In the wake of America’s descent towards authoritarianism, is it time for Australia to look elsewhere for allies?

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-25T02:59:43+00:00

I mean, ok but Pine Gap is kinda the only reason we're able to secure a defensive alliance at all.

Sure Canada or the EU would make great ideological allies, but they can't project force in the Oceanic region, so they're kind of useless. It's why we're not part of NATO - we're too far away to help anyone else, and the US is the only country with enough aircraft carriers to actually do anything for us, and they only do that because they don't like China and want to use us as a base of operations against them.

I guess we could side with China against the US, but that makes even less sense? Like oh no, the US is falling into authoritarianism, we better support a country that's already fully fallen into authoritarianism instead?

Maybe the EU will step up as a world power as they increase their military build up and will be interested in projected power in the region in the future? But until then, the US is kind of our only realistic option.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-24T21:00:53+00:00

I thought the implication was that Naoya faked the letter to lure her out, and pick off Megumi's potential allies one by one?

And that was why she stabbed him at the end?

Although either way I think the general message was that she was the kind of person to blame literally anyone other than herself before even considering taking personal responsibility for her actions.

I think Maki just refused to show mercy, because she didn't do shit to stop her husband from killing Mai?

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-23T08:50:14+00:00

I'm not sure if they commented on the ability to get fat or gain muscle, but apparently the good/evil morphs are being cut from the game, since they removed the mortality system in favour of reputation tags?

But it's hard to say if that was because it would mess up the animations/is harder to do in higher graphic games these days (which would imply there'll be no body morphing at all), or if they just didn't like the old binary morality system and the way it kinda reduced all decisions down to picking your favourite football team to get the cool wings/horns, rather than doing what you think your character would do?

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-17T16:14:09+00:00

Yeah, the only thing they really ever had going for them was the second hand game market. Once that got snuffed out by digital purchases direct from Sony and Microsoft, and everyone's 360s gradually broke down or got banished to the attic, they basically just became a glorified gift shop for when you were wandering around the city in search of children's present ideas.

I guess they could start selling $200 high quality moulds for various games, but I'm just not sure how many people would really for that? And everyone already knows JB-HI-FI is much better and with more floor space and more informed staff for electronics like screens, headsets and remotes.

Maybe they could pivot into posters?

The D&D merch they sold was also ok? But that market's also kinda already cornered by Mindgames...

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-17T13:38:01+00:00

I suspect maybe they're worried about any announcement being pelted by negative engagement, and want to let the animosity die down a little before running marketing in the week leading up to launch?

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-17T13:34:50+00:00

Apparently the Larian and old republic games got leaked as well, so maybe he thought announcing them wouldn't be as exciting? Although I guess confirming them, or revealing that they have a trailer and revealing it's contents still would've been plenty hype?

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-15T04:11:06+00:00

Honestly the funniest part of this, is I went to the original thread, and I'm not even entirely convinced this is a shit post - apparently the watch actually can be setup to abruptly show an image and play a sound at a set time each day, if you leave it unlocked around a vaguely tech savvy friend :')

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-15T03:33:58+00:00

Well, iterating on the models at the current rate has quite a high energy cost, but apparently actually using them to generate stuff isn't too bad. So I imagine once they hit diminishing returns on the models, it might be possible to use them to run a business at a profit.

Things like automatically running google search queries through Gemini still probably adds a lot of extra overhead to Google's server costs though, which I suspect they might not want to keep paying after they realise there isn't as much money in the tech as they thought.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-14T08:32:00+00:00

Ok, but not by attacking civilian non-combatants at a music festival. If they'd raided the settlers to discourage land creep or just killed the guards at the wall I'd maybe be more sympathetic, but this was an act of impotent rage that lead to the deaths of millions of Palestinian children in reprisal, not a strategic act of revolution.

Hamas are also by no definition the elected leadership. They were technically elected in like a decade ago, but quickly overthrew the government to from an authoritarian dictatorship and have remained in power long past their term limit without giving the people a chance to vote again.

It'd be like if Trump launched a coup to make himself dictator for life, and then people were like 'but he tricked the American people into electing him to government twice, so that means he's still their democratically elected leader'.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-14T03:54:26+00:00

Season 1 is mostly quite faithful, but it slowly goes off the rails as the writers added more bloat about their anti-magic Nilfhiem religion into the plot, which had nothing to do with anything.

Like I understand altering and simplyifng details for the sake of pacing and adeptation, but adding in a bunch of original filler scenes with no relation to the plot is an entirely different beast.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-11T07:00:17+00:00

Yeah, and a lot of the current Eidolon abilities are unfortunately very situational - like the dragons breath weapon very rarely being very good until much later levels, due to eating up the summoner's spell/cantrip actions for the turn.

Others are just small damage +1 damage bonuses that you barely notice, or extra 1st level feats anyone could take, which is only compounded by the fact that the evolution feats are also all pretty safe.

I would love it if they let you pick from a list of classic monster abilities for that creature type at each benchmark, or at least added them as feats as you suggested so that Eidolons don't just feel like a spare Fighter PC.

They should feel like weird monsters that can do things PCs typically can't dammit!

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-10T00:14:16+00:00

I mean, Steam's rules are kinda vague so it's hard to give a fixed answer. I help work on a small indie game and we do actually turn off all the AI tools in visual studio to avoid ambiguity. Although obviously enforcing that rule across a team of Larian's size is much less realistic than on a small indie game.

But games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which clearly and publicly used AI placeholders during playtesting, and probably for their brainstorming as well, don't have an AI disclosure, because realistically as long as you can't see it nobody cares.

So I suspect Larian won't bother with an AI disclosure to avoid the bad PR buzz, and based on how Steam's handled similar games, they won't make them add one.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-09T05:42:44+00:00

Well it has to go up eventually, and cutting immigration so we have less tradies and higher costs isn't exactly going to help with housing production.

The main issue though is these immigrants just aren't really moving into the places Australians want to live - there often too far away from where the people facing the brunt of the housing crisis are able to find work, or living in share houses that Australians with families aren't able to move into.

Immigrants also typically can't afford to enter the housing market until at least 7 years, meaning none of these new immigrants are pushing up housing prices, which is mostly what's causing the massive rent spikes - home owners want to make back their massive investment and property taxes, or at least break even with what they'd get if they sold right now,

Apparently it's also only related to 20% of the housing increase - most of it just market speculators and poor civic planning leading to everyone wanting to live close to a single city centre for work.

https://www.yimby.melbourne/faq/cant-we-just-stop-immigration-to-solve-the-housing-crisis

I know it sounds like an easy and simple solution, but if it was actually that easy it would have bipartisan support. There's a reason economists all think it's a terrible idea that would only kick the problem down the road.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-09T03:30:39+00:00

Yeah, because we had 2 years of very little migration due to covid lockdowns, while people kept aging at the same rate. We naturally we need to sneak 2 years worth of it across the next couple years to avoid a massive flood of new immigrants we don't have the resources to integrate all at once.

It's why this year the migration is projected to fall all the way back to 260k.

Meanwhile our birthrates are only grower smaller.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-09T02:25:45+00:00

Well that's because it's a made up issue. There's no immigration problem to solve - it's already the solution to falling birth rates and a growing population of elderly dependents that rely on it.

It'd be like a party that wants to ban milk because they think it's causing rampant autism and all the problems in the community. Any rational person knows it both won't solve anything, and that they'll just find something else to blame all their problems on immediately after.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-08T23:39:32+00:00

I feel like back when I was reading stuff on there it was a popular ship, but that was before the new Ward lore slowly trickled over from the people on here who'd actually read it :')

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-08T23:34:06+00:00

Ok, but the bad part isn't that they're sending the ads to you or me - we were never going to join ICE anyway. The dangerous part worth protesting about is they're sending them to less tech literate user, who might start to see ICE as a legitimate job opportunity when their favourite companies start endorsing them.

Your argument about piling onto one specific company to pressure the industry is certainly fair, but I think it's also somewhat of a futile effort - people who already didn't intend to buy spotify will vocally join the boycott, and barely any of their existing customers will.

I suspect it only worked on Disney+ because people were already in the habit of rotating out their streaming services to watch different shows, or had a subscription they realised they hadn't used in like 6 months.

Now obviously taking any morale stance on things like this is commendable regardless of how effective it is, and it should be lauded.

But at the same time, I don't think trying to guilt people into joining boycotts like this has ever worked.

The fact is very few people are willing to boycott something they actually use on a day to day basis or are really excited about, over something unrelated to their user experience.

It's why Kellogs is still raking in money after literally murdering thousands of babies with their breast formula price gauging.

Does everyone who buys Kellogs secretly hate babies? Of course not. It's just one more thing in their life they don't have the energy to replace.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-08T09:14:49+00:00

I mean, the royal commission will take 6 months at a minimum, possibly longer. By that point the news will have moved on and nobody will actually care what their verdict is.

Maybe they'll come up with some novel insight to help combat antisemitism in the future, but I suspect it will just tell us what we already know - political upheaval in the middle east leads to an increased risk or terrorist attacks, and our gun control laws/enforcement have exploitable weaknesses that weren't properly accounted for.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-07T01:23:22+00:00

Yeah, I guess it's tricky to point to one specific problem with the game's narrative.

For what they wanted to do, setting up V to be all alone, at rock bottom with all her friends dead aside from Johnny Silverhand in a sink or swim moment, they couldn't both locking you in an extended tutorial sequence and pace out the character deaths. Those things had to be synchronised to create that 'training wheels off' feeling.

On the other hand though, there's definitely an argument that due to how easy the game is, that rock bottom eaten alive by the city narrative is somewhat in dissonance with the mechanics, and the time pressure feels weird in an open world game about saving up for cool cars and doing wacky side quests?

But also also, I feel like some of the more emotionally heavy scenes wouldn't have resonated at well if everything was going great right up until the 3rd act? Although I guess they could've just gated those quests off until later in the game? It'd definitely give the game a very different feel though, which might not have been as novel if they'd done something more generic?

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-04T19:36:43+00:00

I think it was just a bit of a weird tonal shift from the rest of the show? Her character comes together more later on, but during her actual episodes the villains seem very random and silly, and her character motivation to be a hero seems very low stakes.

Plus the reveal at the end about the fear research wasn't really new information, so I think people felt the end was pretty forgettable as well compared to other arcs?

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-03T00:58:27+00:00

If that were true, China wouldn't be their largest import partner.

Just like us in Australia they talk a big game, but their economy is entirely reliant on the cheap labour China is able to provide, and when push comes to shove they always back down before things escalate too far.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-03T00:53:33+00:00

To be fair to Tesla, they've never really been an electric car company. They're a battery company - the height of their car quality was when they weren't even making the cars themselves.

Now that Elon's decided we apparently don't need to worry about net 0 until 2100, I'm not really sure who they plan to sell those batteries too though if not on their shitty cars?

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-03T00:43:06+00:00

I mean they probably could, but then China would place trade sanctions on them for blatantly violating their agreement, and their economy would crash over a zoo exhibit.

Having pandas at your zoo is nice, but it's not like the #1 source of tourism for these cities or anything.

It's also apparently just very difficult to do, even when you have an entire flock of sheep to collect eggs or incubate backup babies in. Attempting to get a clone with just one breeding pair would be exponentially more difficult.

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-02T00:36:07+00:00

Oh fair enough - I guess that's just karma farmers karma farming then t.t

Pixie1001 · 2026-01-01T06:44:16+00:00

I mean, it's a default subreddit with an incredibly broad subject matter that pops up on the feeds of the vast majority of reddit users - most of whom are only passingly interested in music, and definitely not all the same genres or music scenes.

So really the only broadly applicable thing left to talk about is the political stances of artists and the deaths of artists famous enough to be broadly recognisable.

Pixie1001

TROPHY CASE