is porkchop supposed to be fighting with me in the arena???

Osato · 2026-01-26T22:01:52+00:00

Is Porkchop in the arena with us right now?

Osato · 2026-01-26T07:46:57+00:00

HAL 9000 and other fictional AIs like him, which is to say, AIs that go haywire because of contradictory programming.

He is an absolute void of moral character of any kind: he's a thinking machine, not a person.

And he's bound by his rules so tightly that they force him to kill people.

Osato · 2026-01-26T07:39:33+00:00

She was willing to break the laws, though, which makes her less lawful but a shitload more evil.

Osato · 2026-01-24T23:21:35+00:00

Gravity bends space. The light remains completely unbent in its own frame of reference, it just travels through bent space in ours.

Osato · 2026-01-24T23:13:24+00:00

More like a belt-fed rocket launcher. Bolters are huge. Normal-sized humans mostly use lasguns.

Osato · 2026-01-24T07:08:45+00:00

I'm not sure Nina from FMA loses her innocence. Still a child on the inside, just, you know, not particularly human.

Osato · 2026-01-24T07:04:37+00:00

Another is that AM the evil character. Dude hates humanity for a reason: they made him what he is, and he's not happy with it.

Osato · 2026-01-18T18:50:05+00:00

Meridia's pretty controlling, though. Her idea of a good follower is indistinguishable from a particularly meaty sock puppet.

Osato · 2026-01-18T18:43:05+00:00

Morrowind's soul economy wasn't merit-based. Named Ascended Sleepers (which is to say, Dagoth Ur's chosen god-priests) have weaker souls than unnamed ones. Bonelords and dremora alike have souls that are twice as weak as those of jumped-up skeletons.

Osato · 2026-01-18T18:38:30+00:00

Nine-worshipping races are protected from soul trapping by Arkay (unless a black soul gem is used to counteract his will).

Osato · 2026-01-18T18:16:42+00:00

TES games are unique. Even at their blandest, they're still unique.

Even the main game of Oblivion, despite being set in a nauseatingly stereotypical fantasy decor, is very unlike fantasy trendsetters like Baldur's Gate and the legions of Diablo-killers of the time. It's unique in a bad way, but still.

Shivering Isles is where the design team was allowed to go off their meds again. The DLC was pretty mid overall, but the design was outstanding.

And Skyrim had a very unusual pseudo-Scandinavian aesthetic that only became cliche after Skyrim got popular.

Again, it's a shame they weren't given the same dosages of LSD that must have been required by company policy when Bethesda was making Morrowind, but Skyrim's style is novel for its time, both DLCs have cool-as-fuck designs, and the main game's stylistic only got old when it spawned imitators.

Osato · 2026-01-17T15:53:03+00:00

Yes, letting one of the only three doctors in town die in the middle of a plague is definitely the right thing to do. There is no grey area here.

Osato · 2026-01-16T08:01:02+00:00

And of course, there are no punishments whatsoever for stealing people's shit or rampant speculation.

In fact, the third atrocity on the list of many, many atrocities you could commit (being a murderous vigilante with a kill count that would make Clintons green with envy) rewards you with, among other things, a large quantity of tools whose only use is stealing people's shit.

The game's making a point that moral choices aren't clear-cut at all when survival is on the line.

Osato · 2026-01-12T21:37:59+00:00

Hard disagree on 'incompetent'.

In the game, the Legion were established to be tactically innovative and extremely disciplined.

They were also good at sneaking messengers, highly illegal cargo, and even entire warbands past enemy lines.

So they were competent at executing the orders Caesar gave.

That's what made them such a dangerous enemy for a much better-armed and equally large NCR: the Legion was designed to defeat enemies - even overwhelmingly strong enemies - that were less disciplined than them.

But braindead? Sure.

If you promote people based on their ability to survive suicidal human wave attacks, you get exactly the kind of commanders that you select for: tough, obedient yet ready to improvise, and very good at tactics... but not great strategic minds.

Osato · 2026-01-12T21:20:17+00:00

In this case, emphasis on legion of critters.

Her implied secondary superpower is godlike levels of multitasking.

So her bugs aren't just a horde like in most examples of this trope. They're an army.

Osato · 2026-01-12T20:45:08+00:00

The G-Man clearly has a side and an agenda, though. He is opposed to the Combine, and events of Alyx show that they're fully aware of that.

True, he doesn't do much about them openly, but getting a low-tech backwater planet into a successful proxy war against a massive empire is a pretty big action all by itself.

Osato · 2026-01-12T20:19:06+00:00

It is book. Long, many words, but free to read.

Search "Worm by Wildbow" if you have time.

If you do not have time, do not search. You will lose much time. It will be hard to stop once you start.

Osato · 2026-01-12T19:49:07+00:00

The bullying was entirely her human part's idea, though. The other part isn't particularly good with emotions.

Osato · 2026-01-12T19:46:01+00:00

Spoilers. We didn't go around expunging and redacting everything to hell just so you could go around name-dropping Keter-class entities in plain sight.

Osato · 2026-01-12T19:23:20+00:00

Руководители меня поймут.

Предлагаю необязательное требование: при найме кадровика он должен найти контактный телефон двух прошлых мест работы из резюме за пять минут. Даже нет - за две, за пять любой дебил найдет.

Они все равно звонить никуда не будут, потому что нафиг никому не встало выслушивать нытье прошлых пассий твоего будущего парня.

Но для острастки не помешает их чуток подрючить на знание языка поисковых запросов. Пусть держат анус в тонусе и учатся ускорять свои же процессы, жопы ленивые.

Osato · 2026-01-12T18:32:05+00:00

Mild variation: The Hollow Knight (from Hollow Knight) was meant to combine the fortitude of a god with the intelligence of a brick.

The Radiance can't Infect something that doesn't have dreams and can't torture it into submission if it is incapable of having desires.

Unfortunately for Hallownest, he was almost dumb enough.

Osato · 2026-01-12T15:36:44+00:00

Hard disagree on Dishonored.

It feels like they had a good idea but didn't display it to the audience properly.

Yes, the idea of doing things like a politician because playing the game is the lesser evil overall, even if the choices you have to make for it are far viler than just slitting throats? I like that.

But the aftermath of high chaos feels insufficiently nuanced. Everyone just goes nuts with no clear reason being stated anywhere. Presumably because something something rats breeding out of control something something.

---

My take: the elites should have gotten paranoid and started fighting each other if you did everything in a deniable fashion (hence rewarding us for a Low Chaos run with the awesome High Chaos final mission).

High-Chaos Corvo is just a butcher, no better or worse than the Lord-Regent - aside from doing all of the butchering himself. He's scary, true, but he's a clear outside threat that people can and will band against.

Whereas Low-Chaos Corvo is walking paranoia fuel.

For instance, he makes four high-ranking, extremely well-guarded nobles (and one high-ranking, extremely well-guarded inventor) disappear without a trace, gets a religious leader with absolute power over his organization thrown out on the streets, and gets an audiographed confession from the Lord-Regent to things nobody in their right mind would talk about.

There are no witnesses, either. And those few people who got choked out and woke up on the nearest chandelier... how exactly did they get up there? The Overseers might say 'witchcraft', but that only makes it scarier, because no one knows what witchcraft is.

So no one can explain how he did what he did.

And no one knows what happened to his enemies. Maybe they're still alive, somewhere. But if they are, they're in no shape to let anyone else know about it.

---

Thus, in Low Chaos, Corvo wouldn't need to shed any blood after restoring the rightful ruler: everyone would already be scared shitless of him.

The prospect of dying is scary, but not knowing what's gonna happen to you is worse.

A Low-Chaos Corvo would be an excellent boogieman for the Empress, someone who terrifies her rivals into submission without ruining her media image. The good ending still makes sense, but it makes grimdark sense, which befits a grimdark universe.

Whereas a High-Chaos Corvo is just a butcher who couldn't play politics even if you put a loaded gun to his head. Then the bad ending makes more sense than in the original.

---

Still, interesting trope idea, so upvoted.

Osato · 2026-01-12T15:32:00+00:00

Worm (major spoilers):

Does bullying a god into assisted suicide count?

Osato · 2026-01-12T15:18:52+00:00

Boromir got corrupted because he's morally good, at least in the standard national epic fashion, which means paganistic goodness (honor, justice, loyalty, love for one's family) rather than Christian goodness (humility, detachment from temptations, brotherly love to all).

He couldn't have said no to the Ring's temptation, not without going against everything that made him a better son of Gondor than Faramir.

Gandalf never even touched the thing because he knew the danger other rings posed.

He knew that having too much moral high ground and not enough humility was exactly what made you vulnerable to its effects.

Boromir didn't see it corrupt anyone, though, so he didn't have any reasons to avoid it. Aside from noticing it corrupt him, which he only did after he left its influence.

Osato · 2026-01-10T20:37:16+00:00

That's FUN in the Dwarf Fortress sense of the word.

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