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... and all the other things floating around out there / Battlerite Royale
« on: October 31, 2018, 03:33:15 AM »
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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.
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.
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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?
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General Off Topic / Genghis Khan and his Mongol Horde were good news for the world.
« on: May 27, 2018, 10:45:47 PM »Quote
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.
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.
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General Discussion / Panos, why do Greeks and Turks have 10 points lower IQ than other Europeans?
« on: November 04, 2017, 08:32:45 PM »
:thinking:
Almost like they're very closely related and there's no difference between them. Both countries have Arab-level IQ and have nothing in common with European countries.
Almost like they're very closely related and there's no difference between them. Both countries have Arab-level IQ and have nothing in common with European countries.
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... and all the other things floating around out there / AC Origins
« on: October 28, 2017, 06:20:20 AM »
Seeing some good reviews for it on Metacritic, unusually so for an AC series.
Anyone played it?
Anyone played it?
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General Discussion / I Don't Trust This RD_Professor Character And Here's Why You Shouldn't Either
« on: October 26, 2017, 02:41:02 PM »
Who is he? Where did he come from? No one knows.
Let's examine the facts:
1) chadz is missing in action
2) "RD_Professor" "appears", suddenly "chadz" "fixes" the launcher
3) RD_Professor is chad'z alter ego, out to infect all of your computers for relentlessly making fun of OKAM.
Don't say you weren't warned, idiots.
Let's examine the facts:
1) chadz is missing in action
2) "RD_Professor" "appears", suddenly "chadz" "fixes" the launcher
3) RD_Professor is chad'z alter ego, out to infect all of your computers for relentlessly making fun of OKAM.
Don't say you weren't warned, idiots.
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Total War Series / Total Warhammer 2
« on: September 30, 2017, 01:37:09 PM »
Supposed to be really good, and the improvements they made over WH 1 sound great too.
Mortal Empires (combined wh1+2 campaign with new features) comes out in a few weeks.
Also, it's already cracked. I think it's retarded that to play Mortal Empires you need to spend something like 130 euros, so IMO they can blame themselves for all the pirates.
Mortal Empires (combined wh1+2 campaign with new features) comes out in a few weeks.
Also, it's already cracked. I think it's retarded that to play Mortal Empires you need to spend something like 130 euros, so IMO they can blame themselves for all the pirates.
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... and all the other things floating around out there / Death of the Outsider, Return of the Feminist
« on: September 25, 2017, 01:29:40 PM »
DotO has some interesting mechanics, but fuck me if Arkane hasn't swallowed the SJW pill. Sneaking suspicions arose after the first mission, wherein I ventured forth as a black lesbian woman shoehorned into the main character role (despite Daud being 100 times more fitting and Billie having no motive to kill the Outsider) to walk among tiny female boxers, equal in martial prowess with the ridiculously muscled huge men also hanging around, all led by a female gang leader, only to rescue Daud -- now weak and frail, spending his time alternating between pathetically lying in a fetal position and writing heartfelt journal pages about how utterly competent the lesbian main character is. When not thanking the lesbian for being his kyeldurht dame in shining armor because Golly, he's just so feeble, that is. What clever trope inversion! Were I a woman, I would have never felt as Empowered. All the Agency was mine to command.
So I went online and to my utter surprise...
Lead narrative designer, a woman and a feminist whose #1 priority is writing "strong women with Agency" -- check.
Gender studies major, a woman and a feminist, whose expertise was sought because she wrote tweets about how patriarchal Dishonored 1 was, brought in to write the lore and background -- check.
And digging deeper, it came as no surprise that Satan Herself was involved in this:
https://mic.com/articles/179976/you-can-thank-anita-sarkeesian-for-being-able-to-play-emily-in-dishonored-2#.CGbXDb47K
Dishonored 1 was, of course, extremely "good" to men, where the only non-scumbag character was the boatman, Samuel, and where men died by far greater numbers, and committed the far greater atrocities, than women -- but she's never let that fact stand in her way before, so naturally she complained about women dying in Dishonored 1.
Smith:
It's pretty fucking bad when the SJW, radical feminism is so obnoxious that after 20 minutes of playing I knew someone was making a political statement and trying to Empower Women instead of caring about making a good video game. If only they learned the difference between writing decent female characters with agency (the Magic Word) and trying to shove their agenda down people's throats.
So I went online and to my utter surprise...
Quote
One of the main writers for Death of the Outsider is a Gender Studies major who was apparently hired because they love FemFreq and critiqued Dishonored 2 on Twitter: https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2017/09/dishonored-death-of-the-outsider-writer-hired-for-tweets-was-gender-studies-major/39633/
Lead narrative designer, a woman and a feminist whose #1 priority is writing "strong women with Agency" -- check.
Gender studies major, a woman and a feminist, whose expertise was sought because she wrote tweets about how patriarchal Dishonored 1 was, brought in to write the lore and background -- check.
And digging deeper, it came as no surprise that Satan Herself was involved in this:
Quote
"I was one of some voices that were very critical of [the first] Dishonored," Sarkeesian said. "While it was a really impressive game, it wasn't so good to women. So, it was such a treat to see Dishonored 2 come out and you can play as Emily, the marketing was Emily... and it was very clear that there was at least some kind of internal conversation that happened internally around that."
Dishonored 1 was, of course, extremely "good" to men, where the only non-scumbag character was the boatman, Samuel, and where men died by far greater numbers, and committed the far greater atrocities, than women -- but she's never let that fact stand in her way before, so naturally she complained about women dying in Dishonored 1.
Smith:
Quote
After hearing Sarkeesian's criticisms, he said that it made him see the way Arkane depicted the women of Dishonored 1 in a new light.
It's pretty fucking bad when the SJW, radical feminism is so obnoxious that after 20 minutes of playing I knew someone was making a political statement and trying to Empower Women instead of caring about making a good video game. If only they learned the difference between writing decent female characters with agency (the Magic Word) and trying to shove their agenda down people's throats.