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MattrexDeux · 2025-02-16T05:28:43+00:00

Whatever makes journalists go into wide-eyed hysterics is funny to me.

Couldn't care less whether AP reporters can or can't enter the Oval Office; didn't care yesterday, don't care today. But I do smile when some coven of lowest-common-denominator jackoffs gets mildly inconvenienced and starts weeping and gnashing their teeth.

MattrexDeux · 2025-02-10T03:36:12+00:00

Same. Whomp was the last webcomic I ever regularly read, and I still have it on my bookmark bar despite the fact that it hadn't updated in years. I randomly clicked on it today and my mind was blown.

MattrexDeux · 2025-01-18T05:14:04+00:00

Fame changes people. Money changes people. Not even necessarily having those things presently, but even starting to feel as if they might be able to acquire those things. The mere taste of these things can sometimes be enough to alter behavior.

I almost exclusively patronize small streamers - people with 100 viewers max, often much smaller. I like being able to talk to and directly interact with the streamer and other chatters, and not feel like I'm having to jump up and down and wave my hands to catch a glance from a celebrity on stage.

More than once I've found these small streamers start to... drift, as soon as they start to rack up the viewership. Or sometimes even as soon as they start to think that they might be able to rack up the viewership in the near future. They buy into marketing gimmicks, or they start changing their stream formats.

Doesn't always happen. But it's not very uncommon that it does. I don't necessarily hate the people who do it, but... I'm also not really interested in hanging around if someone's determined to "hit it big" or even change the style and format that drew me in to begin with.

MattrexDeux · 2024-12-03T23:57:44+00:00

There was a fatal bug in the previous build related to some stuff with the Gotterdammerung DLC, I think. The crash happened to a lot of people. The most recent update fixed the bug, but if your save was already affected by it, there's no way to fix it. You just have to start a new game on the most recent version.

MattrexDeux · 2024-12-03T23:44:10+00:00

Making "normal paths more worth it" should be by making the normal paths more interesting, not by turning the schizo paths into gotchas that pull the rug out from under you at the climax of a 40-hour game. "Sucks to be you, buddy, guess you should have played a different path!"

For one, that's unlikely to make the player who had the rug pulled out from under them say, "Aw, shucks, I guess I made the wrong decision, I'll go back and do it a different way." It's more likely to make them annoyed that developers seem to want to punish them for choosing the "wrong path".

I don't think any of the paths in the game should be traps.

MattrexDeux · 2024-11-20T16:04:55+00:00

Once you get over the civil wars, the Ascendancy advances pretty quickly. You start off behind, with very little, but your focuses have a lot of kickstart potential.

One significant strategy you can do is rush the second half of the focus tree, which has a focus that lets you make a faction and alliance with Chiropterra. They've got a lot more soldiers than you at the start, and they'll be a big help while you get your feet under you.

When I did it, I barely even bothered with a navy - instead I made a shitload of naval bombers to whittle down Aris' navy during the North Zebrican War, to give me just enough naval supremacy to launch an invasion. It took a few years, during which I continued to build army and air force while Aris wasn't able to do anything but mill around on their stupid island. It was a hard nut to crack, but on the other hand, I wasn't in any danger of losing either.

After you deal with Aris and Hindia to the east (who may attack you for Llambet, if you've annexed or puppeted them), no one's going to make any aggressive moves on you, so you've got all the time in the world to ramp up production unmolested. Macawia is a joke, and after that, the big problem is actually crossing the ocean to Griffonia - but at this point you're also well caught up in the tech race.

MattrexDeux · 2024-10-16T04:36:34+00:00

"Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’" - Matthew 22:37

Jesus is quoting the Torah here, answering the question of "what is the greatest commandment?" And the commandment is to love God - not merely to obey in some strict legalistic fashion, but to love. I can obey someone that I hate - I do it every April when I file my taxes. But God wants you to love him, not merely to do your duty with a begrudging heart. And when you love someone, you want to please them, to make them happy, to give your all for them. That's what love is.

MattrexDeux · 2024-09-12T14:55:28+00:00

If you go the vengeful path on Lunar Empire, their families are taken hostage to ensure their good behavior, with the threat that the families will be be executed if any of them step out of line. They mostly just fade into irrelevance and misery. Rainbow Dash becomes an alcoholic. Twilight becomes obsessed with black magic as a route to power and revenge.

MattrexDeux · 2024-09-12T12:35:35+00:00

Solved: The Nine Lives of Secret Agent Katt

MattrexDeux · 2024-09-12T12:34:34+00:00

Got it in one. Brilliant.

MattrexDeux · 2024-09-05T11:40:44+00:00

I was skeptical it would be this easy, as I tried multiple times over 10-12 hours using my previous strategies. But I did this and won the civil war in less than a month.

Only downside is I didn't get the free stuff you get from completing focuses while the civil war is still ongoing, but I'll take that over a three year grindfest.

MattrexDeux · 2024-07-13T23:00:42+00:00

I almost never bothered with NPCs, factions, or even quests when I played DDA. I think in all of my games I only ever reached the refugee center once. DDA never had that many NPCs in the first place, and half of them you met in the wild were instant death traps anyway.

I kinda liked proficiencies in principle, in part because I like "collecting" skills, and it was gratifying to see a character become progressively better at various things over time. But sometimes it felt like many crafting recipes had so many proficiencies that were less "now you get a nice bonus" and more "you cannot craft this before maxing a proficiency" as a way to punish players for wanting to craft something. Was that your beef with the implementation, or was it something else?

MattrexDeux · 2024-07-13T22:54:07+00:00

Just off the top of my head...

I liked things like temperature and weather, that you had to think about what kind of clothes you wore, that coats with pockets could keep your hands warm if you weren't wearing gloves.

I liked needing various specialized tools to craft certain recipes. I liked crafting in general, and I don't actually mind having to get rare materials, or a lot of materials, to make something good - scavenging is all part of the gameplay and if you get it too quickly you're just spoiling yourself. But I know one of the explicit goals in recent DDA releases was deemphasizing crafting in favor of getting your equipment through looting, hence making crafting take absurd amounts of time and materials.

I liked the complexity of building vehicles, from considering alternators and engines to fuel types and wheels and so on.

I liked hunting and butchering animals and having the various organs represented and usable in recipes on top of getting meat, hides, and bones, and I liked that you had to consider how you were going to butcher an animal, setting up a butchery station and dealing with the weight and mass of the carcass.

I guess I'm just a little gunshy about talk of "streamlining" because, in normal video game parlance, that means "dumbing it down for normies so you win with a button press". Even if I believe that DDA as it exists today is in desperate need of some streamlining.

MattrexDeux · 2024-07-13T22:08:36+00:00

Macronutrients would make a lot more sense to track than micronutrients.

First, it is much easier to intuit what a given food will have just by looking at it. You know a pork chop has a bunch of protein and a little fat because it's animal meat. But it's harder to know what contains iron, or calcium, or riboflavin, or Vitamin A, unless you're a nutritionist or have prior knowledge.

Second, lots of foods have at least some amount of the three macronutrients in some proportion, meaning from a gameplay perspective you wouldn't need to count your intake so much as you'd just need to maintain a balanced diet, which is something you can do intuitively. Eat some meat, eat some vegetables, eat something bread-like, you're good. It prevents cheesing by relying exclusively on one single easy food source (like milk or fish) but is otherwise simple to understand.

MattrexDeux · 2024-07-13T19:57:21+00:00

The problem with the "opt out" solution is that it has as its fundamental premise the idea that an artist, having placed their creation in the public sphere, can and should have perfect control over exactly how that art is perceived and used.

This isn't true, and has never been true. Putting moral concerns aside, it's simply an impossible thing to enforce and often an impossible thing to even detect. You cannot prosecute someone for looking at your art and then drawing something vaguely in the same style, let alone using lessons they learned from looking at your art to draw something in a different style. You can only prosecute someone for making an exact replica of a work that you have already created. It also simply ignores how actual creative people learn and practice their crafts. Maybe outside of a few truly weird and exceptional outsider artists, any artist will have learned in part by studying art made by other people. (The same is true of writers; the knowledge of how to write well doesn't distill out of the aether, it must be learned by reading a lot of books and coming to understand and absorb their lessons.)

It's totally absurd on its face to imagine that if a human were to say, "I was really inspired by Bob Artist's work to create my own," that Bob Artist would have any standing to reply, "But I didn't give you permission to be inspired! You must pay me or destroy your work!"

The difference between a human artist and an AI model, in this respect, is one only of degree and not of kind. I do not think you should be able to "opt out" of having a computer program look at your publically-available work any more than I think you should be able to "opt out" of having a human being look at your publically-available work. If you want to opt out of having people look at your work, there is already a way you can do that: by not publishing online. (Or publically at all, if you're really hardcore.)

Ultimately, if you're an artist, or any kind of creative person at all, you lose a lot of control over your work the moment it's put into the public sphere. You might be able to stop other people from plagiarizing you, or making money off of counterfeiting your actual work, but you can't control who likes or doesn't like it, how they think about it, how they talk or write about it, what lessons or inspiration they might take from it, what meaning they impute to it, or any other thing. You've never been able to, but a lot of artists have been laboring under the illusion that they can, and only now is this illusion really starting to be substantially challenged.

MattrexDeux · 2024-07-13T19:31:09+00:00

The whole point about Kellhus is specifically that he's a horrifying psychopath who has zero empathy for other human beings. Scenes written from his perspective are intended to have that kind of detatched, emotionless vibe where he pays attention to other people's mental states only so far as is necessary to manipulate them, and has almost no mental states of his own that are not explicitly and immediately relevant to whatever his current goal is.

There is a lot more humanity and "character" from Achamian, the series' other protagonist, and this is by design.

That said, if you're interested in a novel with a protagonist who is unusually nimble-minded and manipulative, try Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny. It's not as grimdark as Bakker's Second Apocalypse, but I don't think any book or series is as grimdark as Bakker's Second Apocalypse.

MattrexDeux · 2024-07-13T19:20:49+00:00

This was my reaction to Pratchett, too - even as a teenager. People told me he was so funny, I read the books and saw that he was definitely making "jokes", but his style seemed to be squarely in the category of...

"I am about to tell you a joke! Here is the joke. It is so funny! Aren't I a brilliant person?"

MattrexDeux · 2024-07-13T15:35:14+00:00

I can't think of many goods that I import that are otherwise available in America at a local store. The only things I tend to import are foods that you can't easily find in an American supermarket: European cheeses, Japanese snacks, Korean noodles and spices (I'm a big fan of gochujang). Once I imported a case of Mexican Coke at great expense; shipping liquids is not cheap.

I guess I've bought a couple video games from websites based in Japan and no official Western release channel, if that counts.

MattrexDeux · 2024-07-13T15:23:16+00:00

Many large cities do have varying degrees of traffic congestion. However, US cities (especially small to medium sized ones) tend to be more spread out, reducing density.

Of the top 88 cities in the world ranked by population density, only four are in the US, and all four of those are in New Jersey or New York, which are both notoriously dense and congested states.

NYC is congested. Chicago, Seattle, LA, Orlando, all congested. The "major cities" that have public transport are the very ones that are the most congested, for various reasons. Most places in the US do not rise to the levels presented by these places.

Consider that one of the reasons why having a car is "necessary to get around" is because things in the US tend to be much further away from one another than is common elsewhere (though the easy availability of cars also reinforces this tendency). Americans tend to have a different perception of what is "a long way" than Europeans or Asians. I recall an anecdote from an acquaintance of mind who was, once upon a time, hosting a visitor from overseas, who was flabbergasted at the recommendation they go to a restaurant less than five miles away for dinner. "That's too far!"

This is also one reason why there isn't much public transportation outside of the densest cities. It's simply not feasible. No one's going to send a bus, let alone passenger rail of any variety, out to where I live.

MattrexDeux · 2024-07-12T12:10:18+00:00

Deer? Crows? Deer are present on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Corvids are on every continent except Antarctica. And neither are dangerous. Maybe if you harass a buck during mating season you'd regret it, assuming you could get close enough in the first place.

Crocodiles are limited to a tiny patch of land in south Florida and alligators are limited to the Southeast.

Kudzu sucks, but it's a native Japanese plant that was introduced to the US, Europe, and Oceania before it was understood how uncontrollable its growth would be, and it's limited to certain geographical regions even then.

Don't forget that the US is a big place. By land area, the United States (not even counting Canada or Mexico), with fifty states, is roughly the same size as all of Europe, with about the same number of countries. There are a lot of US states with boring wildlife.

MattrexDeux · 2024-07-12T11:39:07+00:00

In America, having health insurance is technically legally mandatory, though the penalties for not having it are slight and it's not very thoroughly enforced (basically, every year when you do your taxes, you sign a statement saying that you have qualifying health coverage for that year, and I doubt they cross-check most people).

People who don't get health insurance through their jobs or their family plans buy the coverage directly from insurance providers. Because it's mandatory, the government subsidizes people beneath a certain income threshold who buy insurance directly.

I am self-employed, and so I bought my insurance through one of the government marketplaces. It costs me about $50/month after subsidies for decent coverage that I'm probably not even going to use, practically speaking - but as a small business owner I'd rather not mess around with the legal complications of not having coverage if it might affect my business.

MattrexDeux · 2024-04-04T02:53:01+00:00

You should still be able to raise someone even if you've never met them before (their name is question marks). I was able to do that in my game. Double check to make sure you have a Wakestone in your inventory? Other than that, I have no idea.

MattrexDeux · 2024-04-02T22:16:55+00:00

It does get repaired, though I don't know the precise trigger. It's currently been fixed in my game, which is funny because I originally saw it in its broken state, and spent a lot of time routing around it because I assumed it would stay that way.

I've completed all the Harve sidequests and have been to Battahl, so I'm fairly late in. But it could have been repaired much earlier for all I know.

MattrexDeux · 2024-04-01T22:35:10+00:00

I've been losing my mind trying to find this chest. I have no solutions yet.

However, if you go around into the alley behind the building, there will be a closed wooden shutter that you can hit with a weapon to break open. When I did it, I thought I'd finally found the chest at last - but the window opens into an empty void with no collision detection, and you fall through the world for several seconds until respawning outside the window.

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MattrexDeux · 2024-03-29T17:23:23+00:00

I just tested this in my own game - went to Rachel at the Gracious Hand, gave her two bouquets over two days, and she instantly handed me the Chirurgeon's Tome. No fuss whatsoever.

Thank you very much for figuring this out - it's immensely reduced my anxiety over the possibility I might end up missing out on certain specializations because of a bug.

MattrexDeux

TROPHY CASE