I mean, that’s the point of Dune? The ‘prophesies’ aren’t real, they’re seeded by the Bene Gesserit, the same group that spent millennia breeding the ‘savior’. And, he’s not meant to really be a savior, but their catspaw.
But also, he’s definitely not actually a savior, on account of all the death he brings. It’s complicated, but overall a deconstruction of white savior narratives and similar stories.
Yeah, I’m holding off for a sale on this one. I liked Elden Ring well enough, but the performance issues are infuriating. Baffling that it still isn’t fixed.
I don’t care for it. It does some interesting things, in base building. But having played it a lot mostly because my friend group likes it, it’s very janky. It does not feel close to 1.0. And, while there’s some fun to be had, everything outside the horde nights just feels like busywork in a way I didn’t feel with Valheim or Grounded.
Short answer: read Jack Vance’s ‘tales of a dying earth’. It’s the reason dnd magic is called ‘vancian’.
Longer answer: in that series, magic works by just remembering words, and then saying them. But these magic words are powerful things, weighty in the mind, hard to carry. And, when said, they tear themselves out of your mind, causing you to forget them.
So, not ‘spell slots’ per se, but the idea is you’re prepping spells almost as a ‘potion’, something you carry in your mind, and consume to cast out a spell.
Also, article skips over the chemical part of this: Vitriol, the name for the impure sulfuric acid they used, was green (due to some iron and cupper sulfates). You can use sulfuric acid to purify gold; it’ll dissolve the silver and copper in a gold alloy, but not the gold itself, giving you 100% gold.
However, the green lion can also ‘ascend’ by combing with nitric acid to make aqua regia, where it can dissolve gold, “devouring it”.
I fully agree. If you read my first comment, I pretty clearly as much as the new ones are pretty bad (story wise), the two Jaffe worked on are even worse in that regard.
I mean, I too would be unhappy with the new games’ stories. They’re not very good stories overall.
But, they’re better than the vast majority of video game plots, because that’s a low bar.
Still, Jaffe seems to imply the old stories in GoW were any better, when they were pure drivel. I might still be very underwhelmed by the story in the two new God of War’s, but I at least like that they’re trying (even if I think the direction of relying heavily on animation and visual flair is the wrong one, as far as telling good stories goes).
I agree. I’m very much for more research into fusion. I’m still somewhat skeptical of it ever being ‘infinite cheap energy’. But even if it never becomes a ‘good energy source’, the advancement of knowledge is valuable. So its not like I think fusion is a scam overall.
But I think this particular company is.
That is what I think the owner is doing here. Scamming venture capital firms for a tech that cannot work.
And I mean, its not like I have any proof. I can’t read minds; maybe he is a true believer.
But this company feels like those companies back in the 80s that sold tickets to mars, for the rockets they were ‘just about to build’; a scam.
This isn’t a research firm. This isn’t trying to find the exact settings and layouts to make fusion possible. If the article can be taken at face value, this is a company to make a commercial fusion plant. And I find that, in 2023, patently absurd.
I hope it works.
But I’m skeptical enough to say that I think this is a scam. We’re closing in, research wise, on getting fusion to generate more power than it takes to run. Which is awesome!
But its still a far trek from that figure, to producing enough power to be practical (I’ve heard it said you really need to aim for 10x more production than input, minimum, for it to make any sense).
And that is still a trek from making a fusion plant competitive with existing grid power.
I’m skeptical if this plant they’re building will even generate power, which is like three steps away from making commercial sense at all.
Why is it “schizo edition”? Is that like, a real thing, or is sseth doing that abelist ‘schizoposting’ stuff?
Edit: man, y’all really hate people with schizophrenia, huh?
Yeah, they got that ‘no pores’ look that selfie filter give, that’s somewhat uncanny looking.
I got through the tutorial, and into the ‘hub world’ or w/e it’s called, and it just felt very ‘MMO’ to me. Which, on top of the monetization already putting a bad taste in my mouth, I just refunded there. I hate games that shove ‘multiplayer stuff’ into single player games. Like, I played through Elden Ring in forced offline: I don’t want to interact with others, even through little stuff like bloodstains.
Good. This is a game I played and immediately refunded when I saw all the monetization stuff.
I just want a single player TBS, in the style of their other game, Monster Train. But I got immediately turned off by the FTP MMO type design choices in Inkbound.
Where’s ‘turning the music off and driving in silence’?
Yeah. It was worse in 3.5 ironically; despite casters having more downsides than 5e, spells were overall stronger. It did leave this narrow window at levels 1 and 2 where martials were basically strictly better, but caster quickly skyrocketted in power, especially if you were playing with prestige classes.
Spell power was reigned in for 5e, and pretty sharply at that (most notably from adding Concentration). But, they also washed away caster downsides, by making cantrips at will, casters not quite so fragile, and by softening Vancian casting. 5e is still absolutely more balanced than 3.5, but that’s not saying a lot; 3.5’s power level was all over the place.
Still, I feel like 5e’s levels 1-5 are pretty balanced, and the martial/caster imbalance doesn’t really become painful until like, level 12.
I think the more important balancing is just ‘making battlemaster maneuvers resourceless and available to all classes’.
But I’m not against ‘limit break’ as a short rest ‘charge’ available to most martials.
TBH, the above is basically the way PF2e handles martials; at least half of their class feats are more or less ‘resourceless maneuvers’, and many martials have access to ‘focus spells’, which are basically just short rest charges for exclusive class features, that just happen to mechanically be considered spells (though, notably, PF2e doesn’t give fighter focus spells, making them nearly 100% at-will).
Personally, I think the most important fix to the martial-caster imbalance is to nerf casters, who just are too strong, but A) that’s basically what PF2e already did, and its largely complained about (though I love it). And B) Its not strictly necessary, if you buff Martials by a large margin (though, imo, that starts to get into like, demigod territory that I don’t love).
In the older editions, like the ones you’re talking about, casters had serious downsides. Between being very fragile, spells being interrupteable, and sometimes having different XP amounts, casters were kinda ‘glass cannons’, and needed a martial frontline.
In 3.5 and 5e, casters have had these harsh downsides decreased or removed, while not otherwise losing power. They are more or less strictly better than martials, in the sense they can do 90%+ of what martials can do better than they can do it, while also doing several other things. And the few things martials do do better, it’s by slight degrees.
It’s not just that casters are powerful, it’s that they’re powerful and flexible, able to be top tier in several different roles at the same time, and can change what roles they cover by resting and swapping spells.
Whereas martials can sometimes build to be top tier in one role, but they’re largely locked into that one role, or can build to be okay in several roles (and be outclassed by casters in all of them).
BG3 was basically unplayable for us for about 2 weeks post 1.0
But also, we really wanted to only play co-op, and the bugs were mostly online related, which is arguably more forgivable.
But still, hard crashing or freezing every 15 minutes for one of the three of us sucked, and looking at support forums, wasn’t uncommon either.
I’m talking about the stuttering, caused primarily not recalculating shaders. Something I just dealt with the entirety of my first playthrough of ER. But the fact that it still isn’t fixed really makes me not want to play, or to pay them money.