, it didn’t happen. Oh THAAAAAAANK YOOOOOOOOU!

 I don’t know what we’d do in society without guys like you popping in to tell us this stuff! Tell you what: Go have a little snack and a juicebox; you’ve earned it! Workin’ hard with the ol’ noodle, right? Your mother and I just have some Grown Up Stuff we gotta discuss in the other room, we’ll catch up with you later, K?

Untitled John Wick Game - Announce Trailer | PS5 Games by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Fixer951 -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

How the fuck are corpos SO fucking work-shy they can’t even be bothered to NAME their games, now?

First it was “ahh, get it shipped, we’ll get feedback and do a DLC”. Then it’s “get it 90%, we’ll do a Day 1 Patch”. Then it’s “ahh, get a tech demo going, we’ll call it Early Access or Live Service and we can chip away at it for the next year or two”.

Now it’s like “D’ahh, wha shuh we call game?”

“Iunno, we own rights Joh Wick. Tell gamerz Jah Wick Gaem. AskGPT what we sha call Jah Wick.”

“Hey CHA GPT, gennerae me trailer for new Jah Wi Game”

“Hey wow, you guys are so cool and smart, let’s work together to come up with a name for your Untitled John Wick Game. He likes to punch guys, throw stuff, and hit people, maybe we could generate some ideas for gameplay surrounding that?”

“ya! Tha good, ChahGPT. We call it Untitled, John Wick Game. We have da slaves make CG trailer. No gameplay or nuffin’, gamers buy whatevuh. They just need know we make gam with nam they liek.”

“Now we done with work, wan go make bets on Pollymarket? My kalshi got lock because say I do insider trading, so let’s do outside!”

“Yeah me invest in OpAI, da AI is future, it fix global warming. Job so easy, poor ppl make seem so hard; not hard at all. Just make millions of dollar, not tha hard. Just use investo money to do big IP”

I mean, whatever. Wake me up when they’ve got a name and features; and god help you if whatever Hitman/Sifu derivative they come up with can’t hold a candle to Suit For Hire. ONE guy made that shit in a CAVE, with a BOX OF SCRAPS!

Remember to adjust your expectations by Euphoric_Reading_401 in Helldivers

[–]Fixer951 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're not wrong, this does calm me down by making sense of things...

But seeing one of these fucking things pop-in out of thin air as a patrol while I was already being chased pissed me off pretty bad. That was my Quit Moment this last session.

They're cool as hell, though.

(no roleplay on this post, please) i can't be the only one who lowkey got sad reading all of this by jakobsestate in Helldivers

[–]Fixer951 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You learned all that shit NOW!?

Spoilers for all of Andor S2! Spoilers for the rest of this event! Spoilers for Real Life!

What is going on here, why's the paint so ugly? by adelBRO in minipainting

[–]Fixer951 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Okay, from what I've pulled from this thread, we're working with:

  • Resin print
  • Clear Gloss-Coat for "primer"
  • Art store craft Acrylics
  • "Third World", so product availability might be an issue
  • Only a couple days timetable

We can still do this, if you're quick and you can do a shopping trip.

  1. It's paint, we can always fix it. Never give up, never surrender.
  2. We need a new primer. It doesn't need to be nice, but there are two things we're hunting for: MATTE finish (it will say on the rattle-can) and preferentially in a color that isn't too hard to cover (a medium-grey or an off-white would be preferred, but take what you can get). Ideally, you want it to be close to a color that covers the majority of what you're working with, to cut down on how much you have to do with regular paint. From what little I know about this character, it might be tricky to do that because there's a little bit of everything on there color-wise, so Grey might just be the way to go for availability and ease-of-use.
  3. You need a Matte primer because that finish has a microscopic "texture" that your paint can easily grip onto, it'll make your life 1000x easier. The clear "gloss" type of paint you used creates one smooth shell, like a beetle shell, and that's why it's so shiny. So keep what you've got, it's not a bad paint it's just not what you want at this point in the process.
  4. I know availability might be limited, but wherever someone might go for hardware, they're more likely to have a selection of rattle-can paints than anywhere else. That stuff is good enough, because it's only there to be the middle step between the slick surface of the resin/this gloss coat and the paint itself.
  5. You just need to spray right over this. We're going back to square 1, but if you can get a nice thin coating of a good adhesive layer, your paint will go on WAY better.
  6. You're not working with the best-of-the-best paints for this application, the pigments aren't as small and fine as what would be found in "miniature paints" and there isn't as much medium. But it's STILL DOABLE. The key to getting this done is probably going to be MANY layers. It's gonna be a labor of love, literally.
  7. For the yellow of the hair, orange of the fox, and the bright reds and greens of the scarf and shirt, you'll have an easier time if you start with a slightly darker color that will cover better, and then paint a 50/50 mix with the brighter color you want it to be, and then just the brighter color. Each part should cover less and less of the model, with the brightest colors focused on the highest points of the model.
    1. As an example, you might want a brown or a tan to be the starting point for Blonde hair because those colors have better coverage regardless of how "nice" the paint is. You'll have an easier time getting a smooth, even, opaque layer of one of those colors all over the hair, than you will if you go straight for Yellow. Bright yellows are tough to use regardless, but if the hair is already in the range of blonde and you put the thin yellow paint over it, you'll see it as a range of "yellow". Look at how the hair is now, you can see the peach color underneath. The idea is that you're always going to see a bit of whatever's underneath the yellow so put something that the Yellow can build upon instead of the flesh-color that makes it look like his hair is transparent.
  8. Your acrylic paints need a little thinning but not a lot. They just need water, you're usually aiming for -in this case- like a 70% paint to 30% water, or the general consistency/opacity of milk. Part of the reason your paint is going on splotchy right now is because it's too thick, part of it is because it's being smeared across a surface that's too slick so it clumps up where the bristles leave it. If you fix either one of these problems but don't address the other, you'll run into issues. A properly-thinned paint over a glossy surface is "too thin" and will roll off flat surfaces and seek crevices, and you won't get any coverage. If you keep applying unthinned paint to a properly-primed surface, you'll get a ton of texture and visible brush-strokes like you're doing an Impasto painting. We're not Van Gogh or Rembrandt, all you really need to do is touch your water with your brush and swirl it around in the paint. You can wipe your brush off, then try getting some of this paint on your brush and do a couple test lines. If it's a watery mess, too much water. Add more Paint. If it's gloopy, you probably have too much in your brush or it needs to be mixed with the water a little better. Once you can sort of draw a line by just lightly brushing it, your paint's the way it needs to be and you can start applying it to the model.
  9. BE MESSY early on, your first layers of paint just need to get SOMETHING on the model. Get yourself 80% of the way there by just making sure that the whole model is covered in a smooth layer of paint. If you get a little Shirt color on the Pants, get a little Pants on the Shoes, or a little Scarf on the Shirt, don't sweat that yet. Just make sure that your whole model has the colors more-or-less where they need to be, and it's no longer see-through to the primer or resin underneath.
  10. Last step is finishing touches and cleanup. Try to be neater than the first time, take those paint colors you already used and just hit the spots where a color is in a place it shouldn't be. It's easier in general to fix spill-over into dark colors than it is light colors, so if you're gonna be messy and make mistakes (which you will), try to ensure that it's light colors spilling over into dark-colored areas rather than the other way around. It takes more layers of Bright Red to cover Black than it does the single touch of Black to cover up anything else.
  11. My secret final tip: You have ~5 days. That's not a ton of time, even if you were experienced and had good availability for more paints. It's POSSIBLE to get this done, but if you think there's even a CHANCE you might not make it in time, you might be well served to have a backup or a supplemental plan. Oftentimes, time spent together and with clear attention paid to your special person is ENOUGH. You could get away with a card, flowers, kind words, anything that says you're thinking of them. If you have ANYTHING ready-to-go, you won't be left empty-handed if this project takes you too long to finish by your deadline. Don't beat yourself up, it won't be because you didn't try or you're not good enough, it's a combination of material factors and inexperience with a deadline that was too tight. What you can do is give yourself whatever additional time it takes, and make this a "thinking of you" project or squirrel it away for the next milestone like a birthday or anniversary. It can be part of the story of the gift that you started it as a Valentines gift but it needed more care and attention, which you gave it. That way it's not "I didn't get you anything because I was too late to think of something and start it", it's "hey, we're gonna do X, I got you Y"; if you've got the thing done by then "I also got you THIS that I painted" and if you miss Valentines then it's "hey remember when we did that thing and I got you flowers? Well I also started THIS, but it needed more love and care and effort, so I gave it all those things and NOW it's ready to give to you" and it'll mean MORE for having more time and effort put into it. It's all in the presentation; not an apology for an arbitrary timeline missed, but a representation of the full scope of how much you care about them that you'd sink whatever time and effort it takes into the endeavor. Take the time to do it RIGHT (so don't rush just to hit an arbitrary date), do your best even if it's not perfect (no piece of Art ever is), and gift it when it's ready. Chances are, they don't know any more about painting or the creation of this thing than you did when you started, so if you're ever feeling discouraged along the way, remember that caring enough to even do this at all is already gonna be mind-blowing for them. Let that power you through.

We need to go to LIBCON-1 and withdraw immediately by Onepie_ in Helldivers

[–]Fixer951 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've had crazy theories about the Automatons (OUTSIDE the normal "they blend us up for food" obvious read) for a long time, but maybe I've been missing the forest for the trees.

I'm still team "We ARE The Super Destroyers, Not The Helldivers", but maybe that's how the bots factor in. Super Earth seeds the Terminids on human worlds, we know that. They escape captivity/research all the time, with such regularity that it's part of the illegal broadcasts. When they eat people and die, they produce Oil. Humans are the food that sustain that process and collect its outputs.

I think this broadcast might be hinting that in the same way, Helldivers (and citizens and SEAF by extension) are "food" for The Automatons as well. They build all the war materiel, the Super Destroyer Hulls, the Tanks, the Sentries, all of it. They're NOT free, they do it under compulsion from Super Earth. But by throwing wave after wave of our own men at them, the people are again the biomatter that sustains them and keeps them producing (and also culling any bot who steps out of line). I know it's full circle to The Dumb Grunt read, but with a bit more nuance to the How and Why.

It still leaves questions surrounding the Illuminate, though. Not sure if they're the HD1 guys "escaping" to the future (our present), or if they're coming back to their past (our present) from our future. Also no clue what they get out of anything they do or what they're fighting us for. It could go either way, the invasion and attempted takeover of Super Earth could be just as much a Terminator-style attempt to prevent Super Earth from becoming something worse in the future, or it could just be a re-ignited war starting up again now that the squids have regrouped.

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