Congratulations, you've successfully gaslit yourself into defining away everyone who disagrees with you as a "bot" and now find yourself haunted on all sides by your shadowy enemies.

And for everyone else: what do you think the odds are some of this unfortunate poster's brainworm infestation was seeded by literal CIA/State Department astroturfing bots? I give it about a 50/50 that that was an important infection vector, and a good 90% chance that they've nodded along while looking at CIA copypasta bot and uncritically believed whatever racist thing it was telling them to.

So you're just gonna double down on the "actually my shadowy enemies are both impossibly more technologically advanced than the imperial core, but also too stupid to use that advantage and instead waste massive amounts of effort specifically in preparation to gaslight me, the main character, due to their impossible prescience that one day I, the main character, would be using a fringe social media website in the middle of the night, prescience that is literally only used for that one purpose and that purpose alone because it so import to trick me, the main character," theory then?

Or you could go and look at the three years of post history the community has, which notably does not revolve around some herculean effort to gaslight a tiny handful of people from sites that did not exist for 90% of hexbear's existence and that no one had any realistic expectation would ever exist.

The entire theory rests on the idea that [insert bad country] had LLMs that were five years ahead of the curve and the supercomputers to run them, and this was devoted to generating massive amounts of content on the speculation that maybe someday it would provide legitimization in a fringe internet community, instead of using that massive technological and material advantage to spam as hard as possible with infinite free burner accounts on mainstream social media sites.

You're talking about one of the oldest lemmy instances, the most active established instance, and the instance with highest per capita activity, at a time when activity has suddenly become higher than ever because suddenly there are a bunch of redditors saying awful shit all over our feeds and we can go dunk on them without needing to bother with accounts on different sites for the first time in over three years.

You're also vastly overestimating what bots require and do: all we have to do is look at the largest and most sophisticated botnets - the CIA/State Department astroturfing botnets - to see how even the laziest and crudest copy/pasta spam is all it takes to completely dominate and drown out opposition. Literally no one needs to be sneaky, just yell the exact same verbatim press release quote over and over from ten thousand firstnamelastname12345 accounts with stock photo profile pics and you control the conversation completely and no one cares if you get caught out, like the CIA/State Department bots constantly do.

You're also claiming that the instance was built up with chatbots more sophisticated than anything there is today - and all of those still-not-coherent most-sophisticated AIs are extremely expensive to run - starting at a time when the most advanced language generating AI was GPT-2, which was only a step or so above old markov chain babbling. You can literally go and look at the ancient post history yourself.

The Culture series is another big exception, combining both readily accessible and extremely fast transitioning tech with the understanding that people still have their own identity and preferred presentation (that can also get complicated).

And of course every car there is a suburban assault vehicle too.

The best part was that it was always just the fact we were all terminally online and saw the same frontpage threads as everyone else. It was (almost) never an actual brigade, just the result of having a bunch of very active posters with better politics than the average redditor. That's all it took to make the worst people on reddit over being unable to consistently silence people with better opinions than their own.

BG3's combat is terrible. D&D 5e is bad enough on tabletop, but in a video game it just does not work at all. D&D needs an incredibly skilled GM to paper over all the glaring problems (and any GM good enough to run D&D well probably knows enough to run something else instead), and just conflicts horrible with the rigid precision of a GM-less video game, nor does its dungeon-crawling resource attrition paradigm work with a fixed narrative world.

Pathfinder Kingmaker or Wrath of the Righteous are probably better alternatives, since Pathfinder fixes at least some of the problems with D&D (Pathfinder 2e fixes more than 1e did, but those games are both 1e). Kingmaker at least has some dogshit brainworms (haven't played Wrath of the Righteous so I can't comment on its brainworms), but is probably the best CRPG I've ever seen apart from that problem.

Love that politics is just two ultranationalist parties sobbing and breathlessly accusing the other party of being insufficiently nationalist.

I disagree with the claim Bondrewd was treated as not-overwhelmingly-evil - He is so obviously and face-slappingly the narrative villain and I don't understand how it didn't feel that way to you - was kidnapping and torturing orphans not clear enough?

The problem is you're looking at his actions instead of looking at the narrative around him: the narrative that has his peers just shrug with the harshest words any of them have for him being to call him a scoundrel while grinning, that positively exalts the will to trample over others to reach one's goal by having it pop up again and again as the lesson, that revels in his crimes, that has the protagonists just let him go once he stops being a threat to them, and that has him constantly being polite and praising the protagonists.

At the very least problematic he's an example of a sort of cargo cult imitation of a certain villain trope, where the author's twisted perspective renders him incapable of making the characterization land and fails to have the narrative treat him appropriately (if his peers accept his actions that should lead to a condemnation of them as well; if the world's institutions support and protect him that should be a scathing condemnation of them as well). However I can't help but see him as an author-insert character, and that all narrative problems around him stem from the author being a pedophile who's extremely aroused while writing about what Bondrewd was doing.

If Bondrewd were to be looked at in isolation maybe these problems could just be brushed off as bad writing, but in the context of a story that's just constantly doing this sort of shit it creates a clear pattern of doing apologetics for the horror and treating it as part of the wonder of the pit. The author just has a completely alien moral perspective that revolves around his pedophilia and seeming fascist tendencies, and that fundamentally shapes Made in Abyss.

Thanks. I also went in blind not knowing anything beyond the vague and rather tame things people usually say about it, like oh it's dark, it's sad, it's gory, that sort of thing and any harsh words they had weren't any more than what some people say about other, much less problematic works.

It's almost funny that they were wrong by being too soft on it, because it really is just so much worse than anyone ever says. The fact that it's apparently so popular is genuinely troubling.

It is lifted directly from an official Star Citizen forum post some years back, both legendary and notorious, back when there was a lot more speculation about what Star Citizen would be (and a lot of it expected more than one star system).

So somebody fantasizing about EVE style player empires and also the idea that SC would be literal magic enabling them to do things, then?

bounty hunting

Yeah I remember a lot of weird "I want the official, central server continuity to allow Ark private server style shenanigans where you can permanently hold another player's character hostage if you feel like it. There's a big overlap between that and the weird fantasies about people who blow up their spaceship getting sentenced to work thousands of real time hours doing hard labor in space prison.

It really is amazing how strongly SC has managed to capitalize on the dumb guys who have bad ideas but lots of money demographic just by virtue of CIG being run by a bunch of dumb guys with bad ideas who promise that someday their beleaguered software engineers will get around to implementing them, once they're done procrastinating by doing literally anything other than touching those ideas with a ten foot pole.

There are two massive problems with that line of thinking: the first is the fact that capitalism is fundamentally a continuation and escalation of what it originally replaced, many of the core concepts of it originated under mercantilism, and the fundamental inequity and ownership-based-rule stretches back through feudalism all the way into antiquity, for all that it's had different flavors and social expectations along the way. The second is that capitalism is the hegemonic system now, so there's no reason to rail against feudal proto-capitalism or the primitive accumulation of the Roman empire, because they are all dead and gone.

Hell, a not insignificant chunk of the European bourgeoisie are literally the failchildren of landed aristocracy, and most non-aristocratic "old money" families at this point got their start under mercantilism. If the old Roman patrician families were still around instead of having diminished into obscurity in the middle ages they'd be bourgeoisie too, and probably weirdo hyper-fascists like most aristocratic failchildren are.

What even is the context of that? It doesn't even seem like Star Citizen fanfiction, just weird worldbuilding from some 4chan incel.

Basically, I'd say it has one strong suit: the sort of soft-around-edges surreal fantasy aesthetic was, while not particularly original, quite stylish and well executed. The problems - ignoring the nonce stuff for the moment - were the pacing and progression. The story had basically two modes for pacing: breakneck glossing over all the weird, surreal fantasy environment, and bogging down while tons of nothing happened. The problem with the progression was that there wasn't any: the main characters remain static through the whole thing, neither growing nor being diminished as they go through their requisite training montage and suffer horrible things - there's no leveling up and becoming more actualized from their experiences nor is their catharsis in their suffering, Riko and Reg are fundamentally the same people when they leave Orth as when they reach the golden city, being neither more competent nor just barely hanging on, the scars they get along the way just being decorations added to their character design.

The movie is vile and can be summed up as "the author-insert serial killing mad scientist responsible for Nanachi and Mitty's conditions (and much worse), has plot armor, the story revels in the heinous shit he was doing, and then even after he's beaten he still wins because the main characters don't even think to stop him after they have the upper hand and instead they just keep going, happy and completely oblivious to all the horror, maiming, and trauma they just went through." I got maybe halfway through the second season before deciding that continuing to watch it constituted self harm, but it gets worse from there with the story bogging down completely to just wallow in the village of horrible nonce ancap blob/tentacle monsters and all the gross vile shit they do as a whole bunch of literally no story happens.

Ultimately it's all just gross empty spectacle: the suffering isn't for anything and it's not making a point anywhere. It's just gratuitous, in the true meaning of the word. Even if the characters were all adults it would still be gross and horrible and pointless.

It is the absolutely worst show I've seen, hands down. I keep meaning to write up a review dissecting exactly everything that's wrong with it, because nonce stuff aside it's also just absolute dogshit, but I never actually finished watching it and slogging through the episodes about the ancap village and its literally-nonce-based-economy is too much to stomach.

At least the sequel should let you make cars untenable by just not letting them have parking anywhere. It'll still probably have last-mile delivery trucks though.

We don't want to literally nuke the concept of a suburb out of existence