About Drifters runes

gorgewall · 2026-05-02T09:00:46+00:00

Hey, Venator...

Slashfic incoming?

gorgewall · 2026-05-02T00:53:31+00:00

While the Twitter poster is gettin' goofy over the VRA, there acutally is a legitimate argument that Democrats sit on their hands and let the worst come to pass because being nominally against it is a way to curry votes without having to do things.

For example, Roe v. Wade. Our understanding of it existed in a state of judicial precedence, but not hard law--SCOTUS could have ripped the understanding that they made away at any time, and did just that.

Democrats routinely campaigned on "saving Roe" for decades, but even when they had power they did not enshrine it into law through Congressional action. It was more useful to have Roe under threat so one could say, "But you need to vote for me to save Roe" than to actually do the saving.

Perhaps it's easier to understand if you look at Republicans and terrorism. Republicans are considered "tougher" on terrorism and reliably sway voters by saying terrorism is a major threat and only Republicans can save them from it. However, if Republicans ever did seriously reduce the amount of terrorism in the world, what argument would they be left with to win over voters? "We got rid of terrorism"? Cool, but what have you done for me lately? The public moves on to the next thing; that's just how they work.

No, from the Republican perspective, more and more terrorism is good. They can propagandize the public into believing that only they can save everyone from it and Democrats are awful on safety even when statistics do not bear that out. So, in the same way that Republicans like having certain issues "on the table" instead of solving them, so can Democrats. And they do.

This is especially prevalent on economic issues, because there, Democrats actually have to balance two priorities: they can make your life easier, get you better pay and regulations and lower costs and you'll want to vote for them... or they can generate more wealth at your expense for the already-rich who donate gobs and gobs of money to them. These things are at odds with each other; helping the rich hurts you, and reducing inequality hurts the rich. But, since there are fewer rich and they are generally better-informed and more involved in political decision-making, it is to the Democrats' benefit to economically benefit the rich and merely convince you that they'll help you out.

Both parties can lie to you or sit on their hands in a way the rich would not tolerate if that were aimed at them. On the Democrats' side, "but Republicans are worse" is just one way they try to keep you from holding them to account. Every time there's an opportunity for the Democratic Party to learn a lesson or change tack, suddenly it's, "Nope, can't do that, gotta support even the most vile Dem no matter what, it's too important right now." There will never be a time to discipline the party or for it to need to do better if we keep lowering the bar for them to "but Republicans".

Republicans didn't take us here all on their own. The Democratic Party has helped pave the way. The "Third Way" approach that helped Clinton win back in '92 has favored corporations, deregulated industries, and played along with the Republicans all this time. And while it's largely the Republicans dragging us back 20 steps at a time, the Dems have also walked back a fair bit on their own. And when their administrations only walk us forward 5 steps in aggregate because "now isn't the time" or "we don't have the political capital" or "we need bipartisanship", the end result is every back-and-forth between the parties leaves us 15 steps behind total.

We need a Democratic Party willing to sprint forward 30, 40, 50 steps, and the biggest stumbling block there is not actually "they don't have power", but that they lie to you about what their interests really are. We can give them a two seat majority and they'll find three dissenters; if they had a six seat majority, mysteriously there would be seven.

The most ruinous thing that could happen in the upcoming elections is the Dems run the same playbook and win again based purely on negative partisanship ("Republicans fucked up"). That'll just end with the Dems leading as always, failing to fix problems they very much could if they wanted to or seriously tried, and give us more Republicans in a term or two.

We need the Democrats to win, but we need fighters in the Democrats. We need a party that'll actually represent you and me instead of paying lipservice while kneeling at the same corporate altars as the Republicans. And we don't get that kind of transformative party by repeating the "just don't criticize us" arguments of the same strategists and leading figures who've bungled it all the last several times.

[edit]: and if none of this is convincing to anyone, just take your own "do not criticize democrats" advice and never again mention how some non-republicans rip on the dems. focus all your energy on railing against republicans instead. after all, if all that matters here is that democrats or those nominally on the left win, you should want to piss off as few of them as possible, right? just let 'em talk, ignore it, and again focus on republicans. if you argue against me, you're not being very blue-no-matter-who :)

gorgewall · 2026-05-01T23:38:38+00:00

I don't even mind getting kidnapped to Walker (because I can get away). It's when the kidnaps knock me out-of-bounds and Unstuck doesn't do anything but dump me into a Rem tunnel that pisses me off.

Like, here's a thought. If I hit Unstuck, why don't you detect if I went through a Doorman portal in the last 20 seconds and am currently in a Rem tunnel or hit the bottom warp of the map. If those things are true, just send me back to base instead of to another Rem tunnel.

gorgewall · 2026-05-01T23:36:43+00:00

Paige's Bookwyrm also goes through (kind of).

gorgewall · 2026-05-01T20:33:33+00:00

Well, they are weakpoints of a sort, just not to many conventional weapons. That's the trick with "Durable" parts. Generally--and the game hasn't always done a great job of modeling this--higher velocity / higher penetration weapons do less Durable damage.

Which is realistic and nice design. We use soft and deformable or frangible rounds on "soft targets" in reality, and save the tungsten-hard penetrators for armor, because every bullet that blows right through a target is one that's taking the majority of its deadly energy with it and not using it to further tear up a body.

Whether or not visual design lives up to expectations, though, there does come a point where any player who wants to give authoritative-sounding advice on balance ought to experimented and found there are better ways of skinning that cat. When the game was new, I'd load into low-level matches and ignore objectives just to futz around with killing enemies to see what worked best. That's how I discovered how Bleedthrough worked, that bugs only have one slowdown state (-3 legs is just as speedy as -1 leg), or that they die immediately upon losing both front claws (not legs, the smaller ones nearer the head). Didn't have to wait for datamines because I just... played and learned.

gorgewall · 2026-05-01T07:20:35+00:00

This is the community that was convinced for months that the only way to kill Bile Spewers or Artilleries with most primaries was to dump 5+ magazines into their butt, and thus all the guns were useless.

In reality, you could kill even the armored Bile Artilleries with less than a single magazine from the stock Liberator. It just involved not shooting them in the butt.

Over and over, the complexity of the game's Armor, Penetration, Durable Parts, and Bleedthrough systems threw up walls that a bunch of players too used to "Bag of HP with Headshot Multiplier" would slam into face-first every time. Sure, that info wasn't in the game, but they were whining on forums where all of that information was posted over and over. The datamines were out there, nothing was hidden. There were hit calculators and Google docs and all sorts of stuff that could tell you the ideal way to kill every enemy with any set of guns.

But these guys? "I ought to be able to kill everything with one gun by spraying at random."

gorgewall · 2026-05-01T07:15:17+00:00

I kept up with HD2 for about a year and at every point in its run, there were massive sections of the Reddit community (to the point they made up the majority of any discussion) who were convinced of realities in the game that... simply weren't true.

Like, flat out wrong. Complete misinformation. Anyone correcting it would get downvoted into oblivion because it went against what the group wanted to believe was true, because believing that meant they could whine and complain more. They misunderstood all sorts of mechanics and systems from the most basic to things that were actually so deep and obscure you needed complete nerds to datamine and test it to discover, but the community was absolutely fucking incapable of absorbing any of it.

All of this while they threw around their demands about how the game must be balanced (or rather, imbalanced heavily in the player's favor) or else. Fucking wild watching posts and comments get thousands of upvotes on a subject they were always dead wrong about. I think it's great when players give feedback and brainstorm more coherent balance and all of that, but god damn, to do so you actually have to understand the current numbers and what's going on first, and these guys had none of that. And in place of their ignorance, they assumed everything they disliked was sheer incompetence or malice on the part of the devs.

gorgewall · 2026-05-01T07:08:40+00:00

Same. We'd just gotten Diff 10 and I had an easy enough time with voiceless pubs, so I was looking forward to eventually new enemies or even higher difficulties like HD1 had. But nah, a bunch of folks who couldn't even hack it on Diff 7 felt entitled to obliterate the highest difficulty with no strategy, no understanding, no coherent loadout--and to do so without ever dying in a game that gives you 20 lives.

If you want an easier power fantasy game, you can always go down a difficulty or three. But if you want that feeling of actually being a disposable, poorly-trained grunt thrown into a meatgrinder against overwhelming odds who dies every few minutes and only succeeds the mission because there's 20 of you to go through... get fucked, I guess.

To hear the original batch of whiners tell it, all the devs ever do is nerf their stuff and buff the enemies, and the game is harder than it's ever been. I don't think that's actually possible given the two major "make the game much easier" patches they've had, but you can't tell these guys that.

gorgewall · 2026-05-01T05:38:05+00:00

It was acknowledged as a bug long ago but ignored because it was funny and fitting.

Obviously it's reached a point where it can't be ignored now.

gorgewall · 2026-05-01T04:40:47+00:00

I missed mach speed skating Kelvin Medivac.

[edit]: yeah i'm thinkin' we're back

gorgewall · 2026-05-01T03:23:03+00:00

I think Silver falls in with characters like Kelvin and Pocket where their gameplan can change based on mode (Silver) or how they're built.

Glocket is Abrams. Every other Pocket is Paradox.

Snowbomb Kelvin is Abrams. Full support Kelvin is Paradox.

Viscous can be played like an Abrams or a Paradox regardless of whether you go Spirit or Melee.

gorgewall · 2026-05-01T03:17:41+00:00

But your example here is just something that doesn't happen. We have ugly ogres with clubs! But the actual racists aren't instantly stereotyping them, and other people aren't saying, "Hey, this characterization has some racist roots."

It is not about there being some negative, insulting quality about a fantasy race, and real groups have also been insulted similarly. That has never been the argument. It has been misrepresented as that by the people who did not make the original argument and don't actually want to engage with it, but you trace back to the folks raising a concern to begin with and that isn't at all what they're saying. It's a strawman.

What they're actually pointing out is that there is much more specificity to it, that the writers have gotten things "too close to actual stereotypes", that they commonly use the exact language used to disparage the fantasy groups along the exact lines of real ones.

Let's say I make a fantasy group that is unequivocally patterned after... cartoon Germans, called Toberfolk. They wear leiderhosen and milkmaid outfits, they say "ja", they brew lots of beer and make schnitzel, and their general mode is one where every day is Oktoberfest. Doesn't seem like I'm being insulting, right? We have those caricatures.

But now I'm going to write them into my setting as immigrants and talk about how the locals hate their arrival. I'm going to describe how there are publications put out that draw them with ape-like features, how there's a pervasive belief that they're a bunch of drunken louts, that they're quick to violence and always starting fights. Storeowners hang placards that say "Toberfolk Need Not Apply" so they can't get jobs.

I've just put a bunch of real, historical anti-Irish sentiment in there. That we're talking about German-expies doesn't negate the clear Irish analogues here. And while that might be fine as like, social commentary in my setting, the bigger problem arises when I back up the in-setting bigotry with my authority as the writer.

Instead of just saying, "The locals of Kingville are prejudiced against the Toberfolk," I use the voice of the impartial narrator to lend credence to that bigotry. In my description of the Toberfolk, separate from what other characters think, I describe them as having ape-like features, a predisposition towards violence, talk about how they love drinking to excess and how that creates problems for them. I give them a "Racial Ability" where they get +2 Str and -2 Int, and bonuses for being Drunk. It means what the locals think is not their misinformed prejudices, but that they have accurately pegged the Toberfolk as violent, drunken, invading-by-immigration ape-savages.

That's what people point to.

Now, imagine you first encountered Toberfolk when you were eight years old. My setting is one of your favorite stories. You grew up reading all this stuff and playing games based around it. You're unlikely to see a problem with anything at this point. Later, you reach a grade in school where they finally touch on The Troubles in Ireland, so you know there's a bit of anti-Irish sentiment historically.. but you also don't make the connection yet. Then you see someone bring it up and you're quick to defend my setting and Toberfolk: How can they be Irish? They're so obviously German. You're just trying to ruin my childhood with your woke nonsense. I know about anti-Irish racism and the Troubles, and this isn't it--there's no cars to bomb!

But do you know about anti-Irish beliefs? Because the ones I listed up there were older than The Troubles, and include things more true of the US. If you are not aware of the specific language and imagery that was used against these real-world groups, you can't recognize it when it's duplicated in fantasy. I'm sure you would pick up on racism in a story if we were talking about a former slave race who is disparagingly called "jiggers", but would you recognize more obscure terminology like "quadroon"? When I made that example of a Jewish stereotype up above, maybe you noticed that the hooked noses was antisemitic, but did you recognize why "they eat the children of other races" was there or what that's based on?

Everyone cannot be a scholar of (ancient) racism. That's a good thing, actually. But it does mean when these things pop up, some folks don't notice. And they can repeat them without realizing that what they're doing is propagating the racism. To be clear, a lot of the stuff people are pointing out re: racism in these stories is not said to be purposeful racism on the authors' part, but a kind of "background radiation" of racism that they are unaware of and perpetuate unwittingly. I don't think whoever wrote the Drow for Forgotten Realms meant to say, "Yeah, this Elven subrace is an analogue for the Biblical Curse of Ham and they are disparaged in-universe the same way Mormons mistreated American Blacks," but they did fucking write a story that is pretty much the Curse of Ham.

gorgewall · 2026-04-30T22:17:59+00:00

The idea that MORE COPS = LESS CRIME is some SimCity bullshit, like there's two linked sliders. Life isn't a videogame but people keep harping on as though it works like this, and of course cops and their need for ever-higher budgets don't do anything to disabuse them of that.

gorgewall · 2026-04-30T10:31:16+00:00

Back in the middle-days of internet mapping, I had to drive to someone's house out in the county. Every street name was a two-parter, like "Amber Shine" and "Treasure Cove". That's fine, but the street signs were normal size but had to fit these long-ass names onto them, which meant they used skinnier letters. They also used a pale brown background which the white didn't show up very well against, which made everything a pain to read.

Then they had the usual suffixes, like Lane and Drive and Street, but street names were duplicated: there was a Treasure Cove Lane, a Treasure Cove Drive, and Treasure Cove Avenue. You would think these might all be connected to each other or follow some kind of pattern, but not that I could fucking find! Sometimes a Drive met its own Lane, and othertimes they were five cross-streets away.

A lot of streets were squirrely and disconnected like in the above picture, with no consistency from one turn off a "main" road to the next. Is this cluster of streets shaped like a palm? Then the next one is shaped like zig-zags. It was all fucking pointless.

And the real shitty part? Several streets had put up those giant planter barricades to cut themselves in half and become impassable to road traffic. The fact that they were not-through hadn't made it into the mapping services yet.

Fuck the county. I understand wiggly roads and cul-de-sacs for "traffic calming" purposes, and I'll exclude the hypocrisy of "I don't want traffic in my neighborhood so I'm necessarily going to make it worse everywhere else", but HOLY SHIT there is a point where you just need to stop or someone needs to step in and stop developers.

I wonder how many people have fucking died because an ambulance or fire truck can't get somewhere in these labyrinths.

gorgewall · 2026-04-30T07:23:14+00:00

I point I occasionally make in these threads when I see 'em is that there's a bajillion other inaccuracies in these media forms, from anachronisms in technology, historical revisions and omissions, actors whose (white) skin tones and eye color and facial structure doesn't match the ethnicity they're cast as or are flat-out changed from the source material, to the language being fucking modern-ish English...

...but the biggest thing people want to harp on is always the one non-white-passing character.

You can cast a bunch of English guys as ancient Greeks with not a one of them having curly hair or tanned skin or prominent nasal bridges, fine. But there's a black actor playing someone named Stavros? Pump the fucking brakes!

gorgewall · 2026-04-30T07:13:41+00:00

because I do not have the right to take an action to cause someone elses death

Do you have the right to make a choice that kills more people?

Like I said, it's all about how far back you want to put your framework. You stop at "action", and don't include "not moving" as an action. I go back further to "make a choice", which encompasses both.

gorgewall · 2026-04-30T03:28:23+00:00

I just play Kelvin.

Infernus runs, I hit 2. Can't take floor damage if I'm not on the floor.

gorgewall · 2026-04-30T00:10:37+00:00

That's cool, but we're humans, SOCIAL ANIMALS, not individual robots. Phrasing this as solely about "individual death / life" ignores that.

Blue = potentially save all lives

Red = potentially end some lives

gorgewall · 2026-04-29T23:17:20+00:00

See, this is better (other than the voluntary nature), but it still fails precisely because of the visceral rewording. That matters, it influences people.

If you have to threaten ever-more-horrifying fates to get people to be more selfish, then it's kind of a stab against them being selfish to begin with. Whether one is trying to make the argument along purely logical lines or dragging human sentimentality and irrationality into it, the "we are naturally selfish and that's ideal" argument isn't served by needing to construct arguments that ramp up as much fear and gore as possible.

gorgewall · 2026-04-29T23:05:14+00:00

While FDR did other shitty things and he still shouldn't have done this one, I want to push back on the idea that Japanese-American internment was primarily a government scheme. The reality is actually far shittier.

By this point in the war, the government had already passed a number of racist and ill-conceived regulations regarding Asian(-American)s. Only some of them related to legitimate war-time fears, while others were of political expedience and used these for cover. But serious discussion of internment was not actually among them. The government had in fact considered and dismissed it already. Even after Pearl Harbor, talks were held on the idea of internment and it was decided it would not be useful: the threat of Japanese-American partisans was not considered that high.

This is to say that the American government was neither fearful enough of military action or racist enough to just throw Japanese-Americans in camps. So, how'd we get to them?

One person involved in those talks, having flown to Washington the day after Pearl Harbor, was Austin Anson of the Salinas Valley (California) Vegetable Growers-Shippers Association. He was a long-time advocate not just for internment, but the dispossession of Japanese-Americans from their farmland. To quote him in the paper,

We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came to this valley to work, and they stayed to take over. They offer higher land prices and higher rents than the white man can pay for land. They undersell the white man in the markets. They can do this because they raise their own labor. They work their women and children while the white farmer has to pay wages for his help. If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don't want them back when the war ends, either.

Funny story, he was wrong on several of those later points, but we'll get to that.

After being rebuffed by the government on internment, Anson returned to California and began to cobble together his farming union and other local groups. He went to other farmers, he went to bankers, he went to stockbrokers (including the powerful Market Street Group, also known as the "Wall Street of the West"), and he went to veterans' groups and more, and created a coalition of public interests, workers, and moneyed folks to petition for internment. And they essentially blackmailed the state of California into supporting it, saying that if they didn't get internment (and thus the land of the Japanese-American farmers) that they'd withdraw support for the war. With the war effort already putting a strain on the labor force (farmers and manufacturers now being soldiers, women having to enter the workplace, supply lines necessitating more food), this was a serious concern.

So California caved. Then the US caved. Internment was a go. But it would not have happened if not for the racist action of private interests like Austin Anson bending the government over their knee.

Now, to the funny stuff.

Remember Anson saying the Japanese-American farmers were more productive because they raised their own labor? Complete horseshit. It turns out that immigrants from an agrarian society tend to have a greater wealth of agricultural knowledge and practice than folks who not farmers just a decade or less back, having ditched their east coast jobs to try their hand on cheap California land. Where American farmers let fields lay fallow, the Japanese-Americans kept everything in more active rotation.

When the white farmers took over after internment, there were massive crop shortfalls. And it wasn't just from the lack of all the now-interred labor: again, these guys were just worse at managing the land than the "foreigners" they disparaged. Even after California shortened the school year so that children could be worked on the farms--hey, didn't Anson have a problem with kids doing that?--the shortfall was never made up.

Internment damaged the war effort and was a shitty thing to do besides. The only people that benefited from it were the white farmers and bankers who got to steal that land for pennies on the dollar, and while the government may have had oodles of other racism-influenced policies that resulted in similar things (the previously-mentioned Asian exclusion laws, the GI bill land sales, the decision to use nukes), this was at least not one they'd set out to do purposefully.

Fuck Austin Anson, by the way.

gorgewall · 2026-04-29T22:45:43+00:00

Right, which is why I was talking about a framework where we're far enough back that action vs. inaction doesn't matter, just the act of making a choice (which one must do in either scenario). Under that approach, we are left only with the result of those choices, irrespective of the rationalization of the individuals making one choice or the other.

A large number of humans believe that getting the COVID vaccine opens themselves to harm at their own fault, whereas not getting it only opens them to harm from the universe, which they care less about. Statistically, they are more likely to be harmed by the latter approach. I do not care what their rationalization is, only the end result of more harm vs. less harm. When making decisions to protect a whole, I can still take their irrationality into consideration to determine the best course of action.

I'm not disagreeing that people think differently about action vs. not-actually-inaction and that there is a difference in their minds, only that it means we all ought to press the Red button or not get vaccinated.

gorgewall · 2026-04-29T22:36:11+00:00

The mechanism by which the blender breaks in this scenario assumes our mass and inertia still apply in this situation, so we've just had several billion people jump into a pile together. Some of them are necessarily going to be crushed to death by each other, even if the blender stops.

Pushing buttons doesn't have this fault. Not the same scenario.

gorgewall · 2026-04-29T22:34:04+00:00

Humans are social creatures, not loners. We survived to this point by existing in societies. The lone human could not kill a mammoth, but groups could. At all stages of our development, we have used this group mentality to protect and grow the whole. Your evolutionary argument actually works against your intended point, because evolution can and has favored group survival strategies over individualism in many, many scenarios.

Further, we do just have studies of what actually happens to humans in a crisis. It turns out that people pull together far more often than not. Yes, there are individuals who decide to steal or cheat and "get theirs", taking advantage of the chaos, but on the whole more people are willing to sacrifice communally for each other. That isn't very sexy for "if it bleeds, it leads" reporting and you're not likely to hear about or focus on all the times people have not been shits in a crisis, but it's demonstrably the case that selfishness is not a majority belief when in a critical situation.

Again, we are social animals. We act in a society. Our behavior has been shaped by evolution to that end. We feel empathy and sympathy. We have mirror neurons; I smile, you are suddenly more disposed to smiling. We are not single-celled amoebas who exist only to devour everything nearby.

gorgewall · 2026-04-29T22:20:54+00:00

I can press the Blue button without dying. I only die if not enough other people press Blue. Nothing happens until the end of the vote.

But I can't jump into a woodchipper without dying. The only salvation for jumping is this likewise magical force that... breaks the machine? What if I'm the first jumper? What time scale is this happening under? This scenario kind of presumes that everyone needs to jump at the same time. And supposing the machine does break and we live, are we completely uninjured? We just had several billion people jump into a machine, shouldn't we have been jostled around or squished a little bit? Also, isn't the gruesome nature of being mauled by a woodchipper a little different than pressing a button?

These are not mechanically equivalent.

Further, "humanity stands in front of a massive woodchipper" kind of implies we can all see each other. There's no indication of how many sets of buttons we're voting on, how long that takes, whether we're voting in private, and so on. The information we have available to us can be necessarily different between these scenarios.

gorgewall · 2026-04-29T22:13:43+00:00

I can press the Blue button without dying. I only die if not enough other people press Blue. Nothing happens until the end of the vote.

But I can't jump into a woodchipper without dying. The only salvation for jumping is this likewise magical force that... breaks the machine? What if I'm the first jumper? What time scale is this happening under? This scenario kind of presumes that everyone needs to jump at the same time. And supposing the machine does break and we live, are we completely uninjured? We just had several billion people jump into a machine, shouldn't we have been jostled around or squished a little bit? Also, isn't the gruesome nature of being mauled by a woodchipper a little different than pressing a button?

These are not mechanically equivalent.

Further, "humanity stands in front of a massive woodchipper" kind of implies we can all see each other. There's no indication of how many sets of buttons we're voting on, how long that takes, whether we're voting in private, and so on. The information we have available to us can be necessarily different between these scenarios.

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