noooooooooooo

Just a note on Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night: it’s extremely egregious yuri bait and the plot as a whole does a massive 180 after the seventh episode to turn a story about living as who you want to be despite social pressure into some tepid slop about reconciling with abusive parents and bullies and conforming to what they want instead, with Kiui’s arc in episode 11 being the only part of the last 5 episodes that’s actually good and matches the earlier episodes in quality and themes. The whole thing is so egregious that it genuinely feels like there was a whole, complete story planned out, some executive came in and said “no, too gay, we’re rewriting it” and then either missed the trans rep or someone managed to protect that, because those last 5 episodes feel like a story that’s just been 90% erased and crudely filled in with filler by a different hand.

Its two founders, crab boy and gucci, were both insufferable reactionary dipshits and the worst posters on the old sub. They explicitly set out to create a safe space for reactionary dipshits like themselves, that was always both the inevitable end state and their intended objective.

It took way too long for the old sub to purge them, I think it only happened towards the end after the admins had started targeting the sub and its mods.

I have literally had a fascist dipshit make exactly that argument before, with the most self-satisfied tone like it was some sort of gotcha.

Pathfinder 2e is basically just D&D done better than D&D itself has ever done. It’s like if 3.5e had been refined into a more streamlined and modern game with a bunch of the bad-design-decisions that are baked into the fabric of D&D mitigated as much as they possibly can without just ripping them out, and they found a way to keep the variety and customizability of 3.5e but without as many exponentially compounding consequences.

Basically, where D&D went down this path of flattening out the splat and turning characters into basically straight line level up progressions with as few choices as possible and no room for character building (that is, you choose your class, your major class feature, and then that’s it you’re done you just level up and never think about anything again unless you’re a magic user who gets to choose which spell you want to be allowed to cast once per day), Pathfinder 2e went down the path of pruning the sprawl of options down to a few major branches for each class, and then fleshed that out with a lot of little choices that aren’t particularly meaningful but which leave tons of room for flavorful character building and which make sure that every level everyone is making some sort of choice no matter how small and fluffy that choice is.

I hate proprietary AI models so much. They’re all the material and social problems of open source ones, but entirely in the hands of the dullest and most ontologically evil corporate suits alive. Trying to make a machine that’s the sum of decades or centuries of human culture and which extrudes a fine paste somewhat resembling the same, that’s obviously a very mixed bag at best, but when that paste is just going straight into a selection of corporate injection molds there are no possible positives left, only the complete enclosure of human culture and its replacement with injection molded slop.

AIDungeon was such a hilarious shitshow, for all that it was an entertaining toy for a while. Honestly I feel a baffling sort of nostalgia for the GPT-2 era of chatbots where it was new and good enough to be interesting but bad enough to be incredibly funny. It was so much better than the bland slop modern chatbots are where they’re bad enough to be useless and good enough to be boring. It’s like schlocky grindhouse B-movie slop vs modern overcooked Hollywood slop.

IIRC what they’re really angling for is getting out of publishing books to begin with and instead selling AI GMs as a service who just play what may as well be calvinball with the players based on a secret ruleset if any at all. Edit: to add onto this, IIRC the reason 5e lacked the massive amount of splatbooks they relied on in earlier editions was because they really wanted to shift towards selling digital services and wanted to get away from things like “people playing the game having a copy of the rules” in favor of them just like, buying an NPC or an item or some shit for a virtual tabletop, because they really want to be a shitty microtransaction-filled MMO but without all the “investing resources into actually making and running that sort of thing” part.

So basically they’re trying to be AIDungeon even though that failed miserably because people only wanted it for porn and also the concept was untenable as a serious thing and also still is completely untenable.

In other words they should go for it, put all their eggs in that incredibly stupid basket, and stop making RPGs at all. I am saying this because I want what’s best for them, obviously, and not because I want to see D&D finally come to an end and make way for other, better systems. Definitely.

Shapeshifting trickster spirit that carries out arbitrary and deadly morality tests on any passersby who look chuddy.

Trotsky’s work as a reactionary particle physicist exposed him to dangerous forms of novel radiation that ultimately lead to his death following a crippling mutant brainworm infestation and a failed attempt to combat them with an icepick.

They seem to go back and forth on whether they’re loss leaders subsidized by more expensive games and captive paid online services or mediocre hardware sold at a premium to their captive audience. Last gen was AFAIK the loss leader phase (and the one before that was outdated, dogshit hardware sold at a premium from the start), so now we’re on to the squeezing their audience for as much as they can phase, and in another 5 years they’ll do another loss leader console, and so on.

One could definitely build a sort of RPGMaker framework engine kind of thing on traditional procgen methods that builds a bunch of prompts to get assets from text and image generators while the engine itself provides the structure and all the mechanical bits. Hell, I could probably have the concept working in a month or two of work, depending on how low the bar for “it makes a game” is.

It would just suck horribly and make the actual worst nonsense you’ve ever seen. Like just as I can see how all the parts to make this would fit together I can also see how everywhere the generators are involved will just straight up fail and produce absolute random garbage because that’s what they do, they produce nonsense that at best only looks good in isolation and to do any better than that they have to both be actively shackled to a very narrow task with tools that require human curation and design tailored to the situation and even then their outputs still have to be carefully curated and edited by hand afterwards.

Just generating images right now is so convoluted that people understand the process a little bit title themselves as “prompt engineers”.

It’s not convoluted or hard at all, they’re just self-aggrandizing dipshits who think learning a few rote prayers and spamming keyword salad into a prompt box while doing gacha pulls with the “generate” button is some sort of esoteric task. The most complicated it gets is setting up workflows in comfyui, which is a simple flowchart for babies that’s straightforward and extremely simple compared to even the simplest of actual programming tasks.

I don’t want to rail against something that people enjoy the way they enjoy Dungeon Meshi especially since the early parts are so good and charming, but goddamn if it didn’t do two things that really sour it for me. The revelation about the Demon and the whole cosmology of the setting are one, and the other was pretty early on with the Falin storyline when

Yeah, I had pretty much the same reaction somewhere around that point too. The Demon and its attendant theme of “the most dAnGeROuS wishes aren’t self serving and cruel ones, but a desire to improve things and help others” are 100% the worst part of the worldbuilding and in fact are so bad that they kind of retroactively ruin all the cool ideas that came before imo.

Not a fan of this quote really. It seems to be built on the premise that humans are somehow incapable of sincerely believing in nonsense because, I don’t know, we’re just inherently rational or something?

I think it’s just observing a sort of nihilistic troll behavior that’s probably a thing that some people have always done, where the contents of what’s being said doesn’t matter so long as they’re at once inflammatory and self-serving. It shouldn’t be taken to conclude that everyone who is awful is just maliciously pretending, but that there’s a certain sort of bombastic troll who just makes up shit on the spot and says it with a shit eating grin and complete conviction, knowing that it’s bullshit but enjoying the harm it causes and the way it furthers their own goals.

It’s like a less formalized, more intuitive version of neoreactionary meme magic bullshit, just saying things you just made up over and over until people believe them.

I once had a former USAF psyops officer claim the Air Force was doing something like that during the first Gulf War, but he was drunk and rambling in a boastful “good old days” sort of way that included pulling out a zip lock bag full of old psyops leaflets he’d kept as souvenirs, so not the most reliable source.

I think I’ve said this before, but if Cyberpunk as a genre was just getting started now it would be about China instead and would be even more racist. Like the role of Japanese corporations in Cyberpunk was largely anxiety over Japan’s tech industry competing with American industry and nativist fears that they’d turn around and dominate the US instead of remaining a client state, but it also had a fair bit of fetishism and was taking inspiration from Japanese Cyberpunk media as well.

If it were just now forming it would be nothing but frothing hatred and fear of China becoming a hegemon on par with what the US has been, and probably made up of like 90% weird bullshit redditors have memed themselves into believing.

I saw a link in this thread to a year old review of that hog slop

Wasn’t that me linking my old review? The “Made in Abyss is the worst thing ever made” thread?

I am baffled, disturbed, and deeply disappointed that even that got excuses made for it from some Hexbears back then.

Some of the deleted comments in that thread were people arguing in its favor. I still see people recommend it now and then and I’m always quick to jump on them for it.

Like just to contextualize this, I like grindhouse as a genre. I like awful slop as a spectacle. I watched (pirated) all of SAO and enjoyed riffing on how bad so much of it was. I sat through (pirated) all of Overlord and found it something that’s awful in a way that’s fun to mock and hate because as gross and bad as it is it’s still in the tier where you can point at it and say “lmao wtf, that’s awful” instead of just feeling sick. I watched (pirated) those shitty Piranha reboots that literally included jokes about breast sizes in their titles and thought they were entertainingly dumb, gratuitous movies. I enjoyed (pirated) the Sci-Fi channel original series Blood Drive about a death race with cars that are powered by human blood for some reason. I think Hellsing Ultimate is actually kind of good if also dumb and very gratuitous, as in lingering on graphically killing literal Nazis so long that it starts to get kind of boring and repetitive, which is a concept one wouldn’t think possible but they manage it somehow. And Made in Abyss actually haunts me with how awful and also just sort of shit it is.

Although that said, I have seen short blurbs about things that might rival it for being unwatchably awful that I’m never going to bother with because they also look boring and gross. Live everything I’ve heard about Peter Grill for example makes me think two things: that it may actually rival Made in Abyss in repulsiveness and also . Shield Hero and Redo of Healer are also in the “maybe this is as bad, but I don’t feel like confirming it” dumpster.

I had a similar experience to each and every attempt for treat hogs in my local area (coworkers too, unfortunately) to show me the “good parts” of Game of Thrones.

I hate the GoT showrunners and all their OC, and even the early seasons I thought were decent when I first saw them looked cheap and mid when I revisited them a few years later, and I want to stress that even that is nowhere near how bad this is, that’s how bad it is.

Like I know you hate Sword Art Online, and let me say that SAO is comparatively quaint and wholesome and well paced and well thought out next to the absolute pile of flaming garbage that is Made in Abyss. SAO is poorly written slop that’s good enough that it can be laughed at for how bad it still is (and its spinoff series that was written by an entirely different author is actually almost good although still bad and problematic). Made in Abyss is just an abomination that should not exist.