Dark Holy Elf
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Posts posted by Dark Holy Elf
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Shooting his mouth off basically falls under (1), though I'm open to someone putting a more positive spin on it than I did!
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So Trump is claiming (without evidence, of course) that there were literally millions of illegal votes cast in this election. This is honestly alarming, because I can only draw one of two conclusions:
1. Trump is so thin-skinned that he is seriously bothered by the fact that he lost a purely symblic vote, to the point that he is turning to conspiracy theories to make himself feel better (and do so publically). This reflects badly on both his temperament and his judgement, yet nevertheless it is the explanation I am hoping for, because the other is...
2. Trump is trying to sow distrust for the American electoral process for the purpose of a future election. I hope I'm just being paranoid.
Yeah, the sheer size of the USA makes everything more complicated.
The US has a voting population roughly equal to that of Indonesia and far smaller than that of India, which manage to run national elections just fine, and Indonesia has run-offs. Being a larger country is a very weak excuse. More population just means you have more polling stations, more people counting ballots, and so on; the system scales up quite well. And yeah, paper works just fine for run-off (and I tend to prefer it to other methods myself in general; it's nice to have a verifiable physical record of all votes should it be necessary).
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People say the EC favors Republicans now, since Trump won, but the conventional wisdom a few weeks ago was that it favored Democrats because of the Blue Wall and shifting demographics, with people saying there would never be a Republican president again.
Not sure where you were going for conventional wisdom, but 538 (for instance) was noting that the EC favoured Trump throughout the entire campaign. That said the EC did favour Obama in 2012, which is why he was heavilly favoured despite the national polls being close.
Despite being an Obama supporter, I disliked the EC (which was likely to benefit him) in 2012, though, so I have my shiny "not a hypocrite" card on this issue, unlike the American president-elect.
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If enemies are failing to even damage Xander, you can probably use someone else (Leo with lots of +spd, Camilla with lots of +mag or even +str, Corrin, etc.) to carve through them instead. Send Xander against the enemies with higher attack.
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Castro is a complicated figure. I don't love him, but I also think the American hatred of him goes too far; if he hadn't thumbed his nose at America, few people in the US would care (how many Central American dictators of that era can you name?) He was a dictator and I have no love for those, but he did have some positive effects on Cuba (such as health care) and was an improvement over the awful Batista regime. There is definitely good and bad in there.
I think Amnesty International's take is pretty good, and they care a lot more about human rights than the right-wing partisans quoted in the article: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/11/fidel-castro-s-human-rights-legacy-a-tale-of-two-worlds/
The Emperor Nero comment is mine.
What's funny is that Nero is also problematic but not as bad as he is sometimes made out to be (in Nero's case, the Christian attribution that he started the Great Fire of Rome is almost certainly false).
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that'd be even worse, though, due to gerrymandering =/
Well optimally you'd do something crazy like get a non-partisan commission to draw up the boundaries like almost every other country does it but that sort of thing seems to be beyond the US, just like nominating Supreme Court judges who aren't blatantly partisan.
Liberals in Canada have a majority government and are currently using that majority to undermine the election system for future elections.
a) While your hatred of the Liberals is adorable, I'm not sure how this is related to the comment of mine you quoted.
b) Are you seriously taking issue with the scrapping of the Orwellian "Fair Elections Act"? Even if you approve of that particularly troublesome piece of legislation, scrapping it is hardly undermining the election system; Canada survived for years without it just fine and will continue to do so.
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You could reduce every state's EV total by 2 (that is, make it equal to the number of House of Rep members), which would make them roughly proportional to population. You could also change it so that every state had a system like Nebraska or Maine, thus giving a rural Californian (majority Republican) or a person in Austin (majority Democrat) more likely to have their vote reflected. Combined, these two would make the system more like that of the UK or Canada, which much less often hands absolute power to someone who couldn't even manage a plurality of the vote.
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The electoral college exists to avoid the tyranny of the majority.
Seems to be enabling the tyranny of a minority at the moment to me, and I'm not sure how that's better. People who voted Democratic are gonna have almost no power at the federal level for the next 4 years, despite there being more of them than who voted Republican at both the presidential and senate level.
http://imgur.com/j2XTzHSHalf the population lives in these counties. Yes, I know "land can't vote", but people do live outside of those areas. They deserve to have their voices heard, and deciding by national popular vote would mean their opinions don't matter.
If you decided by popular vote, their opinions would count for exactly half of the total. Which is as it should be. As is a person in Wyoming's vote counts far more than that of a person who lives in California or Texas (incidentlaly, why is Texas so often ignored in these conversations? It's the second most populous state by quite a bit, not NY).
I think the EC has its advantages (it prevents the need for a nation-wide recount, for one), but some of the defences of it seem pretty logically inconsistent. And it has some major problems, and yeah I do think it has probably contributed to the low turnout in US elections.
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What's dishonest about using the torches that the game gives you for exactly this purpose?
It's more that you'd have to set them up in a lot of different locations (or know in advance where the right locations are). I don't really see the appeal of this, either way. It's a map where by far the most likely way for you to lose units is due to things you don't know about (or maybe a bad approach to the boss*). That's bad design.
*Actually I quite like the boss of Phantom Ship aside from the issue of him possibly having a surprise attack; he's probably the only thing I like about the map. Competent stats + moves + flies + has some crit rate + hey a reward for actually raising an archer in a FE game, how novel.
What I mean to say is that if you use Duessel, and Seth even if moderately, the ship isn't hard at all.
That was my original argument. You said, and I quote: "The map is hard, but I wouldn't call it badly designed". Which, well, I disagree on both counts! If you're retreating from the first, good; I'm much more interested in talking about the second anyway.
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The map does zoom out to show that flying reinforcements are coming so they're not exactly out of nowhere. Early in the map you begin close to the enemy starting points too so you have an idea of where they're coming. The map is hard, but I wouldn't call it badly designed. Specially when the actual enemies in question are actually very weak it's just the fliers with high speed and steel weapons.
I may be remembering things wrong but is there a map in Sacred Stones outside of 14E that isn't a braindead power rush? Even on Selena's map it's safer to dance and fly Vanessa, Tana or Cormag (Or my personal favorite: walk Pirate Ross over yhe water) over to Selena than to take her Bolting assault.
In your previous post you said Phantom Ship "isn't hard at all"...
Anyway in general I think most maps do a better job with placing enemies into groups which are more interesting to individually deal with than Phantom Ship's swarm of low-level monsters. Darkling Woods is the only map which feels as bad about this, but even it has some more interesting elements (shadowshot). To say nothing of the cool things the game does with secondary objectives. FE8 doesn't have the best map design in the series but you're really selling it short, and by comparison Phantom Ship just looks bad.
I don't think too highly of hints that reinforcements are coming. I hate reinforcements who act on the same turn in FE6, Hard Modes of FE11-13, etc. Phantom Ship feels like the closest thing to that in FE8. Yes there are ways to mitigate this (spam torches like crazy) but it's still dishonest and not much fun. The couple of times I've lost people on that map my reaction was "well that was cheap" instead of "well that was my fault", and usually it's the latter for me in Fire Emblem, so that's a bad feeling.
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Why does Jill Stein even want a recount? It's not going to magically make her the winner.
And if they want to avoid fraud, they should ensure people have an ID that proves they're citizens before allowing them to vote. The US is apparently the only first-world country where you don't have to prove you're a citizen to vote.
It gets even sketchier when there are states like California, Washington and New York that provide driver's licenses (aka government-issue ID) to illegal immigrants.
If you're an illegal immigrant, you're not going to risk discovery just to cast a single vote. These sorts of claims are pure anti-immigrant fearmongering that don't hold up to basic logic. (Also, the states you cited aren't close anyway, so there's even less reason for an individual voter to commit fraud.) Individual voter fraud is honestly a bit of a boogeyman. Relevant reading: http://www.factcheck.org/2016/10/trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims/
It is certainly untrue that all other contries require ID that proves you are a citizen to vote; that would be ridiculous as very little ID actually offers proof of citizenship (you've got birth certificates, passports, and citizenship certificates in some cases... that's about it?). In most countries, there is already a voting list; any sort of ID is all you need to show that you are a name who appears on that list. Generally speaking most moves done to require more stringent ID are purely political moves to disenfranchise the poor (who are by far the most likely to lack such ID, and the least likely to have the time and political awareness needed to obtain it).
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Ephraim. I like Ephraim himself I feel he's one of the better lords in the series. I also like a lot the music in his maps, the challenge, and the idea that while Eirika was achieving little of relevance on her maps Ephraim conquered Grado before even promoting.
I didn't felt the Phantom ship was unfair or hard at all. You just got Duessel two maps ago, use him! He takes no speed penalty from Steel Axes and tanks very well. You can always unequip him to make him a decoy or a choke point.
Phantom Ship isn't hard but it is one of the worst maps in the game. The initial skeleton rush is one of the most braindead uses of enemy placement I have ever seen (and as you note just encourages brainless use of Duessel or some other PC who can play a similar role), and then after that the map just tries to kill you with reinforcements from the fog that you aren't aware of ganging up on someone.
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As per my comments in the punditry thread, it's pretty difficult/arbitrary to define what "centre" means, at least internationally. The Dems are certainly centre-left by the standards of the average American voter, but might be centre-right in some other countries.
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Neat chart to look at. Though I'm honestly surprised that centrists trust Fox News and MSNBC. I will certainly read both to see what they're saying (unlike Breitbart/Huffpost) but I would never fully trust either without confirming with a second source.
It's interesting how "consistent conservatives" trust almost no news that is trusted by even centrists (let alone people on the other side), and only trust one source that is broadly trusted (WSJ) out of those listed.
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IMO Lyon's basically the same character on both routes, you're just seeing different sides of him. So... yeah, you're missing out in a big way if you only play one route, I don't think you can properly understand him without seeing both. Not to mention missing out on six maps! And some of 'em are quite cool whichever route we're talking about.
Even if you really dislike one of the lords you're doing yourself a disservice to not try both at some point (assuming you like the game enough to play it twice or more of course).
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The best Zelda game is Zelda 2, which is maintains the exploration chops and actually has fun side-scroller gameplay instead of the boring overhead/weak 3D action of other games. Man I wish the series had stuck with this, at least for the other 2D games.
Almost every game after the first two has far too much in the way of doing fetchquests for NPCs instead of focusing on gameplay and exploration. I have not played them all (in particular I haven't played one since OoT though I've watched some of MM and TP) so maybe the series gets better about this, but I am skeptical.
I also like Hyrule Warriors better than any mainline Zelda game, but I like 3D action better than Zelda generally so that's par for the course. Still, I'll call it out specifically because it did actually impress me; I also like it more than the other Warriors games I've played, despite not having much particular Zelda love (as should be evident).
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I'm of the opinion that using Strength as the Con substitute was a big mistake. It has a lot of unpleasant effects:
-Strength is much too important early, gaining or failing to gain a couple points will completely make or break PoR Ike/Oscar/Boyd in particular. It's both +1 damage and +1 AS.
-Early, some weapons are much, much too heavy, because they're trying to balance with midgame in mind. (e.g. Armourslayer)
-Later on, the system becomes completely irrelevant. The heaviest weapons in PoR are 20 weight, and most top out at 13-15, so everyone has that by promotion.
FE10 and FE11 mostly made the system irrelevant with higher strength stats/lighter weapons, which of course led to the system being scrapped entirely. Which is a shame because weight is an excellent way to tune weapon balance.
I think Con being a fixed stat is a pretty good idea, because:
-It allows the system to be balanced for the entire game
-It gives some characters an edge over others, so is another way to distinguish/balance characters. Oswin has less speed than Florina but if they both try to use a Steel Lance the gap closes considerably/entirely depending on point in the game.
-It's a nice little flavour element
even if I have to roll my eyes at how FE7 made every single non-Vaida female have the Con stat equal to that of the skinniest/youngest malesand I liked how it also affected rescuing.That said I also really like FE14's system because it's more elegant and makes for less on-the-fly subtraction calculations for something so important. It would be nice if some characters/classes got a skill which eliminates speed penalties from weapons, so you could still have the "slow character, but doesn't get slower from javelins/etc." as a build.
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It's funny because, after over 30 resets, I STILL haven't beaten chapter 10 on hard mode. Yet the moment I switched to normal mode I beat it on my first try! Who'd of thought normal mode would've been THIS forgiving!?
Well, you most likely learned a lot about strategies for the map from those 30 resets! At that point, getting an easier version of the map was something you could easily handle. It's honestly not an easy map on Normal, so congrats. :)
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I'd love to see them get rid of caucuses as well; they seem extremely undemocratic to me.
Regarding Romney and other such people who may have opposed Trump, I'd be fine with them willing to work with him anyway; I don't think doing so is a betrayal of principles. You can have your disagreements with the president but still influence his policy in a good way from such a position. Far better than getting some embarrassment like Steve Bannon.
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Ephraim route randomly bundling Tana into a jail for Ephraim to rescue pretty much made me dislike that pairing from the word go and I'd say it never recovered. Besides it would interfere with Ephraim/L'Arachel which is too funny.
I play Eirika route much more often though so I'm lucky if I end up building her support with anyone but Eirika; Cormag's a decent option but kinda late/not that fast (and I'd pretty much need to be using three fliers because Vanessa is usually on the team too... not that there's anything wrong with that), and Ephraim is even later, though faster.
Cormag is a wild encounter, as a wyvern lord he is more like her peer except better combat skill.
Coulda fooled me
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Eirika. I find the story quite a bit better. Almost every character has a more sensible/narratively satisfying reason for joining on Eirika's route (particularly Gerik and co. and Cormag), or at least equal in cases like L'Arachel. The main advantage Ephraim route has is a different take on Lyon which is very neat and absolutely makes both routes 100% worth playing even if the gameplay differences didn't.
People often say that Ephraim route is harder but I don't really see it myself; they seem about equal to me. And for actual map design I think Ephraim 11 is probably the worst-designed map in the game.
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I haven't played it myself but I'm kinda skeptical that FE10 Easy would be as tough as Conquest Normal from what I've read about it.
I played Conquest on Hard first playthrough and don't regret it (for all that I've gotten lots of reports on Normal from friends) but yeesh it's not easy at all. However, the nice thing about Conquest is it doesn't really pull many mean surprises that you couldn't possibly know in advance, so it's more reasonable to jump straight into Hard (and maybe even Lunatic?) as long as you're in the mood for that level of challenge (and are a Fire Emblem veteran).
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You say that, but that's very much at odds with your claim that the Conservative party isn't far enough to the right for you; you're actually claiming that you are significantly to their left!
https://www.politicalcompass.org/canada2015
You frequently put forward the furthest right-wing view of any poster in threads here, that I've seen (e.g. you seem to oppose taxation and public spending in nearly all forms, though correct me if I'm wrong). I'm not attacking you, as you're obviously entitled to your views; I am just stating the facts as I see them. I'm actually quite surprised you got so close to the centre on Political Compass (quite close to me, in fact! My lean is slight left instead of slight right) and am curious what views of yours you would identify as left-wing, since you must have some to account for that score.
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I feel like final chapters should have at least somewhat of a boss focus. There are plenty of other times to have pure map focuses, but this is your showdown with the main villain, and it's anticlimactic when he or she feels like just another minor roadblock (see: Shadow Dragon, Binding Blade).
I think there are definitely different ways to do this well. Radiant Dawn has possibly my favourite to date, since it's just one boss fight that feels truly epic with the massive multitarget attacks that get thrown at you... but thanks to the auras, their counters and defences, and all the cover/wardwood terrain boosts, it still feels like you're playing a strategy RPG. On the other hand, you can get less boss-focused versions like Conquest and Awakening which still work well, because the boss constantly summons powerful support so you have to move quickly and effectively through them then deal with a boss who, if not as overall powerful as Ashera, still needs to be engaged carefully.
I also don't really like final bosses which can only be fought reasonably by a small, specific number of people, and FE is pretty guilty of this (especially PoR, but also the DS games, FE6, FE7). I think the recent games' handling of Dragonskin to make certain character(s) slightly better, but not far better worked pretty well.
General US Politics
in Serious Discussion
Posted
No, it really isn't. Let me quote my own post from a few days ago:
http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=56082&p=4618138
I'll add another link this time for good measure: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/17/donald-trump/donald-trumps-pants-fire-claim-large-scale-voter-f/
(By the way: yes, I know that Trump made similar comments prior to the election. I'm relatively less concerned about those because they can be dismissed as posturing designed to help rile up his base for the election; that sort of shit happens in politics. The more recent comments, even though they are nothing but repetition of what he said before the election, are thus far more concerning to me.)