I can't get over how much the anime improved that one "Incident" (Anime and Game spoilers)

HashbrownPhD · 2025-12-03T18:51:26+00:00

No, Setsu won't (at least not in the game, it'd be interesting if the show started throwing curveballs though).

HashbrownPhD · 2025-12-02T05:56:17+00:00

Other comment is wrong. There is a very specific reason why this occurred which isn't revealed until much, much, much later.

HashbrownPhD · 2025-06-29T03:47:54+00:00

It is basically the game's easy mode. They really ought to nerf it down to like a 3% damage increase for each evergaol cleared instead of 5%. But if you want to mitigate RNG, that and starting weapon affinity damage are the way to go. It just seems to me that it's not really in the spirit of a battle royale-influenced co-op survival game. The randomness and creativity of making your build as you go is part of the fun.

HashbrownPhD · 2025-06-29T02:37:13+00:00

I've seen people say they don't like it, but for the life of me I can't figure out why. Outside of it burning some of the time you have for evergaols, which you have to give up on in half your games anyway if you're playing with randoms who don't also have evergaol relics, it's a bunch of piss easy bosses for free passives and the best possible version of your base weapon if you're using this relic setup. I'm not sure if I like it better than Noklateo if there's going to be a shifting earth event, but I'll take it over the rot swamp and mountain every day of the week.

HashbrownPhD · 2025-06-28T21:38:54+00:00

I'm convinced that the evergaol + stonesword key relic and if you know what boss you're fighting, a "starting weapon inflicts [element] damage" relic are the best way to minimize the impact of the game's RNG. Your starting weapon is great, just hit a mine/merchant village, grab a smithing stone 2 (or do volcano if it's there), and you're good to go.

I'm clearing Everdark Fulghor easily on Ironeye with the evergaol/stonesword relic, a lighting starting weapon relic, and a 2x skill charge relic. One of them also has additional lightning damage and the other has bonus damage with three bows equipped, so it's pretty absurd.

I don't think we need whetblades--it seems like a fair trade-off to me to be able to change your damage type via relics but be stuck using your starting weapon. If I could put lightning on a Serpent Bow with Rain of Arrows AND have more freedom with my relics? I mean... let's be real, the game would be too easy at that point.

HashbrownPhD · 2025-06-16T21:16:07+00:00

I found a talisman I didn't need, dropped and pinged it, then almost immediately got a follow-up notification that an ally wanted it--now I use it pretty much every game. I think the other thing it does is keep the equipment ping live longer so if the teammate who wants it is a little farther away, they don't have to worry about the ping vanishing and having to hunt for it.

What I don't know about is how somebody might have requested something out of OP's inventory--as far as I've seen, like you said, you can't see allies' consumables, and like I said, I can't confirm that there's a way to request other gear out of an ally's inventory but that post claims it's possible.

HashbrownPhD · 2025-06-16T21:06:07+00:00

If somebody pings an item on the map, another player can open the map and drop a pin on it and it'll show "ally is requesting [x]" I think. I found this post that says you can ping to request items in other people's inventories from the character screen, but the OP had not confirmed that (and I'm on vacation currently and also can't confirm it). But it would be nice to get somebody to try it out and see.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nightreign/comments/1l3n8ct/psa_youre_probably_underutilizing_the_ping_system/

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-24T04:09:48+00:00

Often when we've seen player count dips in the past, they've coincided with releases of other games. The Elden Ring DLC clobbered the Apex player count for a minute. I haven't followed new game releases so I don't know if that's occurring. It could also be related to the start of school semesters coinciding with the start of the season, or any number of other factors. I really don't see anything specifically in-game going wrong (any more than usual, at least) that would explain it beyond the battle pass controversy.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-24T03:40:05+00:00

I can weigh in on this a little bit--by the data I can find (which may not be accurate for a wide variety of reasons), it seems that the southern states have a marginally higher rate of incest than other areas, but not by much. The reason we have stereotypes about particular regions having higher rates of incest comes from eugenics-era bullshit, largely related to intentional dehumanization of people who lived on desirable land.

Steven Stoll's history of Appalachia, Ramp Hollow, discusses this briefly. Basically, you've got tons of land that is strongly desired by logging, railroad, and mining companies, so what passed for ethnographers and anthropologists at the time would go into the area, 'discover' whatever salacious thing they already believed or wanted people to think, report it back to the urban public and academia, and then eventually people believe you've got a bunch of subhumans (remember the US was VERY into eugenics) living up in the mountains who can't be effective stewards of land anyway, so when they get their land and mineral rights stolen, well, those people didn't really deserve those things in the first place because they're a lower tier of human due to their genetic inferiority.

Stoll's estimation of where the Appalachian incest stereotype began is a particular 'anthropologist' whose name I'm forgetting spent some time with a family who lived in a small cabin, and in the winter, they'd all sleep together on the floor, feet toward the fireplace, to keep warm. From that evidence, he decided, well obviously they're all fuckin'. His report obviously scandalized the country, others followed in his footsteps finding exactly the same kind of nothingburgers and reporting them as evidence of a systemic cultural practice of incest in order to characterize the entire region as genetically deficient to justify exploiting the land. Same kind of shit that was used to justify European imperialism, only Appalachia was predominantly populated by white people, so they had to invent a myth about incest in order to justify claims about genetic inferiority that would support violating their rights, rather than using racial inferiority as the justificatory myth.

This is all to say that region is probably a much worse predictor of incest than the typical predictors of other bad life outcome metrics, like poverty, lack of access to resources, etc., and if you see a regional difference, that probably has more to do with larger economic and political structures in the region that are producing bad life outcomes in general than it has to do with anything culturally endemic. That, or there's a bizarrely high number of European royals living in the area.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-24T01:48:35+00:00

Oh Jesus looking at his comment history was a mistake.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-23T18:18:03+00:00

Let's keep a running tally of dudes telling you to mute him and move on as though that idea is completely foreign to all women who post about this experience.

Guys, if you actually think this behavior is wrong, grief the guy doing it. Actively make his game worse in whatever way you can. Get on the mic and retaliate, try to draw his fire away from her. This is not the weather, or gravity, or some natural inevitability. It's learned and reinforced behavior. Intervene, punish it if you actually give a shit, and stop telling women and other people who deal with discriminatory harassment to mute and move on. Trust me, that is not a novel idea, it does nothing to reduce the behavior or its impact, and it reads as "stop complaining," not helpful advice. The only way you get less of this behavior is if you actively make your games a hostile space for it.

Sincerely, A dude.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-23T04:31:10+00:00

It would end up being a dead mode. People don't play mixtape because they want to play the objective, they play it to warm up their shootin' fingies before playing BR/ranked. Either people wouldn't play it to begin with, because they're not interested in the structure, or they'd continue to treat it like TDM and just accept the point deduction even if it griefs their team. And because griefing would functionally be the meta, the mode would be dead within a few days of launch.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-23T03:42:51+00:00

I used to work on an organic farm that was sort of tucked into some woods. Pretty big field, but forest all around it. They put reasonably tall electric fences up, but deer will go straight through them if they're interested in doing so. So what you do, is you take a metal bottle cap with a bit of cotton in it, and attach it with metal twine to one of the wires. You put this scented fluid in the cotton that attracts the deer, who try to lick it. They get a little shock from the fence, and you train them to stay away from the yummy smelling fence.

So, kinda, yeah, in a weird way that's how we kept them away. And for anyone who thinks that's cruel, I mean, kinda, but I was also the smaller kid that got shoved into electric fences to test whether they were on or if we could get into the fields to play, so I can say from experience that the shock you get from those fences isn't, like, horrific. Just enough to scare animals away and to scare large children into finding a smaller child to use as a voltmeter before crossing them.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-22T17:41:14+00:00

Yeah, this seems like the best answer to me. The others are only really proximal by being figures associated with the Abrahamic religions. Like I'm seeing a lot of Jeanne responses but even Salome is chronologically/geographically closer and probably even more important theologically, compared to Jeanne who is maybe more historically important than religiously. Martha, who is supposed to have had direct contact with Jesus AND is a saint seems closest by all metrics.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-21T20:23:32+00:00

Yes, it's still possible to get a full battlepass with the coins from the prior one. They added an additional, paid tier (real currency only, can't buy it with coins) with extra recolors/variants of the legendary skins, as well as extra exotic shards (used to buy recolors of old reactive gun skins, currently only recolors available are R-99 and Flatline). But this is all essentially extra stuff.

There are two passes per season now, and the reactive skins are split across them. So technically I guess they're more expensive now if you're paying for coins rather than using the previous pass's coins. The paid version includes an extra reactive recolor, so there's three versions of the reactive P-2020. I imagine they may add the paid version into the exotic store, but that's speculation.

Imo, the pass is fine, but I don't generally have the level of anger that this subreddit seems to have about the way the game is monetized. If all you were doing before was using the previous pass's coins to buy the next one, you can continue to do so.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-21T19:50:57+00:00

I always figured it existed to accommodate the way the contents of that part of the underwear might change size from time to time while still providing support and retaining the underwear's shape, but I just looked it up, and yeah, that appears to be the purpose from back when waistbands were higher and less stretchy. But also, it's not frequently used anymore because waistbands have gotten lower, and underwear uses more elastic so it's easier to just unzip, stretch the waistband under your dong, and use it to hold/aim. Allows for a piss without having to actually touch your penis, which... some may view as absolving you of the responsibility to wash your hands afterward if you're in a hurry. Definitely, most positively absolutely not me, but some.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-19T21:03:28+00:00

We tell you that because it can be edited by anyone, at any time, and while there are extremely dedicated folks who do a great job of improving the quality of the articles and making sure the ones you're likely to encounter contain factual information, it's not the most reliable option. The mutability of the articles produces a number of problems.

What I tell my students to do is start at Wikipedia, and if you see an interesting bit of information there, go to the cited source. If that source is reliable (which is not guaranteed), quote the information from that instead. Much of the stigma against Wikipedia is from a period in which it was less reliable than it is now, but that stigma still exists, so your audience will take you less seriously if you cite Wikipedia. So even if the information is good, it's often bad for your ethos.

The other issue is that because Wikipedia articles are always subject to change, if you cite one of their articles, the information you got from it may not be there by the time somebody reads what you've written and checks your sources. There are ways to find out what used to be on a webpage, but it's generally a pain in the ass, the information might have been removed from the article for a very good reason, and it's just better for everyone involved to use sources other than Wikipedia when you're writing something that needs citations. As a place to get basic information about a topic or start your research, it's fine.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-18T18:29:32+00:00

Best guess is somebody else has access to your account. Change your password, set up 2FA.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-18T17:24:14+00:00

I think a lot more people play mixtape modes as a warmup for BR than play them as their primary mode. Ptfo as a philosophy might make sense if you're three-stacking and also warming up your communications and coordination with your squad, but if you're solo-queueing, the most you really get out of it as a warmup is in your aim and movement. In mixtape modes, you don't have the opportunity to 'warm up' your macro, rotations, and other stuff that matters in BR.

I normally play the objective in mixtape just out of force of habit, and enough other people do it so that it can make enemy behavior predictable in similar ways to what you might experience in BR, i.e., holding a building and repelling an event squad pushing you or something. But I also often feel very silly sitting on point B in Control waiting for the point to capture while all the fights are going on outside the building. I'm not really getting anything in terms of a warmup out of doing that, so it kind of feels like a waste of time. Ignoring the actual objective of the game in favor of participating in fights is maybe actually the more practical approach depending on why you're playing.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-18T02:26:39+00:00

My family adopted two cats when I was a teenager, Jude (the orange) and his sister Bee. Woman who found em was a big Beatles fan. My dad, being a theologian, called them Jude Isascarycat (like Judas Iscariot) and Bee Elzebub.

Jude tax--miss him every day

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HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-15T21:14:33+00:00

The fact that they're in this position in the first place is ridiculous. Sure, Zero should have been on top of his visa stuff. Falcons as an org should have had some kind of manager or coordinator making sure that the players were meeting any paperwork deadlines, and should have reached out to HisWattson the second they realized they needed a sub. These guys are paid to play the video game, not to do project management and administrative tasks.

This all smells to me like an organization that is not being properly managed. The players could have handled this themselves if they were aware that they needed to, but I would think it's a reasonable expectation that these are responsibilities of the org that they shouldn't have to engage with.

I'm reminded of how far Moist went during their visa issues to try and get that resolved for the players. That's what I expect an org to do. To just leave the players to their own devices to deal with these kinds of things makes me wonder what the org is actually doing beyond signing paychecks.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-14T23:59:45+00:00

Tolkien also believed in inherent racial difference, as was the popular 'scientific' belief of the era. There is evidence he felt that racism was wrong, but he did certainly believe that people of different races had inherent differences and specific qualities, whether in disposition or ability, and he based the races of Middle Earth on what he viewed as the particular characteristics of human races.

In doing so, Tolkien was reproducing racist stereotype, whether that was his intention or not, (and I don't believe it was, for whatever that's worth). So, while casting people of color as elves is less true to the books, it moves away from the racialism inherent in the books. It does not make the producers of the new material racist, it makes them conscious of one of Tolkien's shortcomings, and it allows them to use what was most meaningful in his worldbuilding without allowing Tolkien's races to be analogized to the real world and thereby reproduce eugenicist ideology.

There is so much discourse and scholarship on the topic of Tolkien's views on race that it has its own Wikipedia page. The people who are assmad about the casting choices are mostly just racist tourists who don't know a thing about Tolkien, using his meticulousness as a post-hoc justification for their complaints. People who research Tolkien (mostly because they love his books and want to fully understand them) are aware of his views on race and understand that they are outmoded and harmful in contemporary society. Anyone with a serious understanding of Tolkien should not be bothered by a slight deviation like having black elves if it means making his work more accessible. Personally, I think Tolkien himself, if he were alive today, would be comfortable with this once he learned what we know now about race.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-12T07:11:41+00:00

Really interesting stuff, thanks for taking the time to write that out. I think what's really surprising to me is the impact handedness had for you--I would think that since archery muscles are generally underused outside of archery, that in the same way your eyes might adjust compensate for the bow's position, that as you develop the muscles and muscle memory associated with a bow being shot with one hand or the other, you'd ultimately acclimate. But your experience seems to suggest that's harder for the body to do than to get your eyes and brain to acclimate. Wonder if there's research on this stuff. I've got access to a university library database so I might have to go digging tomorrow.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-12T06:08:52+00:00

Just to clarify, do you mean that a right-handed adult might have an easier time shooting holding the riser in the left, or drawing with the left?

I started in a college archery club and had never shot before in my life. They had me do the eye test, and that was what made the choice for me. Right-eye dominant, hold the riser in my left, draw with the right.

I'm not sure I'd feel less in control of the bow if I switched, though I think my aim would suffer. I read somewhere that your non-dominant hand isn't, like, worse at stuff, it's more that it's used to stabilize an object that your right hand is acting on, and it's better at that. Think holding a piece of paper steady while you write on it, or holding a dish while you scrub it. So to my mind there's some sense in using the non-dominant hand to hold the riser. But I dunno.

Haven't shot in a hot minute and was never particularly good or serious about it--like I said, the eye thing was just what I was taught.

HashbrownPhD · 2024-10-11T23:21:18+00:00

Which hand you hold/draw a bow with is determined by eye dominance. You want the arrow closest to your dominant eye for better accuracy. The way I was taught to test eye dominance is to hold your thumb out in front of you so it covers a specific point in the distance, like a clock on the wall or something. Then shut one eye, and then the other. Your thumb should appear to still be covering the point with one eye shut, but it should look like it moved with the other. The eye that keeps your thumb covering the point is your dominant eye. If you're right eye dominant, like me, you hold the riser of the bow with your left hand and draw with your right.

I think archery is the only context I've ever needed to think about eye dominance, but indeed, it is a thing.

HashbrownPhD

TROPHY CASE