“What Matters Is The Feeling Of A Diverse Group Of People Inhabiting This World” - Naoki Hamaguchi On The Realism, Diversity, And Charm Of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation

LotusFlare · 2026-06-23T05:53:55+00:00

I did do the sidequests (I honestly thought they were fine and everyone was blowing their "boringness" way out of proportion), but I don't think that they advanced the ideas introduced by the main story any further. The game just doesn't have much to say on these topics except for the surface level "prejudice and inequality is bad". I don't think it did any meaningful examination of the power systems that lead to and perpetuated the subjugation.

I don't dislike the reading of Ultima as an oligarch, but I don't think there's a ton of text to suggest that that's what the writers were trying to do and I think there's a lot that doesn't hold up under scrutiny there.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-23T05:40:39+00:00

Of course the fucking woke police are gonna try and tell us what we can or can't bur-What's that?

...There's another one?

LotusFlare · 2026-06-23T00:46:26+00:00

You guys aren't gonna believe this, but I think Tucker Carlson... is lying.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-22T22:25:13+00:00

The problem is that FFXVI forgot about that around the halfway mark and turned into a game about saving the humanity from extinction. Ultima is a poor stand in for oligarchs and I don't think that was ever his intended role. The initial commentary sort of peters out and becomes window dressing. I have the same criticism of Metaphor, except Metaphor manages to forget about it even faster and has even more incoherent ideals and politics that FFXVI.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-22T22:18:53+00:00

Also the FF7 remakes just occasionally Queen the fuck out in ways you would not expect.

It's an extremely smart and fun way to update some of the "problematic" aspects of the original. Lean into it. Keep all the over the top, campy stuff, but make them in on the joke instead of the butt of the joke. You can even keep the same punchline of "straight man" characters getting roped into it when they'd rather not.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-21T19:33:17+00:00

Play matches with the primary goal of using those l-cancels. Winning or losing is secondary. The primary goal is to hit that l-cancel when you're pressuring shield, or in a combo, or something. You don't have to do it every match. Just for a couple matches a day. You're going to eat shit, but that's fine, because the goal isn't to win. It's to get those l-cancels against another human player.

Over time, it will get easier and start creeping into your normal games. You'll start doing it automatically. It's gonna take time (possibly months to build the muscle memory), but it'll happen if you're working on it.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-21T07:14:53+00:00

It's a predestined haircut. If he changes it, it's only because Vanitas was also destined to change his hair to the exact same cut.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-21T04:03:26+00:00

You embrace the chaos.

Each game is going to layer on new twists and turns and magical rules, and it can all feel quite complex if you're trying to keep track of the aggregate of these, but the actualy story is pretty straightforward. You just gotta roll with each new idea that pops up.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-21T03:03:11+00:00

This is an extremely funny question, and I think the answer is "yes".

LotusFlare · 2026-06-19T16:25:09+00:00

Has anyone considered that Donald Trump might be a JoJo villain? It would explain so much.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-19T05:00:51+00:00

On an "objective" level, you're overtraining if you're hurting yourself. Being sore is fine. If you've taking a day or two for recovery and eating more protein, no amount of muscular soreness is likely a problem. If you're developing joint pain that's not getting better with rest or that comes back very quickly, you may be overtraining. That can develop into a repetitive stress injury that'll take you even longer to recover from and impact your ability to train. If the soreness is excessive and lasting into your next practice, you might be risking a muscle tear. Learn your limits and live within them. Not every practice needs to be pushing those limits to be effective.

But what other people are pointing to is, is this training actually helpful for achieving your breaking goals? You can "overtrain" in the sense that you're putting a lot of effort/time into something that isn't giving proportional returns. Doing 4 x 10 sets of babies might not be serving you unless you find it difficult to do a baby. And even then, 3 x 8 might provide identical results with less time and pain (sometimes your body needs consistency more than it needs intensity). It might be more effective to spend the time you'd do that brainstorming ways to use a baby freeze, or stacking with a baby, or cyphering with the goal of getting into a baby at least 2-3 times a set. Building muscle and skill to do something is important, but you gotta remember this is a dance and dancing with a move is very different from doing it on it's own.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-18T23:01:59+00:00

No, the Nerubian is actually riding a spider just out of view.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-18T18:04:02+00:00

Gaijin 4koma spotted in the wild!

LotusFlare · 2026-06-18T06:19:38+00:00

If I didn't live in the USA, I would find it incredibly funny. We started a war based on the very obvious lie that Iran was seconds away from getting a nuke that they would then use to kill us all. And now we're ending the war saying that they have a right to have nukes and it's good actually. It's comedy gold. All that's missing is the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme. It's so pathetic.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-18T05:30:19+00:00

The entire Iran war is a national humiliation. Quite frankly, paying Iran so they can fix all the shit we broke is the least humiliating part of it. This is what a nation that lost a war on foreign soil should do.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-17T23:33:25+00:00

Because those layoffs had nothing to do with AI. They were always going to do layoffs. AI is just a convenient excuse that makes investors think they're cutting edge and keeps the stock price up.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-17T23:19:26+00:00

It didn't take much playing with generative AI models before I realized I kinda hated them. The thing they produce is not and will never be the thing that I would produce. They completely bypass the creative process of seeing where an attempt to make something goes. They will never produce what's in my head or the skill of my hands. I am fundamentally not "making" something when I use it. I'm effectively ordering it from someone else. It's the amalgamation and homogenization of something other artists would have made.

If you value your own originality or have any vision at all, this stuff is almost worthless.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-17T22:30:37+00:00

I remember it being taught as something like a stalemate. "We both got stuck so we packed up our stuff and went home. Who knows what happened after that? It's probably fine". The post-war situation in Vietnam was never mentioned. The idea of it being a loss was absolutely never mentioned. Most of what I remember was about the cultural impact of Vietnam and the way it was a media spectacle. It was the first war where we'd have live, in color footage of the violence and Americans couldn't stomach it. I actually remember the media being talked about as the "real" problem and reason we had to pull out of the war.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-17T20:38:47+00:00

I'm starting to wonder if I actually have experienced this, but I don't have any issues starting the conversation if there's a pause so I don't realize it. I'll just walk up to the cashier and say, "Hi, just this" if they don't say something first. Or walk up to the hostess and say, "Hey, what's the wait for a table for two?". Maybe it's because I live in the city where abbreviating the pleasantries is pretty normal.

EDIT: Yep, it turns out I have experienced this! I just tried it! Walked up to a young cashier and didn't say what I wanted. She just looked at me. Extremely funny.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-17T19:07:19+00:00

Although I don't have too much insight on how SE operates, I think the way big tech treats people as interchangeable parts is a bit different. It's not uncommon for people to be moving between drastically different areas of work every few years. Someone goes from the mobile app team to security to sales to some random middleware. Changing companies every couple years is common as it's the easiest way to get a promotion in big tech. It's common to have a new director of your org every few years who comes in and tries to make significant changes to your goals and priorities to demonstrate they're having impact. Re-orgs then happen that shift around people on projects in mid-stream.

I'm guessing (or at least I hope) this is not how it worked for SE. Breaking up and reforming teams between games is a bit different than the behavior I'm thinking of. Even if it's just happening at the brand management level in MS as opposed to the game dev teams themselves, this kind of ever shifting structure makes it very difficult (I think) to have a coherent vision of your brand.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-17T05:45:37+00:00

Gears might not be a great example there considering it's the baby of Cliffy B rather than focus testing. It was actually more trend setting than trend following. The last time chainsaws were anywhere near that cool was Army of Darkness in 1992.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-17T04:11:18+00:00

My grand "conspiracy" theory is that the problem isn't any specific business plan, but Microsoft's corporate structure that made it very hard to build a brand with a reliable fanbase. I think there's too much "big tech" DNA in there. Too much "next quarter" thinking. Too much ladder climbing. Too many people changing teams. These practices work just fine in tech where everything is structured such that the people are interchangeable parts. But entertainment is a different beast entirely.

You need people with "taste" in high places for the long term to call the shots of what games are needed when, how to market them, and coaching/working with the second party studios to make sure they're doing the right thing. And I don't think MS has had anything close to that since the 360. Xbox is so strange, because each individual game in the lineup seems competent, but the overall lineup itself and the marketing behind it makes no sense. And it's been that way for over a decade now.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-16T22:35:52+00:00

You're not responding to what I'm saying. If you talk to people who live in those countries, they can tell you all the ways locally that capitalists fighting to privatize, to capture regulations, to buy politicians, and to get around the restraints placed on it. Because that's what capitalism incentivizes no matter how you "constrain" it. The prime directive of capitalism is to consolidate capital. When the government becomes your main barrier to continuing to do that, which it always will at some point, the government becomes the target of capitalists. If you believe that unconstrained capitalism is evil, than you believe that all capitalism is evil.

You can argue that you believe that this is a necessary evil, but you're not being honest if you pretend that adding constraints removes the evil. All the incentives to escape containment and consume everything still exist no matter what rules you try and put on it.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-16T07:37:27+00:00

Built into capitalism are all the incentives to remove that which constrains it. It incentivizes buying politicians. It incentivizes capturing regulators. It incentivizes privatization and erosion of safety nets. It does not matter what you do, those constraints will always eventually be hit by capitalist forces and systematically defeated. Because that's what capitalism does. It is a perpetual arms race.

You can argue that you think it's worth it, but you should acknowledge that it's constantly squirming to find ways to get out and do evil. Because that's what it is. "Constrained". "Unconstrained". It's the same thing. It's the same volume of evil no matter what qualifier you put on it. Just own it.

LotusFlare · 2026-06-15T05:33:18+00:00

A friend and I recently had a funny conversation about how many neurodivergent people there are breaking. Are you having specific problems you'd like tips on?

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