Post your searing hot takes

The macs themselves are a huge waste of money but the reason macbooks are popular is because there really aren't a ton of good options for laptops in general. Pretty much any new laptop has glaring issues out of the box that reveal themselves after about a year. In that space macbooks are to some extent a good option as mac is a much lighter OS than windows is (especially compared to win11) and the specs aren't terrible for the price.

MacOS does have it's fair share of flaws, primarily regarding incompatibility with both software and hardware, but there are legitimate reasons to get their laptop. Obviously the best way to get laptops today is to get them refurbished, but even then macbooks (pretty much anything that doesn't use the proprietary apple chip which is before 2014 or 2015 iirc) are a solid option in that market too. There's also always the option of putting a linux distro on your macbook which helps get rid of the very clear downsides of macOS.

I have my own fair share of issues with the laptop market today (primarily regarding the whole anti-repair movement all the corporations have been doing) but apple is about equal to every other manufacturer there all things considered.
I've been using a laptop with Windows on it for years, and it has yet to reveal any major issues besides the usual Microsoft blues (fuck OneDrive). Granted, my machine was specifically advertised as a #gamer device, so I'd accept that it's more dire for people who aren't interested in that kind of thing.
 
The macs themselves are a huge waste of money but the reason macbooks are popular is because there really aren't a ton of good options for laptops in general. Pretty much any new laptop has glaring issues out of the box that reveal themselves after about a year. In that space macbooks are to some extent a good option as mac is a much lighter OS than windows is (especially compared to win11) and the specs aren't terrible for the price.

MacOS does have it's fair share of flaws, primarily regarding incompatibility with both software and hardware, but there are legitimate reasons to get their laptop. Obviously the best way to get laptops today is to get them refurbished, but even then macbooks (pretty much anything that doesn't use the proprietary apple chip which is before 2014 or 2015 iirc) are a solid option in that market too. There's also always the option of putting a linux distro on your macbook which helps get rid of the very clear downsides of macOS.

I have my own fair share of issues with the laptop market today (primarily regarding the whole anti-repair movement all the corporations have been doing) but apple is about equal to every other manufacturer there all things considered.
I think the laptop is mostly p good (if a bit overpriced), I think the desktops are a bad buy 100% tho
 
I think the laptop is mostly p good (if a bit overpriced), I think the desktops are a bad buy 100% tho
yeah theres really no reason to get a mac when you can get a whole setup that costs 5-600 less and has better specs AND a graphics card
 
most poptarts are disgusting

i dont know how to describe it other than the "tart" doesn't taste like it's made of wheat; its more like it was glue mixed with wheat and pressed into little panels of mystery substance x tarts. not enough filling, and even when it is enough, most of the time it just tastes fake or just outright nasty. in particular, blueberry poptarts go in the bin

the WORST offense though? the frosting. i can even excuse the crumbling of the "x tart" from the back packaging; but when the frosting looks horrendous thats where I draw the line buddy. it just makes it all look more ingenuine than it already was; completely and utterly fake; rushed out to make money rather than make a quality product

ive found that offbrand toaster tarts are infinitely better albeit with their own issues, but I dont feel like I'm eating completely processed crap when I'm eating something that isnt "poptart". all you get from eating a poptart is the chemicals that those smart people scream down your throat not to eat, and disappointment when you open up the sleeve to find a crumbly mess of what once was a solid piece of poptart
 
most poptarts are disgusting

i dont know how to describe it other than the "tart" doesn't taste like it's made of wheat; its more like it was glue mixed with wheat and pressed into little panels of mystery substance x tarts. not enough filling, and even when it is enough, most of the time it just tastes fake or just outright nasty. in particular, blueberry poptarts go in the bin

the WORST offense though? the frosting. i can even excuse the crumbling of the "x tart" from the back packaging; but when the frosting looks horrendous thats where I draw the line buddy. it just makes it all look more ingenuine than it already was; completely and utterly fake; rushed out to make money rather than make a quality product

ive found that offbrand toaster tarts are infinitely better albeit with their own issues, but I dont feel like I'm eating completely processed crap when I'm eating something that isnt "poptart". all you get from eating a poptart is the chemicals that those smart people scream down your throat not to eat, and disappointment when you open up the sleeve to find a crumbly mess of what once was a solid piece of poptart
Every so often, I get the inexplicable urge to eat one, and I am quickly reminded that it is a horrible mistake. I don't know why the urge keeps coming back.
 
1731093077313.jpeg


I am not gonna lie, this is one of the greatest TV shows ever made
 
Using complex words to make yourself look smarter is usually the sign of someone arguing in bad faith.
Complex words are useful for being precise about things, and complex arguments/problems are much easier when you have a robust vocabulary with which to tackle them. There are definitely some people who bust out the thesaurus when they don't have to just to make themselves appear smart, but I really don't see that as often as I see people immediately check out of a conversation and start shitposting when they see a word longer than three syllables regardless of what is actually being said. It's a symptom of poor education and anti-intellectualism.
 
Complex words are useful for being precise about things, and complex arguments/problems are much easier when you have a robust vocabulary with which to tackle them. There are definitely some people who bust out the thesaurus when they don't have to just to make themselves appear smart, but I really don't see that as often as I see people immediately check out of a conversation and start shitposting when they see a word longer than three syllables regardless of what is actually being said. It's a symptom of poor education and anti-intellectualism.
I get if a complex word better describes something than a simple one, but if it doesn't, there is very little reason to use it. And while anyone who runs away from a conversation with big words in the age of the internet clearly has brain damage, this isn't a symptom of poor education. First of all, how would you even "fix" it? Sit kids down and list words to them for hours? And a large vocabulary is such a useless tool, especially in this day and age. You're telling me that you would rather teachers spend time making sure kids know synonyms for said then anything else? The words themselves do not determine the quality of an argument, the meaning does.
 
I get if a complex word better describes something than a simple one, but if it doesn't, there is very little reason to use it. And while anyone who runs away from a conversation with big words in the age of the internet clearly has brain damage, this isn't a symptom of poor education. First of all, how would you even "fix" it? Sit kids down and list words to them for hours? And a large vocabulary is such a useless tool, especially in this day and age. You're telling me that you would rather teachers spend time making sure kids know synonyms for said then anything else? The words themselves do not determine the quality of an argument, the meaning does.
I mean it's not like you need to memorize the entire dictionary. Most people aren't purposefully going out of their way to use synonyms for average words, and being able to deconstruct words you don't know and guess their meaning based on roots and whatnot is something you should know how to do before entering high school. Plus you can always just look a word up if you really don't know what it means.
 
I get if a complex word better describes something than a simple one, but if it doesn't, there is very little reason to use it. And while anyone who runs away from a conversation with big words in the age of the internet clearly has brain damage, this isn't a symptom of poor education. First of all, how would you even "fix" it? Sit kids down and list words to them for hours? And a large vocabulary is such a useless tool, especially in this day and age. You're telling me that you would rather teachers spend time making sure kids know synonyms for said then anything else? The words themselves do not determine the quality of an argument, the meaning does.
If you have a good education in the language arts, you will naturally develop a robust vocabulary without needing it to be shoved down your throat. I picked up a ton of words over the years just from having to read texts with those words in them and from having to make complex arguments about things. This is a supremely unimaginative argument, and it puts words in my mouth: I never made any claims about how important this kind of education is relative to anything else we could be teaching people in school. Just so we're clear, I think the most important thing for education to be is well-rounded.

I can also tell you right now that it's not a useless thing to have: Being able to articulate myself in the way that I do has served me well in both the sciences and humanities, and I've seen less articulate people really struggle to properly get valuable ideas across. Communication is everything, and there isn't always a simpler word or phrase that properly captures what you're getting at when you get into more complex subjects. Your argument can be extremely high-quality, but it doesn't matter if you don't have the tools to adequately communicate it to other people.
 
I mean it's not like you need to memorize the entire dictionary. Most people aren't purposefully going out of their way to use synonyms for average words, and being able to deconstruct words you don't know and guess their meaning based on roots and whatnot is something you should know how to do before entering high school. Plus you can always just look a word up if you really don't know what it means.
...
I'm not saying I'm upset because I cant figure out what they are saying, I'm saying that people who do that generally are trying to come across as smarter then they are.
 
Using complex words to make yourself look smarter is usually the sign of someone arguing in bad faith.

See, this is very much a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't deal. Either you use very precise and often esoteric language, in which case people accuse you of being a know-it-all pseudo-intellectual who conceals bad arguments with fancy words, or you dumb your language down and use more generic terms, which leaves your arguments more open to being misinterpreted, whether intentionally or otherwise. The best compromise is to use more technical language to begin with, but to be able to restate those arguments in simpler layman terms when questioned about them. For a non-political example of this, see how science educators can condense extremely technical theory/math-dense topics into something easily digestible for someone with only a simple understanding of the subject.

Also some of us are writers and just can't help it.
 
If pokemon fans did not make complete fools out of themselves in 2019-20, #BringBackNationalDex would have had a chance of slowly integrating all pokemon into 1 of the switch titles.
There is an alternate timeline where emails would be sent by pokemon fans upon the National Dex cut's announcement, and things would probably go smoother and we'd have close to every pokemon in the game by like gen 9.
Of course, even with that, I cannot assume they'd still have the time to implement all the mons in. They still have 3 years of dev time. But I'm sure if the fans didn't act like barbarians, then things would have gone at least 35% more swimmingly for GF and friends than in reality.
 
Having just recently played it, ultrakill is a solid b game but absolutely not "the best first person shooter since doom" or however people are overhyping it nowadays, for a couple of reasons.

1: "Knowing what's happening on your screen is overrated" -Hakita, probably

Holy crap, this game has so much visual input.
Screen Shot 2024-11-09 at 1.25.43 AM.png
This happens literally every time you kill an enemy. As part of the game's central gimmick, you heal by blood, which machines are powered with in this universe, which means that every enemy explodes into a shower of blood when you kill them. What this means is that you are effectively blind for .3~ of a second, which is actually super important because this game relies so much on parry mechanics, which become essentailly impossible to utilize. This means that even though you heal some from the blood, "hard damage" (temporary damage that cannot be healed) combined with damage from projectiles/lasers/melee means that you actually lose hp from the interaction. Whereas you should be rewarded for getting in close and utilizing the game's mechanic, you're basically restricted to long-range attacks and immediately dashing after any kill, which is disorienting in its own right and also limits your mobility before the kill since you need stamina to dash.

Screen Shot 2024-11-09 at 1.25.19 AM.png
This is a great example of both how the game's retro style backfires on it and how consistently cluttered the visual style is. Notable here is the muzzle flash from your shotgun, the copious blood emitted on hit (healed like 14 hp lol) and the amount of pixels being literally countable. Also, almost everything in this shot is moving in some way, from the particles moving outwards to the shotgun reloading to the fist punching to the (loud, glowing red) multiplier shaking to the enemy being knocked back and holy shit I can't figure out what the game wants me to look at here.

Screen Shot 2024-11-09 at 1.26.18 AM.png
here's another one, mostly the same things, but with me actually being attacked on top of everything.

and all of this takes place in this arena:
Screen Shot 2024-11-09 at 1.43.04 AM.png
one of the clearest possible ones in the game. It's also still a relatively early stage, so there's only 1 type of enemy being spammed here. I even beat this level despite everything! It gets so much worse: One of the final layers, heresy, has such a heavy coating of red that I genuinely couldn't tell when I was damaged or not because your vision blends in so well with the floor.


even if you disregard flashes and particle effects, the hud takes up entirely too much of the screen:

1731132483302.png
Despite the (relatively) minimal blood splatter, you probably can't tell what's happening here because a: i have the nailgun out, b: I have a style meter on shitstorm, c: I'm holding a secret in my left hand, and d: the actual enemy is covered in nails and blood.

That makes up the reason I can't in fairness give the game more than an A. But there's some more minor things that drop it from a to b

For having 6000 cool weapon combos, exactly 4 of them are viable at all: projectile boosting, ricoshot and its derivatives including fistful of dollar, saw traps, and maaaybe nuking (shooting your own bomb projectile to make it explode earlier and have a bigger explosion diameter), though i personally don't even like that because of how long it takes to set up and get right. The rest are either straight-up worse (why give us a rocket launcher when our shotgun can do literally the same thing but better???), take too long to set up to be any useful (conductor nail gun), or just suck (firefighter rocket launcher). I had way more fun messing around in sandbox mode for 20 minutes trying out new techniques than I did actually playing any of the levels, let alone p-ranking them.

speaking of those 6000 weapon combos, the game only explicitely tells you about 2 or 3 of them, which meant on my first playthrough I was fighting v2 with the blue shotgun shooting the explosions because that was literally all I knew how to do. You generally don't want your fps to be a wiki game.

Maybe its just my computer being ass as usual but the game was chugging on some of the arenas because of just the sheer amount of projectiles, mostly from the purple flying drones, malicious faces and guttermen.

The community has 2 modes: extremely horny and extremely toxic. This is kind of bog standard for shooter games, but whats unfortunate the creator actually supports this. there is actually an official gabriel (one of the bosses) body pillow that you can buy, complete with a pseudo-thong and the description "MACHINE, STOP LOOKING AT MY..." Not only is this super weird but it hugely clashes with Ultrakill's more serious theming and tone.

Secrets are either I-find-them-by-accident easy or hidden behind 6 secret walls with 3 enraged boss fights in between, and there is no in-between.

I don't mean to diminish the game too much, and it's definitely a game with a lot of passion put into it. The in-game lore goes hard, the fights are epic when you can actually see them, and the characters actually memorable, which is notable especially for an fps game. I just don't think it's the best shooter ever created, and that's fine. I wasn't expecting it to be. I just am stating some experiences I had with it. Feel free to share your own experiences with it, I'm definitely not the best player (haven't beaten sisy prime on violent yet), and I'd love some productive discussion.
 
Having just recently played it, ultrakill is a solid b game but absolutely not "the best first person shooter since doom" or however people are overhyping it nowadays, for a couple of reasons.

1: "Knowing what's happening on your screen is overrated" -Hakita, probably

Holy crap, this game has so much visual input.
This happens literally every time you kill an enemy. As part of the game's central gimmick, you heal by blood, which machines are powered with in this universe, which means that every enemy explodes into a shower of blood when you kill them. What this means is that you are effectively blind for .3~ of a second, which is actually super important because this game relies so much on parry mechanics, which become essentailly impossible to utilize. This means that even though you heal some from the blood, "hard damage" (temporary damage that cannot be healed) combined with damage from projectiles/lasers/melee means that you actually lose hp from the interaction. Whereas you should be rewarded for getting in close and utilizing the game's mechanic, you're basically restricted to long-range attacks and immediately dashing after any kill, which is disorienting in its own right and also limits your mobility before the kill since you need stamina to dash.

This is a great example of both how the game's retro style backfires on it and how consistently cluttered the visual style is. Notable here is the muzzle flash from your shotgun, the copious blood emitted on hit (healed like 14 hp lol) and the amount of pixels being literally countable. Also, almost everything in this shot is moving in some way, from the particles moving outwards to the shotgun reloading to the fist punching to the (loud, glowing red) multiplier shaking to the enemy being knocked back and holy shit I can't figure out what the game wants me to look at here.

here's another one, mostly the same things, but with me actually being attacked on top of everything.

and all of this takes place in this arena:
one of the clearest possible ones in the game. It's also still a relatively early stage, so there's only 1 type of enemy being spammed here. I even beat this level despite everything! It gets so much worse: One of the final layers, heresy, has such a heavy coating of red that I genuinely couldn't tell when I was damaged or not because your vision blends in so well with the floor.


even if you disregard flashes and particle effects, the hud takes up entirely too much of the screen:

Despite the (relatively) minimal blood splatter, you probably can't tell what's happening here because a: i have the nailgun out, b: I have a style meter on shitstorm, c: I'm holding a secret in my left hand, and d: the actual enemy is covered in nails and blood.

That makes up the reason I can't in fairness give the game more than an A. But there's some more minor things that drop it from a to b

For having 6000 cool weapon combos, exactly 4 of them are viable at all: projectile boosting, ricoshot and its derivatives including fistful of dollar, saw traps, and maaaybe nuking (shooting your own bomb projectile to make it explode earlier and have a bigger explosion diameter), though i personally don't even like that because of how long it takes to set up and get right. The rest are either straight-up worse (why give us a rocket launcher when our shotgun can do literally the same thing but better???), take too long to set up to be any useful (conductor nail gun), or just suck (firefighter rocket launcher). I had way more fun messing around in sandbox mode for 20 minutes trying out new techniques than I did actually playing any of the levels, let alone p-ranking them.

speaking of those 6000 weapon combos, the game only explicitely tells you about 2 or 3 of them, which meant on my first playthrough I was fighting v2 with the blue shotgun shooting the explosions because that was literally all I knew how to do. You generally don't want your fps to be a wiki game.

Maybe its just my computer being ass as usual but the game was chugging on some of the arenas because of just the sheer amount of projectiles, mostly from the purple flying drones, malicious faces and guttermen.

The community has 2 modes: extremely horny and extremely toxic. This is kind of bog standard for shooter games, but whats unfortunate the creator actually supports this. there is actually an official gabriel (one of the bosses) body pillow that you can buy, complete with a pseudo-thong and the description "MACHINE, STOP LOOKING AT MY..." Not only is this super weird but it hugely clashes with Ultrakill's more serious theming and tone.

Secrets are either I-find-them-by-accident easy or hidden behind 6 secret walls with 3 enraged boss fights in between, and there is no in-between.

I don't mean to diminish the game too much, and it's definitely a game with a lot of passion put into it. The in-game lore goes hard, the fights are epic when you can actually see them, and the characters actually memorable, which is notable especially for an fps game. I just don't think it's the best shooter ever created, and that's fine. I wasn't expecting it to be. I just am stating some experiences I had with it. Feel free to share your own experiences with it, I'm definitely not the best player (haven't beaten sisy prime on violent yet), and I'd love some productive discussion.
I've got a few hundred hours in this game-I have a few complaints about how some of this is kinda dishonest.

Obviously if you're taking screenshots of cluttered screens it's going to seem more cluttered than the game actually is. The game clearly telegraphs where every enemy is, and time to kill is super fast for anything less bulky than a cerb. Don't know where an enemy is? We have a tool for that. It's called the marksman. Shoot a coin and your bullet goes straight into the skull of 1-2 enemies (depending on whether you're good at the game and whether you're using the slab marksman) as well as telling you where pretty much every enemy you haven't killed yet is as well as being literally free style points for p-ranks.

Since you're talking about sisyphus prime, i'm assuming you have the alt nailgun, and now is a good time to point out that there's literally zero point in using the regular blue nailgun when the green nailgun has infinite ammo+enough immediate DPS to kill anything the blue nailgun does twice as fast and the red nailgun has actual parity with the nail explosion gimmick. Blue sawblade is pretty much standard because you can set a trap that pretty much acts as a "fodder enemies can't enter here" space. In that same image you complain about the style meter being on a high rank, which is a completely pointless thing to say because the style menu doesn't change size.

There's a lot more than 4 of the techs that are useful. I've got a list.
Projectile boosting: Very good at clearing out fodder enemies, has a very consistent mindflayer/maurice instakill, free style

Coins: literal most overpowered weapon in the game. With base revolver, consistently oneshots any fodder enemy and makes dealing with sweepers hilariously easy.

Railcoins: throw a coin behind and in front of an enemy and shoot the backmost coin with the blue railgun. 2 coins instakills cerb, sentries, and knocks down swordsmachines, 3 coins instakills non-boss ferryman and mindflayers (although parrying/explosion kills are more efficient for them respectively). fully charged slab revolver can also deal 50-75% of phase 1 gabe 2 if done properly with this tech

Deadcoining: stupid advanced tech not worth worrying about but makes both gabe fights+prime souls lose half their health bar right away

Nukes: great opener for cybergrind waves at high style as you take minimal heal decay and can easily heal off the 50 hp you take while clearing out most fodders and making your life 10x easier.

Rocket riding: the real reason for freeze rocket, allows you to pretty much not die from falling.

Cannonball: initial ball has great consistent damage and when it hits it can be shot again with any hitscan. slab revolver cball knocks down swordsmachine iirc.

this is pretty much every tech that should be in a player's arsenal once they get to it. pretty much anything other than that is gonna be for personal clips/MAD submissions

Other side notes include the fact that you can change your hud colors to not blend in to backgrounds (my hp bar is set to white with pink text) and that the thing in your hand isn't a secret, it's the grappling hook arm which from personal experience is not intrusive in the slightest. Blood splatter can also be disabled, and so can any extraneous particles so they don't clutter up your screen (i keep them on cause it looks cool)

I will provide my own ultrakill clips soon btw

tl;dr purposeful screenshots of cluttered screens is a bad faith argument and learning how to not be bothered by this stuff is a very intentional part of the game and is something you will learn just by playing the game.
 
For having 6000 cool weapon combos, exactly 4 of them are viable at all: projectile boosting, ricoshot and its derivatives including fistful of dollar, saw traps, and maaaybe nuking (shooting your own bomb projectile to make it explode earlier and have a bigger explosion diameter), though i personally don't even like that because of how long it takes to set up and get right. The rest are either straight-up worse (why give us a rocket launcher when our shotgun can do literally the same thing but better???), take too long to set up to be any useful (conductor nail gun), or just suck (firefighter rocket launcher). I had way more fun messing around in sandbox mode for 20 minutes trying out new techniques than I did actually playing any of the levels, let alone p-ranking them.
>diversity of viable strategies is small
>single player game
>nothing stopping you from using them anyways
The community has 2 modes: extremely horny and extremely toxic. This is kind of bog standard for shooter games, but whats unfortunate the creator actually supports this. there is actually an official gabriel (one of the bosses) body pillow that you can buy, complete with a pseudo-thong and the description "MACHINE, STOP LOOKING AT MY..." Not only is this super weird but it hugely clashes with Ultrakill's more serious theming and tone.
Have you ever heard of a joke?
 
this is the only actual clip i have on my pc right now lol. Yes it's cluttered but I can immediately recognise where everything is and utilize the tools at my disposal to kill them.

please ignore the really bad maurice kill at the start
 
Jak 3 is the best game out of the original trilogy (haven't played The Lost Frontier) and heads and shoulders above Jak II (I think at worst 3 ties with Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy).

To address the negatives really quickly, Jak 3 has an aggressively forgettable story (not a hot take) but gameplay >>> story in platformers in my opinion so it's not a huge loss. The other big negative is the driving mechanics are among the worst I've seen in any game ever, especially when the game puts you on a timer (which I think most would also agree with). But neither really hurt my opinion of the game overall.

Unlike Jak II, Jak 3 not only adds actual checkpoints in missions, but gives you TWELVE guns actually worth something, and once you get the overpowered yellow Beam Reflexor (super early on) with its ricochet shots and homing capabilities, OOPS ALL CHALLENGE! This is made even better by the Gyro Burster (another upgrade for your yellow gun). The Gyro Burster in Jak 3 is probably one of my favorite weapons in any platformer ever. It’s like a Miniturret from Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando on crack: you shoot off an orb turret that shoots VERY fast bullets in your immediate radius. The other weapons aren't half bad either, the Wave Concussor upgrades are good for crowd control, Vulcan Fury chaingun and shock wave are pretty fun, and the Peace Maker and upgrades are good in theory but kinda superfluous to me with their low ammo count. You know it's bad when the literal screen nuke gun, complete with mushroom cloud, is outclassed by the blaster. Combat may be easy but it is FUN unlike Jak II's insanely half-baked combat and that's what matters.

The platforming in Jak 3 is also solid which often is combined with the fantastic gunplay. While Jak 3 falls into the typical third platforming game cliche of mixing things up for the sake of it, some of the variations on gameplay are pretty fun - simon says, random Pac-Man, rocket riding, a couple antigravity racer segments that almost play like bad Mario Kart 8, yeah, the one-offs are kind of typical of a third installment even if I found them pretty fun. It's weird they don't recurr more (they also have a bad, bad tendency to forego tutorial text). The one gameplay style I enjoyed the most of these was...actually the turret sections! As someone who thinks turret missions are kinda dull, I think Jak 3 is one of the very few games that makes them genuinely fun. The only one I don’t quite like is defending Spargus from Dark Makers because the red targets are hard to see. The other ones, especially the ones that play like rail shooters, are really great!

Jak II loved to remind me that it's EDGY and HARDCORE but failed to have actually fun gameplay to complement its radical changes. If you looked up the word "tryhard" in the dictionary you would see a picture of Jak II with its arm around insecure """mature""" Pokemon ROM hacks. You'd never guess Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy and Jak II are from the same series going off screenshots of both games, it's ridiculous.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top