Eiyuden Chronicle Hundred Heroes Review

Greetings Friends, I originally played Eiyuden around release, I believe I tried the Switch Version, the Steam Version, and the Game Pass Version; mostly played the Game Pass one for about 10 hours. I love Suikoden in general and want more Suikoden of course but the game was just dull for those first 10 hours. Not to worry the game does get better like 20-30 hours in and is ONLY 95 hours long if you do everything. So I was aware of this more or less and just didn't play it because its 40 hours too long a la Rebirth, in the case of Rebirth it was very profitable to cover on youtube so that negated the shittiness of the length (same thing for Revelations I'm sure) but more and more of the comments on the Rebirth videos are like "fuck this game its way too long." Now in a general sense very few people care about Suikoden at this point and games like Kessen 3 and Valkyrie Profile 2 are much better than any Suikoden game and those franchises are both super dead so accepting the fate of franchises that peaked in PS2 era and died is sort of an inevitability of a traditional JRPG fan. How many active people would you say even know that the character Arshtat (a fantastic character and character design) even exists? Probably like 2000 tops; there is a lot more Arshtat on gelbooru than Eiyuden though so that's something. They are actually making a new Suikoden shockingly enough and it is a gacha which most people would say is a negative BUT based on Eiyuden not doing well and not reviewing more than mediocre people wouldn't play a traditional Suikoden but a few superfan whales might fund the gacha enough to deceive Konami into making a mainline Suikoden afterward; so gacha is probably the correct angle for reviving the franchise and also for more Jeane artwork.....................................................................................................................................................................................................So your question is probably what got me to play it at long last, firstly I got a Steam Machine which meant I could play steam games on my couch with the Steam Controller with ease and also motivated me to try out some more games that I was mildly interested in. Secondly the illustrious SRD posted a 100% speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T_mBIq0FjM a few months ago which is an ultra complicated route that I had no interest in making myself but if you wait long enough and outsource all things are possible. So as a result Eiyuden "only" took me like 45 hours to beat while doing all the minigames (~25 hours was watching very tedious dialogue), so I got the full experience and had level 99 characters 5 hours in etc.........................................................................................................................................................................................................So What's the verdict and why you ask. Well it is about an 8/10 or so, the first 10-20 hours is basically dogshit with a few high points like Mellore, then the castle metagame is quite good and fairly engaging particularly if you have an efficient route for gathering the resources. The main protagonist level characters all suck except Marisa. Nowa is better than a silent protagonist but not that much better; he's mostly good in comedic situations where he breaks the fourth wall about helping people for no reason. The villains are okay, Luca Blight but more evil I guess; the strategist is very good compared to most Suikodens but also kind of a minor character, Perielle is a very good character but arbitrarily dies if you don't recruit 120 stars you don't have any input on this beyond 100%ing the game; its totally fine if the main love interest dies because of a decision you made in the game like Vandal Hearts 2 but it randomly happening is generally terrible without spectacular writing and as you may have guessed the writing in this game is mediocre and inconsistent with the exception of the Cooking Minigame which actually has a good story. To reiterate the Cooking characters have better plot development than the main cast; also the cooking minigame takes 10-15 hours to complete essentially..............................................................................................................................................................................................So I really like Suikoden V but in my decrepit old age of still less than 40 I've had to reconsider it being 60-65 hours long and some of it being fairly tedious to interact with; that doesn't mean I'll pick Suikoden 2 over it but Suikoden 2 is much more appealing to replay because it doesn't take fucking forever to beat. Enter Eiyuden which is longer than both combined and way worse at most things, especially fundamental baseline things like character design and basic plot construction. So its clearly not in the upper echelon of Suikodens; is it better than 1, 3, 4, and Tactics; of course its better than Tactics, tactics fucking sucks (except for Jeane of course); I don't think its better than 4 or 3 and 1 is like 1/10th the length and thus far more digestible so it is basically the worst Suikoden, albeit every Suikoden is between 7.5 and 9 give or take and this is just another 8 or slightly less than 8.

Disclosure Day (A Philosophical Discussion)

Greetings Friends; rare movie review post; not really a review so much as a discussion of the concept. Disclosure Day is a hard sci fi film by Steven Spielberg and basically the idea is that empathy will defeat all evil magically, so kind of the plot of every JRPG. Since its hard sci fi and philosophically interesting I like the film, it does have some rather glaring flaws that we'll go over but a flawed interesting movie is way better than a by the numbers movie. Essentially since the 1970s at least the gubmint of Disclosure Day has been concealing that there are Aliens and has been taking advantage of their technology; this is very effectively shown to be a long distance mind control device that works as long as you know what a person looks like; like extremely telepathic godhood essentially. Despite this the organization that uses said device to interfere with the protagonists and has infinite resources can't seem to wrangle two to three fairly inept people at any given point in the story........................................................................................................................................................................................................Now; the current state of the government leaves a lot to be desired as far as general competence goes however if the government and/or secret corporate pseudo government had access to godlike mind control powers they probably would be fairly competent; so basically this is a failure of making the villains seem effective or dangerous at all in the film with one interesting exception. So for one thing the villains should be more competent and also Emily Blunt's character should have more superpowers basically, it shouldn't be she has to look into everyone's eyes individually to tame them but she should have a personal burst aoe mind control effect or something instead. These two things together would make the film a lot better, it might also benefit from being rated R and considerably more violent, they don't necessarily have to kill characters for that to work either just be more imposing on that end, the subject matter is relatively heavy for being relatively toothless (aside from the fabled car vs train battle).............................................................................................................................................................................................................Okay on to the philosophy aspect; does empathy being imposed on you from an external, alien force lead to a better society. It might lead to a better society relatively speaking but would probably have some adverse effects especially in the short term. One of the characters does sort of present this argument in the movie but it kind of just gets tossed aside ultimately. Ayn Rand's Anthem basically has a forced empathetic society in it and objectivism which is generally pretty terrible is sort of rooted in a counter philosophical aspect in that regard. I'm not that much of an individualist but the "Great Man" theory as far as how history moves forward is somewhat appealing to me and a universally empathetic society would probably prevent and eliminate greatness as a concept. John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism is not unlike the philosophy Spielberg presents in this movie, I think Utilitarianism works quite a bit better than forced empathy from an external source but also has a milieu of issues............................................................................................................................................................................................................So, how would I improve this movie on the philosophical level; I think going deeper into the concept of forced empathy would be good, the CGI animals and presumably not CGI alien that is piloting said animals could probably be used in a creepier fashion to highlight this. Basically you need to present the counter factual in the movie instead of just giving it lip service; if you then present a situation where that is remedied then it would be more cohesive as a plot point. You could also have a flashback sequence at some point demonstrating how the aliens made first contact and how the human alien relationship broke down; if their empathy is so godlike and powerful as to tame Colin Firth easily then surely they could've handled Nixon too. Perhaps Kissinger with a shotgun shows up and blasts the aliens to smithereens. Shoutouts to John Williams.

MMO Stories

While working I've been watching a lot of Tim Cain's (one of the creators of Fallout) youtube videos including this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgL2HCS-29A and left a few comments, here they are for double publication purposes I suppose. If you're curious as to my current thoughts on Iran well its still TBD so the original thesis could still happen but it seems more and more likely the US will simply lose which was not in my prediction thesis (the US typically loses like 5-20 years later after wasting a shitload of money but they might lose really quickly this time)......................................................................................................................................................................................................... More MMO (and MMO adjacent) stories for posterity: Later in my Warhammer Online career I had switched factions and become a Witch Elf myself since I was well studied in all their rogueries from spectating and killing them repeatedly; in one day I had 1100 kills (a well above average day, almost certainly the most anyone had on that day there were a couple of extremely good Korean players (Norrist and Prettyfly (who also had a youtube)) so they may have had more I don't recall) and 0 deaths, I did this in the big BG instances that they had with a group that consisted of random support players and me; some of whom were quite entertaining in their excess proclivities; I did not go out in the PVP (or RVR) Lake on this day much as a caveat which is where you would die to 200 players at once sometimes; I think I did a small amount of laking though for like 50 kills. These next two are not from an MMO but the experience was very MMO. In 2019/2020 I was playing Hardcore Diablo 2 with the SM World Record Holder Zoast and we met a core group of friends and played together a bunch; one of these friends the noble Godhands or GH was relatively esteemed by the community. There was another rogue PVPer who would join your games and everyone would leave instantly in sheer terror. Eventually these two got to shit talking each other so much that they had an impromptu duel and tragically my friend died, this is hardcore so that was permanent; everyone left the game after this including me and that meant that no one could claim my friend's corpse so the loot there was gone forever (Enigma 2 socket COA perfect HOZ etc.); this was a mistake on my part but I'm not sure it would have mattered since the corpse would've been camped by the erstwhile PVP deity. This is an extremely rare experience to have in 2019 or 2020 its like straight out of 2001-2003 era Diablo 2 but 20 years later; very wild stuff and I got to experience it. There isn't really a sense of community that way where you could identify individual players in D2R; it does not have the old school bnet feel most of the time. However in PD2 there is still the bnet vibe and experience so here comes our third story. Just a few months ago in 2026 I had a fun levelling experience, I believe this was on hell difficulty I was mostly afking every game but occasionally participating; in this case I was participating. We had a pretty scattershot group with everyone in a pseudo isolated position in Act 2 but we got to Claw Viper Temple and someone went in and pulled Snakeskin to the entrance of CV2 and everyone who entered the room died instantly for about 5 minutes; eventually we decided we had to all go in at once and naturally almost everyone died but one barbarian leap attacked to the altar and got the viper amulet; thus saving the group; without the coordination of everyone going in together for essentially guaranteed suicide we wouldn't have saved that particular game and been able to finish the rest of Hell Difficulty in short order thereafter....................................................................................................................................................................................................................Thanks Tim. I think I've documented this elsewhere but here you go; in Warhammer Online which is basically DAOC with better combat and somewhat different mechanics there was this gigantic bridge in the zone Dragonwake in the middle of the PVP area and it was like 1000 meters above the rest of the zone. Myself a White Lion (my Lion was named Dave) and a Warrior Priest (Silent Bob was his name) were on the bridge and then we were ambushed by three witch elves; literally the top three witch elves on the server (there were weekly leaderboards with numbers of player kills and so on) and by extension all of Warhammer Online (which had maybe 150k players at this time) since it was the biggest server. Bob used one aoe punt ability, Warrior Priest was a very strong class, and it knocked off all three Witch Elves off the bridge to fall to their dooms; I believe we were shit talking each other in Ventrilo at the time as well. This was a completely unscripted event, just happened out of nowhere; impossible to replicate; and stuff like this would happen every day or week since PVP was the only endgame worth doing. I'm pretty sure two of the Witch Elves had PVP Video youtube channels (this was either late 2009 or early 2010) so could probably still find them somewhere.

Iran Potential Outcomes, is there a Way for the US to Win?

Greetings friends, I've been thinking strategically about the War in Iran and whether it was ever possible for it to be a good move on Trump or Netanyahu's part. On the surface it looks really terrible before and after and during so is there any benefit to the action in the first place. I think the main good argument for why it happened for Trump is some variation of Hubris or expectation that Iran's regime would be weak; which to be fair they generally have been for 2-3 years. That said Iran has 93 (!) million people so if you bank on killing the leader and all potential leader prospects working (I don't think this has ever worked historically despite the assassin's creed games) you'd have to go through quite a lot of people. It is possible for the US and Israel to destroy all weapons making facilities in Iran eventually but it will probably take like 6 months or more at which point the Strait of Hormuz would be closed for that entire duration and presumably things like Desalination plants would be attacked in the GCC countries..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................So if you can't win via bombing can you win via ground invasion. Obviously ground invasion would be spectacularly unpopular in the US but so is the price at the pump going up for 6 months so as discussed every outcome is dogshit so because of that some kind of ground invasion is possible. A limited occupation of Iran's coast seems like the least likely ground invasion to fail (though still relatively likely to fail) so this is more about how should the force be made up and so on. Its not that easy to transport let's say 40,000 troops over night so it would take maybe 1-2 months to happen; the same is true for China Vis-a-Vis Taiwan; obviously right now is the absolute best time ever to attack Taiwan but the amphibious assault takes a while to setup so they probably won't wind up doing it and there will be some amount of force replenishment; maybe a pit stop for the Gerald R. Ford en route to Hawaii or what have you....................................................................................................................................................................................................................So a ground invasion requires prep work and will take 2-3 months to setup; assuming no Iranian capitulation (which their authority is decentralized now so its really hard for them to capitulate mechanically in the first place even if some of them wanted to), do you begin the plan now or do you wait for more economic pain to incentivize other countries to help you. Here's where we get to the main interesting strategic point; I don't think it's possible for the Iran War to ever look good on the whole but it is probably possible to have a "good" outcome in the end via a coalition invasion; an actual coalition invasion mind not one that's 90% US or what have you. If France, UK, Germany all contribute 5000-10000 troops and the US/Israel take up the remaining amount and occupy the southern coast of Iran then they can probably hold open the Strait of Hormuz indefinitely; if this doesn't happen within say 6 months to a year we have a very probable recession globally and probably a catastrophic famine in the Gulf States due to no food coming in; I guess there could be some air lift potential there or something but its quite a lot of people to feed by that method......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... There is some vague amount of risk with such an invasion that it could spark WW3 but Russia does not have the military capacity to help Iran and China is likely almost entirely focused on Taiwan because of the golden opportunity if they can pull that off in the same time period. So WW3 certainly not and Taiwan maybe like 15% possibility within a year or so; 2027 was the predicted invasion date for US/NATO wargames; if Trump had continued to be successful in foreign policy actions he probably would have deterred China but presumably the Iran conflict will have the opposite effect so we might still wind up getting 2027 anyway. Shoutouts to the Esports World Cup; insert various jokes here.

Analyzing Trump's Seemingly Random Foreign Policy Decisions

Greetings Friends (apologies for the Mercator projection which is still funny to me), Rare Burst of Inspiration post used to happen once every other year or so; the perils of aging. US Foreign Policy has been dreadful for roughly 30 years with some rare exceptions, I don't think much of Clinton's tenure but there are pretty good defensive arguments for what he did in the moment and the uniqueness of unipolarity so despite Black Hawk Down he wasn't that bad strictly from a foreign policy perspective; Bush Sr. and Reagan were both quite good at foreign policy; and Nixon the beloved was the best since Polk the actual best President. I guess Trump or someone in Trump's circle also thinks Polk is the best president hence the land grabbing tendencies or desires. Kind of an uncommon perspective but as we'll see a lot of my train of thought when it comes to how the world works recently becamse reality instead of theoretical "whenever this nonsense crumbles"........................................................................................................................................................................................................I'm more interested in discussing the current state of affairs than giving an overall discussion of how stupid the previous foreign policy decision makers were but essentially COVID destroyed the rules based order and the War in Ukraine/10/7th took it out back and obliterated it. There could have been either precautions to prevent this from happening or it could've never been structured in such a foolish way to begin with but essentially Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and so on were always stupid and this was already proven by WW2 and we didn't need to reiterate that process a hundred years later....................................................................................................................................................................................................................Now for a Biden retrospective, I think up until October 7th Biden was actually quite a good President and he did an excellent job in the early days of the Ukraine War, whether the Ukraine War is strategically smart from a non European perspective is another issue but assuming you want to support Ukraine in a defensive war a lot of that credit should go to Biden and Wesley Clark and so on. That said October 7th was an unmitigated disaster and led to the worst public facing genocide in 30 years, it's possible Iran will genocide its own populace at a faster tick soon but until then that statement holds up. Under Biden it really did not look like there was any chance the War in Gaza would ever end and Israel would continue doing preposterously evil things continuously but under Trump it seems to have a chance of restoring the pre October 7th order which is still bad but at least not horrifying............................................................................................................................................................................................................Here we have the first Trump foreign policy move of destroying Iran's Nuclear Facility at Fordow; in a vacuum this was a smart move done quickly but because of its proximity to genocide its kind of hard to evaluate. Also Iran will eventually rebuild its Nuclear program (*if the regime doesn't fall), but it might take like 10-30 years. In any case its still better than Iran and Israel exchanging missiles/F-35 strikes every few months, overall a solid move; doesn't seem like a regime change move in Iran would work anywhere near as well as the Venezuela one but it's hard to tell if Trump is operating on pure bluster in this case or not............................................................................................................................................................................................................As far as Venezuela's concerned I should point out that the previous leader of Venezuela Hugo Chavez was very anti-US but he was also a competent, popular leader and the country was doing perfectly fine under his rule. Nicolas Maduro was/is an incompetent dipshit that was extremely unpopular in his country, this is a big reason why a huge risk like using helicopters to extract a foreign hostile head of state went so well. So while this move looks on paper possibly quite foolish it went just amazingly well and if you were theoretically planning a Coup in 3 years (who would ever do such a thing) a good way to get the military on board is doing a flawless military operation that makes the US military seem terrifying to all but the strongest powers. This is a 10/10 for Trump in general, he probably got pretty lucky a helo didn't get shot down but it was going to work even if that had happened so maybe it wouldn't have had that much fallout depending on how poorly that aspect had gone...................................................................................................................................................................................................................Onwards to Greenland discussion; I don't think its smart to threaten your ally and demand their land and so on in general and I think the way Trump is going about doing it is both stupid on the surface and in reality. However, the Arctic ocean is in the process of melting and eventually will be a major trade route thus Greenland and Northern Canada will likely become a lot more prosperous in 50-100 years assuming no nuclear apocalypse; so Greenland isn't a bad piece of land to target acquiring on paper. Even if Trump does nothing and this whole situation is just seen as a farce there is at least a precedent of a US president demanding Greenland in the past for some other future president to utilize in the future. From a NATO perspective they have a new "enemy" to rally against and might actually become militarily competent again (Ukraine isn't in NATO yet) without the aid of the US; obviously Europe having a strong military has never caused any issues historically. So while this seems generally a pretty stupid move from Trump it could work out in the end, I may or may not be alive at the point when it becomes relevant but also projecting the future currently beyond a few months seems foolish (whereas you could foresee a Taiwan or Ukraine conflict from 15-25 years away before, now there could be a conflict anywhere on the planet at any time); insert proverbial Lenin quote waiting for decades and nothing happens, wait a week and then decades happen.

Ranking of Halos, 2026 Non Halo Fanboy Edition

Greetings Friends, I've had a comical interest in FPS's lately for whatever reason. Usually when I'm binging a genre it'll be 16 bit or PS1 JRPGs for a month or two but this time it was shooters. This will be a pretty lengthy pre-amble so fair warning. I played the original Halo quite a bit from 2001-2003 or so including LAN parties and so on; I had already played Doom, Doom 2, Duke 3D, Rise of the Triad, Quake 3, and a lot of Unreal Tournament as well as Goldeneye so I was never Mr. Halo but the game was fun and the campaigns in particular are quite good relative to something like Call of Duty's average campaign (though some CoD campaigns are good too). Side note: while Doom 2 is probably the best FPS still RE4 is a lot better than any FPS and anything that isn't Super Metroid, Vagrant Story, or a Link to the Past. RE4 has the best pistol in any game and also the best shotgun in any game and I guess ultimately that's what you want in a shooter. My first experiences with Halo 2 were in like 2005-2006ish, some random Freshman kept bugging me to play it so I eventually did; I guess I did know him from years prior but it was pretty impromptu on the whole; I also played Republic Commando and Crimson Skies High Road to Revenge thanks to this kid which are both fantastic games. I think we beat most of the game on legendary at that point (Halo 1 I've beaten the campaign like a dozen times across every difficulty) but possibly not the entire thing.....................................................................................................................................................................................................Enter first large gap of time here, at some point my brother (who is now a Lawyer) sent me Halo 2 and possibly Halo 1 as well in the mail because his roommate in the Coastguard left it over at his house; so I just had it spontaneously; I don't think I did anything with it for like 3 years but eventually I had some free time and no one in the house so I set out to beat Vanquish Tactical Challenge 6 for the Platinum Trophy which is still the hardest singleplayer thing to do in any shooter as far as skill required and also Halo 2 on legendary solo which was quite a fun experience, Halo 2 was much easier than Vanquish but it still took some doing and I just generally have a fondness for Halo 2 because of how it coalesced at that exact moment in time (now 14 or 15 years ago) I guess there's some random disdain for Halo 2's campaign because the ending is a cliffhanger and you had to play as Keith David (the horror!) but it seems pretty good to me still; also unlike Halo 1 Halo 2 did sort of birth the console shooter online experience even though COD4 is sort of the one that matters in that regard so Halo 2 would have a mark in the influential category (so Goldeneye, then Halo 2, then COD4 for console shooter influence; COD4 is more influential than Doom or Doom 2 though those games are a lot better; its sort of influential because of the moment in time moreso than the actual innovation). .................................................................................................................................................................................................................Enter second large gap of time, so at this point we've played Halo and Halo 2; surely enough to rank the entire series; well now I played Halo 5 with a friend without ever playing anything in between; we only played the campaign in co-op on legendary so I don't have any opinion on Halo multiplayer beyond 2 (other than a few firefight sessions in the past few days). Halo 5 is a pretty decent game but you do fight the same boss like 4 times in a row for some reason, as far as I can remember it did have the feel of a Halo game and the ability to like skip large portions of firefights if you could just get to the next checkpoint instead which we'll get to that issue later vis-a-vis Halo 4. Running past enemies is the essence of Halo, the key component of the experience regardless of the difficulty you play on, it must be present except for stuff that doesn't progress until you kill all enemies which is typically like one fight in an entire mission.........................................................................................................................................................................................................Enter Largest gap of time in this exercise, the Halo 5 run was in 2016 or 2017 and every other Halo was played in the past two weeks or so, a little bit of infinite like a year ago but the rest of it just now. Full disclosure I got Game Pass for free from Microsoft for about 2 years due to being a Youtubist; that period is shortly to run out though it will probably be back at some point to hazard a guess. Things not going so great for Phil Spencer and co presently but actually last year up until the last few months was quite a good one for game pass; Expedition 33, Oblivion remake, Avowed, Outer Worlds 2, Ninja Gaiden 4, etc. I'm happy with the money I didn't spend to get it. But since it was on the verge of running out I was suddenly motivated to actually use game pass for something aside from new releases, Lo! a Halo spree. I played 3 on Normal and 4, Reach, and ODST on Easy despite playing every prior game on Legendary; this was mostly a time consideration, Infinite I'm not even sure how the difficulty works but I guess its on Normal right now?............................................................................................................................................................................................................Now for Ranking stuff; 1. Halo: CE it seems like ranking Halo as the best shooter ever has died down but maybe there's still some people that feel that way, the first Halo has some fantastic levels and then a bunch of okay levels and just by virtue of having a LAN Party scene in the first place a sort of inherent legitimacy in the moment of time segment of gaming; that said I don't think it's actually particularly influential beyond regenerating health/shields which isn't something to be proud of. Its just a good game that's fun and replayable, it did come out before RE4 so if you look at before RE4 shooters it's almost certainly top 10 region but maybe not that much higher than like 8th.................................................................................................................................................................................................................2. Halo 2, the most influential game in the series due to online multiplayer on console; I guess in theory I shouldn't have that much nostalgia for Halo 2 since I played it for maybe 40 hours total but it still seems a bit better than everything except Reach and Halo 1, I remember where I was when I played different moments in the campaign in a tactile sense still. If we're looking at all time shooter rankings Halo 2 might barely scrape into the top 20 though we'll have that discussion again shortly.............................................................................................................................................................................................................3. Halo Reach, almost certainly the best game on a technical proficiency level and just the overall strength of the campaign. If you were someone who didn't give a fuck about Halo 1 when it came out I'd recommend Reach as the main game to play in the series; fantastic game but no nostalgia for it here, I do think Halo Reach should rank a little higher than Halo 2 on an all time shooter list..............................................................................................................................................................................................................4. Halo Infinite, the first controvertial choice I suppose; ultimately 3 and Infinite are very close and would both probably get an 8.5/10 from me but Halo 3's beginning and ending suck and Halo Infinite's middle sucks so ultimately I went with stronger ending. The story of both games sucks as well so that's not really a deciding factor. Halo Infinite does let you run past about 2500 enemies and that is peak Halo.............................................................................................................................................................................................................5. Halo 3, as above; I do think the like 5th through 7th level is some of the best Haloing available its just kind of ass after that part. The gunship is pretty cool for the 5 seconds you get to use it..................................................................................................................................................................................................................6. Halo 3: ODST; ODST is a pretty good game its just that Reach is better in every way. Also Nathan Fillion quips might have worked on me in 2009 but not really at this point in my life................................................................................................................................................................................................................7. Halo 5, I confess I don't know that much about Halo 5 other than I beat it on Legendary in Co-op and you fight the same boss 5 times; I'm pretty sure the entire story was discarded in favor of Halo Wars 2/Infinite's story...................................................................................................................................................................................................................8. Halo 4; unlike Halo 5 Halo 4 doesn't let you run past most enemies and just generally doesn't feel like Halo most of the time, the big tank level is cool and the you drive a Pelican level is cool. It's still a pretty good game ignoring the title.................................................................................................................................................................................................................Final thoughts: A lot of people seem to think modern Doom is like an iteration of Halo and also Destiny is from the Halo devs; I think Destiny felt kind of like Halo originally but not really at all anymore so no need to discuss that. I can buy that modern Doom is pretty Halo-ey and Doom 2016 is maybe the best single player console FPS of all time so that's fine. Doom Eternal is not very good on console and I've only played a little bit on PC which is much better and Doom the Dark Ages is like a top 10 game from last year but lower end of the list; only played that one on PC so couldn't speak to the console controls but I imagine they're fine. I did play all the Halos recently on PC with mouse and Keyboard except for Infinite which does read PS4 pads on PC, rest was on consoles though I played some Halo 1 multiplayer on PC (some time between 2005 and 2010?) which is fun.

Bean Dip, Burrito Filling, Fajita Meat Recipes

Greetings friends, Figured I might as well write this up since I've enjoyed my past few attempts quite a bit. Basically like 15 years ago I had an excess amount of money to buy food and thus wound up working on a particular recipe for 9-12 months intensively and then just added random refinements or subtractions additions over time. The basic concept is refried beans, salsa, sour cream, and shredded cheese (or chopped up block cheese) which is a common enough dip composition but then you combine that with a fajita mix which was Heinz Beef Gravy, Extra Lean Ground beef, and 1 of each color of bell pepper sliced (green, orange, yellow, and red in this case); added to the fajita meat was some kind of taco seasoning (doesn't matter which), garlic salt, and garlic powder typically added directly to the gravy as its cooking on a stove top. The fajita meat is extremely good by itself but you can mix it with the bean mix and voila super good bean dip. In the past 5 years or so I haven't been able to eat a large amount of meat, I can eat meat occasionally just not as a regular component of my diet so I just was working with the bean dip component itself independent of the fajita mix and I've subtracted the sour cream and added rice (and garlic powder recently) but basically you need a bonding agent so that the salsa doesn't become the dominant flavor. Generally avoid using salsa that tastes too much like tomatoes as it will overwrite some of the other component flavors. I've made the full on dip with the fajita mix like 30 or 40 times and the bean component several hundred times with varying results but sometimes you will end up with a completely heterogeneous solidified mix and sometimes it will be more homogenous and closer to liquid; both can be good for different reasons and all of these can be used with tortillas or tostadas as a main dish or just as something to eat with tortilla chips or doritos.

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Expedition 33 Review

Greetings Friends, rare game review post. I guess just to get this out of the way this is the best game since the Witcher 3 which was the best game since RE4 so it's the once in a decade experience more or less; it's only 50 bucks too so you should probably go play it. I actually bought a physical PS5 copy of it as like a symbol; it is the only PS5 physical game that I own (I played the Game Pass version mostly) which is pretty emblematic of the current generations issues. I do get almost every game for free from developers including this one but I thought it would be nice to own one physical PS5 game to go with my Two (2) PS5s and 5 PS5 controllers (2 are broken one is halfway broken); apparently said PS5s are appreciating assets which is highly amusing. Was able to make it through the entire game on a beefy 3090 PC; top of the line from 3-4 years ago but no longer so necessarily; I think it varies a lot on optimization though; the 3090 isn't drastically less powerful than 40 series cards and the 50 series is generally trash so far; Indiana Jones for instance ran very well on high settings with no crashes.................................................................................................................................................................................................................... So what makes this game special and how does it tick. Well for starters Lune is probably the best character design for any female character in any game, visually and the cohesion of the character in the plot; she's not KOS-MOS levels of awesome or anything and not actually the central figure but pretty damn masterful for a supporting character; plus she has feet (and even laughs nervously when she mentions feet in a conversation). This game's inspirations are many and multi faceted but as a baseline it's Final Fantasy X mixed with Legend of Dragoon; then you add a sprinkling of Dark Souls and Sekiro's Mikiri counters (quite randomly in the middle of the game); very reductive dipshits will say "its just Mario" but there's so much more to it than that. It also has very complicated build construction systems though admittedly after a certain point the game is a little too easy to break, but before that point it's fantastic in a balancing sense. I think only Valkyrie Profile 2 has a similar level of customization through gear as far as how busted you can get characters to be; coincidentally before this game VP2 was my 6th best game of all time and now this is my 6th best game of all time..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................As far as the plot is concerned its some mixture of Mother (the Aronofsky movie), Greek Tragedy/Olympic Diaspora of Greek Gods, and otherwise generally pretty unique, the setting is almost entirely unique for any non walking simulator and it's fucking gorgeous the entire time. There's even like some artistry if you're running on lower settings compared to high, the way the game shows that is also sort of artistic. There's an exceptional deconstruction of the JRPG protagonist like "what would actually happen to a JRPG protag in a more realistic setting" and that's wonderful, Andy Serkis is in the game which is pretty wild, plays like a top 10 villain in any game in it probably the most intimidating villain ever in a game but not like a life changing experience to watch like Albedo in Xenosaga or anything (or Delita who still transcends the medium). I do think the Witcher 3 is just better in terms of plot and also has Gaunter O'dim in it who's hard to beat, but if you ignore the Witcher 3 there's not really any other RPG that has voice acting and competes evenly with this game on a presentation level......................................................................................................................................................................................................................So how would this game have been better than The Witcher 3 to broach the Top 5 games ever; well it would have to be mechanically perfect and that's not quite the case. For starters there are awful minigames in it a la Rebirth (they are worse than Rebirth's though not as numerous); my advice is either don't do them (sadly losing out on swimsuits) or mod the game to do them for you basically; no need to stain the masterpiece with the minigames. The gameplay is top 3 in any JRPG for sure but that's still not quite as good as Vagrant Story's gameplay which also has defensive and offensive timing; so from an RPG standpoint it can't quite make it over the hump. So tragically the game is only a 10/10 and better than fucking everything in ages.

Ranking of Final Fantasies 2025 Edition

Greetings Friends, somewhat rare game post. This is mostly just a mental exercise and a self review of past opinions; blog format is so borked I don't think I can actually formulate it as a list so I'll just copy paste the notepad section here momentarily: Tactics, 6, 4, 10, 12, 5, 8, 7 Remake, 1, 7, 2, 9, 13, 3, 15, 7 Rebirth, 16; don't care about the mmos. Tactics has the best non voiced (though it is voiced now) story in any game and the best character in any game in Delita though you could take Gaunter O'dim and I would be fine with that choice as well. It's also the best game mechanically in the tactics genre aside from Front Mission 5 and arguably XCOM 2; great game; sort of killed its own genre by being so good I guess with everything being compared to it and Tactics Ogre afterward...................................................................................................................................................................................................................For a long time 4 was my best final fantasy, I'd say 10 or 15 years straight; I've played 6 and 4 like 25 times each under various conditions and it comes down to how much do I still enjoy it at this point; most recently I've played both on a Super Famicom with actual cartridges and what not; actually both games have really cool and weird bugs/glitches that work on actual hardware so that part is a wash even though the 4 one is more useful I think the Opera House glitch is also fascinating. Sketch glitch doesn't work very well on the JP cartridge so didn't screw with that much (also probably wouldn't since it could be unhealthy to the cart). I think FF6 pre world of ruin is the best game of all time pretty much but World of Ruin botches that even though it's decent enough; it's just not utterly flawless like the rest of the game. That said the WoR grind is strangely appealing the last 4 or 5 times I've played, dunno if its just the habit of doing it or the music when you get the Falcon; who knows. The biggest thing is being able to beat the final boss with any party at any level; I used Umaro and Relm this time who I've never used before and it was a blast. Just coming up with a party to farm Brachosaurs is fun in and of itself and as Celes and Terra become more and more comically broken the game becomes increasingly silly and enjoyable; even in Pixel Remaster (where MBlock is fixed) those characters are basically invincible; just a good time all around. I think conceptually I'd still say 4 is better because Whale, Golbez, Kain, Rubicante etc. but this time out 6 is the victor.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................10 is basically a flawless masterpiece all around, best turn based combat system in any game period; and then the protagonist is unbelievably fucking terrible and thats what shoots the game in the foot. No Tidus and 10 is also maybe the best game ever, but Tidus is there and straight garbage so that's it for that argument, it's still like a 9.5/10 though albeit it tends to elude my top 20 games of all time lists. 12 is awesome and 12 zodiac with 4x speed is even more awesome. 5 is the third most replayable, 8 with speed up options is also quite so plus Triple Triad. 8's story is a mixed bag but aside from Tactics 4 and 6 (and 10 if you exclude Tidus) the series hasn't really had many good stories so it doesn't really bother me much; the strength of Final Fantasy has always been the gameplay, if the story happens to be good that's a bonus on top........................................................................................................................................................................................................................7 Remake has one of the best soundtracks of all time and fantastic gameplay; great usage of the characters and set the stage for Rebirth being good (it wasn't, at least not particularly); great stuff all around. 1 still holds up and is the main NES one I would want to replay though I've more recently played 2 and 3 on Famicom; the Tower of Mystics music in 2 is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsMQnlL8qw0 Considering how ancient the game is the fact that 1 still works at all and is fun is remarkable; most NES games are terrible. Original 7 (and 8) are big parts of my childhood and hard to parse entirely but aside from particular affection for the characters it's just generally a pretty good game with a cool level up system and good characters; lots of better JRPGs. I like 2's leveling system and did get a second Excalibur to drop from an Iron Giant (1/64 + 3/64 I believe) for my run of Pandemonium on actual hardware (Famicom) so that's cool.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................9 is good for 1.5-2 discs and Chocobo Hot and Cold then it sucks. 13 has issues but a fantastic and super difficult combat system and the hardest boss in the series (Bart Part 2 if you don't grind); I don't have that much desire to replay it or Lightning Returns though; XIII-2 I kind of did everything already. 3 is just worse 5 it's a neat game for a Famicom game though. 15 is pretty damn good considering how much hate it got, love Adamantoise and the platforming dungeon; I'll play the DLCs at some point. 7 Rebirth would be a good game if it was 60 hours long and the ending didn't suck ass but it's like 150 hours long and the ending is terrible and sets up the next game to also be terrible (gameplay/outfits for Tifa aside); of course I'm going to wind up playing that too. It does have the quality of Remake's soundtrack but again there's too much of it so you need to trim the fat and make it more polished; fat chance with Nomura in charge. 16 I've played both DLCs and around 10 hours of the beginning at this point; I will play through the entire thing when it goes on PS Plus; it has very good core gameplay and a pretty solid story (if slow moving); very bland art design except for a handful of characters and very poor exploration systems; 13 had that problem too but the story was compelling enough for me at the time so it didn't bother me much. It's cool as a character action game because not many of those exist; still like an 8/10.

Economic System Theory Thoughts, Marx, Elon, Lowest Common Denominator Information Dispersion, Marketplace Discoverability etc.

Greetings friends, I haven't really talked about this topic in quite a while so my viewpoint might have changed over time and so forth; a bit of background I was more or less a pseudo Marxist for around 10 years; not because I think Marx is without faults but moreso that I was more concerned with geopoltiical theories and so on and thinking of an economic theory superior to Marx would be difficult and not necessarily productive. But I've had some fairly cogent thoughts recently about both economics and the way information is disseminated on the internet......................................................................................................................................................................................................................I do think there are some overarching merits to capitalism or at least Burgher style market policies in the middle ages that we have inherited; most modern capitalist practices are extremely flawed but the general core concepts from hundreds of years ago do have some merit. The question is how do you harness this; I think nominally we need to reach the 1917 state which we are kind of barreling towards right now; once that happens which every billionaire seems to be anticipating with their bunker building frenzy then we can probably come up with a better system that is neither Marxism nor Capitalism. I think a sort of separation of economic powers and some amount decentralization will help enable this; there will almost certainly need to be a period of some sort of brutal dictatorship though; or at least that will happen and then whoever that person is can then enforce some economic system that isn't so terrible, all other methods of reaching this point are either utopian or apocalyptic; I'm not too opposed to the latter.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................More to the point of discoverability, if a random average person looks at a list of things then they will almost invariably pick from the top of the list due to laziness or general stupidity and being incapable of scrolling down past a point; this is just an inherent flaw with search engines from inception and also an educational flaw in how humans are currently raised; not necessarily a scholastic flaw but a methodology flaw. This isn't fixable under capitalism because every system is informed by it and thus you have a world where one game or one streamer or one politician or one tv show or one sport dominates the conversation and everything else falls to the wayside. I've mentioned Pokrovsk in twitch chats recently when people bring up like "yo Washington DC is the worst place ever" and things similar to that and no one even fucking knows what Pokrovsk is, they are incapable of knowing that; its just too foreign and too old news and doesn't pop up enough in their news feeds. Recently POE2 released and then had like 1.2 million viewers on twitch (now it has like 6k); Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 just came out and same thing but if you look at who's streaming it and doing well for POE2 it was Asmongold (who played the game for like 3 days maybe) with 250k views and for Kingdom Come various other people but if you look down the list at other streamers you would think would benefit from this generally speaking they don't. So I watch Elajjaz and Lobos for example who at some point in time were similarly sized streamers; if Lobos streams a souls game he gets 2k viewers let's say for example and Ela gets 12k now, if Lobos streams Kingdom Come he gets 400 viewers and Ela still gets 10k-12k; this is the discoverability problem in a nutshell as disseminated on twitch. But the same thing happens for anything that functions in a search engine or "algorithm" format, same on youtube, same on reddit, same on google. This entire concept is why both Trump and Elon have power right now because they were able to harness that even though a lot of that traffic is negative for both persons.................................................................................................................................................................................................................I am still somewhat optimistic about Trump or rather the people Trump has selected to put in power in that they're generally 30-40 something instead of 70-80 something and thus probably have more mental acuity or adaptability; Trump himself has sort of descended to lunacy of late but it's hard to tell if that's deliberate or he's just saying shit for the sake of generating more discoverability until invariably all conversations and all wealth and power in the western world are either focused on Trump or focused on Elon; I don't think this leads to any particular outcome persay other than comedy but that does seem to be the current trend. Elon has done some extremely abrasive shit just in the past few days but generally speaking him being such an imbecile is really good for everyone since more and more people will grow to hate billionaires which will probably lead to some sort of revolution eventually; hard to say how that will come to fruition precisely but I would assume some kind of coup attempt and the repercussions therein; maybe in 2028, maybe in 2032; maybe caused by external forces due to WW3. After that happens we need to create a new economic system, when Lenin was doing his theoretical construct stuff he was just a writer and a journalist so if someone else can do that right now or start to maybe that will lead to some kind of economic reform in a decade or two; I'm not suggesting that Marx should be the basis of this it's just a loose reference for comparison; any idea is better than the current system you just need to develop and improve upon it enough in that timespan.

Early D3 Inferno and Path of Exile 2 Comparison/Discussion; is Jonathan Rogers Jay Wilson in Disguise?

Note: I'm listen to Mektul the forgemaster's theme while writing this, pretty damn good song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv8gzm2bLpM x............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. I considered doing like a video essay on this topic but I don't think I'm up to the task of summarizing it well; it's an extremely complicated backstory so something would fall in the gaps. D3 Inferno was this very strange, brief, interesting time in history and POE2 is sort of loosely attempting to do a similar thing (which is to say be impossibly hard for a few months and then get nerfed into oblivion); it's just that POE2 feels extremely sluggish getting to that point so while the concept of e.g. fighting Super Zana over and over and it taking 20 hours of attempts to beat would be cool in reality it would be farm the atlas for 400 hours for one 5 minute attempt (6 logouts) where you randomly get one shot then go again etc. assuming GGG doesn't nerf your build from orbit in the mean time. One attempt per boss just doesn't work for the general interest of beating Early Inferno D3..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................I suppose I should define how D3 Inferno worked and how villainous it was precisely; basically every white mob in the entire game would kill you in one hit if you didn't have the best gear imaginable and none of that would ever drop unless farmed 10,000 treasure goblins basically (what Kripp did); so it was entirely pay to win in a literal sense with the real money auction house. That said if you didn't engage with the P2W system it was really fun just figuring out how to progress in these unbelivably fucked zones. Silver Spire 2 in launch D3 Inferno is far and away probably the hardest thing in any RPG ever made; I don't think the zone was ever fully cleared out pre nerf, the only way through was just to run to the exit then go fight Diablo (Voiced by Jennifer Hale) who was relatively easy by comparison; there's monsters in that zone that don't even show up, they just appear from nothingness and instantly one shot you; there's angels that fly in from off screen, all of this shit hits for like 25,000 damage and you've got 15,000 health maybe (again unless you paid to win to trivialize it). Is POE2 that hard? No not even close, is that the target, eh hard to say; surely it's informed by it but most people don't remember that part of D3; they remember post Reaper of Souls and Greater Rifts etc. which is a fine game but nothing remarkable in the grand scheme of things (apparently now highly beloved in a nostalgia way as though it was as good as D2 which is laughable naturally)....................................................................................................................................................................................................................So what is POE2 targetting here precisely, is it the hardcores, is it the casuals; what's the goal. Well the main thing is to keep you playing the game forever so you spend money, Diablo 2 doesn't have this issue therefore Diablo 2 will always be a better game for all time; and Chris Wilson will keep playing D2/D2R and not POE. They want the combat to be slower paced and have a more methodical feeling to it but also for it to be abrasively impossible at the high end so only like 5-10 people can even kill the top pinnacle bosses and everyone else can wish they were that guy. There's a hundred different issues with this conceptually but I think the big one right now is that even those players don't like the game so if you lose e.g. Ben's interest then your whole concept is fucked. That said I would anticipate them dramatically changing how the entire endgame functions; I don't think the campaign is going to change much and seems to be in an okay state aside from a preposterous amount of bugs in Act 3. That's another thing with Diablo 3 is that it's a technical marvel, still feels overall the best and basically never had any technical issues aside from launch day server stuff; the endgame was always pretty whatever and the desire to play it forever absolutely not but just the way the game feels on a moment to moment basis is very good (at least with the classes that aren't boring as shit) If you could get D3's gameplay and then put POE1's mechanics and systems into it you could probably make a really fucking good game but no one is up to that task so instead we have some strange souls-like not particularly difficult combat combined with no loot and constant build nerfing.......................................................................................................................................................................................................... I will say the Necromancer play style from D2 is best revived in POE2 at this point; you still don't have enigma or something like that to tie the thing together for usability but at least you have to straight up going afk and everything dies while you listen to a podcast vibe; that's neat. They will nerf aspects of this build but probably not the overall feel; for some reason almost no game has accomplished D2 necro so minions always feel exceedingly tedious to optimize outside of D2 but that's not really an issue in POE2 so far; pick minion nodes and go afk, you win. Tough game. I'm not even playing my Necromancer I'm actively using a different character in couch co-op and the necro just functions as a series of meatshields, pretty fun if you don't mind using two controllers or a controller and a keyboard...........................................................................................................................................................................................................Tinfoil hat mode engage. Why the Jay Wilson comparison? Well before release Jonathan Rogers kept saying stuff like "we're making the best action RPG of all time" blah blah blah, setting expectations higher than Cyberpunk 2077; what they should have said was yo pay me and you get to be a free labor beta tester, isn't that fucking sweet? Thanks bro. In like 5 years the game'll be good, trust fam. So in a non honesty context that wasn't going to happen, if you don't know who Jay Wilson was he was the original game director for D3 which was at the time the largest PC game release of all time, fastest selling and all that jazz; probably made like 1/500th of Minecraft and Fortnite, incredible levels of success; naturally this made Jay Wilson really happy. Unfortunately the Battle.net forums, that hive of magnificent bastardry became an endless barrage of complaints mostly about D3 Inferno and the RMAH; eventually Jay Wilson released this weird Tseric like statement that ended with "Aren't you thankful?" and was forced to resign like a few weeks later; Aren't you thankful is one of the predecessors of you guys have phones right etc. just meme culture/youtube wasn't as prominent at the time so it's more of an old hat forum lore concept now than an enduring thing...................................................................................................................................................................................................................If you look at the POE2 reddits right now it's very similar to that just constant complaining from people that have played POE for 5000-25000 hours, basically the worst place on the planet including Gaza (meme); that sort of thing combined with very high sales will probably eventually lead to statements and youtube videos and apologies and suck my dicks and so on and most likely some sort of comedic iconic moment like Chris Wilson during Lake of Kalandra; how will it manifest exactly who can say but it could probably happen any time now; grab that popcorn............................................................................................................................................................................................................................What would I do as a profound intellectual mastermind who's good at predicting real life and doesn't really give a fuck about POE unless the league is good (shoutouts to Sanctum/Ultimatum in POE1)? Well I think they have the casual audience and they need to figure out a way to make the onboarding in maps better, they could make endgame like 10-20-50 times harder and who cares those autistic morons would keep playing regardless but you need to get the casuals to play maps so buff white maps/yellow maps and only nerf high end builds or exceedingly high popularity builds. Also maybe just delete deadeye and replace it with Warden or whatever; bring it back later in redesigned form; otherwise we're just back to POE1 31%+ Deadeye play rates and what not; I don't think nerfing it is going to work and would probably be received worse though either move will cause drama.

Thought Experiment for Various Apocalyptic and/or WW3 Scenarios and Probable Outcomes

' Greetings Friends, as we creep ever closer to annihilation I thought it might be worth loosely looking at the various scenarios of doom and gloom that are at least cumulatively likely to occur in the next 10-25 years. A lot of talk has been given to companies not being forward thinking leading to our present state (i.e. not planning for more than 5 years or even 3 months in the future) and while that has merit I'd suggest there's basically no reason to plan for any scenario beyond 25 years right now given the extraordinary likelihood of catastrophic failure of the global economy in that timeframe; this wasn't always the case and in a non Francis Fukuyama asinine optimism world post 1991 maybe this wouldn't have occurred but here we are.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................1. Regional Simultaneous Wars in Many Places which don't have a core alliance system connecting them. This is already happening; the short list of wars or very recent wars right now is Ukraine, Israel Palestine, Israel Lebanon, Israel Iran, Houthis Vs Shipping, Somalian Civil War, Sudanese Civil War, Congolese Civil War, Myanmar Civil War, Syrian Civil War, Armenia Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Ecuador Collapse of Society, Haitian Collapse of Society. Those are all already happening or have happened; so I think you just add Taiwan or South China Sea/Philippines to this and this is one of the more probably scenarios moving forward; I don't think this automatically leads to a World War and even a big conflict between the US and China direclty doesn't necessarily completely crash the global economy of its own volition. The main thing that it does is incentivize destroying the satellite network because of asymmetry...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................2. Nuclear Weapons Used in Space. The main reason this will happen is a significant enough lead for the US over all opposition so that even though destroying the vast majority of satellites causes great collateral damage the assumption is that it levels the information playing field and we get a war more similar to WW2 than WW1; ubiquitous information has led to stagnation of the frontline in Ukraine (though that's changing as we speak); but if you take out the satellites then maneuver warfare becomes viable again. Right now Russia benefits more from this in a expanded war in Europe scenario but I think China would also benefit eventually; particularly if they start with a beachhead in Taiwan that leads to stagnant expensive trench warfare; but if you negate surveillance through EWS and knocking out most satellites then you can levy more force advantages. This still doesn't necessarily lead to a world war but it does destroy the economic system and most internet/GPS systems as we know them....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................3. United States Civil War for Domestic Issues. The main corrolary here is the American Civil War of course, I guess the main issue with that direct comparison is that it's more likely to be a bunch of smaller organizations than entire states banding together at least presently; this could change over the course of 20 years though. But ultimately the point is at least a partial collapse of society due to infighting and the rise of populism; note Trump is probably too old to actually see this come to fruition or at least the conclusion so if it is centered around a particular leader it'll have to be someone new. This is one that's harder to grasp happening on a logistics level, it's a scenario that could happen but how and why and when it would happen are hard to foresee beforehand (Not unlike the Russian government having an upheaval at some point)..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................4. United States Civil War for Economic Issues. This is your 1917 scenario; the main reason this hasn't taken off is that the elite are able to keep people comfortable enough that they don't feel the need to contest economic inequality; but there is obviously a point where this doesn't hold true forever assuming the wealthiest control a greater and greater percentage of the baseline of society. If we had gone into a scenario of Corporate control of everything then this probably would never happen, but because Globalization (at least centered around the US instead of BRICS) is dying and State Foreign Affairs are clearly showing a superiority of control (i.e. companies are listening to the government for things like military buildup and not the other way around) the corporate control of society is also declining. I don't think this necessarily leads to more economic equality and it will probably lead to a spike in inequality eventually, the question is does that cause enough upheaval to lead to societal decline and the specific targetting of the wealthy for destruction; also hard to define the likelihood of this occurring but it should have clearer indicators as it gets closer to happening. The Rich already think it's going to happen and are building survival bunkers both in the US and New Zealand to try to avoid getting decapitated; Mark Zuckerberg being the poster child for this presently. If society completely collapses that probably won't wind up helping them in the long run but maybe it gets them 5-10 more years of security.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................5. Internet apocalypse. This is a theoretical scenario that gets wargamed a lot but no one actually knows if its possible; it would probably require the nuclear weapons in space scenario to happen first but the basic idea is that some team of hackers (probably nationalized) does sufficient virtual and actual infrastructure damage to the internet (which has always been kind of a hodge podge system) to make it cease functioning. The main thing this does is kill all fiat currency and thus at least temporarily destroy economic and trade systems either on a continental basis or worldwide; this kind of thing has happened before so you can figure out various scenarios but ultimately barter would return for a while and then eventually some kind of gold or silver standard. Fiat has led to infinite inflation so at some point it would probably collapse of its own volition in a non unified world scenario (though that's much longer term than the likelihood of modern society's survival). There was some thought that Russia would try to do this to Ukraine during its initial invasion but that did not happen, probably because of collateral damage fear and also overconfidence (thinking that the infrastructure would be valuable to them after victory)...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................6. World War 3 Based on Alliance Systems. I don't actually think this outcome is that likely but the main scenario is that Taiwan/South China Sea and the invasion of the Baltic States happen within 6 months or so of each other; Baltic States invasion is probably 10-15 years out and most Taiwan scenarios are only 5-10 years out so the odds of them actually lining up neatly and enough parties being interested in participating in a global conflict is pretty unlikely. There's also not much to point to Israel playing a role in this, more and more Israel is completely isolated except for a few countries in Western Europe and the US itself so it shouldn't impact a global conflict scenario at least in the forseeable future.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................7. Nuclear Apocalypse. This would likely happen as a result of something else happening above except for US Civil Wars, we are definitely closer to this happening that any point post Cuban Missile Crisis but it still seems pretty unlikely. The Nuclear Taboo being broken seems probable but not a massive dueling retaliation scenario; as conventional war is more and more normalized and expected in society I don't think pressing the Nuclear button becomes more likely; though if another deterrent system like a drone that is invincible and shoots down everything sent at it starts functioning then parallel deterrence systems become more probable. Alternatively we could have many small exchanges of tactical nuclear weapons that don't inherently lead to apocalyptic scenarios; this would mean widespread destruction in Eastern Europe but not in many other places; that seems fairly likely overall even in the absence of the taboo being broken. Note if the US, China, and Russia were all destroyed in this way it wouldn't necessarily lead to an apocalyptic scenario for the rest of the world and assuming secondary trading systems are in place by then the world might be able to continue on in a civilized fashion.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Rare Movie Review post in the now interesting world. Furiosa is the prequel to maybe the best action movie of all time and as such should be entered with tempered expectations; it feels a lot more similar to the non Fury Road Mad Max films which tend to be pretty slow paced and punctuated by action sequences instead of just being one long action (fucking amazing) sequence. I think if you compare it to the very first Mad Max that's a good way to think about Furiosa; Fury Road was a way more action-ey version of the Road Warrior and this is a world building exercise around the world established by Fury Road but maybe happening at a similar time frame as the first Mad Max (Toecutter's interdimensional properties notwithstanding); albeit maybe 5-10 years later. It does start with a post apocalyptic overview implying it's earlier and then goes to zoom in on Australia (despite still being filmed in the Namibian desert, in fact in the exact same places as Fury Road).....................................................................................................................................................................................................You start with a young Furiosa for the first 45 minutes or so who seems to have the same lipstick for every scene (which maybe makes sense in one of the scenes but not really otherwise); dunno if that's the child actor's parents interceding and forcing George Miller to make her look a certain way for most sequences but she does eventually look more Furiosa-ish briefly. These scenes have some Many Mothers bits, The Organic Mechanic, and Rictus Erectus as well as Scrotus from the Mad Max Game. I never finished the Mad Max game but I did play like 20 hours of it and it does seem to tie in pretty heavily to the world building and scene construction of this movie (in addition to establishing stuff that exists in Fury Road itself). I wouldn't have minded a young, mostly mute Furiosa for maybe the entire movie; Charlize Theron doesn't really resemble Anya Taylor Joy at all apart from being like 7 inches taller but a child can obviously look quite a bit different and it wouldn't harm the film much; also she doesn't have very many lines of dialogue anyway. They do use Anya Taylor Joy's height to emphasize the transition to adulthood so I guess it works in the context of the movie independent of Fury Road............................................................................................................................................................................................................Eventually Furiosa is captured and brought to Chris Hemsworth's Dementus (who might be referenced in the game as well) who has this pristine white cape at the start and seems relatively friendly and optimistic, the cape and Dementus himself shift in fairly striking visual and presentiation motifs; you probably could've titled the film Dementus for how much he is emphasized; obviously the state of Furiosa at the beginning of Fury Road is known so what becomes interesting is how she got there and that character building mostly happens for Dementus instead of Furiosa. I guess this is a potential point of criticism, but I think it would be quite difficult if you're starting with a child actress and switching actresses mid movie to establish an arc beyond simple revenge (apart from her general lack of dialogue); so this would be more of a thing if they had stuck with one actress.........................................................................................................................................................................................................As far as the general action sequence construct of the movie there is one big middle convoy fight a la the first sequence in Fury Road; then a heavily dramatic short action sequence a la Splendid being run over by Rictus' Bigfoot giant VW monster truck in Fury Road; then there is not really a climactic final battle sequence so that's probably the main thing that Fury Road fans would take issue with. That and the movie being 2.5 hours long instead of exactly 2 hours for Fury Road; again this is more similar to Mad Max 1's ending and general pacing though the bigger action sequences (with some really cool practical effects) are more in line with the Road Warrior or Fury Road. An interesting bit is that in the Mad Max game you have these outposts you take over that have an entrance with a door and then a series of dudes to fight inside to take over the outpost; that exact thing happens in this movie twice which is pretty bizarre because it's a very video game thing to happen but you wouldn't think of that in the context of a film that's about convoy fights and ridiculous vehicles. One spoiler I will share is that Dementus' main monster truck doesn't get destroyed at least not on screen, it loses its wheels but no big explosion; I'm not sure if George Miller just didn't have a back-up one or two a la Gigahorse and Bigfoot (and several OG War Rigs) and didn't want to blow up a nice impractical vehicle or that's just part of the methodical nature of the ending; who knows....................................................................................................................................................................................................... Overall the movie is worth watching just for the world-building and atmospheric nature alone. There are some extremely specific musical sequences that happen briefly in the movie (and only Fury Road devotees will notice) but by and large there just is a very toned down score with a lot of silence a la No Country for Old Men; I think your mileage may vary on whether you like that or not; I did have a completely silent theater so it worked for me (1 other guy in attendance, Tuesday afternoon showtime). The original Immortan Joe died in 2020 so they had to replace him, the replacement is fine but you will probably notice; I feel like with AI assistance you could've pulled off the voice better and just had the dude play him since the visual is more or less spot on (looks younger around the eyes but the film is 20 years earlier); he does say "You are Awaited" well at least; 3 or 4 Witness Me's in the movie. Nicholas Hoult being in the movie wouldn't make any sense but he did kind of hard carry a lot of Fury Road's dialogue so him not being there is felt, Dementus is good but doesn't fill the same role. Nathan Jones as Rictus is excellent again.

COVID to Afghanistan to Ukraine to Gaza, delineating American Prestige Loss and the End of Deterrence as a Concept

Greetings Friends. So this is a similar concept to what I've been talking about as far as the causality of current wars and so on but in theory is still worth thinking and writing about. If you listen to Western Military leaders a lot of it is about "How do we deter Iran or the Houthis from fucking with us" and fundamentally the question is why would they not care about the American military response. The answer is fundamentally we are away from the unique era where deterrence exists as Nuclear Weapon usage fades from living memory so those can't function as a deterrent until they get used again (which is more likely now than at any point since the early 1960s, but still not very likely); so we are back to Great Power politics or strategic competition or whatever and the concept of global Prestige is more meritorious than anything resembling deterrence...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................American Prestige started to fade with COVID as 1.2 million Americans died as a result of it compared to 5.8 million for the entire rest of the world, if the most powerful country suffers the most then that's an indication that they aren't actually that powerful anymore with the inability to stop the spread of a contagion (due to lack of social control or the president(s) being a moron or whatever), obviously there are a multitude more factors in how and why COVID happened the way it did but those are the ones that are prominent and easily perceived by friends and foes alike. After this we had the withdrawal from Afghanistan which might as well be a total defeat for a 20 year war which didn't accomplish much of anything and then the invasion of Ukraine and October 7th; at this point its safe to assume there isn't that much American prestige on the global scale on the whole so my question is how do you stop the decline of American prestige or is there a way to stop it............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................So fundamentally I think the only way to regain prestige is an extraordinary military success against a peer competitor; the US could technically win the war in Ukraine on a whim (and risk nuclear escalation) but that doesn't seem to be in the cards so we'll just have China be the only peer competitor in this scenario. IF China invades Taiwan and the US helps stop it inflicting a catastrophic defeat then the US will re-emerge as the world leader at least for 5-10 years; I still think China will get back in position and return to the pre WWI-ish alliance system state that we're in right now but technically the US does have an out for prestige regrowth assuming China invades Taiwan. If China just does nothing for 20 years then they will probably automatically become more prestigious over time as the US becomes less prestigious both because of that and additional other factors; mostly just the progression of time. China does appear to have a superior industrial base for military procurement presently even if we still have the technological advantage in most areas, so while we have the Gerald R. Ford aircraft Carrier we lack the ability to produce more of them quickly enough but China could theoretically produce more carrier strike groups over time with their larger naval production capabilities; same is true of other areas though I would assume the US still has the advantage purely for aircraft (this is a vague area with untested systems so on one actually knows until a war breaks out)

FFVII Rebirth Ending Analysis; Philosophically Similar to Ending E from Nier Automata; Schrodinger's Aerith (Spoilers)

Greetings Friends, a rare non geopolitics post though by the time the next FFVII sequel comes out (titled Reunion no doubt) Japan will very likely be in at least a large regional war if not a world war so basically any Japanese game that you were planning on playing in the next 2-6 years could get delayed indefinitely...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................So basically the question at the end of Rebirth is "Is Aerith dead or not?" I think to be dead in the traditional sense of FFVII she would have to not effect the plot of the third game until the very end with the summoning of Holy (Note this isn't necessarily where the third game will end but probably is in some way); but instead Cloud is perceptive of a timeline where Aerith is alive while everyone else is in a "normal timeline" (though Tseng is alive for no apparent reason) where she "died;" essentially the (8 hour long) ending is as ambiguous as it possibly could be; so the answer to the question of "Does Aerith die?" In FFVII Rebirth is "Yes... no... maybe? Also fuck Nomura" I think ultimately the most dead she could be in the third game is being a Jokerlike figure in Arkham Knight which is to say having more dialogue than every other character in the game but she'll also show up as a playable character during the final boss fights (of which there could be 15 consecutively); is that what you define as dead or will she be more properly dead by the end of the third game? They don't even have the scene of Cloud putting her body in the water which is the most "yo she's dead" scene that they could've put in; doesn't happen.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................As far as the general construction of the third game, they more or less did about 90% of the remaining plot in Rebirth, so you had 5% in Midgar with Remake (which is a much better, more coherent game with an outstanding soundtrack (Rebirth's is all over the place)); therefore the only plotlines still out there are Wutai (?) and the Northern Crater. Tifa's plot is completely butchered in Rebirth, they will probably retcon this and still have the Tifa saves cloud thing happen in Reunion but that doesn't mean they didn't butcher her plot in Rebirth. Fucking Zack is not even dead at the end of Rebirth, even he has no satisfying conclusion to being a ghost dream final boss helper man (complete with character tutorial and mechanics during the 27 phase final boss fight). Basically they have nothing other than nostalgia references to carry the third game with, and Rebirth itself was only particularly strong in a few key moments (though the combat gameplay is still fantastic), also Aerith being sort of alive doesn't mean she'll be a party member for much of the game though a Search for Spock situation could happen where she rejoins 10-15 hours from the end. Mechanically the game suffers a lot without Arcane Ward so it seems like they'll have to introduce some sort of caster character to make the combat jive again (or just keep Yuffie unnerfed so she can solo everything)..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................So why the Nier comparison; well 2B does in fact die with an actual departure scene and everything but there's an implication that her memory unit is still alive in the possession of pod, I think if they ever make a Nier sequel 2B will come back like halfway through the game. However Aerith is probably going to be effecting the plot of Reunion throughout the story, every time Cloud has an argument with Sephiroth in his head there'll be him having a conversation with Aerith too; so essentially she'll be omnipresent and might have more dialogue than everyone else in the game. To me that is more alive than 2B's current state though I would also argue that 2B is "alive" or potentially alive in the context of a Nier sequel, thus Aerith is in some state of living and not being actually dead despite sort of dying in some perceived reality (though again there's still some alternate timeline bullshit going on). Ultimately Nomura probably wanted to leave the potential of Aerith being properly alive and not just ghostly alive to the next game, but there really is no plot allure to the next game at all (though people will still play it just like people went and saw Rise of Skywalker), at best if they somehow integrate Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus into the core plot (not DLC) then it could be somewhat interesting though still a giant clusterfuck. Aside: Final playtime with Rebirth was 114 hours so it's somewhere around 2.5 times longer than traditional FFVII, plot threads resolved: 0.