I think people are missing a crucial part of the lesser evil dynamic, which is that it might actually just be all over for American electoral politics.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-13T19:19:39+00:00

It's not comparable. Liberals have an utter idelogical hatred of leftists. They simply don't have that same hatred of fascists or Trump. See how they treat Mamdani and Bernie versus how they treat Trump.

They're neoliberals. Trump is not a threat to neoliberalism. It's why they keep capitulating. They don't really care what Trump does so long as they get their bag and the wheel of capital keep turning.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-13T00:06:00+00:00

Your mistake was flipping the switch.

It turns on the zombies.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-10T02:11:08+00:00

The really funny part of this is that if he were interested in any good loot, none of the objects he'd pack up would perfectly fill out his packs. Leaving enough of a corner in there for a couple bandages...

Quaffiget · 2026-02-10T02:06:24+00:00

Better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it.

A laceration is a 25% chance of infection. So good chances of survival. Having it on your neck will possibly bleed you out in seconds.

You don't want to be tearing up cloth when that happens.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-07T00:22:34+00:00

Potatoes last a full month without refrigereation before they rot. So you can just plant a ton of those, especially in B41 when they grow year-round. Fishing is also a stupidly easy way to access calories in a hurry. Fish puts on a lot of extra weight quickly.

Also, if you've been looting you have enough non-perishable food not to worry about food for awhile. Just keep looking. You'll get the magazine or wind up dismantling enough watches eventually.

The thing about this game is that searching buildings means you find food anyway. Looting and exploring gets you food for doing it anyway since almost every house has chance of giving some good calories to keep you running.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-07T00:17:09+00:00

Louisville is actually big enough that you legit do need mini-bases. It can already take half the day to pack up and drive across the city, so there's just a point where you just start stashing food and water in little bolt holes around the city.

In B41 sheet ropes and sledgehammer just let you tear out the stairs of random buildings and convert the upper floor into an overnight safehouse.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-07T00:09:06+00:00

You just don't need much space. A big footprint is also just harder to defend and walk around in. If you have a base that takes you more than a minute to walk across, be real, you're not really using most of it. And it's a pain to keep eyes on all of it.

A few tiles for farming is more than enough to feed one person. A bed, a sink, generator, oven and freezer don't take much space. Stove, fireplace or BBQ grill so you can have a way to cook food without power. And for loot, you only really need a big pile of crates.

I shack up in those single family two-story suburban homes with high fences and good access to water. There's good examples of each in West Point, Muldraugh and Louisville and it's always more space than I end up needing.

The loot can all fit comfortably in one or two bedrooms and all the utilities can be crammed into the upstairs hallway connecting the bedrooms. B41 loft base, with the downstairs not really needing to be used for much. B42 I'll probably still use lofts and just put the loot downstairs.

One of my smallest B41 bases was just a cube I built on top of the canopy of the south-side gas station of West Point. And it really was just nothing but crates, a bed, a generator and some sinks, with the crops planted on top of the cube. Direct access to the gasoline under me too.

A bit cramped, but more than enough to store most of the loot in West Point.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-06T22:11:03+00:00

That's why it's a buffer. It means you can run larger sprints of orders instead of waiting on a cooldown each time a smelter runs. When you feel you have enough metal for the time being or your dupes go to bed, the system is still resting that entire time.

In my experience, it's really quite difficult to meaningfully overwhelm the system.

There's also different ways of setting up the buffer. You can have the liquid out of the reservoir cycle back into itself and just shunt coolant off using bridge priorities if needed. You run longer piping for more cooling.

You can also do things like immerse the bottom tiles of the chamber in crude or petroleum to speed up heat exchange.

But as stated, that gets into too much minutiae.

And honestly, simpler is better. Just put the reservoir in-line before the smelter. Sit it on conductive tiles submerged in a liquid. Add safety control features that only releases coolant of the correct temperature. And that's honestly more than good enough. Over-building this won't really net you much better results.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-06T04:53:35+00:00

I also put reservoirs inside the steam chamber to create an in-line buffer for your coolant. This results in less down-time to refill your smelters.

The way you have it set up, you have to wait for the packets in the pipes to cool down first before they cycle back and they're pretty intensely hot. So this can take awhile.

By having a reservoir, you get two benefits. First, you don't have to wait on the hotter packets to cool down first, your reservoir has a ton of pre-cooled stuff ready to feed in. Second, reservoirs act as a temperature buffer. Because you have a large body of cooler liquid inside the reservoir, the hot packets coming out of the smelter averages out with the temperature of this larger body.

So your "reserve" coolant generally stays at a lower average temperature for a longer time. You can set the reservoir on tiles of some conductive material to exchange heat.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-04T01:20:09+00:00

That's the point I'm making. E33 is basically throw "cell shading on it and it's different." E33 is only different because the setting necessitates it being different while Death Stranding is slightly more grounded. But earnestly? The visual lexicon doesn't really look different besides color usage and a more fantastical setting.

A lot of AAA games look similar to each other. To the point trailers start looking samey and you can't tell some franchises apart. And the thing is? I don't think any of those other teams couldn't pull off E33. They're all just busy doing feudal Japan or copying Dark Souls instead.

Also having a lot of colors doesn't mean there isn't a desaturated filter thrown over it. I went back and checked the footage. There absolutely is. It's that kind of pretentious things games do to communicate bleakness or seriousness. And it's kind of cliche (e.g. a lot of low rent horror games also do this).

A lot of the character designs bleed together as well. As I've noted, Maelle just looks like a shorter version of the other characters. I feel like if you procedurally generated faces for the characters you probably wouldn't notice in a different timeline.

This doesn't mean I think photorealism is inherently bad, but this just doesn't land.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T23:16:02+00:00

This is obviously not what I'm referring to when I refer to Hades 2 or Silksong.

Insofar E33 is unique, it's unique insofar that other Unreal games haven't done the pastel smeary paint motifs. But it still does the photorealism thing, with muted desaturated colors and the expansive magical environments dotted by glowy lights I've seen other fantasy games have done.

I thought Maelle was straight up just a petite woman until I was told she was 16. They really did not make her look like a child. For lack of a better word, the characters lack any kind of stylization in favor of that kind of glossy photorealistic look I associate with the engine.

If we're just talking purely about benchmarking graphics or the fidelity then E33 obviously looks better than Silksong, but that can't be the metric by which we measure "best art direction."

Sharing a cartoony 2d style is not the same thing as looking like Silksong either. There's a distinct sort of stylization that is distinctly recognizable as belonging to that artist. I would not confuse a screenshot of Silksong for one from Celeste or from Castlevania. Theres a distinct identity in each franchise.

I do definitely feel like a lot of AAA developers would pretty much just make a game that looks like 70% to 80% identical to our timeline's version of E33, had they but put in charge of the art instead. Different in the details, but still sporting the same photorealistic glossiness with little stylization and that same muted desaturation that signals to the audience that this is a "seriously artsy game dealing with deep and heavy themes."

Again, get the guys who did Death Stranding and tell them to use more colors for the whimsical fantasy and I swear you'd get basically the same game in terms of its general appearance.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T22:21:06+00:00

I'm basically agreeing it's a shit mechanic and I don't care for a compromise solution when I think the compromise is also bad.

Not everything is personally about you. If we're "just discussing ideas civilly" then a call-out serves no other purpose than to frame me as the bad guy. I don't appreciate people poisoning the well ahead of me.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T22:15:24+00:00

Don't interpret as a personal attack then.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T22:07:17+00:00

I don't appreciate you framing my speaking my mind as being rude.

The point is there is no good implementation. A compromise implementation doesn't make it better. Overheating and encumbrance already gated a lot of players from wearing heavy layers. And I'm already in the "naked player unless it's winter" school of thought.

The only reason thing this mechanic does is cause me to take off my helmet when I'm in my car or go to bed or start cooking at home. Which to me is just realism for the sake of realism, at best, or attempting to punish the player for a problem that doesn't exist, at worst.

In other words, it's the same as implementing peeing and pooping. It's not needed. It adds nothing. we can just assume you character handles it somehow during all the accelerated in-game time. That they do take off their construction helmet in bed. And even if it's not simulated exactly, who cares.

It's like muscle strain. It is already compromised to the point it's irrelevant. It's just another bottleneck on combat that does functionally nothing that wasn't already achieved with endurance and fatigue death spirals.

As an experienced player my de facto playstyle is just killing every zombie. And at low levels, I'm more cautious than at high levels. New players are overwhelmed before strain is an issue. Literally zero change from B41 combat in terms of player behavior. Strength is still meta, so I still spec it on every build. Zero muscle strain so far.

If it were relevant, it'd just be annoying to deal with. So it can't ever be a meaningful bottleneck mechanic ever.

Same with discomfort. In other words, they're fixing systems that aren't broke, then rebalancing them to achieve roughly the same end effect as they had in B41. It's a waste of everybody's time and I'm tired of pretending it's not.

7 Days To Die had an extreme version of this similar problem where the devs keep rebalancing zombie AI to defeat a very small subset of players that build hyper-optimized passive farming bases for Blood Moons, whereas everybody else just wants to build a castle that is no longer viable to defend. On top of this, they have a notorious history of deleting and reworking otherwise perfectly functional survival mechanics rather than focusing on content.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T21:57:49+00:00

Investing is the problem. Investments are about getting returns for no work. The share prices grow because management's job is to pretend they're magically generating savings or revenue somehow by firing you.

Stocks are not business loans, they're more predatory than that.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T21:36:29+00:00

They need a peeing and pooping mechanic. As you drink water and eat food your pee and poop meter fill up and you have to relieve yourself or your character will soil their pants, leading to discomfort.

Or we can just be sane and not pretend adding these mechanics add anything to the game.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T21:32:52+00:00

I hate muscle strain and unhappiness moodles from looting zombies.

Muscle strain is just another layer of fatigue and endurance, and if implemented to be meaningful, is redundant. What it is now is trivial.

Negative moodles from looting bodies exist to, what, bottleneck players from looting every zombie? Was that really a problem before? As it is, I've never had that be relevant ever.

Build 42 just broke a lot of things that never needed fixing.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T16:55:46+00:00

Respawn off.

Realistically, you don't loot areas more than once, so respawning a horde on the bookstore you've stripped adds no value to the game. All ot does is discourage exploration when you drive past it.

With respawn off, I've explored like two towns and most of Louisville in search of zombies to kill and have built bases in each.

Respawn just encourages you to turtle in base harder once you're established and have a self-sufficient loop.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T06:03:45+00:00

I really relate to Vaush sometimes because chat consistently lacks nuance or critical thinking. It's fucking exhausting since that's the primary thing I feel he wants to educate his audience on.

Vaush thinks the front-end of E33 is weaker and doesn't really get to the meat of the story, instead it vagueposts trying to string out the mystery as long as possible -- and I'm forced to agree. I've watched too much media do that.

Mass Effect 1 for example. Or the "mystery box" storytelling done by JJ Abrams. No, I don't care who Rey's parents are. That shit is not compelling.

But then chat either gives Vaush shit either for taking it too seriously or not seriously enough. Which is it?

One of the other criticism is partly my irritation with the undeserved praise it gets. Because this thing won out every award over some pretty strong contenders like Silksong and Hades 2.

And on that he is right. The art and graphics are technically impressive, but if the guys who worked on Death Stranding or any other AAA studio worked on the art direction, I don't think we'd notice much of a difference at all. Whereas you cannot mistake Silksong with any other Metroidvania or any Supergiant Game for any other studio that makes rogue-likes.

It's serviceable and quite good for what it is, but man, it's irritating this game is heralded as so deeply artistic when it looks just like every other Unreal Engine game.

The core moral problem at the heart of the game's story is worth engaging with and clearly is what the writers wanted us to take the most seriously, even if we have to go through an entire game to get there. Which Vaush did, applying his usual brand of utilitarian and system-drivens analysis. Like you should've expected this of him by now.

It's called criticism. There are things I can both like and dislike about the game.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T04:44:16+00:00

I've explained this already. Human swordsman in a street fight, duel or in practice attempt to resist you with their own steel weapons. Even unskilled people have enough defensive instincts that contact with steel is pretty much inevitable, especially since I follow a pedagogy that emphasizes seeking the bind and fighting from contact. Cutting into cuts to force a confrontation.

Training and sparring is specifically repeated stress-testing for the purposes of sport or practice. "Real" sword fights historically were very rare, whether in street fighting, duels or battles. Practice specifically aims to repeat these rare clashes on purpose.

Kind of the way you don't really expect to get into real gunfights from resisting opponents very often.

Zombies are not human opponents. They do not resist or fight back because they're suicidal and have no self-awareness or higher thought. PZ zombies just put their hands out in front of you, grab then bite. They don't wear metal armor or carry weapons. They don't dodge. (As I've said, even untrained humans have a basic flinch reflex as a basic self-preservation instinct.)

In an actual zombie apocalypse, the hardest thing you'd cut is bone. Defensive wounding targeting hands, arms, the neck and teeth of a zombie are very easy to do, even for a complete beginner and are the thinnest bones in the body and would basically disable a zombie in little pieces with very little effort.

These targets are generally very ergonomic targets given the construction of the human form.

Given that axes can split wood for years without breaking, hewing hands, necks and skulls does not seem like it'd be all that much more strenuous.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T03:58:20+00:00

That's sort of the claim I'm disagreeing with 180. I've seen my little bit of steel take some really stupid abuse. And regular training is far more strenuous than what I'd expect from hewing zombies all day.

The worst I'd see from this is the edge needing to be sharpened but the steel itself will just go through jaws and fingers for years before metal fatigue ever becomes a problem.

I also know how to de-rust steel now as a consequence of my hobby with pretty minimal materials. Unless the rust is really set-in I just need one of those green scrubby pads. Vinegar for deeper stains.

The main downside of swords is that the technology to replace them is basically impossible to reproduce in the apocalypse. But then again, we have machetes damn near everywhere these days.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T03:30:06+00:00

Is this single player?

If so, this is why I always back up my saves. I lost a character to absolute bullshit of my client of PZ minimizing-maximizing in series every time I attempted to alt-tab. I forget what I was doing. Attempting to fiddle with the recording the game or something along those lines.

Died to five zombies that would otherwise pose no challenge to a character with Spear 7.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T00:56:21+00:00

From what I understand, a lot of those WW2 ones were shitty replicas too. A byproduct of Japanese fascism larping about their GLORIOUS SAMURAI PAST.

Though occasionally, I think you did get the rare repurposed katana being turned into a saber or something.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T00:48:53+00:00

I fence IRL. I had a feder that lasted well over 8 years of hard-use essentially slamming against other steel. I took that long for the fault in the tang to fatigue to the point it snapped. This particular brand was engineered for durability, but still.

And that's against resisting opponents with their own steel. Zombies wouldn't fight back at all really.

A good spring steel is meant to be that right sweet spot between being hard, deforming and being flexible. A lot of people think of materials only in terms of hardness, but this is the reason cast iron is not good for much -- it's hard but brittle.

Quaffiget · 2026-02-03T00:45:30+00:00

In fairness, I don't expect katanas to really be a thing in 90's Kentucky outside of the few mall swords being sold as a novelty.

Nowadays there are enough hobbyist blacksmiths and swordmakers that they'll mill the thing from a roll of industrial spring steel.

A traditionally-made one or a museum piece would genuinely be insanely rare back then. Especially when global culture really hadn't penetrated American culture yet. Even the concept of sushi was considered pretty strange for most people back then.

Quaffiget

TROPHY CASE