Topics

1

General Off Topic / Avengers Endgayme

« on: April 26, 2019, 10:08:35 AM »

So have people here seen this? Personally I've never understood why people love superhero movies so much, and I've no idea why the last Avengers movie was the highest grossing movie ever. All these movies follow the same tired clichés, have the same kind of out-of-place shitty predictable jokes, have ridiculously childish and dumb plotlines (and characters and worldbuilding) with zero internal consistency, and awful fight scenes which resemble 80's action movies but just with REALLY powerful dudes and dudettes. In a sentence, they're live-action Disney cartoons. I would've enjoyed them greatly as a ten year old, just like I enjoyed Disney cartoons, but I see all these grown men acting like it's Christmas because a new superhero movie came out. Baffles the mind.

And now people have been insanely excited and hyped about Endgame. Apparently they're crying and laughing and being rendered speechless in the audience.

My question, then, dear readers, is twofold: was Endgame good, and why do you like watching movies like it?

2

General Off Topic / Cobra Kai

« on: April 25, 2019, 07:21:07 AM »

VERY good Tv show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rB36UGoP4Y&vl=en

Season 2 just released as well

Watch it nerds

3

... and all the other things floating around out there / Donkey Crew new game: Last Oasis

« on: April 05, 2019, 03:52:31 PM »

I just heard about this, didn't even click on Yuhmaz's thread because never heard of "Last Oasis." What are the latest news on this shit? Thoughts?

It actually looks surprisingly good, animations and graphics and shit like that don't look nearly as "indie babbu's first game with 3 man studio" as they did in OKAM. And the gameplay could be pretty fucking cool if they get it to work, those land ships look comfy to travel around in and the boarding could be really fun with Warband-inspired combat.

Not sure about the survival genre, because there are a lot of opportunities to fuck things up in dozens of different ways (by e.g. making the ratio of grinding mats:fighting in pvp too skewed in the former direction, or making respawning too easy like in ATLAS etc). But we'll see I guess.

4

General Off Topic / Xant

« on: March 10, 2019, 12:37:18 AM »

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5

... and all the other things floating around out there / Anthem

« on: March 02, 2019, 06:19:25 PM »

Any Anthem fans?

LOL jk, Anthem blows and bioware is dead.

This is now a Star Citizen thread. Star Citizen is coming along nicely. Anthem took six years to make and it has no content, so it's only to be expected that SC's development takes time too. But they're really ambitious, and there's been some great progress in the past year. In two years it'll be in a full-time playable state is my guess. Already possible to have fun with it but they're still building the basic mechanics.

6

General Off Topic / Best news I've heard in a few years

« on: February 10, 2019, 09:43:03 PM »

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/02/07/the-russian-government-is-planning-to-isolate-the-country-s-internet-to-facilitate-censorship-and-security-measures-how-is-this-going-to-work

Thank God. Anyone who's ever played an online team game will be ecstatic if this goes through.

7

... and all the other things floating around out there / apex legends

« on: February 06, 2019, 12:08:29 PM »

best battle royale and its free bitches

8

... and all the other things floating around out there / Battlerite Royale

« on: October 31, 2018, 03:33:15 AM »

It's free for a week

9

General Off Topic / Mates

« on: October 19, 2018, 11:34:35 PM »

https://ocdla.com/gay-ocd-hocd-test

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... and all the other things floating around out there / Red Dead Redemption 2

« on: October 11, 2018, 08:41:04 AM »

https://youtu.be/Dw_oH5oiUSE?t=82

How the fuck are these graphics possible on current gen consoles? It looks way better than anything anyone's released, even on PC. Best graphics AND insane view distance. The animations and the attention to detail look crazy. How is such a thing possible, I ask you? Honestly I'm hyped just because the animations are so fucking good.

11

General Off Topic / #SayNoToKavanaugh

« on: October 05, 2018, 10:42:34 PM »

I can't believe he's probably getting confirmed tomorrow. Is #America about defending #rapists now? WTF?

12

General Off Topic / American politicians are very smart

« on: July 24, 2018, 08:48:11 PM »

https://youtu.be/4k4pMTsa1Kw

13

General Off Topic / Let's play a game

« on: June 15, 2018, 05:24:22 PM »

http://sifter.org/iqtest/iqtest.cgi

What do you guys get?

14

General Off Topic / Genghis Khan and his Mongol Horde were good news for the world.

« on: May 27, 2018, 10:45:47 PM »

Not convinced? Consider the following:

1.   Genghis Khan was an advocate of human rights, specifically freedom of religion, freedom from torture and free trade (he got two of the Four Freedoms right, which is pretty impressive by medieval standards, especially when they still, like, burned heretics and unbelievers in Europe and elsewhere). GK forbade the use of torture in trials and as punishment. He also granted religious freedom within his realm, though he demanded total loyalty from conquered subjects of all religions. His own immediate family was religiously diverse: besides those who were Shamanists or Buddhists, a significant number were Monophysite Christians --- and later also Muslim converts. As for the free trade thing, it was more of a byproduct of the commercial opportunities that developed along the Silk Road (“history’s largest free-trade zone”), once the interior of the Eurasian landmass became safe enough to travel under the Pax Mongolica. Free trade as human right is still a pretty iffy concept, anyway.

2.   GK created a hitherto unprecedented egalitarian society where men and some women (more on this later) advanced through “individual merit, loyalty and achievement”, instead through birth and aristocratic privilege. This egalitarian society was also incredibly diverse, comprising of people of different religions and nations. The Mongols hired European artisans to decorate their HQ in Xanadu, Chinese engineers to man their siege engines, and Muslim astronomers to chart their horoscopes. And they might have hired an Italian guy called Marco Polo to govern the city of Hangzhou --- who knows? But there’s no independent proof of it whatsoever.

3.   GK was a proto-feminist --- well, he was sort of pro-woman, in the context of his era. He made it law that women are not to be kidnapped, sold or traded. Through marital alliances, he installed his daughters as de facto rulers over conquered nations. In Mongol culture, when the men went off to war, the women ruled the roost. And since Mongol men in the time of GK went really far away to conquer distant nations and did not return for years, the wives and daughters were the real boss at home (and also at the various Mongol courts, when many of GK’s male descendants turned out to be drunken incompetents). A successful queen like Sorkhothani, the wife of GK’s youngest son, was able to rule in her dead husband’s stead and made all of her sons Great Khans. Failure, however, could doom such women into cruel and unusual punishments, such as being sewed up naked into a rug and then pummeled to death (Mongols abhorred the sight of blood, thus the rug).

4.   The Mongols promoted pragmatic, non-dogmatic intellectual development in the countries that they ruled. Although himself an illiterate, GK and his family recognized the value of learning and actively encouraged the development of the sciences. Under the Mongols, learned men did not have to “worry whether their astronomy agreed with the precepts of the Bible, that their standards of writing followed the classical principles taught by the mandarins of China, or that Muslim imams disapproved of their printing and painting.” New technology, such as paper and printing, gunpowder and the compass were transmitted through the Mongol realm to the West and sparked the Renaissance a few generations later.

5.   The Mongols were for low taxes. GK lowered taxes for everyone, and abolished them altogether for professionals such as doctors, teachers and priests, and educational institutions.

6.   The Mongols established a regular census and created the first international postal system.

7.   The Mongols invented paper money (it was soon abandoned because of hyper-inflation, but they got the right idea) and elevated the status of merchants ahead of all religions and professions, second only to government officials (this is in contrast to Confucian culture, which ranked merchants as merely a step above robbers). They also widely distributed loot acquired in combat and thus promoted healthy commercial circulation of goods.

8.   The Mongols improved agriculture by encouraging farmers to adopt more efficient planting methods and tools, as well as transplanting different varieties of edible plants from country to country and developed new varieties and hybrids.

Okay. So Pax Mongolica was basically good for the world. But wait, how about all of those terrible massacres, rapine and wholesale destruction of cities? Didn’t Genghis Khan famously stated that “the greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms?”

Actually, Muslim chroniclers attributed that quote to him and it is highly unlikely that he ever uttered it. Muslims writers of the era often exaggerated Mongol atrocities for Jihad purposes.* The Mongols were very aware of the value of propaganda as a weapon of war and actively encouraged scary stories about themselves.The Mongols decimated cities that resisted them, such as Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, but they generally let those that surrendered remain unmolested. At the end of the fourteenth century, Tamerlane piled up pyramids of heads outside the cities that he conquered, and as he (flimsily) claimed to be a Mongol, “his practices were anachronistically assigned back to Genghis Khan.” Three centuries later, Voltaire adopted a Mongol dynasty play to fit his own personal political and social agenda by portraying GK, whom he used as a substitute for the French king, as an ignorant and cruel villain. So basically, GK got an undeservedly bad rap.

Yay for Genghis Khan!

* “…more conservative scholars place the number of dead from Genghis Khan’s invasion of central Asia at 15 million within five years. Even this more modest total, however, would require that each Mongol kill more than a hundred people; the inflated tallies for other cities required a slaughter of 350 people by every Mongol soldier. Had so many people lived in the cities of central Asia at the time, they could have easily overwhelmed the invading Mongols. Although accepted as fact and repeated through the generations, the (inflated) numbers have no basis in reality.”

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We all think of the Mongols as barbarians that wrought havoc on the world. Few of us are aware of how they opened the world to commerce. They opened new trade routes, not only of physical goods but for the transmission of ideas and cultures. I am daunted because I cannot adequately express how this book has so changed how I view world history. I used to praise the new ideas espoused during the Enlightenment, but did you know that Voltaire drew a picture of the savage, blood-thirsty Mongols that served their own purposes and created a one-sided view that hid the truth. Chaucer praised Genghis Kahn and Marco Polo did the same for Kublai Kahn; When Christopher Columbus sailed west it was to look for Cathay, to reconnect with the fantastic trade routes established by the Mongols. I could go on and on showing how what we have been told about these so-called barbarians just doesn’t quite add up! What is explained here in this book makes sense and it changes how we understand today’s modern world.

Did you know that Genghis Kahn made the capital of his Chinese Empire present day Beijing in 1266 and that that the Forbidden City was a huge park filled with wild animals where the Mongol leaders lived in ghers/yurts? Here in this enclosed area the Mongol leaders lived according to their own Mongol traditions. They ate their traditional foods, ate with knives, which the Chinese found abhorrent, drank fermented mare’s milk and practiced their own sports and games, so foreign to the Chinese culture around them. Did you know that “hooray” is based on a Mongol expression of exuberance? Did you know that Columbus called the red-skinned natives he encountered when he landed on the islands off the American mainland Indians because he thought he had met up with the Mongols living south of the Chinese Mongols, the Mongols of India? That is why Native Americans originally were called Indians. There is so much in this book that makes sense, it is like putting together all the pieces of a puzzle and everything fits!

Kublai Kahn supported universal education with classes held in the colloquial language. Paper money was invented by the Chinese, but he saw its practicality and radically expanded its usage. Under his rule China attained its Golden Age of Drama. Medical knowledge, textile production, printing techniques, basically all areas of knowledge that were practical and useful were supported and transported to new areas around the world. Under the Mongol rule there was religious freedom. In the 1200s, think of that!

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... and all the other things floating around out there / Battlerite

« on: November 12, 2017, 07:47:45 AM »

F2P now. Get it, retards. It's really good.

Like Dota/LoL teamfights without the grinding or leveling up. Super responsive controls, very skill and reaction based. Or as a lot of people describe it, like WoW battlegrounds but with a top-down view.