With all the solo raging I've been doing at the game, I had a lot to get off my chest. eat ittttt
I agree with most stuff but curious what your problem is with the M&KB controls? Everything's rebindable and most of the defaults are intuitive, haven't noticed any problem with mouse smoothing and the cam control is okay except for certain tight angles where the cam turns to shit even on pad. It's leagues ahead of some of the problems I had with, say, Max Payne 3 back in the day.
I've had some hair-tearing moments with the gameplay, like the bullshit tracking attacks and jankily sped up attack animations on Lethal difficulty. The most annoying part for me is the checkpointing, where on death you have no penalty except that you get reset into a random nearby position while the enemies who killed you are usually randomly deleted from the world, so you don't even get a retry. That's for random encounters... die during a map/story location and it's way more arbitrary where you end up; could be somewhere in the middle, could be right at the beginning with all enemies respawned but some bonus objective progress saved, but also some of your consumed items gone... who knows. The fact that I haven't seen a single person complain about this tells me that maybe it's just the standard for open world slop these days so I've been well off avoiding it these past few years.
I'm also unimpressed that very few people online flagged up the latent feminism. Main char gets his life saved by a woman who on first introduction appears to be a crying helpless peasant but soon turns out to be a badass ladybandit who assassinates Mongols on a dime, also she's butt ugly. Dialogue can never resist reminding me she's a handful and always down for a fight. A little while later I encounter a grizzled, no-nonsense lady samurai who's the only survivor of her assassinated family; she's also ugly (because old), but since this one's angry and sad she's also rude and (obviously) a badass, plus a bit of a handful to control when we're trying to get information out of people. Then, in a sidequest, I encounter a samurai warrior who has arrived in the region to help train up the local resistance fighters - this warrior is, obviously, a lady. In a world first, she isn't very badass, but this turns out to be more of a gameplay device to force you to save her in a protect quest when her fearless anger (naturally she has this) causes her to charge head first into a fight. An utterly infuriating encounter on Lethal, to the extent I would have hated her no matter what kind of character she was otherwise. She was however slightly less ugly.
Next I decide to go on a treasure hunt for some antique legendary armour. The way to the treasure is littered with mongol bodies so I know it's guarded by a badass. Such a badass that it turns out to be my first taste of Tsushima's boss-like encounters, which I became more familiar with afterwards. The boss iiiiis... a no-nonsense lady samurai, highly skilled, the last of her line- wait, didn't we just do this unlikely archetype? Guess you can never have too many. Whatever. I was getting too jaded to note down how ugly this one was.
All this within the first few hours of what could be dozens if not hundreds of hours of gameplay. I get that in story terms, most of the fighting men have been killed by the mongols. Yet it's funny that there seem to still be plenty of fighting age men left among the dozens of dishonnaburru Japanese bandits I'm forced to slay, while the very first bandit I encountered in the entire world was my buttfaced lady sidekick who I now owe everything to, and never another female one since. How come the resistance is all ladybosses and the treacherous Japanese sellouts are all men? I will be completely unsurprised if I go the entire game without there being an interesting male ally character or male friendship.
Anyway the game is occasionally fun when you're allowed to engage with the core of the combat and not having to deal with trash gameplay conventions. The open world might not stack up to some others...? IDK, I'm not much of a judge of open worlds, but for me it's on a par in atmosphere and interactibles to parts of Witcher 3's Velen, in terms of being a wartorn medieval countryside with a believable soul and aesthetic. It's fun for me to explore and there's enough attention to detail to convince me much of this game was made with love (flute playing and Jin praying when you bow to corpses is a nice touch). But with that said it's at best a fun, pretty game that's obviously written by feminists. Much like Disco Elysium was a kind of cool game-prototype that was obviously made by communists. The fact it has only been maimed by ideology as opposed to completely destroyed by it seems like weak cause for celebration imo. I'm starting to think the overton window's shifted so much that the effect is just invisible to most.
It might seem like transwomen have a physical advantage when it comes to stabbing but that's only because xhey trained harder than xheir victims.
I haven't really been a fan of horror since I came of age, but I read most of James Herbert's output when I was younger. If you've somehow missed him, then you have to go back and check, although be prepared for graphic sexual descriptions as well as horror.
He wrote The Fog , The Dark, Moon and many others. It's been too long to remember specific favourites, but just be aware of reading order in case you're jumping in on a book that's part of a series (eg. there's a Rats trilogy, a David Ash trilogy, maybe more). He also wrote some non-horror curiosities like Fluke (man reborn as dog; sounded so odd that I never bothered to read it, but it got a bad movie adaptation) and '48 (post apoc London setting where Hitler won WW2 using a bioweapon - more of an action thriller novel, somewhat un-based to the extent that nazi types are the bad guys but I have vague fond memories).
From what I understand, the ones doing the killing in Akita are Asian black bears, as opposed to the bigger brown bears you can find in Hokkaido (so much for #NotAllBears...), so they're not as fearsome. Still, they're plenty vicious enough to kill the mainly elderly farmers and foragers still left in the region, such as the single bear in 2016 which ate four different elderly people in separate attacks, and the killing intent is there.
I think the cops are just there just to keep nosy humans out of the scene of the latest attack while they make a perfunctory search of the area, then they'll soon be gone again.
Send all feminists on a bamboo gathering trip to Akita-ken.
tl;dw: two cops there just got heavily injured by a bear while trying to transport the corpse they found of a missing man (who was missing because he'd been killed by a bear). 212 bear attacks and 6 deaths in Japan last year - which is a significant proportion of reported sightings overall, meaning that if you see a bear, you're in fucking danger - mostly in Akita, with experts suspecting that the bears are coming to see human meat itself as a food source. The whole forested region is sealed off while body-armoured police watch the treeline nervously.
I can't help but feel that we need some feminists to stride in there and prove to them all how much safer the local women would be among the bears, instead of the men. Defuse this hysterical anti-bear, pro-male propaganda.
The wikipedia article links to a blog listicle, which links to mariowiki entry, which - aside from Japanese screenshots that show no evidence of transgenderism, as you mention - links to this 2007 essay from a random dyke, arguing how great and necessary it is for localisers to make cultural changes in Japanese games. It also pops up as a primary source in the wikipedia article, adding to the citogenetic knot.
It's activist bullshit all the way down and always has been, but the revealing thing about the essay is it proves the Italian script is totally invented and different from the Japanese. 'And That's A Good Thing'(tm) in their eyes.
All I ever really hear of him in recent years is when he has cringeworthy awkward run-ins with other comedians he's pissed off at, either for political reasons or obscure personal ones: bill maher, anthony cumia, theo von...
There's little that's mischievous about his joking these days, he just seems like a miserable ball of spite, occasionally spitting out the complete shittest takes on things. I imagine Burr's picked up a sense of the cucked out image that has come to spread of him online and doesn't like it one bit, nor how it all revolves around his wife - justifiably so, since it's obvious that she contributes to his misery and retardation. His 'Rittenhouse just wanted to murder people amirite?!?' stuff clearly came off the back of a convo with her, in a white-hating bubble tone deaf to reality, for example.
I just find it hard to laugh at anything said by people who appear to be inwardly seething while trying to use 'bantz' as a tool to lash out. He comes off like an angry man in a brittle shell that nobody in his circles will dare to take a crack at, partly because of his roasting but mostly also because of his showbiz cachet that comedians want to suck off.
Tired of this bullshit eulogising of Sikhs. I like the fact that they're mostly quiet too but they chimp out and they colonise their host nation's values when it suits them, just the same.
Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's drama Behzti (Dishonour) sparked violence on Saturday night when Sikh protesters clashed with riot police outside the theatre as a production was in progress.
Her play was suspended and the audience evacuated as clashes outside caused thousands of pounds worth of damage.
Speaking at a press conference at the city centre theatre, Mr Rogers said: "It is now clear that we cannot guarantee the safety of our audiences. Very reluctantly, therefore, we have decided to end the current run of the play, purely on safety grounds."
Mohan Singh, from the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in south Birmingham, an organisation of Sikh temples, said the theatre should have heeded the concerns of Sikh representatives before the protests turned violent but denied that the protesters had attempted to stifle free speech.
He said: "Free speech can go so far. Maybe 5,000 people would have seen this play over the run. Are you going to upset 600,000 thousands Sikhs in Britain and maybe 20 million outside the UK for that?"
From the horse's mouth itself: disrespect Sikhs in some miniscule way that might only be seen by 5000 people total, and they will mobilise all their local temples and their tens of millions of Sikhs worldwide to come and destroy you. This was 2004, funny how you NEVER hear about it. All the good goy Brits just completely 'forgot' about it and switched to praising Sikhs to prove they're not racist, in return for headpats.
Radio news here said authorities have declared it 'politically motivated'. I'm surprised they admitted that much since our news is usually highly crafted, yet it's more than I saw admitted in the RT article. I wonder if they're gearing up to pivot to blaming 'right wingers'.
Tatami Galaxy by Morimi Tomihiko, the source material for the anime of the same name. It's a novel, not a manga or a light novel btw. I tried the anime but was put off by the outlandishness of the design, even if it was all stylish and unique or whatever. I did enjoy his other anime adaptations more than Tatami, such as Penguin Highway and Uchouten Kazoku/Eccentric Family, but really they've all each had a striking visual style which I felt distracted a bit from the background running themes, which seemed to be about fate, the meaning of life, growing older, coping with the inevitability of death and loss, etc... So I wanted to get at some of the source material directly and see how it felt without someone else's visuals dictating it. It's interesting that the visual picture I build in my head from a book is always very grounded in photorealistic Japan, compared to the kind of visuals you get thrust on you from an anime.
I'm not too deep into Tatami Galaxy yet, but basically it's about a sexually-frustrated, jaded uni student trying to get his rocks off while harangued by a cupid-style kami spirit. I'm not crazy about the premise, but it's clearly got some of the themes of fate and growing older, plus the usual Morimi folkloric surreality that you see in adaptations of his, like Uchouten Kazoku and The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl.
The previous book wasYoiyama Kaleidoscope (Yoiyama Mangekyou), by the same author, which was actually my catalyst for buying most of his books, since it was the most interesting sounding and it hasn't had any tv adaptation yet. It's a jumble of overlapping short stories, set during 'Yoiyama' which is the kind of warm-up festival, the night before Kyoto's famous Gion festival. The atmosphere is a soup of big strange shrines, glowing paper lanterns and ancient folklore (even irl) so the book piggybacks off this, into stuff with a hint of the supernatural and fantastical, in a very gently spooky fashion, all happening during the night of Yoiyama and centering around a missing girl.
I liked it a lot. I suspect Tatami galaxy will struggle to improve on it, given how I simply liked the Alice In Kyotoland setting of Kaleidoscope more. Morimi's atmos - less charitably, his gimmick, since it's in the majority of his stuff - of stuffing loads of Kyoto and festival-style paraphernalia into a setting, while having low-fantasy events happen around it, scratches an itch I can't really describe. I'm curious how his source material for Uchouten Kazoku will hold up, since the adaptation is my favourite of his and among my favourite anime in general, but at this rate I might not work my way around to those books for another year or two.
I'm guessing he was up date on all his boosters.
GAD65-based Stiff Person Syndrome + autoimmune shit
Celine Dion got Stiff Person Syndrome during the vaxx rollout, first time I'd ever heard of it.
oi oi, I love the look of Felvidek. Glowing Steam reviews which all suggest it's very short, so I might even be able to fit it in my backlog without forgetting it forever...
My favourite is this one:
The doctor who opened and moderated 2023's World Vaccine Congress, and who happens to be a pastor who 'heals body and soul', went up on stage and led various talks about how to reduce vaxx hesitancy.
He doesn't mention in his stage talks that he too has got permanent tinnitus from the jab, and that it's "extraordinarily bothersome" and still "debilitating". He just keeps on preaching.
How fucking 'trad' can an Australian glowie ever be in the first place, considering the willing globalist puppet that that country's power structure has revealed itself as. Trad or not, she searched the entire world and picked an A1 cunt.
SUGGESTED READING
The case for polyamory
BY OLYMPIA CAMPBELL
I suspect this advert in the middle of the article, with a pic from that new faggy tennis movie, tells me more about the piece than the text does.
I mean, there is an outside chance that I'm being incredibly uncharitable to the MaHoYo translation because I'm not going through and doing a comprehensive comparison. I'm just using it as a fallback for when I'm lazy or brainlocked, so it's possible that the 3-4 times the Japanese temporarily defeated me are the exact same points where the translators chose to inject... flourishes, or else were defeated by the text themselves - but I doubt it.
The point where I decided it's 100% unreliable in general was this: 鳶丸(tobimaru, a char name)の推測だが、この少年は個人的に譲れない事のみ白黒をハッキリさせる気質らしい。 It's a reasonably twisty sentence, despite the brevity, which means 'It was just Tobimaru's speculation, but the boy seemed to be of a disposition where he only sought confirmation on certain things, ones which he personally couldn't let slip by.' (My own translation, ugly for the purposes of including everything said). In context, the 'shounen' just asked for clarification on something said to him, which is out of character for him to do. The English has: 'Tobimaru had come to suspect that the boy had a very black-and-white way of seeing things.' Totally lazy, lacking insight and in fact gives the direct opposite meaning. It's a translation that kind of gives up on the entire grammar and tries to get by on latching onto the 'black-and-white' word used in the Japanese. The boy is clearly perfectly content for most things to exist in a grey zone, since despite being a fish out of water he only seeks clarity on rare, specific things. English only readers don't get told this. It just makes me wonder how much else they're not being told, or being told wrong, with every sentence that goes by.
The quality of presentation with the art and camera usage in the scenes is off the charts for a VN, still. On some level I'm glad that the officially translated game is, apparently, good enough for most to enjoy and love, but like you I've toyed idly with the idea of getting into this scene myself and setting the world to rights. The one I still toy with is the possibility of putting out the world's first and only worthwhile English translation of Cross Channel - although given the history of the different attempts to translate that one, it's probably cursed. The one on Steam is a foul travesty, anyhow, not least because it's so censored.
A while back, I got talking to a guy over our mutual enthusiasm for Full Metal Daemon: Muramasa. In the time it took me to finish reading through that VN a couple of years back, it got an official translation to English. From what I've seen, it's a pretty decent translation that captures the spirit of the original, although I can also testify by Parvati's tits it is heavily embellished in parts (the original Japanese in the pic is just 'nan ja?!?'). The English editor did however respond to a YT comment of mine and used it to make a correction to the script which was applied in a patch, apparently.
So anyway, the aforementioned Muramasa enthusiast at one point invited me to a discord server where several professional VN localisers supposedly hang out and discuss their work, including Moogy, the Muramasa guy who responded to my comment. I turned this invite over in my head and wondered if this might be my in-road into making some contacts and adding my own contribution - hopefully a better one - to this shit-stinking field. In the end I made my excuses and never clicked the invite. Because we all know what it's like - trannies and sexual degenerates. This would have been trannylation central. In fact I'm reasonably suspicious that Moogy himself is a tranny. If game translation can ever be redeemed, and I'm 80% sure it can't until there's a bigger cultural shift, it would take a lot more than me making friends on some dicksawed server, something which is probably only going to pose a challenge to my sanity and my retch reflex.
Anyway, if you ever do decide to take on the challenge of translating something independently, keep me in mind and shoot me a message lol. We couldn't possibly do a worse job than some of the stuff getting the highest praise.
Reason number 437
Truth. There really are so many reasons. I picked up MaHoYo/Mahoutsukai no Yoru/'Witch on the Holy Night' for language practice a few days back. My Japanese is a long way short of perfect, so occasionally when my dictionary-fu fails me I switch to the English script for a reference point. This turned out quickly to be pointless in MaHoYo because the English is brutally bad. Any reasonably difficult sentence will attempt to paper over the translation cracks with Flavour(tm) or else will have a coinflip chance of just being completely mistranslated.
This is a game that's Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, with thousands of reviews, so as far as popularity goes it's stratospheric for a VN, knocking on the door of Saya no Uta level. But these reviewers aren't even really playing the same game. I've never heard about any translation controversies or complaints with this game (although that might just be because I don't poke my nose into circles where it gets discussed). I think for most people it just 'seems good enough', but really it shouldn't be and isn't.
Seems there's no room for mockery, they actively embrace the 'trannifa' label. So since it's uncontroversial, trannifa's the word for antifa one should use when talking with normies - force them to make the association and pick an alliance in their heads.
With this long spent programming the golem, I'd complain to its manager too.
The FGC is dead because it's full of this kind of woman/troon and their young enablers now. Notice how it's piggybacking off a sonicfox tweet and gets wall to wall Likes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYw3z747FcM&t=4101s
1h8m21s if timestamp doesn't work
They pretty much do their own policing, at this point
They aim for this. The modern state of affairs where they are mostly not permitted to be a law unto themselves is historically the more abnormal one. People know and worry about sharia but are mostly ignorant of talmudic tendencies:
Since the time of the late Roman Empire, Jewish communities had considerable legal powers over their members. Not only powers which arise through voluntary mobilization of social pressure (for example refusal to have any dealing whatsoever with an excommunicated Jew or even to bury his body), but a power of naked coercion: to flog, to imprison, to expel - all this could be inflicted quite legally on an individual Jew by the rabbinical courts for all kinds of offenses. In many countries - Spain and Poland are notable examples - even capital punishment could be and was inflicted, sometimes using particularly cruel methods such as flogging to death.
This was the most important social fact of Jewish existence before the advent of the modern state: observance of the religious laws of Judaism, as well as their inculcation through education, were enforced on Jews by physical coercion, from which one could only escape by conversion to the religion of the majority, amounting in the circumstances to a total social break and for that reason very impracticable, except during a religious crisis.
-Israel Shahak, 'Jewish History, Jewish Religion'
I think the core of the combat gameplay could have been fine. There's satisfying rewards for higher risk stuff like parrying and a decent RPS thing going on with the stances. But much like other aspects of the game, it's like they had a solid central idea then did everything they could to make it annoying. People call it 'arkham combat' but the arkham games have a tight sense of rhythm to enemy attacks and make your own attacks very sticky so it's hard to miss, within a combat framework that's all about style and combo retention.
With this game, the enemies attack totally chaotically, your own attacks don't 'stick' much at all (unless you turn on a lot of auto target stuff in the options which aren't the default), yet enemy attacks track like crazy. Like Witcher 3, there's 2 evasion options in the game for no reason except to stop dark souls fans from bitching about not having a roll. That forces them to balance fights around your crazy movement options, so enemies develop psychic skills to cover your roll with a long tracking attack or punish you for striking their comrade, unless you kite the shit out of them. I've seen them start a multi-attack string then track 180 degrees to perfectly punish my roll which I used to evade their first move. So why even put a roll in the game? I'd honestly turn it off and rely entirely on the dodge if I could, but they're the same button and there's loads of skills gated behind the roll skill. It wouldn't be quite so bad if half their shit wasn't unblockable and unseeably fast.
Stealth, I don't really give a shit about and I'm trying to stealth as little as possible.
Perfect example of this was in my last session where some mongols were storming an area with some friendly peasants around. The mechanic where one mongol will decide, from 100m away, to lock onto an unarmed friendly he can't even see and rush blindly towards them to take them out, at which point he turns into an obtrusive skull and crossbones symbol and it's all just a thinly disguised failure timer, is pure cancer. It made zero in-world sense either. None of the peasants were particularly significant in story terms and there's no reason a mongol soldier should be ignoring me to get to them. It's a bullshit way of forcing the player to do annoying pointless stuff, when they could just have me fight the fucking mongols, rather than create dynamic hostage rescue mechanics just because they can.