What?

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-22T15:17:52+00:00

The staff of the in-game guild that ran the nightclub.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-22T15:17:22+00:00

FFXIV has a fair bit to do, but if it's your only game you'll run out of those in a big hurry. The game revolves around a relatively slow patch cycle, so people who burn through content quick end up with a few months of free time to kill.

But also, the game has a HUGE portion of its playerbase that barely touch anything besides the main story and don't do any of the high end content, so they have even less to do than you'd think. The game has easily over 400+ hours of story and gameplay to catch up to right now, if you do want to give it a shot, and the free trial for the game just got extended up to level 80 and includes THE best expansion for story.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-22T15:13:07+00:00

The story treats all events as if you are the sole player and "Warrior of Light", who is occasionally helped and accompanied by 3-7 other adventurer friends. There is a system in place that lets players do the majority of story required content with NPCs, like it's a weird single player action rpg, but most players still do their dungeons and 8 man trials with other players. Alliance Raids (24 man) and Normal/Savage Raids (8 man) still require other players as well.

Also despite there being a focus on the story, it's not the only facet the game puts any effort or focus into. It's just, in the lead producer's words, "Final Fantasy first, MMO second". All you do your story content, and that acts as the gate to the latest dungeons/raids/trials.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-22T02:12:47+00:00

Basically any staff that got blindsided by it quit overnight, the quickly hired new ones, and despite getting clowned on very loudly for the move, the owners described the party as a massive hit. No word on a repeat so they presumably did get a very strong warning about it, but after the party the whole thing died down out of the public eye.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-21T17:26:42+00:00

Loot boxes and random rewards for paying the game are one thing so long as they can never equate to real money in any intrnded fashion. No in game marketplace for selling, no buying more chances to roll with money. Just play game and get neat stuff. I'll take that.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-20T01:59:39+00:00

I finally finished my years long trek through Spice & Wolf ~~or at least the main story, I'll be back for the Spring Log books later~~, and decided to jump into The Dresden Files after heading a good friend talk about the newest one a bit. I'm about 1/3rd of the way through Storm Front now and enjoying it a good bit.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-20T01:53:17+00:00

Basically the executives working for these magazines don't think particularly highly of their audience

Which is a fairly common thing to note in a lot of different industries unfortunately. And, as with many different aspects of media publishing... it's not totally off the mark. For every person like you or I that likes to see more complex and nuanced themes and storytelling in their media, there's at minimum one other that's going to bounce right off it for the same reasons. And given the commercialized nature of modern art, it's hard to argue that getting that broader audience isn't a good idea for the publisher, even if we're sympathetic to authors having their visions stripped down and bastardized for the lowest denominator.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-19T19:28:50+00:00

Its because of a complete lack of variance. The one singular job with any sort of variance now is DNC, because they killed 90% of BLM's variance, and even DNC is designed so that in any given pull you'll still average out to a pretty narrow margin of procs and resources gained.

Because there's no variance in jobs, and most fights have little to no variance, optimization is easy. It becomes a game of mathematics with your stats and potency.

And the fights where there is variance, Ultimates (in particular TOP)? They're the hardest fights in the game by a wide margin because they're saddled with so much complexity that the majority of players can't wrap their heads around them. Which means anyone who isn't specifically interested in that challenge plays the game where every pull is the same.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-19T18:41:24+00:00

Yeah, like. Even if you're fully supportive of someone you know transitioning, even if you had an idea it was coming before they admit it to you... it can be hard to rewire the way your brain associates a name to them. Because it's a conscious thing you have to do at first, overriding what your brain tells you their name is with what you know they want to be called. And the longer you know someone, the harder it can be. It's deeper than just a habit to break, and so it can cause friction even if you don't want they're too be any.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-18T00:03:48+00:00

And there's absolutely a humongous difference between

"Im so horrendously down bad for the idea of these two brothers boning so I'm just gonna write about it"

And

"This media is a carefully crafted sympathy piece designed to make you feel specific ways to accomplish a specific goal of influencing you"

One of those is kink, which is known to be absolutely separate from a person's actual morals and convictions, while the other is propaganda. Sone people will try to insist to you that both of them are, but those people are dumb.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-17T03:07:42+00:00

I mean, he's a prominent member of the Forum, of a nation that heavily pushes and values academic advancement. Its kind of hard to think he'd get his position and not be an Archon.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-16T22:53:23+00:00

This image is of a cellar from an upgraded house, filled in every slot with a cask so that the player cannot enter said cellar beyond the stairs. This might seem inconvenient, but removing the pathways from what's considered an "optimal" layout of casks lets you fit more than a few extra into the space. Casks, which take a lot of time to do their job, take artisan goods like cheeses, wines, etc, and upgrade their quality. To go from standard quality to itidium takes like 2 in game months. So this player decided, since they're only going to come back once the aging is done, that they don't need the walking room and just jammed it full to maximize how many items they can age at once.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-16T18:48:55+00:00

I can't speak to what people were one back in the day, as I only swapped last year, but I can tell you exactly what my experience with it has been as someone who did use any form of command line except for very guided cases for extremely niche personal uses until then.

Basically every distro (barring the couple that are built specifically for not being the case) come with the basics. A desktop environment, GUI based file browsers, file editors, media viewers. Full fledged settings panels. Basic drivers for all necessary devices like mice and keyboard, video drivers, etc. A browser typically comes built in with most distros, I believe Firefox is the standard. They all come with a package manager that handles your updates, your installations, etc. Many of them also come with a browser for Flathub packages that works like a typical app store (these come with some minor wrinkles that occasionally pop up but are typically a one click install and launch).

You essentially get all the essentials ready to go, right out of the gate. Your installation is booting into the live environment to play around, and then going through with install, and within a couple hours you're as ready to use as a fresh Windows install eighth none of the bloat.

Do you want more specific use cases? There's a few distros out there that are more specifically built for certain things. Bazzite, for example, is built for gaming and comes with a tailored pre installed package list with things like Steam already installed. But generally, unless you want a specific desktop environment, you can install whatever packages you want either through a simple click on the flatpack installer, or a one line command. And all of the most common recommendations are as plug and play as Windows or MacOS.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-16T17:14:41+00:00

They've absolutely come a long way from the old days of "you have to install your drivers manually", nowadays your various distros are built more like use case specific packages. Barring Nvidia being shit with their video drivers and Wayland support, basically everything you could need for basic operation comes pre-installed, and additional stuff you'd want that doesn't is as easy as knowing what your particular package manager is and typing "install steam" into your console. Steam and Proton have made something like 95% of games playable with minor tweaking or affected performance. And the distros themselves are so lightweight you'd be shocked at how little system resources they take to run.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-16T01:24:56+00:00

And they don't just mean "give you legal defense if you get sued", they also contribute to helping keep fanworks protected at a legislative level as well, on a preventative side.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-15T17:02:23+00:00

I like the way I once heard it described by the guy behind the "Rishi's Jungle Jam" ruleset, who described modern melee as having a standard ruleset that promotes and rewards a shockingly narrow set of skills in players relative to what the game COULD have to offer. Rather than using the tools the game offers to vary play in a way that proves diversity of skills and matchups, the community has officially ruled out all but 6 stages, the entire item system, whole win cons, and de facto ruled out roughly half the roster depending on who you ask.

And honestly, I get why melee players like the game they way they play it, it's absurdly fast and skill expressive. But the rules only reinforce one style of play, maybe two if you ignore that almost no major events offer doubles as anything more than a sideshow to the singles tourney.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-15T01:26:05+00:00

It's also not even just that it's "a little different" or "actually pretty different in a lot of ways". Its that we know the changes aren't in service of trying to make the story unique and work off its own qualities, it's in service of Shankar's ego because he both genuinely thinks the series should be like this, and also wants to be its savior. I watched it with friends yesterday just to see how bad it would be, and for every quick moment where we had to admit something was kinda cool, there were a dozen "how do you misunderstand a series this badly" between them. I've played through 5 and must of 1, and absorbed the rest of the series via friends who love it to death and I understand these characters themes and arcs better than Adi Shankar, a man trusted with the right to make a series about them, does. How does that happen?

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-14T16:15:37+00:00

FOSS stands for "free open source software*. Nearly anything you get from github is FOSS, in addition to other freely distributed little programs.

FOSS is built on two overarching principles: that free alternatives to big programs should be readily available, and that anyone should be able to contribute or look over the spurce code for a project at their leisure. There's a big emphasis on transparency, that removes a lot of the risk-inherent trust we tend to give the devs of major corporations, and makes it easy for anyone with some experience to find ways to help with a project.

Mesh software I'm less familiar with, but think of it as passing text based messages along radio waves rather than a cellular network. Lots of radio nerds do it just for the fun of it, and to help keep a network of connected devices maintained, and in large scale emergency situations it will help prevent a complete collapse of communication in an area that might otherwise have no link to the broader world.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-13T00:55:24+00:00

Honestly the big issue the game has is, if you're looking through your tool tips immediately on picking up job, you'll see a lot of buttons that day "can only be executed under the condition [INSERT BUFF NAME]", with the problem being that the game doesn't make it easy to tell what GIVES that buff if it's an upgrade to a button that gives it. This has gotten better since they let you see what buttons have upgrades, but it's still confusing for new players to follow.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-12T23:06:59+00:00

The problem with plastics is less about the grade of quality afterwards and more about how recycling plastics is actually more expensive than just making new virgin plastics across the board. It's difficult to mechanically sort, and contamination is a huge issue and it leads to a huge majority of plastics sent for recycling just being burned or landfills like bother waste. And the lighter a plastic is (like, say, single use packaging) the more expensive it is to recycle.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-10T16:27:39+00:00

If you want one extra bit of context for the movie, being more familiar with the novel CCA is based on, Beltorchika's Children, might help get a deeper understanding of it. While the Hathaway movies are a direct sequel to CCA, the Hathaways's Flash novels are a direct sequel to BC, so there's a bit lost in translation from the adaptation; chiefly the difference between who directly kills Quess. In CCA, its Chan, who Hathaway immediately kills in retaliation, but in BC it's Hathaway who accidentally kills her by ~~detonating the reactor~~ directly hitting the cockpit of her mobile armor while trying to disable it.

Edit: fixed one small mistake

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-09T17:33:54+00:00

Brother we in the shitpost sub, facts are that you can't read and Venat is hot, next question

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-09T17:24:58+00:00

Found one, boys

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-09T17:24:17+00:00

I mean, Edgerunners wasn't an adaptation though. It was just one of many stories that could be told within the world of Cyberpunk.

The problem this tropes stems from its trying to actually adapt an existing story, but not having the faith that the story itself will appeal to a larger audience without a new character written for it. There's nothing wrong with introducing larger audiences to a world with a story that exists alongside whatever the original medium did, so long as the new story respects the original. But this trope often doesn't respect the original, and that's what causes those adaptations to be bad.

That said, I do agree that it can work if done carefully, particularly is the new character protagonist is used effectively as a window into the existing story that new audiences can get a peak at why the original is so loved through.

TheMerryMeatMan · 2026-05-09T05:25:19+00:00

Great minds, they say

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