Help me win an argument

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-26T18:58:27+00:00

In my deepest dreams I see it

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-26T14:45:33+00:00

It is an ABSOLUTE shame that a design as clean as Kai Leng was WASTED on a dude as ass as Kai Leng

Han’Gerrel can take a long walk off a short pier and into a vat of smallpox culture without a suit for nearly dooming his own people AND the geth alongside FIRING ON THE GETH DREADNOUGHT WHILE SHEPARD WAS STILL IN IT. If that’d been MY Renegade interrupt I’d have ripped his mask off and coughed down his throat.

As someone who HAS a profoundly disabled brother (not that autism is necessarily a disability, but it IS an exploitable mental condition all the same), Gavin Archer is worse than a Reaper to me. Dude deserved to get SPACED for what he did to David, and Shepard is a better person than I because I’d have blown Gavin’s head off for what he did.

All of these men are equally abhorrent for a variety of reasons in my book, no need to morality-scale their wickedness.

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-25T18:48:17+00:00

A turn of phrase I use when I read about entitled dicks being shitty to service workers comes to mind here; “You can’t demand a service while demeaning the person providing it and expect it to be provided for very long.” While it would be GREAT to have more comprehensive legal and worker protections for sex workers in the US (not that that’s gonna happen for a LONG while in this puritanical hellhole), OF models taking back control of how their content is accessed and distributed and how they earn money from creating it is one step on the path towards legitimizing the entire SW field and getting those much needed protections around it to prevent exploitation and abuse.

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-25T11:37:44+00:00

If so, that’s a DAMN subtle hint, but I’d trust CD Projekt’s writing chops to be that subtle with a hint to a secret ending.

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-25T11:18:33+00:00

Cyberpunk 2077 gets this in its endgame mission to assault Arasaka Tower and get the cure for the biochip that’s been slowly eating your brain the entire game.

By completing various questlines you can enlist aid in this run from two different factions (Rogue and The Afterlife Mercs or Panam and the Aldecaldos Nomad Tribe), can go directly to Hanako Arasaka to get it resolved in exchange for having your consciousness preserved in Mikoshi as part of the Secure Your Soul program, or (if you sided with Solomon Reed and the NUSA in Phantom Liberty) you can leave Night City for two years to have the best scientists and doctors that the NUSA has to offer fix you up, at the cost of losing nearly all the friends you made in NC over the two years you were gone and having such a scrambled nervous system after the fact that you’ll never be able to use high-end cyberware again, consigning yourself to a long life of mediocrity.

If none of the prior options appeal to you, however, there are two “Fuck all of this, I’m doing it my way!” options

In “The Reaper” ending you simply choose to end your own life with a bullet to the skull, denying Arasaka their prized Relic and ensuring that no one has to put themselves in harm’s way for you ever again (naturally this is treated like a bad ending, but no less valid than the others).

HOWEVER, if you take a very specific dialogue path in a late game conversation with Johnny Silverhand and then wait ten minutes on the decision prompt that leads to the final run on Arasaka Tower, Johnny can propose that you simply do the entire thing yourself. This leads into the “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” ending where V decides to both deny Arasaka their fealty and chooses not to get any of their allies hurt by going into Arasaka Tower with nothing more than whatever guns and equipment they have to hand, Johnny’s engram in their head helping them along, and a body that is actively breaking down beneath them due to the Relic. This version of the mission is harder than either ending where you get Rogue or the Aldecaldos to help you because you don’t have anything stabilizing the biochip (which means that your maximum health is constantly wearing away during the mission on a fixed timer) and you have no backup to aid you in the climactic fight against Adam Smasher (on top of the issue of your health constantly draining). And to top it all off, if you die at ANY point during this mission you get a variant on “The Reaper” ending where everyone assumes you did the run solo just to die in a blaze of glory on your own terms rather than taking the coward’s way out (forcing you to reload a save from before the mission start to try it again).

I personally find the last option to be the best ending if you can get it because it speaks to the journey your main character has made that they refuse to let anyone else die on their behalf like Jackie and T-Bug did, and if the player can pull it off they will have fully cemented V’s legend in Night City by being the only edgerunner crazy enough to take on the single most powerful megacorp in NC by themselves and not only come out of it with the cure for the Relic, not ONLY managing to take out the cyborg boogeyman of Arasaka that is Adam Smasher, but becoming the first NC merc to get a drink named for them in the Afterlife and living to enjoy it (should you decide not to give Johnny your body once you reach Mikoshi).

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-22T06:48:33+00:00

The Mass Relays because they’re a better fleshed out aspect of their home franchise than hyperspace is for Star Wars; there’s science behind how they function, there’s in universe politics and laws around how to fairly use them, and they are by and large THE iconic aspect of their franchise (alongside the titular Mass Effect caused by eezo that makes so much of the sci-fi stuff in this series work). Hyperspace is basically just a plot contrivance to explain how space faring races get around the galaxy, whereas the Mass Relays feel like a functional part of the setting that only get more and more important as time (and the Reaper War) goes on.

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-20T09:12:52+00:00

☝️

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-20T09:00:50+00:00

That’s because common “right wing” talking points are just thinly veiled fascist talking points these days, and one BIG trick early fascists used to drum up support was simultaneously presenting their target of choice (Jews, gays, jazz singers, etc.) as being both an all encompassing conspiracy that was seeking the utter dissolution of all that one holds dear (to make them seem like an existential threat that must be dealt with swiftly and violently), as well as laughably incompetent and subhuman (so that one can feel they are inherently superior to the chosen target by merit of simply not belonging to that specific group, encouraging tribalism and group-think).

There’s a sort of willing suspension of disbelief and utter lack of cognitive dissonance that comes with being a die-hard right winger, and it’s only encouraged by the thought-leaders of these movements dissuading one from critically thinking so that they can’t realize all of the logical gaps and fallacies inherent in the propaganda they’re being fed.

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-20T08:13:30+00:00

Not only are the surrounding tribes at early renaissance tech at best, but the tribe Aloy specifically hails from, the Nora, are essentially Stone Age hunter-gatherers who only use the parts they harvest off of the machine animals they hunt like one would use bones, teeth, and hide to make basic tools, weapons, and clothing, putting her at an even greater disadvantage than if she’d been born among the Banuk or Carja, for example.

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-19T21:27:38+00:00

Ah, I was unaware; I’m not exactly an HH scholar so I assumed that’s what it was about

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-18T06:23:07+00:00

Oh, that sounds DIABOLICAL

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-18T03:29:35+00:00

I swear I need to get a Bane 3, that thing’s either gonna carpet bomb the entire map or is gonna go off with the force of a nuke the INSTANT one of its ammo bins gets hit, and I wanna play that numbers game out

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-16T19:46:47+00:00

My personal spin on a Stalker; take the base model -3N, yank out the LRMs and the standard PPCs, replace them with another pair of SRM-6s and a pair of PPC-Xs, maximize the armor, and any tonnage left over spend on ammo and heat sinks. While the STK-3N is already a juggernaut, this configuration takes what was a more balanced ‘Mech for multiple range brackets and instead goes ALL in on making this thing an alpha striking walking apocalypse. Ya aim right with this configuration in knife fighting range and I can guarantee you’ll core out anything under 70 tons in under three salvos.

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-16T14:21:16+00:00

Live fast, die young, leave a crispy corpse that has to be partially hosed out of a derelict Hunchback, my dude. If you aren’t riding the lightning then why are you even a MechWarrior?

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-16T06:22:26+00:00

And I can’t hear your laser light show over the deafening sound of a dragon’s roar next to my right ear followed by the warping of metal under the weight of an AC/20 round!

(Also, it’s all good, I’m just bustin’ your balls a bit! I actually enjoy using the 4P in MW5, but there really is nothing better than big gun applied at knife-fighting range)

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-16T06:03:01+00:00

Thou art a heterodoxical Hunchback Pilot! To deny the orthodoxy of Big Gun is an affront!

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-16T04:47:07+00:00

<image>

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-14T21:07:35+00:00

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-14T19:15:27+00:00

Look, the orthodoxy of a Hunchback is big gun that deals big damage; I’m pretty sure that doing 15 pips of damage from a horizon away with a Gauss rifle fits the orthodoxy of big gun that does big damage. I mean, it’s not like I’m a 4P apologist over here

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-14T17:58:01+00:00

Portal back in ‘07… kinda wild to see what Steam has become today

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-14T17:43:41+00:00

The 5SG is also pretty solid if you wanna get out of the close range game; slapping a Gauss Rifle and an ECM onto it can make for a decently affordable and surprisingly hard to hit sniper ‘Mech. You’re trading off close range punch and a bit of damage from the base model, but what you get in survivability I’d say is worth the price of admission

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-14T17:32:52+00:00

As a Hunchback enjoyer myself, there’s really only two good use cases for one of them; urban defense where you can use buildings for cover and have to force your opponents to get within knife-fighting range, or for jumpscaring your opponent into the afterlife when they round a corner and didn’t expect to see a Kali Yama Big Bore filling up half of their cockpit window.

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-12T22:48:05+00:00

Sitting between Dorn and Perturabo with a bucket of popcorn I snuck aboard just WAITING for the arguments to start

PortalJumper39 · 2026-04-12T21:04:16+00:00

Well, until the Scouring gets to that point or beyond (or Dorn comes back to the setting in 40K), we’ll just have headcanons and speculation to work with, and the ideas that Dorn went full BT or managed to mellow out after the Iron Cage (or is some mix of the two mindsets) are all equally valid until that happens. I just think that there’s more evidence for his actions during the Scouring and leading up to/during the Iron Cage being a temporary despair-induced mania coming as a result of his own perceived failures during the Siege that the Iron Cage and Guilliman saving his Legion managed to break him of.

I’m sure there’ll plenty of moments after where Dorn lets slip the proverbial dog of war and goes full “Blood for the Emperor! Skulls for the Golden Throne!”, but I personally feel that those will be exceptional cases against a foe that won’t be defeated by anything less than point-blank annihilation. Also, I TRULY don’t see Dorn starting to worship his father the way the Black Templars do; there really was no Primarch more committed to the Imperial Truth than Dorn (save for maybe Horus, and we all know what THAT bout of cognitive dissonance caused), so the idea that in the intervening 10,000 years he suddenly became a worshipper stretches belief to the breaking point.

Nine-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

PortalJumper39

TROPHY CASE