The IMF and World Bank are single, centralized institutions that (from my perspective right now) are making an unforced error.

As much as neoliberals can be cynical, calculated, and cruel, it's easy to forget that their economic system is a dogmatic cult that's irrational, flawed, and built on materially false tenets. They're not magic robots doing paperclip optimization, they're cruel people dogmatically following an earnest belief in a deeply flawed school of economic thought written by cranks with ulterior motives.

I also learned that the color red wasn't strongly associated with them until 2000.

This is the weirdest and most infuriating of all the empty little symbol stuff. Historically election maps just kind of used random colors in the US because none of the parties had traditional color associations, but because one newscaster talked about "the red states" when pointing at a map where Bush was represented with red and the states in question were literally just colored red on the map, now the GOP has the left's color and the Democrats have the traditional color of elite reactionaries and as stupid and meaningless as this is it's just so annoying especially because the Democrats really do just want to be snooty aristocratic elites and they do insufferable left punching based on associating their even-more-reactionary liberal counterparts in the GOP with the left to smear them.

It'd be like if American political parties somehow adopted the hammer and sickle through some galaxy brain "hammer=judge's gavel=law and order" and "sickle=agricorp subsidies" logic: meaningless and empty, but offensive appropriation all the same.

looking for good guys in WW1 is probably not going to end well

The Red Army fighting the invasion by the Entente who wanted the Whites back in power so Russia would return to the war. That's technically not in WWI but it was both contemporaneous to it, related to it, and involved powers currently fighting in it.

I find myself describing it as a cold and crystalized rage - icy, sharp, and still, lying beneath the surface. We have far since passed the point where frantic anger became appropriate, since any sort of moral event horizon was passed, but it all has to be frozen and put away, still present and painful but constrained enough that we can still function.

I assume if there's a massive volcanic eruption and the average is 1.7 - they'll [cough] cook the books and say there's no breach because the eruption was a natural fluctuation in the climate.

Not that it affects your overall point, but a large volcanic eruption would generally lower the temperature because the ash and chemicals it puts out increase the amount of light reflected back out of the atmosphere instead of being absorbed. It's basically the natural equivalent of the sorts of hairbrained geoengineering schemes techbros like to promise as a miracle cure. AFAIK there have even been what are basically miniature ice ages because of volcanic activity in recorded history.

So if, say, the Yellowstone volcano blew that would drop the global temperature back down for a year or two, as well as decreasing carbon emissions by shutting down the US and its coal mines and oil fields.

I read it when I was a depressed ball of repression and anxiety in my early 20s, and in retrospect I'm half convinced that the book was an elaborate shitpost to get the sort of person who wants to read a book on manipulating people to instead read a bunch of old arabic parables and ultimately get indirectly called a dumbass in the final chapter for thinking they could learn how to manipulate people and wield power from a book, which also praises Mao and the CPC's strategic ability during the revolution.

It will never not be funny/infuriating that literally everyone resorted to human wave tactics except for the army that's racistly stereotyped as using them.

As an aside, it is genuinely fucked how things like ad-hoc militias in the early days of the war deciding to fight doomed holding actions to buy their families and neighbors time to evacuate despite not being able to source enough guns to arm everyone who was willing to actively and knowingly sacrifice their own lives in the hopes of saving everyone they know and care about gets spun into racist tales about an entire army throwing unarmed men into a meatgrinder, and how this seeps into portrayals of successful attacks carried out by well equipped veteran units who'd spent days training for it ahead of time like the river crossing in Enemy at the Gates (which IRL was an unopposed action from a well equipped and extremely prepared veteran unit).

Oh shit, it's that game. I remember seeing a trailer for it posted here several years ago and I was just thinking about it the other day, wondering if that ever released or what its deal was.

Yeah, he's Khajiit CIA with all the propaganda-driven "super cool Adult In The Room that pragmatically murders enemies of the regime" vibes that entails.

It does help that most of the people he's killing are aristocratic elf nazis.

The expansion packs gave us some decent characters, including some Altmer that didn't like the Altmer nazis to the point of making their entire island disappear from them (but now cooperating with them in the present because fucking liberalism again).

On that note, the Psijics kind of embody both what I love and hate about ESO's writing: it actually gets to go to and use all the cool, weird places and things from the lore that are seemingly banned from mainline games because they step outside Todd Howard's unseasoned mashed potato vision, which is really cool and an actually good use of the setting, but then they also tend to have really underwhelming writing and story design because it's an MMO. Like just walking around Vvardenfell or the Morrowind mainland or Valenwood or Elsweyr is really cool, but then the actual storylines there are just kind of shit. There are flashes of good character design and some writing that actually grapples with how fucked up and weird the TES setting is supposed to be, and they definitely do this better than the mainline Bethesda studio, but overall the writing and stories are just kind of bland slop spread over really cool and nice looking places.

It also doesn't help that the way they split their expansions up means if you just buy the latest major expansion you miss the first story beat of every arc, then get about 60% of its story, then miss the remaining ~35% or so because it's all sliced up into dungeon stories and minor DLCs that suck and are also very short but contain the ending of their respective arc's story.

if she was just incompetent or uncaring enough to delegate to genocide-enjoying generals

Something like half the quests involving Altmer are basically "the hitlerite elves have such enlarged racism lobes they cannot help but plot to rebel against the liberal Ayrenn and do pogroms, genocide, or attempted omnicide." Ayrenn is a tepid liberal reformer whose hegemony relies on the willing violence of a bunch of self-defeatingly racist elven fancy lads, and any possibility of making the AD less ontologically evil died the second she decided to try to coexist with the omnicidal aristocrats as long as they agreed to let a few bosmer and khajit into their paramilitary country club, instead of purging the entire noble class and replacing them with bosmer and khajit loyalists.

That's right, she's basically elf Jimmy Carter: charismatic, affable, seemingly well meaning and empathic on a personal level, but entirely unwilling to wield power against entrenched blocs of ontologically evil racist monsters in the state's ranks and supporting institutions, and still ultimately willing to collaborate with maintaining the empire's hegemony abroad with the most grotesque violence including turning a blind eye to or rubber stamping genocide.

My hot take is that most of the community love for the AD comes entirely from Razum-dar being such a charismatic and memorable character and other factions just not having any recurring characters as memorable or enjoyable as Raz. Players like Raz and Raz worships the ground Ayrenn walks on, so some of that rubs off on the players too. I couldn't even give you a description of the equivalent recurring secret agent quest giver for the Ebonheart Pact, and I couldn't get into the Daggerfall Covenant storyline at all because Daggerfall is such a painfully generic and dull place that I rushed through a little of it then just got demoralized by how much all of it was bland and boring and went to do something else instead, so I don't know if they got any decent characters at any point but I've never heard of any whereas everyone knows and loves Raz.

Stanning any of the ontologically evil factions and their idle dipshit monarchs is bad and dumb, but if someone's going to do it the funny cat man secret agent has gotta tip the scales a fair bit.

100%. There's a pervasive sort of belief that laws are discrete, literal things carved into the very ontology of existence instead of fuzzy guidelines enforced or ignored at the arbitrary whims of the legal system which also has no actual obligation to know the laws and whose will is still considered legitimate even when it is directly breaking the law or making up imaginary ones that don't exist but some dipshit cop thinks they do. Like it's just straight up these civic cult brainworms that legislatures are doing some sort of magic ritual to create Law and this then becomes some sort of real and true binding principle to be unfailingly carried out by reliable enforcers.

Dial up that belief even further and it becomes like the civic cult's version of numerology and prophesy through analyzing the holy texts, where they believe so wholly in legal literalism that they start to think it's a magic system and they're wizards who can exploit its literalness and nature of being fundamental to reality to their own advantage.

Yeah, I liked Kingmaker despite its writhing brainworms, though I never managed to get into Wrath because every time I opened it up I got some decision paralysis/anxiety thing about making a character build and closed it before actually doing anything.

Owlcat's Rogue Trader game was janky as hell but very fun and I need to go back and actually finish that someday. I'd really like to see them, or any decent studio really, do a Pathfinder 2e game, because that's such an improvement over both D&D and over first edition Pathfinder.

The Witcher 3 and Skyrim both have notoriously bad mechanics, and while FONV was better than FO3 mechanically it was still panned as being the same janky not-very-good attempt at FPS combat that FO3 was. I never played nor paid attention to RDR, but Rockstar is also notoriously bad at doing combat and haven't ever really improved past early 2000s third person shooter mechanics so I'm assuming it had bad combat too.

I mean Veilguard looks janky and mid too and BG3 is just D&D and D&D is and always has been mechanically awful, but that's such a weird point to focus on: everything in the image has bad combat and for some of them that's famously just a flaw people overlook because of the game's other strengths, with the worst offenders being the older games.

Also The Witcher 3 literally has the canonically pan narrator say "the real monsters are cruel and intolerant men" repeatedly, along with a sizeable portion of the game's quests being literally "damn, all this racism and intolerance really is the real monster, isn't it?" or "damn, this rich misogynist really is the real monster, isn't he?" It is literally doing the thing I say writers with a point should do and that's have the characters face the camera and say that point over and over, and it still goes over s heads.

D&D does genuinely suck at both being an RPG system in general and also at the specific sort of dungeon crawling resource attrition game it was designed to be, and BG3 does suffer horribly for being D&D. I'd say it being 5e is even worse, but it's not like 4e was any better. 3.5e was interesting but an absolute mess, and I have limited exposure to earlier editions but what I've seen looks even worse and jankier. Like the character building is "this character is [class], number get bigger when level up, no choices, only number go up" and the combat is "you make a basic attack, because this is D&D 5e and that's what characters do they make a single attack role; magic users can make a basic attack with bigger numbers once per day, in exchange for their normal basic attacks being worse; this is a very serious and respectable system that people play for some reason."

Pathfinder is the only good version of D&D and even that still has problems from the whole "it's still D&D, fundamentally speaking" thing no matter how much 2e does to mitigate all that design tech debt and give lots of flavorful build options and things different classes can do other than D&D's bread and butter of characters either being a basic attack bot or being a worse basic attack bot that sometimes does a special attack.

Damn, imagine if instead of BG3 Larian had made a Pathfinder 2e game that had nothing to do with WotC's mid setting or bad ruleset. I vaguely remember hearing about a mod project to overhaul BG3 to Pathfinder rules since the underpinning mechanics are the basically same and Pathfinder just has better class and ability design and balancing, is that actually real or did I imagine it?

I think the point is that if a computer has lost power it is likely enough to lose power again that it shouldn't go into an update cycle where losing power has a risk of corrupting files. Like windows really shouldn't be like "oh, the computer was improperly shutdown? this is the perfect time to force an update through!" and should, at the very least, ask permission to do so through a "this computer wasn't shutdown correctly, is it safe to update?" screen.

AFAIK the premise is basically "given the last frame and the current input, what is the next frame?" so there's no object permanence or structure behind it it's just making a video that for any given span of two consecutive frames looks like a video of minecraft.

It basically means "they are impure and have made too many concessions/strayed from the true path" and is something ultras, especially Hoxhaists who can get up to like a third of a given text just being the word "revisionist" prefixed to every single noun, like to use as a catch-all term for why they're unhappy with an ML party or AES state. Sometimes it's actually cogent, like the Hoxhaist critique of China's foreign policy after Mao, other times it's just sectarian whining from people who want to feel like the most pure and clever special lads with the best theory untainted by praxis.

It's full/literal meaning as used by leftists is just something like "going backwards" either in theory or praxis, but like I said in its normal use is just calling a policy, tendency, party, or state impure.

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Is that a normal, perfectly acceptable moat for an enclosure in a dinosaur/prehistoric animal zoo game? Is this actually a game that treats dinosaurs as just the large animals they are, instead of as magical movie monsters? Because as silly a thing to focus on as that is that is like the biggest aesthetic criticism I have of anything to do with like Jurassic Park or its sequels and spinoffs.

Is the game itself any good, or at least better than the Jurassic Park branded zoo games that are rather silly and not very good at being zoo games?

Why did they react so massively, instead of dicking with patches?

Its fundamental issues were really just two things: it was a $40 game competing in a stale genre dominated by well established F2P games, and literally nobody even knew it existed in the first place. It had nothing selling it, Sony didn't do anything to manufacture any sort of enthusiasm, and the first time anyone heard about it was when there were a ton of "lmao you ever heard of Concord? No? Well get this, nobody's playing it! This game you haven't heard of, that nobody's heard of? It's dead, complete flop, what a joke amirite?" articles that sealed its fate because PvP games more than anything live on player confidence and investment (hence why F2P live service models have become basically mandatory for them, because anyone can "just try" those which helps keep the population numbers high enough that people keep playing).

It's still kind of weird they didn't shuffle it around and rerelease it as a F2P live service game, which it probably could have survived as, but honestly after getting the "dead game in the first 12 hours" rep it probably wasn't ever going to draw in crowds because all anyone associated it with was it being dead and unpopular.