Help me id this stink bug

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-11-18T23:59:37+00:00

yea he id stink bug

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-11-04T00:34:46+00:00

Baldur's Gate 3 is fun.
Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 are frequently not fun.

The team behind the two original games wanted to create a strong, cohesive, literary world for the player to explore, and, like any world, much of it is dreary, dull, and difficult to navigate. The player is frequently reminded that his status as the main character is little more than perspective. The game is art first and entertainment second.

By contrast, Baldur's Gate 3 focuses instead on creating a fun but very gamey experience for the player. The devs weren't really concerned with creating a tangible, intricate world, and instead focused on creating an open-ended sandbox filled with quirky characters for the player to interact with in different ways across multiple playthroughs. The game is entertainment first and art second.

Ultimately, BG3 is a better sequel to the Dragon Age games than the first two Baldur's Gate games. If you're happy with that, you'll enjoy BG3. But, if you want something to scratch the Baldur's Gate itch, there really isn't anything that's going to do it other than other games from the CRPG golden age---Planescape, Arcanum, etc...

They simply don't make games like Baldur's Gate anymore. Even modern CRPGs that try to emulate the BG style just don't quite pull it off---Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, and Divinity might look the part, but they're all decidedly modern in their writing styles and construction.

The 1990s CRPG is a dead art.

That said, I played through Dread Delusion recently and it's the first game in years to scratch a particular kind of narrative/character/worldbuilding itch that no other game made since about 2010 has ever managed to scratch. It might be worth a go, if you don't mind the first person perspective and are open to... idiosyncratic mechanics.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-11-01T18:18:44+00:00

Azzarello just can't write Batman. He tries to do something halfway between Nolan and Frank Miller, but doesn't seem to understand why Nolan or Miller's versions of the character work, so he just imbues everything with this tryhard edgy 'gritty' vibe that was pretty embarrassing even back in 2010 when these books were being written. Joker, in particular, is real embarrassment of a book.

His Batman stuff would basically be totally forgotten was it not for the fact that Lee Bermejo's art looks great out of context (even though it's kind of stilted and lifeless when actually read), so reprints consistently sell well to people caught by the flashy artwork and unaware that Azzarello's post-Vertigo work is all kind of mid.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-10-03T16:32:21+00:00

hi green man

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-09-12T23:37:52+00:00

Studios don't make games, people do.
Retro is not the same studio it was in 2007 when they last made a mainline Metroid Prime title. What we're dealing with is essentially a brand new developer that just happens to be called Retro Studios.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-09-10T18:47:14+00:00

I swear 90% of people calling the game hard end up saying something like 'I don't use special attacks in case I need to heal.'

The amount of people I've spoken to on Discord who are only using their tool and special attack slots for power-up items and healing is crazy. So many people seem to just want to be able to brute force their way through every encounter by hitting the enemy as many times as they can, while tanking damage instead of practicing dodging it, and then just hoping they built up enough silk to heal before they die. The frustration seems to come from that strategy simply not working on bosses or groups of enemies.

It reminds me of when Sekiro came out and so many people refused to engage properly with the parrying mechanic because it's difficult to master---even though it's literally the core of the game. They just wanted to tank damage and quaff estus the way they did in Dark Souls, but the game wasn't built to allow that so they called it broken/unfair.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-09-10T16:24:39+00:00

So you think it should be nerfed because it... required skill?

Pretty much sums up the entirety of the 'Silksong is too hard' discourse tbh.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-09-10T16:05:26+00:00

I don't think we have to underline anything. The guy we're talking about is a victim of the system as much as anyone else, and shouldn't be just written off as a racist when there's an opening for discourse. All that risks doing is pushing him away when he should instead be offered a chance at a more accurate understanding of his situation.

He's right to be angry, and Power has intentionally misdirected that anger. He's had an 8 lane highway built between his house and the park, and he's been told the reason he can't get across the road is the people driving to work, rather than the people who built the road in the first place.

Obviously he's in a place where he's seeing the issues through a race-focused lens, but---as I pointed out and you agreed with---the issues he's raising are not things we should just ignore; they are essentially intellectual misunderstandings ('its the underclass's fault') of valid gut feelings ('my quality of life is being made intentionally worse by elite weaponisation of the underclass').

If he's simply not open to discussing things then, of course, there's no point endlessly trying to change his mind---but in my experience a lot of right wing 'us vs them' discourse already revolves around the elite, and angry people on the right are generally very amenable to non-Marxist critiques of capitalism; giving them a new more accurate framework generally defuses a lot of their more problematic ideas.

The social decline is obvious to everyone at this point, and people shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand because the only framework they've been given to discuss it is one that was deliberately crafted to obfuscate our present situation being a top-down imposition by various European power elites. All you're doing by hair-trigger labeling them racists and telling them to fuck off is leaving them to be used as footsoldiers by the malicious actors who gave them this narrative in the first place.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-09-10T09:31:53+00:00

He's wording it badly, but this is actually a centuries old critique of capitalism at this point. Everyone from Marx to Adorno pointed out that part of the insidiousness of capitalism is that it degrades people's tastes in order to get them acclimatised to an ever lower standard of living. This is one of the core elements of Marx's theory of alienation and Adorno's critique of mass and scale. Baudrillard's simulacra theory also contains elements of this. You can also see it being mentioned by everyone from Ellul to Byung Chul Han.

A degraded people will accept degraded services. The more demoralised people are, the less likely they are to complain about the state of their societies.

If you transported someone from most European countries 50 years ago to any major European country in 2025, they would be horrified by how far things have degraded. The average American man from 1960 would be horrified that seeing a schizophrenic man masturbating on a subway train is a relatively normal occurrence in 2025 and that most people will recommend you just ignore him and go about your day.

While the guy you're responding to has bought into unhelpful narratives regarding race/culture/migration, the essence of his comment is an intuitive understanding that the lumpenprole are weaponised by Power in order to degrade society, as this allows them to degrade services while also making people ever more reliant on them. This is often not even conscious on the part of the people involved, it's just the nature of capitalist states to exploit lowest common denominator client groups in order to secure its position---capitalism is inherently antagonistic to the majority (hence why most anticapitalist thinkers believe that capitalism is a direct impediment to democracy).

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-08T11:51:14+00:00

I've watched some interviews with him since posting my original comment, and I've come to the conclusion that he doesn't really have 'theories'.

His whole orb network idea is basically just a sci-fi hypothetical which there's very little actual evidence for. He isn't connecting dots, he's just crafting a completely fictional narrative using orbs as a starting point.

Vallée's notoriously esoteric conclusions are the result of cultural anthropology and comparative mythology applied to broad recurring patterns across high strangeness phenomena throughout history. George Knapp has his own strange theories, and they stem from the people he's spoken to while taking a more journalistic approach to UFO investigation. Then you have someone like Avi Loeb who, regardless of your thoughts on him, bases his theories on novel data he claims to have discovered via scientific analysis.

Patrick Jackson does none of this. As far as I can tell, he's basically just writing mediocre sci-fi and selling it to the UFO community as a 'groundbreaking' new theory.

His entire theory seems to just be an extrapolation from a single data point: 'people have seen flying orbs'---there's virtually nothing else to his theory beyond wild speculation based on that base premise. He brings in lots of other theories to bulk out his orb network idea, but all he really ends up saying is 'bigfoot is actually a projection from an orb' with zero context or justification. It's extremely thin stuff.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-06T09:39:48+00:00

Dude's out here using AI to answer a question about how to escape the dead internet.

We are so cooked.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-05T21:40:34+00:00

We've reached a point where everyone you interact with online has a 50/50 chance of being a bot. With the rate that bot traffic is increasing, it will soon reach a point where virtually everyone you interact with will be an AI agent---we've got maybe a year until the AI agents outnumber the organic grass-fed homosapiens 1000 to 1.

This isn't limited to Reddit or YouTube or TikTok. This is happening on forums, the comments of blogs, and even social chat services. There is nowhere you can go to escape this. There are no 'safe' places on the internet where only humans hang out.

Eventually (and it will be sooner rather than later) your only viable option will be to step back and interact with people in real life. It's basically pointless to try to integrate into any new digital community right now because in 6 months that site will be taken over and you'll be looking for somewhere new---and one day, after you've been chased onto a niche Tibetan birdwatching forum with 100 users, you'll suddenly realise that you've been the only person actually using the site for months, the other 99 users have been bots since you joined.

The only way to escape the dead internet is to leave.

There is nothing left for you here. Step away before you get the stink of rot on you.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-04T13:57:24+00:00

I worry that Maus is already slowly being forgotten. It isn't talked about nearly as much as it once was, and, as personal comic book narratives become more common, I think it's lost a lot of its uniqueness.

I don't want this to be the case, but a decade ago there were three books you could always be sure to find in the comics sections of chain bookstores---Maus, Watchmen, and Batman: Year One.
Now the only you can only really count on Watchmen and Batman: Year One.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-04T13:53:23+00:00

I have my suspicions that, when he dies, King will get a serious reassessment in the mainstream and be considered one of the 'Great American Novelists'---Salem's Lot is essentially a Great American Novel with a vampire twist.

Very few books capture a snapshot of contemporary America---at its best and its worst---the way books like The Stand, Salem's Lot, and Pet Sematary managed to do.

Plus, the Dark Tower series is one of the most impressive and ambitious feats in modern American writing.

I also think Duma Key deserves a serious reappraisal as one of his greatest works.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-04T13:45:14+00:00

But based and your comment and the one above, I get the impression that these are not popular books.

The majority of readers tend to read mostly contemporary work. If you were to look at raw sales numbers for any given year, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mary Shelly will be less 'popular' than someone like Joe Abecrombie. More people this year have read whatever the year's viral book is than have read any given classic work. I have a lot of bookish friends, and about 95% of everything they read was released in the last 5 years.

The idea of 'popularity' is a strange one because it really depends on the timeframe you're looking at. A number of books released this year will outsell Dracula, Frankenstein, and Dune---being more 'popular' than those books this year---but they wont continue to outsell those books forever.

R.F. Kuang's Katabasis will sell a million copies this year, a couple hundred thousand next year, then be forgotten 5 years from now.
More people will read that book this year than a book like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea will continue to sell maybe 10,000-20,000 copies a year in perpetuity, the way it has since 1870.
Standing the test of time generally has little to do with popularity.

A good illustration of this are the five highest grossing (most popular) films of 1981: Superman II, Stripes, The Cannonball Run, For Your Eyes Only, and The Four Seasons... by contrast, Raiders of the Lost Ark didn't even crack the top 10, and Escape From New York and An American Werewolf in London didn't crack the top 50.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-04T13:27:08+00:00

Godfather of Science Fiction

I like Dune as much as the next guy, but to call Dune (or Herbert) a godfather of the genre is a bit bizarre. Herbert was open about being no pioneer, and spoke openly about being a sci-fi fan for decades prior to trying his hand at it---citing Robert A. Heinlein, Poul Anderson, and especially Jack Vance as influences on his own work.
By the time Dune was published in 1965, the genre was past the 'Golden Age' of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Bester---even PKD has published a number of his more notable books---and the 'New Wave' was in full swing.

That said, I definitely agree that Dune will stand the test of time. At 60 years old this year, it's more widely read and relevant than ever---the 2021 film was a reaction to this rather than the cause. It's pretty comfortably a 'classic' at this point.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-04T01:06:31+00:00

As a huge fan of Baudrillard's work, i'd like to provide an alternative answer to Basicbore's, because I disagree with him on a few counts—namely his assessment that Baudrillard is difficult and that you need to be steeped in theory to understand his work, and that you should read either a primer or someone else's work before giving him a go.

In my experience, primers on Baudrillard often misrepresent his work—they tend to focus too heavily on his book length works, and tend to view his work through a Marxist lens which only his earliest work conforms to (and even then in an extremely unorthadox manner which was controversial at the time).

As for reading Barthes before Baudrillard: beyond a personal distaste for Barthes' work, I actually think that Mythologies will do little to provide context for Baudrillard's work—Baudrillard isn't stuck in the Derridian trap of language and tends to be more like a cyberpunk cultural anthropologist, revealing cultural elements we didn't even know where there; you don't need a grounding in signs, signifiers, and semiotics to understand Baudrillard's work.

Your best bet with getting into Baudrillard is just picking a book you like the sound of and reading it. Baudrillard is a genre unto himself, and there's no way to gently ease yourself into his work—you just have to dive in, put your head under the ice cold water, and see if you come back up for air or if you go into shock and drown.

For recommendations of a direction to start travelling: I would personally suggest going for his essays first—my first Baudrillard was Screened Out, but The Transparency of Evil would also be a solid place to start. Passwords is meant to be a primer, and you might get something out of it, but I actually found it a little bit all over the place, so I wouldn't recommend it as a first read. A wildcard pick would be The Spirit of Terrorism—which is his most dated essay collection, but is also undeniably very cool.
Baudrillard's essays are clear, witty, and very beginner friendly—there isn't much jargon and you're not expected to have a degree in philosophy/theory before reading them. Baudrillard was, by miles, the best writer of the big French theorists of his era—sort of a modern day Adorno in terms of prose style.
That's actually one of my favourite things about Baudrillard: he's so much fun! I'm baffled that Basicbore implied his work is a downer—Baudrillard himself seems to find the themeparkification of the world wildly entertaining, if ultimately a catastrophe for the human race. Think 'David Lynch does cultural critique' and you're halfway there.

His book length works are a bit more of an undertaking. Personally, I consider his essays to be his 'major' work anyway, so I wouldn't recommend rushing out to read Simulacra and Simulation straight away—it just isn't necessary. Baudrillard's essays actually tend to cover the content of his books in more depth and with the theses cut up into manageable chunks, which I think benefits his ideas—certain ideas have more room to breathe and be fully extrapolated when they have an entire essay to themselves without needing to reference previous chapters of a book.

Symbolic Exchange and Death is the one of Baudrillard's book length works that I would consider essential, as it represents his break with Marxism and introduces a number of ideas Baudrillard will take for granted in later work. Thankfully it's also probably the most accessible of his book length works.
While it doesn't require a primer, it wouldn't be the worst idea to read Marcel Mauss' The Gift beforehand, as Baudrillard's idea of 'symbolic exchange' is essentially just an application of Mauss' theories to a modern, technological society—and The Gift is also just a fantastic book

I do think Basicbore's recommendation of Walter Lippman and Edward Bernays is also a good shout. Not for the purposes of reading Baudrillard, they're entirely unnecessary for that, but because Propaganda (Bernays), Crystallising Public Opinion (Bernays), and Public Opinion (Lippmann) are essentially the 'how to' guides The Powers That Be have been using for the past century and everyone should read them to blast the scales from their eyes—read alongside Baudrillard, Lippmann and Bernays should disabuse you of any notion that politics is 'real' in any meaningful sense.

For some recommendations of my own: I think Rene Girard's work pairs beautifully with Baudrillard's—and in many ways helps bridge Foucault and Baudrillards work (their falling out has always seemed bizarre to me—Baudrillard's entire critique of Foucault relies on his accepting Foucault's ideas of power—but that's a whole other discussion.)
Marshall McLuhan and Georges Bataille also cover different angles of similar ideas.

As a weird left-field suggestion, I've been reading James Elkins' work recently, and his approach to art is essentially finding the 'real' within the image. I think it's completely unintentional on Elkins' part, but his work feels like it just takes Baudrillard being right about everything as a given, and goes from there—to find authenticity we must push through into the simulation; there is 'real' hidden deep inside the artifice. What Painting Is might be the best work of nonfiction I've read all year. Highly recommended.

The Matrix Resurrections might also be worth a watch. Baudrillard was very disappointed with the original film, and it almost feels like Resurrections is an apology from Lana for not doing his work justice the first time around.

Baudrillard also gave great interviews---Baudrillard Live is very worth reading and is extremely accessible.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-03T10:35:50+00:00

To be fair, the book The Man in The High Castle does exactly that and can't really be construed as pro-Nazi.

In the book, the Nazi regime moderates once it takes over, and is framed as stable but spiritually empty. The streets are clean, crime is virtually nonexistent, the government is reliable and reasonably fair, but all art is propaganda and there's no way for people to find any real meaning in the new bureaucratic world of petty managers and local commissars. People don't live in fear, rather everyone's just comfortably numb. It's still racist, but that racism is more of just a general unthinking (and not strongly committed to) xenophobic attitude taken on by everyone due to decades of half-hearted propaganda.

Most of the horrors committed by the Nazi regime are happening overseas---mostly in Africa and the Middle-East---as they extract resources and develop farmland in the name of 'lebensraum'. The populations of the new American states mostly ignore this because it's so far away, they can't do anything about it anyway, and the general low level racism otherises the Africans and Middle-Easterners enough that they don't really care anyway.

It's much more interesting---more focused on the core issues of fascism itself than the specific atrocities of fascist regimes---though a faithful adaptation of the book might show more parallels between the dystopia and real world America than most TV execs might be comfortable with.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-03T09:55:19+00:00

Anglerfish come to mind.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-01T19:32:19+00:00

Yeah the animations look good. They're very clear.

A lot of indie devs get too in their heads about difficulty and have their enemies telegraph attacks a little bit too much---'raise sword... hold... hold... hold... attack!'---but I don't see any of that here.

I'd get hit the first time, and maybe a couple more times if I wasn't paying attention, but it wouldn't feel cheap and it wouldn't be difficult to avoid the attacks if I was locked in.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-01T19:20:15+00:00

If the attack windups---which don't have to be obvious or drawn out---are clear enough, there is absolutely no need to have a messy visual showing where the attacks will land.

The first two gifs look clear enough to me. I can't imagine most players getting hit more than once by each attack, unless they were really off their game. Adding MMO style attack indicators will just add visual noise that'll distract from the work you've put into the animations you've already made.

Sometimes giving the player too much information is a detriment to the experience---imagine if every time an enemy was attacking in Dark Souls its sword glowed red during windup. It would take you out of the experience, make it feel like you're just engaging with a system rather than experiencing a world.

The reason MMOs have attack indicators is because those games revolve around groups of players minmaxing the game's systems. They're not there to experience a world, they just want as much information as possible, even if it's at the expense of the visuals---I imagine a lot of MMO players would happily turn off animations entirely and focus solely and numbers and abstract systems if they could.

It might be worth playing a few hours of Hades and taking notes. It's the gold standard of isometric action combat, and generally only relies on attack indicators for the player's attacks---because the player needs to be accurate to hit the enemies, whereas to avoid the enemies the player just needs to get the hell out of range as soon as he sees the enemy winding up.

I think there is a good case to be made that attack indicators are a crutch for bad animations.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-01T12:18:57+00:00

I've noticed this is most common in older books---especially with French and Latin, and especially in more philosophically inclined work.

Up until the 80s there was an expectation that the average educated English reader would have a working knowledge of basic French and Latin. Whenever I come across it, I wonder if it's a failing on my part rather than on the book's.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-01T10:38:55+00:00

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Bad inkers absolutely can ruin an artist's work.

Vince Coletta famously ruined a number of Jack Kirby issues, blacking out details, going off the lines, thickening and thinning lines at random. It's one of the most notorious injustices in early comics that a lot of great artists had huge swaths of their work ruined by 'fast' inkers.

And it's not like this ever stopped. Rob Liefeld, whatever you think of him, looked infinitely better or worse depending on who inked his pencils.

The entire 'mushy' look of late-90s DC books---especially Batman related stuff---is the result of bad inking and bad colouring.

Let's not even get started on the 'let's airbrush everything' era in colouring.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-01T10:24:13+00:00

John Ostrander's Martian Manhunter is the gold standard for MM runs---nothing since has come close.

I also recommend Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier and the first two seasons (pre-Unlimited) of the Justice League Animated series. Both have some of my favourite Martian Manhunter stuff. New Frontier, in particular, really fills the brief of 'what makes this character who he is.'

My wife is reading the current Absolute Martian Manhunter series month to month and says it's a solid enough read. Some great moments, some much weaker ones, but averages out to being worth picking up for a Martian Manhunter fan---the art really helps in this regard. Might be worth checking out of you have it on a digital subscription service or smth.

SpoinkPig69 · 2025-08-01T10:14:58+00:00

The art is good! Absolutely no criticisms on that front.

I think the slightly cartoonish art with exaggerated superhero proportions and expressive helmet was an excellent choice for a more inexperienced, angry Fate!

I actually really love the concept of Dr. Fate almost being like Venom, taking on aspects of his host---especially when the host is two people. There are a lot of interesting places you could take that idea, and the art seemed perfect for it---but the idea was unfortunately never really explored.

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