Another useless fucking chatbot

Even if I secretly believed this I would simply not say it out loud

Reading House of Leaves. I’m reading it in English even though it’s not my first language because I feel like too much might get lost in translation. But this book has a lot of difficult language in it ngl.

Edit: “Anfractuosity” that is not a word your mom is anfractuous

Felix: This is like if random-ass movie was directed by random-ass NYT columnist and it starred random-ass actor and random-ass blue check person

Will:

I’ve only ever finished a campaign when I used “Become the Crisis”.

I think the game would benefit from scarcity being introduced. As it is right now, there’s rarely a need to fight because there’s nothing to fight over. If your deposits and planets could actually run out of resources, you would need to either negotiate trade agreements or fight over territory to keep things running and it would add a more natural and narratively coherent end to campaigns rather than the current system. Right now, some guys just show up in the 3rd act, completely unrelated to anything happening prior.

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Exactly, every time some corporation introduces an AI feature, it’s exclusively for the purpose of jingling car keys in front of dumbass investors. Investors have toddler brains.

Elon’s wife leaving him for Chelsea Manning, now Trump’s wife leaving him for Stan Kelly. Stay tuned for breaking news about Zuckerberg’s wife and Brace Belden.

I usually post here when complaining about bad video games but today I am happy to inform you that I think Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is very good.

I’ve said this before, my family is basically the Park family from Parasite

It’s a big picture thing for me. Capitalism “benefits” me individually in that it enables my family to live in decadence right now, but it’s not sustainable. The world is burning up and while it won’t affect me initially, it inevitably will. The immense alienation and loneliness is also a direct consequence of individualist ideology.

My family is upper class, but not billionaires. We will be on the chopping block later than most, but we will end up there eventually. Capitalism, like fascism, has no end goal. While it might temporarily benefit me to close my eyes and pretend like neoliberalism is epic, I can’t ignore how fucked we are if nothing changes.

There’s only a couple thousand people on this planet who remember Juan Guaido, 5% of them live in Venezuela, 5% in Langley and the remaining 90% are hexbears.

Iirc Elon said they would be amphibious and you could literally drive them across small rivers

Well, yeah. Endless mode will always eventually require cheese to progress, that’s almost inherent to its nature. When the enemy has 500 “deal 2,5% more damage” and “take 2,5% less damage” tokens, any “fair” Pokemon strategies are not viable anymore and there is no way around that. Endless mode is always gonna be an unbalanced clown show and they shouldn’t bother balancing it.

The game doesn’t need more modes, it needs to make Classic mode good. It needs to move far, far, far away from the starter system and make changes that add variety to the game. Pokemon is not a balanced game, but Pokerogue basically goes out of its way to ruin any existing semblance of balance.

1. The pacing of Classic mode sucks. Runs are way too long and the level cap being 200 throws the balance way out of whack. By level 50, 99% of Pokemon have reached their final evolution and learned most of their available moves, you hit this at around wave 70. This not only means that for over half of your run, your team stays pretty much the same, it also means that Pokemon that are powerful early and weak later (such as Butterfree or Bibarel that are much stronger than most mons you’ll have between levels 10-20 but fall off really hard) are completely redundant. In Firered/Leafgreen, the Elite 4 are around lvl 50-60, which means that your Dragonair will not become a Dragonite (lvl 55) until you’ve reached the very end of the game. In Pokerogue, it reaches its peak in the first 1/3rd of the game. So why bother with anything but the lategame behemoths?

2. This is further exacerbated by the egg moves. There’s a reason your Charmander starts with Ember and not with Flamethrower, there’s balancing going on here. But Pokerogue just gives your Pokemon full movesets starting from level 1, making your runs even more static and disincentivizing switching your team up even more. This also makes it so your late game scaling mons like your Dratinis are punished even less in the early game, because having low stats doesn’t matter when you have Core Enforcer as a STAB move while your enemy has Tackle.

3. The egg moves and of course the pAsSiVeS make this even worse by being exclusive to your fucking starters, meaning any Pokemon you encounter throughout the run will be strictly worse than the Pokemon you start with which makes me want to bash my head against a wall. So not only are you even further disincentivized from switching out any mons you start with, you are also disincentivized from starting with any early game-focused Pokemon because all that matters is the late game and you don’t get rewarded for winning the early game harder.

A Pokemon roguelike could allow you to use so many different Pokemon. You could use a Pidgey and a Butterfree early when they’re at their relative strongest, switch them out for a Tauros and a Weezing mid game and late game you can get the heavy hitters like Dragonite and Zapdos or whatever. But Pokerogue seemingly goes out of its way at every opportunity to make your runs as static and predictable as possible. You can start with a Latios with a full moveset and all that changes throughout your run is the lvl counter going up. There’s a reason that Hades doesn’t let you handpick all of your freaking boons at the start of a run.

Pokerogue is fun because you can catch 'em all and because it’s fun to watch a number go up, but it might be the worst Roguelike I have ever played. The wasted potential is incredible and the problems are so fundamental that I have very little hope they will ever be fixed. Terastalization could have been a great way to add variety by changing your Pokemon’s types for individual runs, but because the developers are literally allergic to variety they have limited Tera shards to lasting 10 battles at a time, which is completely baffling because terastalization doesn’t have a time limit in the main series (unlike Gigantamaxing, which lasts only 3 turns in the main series but is permanent in Pokerogue???). The main draw of Roguelikes is going in with little equipment and making the best of whatever the game throws at you. Pokerogue literally lets you handpick your equipment. It’s not a Pokemon Roguelike, it’s just a glorified Battle Tower.

Played a lot of Pokerogue the past few days and my verdict is this: It succeeds as a Pokemon game but fails as a Roguelike. It so heavily relies on the starter system that at the beginning of each run, you pretty much already know what your “build” is gonna be. It heavily disincentivizes releasing your starters mid-run which kills the variety that Roguelikes are built upon. The more you progress, the more you get to basically just handpick your entire team, which is so antithetical to the genre I don’t even know where to start.

Instead, its main draw is the “catch 'em all” aspect and the infinite joy of watching numbers go up, making it honestly more comparable to Cookie Clicker than to Hades or Slay the Spire. Sure, you get to pick from random rewards at the end of each battle which makes it look like a Roguelike, but those items do not define your run at all. Your run is defined by the Pokemon on your team, by their moves and their abilities. And you can pick those in the starter screen.

I think Pokerogue will suffer a lot in the long run because of this. As people complete their collections, the replay value will plummet because the variety is just not there.

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My dad has been watching a lot of youtube recently and he loves “daily show mocking Trump” kind of content

Maybe I should recommend Sam Seder to him

Watching season 13 of It’s Always Sunny and the show may have fallen off but the Waitress looks better and better each season

Slowly sowing seeds of doubt in my dad’s neoliberal ideology

I must hand it to him: Trudeau has aced his standing lessons

The country ruled by decaying geriatrics are acting in service of Papa Nurgle. It should’ve been obvious.