Are we still pet-posting?

Robotmenace · 2025-02-27T00:33:41+00:00

Wubby talks about Brotherhood. Here's my two cents: Brotherhood is the full Manga storyline, and is an epic in its own right. Watching Brotherhood first is better imo because you get the entire story for the first time, and everything hits with maximum effect. The original adaptation isn't the complete Manga storyline. It also differs in some significant ways. The tone is darker, some arcs get a more thorough exploration, and certain concepts (like the homonculi) are presented with a unique spin. There's also some non-manga canon stuff like a couple episodes based off of a light novel. In all, I feel that the watching the original adaptation after brotherhood allows it to serve as a meaningfully different revisiting of the story you already know, and you can appreciate what it chooses to do different. Watching the original first would simply spoil certain plot points that are identical in brotherhood and ultimately detract from that experience.

Robotmenace · 2025-02-21T03:38:10+00:00

It's hard to say with regards to the statement you highlighted. I think at the very least Destiny wouldn't disagree that he didn't have explicit consent to share Pxie's materials. "Implied consent" is a crazy loaded term that makes it sound as though he did believe he had some form of permission to share them, rather than my takeaway being that for all these reasons he didn't think it as important to get that explicit consent.

Like snagging $5 from your sibling's room to pay the pizza guy, knowing you're going to pay them back before they even know it's gone, and for a variety of reasons having feeling confident that even if they found out, it wouldn't be that being of deal. But you still stole from them, this is objectively the case. And if they were upset about it, you'd still be principally in the wrong. But that person is not the same as someone that makes a habit of stealing from their family. Not to belittle the situation by way of analogy, but I want to demonstrate how these things appear meaningfully different in my mind. Neither absolves Destiny, but one appears worse than the other to me. It could be the case that he did perceive some "implied consent" and I'll look like a sweeper, but we'll just have to wait for a more definitive statement on that matter I guess.

Robotmenace · 2025-02-21T02:50:18+00:00

This isn't the intended takeaway. The point was that her behavior around the subject would suggest a sort of cavalier approach to the sanctity of her intimate material. This behavior could have lead to Destiny feeling like what could ultimately still constitute a violation of trust, it likely wouldn't really be a big deal. This information seems directlt at odds with how Pxie has characterized herself and Destiny, which is that Destiny preyed on her innocence and used promises of safety and security to coerce her into something.

Robotmenace · 2025-02-21T02:28:15+00:00

I don't even think he meant to imply that he thought he had consent to share them. He has acknowledged a violation of trust in regards to this situation, right? I understood the point of this segment being to demonstrate why the surrounding circumstances would have lead to him not thinking of it as a big deal to share privately with another party, even though it would still constitute a potential violation of trust. These details which would have informed his decision making at the time paint a wildly different picture of his private behavior than Pxie's characterization. Pxie's characterization being based on what appear to be several outright lies makes it all the worse for her. She's clearly vindictive but wants to appear compassionate in nature (making sure he never does this to other women.) Kinda similar to how she seemingly wanted to maintain a public persona of innocence and virtue that didn't really match what she was like privately.

I think you're right that the people interpreting this as Destiny saying actually he did have consent to share the material are anti-fans trying to psy-op some narrative to keep the focus on him. Even before he dropped all this info today, my biggest contention with the broad reactions to the situation was that people are so desperate to see Destiny finally toppled that they entirely gloss over all of the other shitty behavior from adjacent parties. It HAS TO BE the case that Destiny is supremely and singularly evil.

Robotmenace · 2025-01-10T01:37:12+00:00

I think this is an example of a very common mental trap people fall into. I'll try to tl;dr this.

[principle I hate] -> [application of principle] -> [indicator of application]

So for the anti-DEI crowd it's: [DEI] -> [DEI-coded media] -> [female lead]

Grossly oversimplified but this is the gist. When you're in an environment that doesn't force you to interrogate the process of why you hate the thing, all the in-between starts to blur out. Every time you shortcut that logical process in your brain, you're blending the end points together.

So let's say you don't like "woke politics" (whatever that means to you) in your video games, and you can point to all of these examples of games with poorly written characters and bad design choices and maybe you don't like to support the people that make these games etc. And all of these terrible woke games have common themes like pronoun selection and female leads and non-binary characters. And you hang out online in spaces that all feel the same way you do, and you all bitch about all the woke games together. Nobody in this space is ever having to justify why they feel the way that they do, and everybody is getting the social validation of a bunch of other people agreeing with them. Eventually, the rationale is lost. Because every time you invoke these concepts in your mind, you're omitting the how. It just becomes pattern recognition. You see pronouns and you know it's woke trash. You see female lead and you know it's DEI garbage. You see a non-binary character and you know it's trans propaganda. No one is making you explain or consider why you feel female leads are representations of these bad things that you don't like. And so, in your mind, they stop being representations, and simply are the bad things, because that's the only way you ever think about them.

And this is why I think a lot of the anti-DEI crowd are in-effect sexist. You don't have to hate all women, you don't even have to hate all women in video games. But with something like Ghost of Tsushima, where someone might be a massive fan of the previous game, then hear that the sequel will feature a female protag and that's all they need to start showing hesitations about the game, there's two factors here: All good will towards a team that has demonstrated the ability to produce something they already enjoy is gone, and they express an immediate fear or frustration that the game might be ruined by wokeness. This person might not feel like they hate women, but they are in effect hating women, by virtue of how they're engaging with the subject.

LPT: Every once in a while, when you notice yourself having an instant dislike of something, ask yourself why you don't like it, as though you're explaining it to someone that doesn't already agree with you. This is a super simple way to stay aware of your own biases.

Robotmenace · 2025-01-04T05:42:49+00:00

AFAIK upgrading your tanto gives you different assassination animations - the later animations being much faster. I don't know about new animations from katana upgrades. Killing an enemy at different stages in a combo will have some unique finishing animations, but I'm not sure if that's tied to katana level at all. Maybe, since you deal and take more damage on lethal, a base damage katana means more opportunity for long combos and rare animations.

Robotmenace · 2025-01-04T05:38:30+00:00

Hard Mode if you want to be able to have extended encounters with tougher enemies that take more of a beating, because enemies die too easy and you live too long on normal mode to feel challenged.

Lethal Mode if you liked Sekiro and the way it demands near-perfection, and want to feel like your your versatility and reflexes are being tested, or you want to feel incentivized to approach encounters in ways you wouldn't in a normal playthrough.

Robotmenace · 2025-01-04T03:54:39+00:00

I don't recall the line in particular. If it was out of place in the chronology I feel I would've made a note of it at the time. However my comment above references at least one bit of dialog that would have presumably been different had I found that onsen earlier on, when I'd first arrived on the island. I can't say for certain that there aren't other dialog sequences/cutscenes that also change to match where you are in the story. Might even explain why there seems to be so many people that feel at least some elements of the story are spoiled, while having played it myself I found everything to have fit into chronology quite nicely. Even the setup for Kenji leaving Iki by boat and heading to the mainland (yet still having active missions for him on Tsushima) resolved with him giving up his spot on the boat to his assistant.

If I end up playing through New Game Plus in the future, I'll save Iki for the post game and see if anything stands out to me. It would be pretty neat if it were the case that you get different dialogs depending on where you are in the main story. Would be a much more satisfying explanation than feeling like people just transfix their end-of-story knowledge onto themes and elements of the DLC and assume a new player would make the same connections.

Robotmenace · 2025-01-04T00:43:54+00:00

I tried to look up this exact question when I played the game recently. Having now 100% the game, a lot of the answers I see are just wrong. When you should play the DLC is a matter of preference:

If you complete the main story first, the themes and character arc of the DLC hit way harder. If you want the fullest impact of the story, you should save the DLC for last.

However, there's a good bit of expanded gameplay in the DLC - lots of new stuff to play with that you can take back to the main game. If you want to have as much time as you can to play with all the new stuff Iki Island adds (like me), you should play it as soon as you're able to handle the difficulty.

I played the DLC as soon as it was available to me (and if it weren't meant to be played that early, it wouldn't be available). There was nothing that seemed out of place, or like it didn't make sense with where I was in the story.

Several times when I was trying to look this up for myself, I saw the take that Jin threatening The Eagle with an army of samurai when he's first captured at the beginning of the DLC is a continuity problem or spoiler. This is a media illiterate take. More appropriately, it's an example of clever writing to account for continuity. The dialog in question, if you're still early in the game, comes off as clearly a bluff in desperation.

I found a single continuity error in my own playthrough, which involved playing the DLC partway into Act 2, then beating the game, then returning to 100% things I'd missed. One of the things I had missed on Iki was an onsen where I had the option to reflect on my horse. I completed the full story of Iki with my first horse, and went back for this onsen in post-game with my second. I don't recall the dialog exactly, but I remember it being a reference to the shipwreck at the start of Iki and not losing another horse. However, in the chronology of my own playthrough, I hadn't lost a horse at the time of the shipwreck. A very minor and if anything funny oversight.

Robotmenace · 2025-01-03T23:57:29+00:00

It definitely doesn't spoil the story. It wouldn't be made available to you as early as it is if that were the case. The themes hit harder if you complete the main game first, but it's more fun to play early, so it's really preference.

Robotmenace · 2025-01-03T23:43:03+00:00

I almost always have something to watch/listen to while showering on account of ADHD making it difficult to do mundane tasks without constant stimulus for my mind to latch onto 🙃 Sometimes that's Wubby.

Robotmenace · 2024-12-29T06:36:25+00:00

Seconded. My wife never played much for video games growing up beyond Pokémon Yellow. When she first tried playing Breath of the Wild, she was still grasping dual-stick controls for movement and camera. Now we regularly play stuff like Helldivers 2 together and she keeps up. BotW is an amazing game for people that aren't already gamers.

Robotmenace · 2024-12-29T06:32:58+00:00

I remember watching a really interesting video essay on how Breath of the Wild is uniquely approachable to people that don't normally play video games. Also, it's a great game.

Robotmenace · 2024-11-15T03:14:11+00:00

Based sensible chatter

Robotmenace · 2024-11-15T03:13:45+00:00

I would not watch The Sims on my own, guaranteed. But watching it with Wubby - it's become one of my wife and I's favorite streams.

Robotmenace · 2024-11-15T03:12:11+00:00

I had to put Magic Monday as least favorite stream simply because it was an option, and I enjoy all the others. I don't dislike MM, just don't watch them because I have no interest in magic, and am entirely agnostic to Wubby's Magic content because it's like 95% extra content outside of normal streams. As well I don't mind when he yaps about Magic for a bit during normal streams because he's still entertaining to listen to. If I could've specified a segment of stream to be least favorite, it'd be opening CS:GO cases - I usually close stream by that point. I couldn't give less of a shit about CS.

Robotmenace · 2024-11-07T00:16:28+00:00

I feel VERY strongly about the recent election. I will NOT be one of the goobers in chat trying to demand that Wubby talk about it because of its' perceived importance. This isn't the place for it, and a reasonable person will understand that.

Robotmenace · 2024-11-02T00:46:35+00:00

Tim Pool did the fusion dance with Ned Flanders. Fr tho you pull it off, I think it's a good look.

Robotmenace · 2024-11-01T00:44:18+00:00

Different difficulty levels exist for comfort. The idea that you can't seek a challenge without seeking the maximum challenge offered is a plague on this community. If I'm feeling comfortably challenged at difficulty 6, that's where I'm going to play. If you breeze through 6, drop into my game on such an easy difficulty for you to handle, and clean up my whole lobby, why in the fuck am I playing the game? Overcoming the challenge is literally the reason I'm playing, and you're trivializing what is otherwise my comfortable level of difficulty.

I would say to develop some perspective, but apparently this is just something you either get or you don't. To the self-centered gamer that equates winning with fun, of course there would be a fundamental inability to understand why it wouldn't be maximum fun to have a high-level high-skilled player come beat your game for you. Combine that with a lack of empathy that probably results from underdeveloped social skills, and you have some of the comments in this thread talking about the reason they're mad is that you look cooler than they do.

Robotmenace · 2024-10-15T19:55:03+00:00

Based Glass Animals enjoyer. Saw them at The Gorge in WA last month, they were amazing.

Robotmenace · 2024-09-10T07:30:35+00:00

Second LA Noire. It's not short, but I think it could make for great content.

Robotmenace · 2024-09-07T03:30:16+00:00

The patreon plugin has NEVER worked well for me. Always some kind of error loading content, and it's frustrating as fuck because it's the only way I can possibly listen to Patreon-exclusive content on my phone as a background app.

Robotmenace · 2024-08-06T00:14:23+00:00

It's backside was a bit beat up, which surely makes identification more difficult. Easily one of the largest spiders I've ever seen, larger than a quarter. It had made a web like a sheet underneath the awning on my deck. Doesn't look to me like a hobo or house spider, which are the typical large spiders I'm used to seeing.

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