Taken from Dethklok | The Gears

jfc this is the most boring fucking game I've ever played in my life. It's not fun getting one-shotted by something that you don't know about until after its killed you at least once. There's nothing interesting about worldbuilding that's all made up of intentionally vague YoU hAvE tO fIlL iN tHe BlAnKs YoUrSeLf nonsense. There's nothing noteworthy about weapon upgrades that require you to look up a guide to see what's worth investing materials in and what's not.

And already some of you have doubtlessly gone down to comment "lmao git gud". Motherfucker it's not about difficulty. You know what was a difficult fucking game? Sekiro. That game is hard as balls and I absolutely love it, precisely because its designed in a such a way that it fixes everything about Dark Souls that sucks.

In Dark Souls, every single time you rock up to an enemy, you know exactly how you're going to defeat it. You're going to learn the patterns of its attacks, dodge at the appropriate time, and hit it in the intervals between. This is interesting once, but doing it over and over again for fifteen bosses is boring, repetitive bullshit.

In Sekiro they fixed this. Instead of literally just dodging every single attack, you have a dozen different defensive options that you have to learn and apply to different attacks. Instead of knowing how every single enemy encounter is going to go down, you have a bunch of different ninja tools that have different effects that you can experiment with.

And yet the geniuses of the gaming sphere all bashed their head cavities together and decided that SEKIRO was the bad one. The best game in the whole fucking genre, now sidelined because these morons confused a repetitive grind for difficulty. And as a result Elden Ring, which was supposed to be the masterpiece of the whole thing, is just another bland endurance test.

Watched the Starfield gameplay, when Todd Howard pulled out his space laser to mine iron ore it was like my soul left my body and i watched the rest of the trailer in a dissociative state.

I like Minecraft. It's a good time. I also really like Satisfactory. But every single other game that has resource mining would be better off without it. It's like hacking and lockpicking minigames, the only thing it can possibly offer to the player is a minute of annoyance - but with mining it's often hours of annoyance.

So I've got this book I'm working on. The basic gist of it is "small 18th-century Germanic country defends itself from Prussian imperialism while the main character is radicalized against the nobility." Everything's still kind of a primordial soup of ideas, I have an outline and a couple potential scenes written but I don't have all of the setting details squared yet. One idea that I keep going back and forth on is the races of everyone involved, because I don't want it to be just humans - but I also don't want to just thoughtlessly crib Tolkien either.

These ideas are assorted, I'd love it if you read one or two of them and gave me your thoughts:

Everyone is born basically human, but transforms (usually by the time they're twelve) through magic into a more powerful form, based on the environment they grow up in and the skills they are taught in their most impressionable years. Magic hangs in the air of the world, and adults have to learn a combination of a ton of factual knowledge and potent meditation techniques to be able to harness it - but children, whose minds are unfettered by knowledge, naturally wield it on a subconscious level, permanently changing themselves to meet the demands of the world they are raised in.

The main races of the world are High Elves and Low Elves, Totemfolk (furries) and Daemons (elementals), with each race having dozens of subgroups. Totemfolk and Daemons are the most prominent races throughout the world by a long shot, but Low Elves tend to dominate the growing urban professional class and High Elves have a racial monopoly on royal families and noble titles throughout the still-fuedal world, so the interests of those two groups are overwhelmingly represented in positions of power.

Elven domination of the upper classes has both a push and a pull to it. On the one hand, Elves are definitely adapted to their environment of extreme privilege - their long lives offer them plenty of time to do primitive accumulation, and their small number of children means that their wealth remains relatively concentrated from generation to generation. But on the other hand, an Elf's body requires twice as much food and twice as much rest to maintain itself compared to the other races, thus it is only even possible for a child to become Elf-like if they are raised in that environment to begin with.

Totemfolk and Daemons tend to have adaptations related to their environment or their parents' craft. Totemfolk raised on the sea often become Mermen/maids, while those trained to ride a horse might become a centaur. Fire-aspected Daemons, called Orcs, are a common sight in many foundries - while earth-aspected ones, called Kobolds, are a common sight in many mines. A rare sight in the most developed cities is the metal-aspected Daemon, sometimes called a Jinshu, because for a long time it was thought that they were a myth from the far north.

In-universe scholars are in agreement that it is impossible to change your race once it manifests, with one notable exception: dragons. The appearance of a Dragon tends to be an ill omen for the average person, since they have a tendency to commit genocides and burn cities to the ground. But historians often regard them as great conquerors and emperors, which is usually the reason they do all of the killing.

What isn't clear is what allows an elf to turn into a dragon - traditionally it's thought to be high martial prowess combined with a genius intelligence, but in actuality it's having a giant pile of gold. Dragons always arise when economic inequality is at its zenith, and the reason they become conquerors and emperors isn't because they can fly overhead and kill a couple dozen people with fire breath - it's because they have the ability to raise a large, well-trained and well-equipped army, which does most of the conquering but gets none of the credit.

The distinction between "High Elves" and "Low Elves" doesn't actually exist, but has been appended by Elven scholars to explain why some elves get to have Divine Right and others are relegated to more servile positions. Magical Fae people doing phrenology.

Several times throughout history, a totemfolk or daemon have lead an army and conquered land - but history records them as elves, because often they would transform into elves after living as kings for about a decade, and their kids always end up being elves themselves.

Certain subsets of philosophers are very interested in the idea of controlling the race that children become. One group, the utopians, believe that all the world's problems could be solved if only everyone was an elf. They have gained no small amount of influence in the ongoing colonial projects of the world, and their ideas and radical experiments have lead to some of the worst genocides in recent history.

nostalgia for the "kidz bop" version before the incident(s)