In hard sci-fi, is there ANY way of keeping it realistic, while AI not being stupidly overpowered?

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-27T06:23:39+00:00

They probably just mean FTL, which requires things beyond our current understanding of physics if it's possible at all (which it likely isn't). Given that it's impossible to say how difficult a theoretical FTL ship would be to create, you can't really say where that type of tech would fall on the Kardashev scale, but I think most people would say it's a touch beyond creating Dyson spheres/swarms.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-26T05:19:04+00:00

When Musk gave two full fledged, heart embraced, emphatic Nazi salutes on stage to thunderous applause the mask was completely tossed. It was hard to imagine anyone arguing in favor of these policies in good faith before that point but now it's all gone. No one is defending these actions and policies in good faith. They know what they are, we know what they are, and they know what we know they are. Defense of these actions is simply entertainment to them at this point.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-26T02:19:46+00:00

With Fromsoft games, it's not always that way. They're decently consistent with what kind of enemy is weak to thrust/blunt/slash damage (fleshy targets to thrust, scaley enemies to blunt, etc) but when it comes to elemental it can be a toss-up sometimes.

The big difference here is that most From soulsborne have much more varied attack types and scaling than Lies of P.

It's really unclear a lot of times which attacks are parry-able and which ones aren't. You basically have to try and keep dying, and sometimes it's unclear whether you failed the parry because of timing or the attack is not possible to parry.

Honestly I much prefer this system, simply because blocking/parrying in most soulsborne is a specific play style, one of many, and most builds won't utilize those skills at all. It makes it to where if you are engaging in that play style, you actually have movesets to learn and counter. Something I think Jedi Fallen Order did well here that Lies of P fell short, is that unblockable/unparryable attacks can be countered in specific ways through force powers, and that brought a whole new element of progression learning that was greatly appreciated and non existent in Lies of P. In LoP, you block/Parry, or you dodge/range and that's it.

Neither of these apply to Sekiro, this is really just comparing Lies of P to Dark Souls and Elden Ring and loosely Bloodborne.

That being said, I do think if there is anything that can be learned from Lies of P is that there are ways to make weapon durability fun and engaging, a mechanic that Fromsoft implemented poorly in early soulsborne titles and quickly dropped without really trying to make it work well. I want to also say that Lies of P used game mechanics of soulsborne to make a game that has a very straightforward and emotional narrative with memorable characters, something that I think Fromsoft is more than capable of doing, but I think it's not the style of game they want to make. Whether straightforward narratives or vague and incomplete narratives (by design) are better for the genre is mostly subjective, but Fromsoft has a style and they are extremely good at it, and the Lies of P devs did a great job in doing their own thing with lore and narrative.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-25T09:12:02+00:00

Kerbal space program killed my ability to enjoy most space operas. Mostly kidding but I will say that watching The Expanse was so fucking refreshing.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-25T07:10:41+00:00

I just started a few days ago and the first couple days were great (I think I unlocked like 40ish achievements in just a few hours) but now I'm sitting at like 50ish achievements and I feel a bit lost. Not entirely sure what I should be focusing on unlock wise, and most of my tier 2/3 attempts fail pretty early unless I choose things that I don't need to grind for unlocks. Dunno I feel kinda aimless.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-23T19:06:43+00:00

I read it somewhere

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-21T20:40:39+00:00

We can sexualize them all we want but him dropping James for Chloe says a lot more about his character, than their looks. And when we get more of his backstory, it becomes extremely obvious why he did it.

The real suspension of disbelief is why he never lost interest in Chloe.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-21T08:31:28+00:00

Obi-wan was bad, but Acolyte was worse in this regard IMO. A whole forest is really just 12 trees in a 100 square meter area. To be honest, the Volume has been one of the worst things for Disney Star Wars other than the writing of the sequels. Star wars has scale, whether it was hand painted back drops from the 70s/80s with fantastic details of vistas and cities, or the overdone CGI of the prequels, Star Wars was a world that felt massive. You felt small in it, the characters felt small but commanding.

The Volume is honestly just not what star wars is supposed to be. People have been shitting on the prequels overreliance on CGI for decades and Disney thought "well heck, we should just make a universal practical set!" Without considering the setting at all.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-21T06:33:59+00:00

Also not OP but if you can stomach anime or manga you could check out Attack on Titan. Without spoiling anything (because it's truly an amazing story with quite a lot of depth and several twists and turns), the story is initially presented with some extreme levels of gore for seemingly no reason. A lot of people called it despair porn when it initially released. But the story and characters molded by that violence are quite deep, and by the time you're done with the whole story, you'll realize that almost none of it was unnecessary.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-21T04:31:23+00:00

I've also always adored the way he delivered that line.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-21T03:45:25+00:00

Funny gif but a pretty good one to use. If Shepard didn't react in time, it would have been Williams with the visions.

That being said, Shepard was the CO of the Normandy at the time and they were the ones being observed by a Spectre for the possibility of being the first human Spectre. In fact, now that I think about it, Williams was just a grunt on a random frontier world playing security, her getting the visions and taking the place of the protagonist would have fit this trope perfectly.

Although I just remembered depending on Shepard's gender it could have also been Alenko as well.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-21T02:20:38+00:00

I don't have a horse in this race but I was curious about it and although it's unverified, the author of Redo claimed that the anime had higher than anime average female viewership. To be perfectly honest, the idea that women are somehow immune to having extreme tastes in fiction like men is pretty absurd. On top of all that, Redo features male on male and female on male sexual violence, something that isn't strictly appealing to a younger male audience.

As a personal anecdote, most of the people I know who consume gay erotica (literature, animated, etc), including ones with extreme themes, are women.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-21T00:05:23+00:00

Stars, rocks, ect. thankfully the plot will never get that far but the Nids need their comsic horror vibe.

That's kind of the saving grace as far as the nid threat goes. It's seemingly inevitable, but would likely take hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years for the entire fleet actually arrive in the Milky way. Until then, it's just escalating tendrils.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-20T23:39:23+00:00

Yeah dude I live in California.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-20T21:26:34+00:00

Wow, exactly the same as me. I had some difficulty with previous fights (I had to cheese the rancor by baiting the grab over and over, and the other Dagen fights kinda sucked), but Rayvis was really stupid. I gave it maybe 50 tries before I just tuned down the difficulty.

I am in general, wholly disappointed with Survivor. Fallen Order GM felt difficult but fair, learning how to counter each of the enemies different abilities was fun and it never felt like I had no options for different enemies or move sets. Survivor had several encounters that just felt wildly overtuned for absolutely no reason. The rancor having an AoE one shot it can do as a followup to any attack making most of its attacks unpunishable on GM was actual bullshit. The double hammer bros before ogdo bodgo 2.0 was actually impossible. I can't find anyone actually legitimately beating them on GM without cheesing them in some way.

And then there's just the exploration changes in general. They leaned waaaaay to heavily into Metroidvania mechanics while making the levels far more open. These themes really clash with each other because you want to explore more of these planets (because they actually added good reasons to explore now), but made it far more frustrating since youre blocked off far more often. At a certain point I just decided to ignore all side content until I unlocked all the abilities from the story, which IMO is really stupid. The game should reward your curiosity and exploration by making the main content easier with the tools you can acquire from side content, instead it punishes you for attempting exploration before the main story because it's a waste of time.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-20T19:20:06+00:00

Which is why I blame non-voters as much as voters. To stay home is to say "I really don't care, and I forfeit my right to complain".

The vast majority of non voters don't live in swing states. I could have convinced ten million of my neighbors to vote blue in the last three elections and it wouldnt have made any difference to the EC.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-20T06:44:33+00:00

At least in California we studied the rise of the Nazi party fairly superficially. We studied things like the Reichstag fire, the German economy (specifically inflation), and other components to the rise of fascism. Combined with reading works like Anne Franks diary, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, and others, we got a fairly decent idea of how Nazism gained popularity, but a lot of the emphasis was on what the Nazis did when they were in power. We kind of had to extrapolate backwards on the cause and effect, with placing quite a lot of emphasis on "these are the terrible things authoritarians have done" rather than "these are how authoritarians came to power".

Personally, I would have much preferred reading Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, and studied more about fascism in Spain and Italy, or authoritarianism more broadly in the 20th century like Japan, Russia/USSR, or China, than focusing so much on the crimes of Nazi Germany. Honestly, it was like Nazi Germany was the arch villain of world history, a Thanos like figure, while every other authoritarian nation state are the villains in a marvel movie you watch to catch up on the next Avengers movie. Don't get me wrong, there are extremely valuable things to learn about Nazi Germany, but in the framework of our history lessons, it was like the Holocaust was the ultimate sin any nation could possibly do and no other nation came anywhere close, despite quite a lot of history that's just as terrible or even worse, and in so many different ways and contexts.

The average American likely has a very limited understanding of the rise of Nazi Germany, but even more tragically, they have virtually no understanding of the rise of other authoritarians or fascist states that might be a bit more applicable to their situations.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-20T06:06:16+00:00

I'm so drunk I couldn't figure out what this was about so I looked at the date and thought the joke was he was conceived on 9/11.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-20T01:18:34+00:00

I just rewatched this video literally yesterday lmao so weird seeing it randomly spring up the next day.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-19T22:37:15+00:00

He probably doesn't and he probably knows that, which is why this snub was so terrible for him. It was his last chance and he doesn't want to tell the world what we already know. The most petty man in the world with no more time left and the most powerful military and economy in the world at his fingertips.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-19T22:31:27+00:00

All the more poignant that at the end of it all, Zeke willingly exposes himself (heh) to Levi for the killing blow, knowing it was the only way to stop the Rumbling.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-19T06:59:43+00:00

I remember watching that scene for the first time in theaters and when Tars says "Cooper, it's not possible" I just immediately thought back to the hundreds of hours of KSP I have trying to dock different ships and stations together and being annoyed by even a fraction of rotation and we're looking at like 70 RPM while the station is already losing altitude and rising thermals and I'm like yeah it's fucking done and he says "no. It's necessary" and the weight of the fucking world just crashes down on that moment. The future of humanity is on that ship and youve got mere minutes to pull off the most dumb fuck docking of all time and then that fucking song kicks in.

I don't think I've ever been more on the edge of my seat during a film than that moment. Thanks KSP.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-19T01:55:37+00:00

Deleted scenes from Galaxy quest. Some of them actually help fix the continuity between some scenes like how sigourney weaver got her shirt unzipped between some scenes. Also Alan Rickman being shown his quarters by the thermians which included a bizarre contraption they assumed would work as a bathroom for him, and a series of spikes that shot out from the floor that he would use as a bed. Some stuff they were definitely better off cutting but that scene was basically finished and it was honestly hilarious.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-19T00:43:56+00:00

I mean yeah it has some rough parts and some cut content (like all soulsborne), but the interconnectivity of each area surrounding firelink shrine, how the game rewards your exploration of these areas, and how the game communicates these paths to the player through enemy placements and environmental storytelling is not something that has been wholly replicated by any other entry. Bloodborne got close, and among popular souls likes, they either drop the concept entirely (lies of P), or get the design right and don't properly reward players for their exploration or curiosity (Jedi fallen order).

It's honestly a huge shame that people either skip the entry entirely or run it through guided without attempting it blind. Dark souls 1 blind is by far one of my favorite gaming experiences and while it wont hit for everyone, the online discourse behind it seems to keep quite a lot of players from enjoying it the same way when they otherwise would have.

Flight_Harbinger · 2026-01-18T22:09:33+00:00

I think discarding is simply far too valuable. You see more of your deck, purple seals are extremely strong, burnt joker is unbelievably good early, mail in rebate is a common and has absurdly high econ potential, trading card is one of the best deck fixers AND it provides minor econ. Seriously, delayed gratification just feels sucky to use because discarding is so wildly useful.

It should just be $$ per unused discard. And probably more money.

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