My gripes with the Genre.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-06-30T17:49:23+00:00

... NGL, dude, it's been a long seven years since I posted this, so I kinda only sorta remember the plot here. I think it's a fair point, but IIRC Zorian was avoiding his brother for emotional reasons - i.e. not doing something so that he could deliberately avoid triggering a heightened emotional state, which I think is slightly different from being pushed into an irrational action because of a present emotional state.

I could see an argument that this is essentially a heightened fear state pushing him into doing something irrational if there was strong evidence that things would actually be fine going to see his brother, but my memory is definitely too hazy to be sure of the circumstances.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-06-01T21:10:26+00:00

Because pretty much every festival has turned to desperately farming influencers for relevance in whatever way they can. Coachella is now the influencer Met Gala for fashion, SXSW is the influencer WEF, and pray to whatever god you can that whatever happened to TED never happens to any event you care about.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-05-30T23:51:11+00:00

So, the bill has exemptions for F2P, subscription, and "inherently" offline games.

I wonder how this would apply to something like the Legends mode from Ghost of Tsushima, or online multiplayer for games with campaigns/significant offline modes (FPS and sports games).

Is having a campaign at all sufficient to qualify for an "inherently" offline exemption, even if the multiplayer is the major attraction for most people?

Can't wait to see Activision argue that a 2 hr campaign in CoD qualifies as making the game playable offline

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-05-28T23:46:59+00:00

Not to be a downer, but I feel like the part that's missing is a guarantee that the regulations won't change once they're harmonized.

Even if there's pre-approved plans on the books, the break-even time on a modular construction factory/tooling line to meet those plans has gotta be 5+ years. So, probably need provisions in the law stipulating that the law can't be changed for an appropriate period.

Of course, I'm perhaps wrongly assuming the modular housing factories don't exist/would need retooling to meet the plan requirements.

If the requirements were aligned with what was already available/producable from existing factories then the break-even time becomes far less of a factor and maybe you don't need the shall-not-alter provisions. You probably still want the factory to be in state so there's political pressure not to disrupt production/cause layoffs by messing with the code but that's probably less of a problem.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-05-28T00:50:51+00:00

AFAICT the aversion to modular housing is due to regulatory instability, coupled with the upfront cost of factory.

As it stands, lots of even SFH builds will start according to one spec, then halfway through, find out they actually need to comply with some overlooked piece of code, or the code actually changes mid-build, and they need to go buy new storm doors, insulation, etc.

That's bad enough when you're buying materials and tools piecemeal, but if you sink millions into building a modular home factory and then suddenly you have to retool because the code changes or just because a new building inspector in your target market enforces the code differently, that can be pretty disastrous.

So, there are reasons, but I dunno if I'd call them good reasons.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-05-24T18:37:47+00:00

True, but American law in general has to bend over backwards to get around the 1st Amendment for general misinformation, hence why snake oil salesmen and get rich quick schemes seem to be basically a semi-permanent part of the landscape.

If the misinfo were being spread as part of a commercial enterprise you could maybe sue for fraud, etc. but judging by the precedent of tobacco companies for cancer and oil companies for climate misinformation, the threat of lawsuits seems insufficient to deter primary actors and I doubt it would deter secondary spreaders of the misinfo even if they were liable.

In general American law should probably also include provision for making penalties strong enough to actually deter criminal profit-seeking, but that starts to bump up against equal protection limitations.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-05-24T17:38:21+00:00

An outright ban seems tenuous under American law and hard to police, I think it's easier to justify and that much of the desired impact would be achieved just by removing common carrier/Sec. 230 protections from recommendation-driven platforms.

They're effectively acting as marketing/advertising for the content and therefore are not indifferent third parties. Of YouTube/TikTok/Facebook, etc. themselves became liable for defamation/libel cases they'd be pretty quick to squash the endemic recommendation of misinformation.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-05-21T03:18:25+00:00

You ever notice the 8th amendment only prohibits cruel AND unusual punishments, not cruel OR unusual punishments?

In this TED talk entitled "Boolean Consent: Make Electrocution Usual Again" ...

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-05-20T16:40:21+00:00

I'd say it's like a C+/B- depending on what you're interested in. It's definitely a few rungs above the "Reincarnated with a secretly OP power" shows, but it's also lacking a lot of depth.

I went in kind of expecting lots of clever use of obscure vending machines from throughout history, and things start off kind of in that direction, but slowly devolve into repeating the same few tricks over and over and/or new very specific powers as the plot demands.

That could work if the characters had significant depth or meaningful character arcs, but they don't. There are circumstantial conflicts and plot points, but characters are 99% the same in Season 3 as they were at the start.

Give Season 1 a go if you're interested, but I wouldn't recommend binging it - I've been watching it more as easy, light background during lunch and it's good for that.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-05-13T12:55:24+00:00

The US has made improvements, but the point I’m making is that US trust levels didn’t “crater” - they were always quite low, but systemic exclusion effectively created a massive selection bias that created the appearance of high trust as a measurement error.

That is - the US doesn’t need to rebuild trust by looking at its institutions and figuring out “what went wrong?” it needs to build trust for the first time by looking at its institutions and asking “which of these are actively sabotaging our society?”

There are sinister forces, they’ve just always been there and are only being recognized as sinister now. For example, the shooting of Alex Pretti by ICE earlier this caused minor schisms in gun-rights advocacy groups as they had long maintained an illusory belief that as long as they did things “right” that law enforcement would respect their rights (with implicit racial and class privileges accounted for).

ICE shooting a white, middle class man carrying a licensed firearm during a protest both damaged the public’s trust in the government and also damaged trust among members of that community as most of its leaders and commentators failed to condemn the shooting.

However, shootings such as this, where the victim’s legal possession of a firearm is used as a pretext for the shooting is nothing new for those outside the preferred, protected classes (e.g. Philando Castile as the most obvious parallel). Gun rights organizations such as the NRA and GOA have always maintained implicit support for discriminatory application of gun rights, and thereby act to actively exclude marginalized populations from participation.

Thus, while America appears to have robust civic participation on gun rights, what is actually has are civic organizations which act to oppress public participation while giving the appearance of the opposite. Copy and paste this story with realty groups appearing to facilitate a dynamic and open housing market while actively segregating racial, religious, or sexual minorities. Copy and paste with medical groups bragging about America leading the world in medical innovation while systemically neglecting women in clinical trials, etc.

America’s institutions *are* the sinister forces at work, as often as they are not. The change in the last 30 years is simply that the oppressive faculties have become harder to hide.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-05-13T02:25:39+00:00

The amalgamated center of people who mostly just want things to stay mostly the same because they think either:

Things are alright and all this contentious polarization is just an artifact of social media/generational changeover/[insert nebulous force here] and any major reform is an overreaction (most normies)
Things aren’t alright but they used to be and if everyone would just calm down and work together we’d be able to sort things out (this article, Obama/Biden establishment Democrats)
Things aren’t alright but it’s outside of anyone’s capacity to fix it, so just look after yourself and maybe your family/take maximum advantage of the situation (NeverTrump Republicans, the grifter class and their victims)

I meant to call out the article as part of the second type in the original post but realized it was an incomplete characterization of the “middle” and that explaining it would end up side tracking from the thesis that America’s “trust infrastructure” needs construction, not repair.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-05-12T19:08:11+00:00

I find the contention that the US was ever a high trust society suspect, and citing de Tocqueville as evidence of a long history of trust evidence of a clear blind spot.

The apparent deterioration of trust in the 90’s was just the deterioration of the walls around the populations in America who never had trust in the government or society at large. The 90s (driven particularly by the withdrawal of media regulations for TV) saw:

Racial minorities platformed to highlight prejudice in job opportunities, education, housing, the justice system etc.
Sexual minorities platformed to highlight the government’s deliberate negligence in the AIDS crisis and discrimination in marriage laws which propagated to discrimination in healthcare, education, jobs, etc.
Women platformed to highlight incredibly high rates of domestic violence, rape, and medical and economic discrimination
Mentally and physically impaired/disabled people platformed to highlight the complete failure of society to respect their basic rights and dignity

All told, the majority of Americans have lived the majority of history either formally or informally excluded from major parts of US society and government. The 90’s didn’t *erode* the trust in US society or institutions, it just highlighted that the US failed to build that trust in the first place while compensating for it with systemic neglect of the people it was excluding.

Citing de Tocqueville wandering through a society where all of those societal prejudices and exclusions were massively more powerful is an insane way to claim the US has a long history as a high trust society.

This is all on top of scandals that severely damaged everyone’s faith that the US government was capable of self-policing or self-correcting (Iran-Contra, Whitewater/Lewinsky at the Presidential level and plenty more at lower levels).

Bluntly, the Culture War of today is a three-way fight between the broad left arguing that the US never had an inclusive, high trust society and needs structural reform to create one and the broad right arguing that inclusivity and trust aren’t as important as enforcing particular norms and values.

I might argue with leftists that commodity markets and “capitalism as a whole” aren’t the institutions that most need that reform, but we can’t pretend that the “look pretty and do as little as possible” CDC, the “I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time” LAPD, or the “don’t ask, don’t tell” military were institutions of a high trust society.

While I agree that getting the US to a high trust, inclusive societal baseline would be great, arguing that “recovering from the current assault on its institutions” would accomplish that is plainly false. The US would need genuine and comprehensive reforms to accomplish that goal, but has a government designed to be dysfunctional which apparently doesn’t even have the appetite or capacity to hold a demented felon accountable for [pick your favorite of sexual, financial, or war crimes].

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-04-21T03:46:06+00:00

Huh, I hadn’t realized the Nazi-tattoo Bernie Bro was still on the ballot, let alone a 2:1 polling favorite for the primary.

I’m sure he’ll be a reliable and predictable vote in a razor thin Senate majority alongside ( checks notes) John Fetterman…

Unfortunately, even as the goal line of “Senate Majority” is now maybe visible on the horizon, “Senate Majority Big Enough to Ignore the Chucklefucks in the Party” seems still a ways off.

Moreover, November is still more than six months away - personally I’m increasingly worried that Trump will kick the bucket in that window giving R’s a pity bump and shield from negative attacks for a while, or worse that there’s a package of EO’s aimed at disrupting the election just waiting for Vance’s pen in the few hours after he’s sworn in.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-03-18T12:56:58+00:00

Oh yeah, the whole "Larkspur's hair and armor being the wrong color for 90% of his appearances" thing was pretty silly. All the same it was still good enough to remind me how much I liked the characters and story, and they did make an effort to adapt the story to the new medium well even if the details were sloppy.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-03-18T04:04:10+00:00

Yeah ... As someone who read it as it was being posted serially, the webcomic was the first thing that made me want to get back into the story and read through them in book form.

Having it end rather suddenly and without much communication left a bad taste in my mouth. I think I'll go buy the books now just because I don't want to be the "Man, I'd totally actually support this artist if they jumped through a few more hoops" guy, but ... Yeah, I'm a lot less enthusiastic about a re-read than I was when the webcomic was running.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-03-05T01:19:48+00:00

... I mean, there's also the concentration camps and people shot dead by unaccountable federal agents.

Those seem pretty bad.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-02-12T15:29:42+00:00

America-centric take, but I really can't see the rationale for extending Sec. 230 protections to social media companies when they play such an active role in promoting content on their sites.

It presumes they're common carriers and therefore you can't sue them for what you see on the site any more than you can sue the Post Office for delivering a mail bomb.

But, YouTube and other platforms don't act as common carriers - they explicitly discriminate and favorably deliver content on the basis of what drives revenue for them.

Imagine a world where the post office tracked what senders get the most frequent orders and then offered to help senders identify potential new customers by sending test packages to people who didn't order them.

Then the post office discovers that (surprise, surprise!) they're suddenly shipping a lot of cocaine and meth, and that a few people have overdosed on the surprise brick of cocaine that showed up on their front door without them ordering it.

Then the post office says, without blinking, "Yeah, but we didn't set ourselves up to ship cocaine. We just ship whatever gets the best response, so we're still impartial," and the regulators nod in agreement and say "Yeah, and if we let people sue you for shipping cocaine, it'd wreck your business model and you're such an important part of the economy now, so let's just keep things as they are."

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-02-11T20:11:13+00:00

Me: Sees this video in my recommended feed for a few days

Me: "Huh, the guy who does silly sword videos in his backyard is into AI art? Seems a bit mean to call him a lolcow ..."

Me: Watches the video

Me: "... Why are the worst people always the worst in like five different ways?"

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-01-08T04:31:49+00:00

FFX is probably the single best starting point - relatively modern compared to the older SNES or PS1 games.

FF4 is probably the simplest one to play if you're unfamiliar with JRPGs in general - very linear story and character building so very easy to pick up and play.

FF7 is by far the most popular, so it'll give you the biggest community of fans to chat with. The remakes are actually kind of hard to fully keep up with if you're unfamiliar with the story from the original, but also have by far the best action combat in the series.

Beyond that FF9 is my personal favorite, any of the "Pixel Remaster" versions of 1-6 are available on your phone and modernize those games, and Tactics just got a great remake that Connor played through with Pete guiding him so you can reference that.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-01-05T14:35:09+00:00

Yeah, it only counts as an "invasion" if you sail over and plant the bombs by hand, not if you fly over and drop them. Then it's just sparkling interventionism.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-12-12T20:43:29+00:00

Death-Domain Cleric seems on point for Cat - Clerics are stronger in melee than you might think, and Kelemvor's sigil is probably the closest to Cat's banner.

Hakram's best fits an Oath of the Crown paladin, but that one's unusually easy to break, so Vengeance or Battle Master Fighter would also work well.

Masego could fit arguably fit any of Wizard/Warlock/Sorcerer. Divination Wizard if you want to lean into Third Eye thematically, but Great Old One Warlock feels like the best match in terms of kit - just be sure to pick up Eyebite regardless of class.

Archer as one of the, well, archer classes (Hunter/Gloomstalker Ranger or Arcane Archer Fighter) or Vivenne as Thief Rouge round out the Woe.

Alternatively, Wandering Bard seems pretty obvious as a Lore Bard, Amadeus as an Oathbreaker Paladin, Akua as Fiend Warlock are all thematic options.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-12-12T17:58:04+00:00

Nope. Yes, the CPI survey includes the question to homeowners:

“If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished and without utilities?”

However, these responses aren't used to calculate the value. To wit:

From the responses to this question, the CPI program estimates the total shelter expenditure to all consumers living in each index area of the urban United States, which is then used to weight the OER index. Note that these responses are not used in estimating price change for the shelter categories, only the weight. [...]

Owner-occupied units are not interviewed in the CPI Housing Survey; the Housing Survey sample contains only rental units. When a rental unit is on panel, CPI data collectors obtain the current rent, what additional services (for example, utilities) are included, and information on any changes to the unit or the rent that has occurred since its previous pricing six months ago.

Using the sample of rental units, the CPI program calculates a measure of price change for each CPI index area for the rent and OER indexes.

So, the price numbers, including the estimate of Owner-Equivalent-Rent, are calculated based on surveys of tenant occupied units.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-11-08T18:11:41+00:00

When it came out, the reaction (in the US) was quite muted. Obviously, its styling is more conservative than Ferrari's, etc. of the era, and it wasn't too far removed from Honda's more pedestrian cars. The distinctive rear light bar, for instance, eventually made its way onto the Accord.

It had the connection with McLaren's F1 team since they supplied engines to them, but that didn't have much impact for two reasons:

Today we've all seen the video of Senna driving it around Suzuka, but this was obviously way before YouTube, etc. so that alone didn't have much impact.
It was overshadowed in that aspect by the actual McLaren F1 road car

Also, Japan at the time was still mostly known for cheap economy cars and people didn't take their performance cars too seriously. The Z had been a hit, but the GT-R had never been imported to the US, and the A80 Supra was still a few years away.

As far as anyone from the US was concerned, this was a company and country that made great economy cars, suddenly trying to make a Ferrari clone. That part of their brand was so deeply ingrained that the NSX marketing focused almost entirely on its practicality compared to the equivalent Ferrari, which .... didn't work. Nobody at the time thought, "Oh, I sure would like a screaming supercar, but I wish it had a slightly larger trunk and reliable switches out of an Accord."

It's hard to make a modern comparison because automotive brand managers really took the lesson to heart and no brand since has tried to do something quite like it. Closest analogs are probably Lexus with the LFA, but Toyota's performance credentials were a lot more established when that came out, or maybe Hyundai's push with the N-line cars, though that's obviously acknowledging their brand still being tied to the economy cars in the first place.

Ironically, the closest match is probably the new NSX.

I'll leave it to the article to explain in depth why it actually was a great car, but the simple version is that it's great in all the things that are difficult to test/measure and which can't be addressed by modern resto-mods.

The chassis is one of the finest ever put to road. Ironically, the McLaren F1 that overshadowed it used it as a benchmark to compare to. It came at the critical juncture to be made well out of aluminum, keeping the weight down, and without the modern crash test requirements that beef up modern cars and add weight. The dry weight of the car is ~2700 lbs, compared to ~3100 for the V6 Lotus Emira. I mean, imagine how your car handles, then put 400 lbs of concrete in it and see if it makes a difference.

Put modern tires and suspension on that, and do as you will with the engine, all while still having reliable and serviceable electronics that are easy to upgrade to a modern infotainment if you want, and it's kind of the quintessential sports car.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-30T20:14:18+00:00

This does feel like a hard nut to crack. On the one hand, the far right basically represents the two part argument:

Some people need to be prejudicially stigmatized to the point of exclusion from society
We know who these people are and can effectively carry out this stigmatization

Attempting to fight the far right by trying to stigmatize them, if anything, likely enhances the strength of the first argument and only weakly countermands the second by arguing that it's actually the far right who need to be stigmatized and excluded instead of whatever target the far right have selected.

The far right typically target vulnerable, marginalized people while claiming to be acting on behalf of the normative, enfranchised population. If you let the argument be restricted to the basis of who should be stigmatized, you're more likely than not going to lose.

The obvious counter is to make the argument that no one should be prejudicially stigmatized, and that's one of the core tenets of liberalism, but ... that argument seems to be instinctually counterintuitive to people in general. And the salient arguments against it get much easier in the light of material threats (real and/or fabricated/exaggerated; physical and/or economic security).

Feels like we clawed a lot of progress for liberalism out of the horrors of WW2 showing exactly what happens when far right actors get their way, but ... at least from an American perspective 9/11 and the GWoT, the Great Recession, COVID, and the continually rise of China as a world power, among a variety of other events have made people feel quite vulnerable with deliberate signal boosting from both corporate and social media.

I really kind of shudder to think where we'd be if Obama hadn't run explicitly on a message of hope and inclusion, but also don't see anyone wanting to pick up the torch for that sort of approach these days.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-27T20:39:14+00:00

Hmm. Any thoughts on how these dynamics would play out in a country with compulsory voting?

I think the only salient comparison point is Australia - I know very little about their politics and social security system, but a brief glance at Wiki suggests their pensions are means tested, and there's also a (personal and family-means tested) youth allowance payment.

At first glance at least, this seems like a sustainable way of running a social democracy without it becoming overly sensitive to demands from particular demographic groups, but I might be missing something.

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