Treat Artificer - i am incapable of enjoying anything because i am preoccupied with ideas for what i would do differently to ‘improve’ it, my mind is a chaotic workshop full of unfinished forgotten creative projects and experimental prototypes that will likely never see completion.

also if a media IP has Cool Mechs i will enjoy it regardless of other problematic aspects, for example Fullmetal Panic! is a lame generic show about high schoolers/child soldiers being awkward, but also has one of the coolest mech designs of all time with the cold war soviet RK-92 SAVAGE. i watched like 1 or 2 episodes and completely hate the show, but the mecha designs are just about Peak Robot Design for me, i love the diesel/gas turbine engine instead of nuclear power idea, i love the cold war aesthetic, i love the fact that the SAVAGE is made by soviets, i love the rounded frog-like appearance. I love that it has mechanical analogue controls (high-sensitivity panels on the cockpit seat to control limbs without needing to move limbs too much in the cockpit) instead of being partially autonomous. i don’t like as much the fact that its the default ‘bad guy’ mech for the NATO mercenary child soldier protagonists.

this is the older RK-91, powered by a diesel engine, note the up-armor panels used to modernize it, like putting ERA blocks on a T-60:

this is the RK-92, powered by a gas-turbine engine:

another fancier RK-92 (pic of a finished painted figure, not a model kit):

here’s a bonus interior/cross section view i found:

i actually sanded the pieces to a model kit before assembly for the first time today. there were a few places i was sure i over-sanded but the parts seem to fit together perfectly regardless. the next skill i need to master is using capillary action to apply extra thin plastic cement, i saw a youtube video of a guy just holding pieces together and painting glue on the outside of the seam almost like a welding gun and was super impressed, it looked way easier than applying glue to one part at a time and rushing to put them together before it dries, and i appreciate when a modelling technique kind of resembles a real world construction technique, like using a pin vise to drill holes to attach other parts, makes me feel like a giant soviet propaganda poster industrial laborer . i also need to learn how to use gap fill material on all the models i have botched with lack of proper equipment/technique, or else i’ll be tempted to risk breaking them trying to dissasemble for maintenance.

hell yea heavy metal guitar noises

i think you are correct, google images says the following are MICLIC carrying vehicles and they look very similar.

i’ve heard of MICLICs (‘MIne Clearing LInear Charges’ for those not problematically obsessed with tools of war, a bunch of explosives attached in a line for clearing paths through minefields) before but have never seen how they are carried or deployed, it’s especially interesting how it seems like the MICLIC tubes are inside of the ‘turret’ hull, underneath what i presume are at least lightly armored panels that fold out. I would usually expect something like that to be mounted on the outside of a vehicle in a tube or something (like a TOW launcher would be on the side of a Bradley turret in an external box). I wonder if the charges are particularly volatile or susceptible to incidental detonation or something.

bonus sci fi pic - this fashionable lad also carries a MICLIC tube!

I don’t agree with that. I don’t see what’s impossible about understanding consciousness as an emergent property of matter in the same way that many individual ants collectively bring feats that you can’t explain looking at a single ant.

the problem is that every ant in the ant colony is ostensibly a purely physical phenomena (at least, we usually do not concern ourselves with the ant’s subjective experience as much as their information processing capabilities - we watch their movement, monitor pheromones and chemical signals, note the structure and changes to their nest, etc., all very physical and mutually compatible ideas), whereas something like the concept of subjectivity is entirely incompatible with our ideas about physics. you can do ‘information processing’ without subjectivity very efficiently, as with any calculator or computer, so subjectivity seems entirely superfluous in the sense of a purely physical explanation.

The fact that we haven’t gotten there just yet doesn’t mean it can’t be done, or that biology is completely independent from physics and/or psychology completely independent from biology.

you have to prove something is true before you believe it, assuming ‘we will figure it out later with no significant modifications to our theory’ is intellectual laziness/unsound epistemology. no one is saying that biology is completely independent from physics or that psychology is completely independent from biology, i am only saying that our understanding of such topics are far from a unified ‘theory of everything’ and are therefore incomplete in a non-trivial way at best, and fundamentally flawed or incorrect at worst. obviously the subjective component of human consciousness is somehow related to brain function, we can prove and accept this empirically without any kind of metaphysical claims or assumptions tacked on. obviously physics isn’t completely BS, it helps us solve a lot of problems. but at the same time, we cannot fully explain (i.e. reduce, hence why i am arguing against ‘reductivist physicalist realism’ and not non-reductivist versions of physicalist realism such as the one you seem to espouse) psychology in terms of atoms and their locations and velocities and mass without losing information. the fact that you believe in ‘emergent processes’ itself means you are likely not a ‘reductivist’ physicalist realist like i am arguing against.

I just don’t see how from “we don’t understand consciousness” it follows “therefore it can’t possibly be explained with physics in the way we understand physics”.

usually when a theory fails to account for a phenomena, it is assumed to be flawed or incomplete somehow, and the significant explanatory gap for subjectivity in physics and information processing (what information processing algorithm produces a first-person experience? is there a fundamental particle or wave of subjectivity, a ‘subjectron’?) would seem to imply a non-trivial incompleteness or flaw.

i don’t think i’m confusing anything, for further clarification i am specifically arguing that reductivist physicalist realism - the belief that all of reality including consciousness can be ‘reduced to’ or entirely explained in terms of our current understanding of physics or a trivially modified version of it - a relatively common belief among ‘reddit atheists’ (see ‘love is just chemicals’ trope, ‘meat computer’ ideas, etc.) - entirely precludes the possibility of any kind of subjectivity whatsoever as an inherent logical consequence of its base assumptions. A mostly unmodified version of our current understanding of physics or information processing has no explanation for things like ‘subjectivity’ or ‘consciousness’ at a fundamental level, and therefore any worldview that would explain such phenomena in terms of physics will necessarily fail to account for, or erroneously posit the lack of existence of, such characteristics (‘consciousness is an illusion’). kind of like the difficulty of finding a coherent way to unify quantum physics and ‘macro’ physics into a single ‘theory of everything’, the ideas in use are more or less incompatible - you can’t really ‘reduce’ a thrown baseball and explain it purely in terms of quantum physics without losing important information, even though quantum physics is smaller scale/more ‘fundamental’ to macro phenomena.

i am a militant agnostic. i don’t know if there is a god, and neither do you. its crazy to me to fully believe in any specific spiritual lore without like direct personal experience, like maybe there is ‘a god’ but maybe its completely inhuman and incomprehensible, maybe its a giant fish, maybe its mind is composed of the EM activity of stars, idfk why people assume our language or our thought could capture something like that, if it even exists. believing that there is Definitely No God or Anything Else Humans Don’t/Can’t Understand seems epistemologically invalid. like yeah, i’m not going to decide how to live my life based on some bronze age account of some Sky Warlord who wants me to sacrifice my children and cut off parts of my penis and beat my slaves and never do anything thats Too Fun, idfk why people would assume bronze age patriarchical slave-owning mysoginists would have the FInal Say on stuff like that, but i’m also not going to just assume that reality is completely pointless and that we are all meaningless meat computers waiting for our homeostatic processes to fizzle out. I agree with ‘materialism’ in the sense that i think there are parts of reality that are outside my personal mind, but strict physicalist realism is metaphysically and existentially and semiotically barren as an ideology, why should i care if i or anyone else has healthcare/rights/life if our existence is pointless nonsense, lifeless particles knocking into each other deterministically, human consciousness an evolutionary spandrel, an information-processing fluke that only makes us suffer from our knowledge of the universe’s meaninglessness. I have to believe that there might possibly be some reason for me to keep collecting new experiences or i would simply stop. i have to believe that , under better conditions such as communism, humans could spend more time on the questions and ideas that matter on a more fundamental level, instead of constantly struggling just to physically survive, and that there might be semiotically interesting paradigms to discover. i have to believe that conscious experience matters, or should matter, to me, that there really is something that differentiates living thinking beings from lifeless particles and the unconscious information processing of a calculator. otherwise there is nothing to distinguish humanity from a cancerous growth or mold, if ‘nothing’ is the beginning and the end i’d rather just cut out the middleman and get back to it and save myself and everyone else a whole heck of a lot of trouble and misery.

idk if it would help in this specific case, but i have successfully used plastic wrap to tighten ball joints, just wrap the ball with 1 or 2 layers of plastic wrap before attaching the part, maybe more layers if its still loose. if you are careful you can pre-cut or tear off excess plastic wrap so its barely even visible. Bandai models usually go together pretty conveniently, i have some allegedly ‘snap-fit’ maschinen krieger kits i paid upwards of 60-80 USD for each one, where there were gaps on almost every seam and none of the parts fit together great, i even had a polycap joint split in half somehow. i trimmed with clippers and a knife instead of sanding tho.

i am willing to defect to the aliens, especially if they let me pilot an alien mecha against the imperialists

SERIOUSLY! i read the lore entries in-game and almost every single thing they mentioned about the Hegemony was incredibly based despite being presented as some unspeakable orwellian evil lmao. like way more lines saying stuff like ‘hegemony citizens all get healthcare and food and housing’ than the bad stuff like ‘they are ruled by a class of orphan oligarchs’.

sorry but i’m blocking you for this lol i have the badposting comm blocked for a reason

death to all IP lawyers. modern games are all fortnite clone over-the-shoulder battle royale microtransaction games, even single player games have microtransactions and locked over-the-right-shoulder cameras. every time i see a new game i have to temper my excitement until i see gameplay footage to check if it has that godawful fortnite locked-to-the-right-shoulder camera perspective, which they almost always do. all 3rd person games should either have centered cameras or the ability to switch which side the camera is on so i can aim around cover to the left sometimes instead of always moving right or having the disadvantage against those who can.

i hate modern gaming, i’m going to go play Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri (the Terran Hegemony did nothing wrong)

arguing that the Imperium are the Good Guys despite the fact they are Space Fascists because The Universe Is Just That Bad

arguing the Imperium are the Good Guys because they have Space Commissars and are therefore Communists doing Galactic War Communism, being literally ruled by Psychic Lenin’s Preserved Corpse after the Horus Revisionism. Space Marines are the True Volcel Vanguard.

their beef with the Tau is like a weird Sino-Soviet Split

here are some pics post launch, but the wires are thin + lightweight enough to be pretty much invisible.

here’s a similar but different weapon (a TOW i’m pretty sure) with the wires visible after launch:

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