TacticsConsort

TacticsConsort , 2 days ago

Megaman 8-bit Deathmatch, Heroes of the Storm, Pizza Tower, and DnD!

TacticsConsort , 7 days ago

Quality is a spectrum. Sure, Mercedes isn’t Rolls-Royce. Mercedes makes cars as their main business and turns a profit from that, Rolls-Royce is a company that makes aircraft engines and produces cars sometimes as publicity stunts (because a car built to the tolerances of an aircraft engine is, shockingly, going to be very precise and well-made).

But Mercedes is definitely a higher quality of build than like. Fiat or Ford. To an average person, you buy something like Toyota if you want reliability and a long-lived vehicle, or Mercedes for a smoother drive full of tiny little expensive gadgets that will probably develop a fault after 3 years.

(No idea why they’ve listed BMW here though lol, those things just love perpetually breaking down, because the systems they use to get that unique tactile feedback while driving that some people crave are absolute dogshit when it comes to life expectancy. They use a fucking chain for a timing belt instead of rubber. Don’t ever buy one unless your idea of luxury is constantly having to shell out on repairs and tow trucks. If you have to experience one, just like. Get one as a hire car so you don’t have to own the fucking thing.)

TacticsConsort , 14 days ago

“Until war aims achieved”

Alright I know the statement is one that’s very dependent on context, but… man, that phrase could have come right out of Putin’s mouth circa 2022 while he was trying to justify his invasion of Ukraine.

TacticsConsort , 14 days ago

Just give us Team Fortress 3…

TacticsConsort , 13 days ago

Huh? That’s not a problem at all. TF1 had a totally different cast to TF2, actually. Fully replacing the cast would be par for the course, and that definitely doesn’t preclude them from making a full set of new characters

TacticsConsort , 20 days ago

https://yiffit.net/pictrs/image/e98482ae-e84c-45a5-a304-43b12ef1a3ab.png

In the interest of transparency, I don’t know if this guy is telling the truth, but it feels very plausible.

TacticsConsort , 21 days ago

Here’s a really good browser game that should last you a good few hours

www.kongregate.com/games/…/amorphous

Otherwise I guess I still play some Heroes of the Storm for old times’ sake. I really, really don’t like Blizzard as a company anymore, but the game is in maintenance and is basically just coasting out the last of the playerbase before it shuts down, so hopefully I’m not helping them succeed while I enjoy the game for its last few years.

TacticsConsort , 22 days ago

Yeah that checks out. I’m not even american but I’ve got to say every single American healthcare worker I’ve ever met on Discord is CONSTANTLY and incurably miserable because they work inhumane hours for so little money that they actually can’t afford rent anyways. I know someone that spent an entire month doing 10-hour shifts 6 days a week which made him unbelievably sick and exhausted, and by the end of it then his paycheck didn’t cover replacing his car’s spare tyre. I know someone else who was ordered to come in every single day in the two weeks after her mother died and on the day of the funeral or she would be fired immediately and without recourse, while her boss took his fifth vacation of the year. I know someone who spent seven years studying to be a nurse and their debts are so bad that I’ve had to talk them out of suicide twice because the job doesn’t pay SHIT.

TLDR: Frankly I’m amazed America still has ANY healthcare workers based on the ones I’ve met. The situation isn’t great in a lot of places because medicine can be expensive, but good lord is it truly bad in America.

TacticsConsort , 23 days ago

What about Firefox? Can’t say that I’ve ever heard of Kagi myself, what makes it so special?

TacticsConsort , 26 days ago

Aside from the usual conundrum of “any way to not starve or become homeless that doesn’t involve whoring out to corporations has been removed from society”, Tesla… wasn’t always like this. Musk didn’t found it. Musk didn’t build it. He just bought it so he could pretend to be clever.

TacticsConsort , 28 days ago

Holy shit, this is a REALLY misleading headline.

if it was just him quitting, that would be terrible; it would be an anti-war person giving up their power to legally obstruct the war.

It’s “his opposition National Unity party will withdraw from the coalition government”. Unless this article is missing something, wouldn’t breaking up the coalition just basically completely paralyse Israel??

TacticsConsort , 28 days ago

Holy fuck. I knew that AI did use above average amounts of power, but THIRTY FUCKING PERCENT added to the total emissions of a data giant like Microsoft??? That’s absurd! How the hell did they create something so inefficient??

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

Yeah, I love my local pizza place and I’m on good terms with the owner, but the prices have gone up enough that I’ve set a hard limit of only going there once a month, and there are some menu items that I explicitly just will not buy because they’re so overpriced.

Cost frankly does define my dietary habits. The number one reason that I don’t decide to grab the odd piece of vegan chicken to put in a bagel is because it costs 50% more than regular chicken.

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

That’s one tank too many.

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

Well… that’s probably the most expected thing to ever be expected. It was never a matter of ‘if’, it was a matter of when.

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

Megaman 8-bit Deathmatch!

Nevermind I just noticed that you don’t have a mouse. Uhhhhhhhhh. You could always grab a gameboy-advance emulator and enjoy some pokemon or Pacman Collection or Beyblade V-Force or Sonic Advance 3. Loads of classics that don’t have overly complicated buttons. I bet you could emulate other old consoles too, the Sega genesis had a phenomenal library that should all be easy enough to play on a keyboard.

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

Huh. Well, that’s an interesting turn of events.

I mean, I’m not a lawyer, but the basic premise seems solid. US has that whole ‘corporations are people’ shtick going on, and… well, guess now it’s time for that ruling to become inconvenient for the government.

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

Ah yes, the crime of trying to keep your nation free and alive through appropriate defensive measures. How truly dastardly (/s)

Honestly this might be the single most pathetic threat that I’ve seen in a long time. Is it even a threat? Publicity stunt? Honestly I don’t know or care, because we all know this statement means about as much as a Trump tweet.

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

Holy shit, there’s a decent vegan cheese? I like my meat but I understand that the current status quo isn’t sustainable, and cheese is the number two thing the vegan industry has been struggling with making a good substitute for (number one being bacon.)

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

Blue cheese is a bit strong for most people, I can respect that, I’m one of those people. The trick is knowing what to pair with blue cheese to help balance it out a bit.

You want my recommendation for how to enjoy some store-bought blue cheese? Try it on a burger, with some sliced avocado instead of lettuce. The meat and the dense fruit balance out the blue beautifully, you get all the nice taste of a blue cheese without feeling like your mouth got nuked from orbit by smelly cheese.

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

Adblock is a godsend.

Although I actually use Invidious for most videos these days. The only things Youtube has going for it are a decent autoplay function and a professional maintenance team. Invidious has things like ‘not aggressively selling my preferences to every algorithm under the fucking sun’ and ‘a functioning search bar’ and ‘not actively fighting against adblockers’

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

I feel he’s right. Youtube alone completely exhausted my patience to be advertised to in 2021, and when you’re fed up with something and it keeps getting shoved down your throat at every corner then you get annoyed at first, and then you really start to actively despise it, and then it becomes completely unbearable. I absolutely cannot stand adverts anymore, including video sponsors. If I see a particularly obnoxious advert I’ll go out of my way to AVOID the products in question, if I couldn’t avoid paying attention to it. I’d like to go on record and say, absolutely fuck the electronic billboard outside my workplace, that piece of shit makes it dangerous to drive at night because it’s so bright and I hope to god it gets vandalized beyond repair.

Most games that I try these days were recommended to me by people who I know personally. BG3 was one of very few exceptions, and honestly? You know what sold me on BG3 and made me think ‘this is going to be a really high-quality game?’ It was when there was a news article discussing the controversies after they confirmed that you could get railed by a druid. Not even something I’m interested in, but that design choice actively showed they were including niche options that not many people would pick into their RPG. That was what made me go ‘Oh shit, if you can do that, you can probably do a lot of other things! It’s an RPG with actual impactful dialog choices! They weren’t just throwing that out as an advertising buzz!’

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

Tbh as far as I know, the universe being a mystery IS one of the bigger problems for physics lads

TacticsConsort , 1 month ago

Hot fucking damn, the russian bots are really out on parade in this comment section aren’t they?

…Welp, not like they can parade IRL, so I guess they’ve got to take what they can get!

Shame the TikTok ban went through, but a 60 billion package should give some fresh strength to the defenders of Ukraine.

TacticsConsort , 2 months ago

Can confirm, not going into higher education and getting an apprenticeship was the bar none best decision that I EVER made.

All my friends who took the college/university path are trapped under crushing debt and struggling to find jobs that pay anything, let alone pay decently. College isn’t the be-all and end-all it used to be.

TacticsConsort , 2 months ago

Aerospace manufacturing; the apprenticeship paid for me to do exactly the courses and qualifications that I’d need for the manufacturing (instead of me having to pay to do those things) and had a guaranteed job at the end so long as I passed said courses. Way easier than a full college or university degree and I was making money the whole way through.

TacticsConsort , 2 months ago

EU being based as always. I have to admit it’s pretty damn rare they let me down.

TacticsConsort , 2 months ago

Gotta say, I’m a blue collar who also builds sensitive machinery, have been doing so for six years now.

There is a VERY sharp divide in how well I consider myself to have mastered certain aspects of the job.

Someone fucking kill me: I’m doing this job for the first time and I’m having to spend ages sifting through our processes that may not be documented in enough detail to do the job perfectly. The job is legally safe because I’m following the rules but god I don’t like it. Takes about three times as long as a ‘normal’ task.

This is fine: I’ve done the job enough to know how everything goes together, what torque to use where, and if there’s anything I should really be doing that isn’t in the instructions, or if there’s an instruction mismatch.

Mastery: I can not only do the job, I actually understand the explicit purpose and function of everything I’m putting together on an intimate level, and can use my knowledge of that purpose and function to make god damn sure that what I’m putting out is top quality. As probably the least sensitive example of this, this is stuff like knowing that the particular brand of no-mixing-needed paint we use can sometimes develop a sediment layer of its’ pigments on the bottom that requires you to mix it with a stick for the paint to perform properly, and that you can tell when the paint is experiencing this issue because it’ll be off-colour due to the lack of pigment; and if you don’t resolve this issue the paint won’t adhere to surfaces correctly and is liable to flake off.

I’ve been doing this for six years and there are only a handful of aspects of my job I consider myself to have complete mastery over. I don’t think I’m the best worker out there, not by a long shot, but to me the idea that you can just lose and replace your workforce when dealing with complicated machinery is about as stupid as the notion that AI can replicate the human mind (It can’t unless you abandon the von-neumann computer design).

TacticsConsort , 2 months ago

Difficulties of making 5e DnD work in a video game beyond 12th level

BG3 might have missed the mark for me in the end, but God Damn do I feel that one. Full respect to them for managing to make such a good game even when working from such a flawed base

TacticsConsort , 2 months ago

Hot damn. So I kind of understand why the Russians would dismiss this as a lie or a threat because yknow. War in Ukraine, Trump, etc, relations are bad to put it politely.

But can we talk about what kind of terrifying flex of power that is from US Intelligence? It’s one thing to predict a terror attack on your own soil- sure your citizens quite rightfully won’t like the privacy violations, but the national authorities are going to help you; so if your intelligence agency is worth the name it should stop most attacks.

But can you imagine having information access that’s so damn good you can not only predict a terror attack in a nation that has an extremely vested interest in not letting you know what they’re doing because they’re running a war that you (and everyone else) don’t like, but you feel completely confident TELLING THEM, which could risk your information sources if they’re not properly hidden. This is like the Foreign Intelligence equivalent of being so far ahead of your opponent in a game that you start giving them sincere advice on how to play so that they don’t get thrashed too badly.

TacticsConsort , 2 months ago

For quality, I think it would be quite sensible to include figures from a few other countries. These findings mean very little when they lack context; we need to know how they compare to other big economies like the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Russia, China (if you can get accurate data on Russia and China), and Japan.

TacticsConsort , 3 months ago

MASSIVE Dwarven energy. This image is the closest you’re going to get to seeing a bunch of children of the mountain sitting in their tavern, discussing their metalworking (hobby cars and bikes) and drinking brews that could atomize a human liver with a single sip.

Anyways I think these guys are cool

TacticsConsort , 3 months ago

Aw, RIP. Guess time comes for us all in the end, and I hadn’t been watching for nearly a decade. Congratulations for lasting as long as you did.

TacticsConsort , 3 months ago

After a little thought, this doesn’t surprise me at all.

Name me ONE other Republican candidate that’s actually gotten a decent number of articles about them in national newspapers. They’ve run into the exact same problem as the Tories: They’ve kicked anyone who’s actually a competent and charismatic public servant out of the party, because said people were getting in the way of their ability to enact unbelievably stupid racism upon the nation.

And unless you have Trump-level skills at grabbing headlines and becoming a problem that makes itself worse… Well, how the hell are you going to become a relevant force that people are going to vote for, when you have no charisma, no skills, and no ability to compete with Trump for headlines? Even that Florida governor who manged to stay in the news for a few months for his racism couldn’t keep up with Trump’s unending torrent of bullshit and new stories for long, and if you can’t keep up, I can’t imagine republican voters would throw in with you over your competitor.

McConnel is unfortunately making the most competent move he can for someone that wants to cling to power at any cost (especially cost to the american public): Endorsing someone who’ll avoid splitting the vote and actually killing the Republican party.

TacticsConsort , 3 months ago

I mean yeah, between Gaza, Republicans managing to push shit through the Supreme Courts and blocking Ukraine aid, and the fact that Trump is STILL somehow avoiding facing any consequences for his actions beyond fines that aren’t even an inconvenience to him…

But mostly Gaza right now. It’s blowing up every media outlet, it’s incredibly easy to see that Israel is going way beyond all reasonable boundaries of retaliation, and it’s completely impossible to ignore that the US is facilitating Israel’s actions, arguably INSTEAD of aiding Ukraine.

Of course, I’m not exactly blind to the fact that two of Biden’s biggest failures are ‘The Republicans are doing comically evil shit for party-over-country political gain’. Even if him failing to stop them is a point against him, that doesn’t change the fact it’s pretty clear proof that the Repubs shouldn’t be anywhere near a government office.

TacticsConsort , 3 months ago

Say it with me, kids!

“What air defence doing?”

TacticsConsort , 3 months ago

You know what? I may not have ended up enjoying BG3 at the end since they stumbled at the hurdle I was most excited to see them clear, but this is a stance deserving of respect. I’m glad that Larian is making good use of their success.

TacticsConsort , 3 months ago

Well, it’s set in DnD; I tried to keep expectations in check for the whole thing but they did a legitimately good job with presenting you with a varied set of options for how you can approach and resolve dungeons in Act 1 and 2. So I did tentatively allow my expectations to be raised.

In any case, I was looking forwards to seeing how they’d handle their dragon encounter. The one I’d been looking forwards to all game. And BOY did they fall flat on their face. The dungeon is one of the most frustrating and unrewarding ones in the game, and the encounter with the dragon (a highly intelligent and charismatic creature within DnD where the conversation with them is half the fun) won’t even talk to you, only to a complete dickhead NPC that’s a mandatory tagalong with your party. There is NO variance in how you approach or resolve the dragon, there is no way you can influence their storyline for better or worse, and you can’t even kill Dickhead NPC. For high hopes to be met with by far the hardest failure to meet expectations… yeah, it just killed my enjoyment.

(For contrast, compare how they handled their dragon to how they handled their Hag, Devil, the entire Thorm family, the Gith Creche, and Grymforge. Look at how much your choices can influence those. Look at how much they will talk to you.)

TacticsConsort , 4 months ago

Heroes of the Storm: Alexstrasza in dragon form actually isn’t any tankier at all (even if she looks it) and wins fights by aggressively backlining no matter what

DnD (yeah the tabletop): The game really gets broken by Spellcasters once you understand that even if their damage is better than martial characters, the most powerful spells are generally AoE crowd control (Entangle, Web and Hypnotic Pattern) or story-warping RP spells. Also of note: the martial builds for Bard and Warlock are full casters that can still do almost everything a regular martial can do. An important part of mastering the game is realising how horrendously imbalanced it is

Dwarf Fortress: This is literally the core gameplay loop for the first 200 hours

TacticsConsort , 4 months ago

Tbh I didn’t truly realize how deeply fucked the class balance was until I started making a really really big homebrew that required me to build and balance eight classes (operating on the personal principle that since it’s a team game, all the classes should have roughly equal impact).

This philosophy right here is the fucking devil when it comes to designing co-op games

tvtropes.org/…/LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards

(I can link you my big homebrew if you like to play DnD 5e, by the way)

TacticsConsort , 4 months ago

Slight exagguration, true, but I wouldn’t want to overexplain things to random guys without being invited. (Also the lifesteal on her attacks is only if you took both the Inner Fire and Ancient Flame talents at their respective levels)

TacticsConsort , 4 months ago

Shoutout to Brutal Critical being the worst feature in the entire game for having minimal mechanical impact (sure it hits hard when you crit, but you have no way to boost crit rate outside Reckless Attack and the chances are still dreadful) and taking up no less than THREE levels on the core barbarian template.

docs.google.com/document/d/…/edit

Anyway, try this on for size! It’s a pretty big homebrew, but so long as you take it one step at a time it should all be balanced and make good sense

TacticsConsort , 4 months ago

Oh hell. How did I forget the barrel. That might be the biggest moment of this of all time. That barrel tortured me for weeks

TacticsConsort , 4 months ago

Surprisingly, yeah. It even gets a once-year balance and bugfix patch. Mostly play Brightwing, Dehaka, Deathwing myself, although Kael’thas is fun too

It may not be the biggest game out there these days, but it’s got a good enough playerbase for matchmaking to work consistently, and it’s still fun to play

TacticsConsort , 4 months ago

Yeah, he was one of the last heroes to get added. The devs knew the writing was on the wall so they focused on adding fan-favourites before the game went into ‘maintenance mode’ and wouldn’t get new content, so we have Deathwing and Hogger (and they’re both great)

Also yeah there’s no level cap on heroes anymore, I have Brightwing over level 200, she’s absolutely great

Ironically I found the game had the opposite balance issues before going Maintenance Mode- too much focus on high level competitive play which was getting super ultra hard stomped by Genji and Tracer plus a support. The day our competitive leagues were officially canned, then we got what I vividly recall was the best balance patch ever that made QM and draft league games so much more open-ended and fun to play.

TacticsConsort , 4 months ago

We care because making boomer jokes, even if tasteless, is SUBSTANTIALLY less important than the general health of labour unions, worker’s rights, and job security.

TacticsConsort , 4 months ago

Can confirm, if the trains ran early enough for me to take one to work then I definitely wouldn’t have a car right now.

Kind of insane how badly our rail network (and postal service) has degraded, apparently it used to be really good, like five times faster than it currently is. Alas… Fucking Tories got their hands on them.

TacticsConsort , 5 months ago

I’m listening. What’ve you got?