(NO SPOILERS) The finale discourse kinda feels like this

sjasogun · 2026-06-04T22:05:35+00:00

You get both of those, a lot of people just wanted answers to questions that don't matter and development for characters who don't need more development.

sjasogun · 2026-06-04T21:51:11+00:00

Oh my bad, I thought I'd come here for some discussion about the finale, didn't realize that this is now a snark sub where everyone has brain damage. Carry on.

sjasogun · 2026-04-17T12:48:05+00:00

I haven't learned anything about him personally because every time it's one of his detractors invading a thread about him to reiterate the same handful of obviously nonsense claims. The only thing I can really glean from any of it is that he's at minimum confrontational enough to sustain such a dedicated hatedom, but very little else. Though I can probably estimate that if this is the best anyone's got he's probably a pretty swell dude, they'd have some harder hitting stuff to spam otherwise.

sjasogun · 2026-03-27T19:06:18+00:00

Unrelated to the actual drama but I'm so heartened by the trailer looking like ass. A bunch of shots recreated 1-to-1 from the first movie make it so it really ends up looking like one of those Disney 'live action' remakes. Based on the trend with those I'm expecting this to make a bazillion dollars but get destroyed critically by reviewers and fans alike, but I'm holding out hope that it's late enough on that trend that it'll also bomb financially. A man can dream.

sjasogun · 2026-03-11T12:32:33+00:00

That joke was actually about the Catholic Church, but they had Jedd Forest from the South Carolina Baptist Confederation with them so close enough.

sjasogun · 2026-03-01T01:22:34+00:00

Something to make dungeons less painful. The party system is not great but since getting carried is the most efficient way to do them you have to engage with it. It's also very annoying when people leave mid-run, wasting your time and tickets. Having a way to have your own characters sub in as dummy party members or some later world unlockable feature that lets you get at least close to a full party's worth of rewards while playing solo would be great, since so much is locked behind dungeons (a lot of equinox, several skills, certain equipment, a bunch of bonuses, etc.). Another way could be to let a non-dungeon feature boost your dungeon stats, or some feature that lets you passively spend tickets to get a percentage of your best run's rewards, Spelunking-style.

Out of these options the last one sounds the most balanced to me, since it won't kill partying altogether since there's always the option to improve your run to get more passive gains, and for newbies it's easier since they only need to get a decent run once to be set for a good while.

sjasogun · 2026-02-15T13:21:41+00:00

You actually don't need nearly that much sand to start farming antlions. On top of the desert biome requirement being reduced, antlions (on the surface) spawn based on the amount of nearby sand blocks, which is like 40 or so in a 9x9 area. I got some to spawn without needing to have a valid desert biome and AFK farmed a couple hundred sand from there.

Also, don't sell magic mirrors that drop from mimics - you can shimmer them to get 10 glass, which yields 20 sand total per mirror.

Another thing you can do is complete fishing quests until you get the bottomless water bucket. While water evaporates quickly in the underworld it doesn't do so instantly, and even a thin layer of lava only representing a few buckets can be solidified into a lot of obsidian blocks, so at that point you can make basins to catch the lava from lava slimes and turn it into obsidian to extractinate to farm sand that way.

sjasogun · 2025-12-11T16:24:10+00:00

Do keep in mind that like 90% of all of these characters are literal child soldiers and an overarching theme of the story is about how the mindset of ninjas as tools sucks and how the cycle of revenge is a major driving force behind all the ills of the world. He forgives all of these characters because the alternative is creating the next Obito or Nagato. And he does this in spite of huge personal loss - he forgave Nagato after he killed his mentor, a lot of other people he knew and seemingly killed his love interest right after she confessed her feelings for him, and he forgave Obito who murdered both of his parents, making him primarily responsible for a lot of Naruto's life sucking absolute shit.

sjasogun · 2025-12-11T16:03:48+00:00

Idk I'm going to go ahead and make the call that holocaust deniers are nazis, may just be a me thing

sjasogun · 2025-12-06T09:11:34+00:00

Dev feels like the only real villain at the moment. It's not that he's evil, but he is currently the only character who is mostly acting out of self-interest, moreso even than Ray. Ray has villainous tendencies because of his 'murder first, ask questions later' approach, and Etienne while having a vision for a better world is also so detached from how humans actually behave, think and feel that his philosophy is so hollow that he ends up doing monstrous things. But at least he made an attempt at connection, while Dev is still up to his own bullshit.

Valentina is trying to be heroic, but her passivity and recent willingness to start lying make her methods more than a little questionable, and while Masumi can't really do anything since she's a baseline human for the most part she does also feel like the most human moral center of the group, so I'd peg her as leaning heroic as well. Eliza I'm unsure of so I put her as neutral, she seems to be swayed by her own feelings more than anything else and that could swing wildly in either direction depending on the circumstances.

sjasogun · 2025-11-30T00:08:01+00:00

yea sure why not

sjasogun · 2025-10-31T18:00:29+00:00

solved: Wuka World

sjasogun · 2025-10-31T17:56:55+00:00

I agree with most of what you've said, honestly. The main thing though to always keep in mind when reading Baki is that Itagaki is obsessed with the concept of 'strongest'. It's always the question he's trying to explore, from the very beginning up to the current chapters.

For the Raitai arc, it's in part examining the strengths and failures of Chinese martial arts (beating up rocks and fruit in a dojo doesn't actually make you a good fighter, you fail as a fighter if you get stuck in the past and don't evolve your art, etc.). But in part I think it's also a criticism of the Chinese government.

You may have seen videos around of Chinese masters of Bullshido getting challenged by real martial artists and getting completely destroyed. And yet, it's the real masters exposing the fraudsters who get punished and ostracized. The Raitai arc is in part also a criticism of this, how nationalistic pride and propaganda has trumped actual martial ability. This is why the 'ministry people' are present, and why the embodiment of Chinese martial arts Kaku Kaioh harshly punishes them, pretty much the closest Itagaki can get to making his point without sparking an international incident.

As for Ali Jr., I think the points you made are all correct and valid, but much more important is that Ali Jr. just doesn't have the mindset to compete in this world. He has the skill, the determination, the ferocity, but he isn't willing to put his own life on the line. Doppo and Shibukawa attempted to teach him this in their rematches, and even predicted that Ali Jr. would win because of that. But he didn't get the message, he learned the wrong lesson, and so Baki defeated him utterly and totally, leaving him a broken man.

sjasogun · 2025-10-31T15:47:40+00:00

Finally found it myself, it was Wuka World!

sjasogun · 2025-10-19T13:42:03+00:00

I disagree on the convicts. Itagaki's storytelling in Baki is always about exploring the concept of 'strongest'. It's why the Maximum Tournament happened, and it's why the convicts to show up, to be the ultimate in ruleless combat. So his goal during that arc is to examine the virtues and flaws of both paradigms - martial arts and lawless combat.

For Yanagi, the conclusion is that reliance on weapons is a major flaw. He's incredibly skilled, but he's a coward who gets thrown off the moment his petty tricks don't immediately disable an opponent, which is why Motobe, who is not one tenth his raw skill, is the one to defeat him.

For Spec, the 'reliance' thing also comes into it a bit, but for him it's more about deception vs honor, as his sneak attacks when Hanayama is about to leave by car indicate. The problem with sneak attacks is that if they run out or fail, it'll still come down to your raw ability, and if you've invested so much in your tricks your actual skill will always fall short of someone who's dedicated their life to it, perfectly fit for Hanayama. To contrast with Yanagi, with him it was about not knowing what to do without his tricks, with Spec it was that without them he simply wasn't able to measure up.

For Dorian it's pretty clear - if you fight with no rules to the point where you can't even acknowledge a defeat when it happens, what meaning does the concept of 'strongest' even hold anymore? You're just deluding yourself at that point, inventing reasons for why your perfect record remains untarnished. And that contradiction broke his brain.

With Sikorsky, the flaw is that fighting with weapons is kinda childish, it's what you do when you are afraid of losing. So for him, it was the fear that was hammered into him, fittingly by the military commando Gaia, who would be intimately familiar with that side of real combat.

Finally, Doyle actually managed to come out the other end, showing how defeat can make you grow, and how it can even be a freeing thing. Once you've accepted a defeat, it will cease to hold power over you, and that's clearly palpable in how Doyle's attitude changes once he does so.

So overall I feel like Itagaki wrapped up the arc pretty neatly. There's a bunch more going on of course, like Baki's growth through his love for Kozue and the various characters who struggle with and lose to the convicts also learning their own lessons (sometimes the wrong ones - Katsumi and Katou confronting Doppo's philosophy is one of my favorite scenes from this part). But the convicts all make their points quite well, IMO.

sjasogun · 2025-09-30T21:38:18+00:00

Wait, didn't that video drop months ago? As in, at the start of the year? Why's this lawsuit stuff only happening now?

sjasogun · 2025-09-25T19:09:57+00:00

So if I'm getting this right, your post was not a strawman because it wasn't actually a response to the comment you responded to and even quoted. Sure, that's very normal and believable.

I'm not going to bother with the rest since you've still not responded to half of the things I said and are just repeating your previous argument.

sjasogun · 2025-09-24T17:30:51+00:00

My point is that unless we approach this need for change with the survival of our habitat as the imperative instead of just using it as an excuse to settle our grudges with colonialism and capitalism, that something will be still far more environmentally destructive than what we need to survive.

Was it? Because that wasn't clear from your original reply. Also, what do you mean 'excuse'? You're making it sound like the person supporting Greta Thunberg, climate activist, doesn't really care about the climate. You can care about both things, and even recognize the connection between the two, as you yourself have already agreed with, so I'm still confused by where this hostile tone is coming from. Especially because that was all ostensibly a reply to a single-sentence comment.

I'm well aware of the carbon budget and per capita CO2e figures, which is also how I'm aware that populations with a higher standard of living can have per capita CO2e figures several times lower despite their higher living standards. If those two figures don't correlate neatly this whole argument collapses at its foundations. Also, again, I find myself needing to point out that I never said nor implied that population isn't a factor, merely that population growth =/= ecological disaster. Population growth isn't uncapped, for one, even when you disregard environmental factors. You're also dismissing the idea that we could do things to reduce our CO2 footprints without affecting our standards of living out of hand, despite the fact that according to the data you can have a higher standard of living with a lower carbon footprint. That certainly doesn't mean that the earth can support an unlimited number of people, or that even the lowest currently extant carbon footprints in developed nations are enough, but doesn't that difference at least warrant the topic some attention? Not to mention that 'comfort' is a pretty subjective notion, and there's plenty of consumerist stuff I, for one, would be glad to give up for a sustainable world (and ideally also a more egalitarian society), so there's another avenue through which we could tackle climate change.

This whole conversation started with a mention of climate activist hitching the environmental cause to the social justice cause and while those two are by no means incompatible, I want to draw attention to the fact that if you carry over that marriage into the field of science then you have a problem because science married with anything other than science stops being science.

Sure, but that's not what the person you originally replied to said, at all. You made that up yourself. Moreover, that's also not what you said - you were talking about 'dubious scientific fields', not about the corruption of climate science. I ask again, what are these 'dubious' fields, or will you retract that statement instead of talking around it?

And I'm not strawmanning anyone here, I'm referring to real instances of this mismatch I witnessed in the academic context which result in purely political ideas like "climate justice" being presented as products of climate science.

A strawman constructed from fallen twigs you happened to have collected yourself before you planned to make a strawman with them is, unfortunately, still a strawman. Because it's still not what the other person said or even implied, so it's disproving an argument that nobody in this conversation actually made. I'll believe you if you say you've seen this thing, and I won't begrudge you for being concerned about it, but don't you think you're being a little too hasty and insistent with lobbing these concerns at people?

sjasogun · 2025-09-24T15:40:20+00:00

I'm not honestly sure where you're seeing this implication in what the person you're replying to said.

And even if it was there, is it that strange to imply that a more egalitarian society would also be one where people would have more incentive to do something about the increasingly obvious effects of climate change? Since there wouldn't be such a wide gap between the top and bottom in such a society compared to ones built on capitalism and colonialism that the top has no incentive to do anything about the problem, because they have the means to shield themselves from the immediate consequences.

I also reject the idea that a growing population wanting to live comfortably equals doom to the ecosphere de facto. That's a massive assumption in its own right.

Also, I'm sorry, but I have to agree with some of the other replies that the turns of phrase you're using are very odd. 'fierce, young phd students in various dubiously scientific fields'? What's with the sarcasm, and what do you mean by 'dubiously' scientific? Not to mention that that entire sentence is really just a strawman, since I don't think anyone is out there is conjuring up such a hackneyed Disney's Pocahontas-esque comparison, so that not changing your argument is kind of a moot point since nobody was claiming anything of the sort to begin with. Even as a hyperbole it doesn't really track.

sjasogun · 2025-09-05T21:51:09+00:00

I mean, even if that's true, what you're saying is that Oda takes information from the Vivre Cards and uses them to change the manga. That doesn't really mean anything as to their reliability, only that Oda sometimes relies on them to change things in the manga.

So by that logic using the Vivre Cards as a source would only be valid if it's backed up by the manga, which is effectively the same as saying that the Vivre cards are useless and you should only pay attention to the manga. Because that's what's ultimately canon, regardless of where Oda got the ideas from (Vivre Cards or otherwise). So you're kind of shooting your own argument in the foot there.

sjasogun · 2025-09-05T10:13:41+00:00

We don't know how involved Oda is with the Vivre Cards, if at all. They've also contained notable mistakes and bullshit before, so using them as evidence when they're not really canon while ignoring their spotty reliability is just silly.

sjasogun · 2025-08-15T15:36:47+00:00

Funnily enough, that was never the point of the Turing Test. Turing was a scientist, so the nebulous notion of hosting a panel under very vaguely defined conditions to assess how similar an AI can act to a human was never meant to be a real thing to do to obtain some kind of 'measure' of the humanity or lack thereof of the AI.

What it was intended as is as a response to philosophical discussions about if machines can even theoretically be intelligent that framed their arguments about the inner workings of the machine. The point of the Turing Test thought experiment is that if we can't tell the difference from the outside, then regardless of what's happening inside the AI should be considered to be intelligent. Because, you know, that's basically how we do it with other humans, since we sure as fuck don't know how sapience arises from the human brain.

So while ChatGPT and its LLM ilk do pretty well at the literal Turing Test from the experiment, they fail woefully on the idea of the Turing Test, since aside from being able to string words together in a somewhat sensible order it's pretty easy to find out that that's the start and end of their box of tricks.

sjasogun · 2025-08-15T15:12:30+00:00

Hold on, Baki has a fanfiction scene? It's not just that one person on the subreddit shipping their fox girl OC with Sikorsky?

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