Michael McMain

@Devon_Eriksen_ And that (in my viewer opinion) is why the writers of Game of Thrones failed. I saw commentary where they said “We were trying to decide who would kill the Night King. It couldn’t be Jon Snow because everyone expects that”. That proved to me they didn’t care about viewers.

"Mary Sue" isn't really a character problem at all. There's nothing wrong with overpowered characters, or characters without noticeable flaws. Superman is both, and you can still write a satisfying story about him, one that doesn't annoy readers. Sure, it's a little trickier, but it's not impossible. All you have to do is give him a problem he can't punch. So, if Mary Sue isn't a character, what is it? Well, remember that Paula Smith wrote the "Mary Sue" character, and the story "A Trekkie's Tale" which she appeared in, to satirize the self-insert stories written by teenage trekkies. A Mary Sue story is a story that was written to serve one of the characters, rather than the reader. The problem isn't that she is too perfect. The problem is that she has no mistakes to make or lessons to learn, everything goes right for her, and so there can be no conflict, dramatic tension, or character growth. Sherlock Holmes can be the smartest, most perceptive man in the world so long as he has a puzzling case that challenges him. Superman can be invincible so long as he needs to protect people who aren't. Hell, you can even make a character who's super-wealthy, super-smart, super-athletic, super-humanly beautiful, and who has an eye color not found in nature just to make her extra-special. Exactly the way "Mary Sue" writers do. All you have to do is treat her like a normal character. By having her plans fail. By having her not know things. By having her enemies be smart, too. By having the universe beat her with the misfortune stick on a regular basis. By giving her something to be scared of. By giving her something to cry about. By giving her a problem she's not sure she can solve. You can get away with almost anything in a story, so long as you write it for the readers, and fill it with things they like. "Mary Sue" is a character who is served by the story, over and above the readers. This violates the one rule of storytelling: Nothing in the story is more important than the audience.

@Devon_Eriksen_ @ArchetypeTheory Or maybe you should try your hand at writing a script… 😀

@ArchetypeTheory Exactly. I want the names of the Fukushima 50 to be made public so they can be honored as heroes.

Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me right now? Is this fucking joke? Fukushima? Really? I mean, Japan did some pretty awful stuff in WW2, but... Fukushima? Of all the ridiculous things to feel guilty over... Fukushima was hit by multiple 50 foot tidal waves from a 9.1 earthquake at sea. That's not a fucking nuclear accident. That's your nuclear plant being hit by the hammer of god. And after that, you contained it. You took the hand fate dealt you and you played it with everything you had. You had workers volunteering to be heroes, to stay and fight to shut that thing down. And you saved... everyone. Not a single clearly connected death. In the middle of a natural disaster that cost you fifteen thousand souls, your people fought this thing and won. Chernobyl is something for Russians to be ashamed of, because that was their own screwup, and stupid communists can't do anything right. Fukushima wasn't your screwup. Fukushima happened to you. And your men stopped it. Fukushima is not your national shame. It is one of your finest hours.

@Devon_Eriksen_ The extremely sad thing about this is none of the people that hold that utopian ideal of a “world without borders” have a shred of an idea what the actual cost is to insure humanity can survive such a world.

Should I write a science fiction short story about a state that stops executing rapists, and starts executing their victims instead? Or would that seem like a far-fetched soapbox of a story, an unbelievable strawman constructed by an overly-online racist author crashing out from internet self-radicalization? In Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert makes a trenchant observation: If a man spends his whole life becoming something, he will choose death rather than allow himself to become its opposite. In the West, we have certain percentages of every post WW2 generation who have spent their entire lives imagining themselves as "citizens of the world", or "citizens of the human race", believing that all distinctions between races, cultures, religions, and value systems were simply relics of a barbaric past, and that all peoples of the world could be thrown into one big happy melting pot. Confronted with evidence that this is not so, over and over again, they have two choices: to become the opposite of everything they strove to be, or to kill the innocent. For them, this is not a difficult choice.

@polikarakis @GPrime85 For me (I agree with OP) the issue is you simply get a series of waypoint tasks that feels super artificial. It feels like you are following a designer’s breadcrumb trail of tasks and not a story that is unfolding.

@GPrime85 I'm not exactly sure what the main issue being pointed out here is. Is it that the MSQ is not heroic and flashy? Or is it that the "radar" is bad for giving away the answer and takes away from you figuring things out yourself. If I decide to try this out, I'm turning radar off.

> Die in combat > Wake up in a fishing hamlet > Fight bandits > Go to town > Arm wrestle a rando > Give a coin to a beggar > Save a lady in a sewer > Rescue a cat from a roof > Sweep a chimney > Unlock a random door in a castle > This is the main quest > The only thing telling you to do this is your radar ...this is a 70 dollar game

@AI_EmeraldApple I like the game a lot but I think the PVP damage is too high. In Arc Raiders if I get surprised I almost always have a chance to run away and try to recover. In Marathon I (or my target will) go down almost instantly. The downed health pool is far too low as well.

It is now Sunday, and Marathon continues to bleed active players and viewers. From a peak of 88k players, the 24-hour peak is now 75k on the WEEKEND, and average Twitch viewership plummeted from peaks of almost 250k. Bungie is scrambling with tweaking MTX, along with many other minor fixes, but it doesn't address the core problem. The game becomes stale, boring, and frustrating in a short amount of time. Nothing new or groundbreaking that hooks the player or lures players away from other games like ARC Raiders. The reality is that the game has core fundamental problems that are causing players to quit early and then not come back.

@byrons_bear @SandyofCthulhu Yeah Scully specifically went on that mission because they promised to pay for his spinal restoration. That is established like 10 minutes into the movie.

@SandyofCthulhu Wait. Why are having wheelchairs in Trek worse than ones in Avatar?

There exist two types of fictional power. In one, you show how your creation works and how it fits within the world. You don't need to explain everything. If you have a dragon, you can say it flies and breathes fire and your fans should accept it. But if you have your teleport across a continent, an ability not normal to dragons, then they are within their rights demanding an explanation. Or you can say your gunfighter is the fastest in the West. After all one must be the fastest, right? Now if your creation is something novel, like Cthulhu, you need to explain a little more. Cthulhu is huge, immortal, and has vast unknowable powers. "He is from another part of the universe." Then there is the other type of power, where you just invent stuff for comic or dramatic effect and don't justify it ever - like Dragonball Z and One Punch Man. Goku is unbeatable and his power isn't explained, because it's inexplicable and impossible. His ability to "yell so loud it breaks time warps" is just because ... he trained hard? It's on a par with defeating Hitler's blitzkrieg because you pulled out an UNO reverse card on the lead tank in the column. It's nonsensical and silly. Which is kind of the point. It's why we love stuff like One Punch Man. For reasons that are dumb and whiny (I blame myself), it bugs me when someone says "Goku could beat Dracula" or "Saitama could beat Cthulhu". I mean, I guess they could because that's how they're defined. But it's an entirely different way of looking at things. Yes Bugs Bunny could pants Cthulhu, so he'd have to bend over and pull up his shorts while Bugs hits Cthulhu on the head with a frying pan. But understand from which source your fictional power emerges. You can say "My gunfighter is the fastest in the West." without question. But you can't say "My gunfighter is so fast his bullets exceed the speed of light." without either just turning him into a joke or making a feeble attempt at justifying it. This is why the whole idea of wheelchairs in Star Trek or D&D is dumb. It is canon that the "wheelchair" problem has been FIXED in both universes. So you need to invent a reason for it NOT to be fixed. Such as when they said Kirk couldn't take the universal eyeball drug which meant he needed glasses for close-in work. Or Pike's body was so destroyed he would die in seconds without his support chair. Figh wizards, why can't you accept a wheelchair?" is on par with "You accept dragons, why can't you accept a Ford Shelby Mustang in your fantasy world." You CAN accept wheelchairs or, I guess Shelbys, but you must justify it becuase it is from beyond that world. Fight me.

@MattWalshBlog So wait, when your kid eventually uses AI to make an image asks you to look at what they did, you will tell them it is soulless? When my son did this I told him it was awesome and made it my desktop background.

Yes, I feel something when my child draws a picture because it was drawn by my child, a human being who I love. I feel nothing when I see “art” generated by a soulless algorithm — regardless of how technically impressive it is — because the algorithm has no soul, no consciousness, and no capacity to create anything with meaning. I understand that you’re in the AI business so you have to defend it in order to protect your bottom line, but you really could not have made a worse argument. You proved my point while trying to debunk it. Try again.

Rather than fatigue, which is only negative. What if it was “Desperation”? Your damage goes up as does damage taken. Your perfect dodge and attack combo windows shrink, and window misses cause a “stumble” interrupt. This gives higher reward for perfect play and increases tension as you push the limit.

I didn’t expect yesterday’s stamina discussion to grow into such a big conversation. It honestly surprised me, in a really good way. I’m truly grateful to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts. There are so many different perspectives here, and I’ve been reading all of them carefully. I try my best to reply to everyone, but since I’m a solo developer balancing both development and community work, my replies might be a bit slow at times. Even so, every comment here matters to me. I’ll take all of this feedback back to the drawing board and rethink this change more carefully. Thank you all for being part of the discussion

I’ve been thinking a lot about stamina systems in my game. A lot of players hate stamina because it limits how much they can act. At the same time, some players like it because it prevents mindless dodge and attack spam. After thinking about this for a long time, I came up with an idea. What if stamina wasn’t a resource at all? Instead, attacks and dodges build fatigue. Higher fatigue means you take more damage (and maybe deal less). You can always act. You’re never locked out of attacking or dodging because a fatigue bar is full. If you like aggressive play and feel confident managing that risk, you’re free to go all in. If you prefer a safer approach, you can manage fatigue and fight more steadily. At the end of the day, you have more freedom to decide how you want to play. This is a pretty big change, and I’d really love to hear your thoughts. Player feedback matters a lot to me!

@artozek @SandyofCthulhu Same-ish quest in Nagrand during The Burning Crusade!

@SandyofCthulhu Better or worse than the goblin who had you sifting through actual dogshit to find his keys?

This is how I gave up on MMOs. Years ago, the new Demon invasion upgrade came out for WOW, with all these new worlds, and astounding demonic monsters. So when I reach 80th level, I travel through the mighty demon gate to the new world, fight my way past the wandering horrors, and find a goblin with a quest. He wants me to collect 12 hot wings for him. It's the exact same quest I had at level 1. And level 12. And level 50. argh.

@TheBlackHokage I think one cool approach could be avoidance of civilian casualties. Fighting normal bad guys is easy if you don’t care about innocents. But throw them into the mix and the skill-based gameplay is about surgical precision and not heavy button mashing. That could be fun.

Simple. Balancing a Superman game for fun & challenge would be a tough task. Make him lore him accurate & people will complain the game is too easy & repetitive. Nerf him & people will cry he doesn’t feel like Superman. Everything he fights has to be a global or galaxy threat to make the game interesting. Not saying it ain’t possible, but I’d imagine a lot of devs view it as a lose lose situation, so they don’t even bother 🤷🏽‍♂️

@Doffx @NeverSinkDev You know what would be cool? Running a corrupted map with a corrupted tablet made a corrupted nexus with X nodes. Then you could bring it to you.

@NeverSinkDev Enjoyed the druid a lot. Endgame is Awful, I cant even complete my atlas because finding those corruption nodes is a real chore. Needs a complete rework. The mechanic is the worst ive ever played in years of POE, even with the changes I wont bother.

Here are my impressions on the temple buff and the state of the league. 1) The temple is now much better. I don't think spending time there currently can compete against 3x rare tablet strats, but the changes made it much more fun. It's a fun palette cleanser. Still needs a lot more work. 2) Here's the point where I should be complaining about lack of endgame activities, but... I'm having fun. I'm enjoying casual mapping (Ritual/Abyss), watching a series etc. having a blast tbh. I don't think I'll stick around for too long this league, maybe level a second character. There's not too much to do, but... That said, most system right now work pretty well, the rare tablets are GREAT. There just needs to be more depth and content. 0.4 makes me much more excited for 0.5 What are your thoughts/impressions?

@empyriangaming They are too big. I agree. What I hate most, though, is the long windy dead-ends. I don’t understand how those can be thought of as “fun”.

Four patches, same feedback, (almost) no change. Will it change 🤔

@SandyofCthulhu When Fight Club went to DVD I brought it to my brother’s house for movie night. After it ended my Dad yells “Who is the deranged maniac that brought this movie?” When I raised my hand he said “What the hell were you thinking?” Then my Mom said “I thought it was pretty good”.

Want to hear a terrifying story? It's true. A friend told me this. He was visiting his grandma and maiden aunt (who lived with her), and got talking about his love for Asian movies. Grannie asked him to show them a cool Asian film. Without thinking, he put on Oldboy. About 20 minutes from the end, he belatedly remembered the film's twist, and panicked. Not wanting Grams to see the end, he started saying stuff like, "This is running a little long, let's watching something else." Nope, they were committed. "Let's finish this later?" (His plan to not ever show it later.) Nope, let's do it now. He said that in retrospect he wishes he'd faked a medical emergency. But instead he sat there. Face flaming red, while Grams and Maiden Auntie saw the whole thing. I have to admit I am not 100% sympathetic with him, and called him a fool several times while he related the tale. He fully agreed.

I remember standing at the top of that hill where the union soldiers were positioned. Looking down that long, steep slope to the distant tree line where the confederates initiated their charge I was overwhelmed with what had to be going through the union soldier’s minds: “Why are they doing this? It is too easy to kill them and they have to know that.” I felt like they had to be looking at each other wanting an answer to what the hell was happening. There is no way someone would just throw their life away like this. It was a very eerie feeling.

I was once a Civil War re-enactor. I only played Union. At one Gettysburg re-enactment we did Pickett's Charge at 1 to 1 scale. I was in dark blue, waiting to receive the rebel charge. I must say seeing those pale ranks massed with their blood red flags was chilling. When they came across the field shrieking the rebel yell it sounded like ten thousand banshees. Unforgettable. I am proud of my ancestors for facing down that terrifying force. And I am impressed with the courage of the misguided men who took that charge to the Union line. I can deride their cause and admire them at the same time.

@Devon_Eriksen_ When long tweets come into my feed I usually think “ugh, not reading all this”. Unless they come from you. Then I am like “Holy Shit! Let me get my coffee! This is gonna be good!” You never disappoint.

This is one is actually kinda true. It's yet one more thing about America that Europeans don't really quite understand. Europeans seem to by constantly aware, in the back of their minds, of all the other European nations their surrounded by, and what those other, slightly different, cultures might think about X, Y, and Z. And a lot of them speak two or three different languages, the tongues of those close-packed neighbors. What they don't have a firm grasp on is what it's like to be American. Because America is not a European country. We're not packed in next to six different cultures that we've had alternating alliances and wars with for the past 1500 years. We're in a great big wilderness with lots of elbow room. We don't have to care what our national neighbors think, because we don't really have any. We have a failed state run by narco-gangs to the south of us, and a few cities full of socialists huddled against our northern border to stay warm, and that's it. We don't speak languages other than English, because there's no one to practice with, and anyone in America who doesn't speak English isn't worth having a conversation with. So we hang out with other people like us, in our big, spacious, largely-wilderness country, and we do our own thing. Just like our ancestors, who moved here because they didn't like busybody neighbors telling them what to do, and not do. That's how we like it. It's not that we are literally unaware of your existence. We just don't think about you that often, because you're on the other side of the planet, and we don't see you every day. We understand that European countries are all up in each others' business, and everyone gets to have an opinion on everything, and yell it at everyone else at the top of their lungs. We just find it extremely arrogant that you try to apply this to us. You think it's extremely rude that we don't what the neighbors think, but you aren't our neighbors. Your opinions are as distant to us as those of Sumatra or Singapore or Malaysia are to you. And, sure, you can say you have to care, because our politics effects you, but that's because you asked for it to effect you. Every time you have a major war, or even a minor one, there's a significant percentage of your population that tries to beg, or rationalize, or guilt-trip us into either fighting it or paying for it. You don't actually need us to defend you from Russia, because stout and determined as the Russians are, they suck at logistics, and anyone who sucks at logistics sucks at warfare. They haven't even been able, in four years, to conquer their former colony, because we let those guys have a bunch of our obsolete GWOT gear, and some money that their corrupt politicians mostly hoovered up. You could easily restrain whatever territorial ambitions Russia has, all by yourselves, if you just got out of the cuck chair, remembered who you are, and beat your plowshares back into swords. I think a lot of you kind of resent us, and I understand why. People are only grateful for gifts up to the point that they feel they can repay. If they can never repay, then they must rationalize that they are owed. We're richer and more powerful than you, and you need us, but it doesn't have to be that way. You don't actually have to need us. You just need to get rid of your parasitic bureaucracies and get busy building stuff again. Your ancestors were warriors and inventors and explorers, but now, from the great distance that we see you from, it looks an awful lot like you just sit around and regulate each other all day. There is no perfect set of laws that makes everything fair for everyone. There's no pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow. The only real purpose of your whole experiment in unified bureaucratic governance, and busybody totalitarianism, is to give you a feeling of moral superiority. But you don't actually need a feeling of moral superiority. You could have feelings of technological, financial, and cultural superiority instead, if you just got over the collective trauma of WW2, stopped telling each other in loud voices that the will to power is inherently bad, and actually applied yourselves to something real. I understand that you resent being vassal states. I would too. And I'm not in love with the whole idea of an American empire, because I don't think that for the average American, the juice has actually been worth the squeeze. Sure, there's lots of people who say we have to maintain the empire, but the reasons they always give seem to boil down to, "to defend ourselves from people who hate us because of all the empire-building" , and "so we can do more stuff to maintain the empire". Feels a bit like a treadmill. And no, it's not our empire that makes us wealthy. We were wealthy and innovative and successful long before we had one. And back then, our federal budget was balanced, too. The indifference of the average American on the street to your opinion of us is frankly the only healthy thing about our relationship. And if you could start to emulate that, look to yourselves, take back your countries from the bureaucrats, and see to your own people instead of an endless stream of strangers... well, you wouldn't need us anymore. Healthy relationships aren't based on need.

This issue is specific to Greenville SC airport. I had the same type of problem. They scolded me when I approached and told me I had to come back one hour before the gate closed. I said that made no sense and I was scolded by a second attendant and told to “sit down”. That counter is subbed out to another company that contracts for AA. They are horrible. Once I got AA on the phone all of a sudden the counter staff were telling me “we never said we wouldn’t help you!”

Never book with @AmericanAir, I am stranded. I booked 2 round trip flights 5 days ago with confirmed seats beside each other. I made it to my first destination with no problem. On the way to my return flight my boarding pass was removed from my app and waitlist was added, I was forced to go to the Airline gate and when I got there neither flight attendant in Greenville SC attempted to help me until the gate was closed. I urged the importance of having to make this flight, they instead helped a random man who came after me. Never have I ever seen anything so disgusting in my 14 years of flying. The second passenger was denied access to even come upstairs because American Airline changed her name on her boarding pass which she was the only one that was allowed to have a boarding pass. It was so toxic, disgusting and unprofessional that it damn near feels like I was targeted. I was signed in for the flight and still lost a boarding pass? I am stranded and there is no way back to Miami today. I vow to do everything I can to prevent people from flying with American Airline for as long as I walk this planet. I swear this on my life.

Without telling me your age. What is the first video game you played? GIFS ONLY!!!

@Devon_Eriksen_ This is spot-on except for one thing. Boomers are not scared of magic rocks. Boomers are scared of government ineptitude. But other than that you nailed it.

This dot is not tiny. This dot is 6,000 square miles, which falls short of the usual figure of 10,000 square miles of solar panels to power the US. 10,000 square miles is two Greater Los Angeles areas, all the way from Thousand Oaks to San Clemente, from Moreno Valley to the ocean. A very large number does not magically become a small number when you pull an even bigger number out of your ass to compare it to. Now you wanna cover that area in solar panels, and keep them all maintained, cleaned, and facing the sun? Then you wanna make enough batteries to charge up and meet the ENTIRE POWER DEMANDS OF THE UNITED STATES over the course of a winter night? Is this impossible? No. Very few things are impossible. But what would it cost, and is it the lowest cost option? Well, allow me to introduce you to the concept of a Radiothermal Steam Generator. Let's suppose, purely for the purpose of argument, that there are some magic rocks that get hot all by themselves. In fact, if you refine them and put a whole bunch of them together, they get really hot. If these magic rocks existed, then it would be relatively simple to gather a bunch of them together, boil some water, and make electricity with a great big steam engine running off the boiling water. Best of all, you could run them all night, so you wouldn't need 25 trillion dollars worth of batteries. Plus more to support growing power demands. And you wouldn't have to clean and maintain 438 Manhattan Islands' worth of solar panels. (See? I can make a big number look even bigger by comparing it to a small number! See how this trick is played?) Sure, you would have to throw away the rocks after they wore out and didn't get hot anymore. But they wouldn't occupy any more volume than they did when you were using them. So you could store them right there in big concrete block, no problem. But there are two problems with Radiothermal Steam Generation. First of all, boomers are scared of magic rocks, so they pass a whole bunch of laws to make them feel safe, to the point where any use of magic rocks costs two extra dollars in regulatory compliance for every one dollar in actual cost. Secondly, magic rocks are clearly made up and don't exist. Otherwise we would have known about them since the early 20th century, and cheap, zero-carbon energy would be a totally solved problem. Since this hasn't happened, magic rocks must not exist, because if they did, what civilization would be so stupid as to not use them?

@elonmusk Not hotdog.

Grok Vision can understand pretty much anything you point the camera at

@Asmongold So sorry to hear about his passing. I was blessed to see him on stream with you a few times. You guys are so much alike and it was so fun to see you cutting-up together. He was a real salt-of-the-earth guy and the world is a lesser place without him in it.

A few days ago my father passed away. It's difficult for me to even find the words for the emptiness it leaves me with, he was my last family member in the state and I was there with him until the end. I will endure, but I don't think I'll ever be the same I love you, Pa