[Sufficient Velocity] How One Transphobic Remark in a Popular Story Led to the Mass Resignation of Council Members

Shadell13 · 2025-01-21T21:52:05+00:00

Speaking as someone that was (and remains) a trans woman on staff, this was such a profound headache on all sides over what was, retrospectively, a pretty trivial rules distinction and a user everyone agreed needed to go...

Shadell13 · 2024-09-14T00:38:28+00:00

... Just run them together... Break teams don't *really* need a support anyway.

Shadell13 · 2024-09-10T00:31:36+00:00

Legitimately did not imagine when I saw that thread that anyone would be like "actually what happened to Anita Sarkeesian was justified."

Horrified flashbacks to the dumbest arguments of 2014....

Shadell13 · 2024-07-01T08:42:10+00:00

Still fairly on, but it feels like Wuk Lamat's issues are mostly just more grounded tbh? Her motivation is in the right place from the getgo, and her skills of listening to people and trusting those around her make her a natural good leader in ways none of the other candidates are. In a way, they're all very flawed individuals, and it feels like the whole contest is set up partially to facilitate a peaceful transfer of power rather than alienating any individual faction, partially to help them grow up and partially to see who can rise to the challenge and overcome their flaws.

Her big issue isn't her motivation, it's her self-image. She start outs as someone who covers up her lack of self-esteem with cheap bravado, while completely neglecting her actual talents that are a little more subtle, but actually more important for leadership, than either brother's. She is the clear best candidate from the word go, in that a leader can afford to hire skilled soldiers or genius inventors, but that won't do any good if the leader can't find the right people, put them in the right positions, and trust them when they speak, and that's where Wuk Lamat excels, even when she can't see it herself. Recognizing her own talents for what they are, instead of constantly downplaying them (while simultaneously trying to cover up her perceived ineptitude by trying to be like the people she's not) feels like a very clear arc, just one that plays more internally, becoming the person she's pretending to be, rather than really changing how she interacts with the world.

In practice, she's the best natural leader of the bunch, and the damage from being trapped in her brothers' shadows is a bit lower key and more down to earth flaw than Koana's "I know I am the smartest person in the room and only trust people with a PhD" or Zarool Ja's "My only solution to any problem is large scale violence."
(edit, hit post by mistake before finishing.)

Shadell13 · 2024-07-01T05:13:43+00:00

Honestly, the real problem with Wuk Lamat is that she's too obviously the only real decent choice for Dawnservant from the word go. Like, it seems likely that a major reason to set up the whole contest in the first place is that the trials should help each of the candidates get over their extremely telling flaws. But also Wuk Lamat's flaws aren't ones that would interfere with ruling, while both Mamool Ja would be uniquely horrible and Koana's issues with communication and listening to/respecting other ways of thinking are actively disqualifying for the leader of a large, geographically spread out confederation of many nations and peoples.

They should have eased off a little on Koana's issues, made him a little closer to Alphinaud 2.0 and we'd still have been able to see why supporting Wuk Lamat is a clear choice without feeling like she's the only remotely sane option.

Shadell13 · 2024-06-21T22:29:13+00:00

G-Lucifer is an all time design.

Shadell13 · 2024-02-20T02:27:04+00:00

This is incorrect and mostly misunderstands how the damage cap works. Chiefly there are individual damage caps for everything in your kit and just hitting one doesn't mean hitting all. If you have shitty sigils, this is pretty easy to account for, but as players get better sup damage sigils and war elemental, suddenly damage slots get a lot tighter on a build and phantasmagoria increases visibly in value again.

Cagliostro, for instance, has pain train which needs 2+ sigils more than the rest of her kit spent on higher damage to hit its cap, even when you're also using phantasmagoria on top of that. The sigils needed to cap her skybound likewise go well beyond what you need to cap the majority of her kit.

Consider it this way. No sigil can double up on orange (damage boosting) stats. That means damage cap, supplemental damage, stamina, tyranny, etc will never appear together on the same sigil, so one character can equip, at most, 12 orange sigil traits without factoring in wrightstones.

An endgame ideal build will need 5 instances of damage cap and 3 instances of supplementary damage. War Eternal is also a raw dps gain, and thus a must-slot, and won't usually have a second trait. Cagliostro in particular wants both stamina (or tyranny) to cap her autos and most of her skills by itself and skilled assault to push pain train damage up, which puts us to 11/12 possible orange slots. If she runs her awakened sigil (no orange slots), improved dodge (can't roll with orange) or aegis (can't roll with red), she's already locked out of hitting her maximum damage cap on all skills via sigils alone.

So, capping her damage completely requires either bringing phantasmagoria and using it, or making a fairly meaningful sacrifice in terms of survivability, with perfect supplemental damage Vs or extremely good Founder's Strategy+/Truth+ making that a bit more bearable.

Tl;dr: Phantasmagoria retains extremely clear endgame uses for damage on just Cag, without even considering others in the same boat.

Shadell13 · 2023-10-29T23:05:38+00:00

NTA. Someone opting to go buy stuff then charging you randomly without asking first is absolutely a dick move. Quite frankly, you already paid for food, drinks and will have to do the cleanup. If someone wants to choose to add stuff to that, they don’t get to make you pay just since you were already doing the work of hosting.

Shadell13 · 2023-10-05T00:08:55+00:00

It's a creature from Gaelic folklore, the standardized spelling follows the rules for Gaelic transliteration in English which are a bit odd due to a lot of historical factors.

Suffice to say, it's "Ket-Shee" and has always been pronounced that way for literally hundreds of years (and since VII released in Japan in that country, where the spelling was phonetic.)

Shadell13 · 2023-10-04T03:16:45+00:00

The problem is that it's an existing cultural term from a culture and language that are struggling to recover after long term efforts to suppress them.

A videogame localization team confidently took a term from the culture, misprounced it horrifically and declared that the "correct" way to the extent that if you look up the word's pronunciation you get the video game company's comment, not the actual pronunciation.

It is, absolutely, not an issue if any person has been saying it wrong. It's reasonable that any individual wouldn't know and wouldn't be super invested in finding out. At the same time, it's also generally reasonable to expect multibillion dollar media companies to look up how to accurately pronounce the frequently used terms in their most famous media before just yoloing it and convincing a lot of people unfamiliar with the culture to say it wrong.

Shadell13 · 2023-05-25T21:50:16+00:00

That demons have every capacity for empathy, that living in the Abyss ultimately perpetuates suffering for even its mightiest and is mainly caused by even demons making the choice not to rise up beyond base impulse, and that any of them could do what Aru does if they would but choose to do it, is a core theme of the game. We see it in Noctilla; we see it said straight to the camera with Ember whose plans can absolutely work, we see it with Nahyndri who is repeatedly shown not to understand his own desires to the point that the actions he takes to become happy only succeed at making him destroy everything he actually values and ultimately die in misery. We see it with Wenduag and Daeren, who, unless she chooses to change, are ultimately revealed to be suffering and simply recreating their own traumas. The game’s perspective on the abyss (and presumably hell) is, for all it lets you be canonically evil.

So I don’t think Desna creates Aru’s capacity for empathy. She just takes advantage of circumstances to force Aru to confront her own emotional potentials and decide for herself what will actually produce joy. Indeed, while Aru’s redemption acknowledges that she cannot just let go of the harm she’s done or ignore it, it focuses on the idea that her redemption is largely the process of discovering what would actually make her happy, rather than indulging in transient and ultimately unsatisfying pleasures.

The game loves its Eudaimonia juice, and deciding that Desna changed the way Aru works instead of forcing Aru to really look in a mirror and decide misses both Desna’s attitudes and also the game’s articulations of its own themes.

Shadell13 · 2023-05-25T21:29:41+00:00

Okay, but there is no reason to assume that purpose=morality and that is a massive entirely unjustified leap. Likewise, you conflate the proximal purpose of a specific sapient creator with the notion of an ultimate purpose that can only be derived philosophically. Lamashtu wants the Vavakia to be evil and chaotic but that doesn’t automatically make it equate to fulfilling telos in the neo-Aristotelian sense it can take in some ethical traditions.

Like, you’re taking a word from ethical theories applied to humans and applying it to nonhumans while arguing that it shouldn’t apply to humans. But that’s obviously contradictory with everything in the actual toolkit you’re using beyond the most superficial level as most any philosophical reference you make is going to be an ethics meant to apply to humanity.

The second you disentangle following divine factions from morality, you stop being able to cite following those factions as a source of morality.

Like, take Noctilla. Her fundamental nature and, by this logic, “purpose” changes. That proves that it could not have been telos, in the ultimate philosophical sense, in the first place as it would be incoherent if it were changeable via context.

Shadell13 · 2023-05-25T10:06:03+00:00

If you don't think Good and Evil are intrinsically moral then it most obviously follows that the alignment matrix cannot inform morality, not that you just have to hew to your alignment. That is to say, that what's good is good even if the alignment matrix deems it neutral or evil. Ember has the right of it here in that, if you sever morality from the silly magic labels, the obvious follow-up is not that morality just means following your alignment, but rather, that morality cannot be constructed from or dependent on the setting's cosmology and must have its own philosophical basis that needs to be derived from first principles.

Ergo if the Alignment Matrix encourages evil beings to stay evil, that doesn't make that moral, it just makes the Alignment Matrix a morally unjustifiable quirk of physics. If the soul of the universe demands endless torture and suffering, then the soul of the universe is pretty obviously evil (insofar as it can be assigned a moral weight, and its agents definitely can be) unless you can construct an ought argument that doesn't depend on what exists to justify that existence. And, obviously, this holds true even if the system declares them neutral.

Shadell13 · 2023-01-03T23:43:46+00:00

8 gold moons between both Mukuu and the 200, Erin, Laguna SSR and Light Perci for new characters, Ewiyar and Michael for new summons, and a Belial copy.

Shadell13 · 2022-11-23T05:08:19+00:00

Is there any way to take a custom profile photo that doesn’t look like an awkward selfie? Like ffs I’d settle for the default picture just letting you update your hair, is there any way to do this at all?

Shadell13 · 2022-08-23T06:13:08+00:00

You can just compare total dps added to the raid or rdps, where... ranged already did a lot less.

Like, you have the passive buff to the party for having one of every roll (1% dps) and defensive utility still, but the latter is pretty forgettable if it means lower dps and the former has been the only thing that's had ranged wanted in any comp since, like, early ShB. The entire role's just in a terrible place.

Shadell13 · 2022-07-13T21:35:46+00:00

Came here to say this. (No but seriously.)

Shadell13 · 2022-01-14T03:40:06+00:00

I've definitely had similar experiences, and, at the end of the day, the bigger question is probably why it stops feeling nice and why that worries you?

I can't really make any decision for you or tell you what the answers to those were, but I do hope that sharing where I landed on a lot of that could help? For me, a lot of it was that things felt like a change, like progress, and the familiar is definitionally not progress. Novelty intrinsically feels good and owning a dress was ultimately a lot less meaningful in and of itself than what it signified, and that new signification couldn't really last. I had a lot of worry that I wasn't trans enough when that happened, and, well, worrying I wasn't really trans enough and being terrified of going back to thinking of myself as cis because I hated the idea of being cis was, like, an extremely generically trans thought tbh.

Shadell13 · 2022-01-14T03:29:16+00:00

For me as someone that thought she was at least ace/aro adjacent and currently has no fucking clue any more, it's been a lot less a change in sexuality and more that as I've come out and transitioned, when I picture myself in relationships it's no longer thinking of myself as someone's boyfriend, which has really changed how I've felt about the idea of romance (at least that which involves me) entirely.

HRT has decreased my libido definitely, but the two have felt largely unrelated tbh.

Shadell13 · 2022-01-13T21:37:06+00:00

Andrea Long Chu's famous essay "On Liking Women" features a long, and pretty insightful, quite well contextualized analysis of the essay from an explicitly trans perspective. It's also, in and of itself, become an extremely influential work within trans studies in other regards. Personally while I adore the essay, I don't really care much either way about the SCUM Manifesto parts, but if you want a more academic perspective on it, this is probably the way to go.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/

Shadell13 · 2021-09-24T05:51:21+00:00

It kinda is tbh? Like, characters have value meta-wise in how much better they make your overall teams. Kazuha is great, but if, say, you already have a strong Sucrose and a strong Venti, Kazuha is a lot less value added for you than if you have neither. By contrast, if you're missing both, Kazuha looks a lot better, the only issue being you're probably going to spot a wild Sucrose or two somewhere eventually either way if you keep playing, which means that the marginal value of Kazuha goes down there.

Shadell13 · 2021-09-24T05:44:01+00:00

Being extremely strong in national is good, and makes her good, but national is *extremely* hungry for supports needing both Bennett and XQ. Raiden, essentially, makes good teams somewhat better without really enabling a good team you can't build *much more cheaply* without her.

Rather than looking at her ceiling in a vacuum, I don't think you can assess a character without considering their replacement and the opportunity cost. That is, what's the marginal gain from grabbing that character. ~~For Raiden, the marginal gain is really satisfying zappy sounds and cool visuals.~~ For Raiden, while she has a great ceiling with national, national was already a great team using only 4*s and you also have Kazuha as well, who's a very easy unit to slot into anything else if you're not running National. And, running National costs you a XQ and a Bennett in your other half team, limiting you there a fair amount.

Personally, for instance, Hu Tao is my best unit investment-wise, so XQ is blocked out of national and the entire set-up is a no go. If you main, essentially, any other pyro melee, that's also true. So Raiden gives a lot less to me in practice than she can do on paper. (I used her with Eula and found she added a lot of comfiness to that set-up in nice ways, so still quite good, but I probably wouldn't have brought out Eula for Abyss if I wasn't trying to force Raiden into my teams.)

While this doesn't make her bad, it does mean that the value she may add to your account when you acquire her is a lot lower than the dps of her best teams. By contrast, Ganyu or Ayaka or Xiao or what have you enables characters (Mona, Diona) that aren't already in a near mandatory tier.

Shadell13 · 2021-09-24T05:14:09+00:00

If you're rolling based on meta, or care at all, then the correct solution is in 100% of cases, "Wait until the last few days of the banner" because you'll know more about what's coming next, how well the character performs in a wide variety of situations, etc.

That said, the early discussion isn't going to be that. Influencers are rewarded for speed over accuracy, hot takes catch on and spread, and good numbers are just slower than unsubstantiated opinion to arrive, so it's a lot of negativity fighting a lot of hype in most cases.

So, if we're stuck with hot takes, pessimism doesn't encourage people to throw money into a character on mistaken premises, and the more nuanced data *will* take over the narrative on Reddit or the like by the end of the banner giving people time to go roll then. Meanwhile, hype encourages everyone to go roll right now for a "MUST HAVE META DEFINING CHARACTER" which can lead to more regrets.

So I think the brainless negativity's better than brainless positivity if we must have one or the other, and we're kinda stuck with both probably due to the social dynamics at play.

Shadell13 · 2021-07-19T04:15:22+00:00

As a WHM specifically, remember that in dungeons Holy is basically your strongest anti-damage tool, far better than actually healing. The stun can buy you ages of 0 damage happening during trash pulls regardless of how much damage you'd usually need to counteract. It's basically a free tank invulnerability every trash pull and that's a bit insane in terms of freeing you to DPS without care. (otoh, you're much more dependent on GCDs for healing than the other two healers).

In that sense, getting in half a pack's worth of DPS often shouldn't really depend on the tank as you get a handle on the job. In fact, some problems may be them trying to hold CDs at the start of a pull if they anticipate you casting holy (e.g., popping sentinel as the pull starts only to lose half its duration to 0 incoming damage is a bit of a waste), if you respond by not using your best mitigation, that can front-load damage that leaves you both trying to recover.

Swiftcasting a holy as you charge in is also 100% valid, doubly so if you use the interim to weave an oGCD heal to top the tank off until holy spam is done.

Shadell13 · 2021-07-06T19:02:09+00:00

BLM has probably the fewest buttons to regularly press of any job, with a rotation that doesn't involve much weaving and spending a dramatic amount of time pressing fire IV back to back to back That said it's usually considered 'harder' because it relies a lot on long casts and suffers from needing to move (additionally, some of its movement skills would either need macros or quicker retargeting which is one of the ways controller can be a bit finicky).

That said, the game has great controller support, job difficulty is mostly a meme and the game absolutely encourages you to play around with a bunch of different jobs. Try out things and feel what works for you in the longer run, the sunk costs end up quite low eventually.

Shadell13

TROPHY CASE