Kalbear

Awesome emergent gameplay thing happened last night. Was driving around doing NCPD calls and saw 3 trauma team members on the top of a hill by North Oak that were highlighted yellow. My dumb ass assumed that meant that they were up to no good and if they were civs or cops they'd be blue, so I killed them (sidenote: Trauma Team folks are hard). That immediately put me at 3 stars wanted. Oops. Within seconds 6 police cruisers showed. I jumped into the bushes and cover nearby and hid while they looked around. I then decided to see if memory wipe would make my wanted rating drop and they'd stop looking for me - so wipe + overclock and I hit the 11 cops I could see. Sure enough, the wanted value dropped like right away. That's pretty cool! But there's now 6 cop cars on North Oak's windy roads, and they've blocked several other cars from passing. The cops start getting back in their cars to take off. The first one starts to pull out but of course the AI being what it is, is none too careful about hitting anyone else - and cops are especially not careful about that. So he absolutely rams the hell out of a civvie car. Which triggers that civvie to think they're under attack, which causes them to pull iron and start shooting at the 12 cops that are there. That, of course, causes ALL the cops to fire back and absolutely murder that civ - which blows up that car and causes some cops to get killed. Which then causes MORE cops to show up and murder the rest of the civs that are in this line. And I'm just sitting in the bushes eating my popcorn.

It is! It's a fun, easy soulslike with good lore and a very good feeling of star wars OT.

Right now I enjoy the nekomaka tech sniper along with a power smg for up close. The smg is nice because it gives me Shinobi points. Will probably be going for a tech shotgun to level my horrible solo values.

I was talking about tw wh3: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/total-war-warhammer-iii/9NGGB0GZPB9D

They've already done that.

Yep, that's pretty spot on. If Riverdale had weird cock & ball torture and jumanji references it'd be almost identical.

It's decent. It definitely leans into the teen drama vibe a lot. They also went hard on some of the hilarious sex and penis things that put the season three opening to shame. Very unsubtle, mind you. But well made, continues the corporation producing satire of corporations thing, and occasionally stupidly extreme.

So bears fans, it could have been worse- they could have traded 3 first rounders + for Russell Wilson. https://www.profootballrumors.com/2023/09/bears-offered-three-first-rounders-for-russell-wilson-in-2021

Like who? Because I bet if you look into it one of the things they do is have way less money in their politics than we do. And acknowledging the reality of things is not defeatist. It just means your idea won't work. There isn't an opposite approach; there's a complementary approach. What you need, ultimately, are a few very popular people who are willing to fight the system and don't care about the money for whatever reason. The most likely source of that will be people who already are fairly wealthy. If they're popular enough they'll be able to get more people onboard because opposing them will be political suicide. The general populace will go along with them happily because they like that person. But - here's the important thing - that liking that person has nothing to do with their policies. The policies come after the person, not the other way around. The majority of people don't vote for someone who will do the things they want; they vote for someone who makes them feel better, and then they justify their rationalization for it later. Or - even worse - they alter their policy goals to suit that popular person's viewpoints. No, this is revisionist bullshit. The lack of care from the public is not remotely what got us there. This is the same bullshit argument that individual people are the ones who need to take care of climate change - an argument that is pushed by big oil companies. Before this there was a system that fucked over minorities left and right. We're still happy to fuck over women. We didn't burn the system down because Nixon literally tried to commit crimes and in fact we elected a Republican 6 years later, one who did far worse things than Nixon ever dreamed of - because we liked him and he made us feel good. I mean, seriously - we had an administration which sold drugs in exchange for arming a brutal insurgency - and you think we are not caring now? People aren't going to change in the aggregate the way you want any more than my cat will start flying if I yell at it enough. You have this notion that personal responsibility solves all problems despite this absurd amount of evidence that this isn't true; have you thought about actually applying this to yourself and seeing how you're actually, ya know, wrong?

I mean, okay - but that's not fixable. That is, as I said, what people are. As long as they're mostly okay and getting by without a lot of strife or pain they'll not be doing anything about it. That is just what people are. Your thesis is that the problem with the system is people, and that's not a particularly interesting problem unless your solution is 'get rid of people'. And then it's a very interesting problem that a lot of people will often have opinions on. As long as you have a system that has rulers based mostly on their personal popularity and tribal allegiances, you will always have this as an issue. If you want to have a system that is more about policy and merit you're asking for a benevolent dictatorship of some kind based mostly on bureaucrats and career government officials. Which, ya know, actually works pretty well as far as running things, provided most people are in line with it - Singapore is such a place as an example. But it isn't a democracy.

Probably the most likely outcome is an oligarchical authoritarian state that has some semblances of democratic rule but largely is highly illiberal. It probably oscillates between full authoritarian power and split governments which get absolutely nothing done, and where many of the big decisions are made via judicial fiat. A civil war or actual dictatorship are only likely if the US goes into deep decline financially for most of the people in it. If that doesn't happen chances are you'll get sporadic rioting and protests, occasional storming of the capital, but not a lot more than that.

This is simply people. It's not Americans exclusively. The main differences with US citizens compared to other Western democracies are around deeper distrust of governmental institutions, major ethnic divides, and a stronger value of individuality. But the general thesis of 'knowing basic stuff about the government' is not going to be a root cause anyone is going to fix because that's people for you. If your solution to fixing the US voting system or anything about our (or anyone else's) politics is 'educate more people better' you are absolutely fucked. If you take that as a basis point it becomes clear what the real root cause of the US political system's problems are: money. People are going to vote for those that they feel best about - regardless of policy concerns or other things like that. Policy doesn't win elections - feelings do. And as long as many politicians are accepting money to make policy changes that are in the rich's self interests those people will continue to win - both because they have more money to manipulate feelings, and because those who are best at manipulating feelings will go and get paid more.

Yeah, found out this was a thing. I think it doubles xp? Its pretty substantial.

Also remember to go sleep in your bed for a 1hr xp boost.

But again we know they didn't - because we see her after the war looking for Thrawn. And the only reason that she would want to find Thrawn is to find Ezra. If she's trying to stop Thrawn and doesn't care about Ezra his location doesn't matter in the least, and the best thing she can do is stop Morgan, find the map and destroy it. But she doesn't do that, because she cares about finding Ezra. Except then, randomly, she decides that Thrawn being rescued is more important. This also feels like a big hit for Hera. Hera could have been the one telling Ahsoka not to go after Ezra because of the threat. Hera could have been the one telling Sabine to destroy the map. Ahsoka could have been actually in line with Sabine instead. There was no need for them to have that conflict at all. Have Hera yelling at Sabine for losing this. But no, we get Ahsoka doing this weird dance.

I'm pretty sure that this is inaccurate given what we see in Worlds between Worlds. You are probably right that Ahsoka doesn't say anything - but the actual text from the other episode is that Ahsoka literally owes Ezra her life: But why would Ahsoka - who doesn't identify as a Jedi and specifically hates that part of it - go that way now? She has never been about doing the greater good thing when friends are going to suffer because of it. That still doesn't track. If she's absolutely wanting to stop the Empire from returning (like Hera does, which DOES make sense) Ahsoka had plenty of opportunity to do that by going after Moff Gideon. Instead she goes a different way, and the obvious implication from her fight with Morgan in Mandalorian and how she was looking there was that she was specifically doing all that because she wanted to save Ezra. Otherwise - why care about where Thrawn is? She wants to know where Thrawn is so...she can make sure he stays there? That doesn't make any sense at all.

I don't see why that matters. That's not the point. The point is that Sabine first hand experienced how bad Thrawn was. Sabine knows how ruthless he is and how bad he was - especially for Mandalore - where her invention of weapons was used against her and her people to kill them by Thrawn. If anyone should want to ensure that Thrawn doesn't come back, no matter what - it's Sabine, not Ahsoka. And again a lot of that doesn't make much sense, because Ahsoka's quest (at the end of Rebels) wasn't about finding Thrawn or worrying about him; it was saving Ezra. Like, that's literally what she tells Sabine that they're going to go and do. And that's fine that they want to drop that, but they should have established at least some reason why Ahsoka is so terrified of Thrawn, because she has, like, zero previous motivation for that. I think we got what we're going to get. The answer was that Ahsoka saw Sabine as not a great student and more importantly thought that a flawed student with Ahsoka as her master would lead Sabine down the dark path - the same way that her master did. I think the implied motivation is that Ahsoka believes herself to be tainted because of Anakin, and when she ran into any amount of trouble she just...quit.

Yeah, sorry pronouns were vague. Though that does remind me. It bugs me how they changed the motivations from Rebels to Ahsoka in the two main characters. As this show demonstrates Ahsoka never actually had any interactions with Thrawn. Hera and Sabine did, but Ahsoka got rescued from certain death by Ezra and basically missed that entire thing. Sabine had to deal with him first hand, though, and he was a right bastard to her and Ezra and Hera. It seems to me that the motivations should be reversed. Ahsoka should be the one who wants to rescue Ezra no matter what - because she is the one that owes Ezra her full existence. Everything she has done since is entirely because of him. Sabine, however, should be a lot more mixed in her feelings - and often was in the show as well, especially when it came to her Mandalorian heritage. Heck, she noped out entirely for a while because of that! I know why they did it - because they wanted Sabine to go on the trip and make the choice - but that's an example of how the plot makes the characters do things that they wouldn't organically do.

Uh, okay. That would make sense if he had any other actual outcome possible to get him home, or that there was vaguely any danger at all about having that stuff on the ship. But I don't think that's the case. I also don't get why on earth it matters at all about Ezra, or any of that plot. Sabine's only value is to go lead them to Ezra...but if they're leaving him on the planet what does he matter? I guess Ezra might have been causing problems, maybe, but it doesn't look like his horde of ninja turtles are doing a whole lot. I know I shouldn't think about this much at all - but that's sort of the problem with having a character like Thrawn. If you're going to have someone known for their master tactics and intelligence their plans should be vaguely looking smart and it should look like he's planning ahead, instead of being surprised by the most basic things.

I'm okay not knowing what they're loading onto the ship yet. If I had to guess based on Jedi Outcast it'd be mummified Dathomir and they're going to raise them as zombie army people. But it's not really that big a deal to not know (yet) - all we need to know is that Thrawn made a deal that he'd transport them back in exchange for their help. Now, a better question is why they didn't load these things up in the YEARS they had for prep time and...I don't know. Thrawn is a master tactician who is also absolute shit at logistics I guess.

it's true that she thinks that. It's not remotely Ezra's character to actually act badly in this case; that's a bit of Sabine projecting. Heck, we see that in this episode where Ezra asks and she says it's complicated and Ezra says 'so...pretty bad then?' He's used to these kinds of horrible odds and weird escapes. Put it another way - I bet that when Ezra finds out about this absolutely nothing special is going to happen.

I guess...but these days that's a big part of it. CP2077 got a lot of goodwill back because of that community outreach - and things like Edgerunners. Skyrim famously has a ton of community support. Minecraft is all about it. Heck, even if you don't engage with those sorts of things I guarantee you you're engaging with things like FAQs and forums and help resources and strategy guides - and those are all part of the community too. Larian's response time has also been exemplary here. It absolutely does suck that act 3 is now hugely unplayable for a whole bunch of folks (especially after they had mostly fixed it), but it's also not unreasonable to think that it'll get fixed or mitigated somewhat quickly.

I don't think that's entirely true, and I also think that the things that they're getting dinged on are (often) not the absolute end of the world as far as enjoyment goes. It also helps that people can spend hundreds of hours on the game and have a great time. It's not like they log in and boom, it doesn't work (like CP2077). The biggest problem that people are having right now, at least, is that they really want to play the game and it keeps crashing or performing badly later in the game. That sucks, and it's a massive bummer, but it's not at all in the same class as can't log in or losing all the saves and whatnot. That the creators are also really good with community engagement AND the actual actors are really great with it too helps tremendously too. The game isn't just about the game; it's about the community involvement, the memes, the hilarious ways people are able to do various things, the creativity...all of that is a lot more than releasing the exact same game.

Yeah, this. There wasn't anything special about Ezra in this that made me think about him in Rebels or endear him. There was a vague hint that he might command the howlers to go do something but...he didn't. He didn't bust out the saber, he kind of used force pushing a bit but nothing special. It was just kinda...there. And as I said earlier Sabine and Skoll both being Super Mysterious for no good reason just felt stupid.

Another awesome mini-detail I love - there are now, at night, roaming bands of gangs shooting it out with cars. And Maelstrom is now putting up roadblocks in various places with burning cars too. Like, if you thought you'd miss out by doing fast travel before, holy crap are you missing out now.