*Pointing directly at washington DC on a map* “yeah yeah of course I know where Iran is. It’s right there. That’s where the US military should be doing it’s thing, this spot I’m pointing at, which is Iran, because I know where that is, see, right there that point right there.”

You got a loicense for that offputting but somehow still mainstream wankslop?

That’s just Madman Theory but the proverbial madman is a magic 8-ball that might, at any moment, start synthesizing novels with its instruction set and randomly start blasting.

I say that literally every time I remember it exists lmao.

I’m gonna go through things I remember offhand, mostly recent-ish stuff that’s still fresh in my memory.

Frieren - this should be well known enough to not need a blurb.

Secrets of the Silent Witch - fairly light and fluffy formulaic shoujo slop, but inoffensive and sort of charming.

BOFURI - no-stakes SAO with a primarily female cast and no weird stuff at all, just the protagonist accidentally min-maxing a terribly balanced VRMMO and then stumbling into every overpowered item and skill synergy possible. Empty, fluffy, completely inoffensive slop.

Call of the Night - despite what the cover art would suggest, this is a very good series that grapples with alienation, depression, and to some extent gender and sexuality, with a more or less ace protagonist trying to become a vampire by falling in love with a depressed alcoholic gremlin of a vampire who’s been mostly sitting on the floor of her unfurnished apartment drinking and playing the same PS1 games for more than 20 years. The other vampires are also all complex, deeply broken people alienated from society. There’s even a crossdressing bisexual femboy character who is actually just sort of there and treated normally instead of being treated as a gag or fetish material. I can vouch for the first season and most of the second, but I haven’t actually finished the second season nor have I read the manga yet. Also has an absolutely amazing OP and ED.

May I Ask For One Final Thing - villainess genre subversion vaguely riffing on Alice in Wonderland but mostly just being a story about a terrifyingly powerful ball of repressed rage kicking the shit out of all the ontologically evil slaving aristocrats she’s been forced to not kick the shit out of, after being given official sanction to just go wild and kick the shit out of all of them by the crown prince.

A Wild Last Boss Appeared! - this is genderbending isekai slop, but is actually pretty clever isekai slop that draws on and uses the way the world and its history was something both shaped by the protagonist (and other players) but also that’s its own distinct thing that exists in a way that’s forcibly trying to reconcile the half-assed lore and player stories with how a world would actually have to work to make those things happen and all the bits that would have had to have happened offscreen. I read several of the LNs and it never got gross or weird from what I remember.

Sakamoto Days - story about a former assassin who retired after his wife forced him to stop killing people. It’s extremely creative and silly, and I can’t remember anything gross and objectionable happening in either season. Great OPs and EDs on both seasons too.

Nokotan - funny deer show.

ZOM100 - phenomenal pro-social zombie apocalypse story about a burnt out office worker reveling in the end of the world because it means he doesn’t have to go to work anymore, and setting out to do everything he always wanted to but never had the time to before it’s too late. If that sounds nihilistic and toxic, making the “pro-social” comment I led with seem out of place: the story would agree with that criticism and it repeatedly interrogates the premise in an almost dialectical way to reorient it into a form that’s more responsible and centers the human element and what experiences mean to people to arrive at a healthier place. It’s also incredibly stylish and fantastically animated. It is kind of riffing on schlocky grindhouse aesthetics, but I don’t remember it ever being particularly gross about it the way some things are.

Yeah, in much higher quality than the original posts too. All the old videos are like 480p, but now they’re at what may be the largest extant resolution anyone bothered to save.

I noticed there are longer videos and that the channel streams something now, but I didn’t look to see if that’s full episodes of the old show or compilations or what.

I wonder if the rights reverted to the surviving members or if they otherwise got them from was it comedy central that had them before, for them to be posting it like that.

It’s not even that. He’s just wrong, and like all media slop critics placed way too much value on his favorite slop treats while scorning other sorts of media slop treats. Like movies are 99+% pure slop, 99+% of all books ever written have been formulaic mass market slop, 99+% of all music ever recorded has been empty slop, 99+% of games ever made have been low effort slop, 99+% of all painted “art” is just slop commissioned to fill space on a wall.

“There are some examples of [insert medium] that are meaningful and well executed” isn’t some profound thing, it doesn’t elevate or transform the nature of the rest of the medium it was in, those things are just individually good and potentially meaningful. Trying to cast some mediums as somehow superior and sublime is just silly elitism that’s willfully ignoring how vapid the vast, vast bulk of everything in every medium is, especially when the purpose of that medium is making people stare at it in exchange for money, but especially when the purpose of the medium is trying to make funtime reference puzzles for modestly educated special good boys who want to feel smart for getting it like what most “high art” is trying to be.

I went and found it on their youtube channel, where it was reposted a few months ago in 1080p: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu6HDOv_lnU

The 4060 is a notoriously bad card with VRAM on par with almost decade old midrange cards, and I did mention it running worse on NVidia GPUs than one would expect given their specs.

The general consensus is the game looks worse and runs worse than world

That’s a nonsense take and people just saying shit. World looked good for its time, and it still doesn’t look bad, but it has some really jarring issues with its antialiasing and certain effects relying on the shitty TAA that it shipped with, and in its time it was as demanding and non-performant. Meanwhile Wilds is visually stunning and runs incredibly smooth on high settings on my 6800, a card that’s older and cheaper than/comparably priced to the 4060 but with a reasonable amount of VRAM. The only problem is starting with Guardian Arkveld it just has random DX errors that hard crash the game and nothing fixes.

With MHWilds it seems to have been a few things: weird CPU things where it was doing too many checks, having worse performance on NVidia cards than would be expected, and running perfectly smooth on AMD cards except for random hard crashes. It runs just fine on older mid-range hardware for the most part, it’s just had some really bizarre problems that it shouldn’t have.

part of my really doesn’t want to find out what happens when you blow up a small nuclear reactor in the middle of the ocean.

Probably not all that much. It’s heavily shielded and I assume buried deep inside the structure (to the point that “refueling” it means “tear the ship up for a refit and replace the entire reactor while you’re at it, because it’s inaccessible and can’t be refueled”), so the ship itself being made to take on water and sink probably wouldn’t crack it open. I have to assume there are also failsafes to make it shut down in the event of catastrophic failure, if nothing else because having it trying to run when submerged may make salvage operations untenable.

It would likely be less of an overall problem than all the other extremely toxic bullshit they no doubt have on board, or the oil and fuel that the oil tankers and cargo ships that would no doubt also get targeted would spew out when cracked open.

Carrot is a class traitor (good)

Carrot might technically be a royal, but his actual class background is proletarian and functionally an ethnic minority, at least within the context of Ankh-Morpork, so in practical terms he’s as much a class traitor as Vimes and in a similar way, for all that Vimes is objectively a piece of shit who is at best a lesser evil compared to much of the setting’s elites, while Carrot is fundamentally a well-meaning true believer who’s likable and earnestly trying to improve the material conditions of the city and make the police somewhat less shit.

Oh fuck, Carrot is just Judge Dredge except charismatic. Maybe he wouldn’t nuke another city to save Ankh-Morpork the way Dredd did in the Apocalypse War, but he really is just an affable Judge Dredd: a fanatic true believer with a layered belief of the law and then his own ideals atop it. Carrot would definitely say that murder is a crime even where there’s no law, and he’d ignore non-murder crime if he wasn’t legally on duty in a jurisdiction. He’d probably even arrest himself for a petty noise violation out of consideration for his neighbors.

I wouldnt be suprised if we hit 50 before they stop support.

Hello Games is an absurdly small studio that as I understand it is wholly owned by Sean, who’s mentioned them having cash reserves high enough to keep working on NMS longer than any of them will be alive. I think the only thing that would make them stop their current almost-seasonal release schedule where a dozen people are putting out more content than some 800 person studios is Sean losing interest in the project, except he comes across as an overenthusiastic puppy who’s endlessly excited about whatever new thing they’re working on.

LNF coming out and being a hit might do it, if that absorbs all their focus moving forwards.

I couldn’t help myself, and went and looked again. Here are some highlights of the titles from the past week:

• Everyone’s a Catgirl! Ch. 332: Rice to the Occasion
• Oops! I Accidentally Started an Industrial Revolution in Another World (24/?)
• [Brian The Isekai] - Chapter 27: Staff Time
• [Reverse Isekai] A Ninja from 1582 gets stuck in modern Tokyo.
• The Villainess Is An SS+ Rank Adventurer: Chapter 486
• There Will Be Scritches Pt.219
• Villains Don’t Date Heroes! 3-25: I Hate Being Right
• How I Helped My Smokin’ Hot Alien Girlfriend Conquer the Empire 2-71: Pre-Ass Kicking Checklist
• How I Helped My Demon Princess Conquer Hell 27: A Promise To A Pretty Girl
• Why isekai high schoolers as heroes when you can isekai delta force instead? (Arcane Exfil Chapter 61)
• Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School (158/?)

I do see a lot of titles that sound like sci-fi, but it’s a pretty even mix of that and what are clearly fantasy, and there’s a bunch of obvious isekais too. A lot of the ones I listed showed up multiple times, too, and three of them are from the same author. I’m assuming a fair bit of it is AI word vomit too, but I really don’t want to fry my brain by looking any closer.

I think that’s just Watanare, although I don’t know where it goes past the first season of the anime because I haven’t read it, nor watched the movie/5-episode continuation.

At least some of it, I think. I’d gone and looked at it again after the thread about the youtube videos that were just AI gibberish stories either lifted from old r/hfy posts or themed after them, and saw a lot of like “Going to a Magic School as a Human in Another World Where There Are Catgirls Chapter 63” (I made this title up because I can’t remember the exact one, but I’m riffing on a specific one that was really close to that) sort of posts. Even morbid curiosity couldn’t get me more than a few skimmed paragraphs in, between how terrible the writing was and also the fact that that was the actual length of those “chapters” lmao.

I assume there is still some of the old style sci-fi stuff too, but it felt like it had largely shifted away from the old one-off short story form “empty slop to trip up certain emotions relating to fear, pride, loss, and accomplishment” to serialized “empty wish fulfillment escapism” slop. I think I even saw a post complaining about exactly that change in the content lmao.

It sounds like a trashy shounen manga publication

It’s like the jankiest, lowest grade imitation of LN web publishing you could imagine. Like I think there are comparable English sites for doing chapter by chapter publishing for webnovels, although they may be less popular than that sort of thing is in Japan, but “a subreddit where you post like 500 word chapters several times a week” is just the worst medium for it.

The last time I looked it was mostly fantasy isekai harem slop, with users treating it as like a chapter by chapter web publishing thing except it’s reddit posts lmao.

For example, an artist using AI to automatically color hundreds of frames of animation at once, or to help with inking/tweening/color correction etc. The tedious shit that isn’t very fun.

The problem is anyone who does do something like that gets crucified by people who think “local program that’s only as intensive as a modern game, running on consumer hardware” is the same thing as “giant datacenter eating multiple cities’ worth of power to run a chatbot that’s always wrong”. I’ve seen people malding over just the thought of a modder using text to speech that’s slightly less bad than traditional text to speech, like a hobbyist making a free piece of art using something that now also runs locally to fill in gaps in their skillset is the same as a corporation cutting down on voice acting.

Like the water’s been so muddied that people who are rightfully disgusted at all this obscene waste to make shitty chatbots that are awful and are being pushed by the literal worst people alive to replace workers (despite not actually being able to) and make everything worse, and annoyed by people spamming low effort slop that’s the equivalent of talking about a weird dream they had mixed with that shitty 3d CGI slop inexpertly made in poser or daz3d and presented as poorly framed single images that flooded everything when those were new and that’s still around in annoying quantities, and extend that to anything that’s been so much as touched in any way by any sort of AI-related system.

Random aside, but I just realized the other day how generative AI has ruined the whole vibe of any genre where part of the conceit is just going for vibes over internally consistent logic, like classic sci-fi and fantasy art or anything trying to evoke dreamlike nonsense vibes, because now anything that doesn’t line up or make sense or is just there to evoke a certain vibe becomes a smoking gun that an entire piece is empty nonsense.

I still think there’s room to riff on the idea in a meaningful way, it just has to combine burnt out disillusionment, the failure of a past lost idyll to actually exist, and some superpositioning stuff where the game world gets swapped out for a dead-but-still-moving-a-little rustbelt town and then a cyberpunk slum without skipping a beat as reality falls apart.

Also finding the cat is the end of act 1, the cat talks, the cat smokes and then eats the cigarettes, and the cat is the Kim figure for the rest of the game. No one else seems to notice that the cat isn’t a person, or is otherwise oblivious to its supernatural nature.

There’s a certain sort of gamer chud who malds very loudly and publicly any time a game they’re not interested in has the audacity to publicly exist at them personally, and when those games are uninspired live service games in heavily ossified genres with strong established competition already it’s like blood in the water for them because they get the small joy of some people online agreeing with them that it doesn’t look particularly good.