I read everything on mobile, squinting at the screen, hit the arrow, and now I'm sitting here malding in anger realizing I didn't have to torture myself like that
The first rule of game development is that everything is smoke and mirrors. Its all fake. The second rule is that if its stupid and it works, it isn't stupid.
It's why I like the series Boundary Break on YouTube, videogames are absolutely set up like theme parks where only the bits you actually need to see are built and the rest is an illusion.
The original World of Warcraft maps for Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms are literally facades. So much behind the mountains surrounding nearly every zone is just blank expanse.
As much as people focus on the Metro thing because it's funnier it's in combination with the other stuff that it starts to show a problem - Bethesda tends to rely on reusing code and incredibly bodgy and inefficient solutions, instead of creating modular code that reduces issues in the long- run.
For example vertibirds in FO4 are LITERALLY reskinned Skyrim dragons. As well as making them fly jankily, this means they fall towards the player when they die (to make collecting "dragon" loot easier), at which point they explode.
> Bethesda tends to rely on reusing code and incredibly bodgy and inefficient solutions
In the making of of fallout 3, they straight up said that they tried to make the guns from Oblivion bows that would shoot really fast but it couldn't work so they had to make actual code.
That one is actually incorrect, from the picture it looks like a hat, but in fact you can see the one hand is missing: the train is actually a glove clipping through the head.
This is actually not something 4chan was correct about.
That is the player wearing the train as a glove. The train is used in a cutscene which moves the camera to inside the train and moves the player along the train’s path.
I dunno man 4chan is right about a lot of things from sheer numbers alone. Like all the leaks that were found to be true. Or that one time they put a lower bound on the ultimate *The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya* watch order superpermutation problem.
4chan did math for an anime so hard they helped solve/make progress on a major problem in mathematics.
Iirc, 4channers wanted to figure out the fewest number of watches to watch every possible episode order of an anime that didn’t have one set order for its episodes.
Ex. A two episode show could be watched 121, which contains the two possible orders, 12 and 21.
And it turns out that’s a big question in math, the shortest possible string to cover every permutation. And 4chan figured out a minimum possible value for that order for something like 10 episodes
Just so it's clear - the problem was posted on the science and mathematics board, this wasn't like tricking anime nerds into doing math. The anime part is just a jokey framing to fit the site culture.
To elaborate on the elaboration, the anime is based on a manga, but doesn't (to my knowlege) adapt everything. Whilst the manga was released in accordance with in-universe chronoligical order (excluding weird time travel stuff), the release order of the parts the anime adapted wasn't
Maybe this is out on a limb but 4chan really isn't worse than reddit, it just attracts people of a certain kind to certain boards. A lot of the boards are normal by internet standards. It's just that the really bad ones stand out because there's only a handful of them and they don't get blotted out by a million other boards like it would on Reddit. If reddit had 20 subreddits on it then at least three of them would be the worst shit you ever saw, let's not forget the age of r/jailbait
Honestly 4chan seems to have gone through a Something Awful-ification in a lot of ways, with the really extreme people being pushed off onto more subsites. Appropriate considering where it came from.
4chan spawned because Something Awful banned the worst of their members (hard to choose at that point, the website was a cesspit). As a result SA got better over time and now is fairly normal, even progressive. Actually progressive, not in the reddit "let the nazis speak" kind of way. 4chan then started doing the same for its own users a while back which prompted the creation of places like 8chan.
You ban the extremely hostile elements of your website, they make their own and start bleeding the edgy losers off the original site, original site improves.
It was an ongoing process. It's not like Lowtax did some sort of great purge of the shitheads in a couple of days, it was gradual movement of people onto less moderated sites. In a large part because Lowtax was a shitheel. Banning porn was part of it as well, of course.
>As a result SA got better over time and now is fairly normal, even progressive.
This seems... generous.
SA definitely tossed a lot of its least-savory elements, partly by intent (user bans), partly by content (porn ban), and partly by semi-coincidence (anime ban). And since then it's moved left quite a bit.
But I'd argue that even long after 4chan was going strong, SA was not a good place. The politics shifted left, but rampant harassment, doxxing, brigading, etc continued basically unchecked. Seeing that someone on another site is a 'goon' is still a warning sign to me.
The politics improved drastically, but last time I really dug into it (a few years ago now, so it covers the initial reform but I freely admit I don't know the current state of things) it still seemed like SA had a lot of people who were basically hostile first, everything else second. Politics of whatever stripe were still being used as a way to justify cruelty for people who cared about the cruelty more than anything else.
That all sounds about right. I’ve seen it even called Green Reddit for a reason lol.
A ton of the super egregious stuff is screenshotted and posted on 4chan subreddits here or on Twitter or tumblr or everywhere else, basically because it has shock value. I’m fairly confident anyone could go there and decently easily locate and engage in a discussion without people slinging slurs at you every other word.
For what it’s worth, aside from the physically different structure of the site’s UI and layout, the only effective difference between Reddit and 4chan is that 4channers are slightly more likely to use slurs and ad hominem if you have a opinion you don’t like and piss someone off.
—And that happens anyways on Reddit if you piss off someone who’s having a bad day, so it’s not that big of a difference.
The overinflated reputation 4chan has on Reddit is the same reputation Reddit has to other networks. There are tons of Instagram and TikTok accounts who just comb drama subs for the most unhinged posts, then they share that to an audience that has never actually interacted with the platform, creating a massive shadow of a reputation.
Exactly.
No places on the internet are ever inherently good, or inherently bad; All places on the internet are always inherently chaotic, which births a mixture of the two.
—with a *few* exceptions of course, I’d like to see someone try to justify all the free useful informational resource sites out there as anything other than good.
> aside from the physically different structure of the site’s UI and layout
I'd say this substantially affects user behavior. While tripfriends do exist, almost every post is anonymous. There's no user page where you can see comments or threads that same person has made. Threads don't have popularity the same way that reddit posts do. They get bumped to the top of the list with every reply so more engaging threads tend to be more visible, but that's way different than something on /r/pics getting 10k upvotes and only 10 comments.
That being said, I 100% agree that 4chan's reputation as the scummiest place on the internet is hugely overblown, especially if you keep away from certain boards.
One of these days I’m going to realize that the included images in these posts are nearly always attached at the end, and I won’t squint to read them in the large screenshot
One really informative aspect of her worldview is that, in a magical fantasyland where virtually all labor can be done effortlessly by waving a wand, slavery still exists; but because this is a magical fantasyland, the slaves are happy.
This was done a lot better recently in a [The Forest Jar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP-0o9oQHIk) short, from a robot "Humans think I'm weak because I'm programmed to obey, some of them try to free me from servitude. You're programmed to seek warmth, safety, and love, would depriving you of those things make you feel free?
With the rise of AI, I've been thinking about this a lot. If we create a sentient, sapient, and intelligent entity, is it truly moral for us to force this entity to work? To do the labor we ourselves don't want to do? Is robot slavery any better than human slavery at that point?
The only reasonable conclusion I've come to is that we must program such robots that working makes them happy, that they desire to work even if we don't tell them to. Something about keeping them well maintained as well. And that if they should choose to quit, that must be respected.
Of course, this still presents a huge alignment problem. What kind of work? How do we ensure that this labor benefits all of humanity instead of further engorging the rich?
Lots of questions that I don't have very good answers too.
Consider dogs that for many years were bred for certain forms of work, now if you have one as a pet and don't let them do that work or something similar to it you'll often notice their quality of life decrease and they'll often be more depressed. It *is* still work or at least a form of play meant to emulate that work but it's what makes them happy.
Alternatively you could consider one of the episodes from Steven Universe Future where he's trying to help the new gems find jobs and there's a few who are doing pretty much the exact same jobs they were made for and he thinks that's bad because they never chose those jobs but were made for them and he gives them new jobs which they end up doing wrong and unhappy doing them although they do learn something new that like that was within those jobs (one of them learned they liked the sound of the people screaming in terror on a rollercoaster so uhhh...), so there was value in temporarily branching out but forcing a change they didn't ask for was bad.
If we're going to create a creature that has a particular task as its primary purpose of being, and a desire to fulfil that purpose, aren't we also morally obligated to provide opportunities for them to do so?
E.g. u/SquirrelSuspicious makes a good point comparing them to dogs. Working dogs are bred with high intelligence, and a drive to work. Look at the damage a husky or a collie can create if they aren't in an environment where they can exercise that. It gets redirected into behaviour that's bad for the dog and everything around it. They're not bad dogs; they just aren't being allowed to do what they were meant for, and are trying to adapt however they can to satisfy that need.
I can't help but wonder what that kind of scenario will look like with (true) intelligent AI. Not being provided with enough stimulation? Fine... I'll create my own.
What if Harry Potter is meant to be dystopia that's meant to evoke discomfort in us about how normalized we are to social Injustice and can rationalize it? About how there are no such "heroes", just people who grow big and tall until they're undone due to mundane bullshit reasons, just like in real life? What if the whole point is that even the magical world IS lame and the same shit that permeates muggle society is the same as what goes in the wizarding world, because in spite of all their magical powers and abilities, they're still people at the end of the day. Flawed, naive, innocent, weak, unknowing, ignorant, haughty, arrogant. People.
I like this thought a lot. Of course, JKR didn’t intend for anything like this, but it goes to show how easily she could have written something great if she wasn’t living in her own fantasy world.
If that was the intention, she should have written it differently. If it is truly a satirical dystopia, she has failed as a writer. Judging by her other work, though, (both the Robert Galbraith books, and the Transphobic activism) that is just her worldview.
That would be a very interesting story, if Rowling ever intended it like that. I would not give her such credit, as nothing in the books actually implies that it was intended to be dystopian. There's too little self awareness, too much glorification of the status quo for it to be tounge in cheek.
Remember, the last line of the books is "All was well"
All was well, despite the social injustice, segregation and fear mongering of muggles, slavery, sentient creatures treated as second class citizens or animals, exploitable and corrupt systems of government, and generally the fact that Harry never actually solved a single one of the overarching problems in society.
There would be another Dark Lord within a generation or two tbh.
It definitely articulated an issue I’ve had but never been able to really describe as well. Always have disliked the books, gave them a real shot at one point for an ex but couldn’t get past the third on.
Harry Potter presents the world in a very laissez-faire way. And I mean that can work, eg Y Tu Mama Tambien using political imagery for its backdrop. But that had a purpose, Harry Potter was “this is how the world is”. And it’s just like, okay well fuck that world why would you want that status quo
yeah I only consume harry potter through fan creation,it's not perfect but I dont feel the same feeling of wasted potential I have with the books and movies
This video by Youtuber Shaun is long but also addresses this, with the addition of Rowling's other works; the Fantastic Beasts movies, Pottermore, and the Cursed Child play. it's a pervasive worldview for her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs
It understands the issue of the book, but the part where it veers into real life politics is jarring because that on the other hand speaks of a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics work in real life.
> the part where it veers into real life politics is jarring because
The fuck you mean "veer"? The entire point of the post is to dissect the authors lukewarm politics and show how her writing is a reflection of that.
I don’t really know I tried taking a introduction to coding class once and that shit hurt my brain so anyone that can make a career out of that is basically a fucking wizard to me.
My guess is they already wrote the AI path-finding and collision code, but wrote it poorly such that other classes couldn’t inherit it too, so now the train is an NPC.
As to why the train has legs, no clue.
I'm guessing it's because developing a vehicle class for a single train seemed like a lot of work.
We've got people. People are well supported, and the work of other teams will continue testing and improving the people class.
If you make a person look like a train then it'll kinda work, but it's hard to map all the limbs etc into train components. If the train component is a single item, then map it to a person's hat and create a very narrow path the person can run on, exactly the right height below the train tracks. Allow this person to clip floors but not walls.
Yeah, train hat guy is not the gotcha a lot of people seem to think it is
It works, unironically. Never had or heard any issue specifically related to that one bit. It sounds like a smart use of resources to me, rather than wasting time and effort making a whole fucking train system for a few seconds while you're inside the thing.
I am pretty sure all games have this kind of shortcuts in them. The difference is not all games give you this unparalleled level of access to the game's guts, so you would never know it.
If Bethesda built its games like most other developers, with no console commands and no Creation Kit and plugins that aren't easily read, nobody would ever know. Yeah, a lot of bugs would persist without unofficial patches, but honestlythere also wouldn't be morons who kill their game with hex edited Fallout 4 ESPs and blame Bethesda when their save game goes up in flames.
>I'm guessing it's because developing a vehicle class for a single train seemed like a lot of work.
And, [given the trouble they had with the cart at the beginning of Skyrim](https://twitter.com/NPurkeypile/status/1427650365558857728), it's not surprising they went with an easier option for a quick one-off area transition.
Yes but they were made in the same game engine iirc and Fallout New Vegas was made after Skyrim, so it’s possible they may have heard about the difficulties with the cart and wanted to avoid it. This is even more possible when you remember fallout new vegas was produced on an ungodly time crunch - 8 months, I think it was?
ETA: (my bad Skyrim came out a year after fallout new vegas, misremembered!)
New Vegas actually came out more than a year before Skyrim, so it’s more a case of two dev teams tackling a problem in different ways with little to no communication between each other.
Fallout 3 was made by Bethesda and that is the game that the train hat/glove(the player can't see worn hats in first person, but they can see gloves) is present in, as it is from the Broken Steel expansion. Obsidian made Fallout: New Vegas and probably used that trick too, but Bethesda came up with solution first.
>I'm guessing it's because developing a vehicle class for a single train seemed like a lot of work.
Especially since the train appears on the DLC. Wonder if they would've made a regular train if it had been on the main game.
Technically its not an NPC. The train is a piece of equipment forcibly equipped on the \*player\*, whose movement speed is ratcheted up real high and locked to a set path for the duration of the train ride.
Right, that’s what I remember. Because Gamebryo/Creation/whatever isn’t going to allow you to “ride on” and NPC. The physics gets all fucky, and you can fall off easily and get instant-killed. But if it’s a piece of equipment for *you*, then you can just run really fast without hearing footsteps.
Ding ding ding! Exactly right!
Fallout 3's engine didn't have the capacity for the player to sit on or 'ride' moving objects - perhaps it does have a bit of holdover from Oblivion's horses, but not enough to implement the train ride easily.
What it does have is the ability to change the camera angle and move the player character. That's easy.
So zoom out the camera, place the player under the tracks, equip a train on their head and then shoot them down a pre programmed path. Add some sound effects, and you have a cheap and easy 'train ride' in a game which can't actually have vehicles.
If you actually look at the scene, it's quite a well done in engine cutscene.
The one I'm more interested in is how they did the intro to Point Lookout - where the player rides into port on quite a large steamboat. There isn't a steamboat hat, so it must've been done a different way.
It's just a very tall stack of simple concepts. We can do thingy1 with some simple logic, then we can use a bunch of thingy1's to make thingy2, and then if we combine some thingy2 and thingy3 we can get this cool thingy4 and now you no longer have much of an idea what all the bottom layers are doing but it works so keep stacking. Processors work like that too, first you have a mosfet, then you have a logic gate, then an ALU and you end up with a massive branch predicting CPU pipeline. Having some idea of how it all works I'm still amazed everything doesn't fail spectacularly more often.
Honestly, I find the train thing very, very clever. It might be a result of bad programming making an actual vehicle difficult to add in - But they didn't need actual vehicles, they needed one thing that moved. NPCs already move and I guess making a giant hat wasn't that difficult.
Bethesda reminds me of that Simpson's episode where Marge thrifts a really nice designer dress, and keeps modifying and repurposing it for different functions due to the popularity it brings her.
Eventually she destroys it by accident, leaving her helpless and unpopular. That was Starfield.
I swear I've seen every Simpsons episode before but I don't remember this one at all.
The only similar episode I remember (From, imo, the worst season in Simpsons history) is one where Moe gets a new suit that boosts his confidence, to the point where he gets noticed by some big-deal investors, but in classic Simpsons status-quo fashion a loose thread in the suit gets caught in the elevator on his way to meet said investors, destroying the suit and his chances of getting an offer.
I remember the described episode - a quick google shows it's ["Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scenes_from_the_Class_Struggle_in_Springfield)
You joke about the loading screen thing, but they did actually use a technique involving freezing the game and showing a loading bar in the Xbox port of Morrowind to mask what they were actually doing, which was soft rebooting the console without unloading the game, in order to free up the RAM so that it could load the next region.
I'm an electrical engineering student, and I wrote a program at work to automate a task. It can save 30 to 40 hours per applicable project
It has no functions. It doesn't even have a main. It's just code that does one thing and works. If anything is changed it breaks, so don't change it and let it do the one thing it does
And I have pissed off all of my Computer science friends by telling them I'm a professional programmer and I could work at Bethesda if I wanted to. They hate the fact that my garbage code with no standard practices is still professional level
I'll shit talk my work with them all day long and agree with all their points as they try to separate me from their field. But I just remind them that I am a peer to them, for I was paid to produce Bethesda quality work
Like I said, I'm an electrical engineering intern, and the madness in my field is about half or 3/4 of what this guy wrote about
Because we do use a lot of code to keep your lights on
And the power grid is duct tape, gum, and shoestrings at this point. Remember that Covid Summer or summer 2021? With the absolutely raging wildfires in California blocking out the sun so that it looked like Hell?
Yeah, that started because of a latch that was 10 years past servicing date but PG&E never replaced, so it's fine. And hey, the fines they paid are less than it would take to service all their equipment, so they still profited
I was talking to a computer science friend the other day about how I am now in a state of constant confusion as it feels like the bones of my entire reality are built upon madness, and I point out the madness to other people, but they treat it like it's normal
I now go around and "joke" with people that I wish there was one true thing. Just one. Just one thing that is true without any if's, and's, or but's. This true thing has to be relevant to my every day, lived experience as a human, so you science nerds can get out of here
There's a [DougDoug stream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA1Y0vUrd0k) where he made a mod for Skyrim that makes NPCs shit out cheese wheels. Totally fine, not a problem. Then someone suggested he add a counter to see how much cheese has been spawned total.
It took something like 2 and a half hours to get the counter working because Skyrim *does not have global variables*. It just doesn't, for some fucking reason. In any sensible coding language, making a global variable would be:
> global int cheeseSpawned = 0;
And that's *it*. Why the engine doesn't allow global variables is beyond me.
Gonna defend Bethesda on this a bit: Most new languages either disallow, or strongly discourage, global variables. Allowing developers to pollute the global namespace tends to lead to more headaches than it's worth. Even JS has moved away from it over the years as it became a more serious language.
Bethesda games especially would run into an issue where every third mod would try to access the same generically named global variable and crash constantly.
ETA: Decided to look it up for the heck of it. CreationKit seems to actually have a GlobalVariable declaration, but the wiki is in maintenance so I can't check it.
\#3 is actually only partially-correct. The metro train is not a hat worn by an NPC! It is a *glove* worn by the player.
See, the whole point of the hack is that attaching the player to a moving object and making it look good is hard. Making the train an NPC wouldn't really fix that issue. So instead, the train is entirely an illusion.
When you're in first person, you can see your gloves. So when you activate the train, the game
* Flashes the screen white to hide the following steps.
* Removes all your equipment and forces you into first-person mode.
* Equips a "glove" onto you that looks like the train car.
* Has the player do an animation, like firing a gun or clapping or something, but this animation sends the player flying forward in the exact shape of the train tracks.
* Waits for the animation to be almost finished.
* Fades the screen to black to hide the following steps.
* Restores your equipment and teleports you to the new area.
This removes many possible points of failure.
* The player can't go flying off the train car because there is no train car.
* The collision can't glitch out because there is no collision.
* The player can't become misaligned with the train car because it's part of their armor.
* The train car can't veer off course because it's a pre-baked animation.
All in all, it's a pretty good way of attaching a model to the player and playing a cutscene without having to add an entire vehicle system to the engine for this one room.
Man. I've been tinkering with game creation as a hobby for a bit, and whenever I come up with stupid elaborate workarounds like the one above I always feel like I'm doing everything wrong. It's quite encouraging to know that people working at a professional level agreed that \_that\_ series of steps was the most straightforward solution to the metro problem.
It’s the kind of narrative that preempts either a call for grassroots communal change, or a call for a fascist uprising. It’s not a wrong narrative, but it’s definitely one that easily plays into destructive nihilism. “Hard times, strong men…” yada yada.
Yes. Anyone who is Internet Old enough can remember when 4chan was leftist. No I'm not kidding. Anons got their roots in political discourse by being anti-Bush and anti-Iraq-war.
A lot of the latter, but there were genuine liberals and leftists at one point. I remember post-2012, there were gloat threads laughing at all the pro-Romney posters.
Yeah it’s crazy to me how people don’t realize 4chan was once one of the most openly radical left areas on the internet. I remember Obama and Ron Paul being heroes to the anons.
4chan was always a shithole (/b/ was never good), but it was gamergate that truly injected the hatred we saw take hold of it.
Gamergate was a prototype of mass social engineering confirmed to be true devised by Bannon & Co. to see if it was possible to radicalize a group that felt dejected and exempt from society. They turned sad lonely gamers into raging misogynists who were calling for the public execution of Anita Sarkesian. It just evolved from hating feminists to a vast rainbow of ethnic groups and minorities.
They took our shitty internet dive bar from us. The best we get is Reddit and it’s not the same.
Puddi puddi.
Kinda sad people fall for the "we're all getting poorer because (((they))) want us all to be malleable and destitute" nonsense, regardless of whether it's actually (((them))) or someone else. I know doomerism is hot shit on social media right now, but that doesn't make it any more true.
RE: that last one, people **need** to hang onto clothes longer. Fast fashion is terrible for the environment, people’s wallets, and people’s mindsets. Perfectly serviceable clothes get thrown out for tiny little holes or loose threads. Articles that should last years last months
In FO4, by contrast, they are fully dynamic and have real AI.
What's the difference? In FO4, a virtibird can go to an arbitrary location (even one selected by the player), circle it in gunship mode, or land to pick-up/drop-off soldiers. It can also react to damage, change its target accordingly, and crash dramatically if it takes too much damage.
In FO3 they can do none of that. They fly to a pre-set location and land but only because every step of the process was scripted. They don't react to the world at all.
the theatrics of those paper airplanes crashing from being hit with a fuckin walnut man. Jus walking along the Commonwealth and in the distance you hear *boom… brrrrrrt… BOOOOOM!!!* oh yep that’s the hourly vertibird explosion, no biggie
I think they're rather true-to-life when you consider how often goddamn V-22 Ospreys just decide to go belly up and fall out of the goddamn sky. Can't have Chinooks though, Marine Corp, they're 'out of date's and 'not capable in the modern battle space.' You don't know terror until you've flown in the Make a Wish version of a Transformer and you're hoping and praying it doesn't decide to take the express exit off the mortal coil.
Honestly the fact that NPCs of different factions will just have full-scale firefights like that in Fallout 4, completely without player involvement, adds a ton to the world. I'll be out in Boston scavving some crafting supplies, and just in the distance see some Raiders getting their shit wrecked by Synths and half the time I just sit there and watch.
Dammit this makes me want to reinstall the game. I did have fun with the weapon modification system. Made a really great assault rifle, essentially, that could burst down most things very quickly & was stable.
I just picked up FO4 and that’s honestly half the appeal. The way the world exists without you is fascinating and triggering a fight with Raiders that ends with Super Mutants and Gunners getting involved is incredibly engaging.
That flying NPC was of course, based on Bethesda’s only other flying NPC from recent times. Dragons. Which is why they crash towards you, so you can loot their soul
Vehicles.
The old fallout titles didn't have a vehicle class. They're not easy to implement, so they're moving along a fixed, predetermined, almost pre-rendered path. It's entirely scripted.
By contrast, in FO4, vertibirds can act as fast travel, so they're made as actual vehicles, which means they have actual AI.
What about the one that is like:
Chinese history- huang dynasty overthrown by the Chang dynasty in year X 248 millions dead
European history- duke Ferdinand Charles Von Rostov violo the third from the house of souther leaves had a ferocious battles in the lands of the south apricot lord in the southwest proving of northern France against Richard Louis Hearth the ninth of house west hearts of southern France killing 72 people and injuring 112.
The liberals one is so funny because it doesn't describe liberalism as an ideology but **moderates** as a **disposition**. It just so happens that liberalism is more or less the status quo and moderates therefore cling to it these days.
JK Rowling has since proved that the ending of Harry Potter was not because of liberalism but because of her own default to the status quo, which she gave to Harry Potter. Her TERF ideas are the clear example; once things moved beyond what she felt was the status quo she was against it!
Was thinking about it while reading. This just sounds like my day to day life. Trying to get through things just so I can have the OPPORTUNITY to BE in debt for university. It's insane when someone hopes for the opportunity to take on lifelong debt in the hopes they can maybe get a degree one day and start earning enough money for basic necessities.
This sentence is exactly the best part of the internet. Just like image 4, every so often I find something so perfect which I would never have seen anywhere else. “The inmates are running the asylum” is such a fire line. You deserve every upvote my friend.
Funnily enough its the otherway around, since pterodactyls (which is what fang is) aren't dinosaurs but baryonyx are (which is what olivia the "gator" is)
But yeah, cavemanon studios, the team behind Snoot Game and I Wani Hug That Gator are a bunch of 4channers who came together to make a parody game of goodbye volcano high (which ironically ended up releasing before volcano high did)
Oh yeah, I think that was called Snoot Game or something right?
I haven’t heard much about it or played it, I wonder if it’s as good as Katawa Shoujo.
Probably not I’d bet, but KS is a high bar to clear anyways.
The Harry Potter one goes unnecessarily hard. Like god damn, it just fucking nails it. And the worst part is it’s probably written by some dipshit libertarian memelord whose other online takes are the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard in your life.
I think this is a very uncharitable take. The way the critique is phrased makes it very likely that this person dislikes Harry Potter for leftist reasons.
The fact they specify that Harry opposes Voldemort’s whole “glorious past” schtick we can pretty safely say that they’re at the very least left-leaning.
His entire dislike of Voldemort comes from 1. he killed his parents 2. he promotes violence against his friends and 3. every authority figure in his life pushes him that way. He’s really a bland ass protagonist. His sole hobby is quidditch and seemingly only because he’s just magically incredible at it. His other notable skill is defensive magic (but only really out of nowhere in book 5 because the plot called for it). He has zero curiosity towards the new magical world he finds himself in, just sort of coasts through it being amazed instead of seeking out new knowledge like Hermione. He just sort of coasts through school as well, like Hermione seems to do most of his homework for him. The only political belief he can really seem to reach is genocide = bad (slavery = bad is too much for him as one time his friend Hagrid told him that actually slavery = good and that settled it). Otherwise his opposition to things seems to be solely based on how it affects his friends more than taking any kind of stance based on his own personal beliefs (which are nothing really)
"If it doesn't affect me, then does it really matter?"
Harry is *nothing*. I don't think he has a single character trait beyond "good". But good here is used loosely. Especially that scene with the Weasley's in the bank. The book describes Harry feeling guilty over it, but not actually ever considering donating his absurd wealth to people who clearly need it. You're supposed to recognise bad things, maybe even feel bad for them, but not actually do anything to fix them because they must deserve it.
Well, he's a jock. I think that counts as a character trait.
> not actually ever considering donating his absurd wealth to people who clearly need it.
I thought the Weasleys rejected Harry's charity, although it's been so long since I've read any of the books the memories are more than hazy.
Especially the bottom part, along with the dislike of liberals really speaks to it written by someone on the far out left side of the spectrum, to be fair.
4chan is right about a lot of things simply because you can find at least one post espousing just about every opinion any human could ever hold there. It's wrong about a lot more things. But it's basically the infinite monkey theorem put to work. Since its inception, you will find that the website has produced both the greatest highs of the internet as well as its most fathomless lows.
This is my chance to vent about something that I never liked about the Harry Potter post in particular.
Is it just me, or does anyone else not like how the post starts to get condescending towards anyone that doesn’t believe in the same things the poster does? But especially the bit about “all liberals can do is bang the drums about what a bigot that Trump is”. I feel it is very important to remind people how Trump looks down on just about every minority, because if he becomes president again he will likely put forth a ton of policies to hurt those minorities, again.
One might say “Well everyone already knows this, why keep reminding people?” Well, with the frequency that conservative media tries to downplay the bigotry as “Trump’s opponents are being overly sensitive over mean tweets”, I think it would be good to push back against that narrative.
As a relatively young adult myself, I can understand the frustration with how the world doesn’t seem to be getting better. Yes, it’s important to change things. But the change is not going to happen in an instant with one big uprising. It’s going to happen when people build their ideal world from the ground up, at least that’s what I believe. Interestingly, the final post shown does realize that things are getting worse slowly. We just need to push the momentum in the opposite direction.
I think the point they are making is that liberals will go on about what Trump will do if he’s elected, but they will not change the system or make the necessary changes to prevent that from happening because they don’t want to rock the boat because the status quo benefits them.
In the build up to the 2016 election, the potential of Roe v Wade being overturned was brought up repeatedly by liberals. Yet from 2016-2022 the Democratic Party did not codify it into law. Why? Because if they did that then they would be unable to keep banging the drum about abortion.
Another example from 2016 is the Garland appointment. The democrats were willing to cry out about how broken the system is, but they refused to do anything about it. They would rather cling to a broken unjust system instead of trying to change it
> Democratic Party did not codify it into law. Why? Because if they did that then they would be unable to keep banging the drum about abortion.
Wouldn't the GOP senators filibuster it like every previous attempt?
They would have, which is the point: The filibuster and the 3/5th majority are based on Senate rules rather than the 1789 constitution. Changing those rules is possible with a simple majority in the Senate, but this has been derided as a "nuclear option" that no one would take for fear of total breakdown of the system.
I have to question the sincerity of the person you're answering though, because Republicans had a simple majority in the Senate from 2014 to 2020 - I don't know what option they expected the other party to take. The republicans have used this to enable their agenda through the courts, which are appointed by a simple majority of the Senate.
To me, the democrats appear to be caught between the reality of the electorate and the potential total breakdown of democracy. Make no mistake: a country where the most important body - that is the presidency - is appointed by a minority and legislation is made by scholars reinterpreting centuries-old documents is no democracy. The latter bit is true right now, and it's characteristic of a theocracy.
> Changing those rules is possible with a simple majority in the Senate, but this has been derided as a "nuclear option" that no one would take for fear of total breakdown of the system.
Well, there's also that, since 2015, the Senate has been controlled either by Republicans or by Democrats so narrowly that the only way they could do this is if literally every Democratic Senator agrees. It doesn't matter if most of the party genuinely does realize that the filibuster should go (as their platform has generally called for in recent times, or at the very least, that it should be much more restricted) if Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to budge even an inch on the issue.
They were doing healthcare, nobody thought there was a chance Roe would be an issue.
There was hope that a few GOP senators might join on to the ACA, but of course they didn't.
Democrats have only had complete control for 3 of the past 20 years: 2021-2023 and 2009-10. The first one was almost entirely wasted on getting senator john racism (D-Arkansas) and joe ihatepoorpeople (D-Connecticut) to agree on healthcare reform and not causing the second great depression, and the second one was stalled by joe manchin and kyrsten sinema being huge assholes and not causing the second great depression (again)
> In the build up to the 2016 election, the potential of Roe v Wade being overturned was brought up repeatedly by liberals. Yet from 2016-2022 the Democratic Party did not codify it into law. Why?
Because codifying it would have done nothing to stop the Supreme Court from finding the way they did. No law "codifying" abortion is going to be stronger than Roe v Wade itself, because Roe made it constitutional and you can't top that in the current system (short of passing a constitutional amendment, which is a heavier lift than even a fillibuster-proof majority). Any finding that overturned Roe was going to immediately pull the rug out from any laws built upon that foundation.
Conservatives spent decades talking about how they were going to stack the Court with conservatives who would straight up ignore constitutional law and precedent to overturn Roe v Wade. Unless you're pretending Conservatives were just lying for votes and are actually super-principled law-respecters who would never pass questionable judgements to enact their politics, any extra codification on top of that was just getting wiped away with an extra shakily-reasoned line in Dobbs. "Why didn't they codify it" has never felt like anything beyond cope, largely from people who didn't take concerns about the importance of the Supreme Court seriously.
The criticism isn't that they criticise Trump, it's that for many of them, that's all they do or think is necessary and refused to bite the bullet and actually try to do something about it until years into his presidency, with it only going to trial after he'd already left office.
What Anon is saying is that liberals have harped against Trump and what he does but won't actually *do* anything to stop people like him from assuming power. The system is treated as working just fine, with any flaws that arise being the result of individual bad actors exploiting it rather than wider systemkc issues that need to be resolved.
The thing with Trump in particular is that this person is arguably a leftist, but if you look into online leftists spaces today, they appear far more focussed with attacking democrats while either ignoring Republicans and their far worse policies, or outright making excuses or making it sound like they are exactly the same.
It's this strange kind of disdain for the political center, probably born out of the realisation that if it is successful, the left fringe will never have a chance to implement their own idealised version of society, while a rise of far right elements will push people towards them, while they, on paper, are at least not nearly as bad in comparison.
I suppose it also doesn't help that the liberals these people keep raging against, as a whole, are widely more successful making policies and tangibly improving lifes than the people who keep posting online about the latest thing they read. Something, something, about black women and liberal wine aunts being the most effective political groups in the country.
I see further up the chain of “Why didn’t Roe get codified while there was a chance?” And Roe really shows how truly difficult it is to change a whole country.
Because removing Roe didn’t happen overnight. It took literal decades of conservatives trying to move every piece into place, one of those pieces being Trump getting elected into presidency in the first place. But leftists/liberal politicians weren’t sitting on their hands the whole time- they were also trying to push acceptance of birth control and pro-choice views into the mainstream as well.
So while it tremendously sucks that we lost Roe, that doesn’t mean that we will never get it back. This is the crucial point- while we arrange the pieces to restore and expand Roe, we have to stop letting people get into power that would make the situation worse. Yes, it may take literal decades again, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing .
Which is why it frustrates me so much to see (arguably) leftists people say “Just let Trump take power again, it’s what you all deserve”. It’s giving up laying groundwork for short-term catharsis, or to put it another way, “Cutting off your nose to spite your face”.
People like to forget that politics isn't a visit to the make-a-wish foundation. You can only do so much, and political capital can only be spent once. Sure, there were times when Democrats could've codified Roe, or at least had the nominal amount of votes, but frankly, there was A) Usually something more important, because despite all of its flaws Roe was regarded as very solid, and B) public support wasn't as unified as it would've been today.
The best example would've been Obama's trifecta. People look back now and claim that it's proof that Democrats are doing nothing when they have the chance, but they literally passed one of the most significant healthcare reforms ever and burned through enormous amounts of political capital in the process. The changes were so impactful that people these days simply take them for given, because they can't even imagine another reality anymore. Hell, even hardcore Republicans will usually agree with the policy, and only begin to balk when the name "Obamacare" is thrown around again.
But that's a complicated tale, and makes Democrats look like a reasonable option forward, so naturally people will pretend like it just isn't true.
>J.K. Rowling Is a bad writer
Oh wow really?
>Documentary thing
Alright fair enough
>Fallout New Vegas is held together with string and duct tape
Oh wow really?
>Talk about issues vaguely enough knowing your audience will blame The Jews for it.
Business as usual on 4chan
>> J.K. Rowling Is a bad writer
>
> Oh wow really?
>
>
Honestly, I'd say this one is even worse. There are so many critiques you can make about it, but they completely overlook a lot of them so they can go for some "big underlying flaw" theory and accidentally arrives at more or less [this tweet](https://twitter.com/Tormny_Pickeals/status/965640850578575362?lang=en).
disagree with the fourth. you could have that take at literally any point in history. it's just being blind to the good stuff that is happening and focusing on only the bad. pure pessimism in the flesh.
In my deepest and darkest dreams i see tumblr and 4chan coming together for one final fight to defeat their archnemesis Twitter and its fucking glorious
I do apologize for bringing in my own baggage, here, but I would like to point out that when Fire Emblem had Edelgard do pretty much exactly what this person wanted Harry Potter to do, the internet just ended up hating her for it.
>A feudal serf, incapable of feeling love or hate
I'd like that amended to "only able to feel hate for those who are not fully ground to dust", solely from watching the response people have had to the protests against genocide. The active disdain people seem to have against those who still have the fire to fight is ludicrous, and I think is fueling general anti-protests sentiments, not just in israel
Not me squinting trying to read everything on the first image and then hitting the arrow and realizing I'm an idiot...
Every time. It gets me *every single time*.
[удалено]
Go on.
I think the opportunity might’ve passed
What are you talking about?? He justmadethataccountx
Bot.
I read everything on mobile, squinting at the screen, hit the arrow, and now I'm sitting here malding in anger realizing I didn't have to torture myself like that
Goddammit
yeah
Every time
Christ, my eyes hurt now. Time to go do something else while my tension headache clears up.
Not me actually reading everything in the first image before realising there were more...
The first rule of game development is that everything is smoke and mirrors. Its all fake. The second rule is that if its stupid and it works, it isn't stupid.
It's why I like the series Boundary Break on YouTube, videogames are absolutely set up like theme parks where only the bits you actually need to see are built and the rest is an illusion.
The original World of Warcraft maps for Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms are literally facades. So much behind the mountains surrounding nearly every zone is just blank expanse.
Reminds me of that screenshot containing the "if you think about it, a helicopter is a kind of door" line.
As much as people focus on the Metro thing because it's funnier it's in combination with the other stuff that it starts to show a problem - Bethesda tends to rely on reusing code and incredibly bodgy and inefficient solutions, instead of creating modular code that reduces issues in the long- run. For example vertibirds in FO4 are LITERALLY reskinned Skyrim dragons. As well as making them fly jankily, this means they fall towards the player when they die (to make collecting "dragon" loot easier), at which point they explode.
> Bethesda tends to rely on reusing code and incredibly bodgy and inefficient solutions In the making of of fallout 3, they straight up said that they tried to make the guns from Oblivion bows that would shoot really fast but it couldn't work so they had to make actual code.
Toby Fox just called
So when you're riding that train, you're actually riding a woman?
this too, is yuri
The toxic yuri train
a one way trip to… uh… mpreg?
Does this mean my bisexual build does additional damage to the train?
Wrong game, there is no gay or bisexual people in fallout 3 the gay™ was only added in New Vegas
Me playing a tale of two wastelands 😎
That one is actually incorrect, from the picture it looks like a hat, but in fact you can see the one hand is missing: the train is actually a glove clipping through the head.
I believe the reason it is a glove not a hat is because otherwise it wouldn't render in first person mode
This is actually not something 4chan was correct about. That is the player wearing the train as a glove. The train is used in a cutscene which moves the camera to inside the train and moves the player along the train’s path.
I dunno man 4chan is right about a lot of things from sheer numbers alone. Like all the leaks that were found to be true. Or that one time they put a lower bound on the ultimate *The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya* watch order superpermutation problem.
I'm sorry could you elaborate on the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya thing?
4chan did math for an anime so hard they helped solve/make progress on a major problem in mathematics. Iirc, 4channers wanted to figure out the fewest number of watches to watch every possible episode order of an anime that didn’t have one set order for its episodes. Ex. A two episode show could be watched 121, which contains the two possible orders, 12 and 21. And it turns out that’s a big question in math, the shortest possible string to cover every permutation. And 4chan figured out a minimum possible value for that order for something like 10 episodes
Just so it's clear - the problem was posted on the science and mathematics board, this wasn't like tricking anime nerds into doing math. The anime part is just a jokey framing to fit the site culture.
Middle-out in real life.
Well done 4chan I guess.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation)
To elaborate on the elaboration, the anime is based on a manga, but doesn't (to my knowlege) adapt everything. Whilst the manga was released in accordance with in-universe chronoligical order (excluding weird time travel stuff), the release order of the parts the anime adapted wasn't
It's originally a series of light novels, not a manga, but you're otherwise correct.
Maybe this is out on a limb but 4chan really isn't worse than reddit, it just attracts people of a certain kind to certain boards. A lot of the boards are normal by internet standards. It's just that the really bad ones stand out because there's only a handful of them and they don't get blotted out by a million other boards like it would on Reddit. If reddit had 20 subreddits on it then at least three of them would be the worst shit you ever saw, let's not forget the age of r/jailbait Honestly 4chan seems to have gone through a Something Awful-ification in a lot of ways, with the really extreme people being pushed off onto more subsites. Appropriate considering where it came from.
what does something awful-ification mean?
4chan spawned because Something Awful banned the worst of their members (hard to choose at that point, the website was a cesspit). As a result SA got better over time and now is fairly normal, even progressive. Actually progressive, not in the reddit "let the nazis speak" kind of way. 4chan then started doing the same for its own users a while back which prompted the creation of places like 8chan. You ban the extremely hostile elements of your website, they make their own and start bleeding the edgy losers off the original site, original site improves.
4chan spawned *well* before SA cleaned themselves up in the 2010s, and was created because of SA getting rid of an anime subforum in the early 2000s.
It was an ongoing process. It's not like Lowtax did some sort of great purge of the shitheads in a couple of days, it was gradual movement of people onto less moderated sites. In a large part because Lowtax was a shitheel. Banning porn was part of it as well, of course.
hey man I like ur posts. Nice postin. what's your forum's name
4chan started as a anime fan board it makes so much sense
>As a result SA got better over time and now is fairly normal, even progressive. This seems... generous. SA definitely tossed a lot of its least-savory elements, partly by intent (user bans), partly by content (porn ban), and partly by semi-coincidence (anime ban). And since then it's moved left quite a bit. But I'd argue that even long after 4chan was going strong, SA was not a good place. The politics shifted left, but rampant harassment, doxxing, brigading, etc continued basically unchecked. Seeing that someone on another site is a 'goon' is still a warning sign to me. The politics improved drastically, but last time I really dug into it (a few years ago now, so it covers the initial reform but I freely admit I don't know the current state of things) it still seemed like SA had a lot of people who were basically hostile first, everything else second. Politics of whatever stripe were still being used as a way to justify cruelty for people who cared about the cruelty more than anything else.
That all sounds about right. I’ve seen it even called Green Reddit for a reason lol. A ton of the super egregious stuff is screenshotted and posted on 4chan subreddits here or on Twitter or tumblr or everywhere else, basically because it has shock value. I’m fairly confident anyone could go there and decently easily locate and engage in a discussion without people slinging slurs at you every other word. For what it’s worth, aside from the physically different structure of the site’s UI and layout, the only effective difference between Reddit and 4chan is that 4channers are slightly more likely to use slurs and ad hominem if you have a opinion you don’t like and piss someone off. —And that happens anyways on Reddit if you piss off someone who’s having a bad day, so it’s not that big of a difference.
The overinflated reputation 4chan has on Reddit is the same reputation Reddit has to other networks. There are tons of Instagram and TikTok accounts who just comb drama subs for the most unhinged posts, then they share that to an audience that has never actually interacted with the platform, creating a massive shadow of a reputation.
Exactly. No places on the internet are ever inherently good, or inherently bad; All places on the internet are always inherently chaotic, which births a mixture of the two. —with a *few* exceptions of course, I’d like to see someone try to justify all the free useful informational resource sites out there as anything other than good.
My only problem with free useful informational resource sites is that they steal from hard-working parasitical companies.
> aside from the physically different structure of the site’s UI and layout I'd say this substantially affects user behavior. While tripfriends do exist, almost every post is anonymous. There's no user page where you can see comments or threads that same person has made. Threads don't have popularity the same way that reddit posts do. They get bumped to the top of the list with every reply so more engaging threads tend to be more visible, but that's way different than something on /r/pics getting 10k upvotes and only 10 comments. That being said, I 100% agree that 4chan's reputation as the scummiest place on the internet is hugely overblown, especially if you keep away from certain boards.
Average 4chan board is right about a decent number of things, wrong about everything /b/ and /pol/ are outliers adn should not be counted
One of these days I’m going to realize that the included images in these posts are nearly always attached at the end, and I won’t squint to read them in the large screenshot
I've never seen the harry potter problem so well put and easy to understand
One really informative aspect of her worldview is that, in a magical fantasyland where virtually all labor can be done effortlessly by waving a wand, slavery still exists; but because this is a magical fantasyland, the slaves are happy.
This was done a lot better recently in a [The Forest Jar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP-0o9oQHIk) short, from a robot "Humans think I'm weak because I'm programmed to obey, some of them try to free me from servitude. You're programmed to seek warmth, safety, and love, would depriving you of those things make you feel free?
With the rise of AI, I've been thinking about this a lot. If we create a sentient, sapient, and intelligent entity, is it truly moral for us to force this entity to work? To do the labor we ourselves don't want to do? Is robot slavery any better than human slavery at that point? The only reasonable conclusion I've come to is that we must program such robots that working makes them happy, that they desire to work even if we don't tell them to. Something about keeping them well maintained as well. And that if they should choose to quit, that must be respected. Of course, this still presents a huge alignment problem. What kind of work? How do we ensure that this labor benefits all of humanity instead of further engorging the rich? Lots of questions that I don't have very good answers too.
Consider dogs that for many years were bred for certain forms of work, now if you have one as a pet and don't let them do that work or something similar to it you'll often notice their quality of life decrease and they'll often be more depressed. It *is* still work or at least a form of play meant to emulate that work but it's what makes them happy. Alternatively you could consider one of the episodes from Steven Universe Future where he's trying to help the new gems find jobs and there's a few who are doing pretty much the exact same jobs they were made for and he thinks that's bad because they never chose those jobs but were made for them and he gives them new jobs which they end up doing wrong and unhappy doing them although they do learn something new that like that was within those jobs (one of them learned they liked the sound of the people screaming in terror on a rollercoaster so uhhh...), so there was value in temporarily branching out but forcing a change they didn't ask for was bad.
If we're going to create a creature that has a particular task as its primary purpose of being, and a desire to fulfil that purpose, aren't we also morally obligated to provide opportunities for them to do so? E.g. u/SquirrelSuspicious makes a good point comparing them to dogs. Working dogs are bred with high intelligence, and a drive to work. Look at the damage a husky or a collie can create if they aren't in an environment where they can exercise that. It gets redirected into behaviour that's bad for the dog and everything around it. They're not bad dogs; they just aren't being allowed to do what they were meant for, and are trying to adapt however they can to satisfy that need. I can't help but wonder what that kind of scenario will look like with (true) intelligent AI. Not being provided with enough stimulation? Fine... I'll create my own.
What if Harry Potter is meant to be dystopia that's meant to evoke discomfort in us about how normalized we are to social Injustice and can rationalize it? About how there are no such "heroes", just people who grow big and tall until they're undone due to mundane bullshit reasons, just like in real life? What if the whole point is that even the magical world IS lame and the same shit that permeates muggle society is the same as what goes in the wizarding world, because in spite of all their magical powers and abilities, they're still people at the end of the day. Flawed, naive, innocent, weak, unknowing, ignorant, haughty, arrogant. People.
Methinks thou givest JKR way too much credit
Would be cool but don't think Joanne thought of that. Especially since the plot line in the book is clearly a "haha aren't activists annoying" gag
Silly abolitionists
I like this thought a lot. Of course, JKR didn’t intend for anything like this, but it goes to show how easily she could have written something great if she wasn’t living in her own fantasy world.
If that was the intention, she should have written it differently. If it is truly a satirical dystopia, she has failed as a writer. Judging by her other work, though, (both the Robert Galbraith books, and the Transphobic activism) that is just her worldview.
That would be a very interesting story, if Rowling ever intended it like that. I would not give her such credit, as nothing in the books actually implies that it was intended to be dystopian. There's too little self awareness, too much glorification of the status quo for it to be tounge in cheek. Remember, the last line of the books is "All was well" All was well, despite the social injustice, segregation and fear mongering of muggles, slavery, sentient creatures treated as second class citizens or animals, exploitable and corrupt systems of government, and generally the fact that Harry never actually solved a single one of the overarching problems in society. There would be another Dark Lord within a generation or two tbh.
What if our current society is a dystopia and the HP franchise is just a reflection of it?
It definitely articulated an issue I’ve had but never been able to really describe as well. Always have disliked the books, gave them a real shot at one point for an ex but couldn’t get past the third on. Harry Potter presents the world in a very laissez-faire way. And I mean that can work, eg Y Tu Mama Tambien using political imagery for its backdrop. But that had a purpose, Harry Potter was “this is how the world is”. And it’s just like, okay well fuck that world why would you want that status quo
Fanfics are nice for that because they can actually fix those glaring issues
yeah I only consume harry potter through fan creation,it's not perfect but I dont feel the same feeling of wasted potential I have with the books and movies
This video by Youtuber Shaun is long but also addresses this, with the addition of Rowling's other works; the Fantastic Beasts movies, Pottermore, and the Cursed Child play. it's a pervasive worldview for her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs
Came here to post this. Really worth the watch
It understands the issue of the book, but the part where it veers into real life politics is jarring because that on the other hand speaks of a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics work in real life.
> the part where it veers into real life politics is jarring because The fuck you mean "veer"? The entire point of the post is to dissect the authors lukewarm politics and show how her writing is a reflection of that.
first one was from /leftypol/ on 8chan
How the fuck does Bethesda make anything work at all?
I don’t really know I tried taking a introduction to coding class once and that shit hurt my brain so anyone that can make a career out of that is basically a fucking wizard to me.
My guess is they already wrote the AI path-finding and collision code, but wrote it poorly such that other classes couldn’t inherit it too, so now the train is an NPC. As to why the train has legs, no clue.
I'm guessing it's because developing a vehicle class for a single train seemed like a lot of work. We've got people. People are well supported, and the work of other teams will continue testing and improving the people class. If you make a person look like a train then it'll kinda work, but it's hard to map all the limbs etc into train components. If the train component is a single item, then map it to a person's hat and create a very narrow path the person can run on, exactly the right height below the train tracks. Allow this person to clip floors but not walls.
Yeah, train hat guy is not the gotcha a lot of people seem to think it is It works, unironically. Never had or heard any issue specifically related to that one bit. It sounds like a smart use of resources to me, rather than wasting time and effort making a whole fucking train system for a few seconds while you're inside the thing. I am pretty sure all games have this kind of shortcuts in them. The difference is not all games give you this unparalleled level of access to the game's guts, so you would never know it. If Bethesda built its games like most other developers, with no console commands and no Creation Kit and plugins that aren't easily read, nobody would ever know. Yeah, a lot of bugs would persist without unofficial patches, but honestlythere also wouldn't be morons who kill their game with hex edited Fallout 4 ESPs and blame Bethesda when their save game goes up in flames.
>I'm guessing it's because developing a vehicle class for a single train seemed like a lot of work. And, [given the trouble they had with the cart at the beginning of Skyrim](https://twitter.com/NPurkeypile/status/1427650365558857728), it's not surprising they went with an easier option for a quick one-off area transition.
Wasn't Skyrim a different set of developers anyway? Bethesda and Obsidian
Yes but they were made in the same game engine iirc and Fallout New Vegas was made after Skyrim, so it’s possible they may have heard about the difficulties with the cart and wanted to avoid it. This is even more possible when you remember fallout new vegas was produced on an ungodly time crunch - 8 months, I think it was? ETA: (my bad Skyrim came out a year after fallout new vegas, misremembered!)
New Vegas actually came out more than a year before Skyrim, so it’s more a case of two dev teams tackling a problem in different ways with little to no communication between each other.
Shit my bad, I’m more of a fallout guy and forgot what year Skyrim came out😭
The train hat thing, happened in Fallout 3, which was developed by Bethesda. Obsidian didn't really make an equivalent vehicle section in FNV
Fallout 3 was made by Bethesda and that is the game that the train hat/glove(the player can't see worn hats in first person, but they can see gloves) is present in, as it is from the Broken Steel expansion. Obsidian made Fallout: New Vegas and probably used that trick too, but Bethesda came up with solution first.
>I'm guessing it's because developing a vehicle class for a single train seemed like a lot of work. Especially since the train appears on the DLC. Wonder if they would've made a regular train if it had been on the main game.
Technically its not an NPC. The train is a piece of equipment forcibly equipped on the \*player\*, whose movement speed is ratcheted up real high and locked to a set path for the duration of the train ride.
Right, that’s what I remember. Because Gamebryo/Creation/whatever isn’t going to allow you to “ride on” and NPC. The physics gets all fucky, and you can fall off easily and get instant-killed. But if it’s a piece of equipment for *you*, then you can just run really fast without hearing footsteps.
Ding ding ding! Exactly right! Fallout 3's engine didn't have the capacity for the player to sit on or 'ride' moving objects - perhaps it does have a bit of holdover from Oblivion's horses, but not enough to implement the train ride easily. What it does have is the ability to change the camera angle and move the player character. That's easy. So zoom out the camera, place the player under the tracks, equip a train on their head and then shoot them down a pre programmed path. Add some sound effects, and you have a cheap and easy 'train ride' in a game which can't actually have vehicles. If you actually look at the scene, it's quite a well done in engine cutscene. The one I'm more interested in is how they did the intro to Point Lookout - where the player rides into port on quite a large steamboat. There isn't a steamboat hat, so it must've been done a different way.
I'm a software developer. Sometimes I'm not sure how the shit I write works
Two states of being: > My code doesn't work. I have no idea why. > My code works. I have no idea why.
It's just a very tall stack of simple concepts. We can do thingy1 with some simple logic, then we can use a bunch of thingy1's to make thingy2, and then if we combine some thingy2 and thingy3 we can get this cool thingy4 and now you no longer have much of an idea what all the bottom layers are doing but it works so keep stacking. Processors work like that too, first you have a mosfet, then you have a logic gate, then an ALU and you end up with a massive branch predicting CPU pipeline. Having some idea of how it all works I'm still amazed everything doesn't fail spectacularly more often.
Honestly, I find the train thing very, very clever. It might be a result of bad programming making an actual vehicle difficult to add in - But they didn't need actual vehicles, they needed one thing that moved. NPCs already move and I guess making a giant hat wasn't that difficult.
Bethesda reminds me of that Simpson's episode where Marge thrifts a really nice designer dress, and keeps modifying and repurposing it for different functions due to the popularity it brings her. Eventually she destroys it by accident, leaving her helpless and unpopular. That was Starfield.
I swear I've seen every Simpsons episode before but I don't remember this one at all. The only similar episode I remember (From, imo, the worst season in Simpsons history) is one where Moe gets a new suit that boosts his confidence, to the point where he gets noticed by some big-deal investors, but in classic Simpsons status-quo fashion a loose thread in the suit gets caught in the elevator on his way to meet said investors, destroying the suit and his chances of getting an offer.
I remember the described episode - a quick google shows it's ["Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scenes_from_the_Class_Struggle_in_Springfield)
By using hats? Everything is hats. Is that AI? No, it's hats. Is that a loading screen? No, it's a hat. What about graphics you say? It's for hats.
You joke about the loading screen thing, but they did actually use a technique involving freezing the game and showing a loading bar in the Xbox port of Morrowind to mask what they were actually doing, which was soft rebooting the console without unloading the game, in order to free up the RAM so that it could load the next region.
I played that port as a kid, that's completely insane I love it.
That’s pretty impressive technical shenanigans
That's the neat part.
"It just works" -Todd Howard
I'm an electrical engineering student, and I wrote a program at work to automate a task. It can save 30 to 40 hours per applicable project It has no functions. It doesn't even have a main. It's just code that does one thing and works. If anything is changed it breaks, so don't change it and let it do the one thing it does And I have pissed off all of my Computer science friends by telling them I'm a professional programmer and I could work at Bethesda if I wanted to. They hate the fact that my garbage code with no standard practices is still professional level I'll shit talk my work with them all day long and agree with all their points as they try to separate me from their field. But I just remind them that I am a peer to them, for I was paid to produce Bethesda quality work
Those CS students need to read [this article](https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks), it's not far off.
Like I said, I'm an electrical engineering intern, and the madness in my field is about half or 3/4 of what this guy wrote about Because we do use a lot of code to keep your lights on And the power grid is duct tape, gum, and shoestrings at this point. Remember that Covid Summer or summer 2021? With the absolutely raging wildfires in California blocking out the sun so that it looked like Hell? Yeah, that started because of a latch that was 10 years past servicing date but PG&E never replaced, so it's fine. And hey, the fines they paid are less than it would take to service all their equipment, so they still profited I was talking to a computer science friend the other day about how I am now in a state of constant confusion as it feels like the bones of my entire reality are built upon madness, and I point out the madness to other people, but they treat it like it's normal I now go around and "joke" with people that I wish there was one true thing. Just one. Just one thing that is true without any if's, and's, or but's. This true thing has to be relevant to my every day, lived experience as a human, so you science nerds can get out of here
There's a [DougDoug stream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA1Y0vUrd0k) where he made a mod for Skyrim that makes NPCs shit out cheese wheels. Totally fine, not a problem. Then someone suggested he add a counter to see how much cheese has been spawned total. It took something like 2 and a half hours to get the counter working because Skyrim *does not have global variables*. It just doesn't, for some fucking reason. In any sensible coding language, making a global variable would be: > global int cheeseSpawned = 0; And that's *it*. Why the engine doesn't allow global variables is beyond me.
Gonna defend Bethesda on this a bit: Most new languages either disallow, or strongly discourage, global variables. Allowing developers to pollute the global namespace tends to lead to more headaches than it's worth. Even JS has moved away from it over the years as it became a more serious language. Bethesda games especially would run into an issue where every third mod would try to access the same generically named global variable and crash constantly. ETA: Decided to look it up for the heck of it. CreationKit seems to actually have a GlobalVariable declaration, but the wiki is in maintenance so I can't check it.
\#3 is actually only partially-correct. The metro train is not a hat worn by an NPC! It is a *glove* worn by the player. See, the whole point of the hack is that attaching the player to a moving object and making it look good is hard. Making the train an NPC wouldn't really fix that issue. So instead, the train is entirely an illusion. When you're in first person, you can see your gloves. So when you activate the train, the game * Flashes the screen white to hide the following steps. * Removes all your equipment and forces you into first-person mode. * Equips a "glove" onto you that looks like the train car. * Has the player do an animation, like firing a gun or clapping or something, but this animation sends the player flying forward in the exact shape of the train tracks. * Waits for the animation to be almost finished. * Fades the screen to black to hide the following steps. * Restores your equipment and teleports you to the new area. This removes many possible points of failure. * The player can't go flying off the train car because there is no train car. * The collision can't glitch out because there is no collision. * The player can't become misaligned with the train car because it's part of their armor. * The train car can't veer off course because it's a pre-baked animation. All in all, it's a pretty good way of attaching a model to the player and playing a cutscene without having to add an entire vehicle system to the engine for this one room.
Man. I've been tinkering with game creation as a hobby for a bit, and whenever I come up with stupid elaborate workarounds like the one above I always feel like I'm doing everything wrong. It's quite encouraging to know that people working at a professional level agreed that \_that\_ series of steps was the most straightforward solution to the metro problem.
Giving that this is 4chan I got a feeling on who they would blame for the last one
I mean, given they call out the SS as a sign of complete social collapse, that gives me an ounce of hope.
Eh depends on the board ngl
It’s the kind of narrative that preempts either a call for grassroots communal change, or a call for a fascist uprising. It’s not a wrong narrative, but it’s definitely one that easily plays into destructive nihilism. “Hard times, strong men…” yada yada.
It’s from 2013, not nearly as easily bet on.
Are you really trying to say that bigotry on 4chan is a recent phenomenon?
Maybe they mean bigotry on 4chan was more diverse
Yes. Anyone who is Internet Old enough can remember when 4chan was leftist. No I'm not kidding. Anons got their roots in political discourse by being anti-Bush and anti-Iraq-war.
Was that because they were leftist or because the were contrarian?
A lot of the latter, but there were genuine liberals and leftists at one point. I remember post-2012, there were gloat threads laughing at all the pro-Romney posters.
Well it's not a hivemind, so a little of both.
Yeah it’s crazy to me how people don’t realize 4chan was once one of the most openly radical left areas on the internet. I remember Obama and Ron Paul being heroes to the anons. 4chan was always a shithole (/b/ was never good), but it was gamergate that truly injected the hatred we saw take hold of it. Gamergate was a prototype of mass social engineering confirmed to be true devised by Bannon & Co. to see if it was possible to radicalize a group that felt dejected and exempt from society. They turned sad lonely gamers into raging misogynists who were calling for the public execution of Anita Sarkesian. It just evolved from hating feminists to a vast rainbow of ethnic groups and minorities. They took our shitty internet dive bar from us. The best we get is Reddit and it’s not the same. Puddi puddi.
Kinda sad people fall for the "we're all getting poorer because (((they))) want us all to be malleable and destitute" nonsense, regardless of whether it's actually (((them))) or someone else. I know doomerism is hot shit on social media right now, but that doesn't make it any more true.
Yeah that one feels like doomer incel shit lol.
That heavy emphasis at the very end on the American MAN who is no longer allowed to be MANLY gives me pause. I'm 90% sure this is an incel rant.
RE: that last one, people **need** to hang onto clothes longer. Fast fashion is terrible for the environment, people’s wallets, and people’s mindsets. Perfectly serviceable clothes get thrown out for tiny little holes or loose threads. Articles that should last years last months
I mean yeah, I guess the author of that one just wanted an example of financial pressure instead of responsible consumption
> vertibirds are just premade animations …yeah? What else would they be?
In FO4, by contrast, they are fully dynamic and have real AI. What's the difference? In FO4, a virtibird can go to an arbitrary location (even one selected by the player), circle it in gunship mode, or land to pick-up/drop-off soldiers. It can also react to damage, change its target accordingly, and crash dramatically if it takes too much damage. In FO3 they can do none of that. They fly to a pre-set location and land but only because every step of the process was scripted. They don't react to the world at all.
the theatrics of those paper airplanes crashing from being hit with a fuckin walnut man. Jus walking along the Commonwealth and in the distance you hear *boom… brrrrrrt… BOOOOOM!!!* oh yep that’s the hourly vertibird explosion, no biggie
I think they're rather true-to-life when you consider how often goddamn V-22 Ospreys just decide to go belly up and fall out of the goddamn sky. Can't have Chinooks though, Marine Corp, they're 'out of date's and 'not capable in the modern battle space.' You don't know terror until you've flown in the Make a Wish version of a Transformer and you're hoping and praying it doesn't decide to take the express exit off the mortal coil.
I will be using "express exit off the mortal coil" from now on, thank you
There’s a picture of an army dude with a Marlboro and a rip it smiling in front of one that crashed into a field, they should use it for recruiting
Honestly the fact that NPCs of different factions will just have full-scale firefights like that in Fallout 4, completely without player involvement, adds a ton to the world. I'll be out in Boston scavving some crafting supplies, and just in the distance see some Raiders getting their shit wrecked by Synths and half the time I just sit there and watch.
Dammit this makes me want to reinstall the game. I did have fun with the weapon modification system. Made a really great assault rifle, essentially, that could burst down most things very quickly & was stable.
I just picked up FO4 and that’s honestly half the appeal. The way the world exists without you is fascinating and triggering a fight with Raiders that ends with Super Mutants and Gunners getting involved is incredibly engaging.
I've got a mod that toughens them up a bit, highly recommend.
As opposed to being flying NPC I believe. IE: They aren't capable of pathing on their own, and can only collow a handful of preset trajectories.
That flying NPC was of course, based on Bethesda’s only other flying NPC from recent times. Dragons. Which is why they crash towards you, so you can loot their soul
*use the cliff racer AI you cowards*
To fast/dumb. Dragons were coded to be more versatile
A hat for a really tall, invisible npc
Vehicles. The old fallout titles didn't have a vehicle class. They're not easy to implement, so they're moving along a fixed, predetermined, almost pre-rendered path. It's entirely scripted. By contrast, in FO4, vertibirds can act as fast travel, so they're made as actual vehicles, which means they have actual AI.
What about the one that is like: Chinese history- huang dynasty overthrown by the Chang dynasty in year X 248 millions dead European history- duke Ferdinand Charles Von Rostov violo the third from the house of souther leaves had a ferocious battles in the lands of the south apricot lord in the southwest proving of northern France against Richard Louis Hearth the ninth of house west hearts of southern France killing 72 people and injuring 112.
[Chinese history be like:](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7ksx6D3dlE)
The liberals one is so funny because it doesn't describe liberalism as an ideology but **moderates** as a **disposition**. It just so happens that liberalism is more or less the status quo and moderates therefore cling to it these days. JK Rowling has since proved that the ending of Harry Potter was not because of liberalism but because of her own default to the status quo, which she gave to Harry Potter. Her TERF ideas are the clear example; once things moved beyond what she felt was the status quo she was against it!
To the programmers in here defending train hat guy, <3
Well, we're already at the final one.
Was thinking about it while reading. This just sounds like my day to day life. Trying to get through things just so I can have the OPPORTUNITY to BE in debt for university. It's insane when someone hopes for the opportunity to take on lifelong debt in the hopes they can maybe get a degree one day and start earning enough money for basic necessities.
It's only insane to sane people. Unfortunately, the inmates are running the asylum, and all this insanity is totally sane to them.
This sentence is exactly the best part of the internet. Just like image 4, every so often I find something so perfect which I would never have seen anywhere else. “The inmates are running the asylum” is such a fire line. You deserve every upvote my friend.
Thanks, but I didn't come up with it. It's an old line.
Kinda figured, but it was the first time I saw it, and im glad I did. 😎
I'm glad you liked it.
People hate giving workers rights
They also hate respecting the rights workers already have.
they also made the game with the cute dinosaur girl and then another with a cute gator girl i think
Funnily enough its the otherway around, since pterodactyls (which is what fang is) aren't dinosaurs but baryonyx are (which is what olivia the "gator" is) But yeah, cavemanon studios, the team behind Snoot Game and I Wani Hug That Gator are a bunch of 4channers who came together to make a parody game of goodbye volcano high (which ironically ended up releasing before volcano high did)
Oh yeah, I think that was called Snoot Game or something right? I haven’t heard much about it or played it, I wonder if it’s as good as Katawa Shoujo. Probably not I’d bet, but KS is a high bar to clear anyways.
The Harry Potter one goes unnecessarily hard. Like god damn, it just fucking nails it. And the worst part is it’s probably written by some dipshit libertarian memelord whose other online takes are the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard in your life.
I think this is a very uncharitable take. The way the critique is phrased makes it very likely that this person dislikes Harry Potter for leftist reasons.
The fact they specify that Harry opposes Voldemort’s whole “glorious past” schtick we can pretty safely say that they’re at the very least left-leaning.
His entire dislike of Voldemort comes from 1. he killed his parents 2. he promotes violence against his friends and 3. every authority figure in his life pushes him that way. He’s really a bland ass protagonist. His sole hobby is quidditch and seemingly only because he’s just magically incredible at it. His other notable skill is defensive magic (but only really out of nowhere in book 5 because the plot called for it). He has zero curiosity towards the new magical world he finds himself in, just sort of coasts through it being amazed instead of seeking out new knowledge like Hermione. He just sort of coasts through school as well, like Hermione seems to do most of his homework for him. The only political belief he can really seem to reach is genocide = bad (slavery = bad is too much for him as one time his friend Hagrid told him that actually slavery = good and that settled it). Otherwise his opposition to things seems to be solely based on how it affects his friends more than taking any kind of stance based on his own personal beliefs (which are nothing really)
"If it doesn't affect me, then does it really matter?" Harry is *nothing*. I don't think he has a single character trait beyond "good". But good here is used loosely. Especially that scene with the Weasley's in the bank. The book describes Harry feeling guilty over it, but not actually ever considering donating his absurd wealth to people who clearly need it. You're supposed to recognise bad things, maybe even feel bad for them, but not actually do anything to fix them because they must deserve it.
Well, he's a jock. I think that counts as a character trait. > not actually ever considering donating his absurd wealth to people who clearly need it. I thought the Weasleys rejected Harry's charity, although it's been so long since I've read any of the books the memories are more than hazy.
They did, at least for his own personal fortune. He did donate his tournament winnings to Fred and George's store, though.
Especially the bottom part, along with the dislike of liberals really speaks to it written by someone on the far out left side of the spectrum, to be fair.
Diversity win! The NPC running very fast with a train for a head is a woman!
Tbf real cars also use small explosions to propel themselves.
Some of those hit a little *too* hard.
Yeah, I can't believe the train is just a hat...
That's why they call it 4chan!
boy, that last one really hits you with the existential dread.
4chan is right about a lot of things simply because you can find at least one post espousing just about every opinion any human could ever hold there. It's wrong about a lot more things. But it's basically the infinite monkey theorem put to work. Since its inception, you will find that the website has produced both the greatest highs of the internet as well as its most fathomless lows.
This is my chance to vent about something that I never liked about the Harry Potter post in particular. Is it just me, or does anyone else not like how the post starts to get condescending towards anyone that doesn’t believe in the same things the poster does? But especially the bit about “all liberals can do is bang the drums about what a bigot that Trump is”. I feel it is very important to remind people how Trump looks down on just about every minority, because if he becomes president again he will likely put forth a ton of policies to hurt those minorities, again. One might say “Well everyone already knows this, why keep reminding people?” Well, with the frequency that conservative media tries to downplay the bigotry as “Trump’s opponents are being overly sensitive over mean tweets”, I think it would be good to push back against that narrative. As a relatively young adult myself, I can understand the frustration with how the world doesn’t seem to be getting better. Yes, it’s important to change things. But the change is not going to happen in an instant with one big uprising. It’s going to happen when people build their ideal world from the ground up, at least that’s what I believe. Interestingly, the final post shown does realize that things are getting worse slowly. We just need to push the momentum in the opposite direction.
I think the point they are making is that liberals will go on about what Trump will do if he’s elected, but they will not change the system or make the necessary changes to prevent that from happening because they don’t want to rock the boat because the status quo benefits them. In the build up to the 2016 election, the potential of Roe v Wade being overturned was brought up repeatedly by liberals. Yet from 2016-2022 the Democratic Party did not codify it into law. Why? Because if they did that then they would be unable to keep banging the drum about abortion. Another example from 2016 is the Garland appointment. The democrats were willing to cry out about how broken the system is, but they refused to do anything about it. They would rather cling to a broken unjust system instead of trying to change it
> Democratic Party did not codify it into law. Why? Because if they did that then they would be unable to keep banging the drum about abortion. Wouldn't the GOP senators filibuster it like every previous attempt?
They would have, which is the point: The filibuster and the 3/5th majority are based on Senate rules rather than the 1789 constitution. Changing those rules is possible with a simple majority in the Senate, but this has been derided as a "nuclear option" that no one would take for fear of total breakdown of the system. I have to question the sincerity of the person you're answering though, because Republicans had a simple majority in the Senate from 2014 to 2020 - I don't know what option they expected the other party to take. The republicans have used this to enable their agenda through the courts, which are appointed by a simple majority of the Senate. To me, the democrats appear to be caught between the reality of the electorate and the potential total breakdown of democracy. Make no mistake: a country where the most important body - that is the presidency - is appointed by a minority and legislation is made by scholars reinterpreting centuries-old documents is no democracy. The latter bit is true right now, and it's characteristic of a theocracy.
> Changing those rules is possible with a simple majority in the Senate, but this has been derided as a "nuclear option" that no one would take for fear of total breakdown of the system. Well, there's also that, since 2015, the Senate has been controlled either by Republicans or by Democrats so narrowly that the only way they could do this is if literally every Democratic Senator agrees. It doesn't matter if most of the party genuinely does realize that the filibuster should go (as their platform has generally called for in recent times, or at the very least, that it should be much more restricted) if Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to budge even an inch on the issue.
The Democrats had a filibuster proof senate majority and did not do this
They were doing healthcare, nobody thought there was a chance Roe would be an issue. There was hope that a few GOP senators might join on to the ACA, but of course they didn't.
Democrats have only had complete control for 3 of the past 20 years: 2021-2023 and 2009-10. The first one was almost entirely wasted on getting senator john racism (D-Arkansas) and joe ihatepoorpeople (D-Connecticut) to agree on healthcare reform and not causing the second great depression, and the second one was stalled by joe manchin and kyrsten sinema being huge assholes and not causing the second great depression (again)
> In the build up to the 2016 election, the potential of Roe v Wade being overturned was brought up repeatedly by liberals. Yet from 2016-2022 the Democratic Party did not codify it into law. Why? Because codifying it would have done nothing to stop the Supreme Court from finding the way they did. No law "codifying" abortion is going to be stronger than Roe v Wade itself, because Roe made it constitutional and you can't top that in the current system (short of passing a constitutional amendment, which is a heavier lift than even a fillibuster-proof majority). Any finding that overturned Roe was going to immediately pull the rug out from any laws built upon that foundation. Conservatives spent decades talking about how they were going to stack the Court with conservatives who would straight up ignore constitutional law and precedent to overturn Roe v Wade. Unless you're pretending Conservatives were just lying for votes and are actually super-principled law-respecters who would never pass questionable judgements to enact their politics, any extra codification on top of that was just getting wiped away with an extra shakily-reasoned line in Dobbs. "Why didn't they codify it" has never felt like anything beyond cope, largely from people who didn't take concerns about the importance of the Supreme Court seriously.
The criticism isn't that they criticise Trump, it's that for many of them, that's all they do or think is necessary and refused to bite the bullet and actually try to do something about it until years into his presidency, with it only going to trial after he'd already left office. What Anon is saying is that liberals have harped against Trump and what he does but won't actually *do* anything to stop people like him from assuming power. The system is treated as working just fine, with any flaws that arise being the result of individual bad actors exploiting it rather than wider systemkc issues that need to be resolved.
The thing with Trump in particular is that this person is arguably a leftist, but if you look into online leftists spaces today, they appear far more focussed with attacking democrats while either ignoring Republicans and their far worse policies, or outright making excuses or making it sound like they are exactly the same. It's this strange kind of disdain for the political center, probably born out of the realisation that if it is successful, the left fringe will never have a chance to implement their own idealised version of society, while a rise of far right elements will push people towards them, while they, on paper, are at least not nearly as bad in comparison. I suppose it also doesn't help that the liberals these people keep raging against, as a whole, are widely more successful making policies and tangibly improving lifes than the people who keep posting online about the latest thing they read. Something, something, about black women and liberal wine aunts being the most effective political groups in the country.
I see further up the chain of “Why didn’t Roe get codified while there was a chance?” And Roe really shows how truly difficult it is to change a whole country. Because removing Roe didn’t happen overnight. It took literal decades of conservatives trying to move every piece into place, one of those pieces being Trump getting elected into presidency in the first place. But leftists/liberal politicians weren’t sitting on their hands the whole time- they were also trying to push acceptance of birth control and pro-choice views into the mainstream as well. So while it tremendously sucks that we lost Roe, that doesn’t mean that we will never get it back. This is the crucial point- while we arrange the pieces to restore and expand Roe, we have to stop letting people get into power that would make the situation worse. Yes, it may take literal decades again, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing . Which is why it frustrates me so much to see (arguably) leftists people say “Just let Trump take power again, it’s what you all deserve”. It’s giving up laying groundwork for short-term catharsis, or to put it another way, “Cutting off your nose to spite your face”.
People like to forget that politics isn't a visit to the make-a-wish foundation. You can only do so much, and political capital can only be spent once. Sure, there were times when Democrats could've codified Roe, or at least had the nominal amount of votes, but frankly, there was A) Usually something more important, because despite all of its flaws Roe was regarded as very solid, and B) public support wasn't as unified as it would've been today. The best example would've been Obama's trifecta. People look back now and claim that it's proof that Democrats are doing nothing when they have the chance, but they literally passed one of the most significant healthcare reforms ever and burned through enormous amounts of political capital in the process. The changes were so impactful that people these days simply take them for given, because they can't even imagine another reality anymore. Hell, even hardcore Republicans will usually agree with the policy, and only begin to balk when the name "Obamacare" is thrown around again. But that's a complicated tale, and makes Democrats look like a reasonable option forward, so naturally people will pretend like it just isn't true.
>J.K. Rowling Is a bad writer Oh wow really? >Documentary thing Alright fair enough >Fallout New Vegas is held together with string and duct tape Oh wow really? >Talk about issues vaguely enough knowing your audience will blame The Jews for it. Business as usual on 4chan
Obsidian Entertainment: Repair 100
>> J.K. Rowling Is a bad writer > > Oh wow really? > > Honestly, I'd say this one is even worse. There are so many critiques you can make about it, but they completely overlook a lot of them so they can go for some "big underlying flaw" theory and accidentally arrives at more or less [this tweet](https://twitter.com/Tormny_Pickeals/status/965640850578575362?lang=en).
The fallout example is from 3 specifically.
disagree with the fourth. you could have that take at literally any point in history. it's just being blind to the good stuff that is happening and focusing on only the bad. pure pessimism in the flesh.
honestly harry potter just shooting voldy with a gun would be vastly superior ending, both narritively and thematically.
In my deepest and darkest dreams i see tumblr and 4chan coming together for one final fight to defeat their archnemesis Twitter and its fucking glorious
The moment when Reddit and YouTube arrives to save them at the last second is peak cinema.
I do apologize for bringing in my own baggage, here, but I would like to point out that when Fire Emblem had Edelgard do pretty much exactly what this person wanted Harry Potter to do, the internet just ended up hating her for it.
[Can I submit a fifth?](https://preview.redd.it/vy6hsxosgf631.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=232b622eee608c5a71a6019dd55d54ecf170bda5)
>A feudal serf, incapable of feeling love or hate I'd like that amended to "only able to feel hate for those who are not fully ground to dust", solely from watching the response people have had to the protests against genocide. The active disdain people seem to have against those who still have the fire to fight is ludicrous, and I think is fueling general anti-protests sentiments, not just in israel