#ik this seems like nothing . and in the grand scheme of things it is

[necro-hamster]

why did i get accused of sneaking out last night . i was at home sleeping and never left the house. i wasnt even doing anything weird. i was literally asleep in my bed. in my house. where i live.

[soraka-in-warhammer40k]

This is definetly among the "It's cute" level of Grotmas detachments. Like the Nid-Warriors detachment, this seems more ike a neat little gimmic than a truy competitive option, although I would not dismiss it that early. Regaining life on tanky models like big knights every round is definetly nothing to sneeze at, and the small admech units can cover what is usually the factions weakness: backfield holding, actions, and screening.

Definetly worth for big knights who are even tougher than the average big lad: most certainly a place for something like the Knight Castellan with its T13 stat and 2+ armor save it profits of the healing much more than its little siblings. You can even do a neat enhancement combo where you give 4 more points of health, and then let the nearby techie heal even more.

With that level of tankiness I doubt losing Rotate Ion Shields means much in the grand scheme of things. This is definetly the right detachment when you want one big unkillable murder-machine that even dedicated anti-tank armies will struggle to bring down (because if they can shoot at you, that means the Castellan shoots back next turn - and oh boy does that thing have GUNS).

[sea-of-dandelions]

...................... *deep inhale*

[nowis-scales]

Pre-Verdant Wind Endgame Update

An Update on the ol’ Three Houses Verdant Wind playthrough, since I’ve been neglecting documenting my journey properly for a bit:

• My current placement is Ch.20, so I’m only a few chapters away from the last one. It’s kind of a weird thought because I feel like I just hit the timeskip, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this will feel well-paced out. In terms of writing, I’m known for being a bit of a stickler for good flow. It’s why all of my fanfics take so long to update! I have to make sure my flow is perfect.

• The fact that they have been giving background information on characters has been so amazing. Learning that Raphael’s sister’s name was Maya and getting to hear about her has made me irrationally happy.

• Also, just generally, holy shit people sleep on Raphael and Leonie. Raphael often gets shoved to the side, and Leonie is treated like her only trait is liking Jeralt, and for me it all just culminates in the question of “so did you like... not do their support conversations, or...?” Seriously. I think Leonie might be one of my favourites in the game so far, and I adore Raph. He’s so sweet!

• The Flame Emperor reveal for some reason gave me “and I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids” vibes. I liked the venom Cherami Leigh had there as Rhea, too. I think I read from someone that in Japanese, Rhea’s actually super calm in that scene. I don’t think I have a preference towards the anger or the calmness, honestly. I think I just liked how smoothly the emotion came across. Plus, I’m a little biased, I’m fond of Cherami as an actress. I haven’t found a performance from her I haven’t enjoyed yet.

• I was really confused as to why Seteth showed up in my house after Chapter 12ish I think? I wasn’t expecting him to just be there after the paralogue, but I definitely wasn’t unhappy. I do like him! I just never use him, because I recruited Bernadetta and Sylvain, so I kinda have a full roster going... 

• I was also confused in the Gronder Field fight because I couldn’t see what people meant about Bernie getting set on fire. Then I remembered Bernie wasn’t on the hill because she was with me. I recruited her. Whatever this proves about me, I don’t know.

• I did end up beating Marianne’s paralogue! It actually wasn’t as hard once I levelled her up a bit and classed her to a Holy Knight. The big thing with her in that paralogue seems to be that she needs a decent amount of power and movement to really get by, so that’s what I’d recommend for anyone else playing it. Using rescue will also probably help you out, but I tried to avoid using Flayn there because it’s kinda easy to kill her. 

• Admittedly, I’m not 100% sure how I feel about the support system. In some ways, I think it’s better that not everybody has that forced S-Support. Oftentimes we were either squeezing a love confession out of two characters who were unlikely to have one, or characters with decent potential might get snubbed because their connection was less apparent to the writers (and unfortunately that still does happen in the case of same sex S-supports in 3H). Having the conversations only go to a certain point is helpful, but at the same time, the inherent romantic undertones of several of the A-supports do make things feel strange. If it weren’t for the fact that I know characters can have only one partner as their paired ending, I would think lots of them were in a polycule. Nothing wrong with that as long as everyone’s comfortable, but because I know they can only have one person in their ending, I find it pretty jarring.

• I think it was interesting that they went to do the fights for breaking into Enbarr and then taking down Edelgard back-to-back. I’m glad they did, honestly, because while I don’t usually like to do two fights next to each other unless I’m grinding, it doesn’t mess with the suspension of disbelief. It would be stupid to break into Enbarr and then just run right back to the Monastery.

• I have still not completed the randomized quest from just after the timeskip. You know, the one I was yelling about with the weeds? Still haven’t gotten any weeds. I think I might just have to give up on it. It’s hilarious that my luck is so good that it’s actually bad.

• The fact that Byleth is praised for having more of a personality than Corrin is the biggest slice of bullshit I have heard from this fanbase in a long time. Byleth is literally designed to be a silent protagonist with nothing going on with them – they even came up with a story reason for why Byleth is such a blank sack of meat! In the kindest way possible, I don’t think most people realize that they are implementing whatever personality they want onto Byleth. Personally, I don’t find anything relatable about being stoic, calm, and not inclined to anyone (until plot happens, of course). I’ve always been the overly enthusiastic and caring type, with a tendency towards nervousness. Trying to relate to Byleth was like trying to relate to the experiences of a cactus. While I definitely don’t think Corrin is the strongest of the modern FE avatars – that award goes to Robin – they still had some things I could understand and relate to. If you’re not the type of person who loves the cool, “I fight for my friends” types like Ike, though, you’re likely to have a hard time relating to Byleth. If you can manage that type of character, then you’re more likely to have present them with a personality of their own.

• Actually, while we’re on the topic of Byleth getting praised for things Corrin got dragged for, the fact that Corrin is still cited as the character who receives the most “player pandering” is ridiculous too. Do a lot of characters like Corrin? Yeah! But most of them who do are deeply traumatized in a way that inclines them specifically towards Corrin. The Nohr siblings cling to each other due to their abusive childhood, the Hoshido siblings all in some capacity seem to suffer from abandonment issues (oldest) and/or attachment issues (youngest), and the official foursome of retainers have also had some sort of abandonment struggle in their past (forced separation from parents, murdered loved ones). While the cast of Three Houses needs therapy and is traumatized too, there is no reason why the inclination moves towards Byleth. Bernadetta feels safe around them just because. Edelgard is obsessed with them just because. Marianne learns to feel better about herself just because. Why are there so many exceptions for Byleth, and so many just without explanation? I don’t hate Byleth by any means, but these two things make my opinion of them lower than it would be otherwise. It kinda sucks that my image of Byleth is tainted by the fanbase’s hypocrisy, but I know I can’t have everything.

• The gameplay overall for 3H has been pretty fun! I love the addition of the Demonic Beasts, as annoying as they are to fight. There’s a charm to having some of your stronger units working to take on the soldiers blocking the path, meanwhile your army’s more intermediate strikeforce works to keep them safe by bringing down the beast. Once you get the hang of it, gameplay with the new additions is fun. The only thing I don’t use is Divine Pulse, but that’s because I’m on Casual and usually when I want to rewind, I want to just plain start over. So I use the old “turn off and start again” trick.

• Edelgard’s death scene was actually pretty good. I must confess that I went out of my way to avoid Edelgard in the academy phase, as I knew how hard the game was going to hit me with the “she’s obessed with you” thing and I wanted to see how wonky it would feel if I didn’t speak to her much. I was right that it’s incredibly awkward in terms of writing when you haven’t spent the time with her, but surprisingly, her death scene still holds up. Good voice acting, animation, and music. My only beef with it is something they have done in FE before, and it’s something I wish they’d stop. If a character is dying, you either let them have a few last breaths after their last lines or you kill them mid-sentence. It’s probably just a personal nitpick, but hearing them get their last word out without struggle and then immediately die just makes me aware of how badly the directors wanted the whole line to be in there. I can totally understand it but I find it so troublesome in the grand scheme of things that I just can’t.

• I also like that in the fight against Edelgard, they tried to make it ambiguous who had the key. Immediately as it told me that, I decided it was Petra and ended up being right. I was kind of sad to kill her though, to be honest. I don’t know her well, but she’s probably one of the Eagles I like more.

• The fight against the Death Knight at Fort Merceus ended up being surprisingly pretty easy. In fact, while I paved the way for most of my army, Nader ended up making it to the Death Knight just as Claude did. He did most of the damage – I’m not kidding, the Death Knight was down to 1 HP – and then Claude took care of the rest. It was a weird fight. They said impregnable a lot leading up to it.

• I understand why they kill Dimitri off-screen at the Gronder Field fight, but I was admittedly a bit disappointed. Again, Salli Saffoti does a good job doing Hilda’s voice for it, but I would have liked to see it animated. It was also nice to have that little rapport with Dedue! If only we could have allied with the Lions a bit more. Everyone always says Claude and Edelgard have similar goals; however, it’s their methods that differ. Claude seems to align himself a bit closer to Dimitri, so I’m usually a bit confused by the idea that Edelgard and Claude would work together. I was spoiled on enough to know her background and story, and even so, I think that her methodology is just a bit too violent for his tastes. But that’s just my two cents.

 Alright. I think that’s about all I can drain out of my brain from the top of my head. With that, I am off to kill the slithers! We’ll see how this goes. Wish me luck!

[theescaperoute]

Calling people illogical

To describe something or someone as illogical or irrational is to describe them as being not logical or rational, respectively. To use such a descriptor, you must have an established sense of what those things mean for them to be meaningful.

Logic, used in the informal sense here, is the study of the form of arguments, by which premises are established and conclusions concluded from them. Rationality is the quality of being reasonable; generally, an argument which is logically both valid (where the premises do lead to the conclusion) and sound (if the premises are actually true) is likely to be reasonable, but reasonableness is a more subjective quality.

In any case, something can seem reasonable but be illogical, and something which is logical can be irrational. For instance, the argument, you must like Ike because you like Ike, is logically valid. If you do indeed like Ike, it is also sound, although if you don’t like Ike, it is still valid because if you did like Ike, then the conclusion that you like Ike would be true. This is a tautology (see again our invitation to tautology club).

If I were to argue that you are so ugly that you repulse others, and therefore others would be happier without your presence, and therefore you’d be better off dead such is the ubiquity of your presence somewhere at some time, and additionally, persons repulsed by you will be repulsed by all others sharing the same trait (being very ugly), so the rest of us will be happier if all the very ugly people were herded into a rocket and fired into the sun, my argument would be both valid (the form of the argument works) and, if you were in fact hideous, would also probably be sound. However, it may not be reasonable; whether it is irrational is up for debate. This would lead us to other questions, such as the factors that justify or defend your existence, which leads us to questions on the nature of morality and ethics, &c. ad nauseam.

The point being that calling someone irrational or illogical because they disagree with you is fucking stupid. You imply that you are right and the other is wrong when it is unlikely that you have done anything to logically or rationally establish that you, in fact, are. It’s, most likely, an ego-driven statement in which you assert that you are right and clever while having no sound reasoning to believe you are, beyond that it feels good to reassure yourself that you must be right. It is not a general insult to throw around, especially given that it is most likely that you are, in fact, of similarly poor reasoning abilities as your target, and if not in the context in dispute, in some other.

To call someone’s argument illogical asserts that their logic used in constructing that argument is flawed, such as if they confuse necessity and sufficiency. To call someone illogical asserts that their means of reasoning is always or usually illogical, which can easily become a case of the genetic fallacy. To call someone’s argument irrational could imply that they or their argument are illogical or not (such is its use in English, it usually contains illogic); it could also imply that their reasoning which established their premises falls short of reality along some epistemological or ethical grounds or something like that. It, potentially, gives every party a solid basis to affirm or refute - not just reject - and work towards a holistic and impartial understanding of what is actually true.

If I were to call you a rotund, flatulent git, you would probably take it to be the slight that it is. Whether or not you are any of those three things matters not because, if we infer the most likely explanation for such phrasing to be employed, the point is to call you insulting names, not to establish fact from which reasonable conclusions can be drawn. If I were to call you a fatuous wazzock with the wit of a hollowed-out tabloid and a face like a melted Wellington, you might take that more descriptive slander to mean that I found you an unfunny and ugly dunderpate, but it is clear from the general form of what I said and by its context that the point is to insult you. The point is not even to make a point beyond the fact I don’t like you; I am not crafting an argument which is also insulting but nonetheless properly presented as an argument. I am calling you names.

On the other hand, to be logical and rational is the foundation upon which all knowledge is built, of every kind, in every field, in every way, at all, ever. If politics is applied philosophy and sociology, which is applied psychology is applied biology is applied chemistry is applied physics is applied maths, maths is built on the most fundamental ideas of formal logic. Without logic, from which reason is derived and applied, you know absolutely nothing. Knowledge is meaningless. Science and the scientific method are meaningless. Everything is utter shit in the absence of logic. Including you. Especially you.

In calling someone irrational or illogical, you challenge the fundamental ideas of knowledge. You challenge the only meaningful way of understanding the entire universe (first person to mention a sky fairy gets a slap). You challenge the ultimate concept of what can ever be true or untrue, right or wrong. Opinions are not created equal. Facts are not created equal either, as most are imperfect or incomplete, and most of the contenders to be facts that parade as facts are not facts at all because they’re full of shit told by lying liars that lie. You invoke just about the only thing that demonstrably and universally matters in all of reality. You invoke the thing that an overwhelming majority of people don’t have the most rudimentary understanding of, which perhaps explains quite how incredibly stupid, short-sighted, hateful, narrow-minded, self-righteous, self-contented, uninsightful, unoriginal and incredibly unaware of all of the preceding, a massive, overwhelming number of people are.

Given just how much in the world could be better given how much of the preceding were less true than it is, and given how unlikely it is that you (yes, you) have the most rudimentary grasp of how knowledge actually works as mentioned, maybe next time you are tempted to throw the words irrational or illogical around, I propose three alternatives which I believe will almost certainly lead to better results for all involved:

1. Disengage. In a moment of humbleness, remember that no-one really cares about your opinion and in the grand scheme of things, you are, deep down, unknown by others, not loved like you want to be loved, alone, and insignificant. You stand only to gain the respect or hatred of people who probably don’t matter much and probably don’t deserve respect themselves. Appreciate how little you matter and that you will be remembered after you die, most likely, as thoroughly unexceptional if objectively compared to anyone else, which is nothing to be proud of. Knowledge is the only meaning in life with any consistent aspirational direction, and you appreciate that you have far too little of it to think it’s your place to teach others and waste your time on such endeavours as human conflict, when you could instead be doing something you like which isn’t harmful to others, like sitting down and watching the sky. Pledge your commitment to non-conflict, agree to disagree, and flee the scene.

2. Adopt knowledge and the scientific method as your lord and saviour. Praise jibbers. Resolve to surpass your ego, gain self-awareness and gain understanding, not by what pleases you, but what actually is true. Learn to investigate not what you want to hear, not what you wish were true, not even what you think at the time would lead to a better world, but to hear conflicting ideas and forever expand your knowledge and mind to finally, perhaps, comprehend, in some small part, the logical, rational, best way to proceed. By then, you will understand what it is to be logical and rational and this blag will be long left behind. Accept that the most intelligent and honest answer to almost any question you find in your life, is ‘I don’t know’. Your reward along the way will be the realisation that, although you don’t get as many occasions to make yourself feel right and clever, you are closer to being right in a meaningful way than just about anyone you come across.

3. Just shut the fuck up.