jantin @ jantin @lemmy.world

Posts

8

Comments

151

Joined

2 yr. ago

Nyaaah, when will people understand? No one in the rich and powerful and tech circles cares about people. We're "human resource" and always have been, one more mineral to be strip-mined until exhaustion (cf. South Korea) or obsolence (cf. echbros' AI wet dreams). Once gone or too hard to mine, the drilling ops move on to another quarry just like with minerals (offshoring).

High fertility in the West is bad because the American and European human mines are capital-intensive while the global South still has billions of units laying bare on the ground. "Pronatalism" is only about the top of pyramid and the narrow slice just below it - white, educated, well-mannered, elegant, artistically minded and creative societe who perpetuate the imaginary, self-proclaimed "western culture". Shame they are also those who are too worried to have lots of kids in this economy and climate, but oh well.

Yes. Solasta is a faithful implementation of the 5e mechanics, with races and classes copied directly and sub-classes being OC to a large degree. There may be some stuff missing though, at a glance BG3 is more comprehensive in how many spells, items are there. The entire setting is also an original thing, we're NOT playing in Faerun there, the mosnters are different, the map is different, the lore is different and much smaller.

Compared to BG3 there's a lot less stories in Solasta. I've won the main campaign and the first DLC while trying to find as many subquests as possible and I don't think it would add up to 100 hours. But then there's the second dlc (which adds levels 12-16) and a myriad of fan content, so sky is the limit. Most quests are excuses to go out there and clear a dungeon or a swamp. Main plots are fairly on the rails and not too deep. The first DLC tries to be a bit more of a sandbox but in my playthrough the ending had a glaring contradiction in it so you see it's not too polished.

But boy, is the dungeon clearing pleasant. Solasta embraces the dungeon crawl and combat aspects of D&D - maps are very diverse, there's a good balance in number of different enemies (enough to not be boring, but not too many to lose track of how to deal with anyone), very granular difficulty settings. And the UI.

Coming from Solasta I can say BG3 has missed the mark in converting 5e to a computer game. Solasta is much cleaner and more accessible (bigger icons, better controller integration, clear movement in combat), multiplayer is easier to start, but is fairly unstable once the game is going. It's not a serious problem tho, desync doesn't kick out anyone from the game (just now everyone plays single at their machines), I can save and re-start the multi session with a save from the moment the server failed.

So if you want the tactical d&d with smooth multiplayer Solasta is the best thing there is. If you care for stories and roleplaying... not so much.

Even the article says some of it trickles down to you over the pond

You better start enjoying them anyway. Unless we get really good at sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere it will be only getting worse. The atmosphere-ocean system isn't at equilibrium yet and we keep pumpin' every year.

Yeah, the oligarchs. It's quite likely that top people at Wagner are/were rubbing shoulders with some of the Russia's rich so there may be more for the mercs in it than just the money.

It's not like Putin and his closest cronies are in any way competent. They are removing anyone who dared to criticize. Before the coup Prigozhin, Girkin were allowed to say whatever they wanted as long as they did not undermine the general effort. Now Putin's inner circle will ultimately disconnect themselves from reality: govern the country and the war from a bunker filled with scared yes-sayers with no alternative voices.

Website not available in the EU due to GDPR

I recommend not clicking, such clauses usually mean there's some scummy bs running in the background.

Oh true, the mineral salts from supplements (and broader salts of necessary metals) should count! Thanks for a long answer!

E-ink is great for this kind of experience, but it has one big problem: abysmal refresh rate. Enough for books, irrelevant for price tags so this is where it succeeds. Movies or fast typing? No.

I heard a rumor that an eink display can be oveclocked to reach reasonable rates, but it would probably wear it down rather fast.

There are still many economic sanctions that could be imposed and the existing ones can and should be tightened.

But the issue of threatened ships can be easily solved by assigning NATO escorts. AFAIK Turkiye declared their navy is going to do that (escort cargo ships on the Black sea) but I don't know how it went

Because you can't argue that. Any other ground reason for policy can be challenged or counterargued or relies on values which are arguable.

No one is going to plainly argue "ok but how about we do not protect children?". And if someone tries a different angle such as "this law is not really going to protect anyone and will bring a lot of problems for children and adults alike" it will be easily dismissed as "you insidious snake, why do you want to hurt children?! Don't sabotage child protection!". Which autokills conversation.

Creating a parallel internet for children is a very intriguing idea

Well I'd also flag a Russian spyware app as suspicious if I had a say in it.

huh "go for a walk, it's gonna help with depression" is not a take I expected here

fascinating, and also good to have it all in one place.

the subtle bitcoin shill at the end is a cherry on top.

No doubt some bullshit happened in economic policies and capitalist influence, oil crises had their hand, but 1971 is conveniently 26 years after the end of WW2. Which means the boomers entered the job market and society for real.

Yes. And they know protecting themselves means destroying lives of billions so they need to make sure the billions won't go after them. And since the masses are also aware of the situation it means at least short-term planning against the people. This requires at least basic coordination between interest groups and gradual capturing of whatever means of power are still left for the masses. Then they figure out how easy it is to wield even more power and off we go to the land of the tin foil headwear.

Two things: geography and popular support.

Most of Germany is a massive plain with super-dense settlement network. There is nowhere to hide for a partisan group and by 20th century it's not possible for local chieftains to hold sovereign power as it's easy to just move towns/regions. Nazis had no way to hide their potential guerilla operations, no way to rely on sympathetic locals in select places. Afghanistan is sparsely populated, with local communities, which sometimes can be isolated from each other due to terrain and distances. The entire country is mountains which have hardly ever been surveyed and are inhospitable to anyone not born there (and even then it's just too easy to hide).

Yes, millions of Germans supported the Nazi party. But millions more were quietly against it or were "not interested in politics". After WW2 the Nazi party was soundly beaten and the non-commited/antinazi Germans could build a civil society - in a land which had centuries of civic traditions. Whereas the Taliban have more commited supporters and weaponise the religion which already is very influential in any individual's life in a land dominated by patriarchal clan social structures.

I predict an unprecedented wave of suicides in about 10 years time. People who knew a nicer world (current 30-40 year olds) will ultimately understand how hopeless the future is. Younger people will break after 20-30 years of polarization, pauperisation and yearly disasters. This will overlap with natural timeline of passing away of today's 60+ year olds. Not fun times ahead.

It could make sense when compared to Brexit. The brexit referendum was supposed to be a 4D chess move from less insane Tories to shut down the new populist party and more radical conservatives. Instead we got shady meddling, "leave" won and they were actually forced to do it and shoot their both feet with a cannon.

Maybe the established powers in the US wanted to use Trump to channel extremism into him and have him lose to get rid of the sentiments. Instead some shady meddling happened etc.

I'd put the cutoff between the "natural" history and emerging NWO around 1995. From whatever little I know the Clinton administration wanted to seriously tackle climate change and use it to reestablish the US as global leader in some regards. In 1992 the first attempt at global climate treaty was sabotaged by big business lobby and it kinda went downhill from there.