nostalgichistorian - Tumblr blog

[nostalgichistorian]

This post got me thinking about online PvP. I will now ramble incoherently about basically every game that has left a significant impression on me because this is my Tumblr and I am entitled to my one rambling lunatic post a year.

Ragnarok Online was an early 00s Korean Action RPG MMO with 2D anime sprites on top of 3D backgrounds. It had a charming aesthetic, a fantastic array of classes, and was more grindy than an inappropriate euphemism.

The PvP in Ragnarok was twofold: One was a lawless arena wherein you’d walk in and you were free to kill people (or not). The other was an area of open conflict that opened up for two hours twice a week, and the winner of a weird sort of king-of-the-hill style game mode was entitled to tangible game rewards.

The war was markedly less toxic than the Arena. Still toxic, to be sure, but it was generally understood that it was high stakes PvP and you went in there because you wanted to fight or you wanted to win, and if you wanted to win, you’d better be prepared to fight.

The arenas were far worse, because murder was completely optional. You didn’t have to fight. You weren’t incentivized to fight. But when you walk into the arena, you could be attacked. And you would be. Violently. Or not.

I think it was the unease that made it vile. A person murdered you. Do they not like you? Do they hate you? Do they just think your death is funny? Is it a power flex? Maybe they’ll tell you. Maybe they’ll shrug and say they came to PvP to kill people because that’s the point. But they’re not fighting their friends. I guess they just don’t like you.

It was, in essence, a relic of online competitive multiplayer before people understood how things work. It was also horrendously imbalanced, and I was absolutely terrible at it because my build was about the worst thing I could have done.

2/10, should have mained Hunter.

Team Fortress 2 was the first really big class-based co-op shooter. 9 classes, two teams of 12. It spawned an entire genre, and was largely responsible for.. honestly, a lot of things in modern multiplayer gaming.

TF2 is openly hostile - You have achievements for taunting people and there’s even one for killing a single player repeatedly and having them leave the game as a result. But it’s also incredibly fickle: If one team started winning too much, the teams would get shuffled, and you were now stuck with the guy who’d just been kicking your ass for the last 20 minutes. And he was stuck with you. And it was usually fine, because that’s kind of what you signed up for.

TF2 had a Mad Chaos kind of vibe. Rounds were short and impersonal. You would die and you would get angry and people would murder you but it was also so frantic and you were murdering other people that you almost didn’t have time to be mad. Also, the teams were big enough that individuals didn’t get blamed much for any kind of conflict, but we’ll get into that later.

9/10, great times voice chatting as an Australian Sniper on US servers.

World of Warcraft became the king of MMOs when it broke 1 million subs, and honestly, it’s still up there, in spite of everything that’s happened. I played mainly during Pandaria, and there was a lot about WoW that I liked, but it had a lot of weird problems. I played mostly on battlegrounds.

The combat design was okay, but the bracketing was weird. The different maps had good designs, but the fact that gear mattered made things pretty lousy. The weird thing is, it’s almost a non-presence in my mind. It was the most middle-of-the-road PvP experience that was compelling enough to keep playing but not outstanding in any way shape manner or form.

5/10, the PvP equivalent of white noise.

DotA 2 is a game I have something like 4500 matches on. I haven’t really played it hardcore in years, but it was, to this day, my most definitive online experience. I have a lot to say about it.

DotA 2 is a MOBA/ARTS: basically an action RPG or single-unit RTS. Two teams of five in a weird sort of mirrored tower defense. Its sister game is League of Legends, which I have played a bit of, but which I won’t be going into because A) I didn’t play it nearly as much, and B) their differences aren’t really relevant to the discussion.

DotA 2 is a wonderful game. It’s got interesting balance, it’s massively complex, you have a huge amount of control over your play style, it’s mechanically well designed, it has one of the best sound designs in any videogame I’ve ever played, it’s hugely popular, it has one of the biggest competitive scenes in gaming, and it’s free to play.

DotA 2 is a horrendous game. In DotA, everybody has a role, and every role has requirements. It is not an easy game. It is a difficult game. It’s very easy to grasp the rudimentary concepts, but the competence gap between a low level and a high level is astronomical. There is so much to know and so many ways in which you can screw up. I played for hours upon hours, and I am still not very good. At my best, I was maybe in the upper half. Maybe. You can pour hours into this game and still be terrible.

Now most of this wouldn’t be too bad, except you have a team of five people, which is big enough that your contributions matter, but small enough where you feel that the outcome of the battle is rarely in your hands. When you screw up (and you will screw up) and people notice (and they will notice) they will point it out to you. Agressively. With extreme hostility. These games typically last around 30-50 minutes, but they can go long.

When people get into fights, it can descend into absolute game-ruining behavior. A person can essentially work to make sure his team loses, and 99% of the time, it works, if only because winning a 4v5 is actually really damn hard when the teams were already balanced on a knife’s edge. There is a reporting system, and it works, but the game is just so aggressively hostile that it doesn’t matter - there will always be a fresh supply of hostility.

Dota 2 is such an aggressively hostile game to play in that to this day I am basically immune to people being shitheels to me in online games. Whenever somebody tries to antagonize me in an online space, I just laugh. I have seen online competitive gaming at its absolute worst. I have bathed in fucking fire. The idea that some dickhead can leave an impression on me for using the wrong emote is laughable. Go spend a thousand hours in hell, then come back to me with shadowed eyes and a dead stare and try telling me how much my mother loves sucking dicks as if those words hold any kind of weight.

10/10, best game ever made, satisfied my PvP addiction for five years, for the love of God don’t fucking play it.

Final Fantasy XIV is a game I’ve only recently been playing (and by recently I mean the last year or so). It’s a fun little MMO that is basically Anime WoW with a way more aggressive single player focus. But it does have PvP. Specifically, there’s a new PvP mode called “Crystaline Conflict”. If you’ve played TF2, I’d describe it as “Reverse Payload”. For the rest of you, it’s a sort of reverse tug-of-war where two teams of five try to push a giant boulder to the other team’s side, and you have to murder anybody who tries to stop you.

Design-wise, it’s fun, but uninteresting, though the fact that player power is normalized turns it into more of a game occupying the same engine as an MMO rather than a form of explicit MMO PvP combat.

No, what’s interesting about CC is that you can’t team up with people and you can’t communicate with anyone, not even your team. Your only avenue for communication is a handful of chat macros (Well played, attack this target, that kind of thing). In spite of this, I’ve still seen remnants of that DotA-style toxicity with people sitting in spawn passive-aggressively spamming “Well Played!”, likely owing to the whole 5-people-to-a-team factor. It makes me suspect that small teams are the worst for toxicity, which is a pity, because mechanically they work great.

6/10, call me when I’m allowed to party with friends.

But, what of the original question. I’ve never played Splatoon 3, but the question of how to deal with people who were your friends a moment ago and are now your enemies is one that’s almost universal to these kinds of games.

When you join one of those lobbies, you have, in essence, signed a sort of implicit contract. Those on your team are your friends, and those on the opposing team are your enemies.

The first implication of this is obvious enough: You have an implicit duty to your team to try your best to win. Obviously this doesn’t mean “don’t play if you’re not at your absolute best”, but in that moment they are your brothers in arms, and you’re there to support them just as they are there to support you. You are, to an extent, expected to disregard your attachments, or at the very least, not let them affect your judgement.

But there is a secondary implication that may be less obvious: Your obligation to your opponents. Without opponents, the game ceases to be entertaining for anybody. A tea party in the middle of an arena can sometimes be a fun diversion, but at the end of the day, your weapons are weapons for a reason, and if none of your opponents wanted to shoot back, you’d probably have a pretty lousy time.

The purpose of a competition is to engage in conflict in a safe environment. If you gain enjoyment from that, there’s no reason to assume other people don’t feel the same way.

Crush your enemies.

Then team up with your enemies to crush other, bigger enemies.

Then write a lesbian squid story for nanowrimo about a hotel room with only one kiddie pool.

Okay but serious question: what do y'all do when friends you’ve made only via switch drop into your turf wars and end up on the opposite team and you have no way of communicating with them? Do you just play normally and squidparty in the lobby after? Do you try to find them in mid and goof off together? Do you hunt them specifically for sport? Is there some kind of norm/etiquette here?!

[nostalgichistorian]

@aggressive-almond-cookie​

childhood emotion of wanting a dragon that is your friend so bad that it feels like there is a vacuum in your soul that only a dragon who is your friend can fill

[nostalgichistorian]

@aggressive-almond-cookie​

What a beautiful image pets give us when they show their love !

[nostalgichistorian]

I don't think you understand how this works.

How do I get people into a Spamton server and not have to deal with the not fun kind of weirdos?

Asking for a friend.

[nostalgichistorian]

The irony is that the orange juice would probably have been measurably worse for you by virtue of the sugar content.

Buy extra milk if you like coffee in the morning, you old cow.

I really like milk, you guys.

[nostalgichistorian]

Hints:

Look for open source projects in the same domain as the type of file you're trying to comprehend. You might be surprised at the arcane formats people support.

If it's a file for an internal tool, expect it to be as simple as possible by virtue of programmers refusing to do more work than necessary.

If you're working with what you know to be a text format but the text is garbled, actual cipher decoding tricks can get you a long way.

If you have a program that can export the file format, then that can give you a lot of information if you export minimal files, or files with very slight changes.

Based on the time period, it may have superficial similarities with other contemporary file formats. Look into other programs in the same domain at the time and their associated formats.

If you're willing to be social, you could try finding the original authors. You might be surprised at the things people keep lying around on some hard drive somewhere.

Finally, consider approaching the problem from the angle of trying to design a format that supports the features you need, as a way of getting into the mindset of the creator.

Okay so imagine you’re a timeline-repair person, and someone breaking the time-laws really screwed things up.

After a lot of investigation, you come to understand that the entire future hinges on this one 5th grade kid’s book report and the impact that it had. And someone has totally removed that book from history.

You have a copy of the destiny-altering book report, and it’s your job to recreate the book and plant it back in history, but the only copy that you have of the book is in a long-dead language that doesn’t exist anymore. There are absolutely zero resources for learning or understanding the language, and it seems to have no structure whatsoever that you can make sense of. But the only way to save history is to figure out how to translate that book into something close enough to the book that the kid originally read so that the kid will then write that exact same book report, word for word, and put history back on the right track.

You have as many chances as you want, because you can just keep going back in time and trying again, but the factors of what words influence a 5th grade kid to write those exact words are so unpredictable that you could very easily be trying for several lifetimes, getting literally nowhere.

Anyways that’s essentially what trying to decode old proprietary file formats is like.

[nostalgichistorian]

I am willing to accept this premise if applied universally to every form of obscenity protected by the first amendment

Don’t @ me.

[nostalgichistorian]

Watching zoomers in the replies infer trans pride from a joke about butch lesbians being hideous sure is an experience

happy pride

[nostalgichistorian]

At first I was going to ridicule you for the suggestion that Batman would get a tan line from going out and perching on gargoyles in the middle of the night but now I’m thinking about literally any hero that appears during the day and regularly wears a mask somehow not getting a tanline from it and it’s bugging the shit out of me thanks a lot cat

[nostalgichistorian]

I have spent an irrational amount of time thinking about this, about how you’d actually communicate with aliens

I feel like, provided they have photosensitive vision that’s primarily dependent on contrast, along with basic pattern recognition abilities, it wouldn’t be too hard to convey the information to them

Like you draw a bunch of dots, and then you put each digit next to the dots, and maybe you hold up your hands and wiggle your fingers just right and maybe you’d be able to communicate your system of mathematics to them fairly simply

Basic arithmetic is also easy by virtue of example, if I show you 1 $ 1 % 2 and then 1 $ 2 % 3 and then 2 $ 3 % 5 you can probably figure out what those symbols mean

Conveying decimals might be a bit tricky, or the fact that there are different notations for different concepts

Our method of graphing data may also be completely unique to us

But basic numbers would be fairly straightforward though, and they may also recognize things like prime numbers and other sequences

I spend too much time thinking about this shit

[nostalgichistorian]

Plot twist: 2021 is Cat. Just, the embodiment of Cat.

So presumably this year is going to be filled with horror tropes becoming manifest, some weird porn, and a general hatred of woke kids.

Honestly, still probably better than 2020.

[nostalgichistorian]

56 kilobits. Not bytes, bits. 8 bits to a byte. That’s 7 kilobytes a second, at best. That image is about 105 kilobytes. It would take around 15 seconds to load. Probably Longer if it was a shitty website, which it almost certainly was.

I keep telling kids at work they can read manga and watch anime for free online and they’re like “but that’s illegal” and I’m like. Trying to find a way to tell them that it doesn’t matter without being a bad influence

[nostalgichistorian]

I’m not a literature guy, but I think people misunderstand the point of Death of the Author. The essence of Death of the Author isn’t about something so simplistic as “Author Bad Therefore Work Bad”. It’s about the question of if it’s worth considering author intent or author perspective in a critical evaluation of the work itself. It’s a complicated question that I don’t have a strong stance on (although I lean towards Author Death), but the problem is people tend to confuse it with things like boycots.

I don’t play Blizzard games in part because of their ties with Communist China. In spite of that, their ties with Communist China do not affect their work in a manner I consider significant. I think Overwatch is a fun game irrespective of how Blizzard feels about the Uyghurs, but my reluctance to support Blizzard affects my willingness to play Overwatch. It’s not all-or-nothing, but it is a factor. But none of this has anything to do with “Death of the Author”, and I think people should stop conflating the two.

It is possible to like a form of media while still having a distaste for the author to such an extent that you refuse to support them.

Super Bunnyhop actually has a good a video on Fez that talks about what having distaste for the author might actually mean in a quantifiable sense. It’s worth watching.

rather than death of the author i subscribe to a critical framework i like to refer to as Schrodinger’s Author where the authors intentions are important except for when i dont like them

[nostalgichistorian]

In any artistic pursuit where one aims to improve, quality is the least of your concerns. Quality naturally increases as long as you’re doing something regularly. Attempting to mitigate fear of publication through improvement is a fool’s errand; If producing art is something that speaks to your soul, then any kind of criticism of what you produce is going to feel like getting a hole punched through your sternum. Self-criticism is an order of magnitude more severe than anything we get from other people because it’s an order of magnitude less impactful. Don’t bother trying to shield yourself. It’s a waste of time. The only way you’re getting through that fear is if the catharsis of production exceeds the pain of criticism, and the only way that’s happening is if you produce what you love.

You don’t need to be reading books on how to be a better writer, you need to be pumping out lesbian Pearl fanfics.

Hit 10k a day early, so I guess I’m feeling okay. I almost feel like I could do more. I’m more in the zone for this than I ever expected, but maybe it’s the anxiety thrilled to grasp onto literally anything.

I know I can’t expect this kind of performance consistently but when I can it really does feel like a borderline superpower being able to churn out so many words so fast. It makes me wonder, if I made a specific effort to improve the quality of my writing, could I actually finally make something good/worth sharing someday? How would I even go about improving? It’s been well over a decade since I was in a writing class of any kind. Should I just read a bunch of How-To-Be-A-Better-Writer books? At some point I’d have to workshop stuff with other writers and that’s terrifying because I know some absolutely god-tier writers and even if they were willing to look at my stuff I feel like I would be wasting their time with it. I can offer to workshop their stuff in return but like… what good would my opinion be to someone 30 levels above me? I dunno. This was a world I wanted to break into when I was younger and Serious about it but I honestly only want to write self-indulgent stuff these days. But I still kinda want to write it well, you know? It would be nice to be confident enough to actually share things, and even nicer if people actually enjoyed them.

[nostalgichistorian]

While I agree with almost all of this, I’ll contest on one minor factor - I don’t think 4chan was ever apolitical, but rather staunchly libertarian. Even in some of the more rabid /pol/ LARPers of recent times, there’s this sense that they’re only as far right as they are in counter to the authoritarian left leanings of the rest of the internet. I think it’s natural that when you have a website devoted to anonymous posting, you’re going to get opinions that can’t be shared elsewhere. Maybe it’s just counter-culture, but I feel like 4chan has always been about freedom of speech above and beyond all else, and contrary to the idiotic sentiments you sometimes hear, sometimes freedom from consequence is the only way you can have freedom of speech.

Theres good parts to chan culture?!

I wouldn’t know about any of the obscure games/cartoons/anime if not for chan sites. If I’ve ever gotten you into something or shown you something you’ve never seen before, there’s a 95% chance I picked it up from 4chan first.

So to answer your question I’d say platforming niche art is one. You can’t really do that on tumblr because it won’t be in front of anyone. If you do the same on 4chan it’s on page 1 whether people like it or not.

There’s a few more but I’m on mobile so I might elaborate another time.

[nostalgichistorian]

That Snake’s tattoo makes me want to get a Tattoo that just says “Human” in a handwritten font

Sketch dump w/ frens including @hoonts and others.

[nostalgichistorian]

Couple of thoughts.

Young men don’t need the far right to pull them away from the far left. The far left are openly aggressive and malevolent towards young men. If you tell a kid they’re a monster for long enough, you’re going to wind up with either an incredibly fucked up kid, or an incredibly fucked up kid who hates your guts. For all the talk of empathy, there’s no empathy for young men being told they’re monsters, because after all, monsters don’t deserve empathy. Until they break down, at which point they do deserve empathy, but only because they had to be monsters for so long. Not for the abuse, you understand. The abuse was necessary. The abuse was out of love.

Whatever this is making me angry fuck this let’s talk about humor

Hearing people talk about corrupting humor in media reminds me of corrupting violence in media. Just like most anti-videogame-violence proponents have never actually played video games, I get the feeling most anti-edgy-humor proponents have never actually been funny.

There are jokes in Family Guy and South Park and Rick and Morty that I find genuinely disturbing. That doesn’t make those shows evil, and it doesn’t make me fragile. Humor is a form of communication. There will be times when a joke doesn’t resonate, and the only thing that’s indicative of is a communication failure between author and audience. Boomer Humor is funny to Boomers. The endless garbage on r/politicalhumor is funny to the progressive left. Happy Merchant memes are funny to people on 4chan.

Humor is a tricky subject, but I get the feeling it’s heavily based on inconsequential subversion of expectations. I suspect the reason edgy jokes are funny is because of the innate expectation of civility, and the reason those jokes don’t resonate with some people is because the subversion is seen as actively disturbing or detrimental, rather than inconsequential.

A personal example for me is anguish. There are plenty of edgy jokes that hinge on anguish - somebody in a state of extreme grief. Usually the subversive core of the joke is the absurdity of the situation, but given my own personal experiences with extreme emotional distress, I find myself empathizing with the victim too much to actually find the joke funny. This is not a moral judgement of the person who wrote the joke, nor of people who find it funny. The joke is not bad, and I’m not humorless. It’s simply an incompatibility between myself and the author.

I suspect this is true for the people decrying immoral humor, too. The thing is, their moral foundations tend to be based less on specific malicious behavior and more on who’s on the receiving end of it. To take the Sandy example above - if the victim of the joke was Plankton, there wouldn’t be a problem, because Plankton is an acceptable target. Most versions of edgy humor that these people decry are probably fine if you change the tone so the butt of the joke is.. I don’t know, Trump or something. And even then, that’s not a moral condemnation of those people. Though it may be indicative of an underlying hypocrisy in their moral standards.

Okay, I’m less angry. Back to young people being turned against the progressive left.

As people said above, a lot of this is just bog-standard anti-authoritarianism. If you impose yourself as a moral authority, teenagers are going to want to fuck with you. Most of the 30-something millennial progressives were that way too, before they became authorities themselves. This is how it usually tends to be. A lot of people never grow out of the idea that they’re rebels. They never realize that They’re Old Now. In their minds, they’re still teenagers saying “Fuck You Mom” in spite of the fact that some of them unironically have children old enough to say “Fuck You Mom”. And then they tell their kids that that’s problematic behavior and that they shouldn’t do that. Genius.

Here’s an old joke in a low quality watermarked jpg:

The idea of political correctness is the idea of a Correct Politics: The notion that there is an ideal final state for political and social opinion. The progressives believe their movement is the way towards that final state. We spent thousands upon thousands of years fumbling through politics, turning it all over, going through cycles and phases, but luckily for us they’ve suddenly finally solved Society and all that needs to happen now is for everybody to shut the fuck up and obey them for the good of all humanity.

I reject the notion that the solution to the unsolvable puzzle of social morality has finally become objectively known by some grotesque neon-haired banshee screaming about white privilege.

Here’s the thing about shows like South Park and Family Guy that make their money off of being edgy and offensive. They fundamentally reduce their viewers’ capacity for empathy. If I found a joke funny, and you found it offensive, you’re just too sensitive. This is directly related to the ride of the alt right and the election of trump. In this essay I will