ill have to consider using this for one of my eternally neglected creative projects lmao

i read a thing earlier about how the chinese military has done drills against a hypothetical technologically superior enemy (jokingly called 'ROBOTECH' drills), where the enemy has cut off any electronic comms, has a bunch of high quality units, and always knows locations and coordinates etc. the normal forces usually lost early on but eventually were able to stalemate and even achieve one or two victories. i would have made a whole post about it but i cannot find the source where i read this, and google is completely uselesss, giving me nothing but china fearmongering about robot dogs or something.

they probably don't hate you (at least not in a way that one could tell from this limited info), people just kind of become more interested in their jobs and personal lives/relationships more than friend groups as they get older. i have a roommate that i would hang out with all the time but they recently got a new romantic partner and now all they do is talk on the phone with them. i don't really have other friends or family nearby to compensate for the new void in my social life so im not taking it particularly well. and thats on top of the ever present background sexual frustration and romantic loneliness that comes with being incapable of socializing normally or forming relationships, which itself is on top of global climate catastrophe, imperialism and genocide that define global politics. i distract myself with weed and mecha models and video games to cope and its worked out so far, i manage to maintain an iron-fisted, white knuckle grip on my sanity to reduce any additional hardship on those around me that might be caused by my mental problems.

i prefer DPS style classses but i will always choose the class with 2 handed swords in fantasy RPGs. i would play mages more often but i generally don't like the 'big glowing colorful ground markers with area of effect elemental damage attacks' genre of magic aesthetic, it comes across as gimmicky/fictitious/unimmersive, magic should be liminal/surreal/terrifying imo. i basically kind of hate the WoW style fantasy/videogame aesthetic and genre of RPG, the only one i really even slightly enjoyed was Guild Wars 2 (because huge playable cat guys with 4 ears and 4 horns and no paid subscription)

@Boredom is literally doing this right here in this thread lmao

i tried to think of something clever to post but i've got nothing

i haven't finished it yet because the controller i use on pc for emulators is broken. i do remember that there are like 2 significantly different campaign playthroughs depending on some dialogue choices in the early missions, there might be other choices as well. i think it determines which of the major political factions you work for in the campaign, and i'm pretty sure one of them features an ally/protagonist/party member that works for the Chinese who recruits you and your friends, who so far has been portrayed as an ok/good guy. front mission games from what i've played tend to be fairly pessimistic about any political faction i think, similar to Ace Combat kind of vibes. Left Behind (technically part of the series i believe) is the closest to having a clear-cut badguy faction and i haven't finished it yet either (the on foot 3rd person stealth is just not very good, not enough robot missions but the robots are super cool when they show up) but i think it was leading up to revealing that the situation is less obvious than it seemed.

lmao navigating the relationship drama of those around me is exhausting. not even anyone's fault so i can't find toxic relief through blame lol. on top of all that, best case scenario i will be significantly more alone-er in the near-ish future. it will be a curse and a blessing, i like having (unproblematic) people around to analyze media and stuff with, to compare experiences etc., but i all too often find the expectations of dialogue to be an interruption of some obscure thought i'm trying to process. maybe more space and time and isolation-induced unhinged-ness will make me manic enough to accomplish something. worst case scenario it doesn't work out for them and they relapse into alcoholism with a risk of self-harm or worse. i'm pretty terrified of the last person i talk to regularly being gone but i obviously want them to be happy. i know i'm going to be less upset than i expect and that will only bother me more, like dead family members or childhood friends that are completely forgotten until you have a weirdly emotional dream about them like once or twice a year that makes you question some of your past choices and priorities but otherwise change nothing about your current life other than a vague sense of existentialist ennui for a few days. i need to sleep now.

what does 'real' even mean? if you are experiencing something consistently, that responds to your interactions, its as real as anything else imo. does something being temporary or conditional on certain phenomena make it 'not real'? because in that case any living being is 'not real', a mere transitory hallucination that will fade and be forgotten in time like an unremembered dream. maybe the characters in your sleeping dreams do in fact have their own subjectivity independent of your own conscious identity, 'subsystems' running on your 'hardware', as mortal and fallible as any living person. does lucidity or clarity or vividness determine reality? if so, then what about people who experience vivid, clear, lucid 'hallucinations', or people (perhaps with conditions like alzheimers or dementia) who experience waking life as an incomprehensible whirlwind of phenomena? is a lucid dream 'more real' than the dreams you do not remember? 'reality' is kind of a meaningless concept, engage with what you are capable of engaging with and don't worry so much is my advice.

when your armor is thicc as well as thick

thats a good example, those are some thicc thigh plates and curvaceous breastplate lines lol. i spent a while trying to find the tournament armor of some english king whose name i forget who was famous for being huge and athletic when he was younger but i couldn't find it. the dude was built like a football player or a wrestler tho, not some triangular torso bodybuilder.

the pic on the right looks so much better imo (and i say that as someone that loves the OG halo armor design), it actually looks like a kind of large muscular guy wearing bulky power armor. most soldiers even in modern times don't look slender and v shaped when they wear their body armor and pouches and such, carrying weight around your hips is optimal to reduce pressure on your spine. even if this cybernetic super soldier was somehow also a dehydrated half-starved bodybuilder with shredded vanity muscles and 0% body fat, which would be unhealthy and unrealistic and impractical for someone expected to have enough stamina to take part in technical long term spec ops combat missions, you shouldn't be able to see that through the power armor. under the armor the dude should look like a gorilla (muscular and round with a healthy layer of fat, think mr. atlas or butterbean) or a twink (skinny but with endurance and stamina, very efficient but not too large muscles, think Bruce Lee or the skinny glasses guy from Full Metal Jacket)

claims to know what death is like

is currently alive

opinion discarded

someone plz tell me this isn't a lolicon pedo game because it sure looks like it. is there like a joke i'm not getting or what? is it problematic for 'frilly 18th century dress design' and neonatal anime proportions/behaviors (thin limbs, large heads, childish affect) to trigger me? (i am autistic and have relevant PTSD so i might legit be overly sensitive)

it would be illegal and a call to violence and terrorism for me to say 'brianna wu should be hanged'

wait people think the bathroom should be the same room as living/sleeping/cooking? what the actual fuck. like that could kinda almost work (not really) with literally one person in this multi-function room, but having families or groups live in something like that is just asking for increased risk of SV/SA imo. your horny uncle should not get to watch his niece shit. teenagers need private spaces to experiment with masturbation. a significant portion of adults and adolescents with a penis likely wake up with a rock hard erection in the morning, you should not have to go through that in the same bed or room as the rest of your extended family. i'm glad i'm not on twitter.

plenty of explanations for this map: cultural differences in how phenomena are interpreted (what americans interpret as 'aliens' may be more likely to be interpreted as 'angels' or 'spirits' or 'weird imperialist jets' or something in many other cultures without the same mass media sci fi trends in their pop culture, and maybe they are even correct to do so!), less access to electronics like cameras to record sightings, less interest among media industries of other cultures to cover such topics, less military equipment like radars and jets deployed to possibly detect phenomena, less organizations researching sightings in other countries, etc. Its silly to present this one map as some kind of 'gotcha' imo.

how do u know that 'green skin' isn't an advanced bionic life support suit?