Balatro 
WhyEssEff
joined 5 years ago
MODERATOR OF
I literally just played a royal straight every time. Used all of my discards on purpose. Lost six bucks every round, don't fucking care. 20 of my cards were lucky. Entirely anathema to the challenge.
so I had the most fucked Golden Needle build, bar none. literally negated every bit of the challenge. most disgusting Balatro win of all time.
no, I don't think I will 
fair enough, this is a certified dumb girl take so I don't mind taking the L here
15120s child stumbling into the catacombs decorated entirely with Beksiński paintings and Junji Ito drawings: 
I should keep going, there is definitely not a great evil down here
i'm being needlessly glib but I'm moreso trying to express my annoyance that a lot of discussion around this barely considers images within it. I don't even mean just symbols, like if we're carving shit into the walls or painting it on we could get artists to draw/sculpt/carve out harrowing imagery meant to communicate without language. if someone stumbles into an ancient tomb with detailed artwork everywhere in it of peoples faces melting off, I gotta be honest, it is very much a skill issue if they continue.
nuclear guys when they find out archaeologists are able to interpret cave paintings because they are pictures depicting things 
just put something fundamentally instinctive like hyperexaggerated emotions and skulls. better yet, just literally anything even an infant can interpret as “BAD BAD BAD NO NO NO”
nuclear guys, tunnel-visioning: oh we’re going to have to bury the nuclear waste and put every language in existence there to warn future people but they might not even speak any of them and may plunder it anyway unknowingly. this speaks to the impermanence of record and the inability to preserve common knowledge. I’m literally so philosophical right now
me, thinking about it for more than five seconds: put picture-to-word association there
translate hebrew function 
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What's a surreal, odd, or generally interesting thing you've experienced that sticks with you?
(hexbear.net)
One time, when I was working at a summer camp as a specialty staff, my coworker/roommate who I barely talked to and barely knew randomly pulled out his switch and asked me if I could do a part of Celeste he was stuck on. I said sure, and did it for him, but then asked why he asked me in particular. He just said I 'seemed like the type of guy to have beaten Celeste'. I haven't started socially transitioning, so I don't know where that vibe came from, and I still think about it 
it's already added 
I just wanted to showcase my 30-minute photoshop trip
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OpenAI marketing GPT as a search engine/encyclopedia replacement is super fucking insidious
(hexbear.net)
I get the general techbro sphere doing this because they're fucking idiots, but you are the maintainers of this technology. You know this is ultimately a language model built to synthesize information from pre-existing data sets. This is extremely fucking ghoulish.
I hate the promotion of the idea that we should be using generative adversarial networks as search engines or encyclopedias so much it's unreal, literal misinfo generation machines :agony-shivering:
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so i finished the essay. the prompt was this:
Pick a case study of a post-colonial country. Using Freedom House, evaluate its democratization progress or lack thereof. Discuss the main cause(s) of this.
and thanks to some comrades here, I found a worthwhile 'creative' interpretation of the prompt to maintain my ability to write something that doesn't come off inherently cynical/farcical, despite the source's farcicality.
thought i'd post it here since i posted the initial cry for help. Some stuff will be edited out due to the fact that i don't know how prevalent my textbook is in the field. excuse the choppiness of it, i had to edit it down to the word limit.
Democracy by whom? Freedom to what? These are the questions one should ask themselves when trying to quantify esoteric concepts such as freedom and democracy. Israel, considered by many to house the world’s largest open-air prison, ranks at 76 points out of 100 on Freedom House’s ‘Global Freedom Status’ rating. Why is this? The likely cause behind the Freedom House’s rating for Israel being discrepantly high is that they are a key geopolitical ally of the United States within the Middle East, and Freedom House is financially entrenched in the State Department as well as the United States Agency for International Development.
In 1947, due to pressure on the British to remove its colonial apparatus from the territory alongside increasing tension between the Jewish immigrants and Palestinian nationals, the UN recommended a territorial split between Palestine and Israel alongside British evacuation. Due to tension over this proposal, civil war between the two groups broke out following the adoption of it. The result of this civil war was a decisive Jewish victory and the official establishment of the Israeli state.
Israel is largely seen as an exception to many of their fellow diverse postcolonial countries’ economic woes. [TEXTBOOK CITATION]. Israel, despite this, seems to be one of the most prosperous countries in the Middle East. What makes Israel different from similar postcolonial countries? The unfortunate fact is that while officially, Israel is regarded as decolonized, much of its territory is still occupied. Occupied by itself, against a Palestinian minority.
Oppression and disenfranchisement of the Palestinian minority is so systemically prevalent in Israel that organizations such as Amnesty International have declared Israel to be an apartheid state. The NGO published a report detailing the demographic-based oppression in Israel. “[...]Israeli authorities treat Palestinians as an inferior racial group who are defined by their non-Jewish, Arab status. This racial discrimination is cemented in laws which affect Palestinians across Israel and the OPT. [...]Palestinian citizens of Israel are denied a nationality, establishing a legal differentiation from Jewish Israelis. In the West Bank and Gaza, where Israel has controlled the population registry since 1967, Palestinians have no citizenship and most are considered stateless, requiring ID cards from the Israeli military to live and work in the territories.” (Amnesty International). If one is not a citizen, one cannot vote. Mass repression of a demographic which ensures unequal political participation is the most anti-democratic a supposed democracy can be. If credible NGOs are declaring Israel to be suppressing political participation, how can it be considered a flourishing democracy by Freedom House?
‘Human rights’, ‘freedom’, and ‘democracy’ are often wielded as bad faith geopolitical tools. PR grounds for the Gulf War were largely based on the ‘Nayirah Testimony’, a fabricated testimony delivered by 15-year old ‘Nayirah’ claiming that the Iraqi military was killing babies by removing them from incubators. Later, it was discovered that ‘Nayirah’ was actually the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, working to astroturf a war effort on behalf of the Kuwaiti government. This sort of bad faith propaganda isn’t something the State Department chooses to abstain from. ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ in the Iraq War is one instance in which the American government lied to its citizenry to advance its geopolitical interest. Freedom House, according to themselves, are primarily funded by the US State Department and USAID. Financially, their geopolitics are compromised.
The likely cause behind the Freedom House’s rating for Israel being discrepantly high is that they are a key geopolitical ally of the United States within the Middle East, and Freedom House is financially entrenched in the US state apparatus. Israel’s anti-democratic mass disenfranchisement is inherently authoritarian, yet Israel’s PR is maintained despite that due to its heavy allegiance with the world hegemon: America. The State Department, and thus through financial influence Freedom House, show themselves to have a vested interest in maintaining the PR of their key regional ally with this blatant discrepancy.
how's that for staying within the lines of the prompt while maintaining my conscience :sicko-blur:
"The furies are at home in the mirror; it is their address. Even the clearest water, if deep enough can drown."
- R. S. Thomas
Disco Elysium is an award-winning computer role-playing game developed by independent studio ZA/UM, headed by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz. Disco Elysium is set in a tabletop role-playing game setting synthesized by Kurvitz in 2005, that itself was used in Kurvitz’s previous novel Sacred and Terrible Air. The original game released on October 15th, 2019. The Final Cut, a fully voice-acted version as well as free expansion to the game, was released March 30th, 2021, a year to this day.
The original cut of the game, whilst not fully voice-acted, stars Will Menaker :will-fancy: Matt Christman :matt: Felix Biederman :felix-linus: and Virgil Texas :virgil-bb: of our amicably-disowned origin podcast :cth-of-saud: in select roles across the board.
The Final Cut does replace them, but if you want the experience of extremely-online podcasters trying to actually voice-act, you can swap the voices to the original cut in the menus.
50 years into the Current Century, a detective :tequila-sunset: wakes up (quite unclothed, somewhat bloated, permanently smiling, and very hungover) after one hell of a bender; one so disco he developed an alcohol-induced case of semantic and retrograde amnesia. Without an identity, nor and idea of where he is or what he is supposed to be doing, he gathers his bearings, hobbles downstairs after a conversation with his hostel room neighbor (who you may or may not try to proposition, or utterly fumble in it; the objectively funnier option, as are many check failures), and meets his assigned case partner, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi :lt-kitsuragi: of the Revachol Citizen’s Militia, Precinct 57.
Apparently there’s a body hanging from a tree. You were supposed to deal with it (bring it down) and you didn’t (oops), you’re supposed to have your badge (double oops), and furthermore, you’re also supposed to have your gun (triple oops), and by the way, you have to pay for the damages to your hotel room with a sum of réal you probably don't have (oh no).
Those, however, can wait, as you might want to get your shit together and inspect the lynching scene behind the hostel. Or don’t. After all, there’s an achievement for solving the case without inspecting the body.
Explore Martinaise, a small city in both Revachol and decay after the Moralist (mostly) and Nationalist crushing of the failed Antecentennial Revolution, as your twenty-four personality-filled skills talk you through the case, as well as many other things. Negotiate with the local union, discuss the nature of the world with a visiting capitalist, and decide whether you're fit and agile enough to kick in the skull of the local phrenologist.
By the way, have you considered your copotype? Political views? Wanna be a superstar communist? Or a sorry fascist? An apocalypse-warning liberal? Or a boring centrist? Mix and match personality and politic, this game explores and critiques all in an (ironically) sobering and realistic way, including how said politics reflect on the persons holding them, and the implications of those views being held by a cop.
(And, a personal addendum, for those wary, Disco Elysium’s politics are some of the best politics in a critically acclaimed game bar not much at all that I can name.)
A point-and-click adventure, with skill checks decided at the roll of a dice, Disco Elysium is a story-driven game first and foremost. Internalize thoughts in your thought cabinet? That services the story. Level up your skills to unlock previously failed white checks? Story-servicing. Change your clothes or indulge in vices for some stat boosts? The latter unfortunate, both story-servicing.
Disco Elysium is a story about a solving a crime. But it can also be a story about getting better. Or building communism (which will obviously be your first chosen ideology) as much as you can individually. Or getting worse. Or finding out the truth of the world. Or learning to let go. Or piecing together your shattered identity. Or picking up the pieces of that which you previously broke. Ultimately, for a game with over a million words (all voice acted), Disco Elysium wastes very few of them. It is a masterclass in using the medium it's built on to tell its tale.
There is so, so much I could say about this game. It’s truly a game with a lore-dense unique story, unique and complex characters, a uniquely vast yet claustrophobic setting, and a unique gameplay experience. It truly deserves the awards its won, and is recommended constantly to communists, Planescape: Torment fans, and Planescape: Torment fans who happen to be communists alike for a good reason.
I am only human however, the limit is 10k characters, and I pre-wrote the CrossCode Megathread well over a month in advance and added along the way, so I will leave it at that. I truly, truly recommend this game to Hexbear users who have not played it. You don’t even have to be a gamer to like it, it’s not at all gameplay intensive. Trust me. You are the audience for this game and story.
You can buy Disco Elysium: The Final Cut for $14 USD (65% sale!) on Steam and GOG, and $40 USD on Switch, PS4/5, and Xbox One/Series S and X. It’s only native to Mac and Windows, but it is Steam Deck Verified and marked Playable on ProtonDB.
“Humans, I have loved you all. Be vigilant!”
- Last words of Czech antifascist resistance fighter Julius Fučik, before being executed by the Nazis, translated.
If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can go here to reserve a spot! :xinternet:
Resources for Organizing your workplace/community :sabo:
Resources for Palestine :palestine-heart:
Buy coffee and learn more about the Zapatistas in Chiapas here :EZLN:
Here are some resources on Prison Abolition :brick-police:
Foundations of Leninism :USSR:
:lenin-shining: :unity: :kropotkin-shining:
Anarchism and Other Essays :ancom:
Remember, sort by new you :LIB:
Follow the Hexbear twitter account :comrade-birdie:
THEORY; it’s good for what ails you (all kinds of tendencies inside!) :RIchard-D-Wolff:
Come listen to music with your fellow Hexbears in Cy.tube :og-hex-bear:
Queer stuff? Come talk in the queer megathread!! :sicko-queer:
Monthly Neurodiverse Megathread and Monthly ND Venting Thread :Care-Comrade:
A retro-inspired 2D Action RPG set in the distant future
Meet Lea as she logs into an MMO of the distant future.
Follow her steps as she discovers a vast world, meets other players and overcomes all the challenges of the game.
Also: Lea can't speak. Nope, no heroic mime. She is actually mute.
CrossCode is ‘a retro-inspired 2D Action RPG set in the distant future’ created by Radical Fish Games, which released on September 21st, 2018. Inspired mainly by early entries in the Legend of Zelda franchise (alongside a litany of other titles), it is a top-down 16-bit indie action-adventure RPG with a fast-paced fluid-yet-intricate combat system, elaborate puzzles that ramp up in complexity as you learn their mechanics, detailed movement mechanics with precise collision complimented with the game’s smooth animations, a robust character-speccing system with leveling, equipment, consumable items and skill trees, and a soundtrack inspired by old SNES and Playstation JRPGs.
Lea is an amnesiac who is tasked with playing through an MMORPG, said to be one she had enjoyed in the past, in order to find anything in the game’s progression that might spark her memory. Well, at least, that’s what she’s told, of course, since she can’t back that up with her own memories.
There are, however, a couple problems haunting this endeavor.
Problem #1: She’s effectively mute, save for the most simplistic of phrases, added one-by-one as a brute-force work-around to a fundamental error in the brain-to-avatar translator known as ‘Speech Desynchronisation’ that a small number of players might face. She also does not know sign, meaning she won’t be able to communicate her status to others very well.
Problem #2: There are outside forces particularly interested in her situation, for reasons regarding her past that are yet unexplained.
CrossCode’s story takes place on the corporate-acquired Raritan Gem, a moon off of a gaseous planet somewhere in the Milky Way, built into the fictional moon of Shadoon by Instatainment Ltd. to host their massively multiplayer online game CrossWorlds. Through somewhat vague means, due to Lea never directly interacting with it throughout the story, players connect to ‘instant matter’ avatars using technology known as the Cross Gear and can control these virtual, yet material avatars through brainwave scanning facilitated by the titular CrossCode. These virtual avatars can interact with both the virtual and physical world of the game, though the latter is much harder to do as instant matter is very lightweight.
CrossCode's story deals with subjects such as communication, the natures of memory/experience and how they shape us, the effects of worker exploitation (in the more colloquial sense, of course) and crunch on the body and mind, the separation (or lack of) between the virtual and the material reality, the measure of the human, and the data accumulation industrial complex.
The game features a charming cast of characters, such as: Lea Hi Bye Lea Lea Hi Lea, the single person on the programming team, the only good Française, oof ouch owie my fingers, Swedish man German gamertag, Phoenix Wright grass-type variant, (not-exactly-)straight man, the guy who dies in the tutorial, his sister, Blue Man Group reject, and many more.
With 30-80 hours of content, 7 extensive unique areas with 7 expansive unique dungeons, 120+ different enemy types and 30+ bosses, 90+ speccable active combat skills (as well as tons more passive), 100+ mostly optional, yet various quests, and 60+ synthy bops, CrossCode is truly an ultimate experience.
You can buy CrossCode for $19.99 on Steam or GOG, as well as on Switch, PS4, and Xbox One. There is also a demo, which you can play in-browser (due to the game running on ImpactJS) or offline on Steam. An $8.99 epilogue expansion to the game, A New Home (Steam, GOG, and previously mentioned consoles) is also available, with 4 new chapters, a new area, the final and most-expansive dungeon, 8-10 hours of content, new tracks, and a final, well-handled tying of the loose ends of the story.
CrossCode is also in the $10 (total) Itch.io Bundle for Ukraine, alongside many other greats, such as Baba is You, Celeste, SUPERHOT, and many, many more! DLC sold separately, of course.
And, for gamers without the disposable income to blow cash on a random Hexbear user’s game recommendation:
if you DM me, I’ve got the torrents, though I would recommend purchasing it later if you enjoy it! They’re working on another project right now, and I’d like to see it manifest to the greatest degree possible personally.
Today is my 134th and final day of reminding you mfs to play CrossCode :lenin-shining:
It’s been a ride, thanks for the positive response! I’ll have to come up with a new megathread bit between the time I pre-write this and the time I post this.
(Maybe OMORI? Had a profound impact on me, we’ll see.)
If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can go here to reserve a spot! :xinternet:
Resources for Organizing your workplace/community :sabo:
Resources for Palestine :palestine-heart:
Buy coffee and learn more about the Zapatistas in Chiapas here :EZLN:
Here are some resources on Prison Abolition :brick-police:
Foundations of Leninism :USSR:
:lenin-shining: :unity: :kropotkin-shining:
Anarchism and Other Essays :ancom:
Remember, sort by new you :LIB:
Follow the Hexbear twitter account :comrade-birdie:
THEORY; it’s good for what ails you (all kinds of tendencies inside!) :RIchard-D-Wolff:
Come listen to music with your fellow Hexbears in Cy.tube :og-hex-bear:
Queer stuff? Come talk in the queer megathread!! :sicko-queer:
Monthly Neurodiverse Megathread and Monthly ND Venting Thread :Care-Comrade:
please just stop accepting debate requests i don't care if you're hakim or noah samsen you will not outdebate a debatebro, even if you're right, that's their realm
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when someone I’m radicalizing’s kneejerk reaction to revolution is “but that’s illegal”
(hexbear.net)
stone ocean good and portrays police as the hogs they are
every third tweet in the venerated 'For You' algorithm even though I continue to mark "Not interested in this post: this post isn't relevant":