u/LiftSleepRepeat123

I don't like that as a coach, you can only coach a national team if you also have a pro team to manage. This makes no sense, and there's far too much micro-management between the games that you'd have scheduled with your national team.

I really really want to see a career mode where you can be a national coach and ignore the club world for the most part. I think this would require having some new things in the game for club management, training programming, etc.

One thing that I do think would be really cool is if they took the drill system and applied it only to actual "camps" for the national teams. I know Team USA had a camp back in January at the start of their preparation for the World Cup this year. That was like a once a year deal that could be implemented in the game with less total drill opportunities but greater progression opportunity.

Believe it or not, I think these two things are not really in contradiction with one another, but this is only true when it is known and accepted that men and women have different domains. When the domains cross or become mixed, both sides feel they are not given an opportunity to express their free will over the other (which is really the essence of dominance), which paradoxically leads both sides feeling controlled by the other party. Men see the women as bitchy/feminist/whatever, and women see the men as patriarchal/misogynist/etc. I think if we can get men and women to stay in their lanes a little more, everyone will be happier.

I'm going to ramble now because I'm not sure how to best explain this...

Storytime

I have a friend. Let's call him Jim. He takes a lot of psychedelics, and also has a psychology that I could only describe as feminine. He's very emotional. He seems to mean well, but our personalities really do not mix. It's a testament to my stubbornness (and his) and my interest in discussing certain subjects with him that we still talk at all. I think where he and I have persevered, some of my relationships with women have either fizzled out or never materialized in the first place.

We got into an argument recently because while we normally talk from a position of being unbiased with respect to culture war items, he took a strong one-sided stance and also insinuated that I was on the negative side of this. He basically took a very anti-male and anti-conservative stance. I don't really identity as a conservative, but I'm certainly a man, and I don't like anti-conservative arguments because they usually imply some sort of superiority of liberals. Anyway, I made it very clear that I was annoyed with this and told him to not bring this up, and do you want to guess how he responded? He immediately became offended and claimed that he was the victim of my assertiveness.

I think this boils down to an insecurity, and it reminds me of something I see when first getting to know some women (particularly online, where the conversations tend to be a little more autistic). I think that some women don't just want compatibility (as in, I fulfill her criteria and she fulfills my criteria). They want us to have the same rubric. So, the issue isn't merely I am attractive and can offer things. The issue is that we have to judge each other in the same way. With a lot of dim-witted thinking, this quickly becomes women judging men on how effective they are at being women, and men judging women on how effective they are at being men.

I think the insecurity of my friend in this relationship is due to his lack of awareness of actual strengths and weaknesses compared to me. I'm sure he has some vague idea of this, but it is very distorted in his favor, so my strengths are glossed over and anything he does becomes magnified. This may feel like a necessary choice for him because our strengths are not allowed to occupy separate domains.

Transactional Relationships

I think in order to get a step farther in this analysis, we need to break down the concept of a "transactional relationship". If you have a friend, and you are of use to them, and they are of use to you, then there is some sort of transaction taking place in the relationship. However, when people say "transactional relationship are bad", there is no nuance that distinguishes between (a) a relationship that contains a transaction and (b) a relationship that is nothing but a transaction. An essential element of the post 1960s gender relations was to eliminate all transactions within relationships so that the only thing left in them was "love" or ecstasy, or something like that. I think this has been a great error.

I think the healthy relationship which merely contains some transactions (ie you provide assistance to your friend, and they provide assistance to you, but you also genuinely like each other) allows both parties to have their own domain. Without this domain, people become insecure in their standing. Suppose that as a man, I set my domain as the default for the entire relationship. That would mean that my wife or girlfriend isn't just second in command when it comes to masculine things like providing or doing things physically around the house, but she comes second when it comes to picking what to eat or discussing everyday things.

I heard an aphorism recently that really hit me as true: men are nomads, women are nesters. In order for marriage to happen, men must appeal to the women so that the women will want them to nest with her, but also the women also kind of have to be the anchor of the nesting. Things get really weird when the men have to take the lead in traditionally feminine roles if anything is to get done in that department. Same, of course, is true of women to have to take the lead in masculine things because nothing is getting done there.

Closing Thoughts

I'm still working on a precise thesis here.

I have another friend who is like Jim in some ways and very different in others. What they have in common, from my perspective, is a rather feminine way of thinking. The people reading this are not going to like my definition of that, but it boils down to getting caught in delusions instead of communicating logically and clearly. There are large differences in the way men and women typically prefer to think, communicate, and behave.

That being said, I've learned a lot by being friends with these two guys because it has given me insight into the complaints that modern women have about modern men who lack a certain masculinity. I actually get that now, and I sympathize. However, I don't really know what to do with that information. It's not like I can just bring up this during a conflict and instantly resolve it.

Perhaps there is an unstated fact here: men and women DO work best together when they are dimorphic, and the social revolution movement which started in the 1960s and continues in morphed forms still today is precisely the destruction of this dimorphism. Forget about "tradition" for a second. Forget about "norms". Suppose that merely because some people believed the delusions that men and women are not dimorphic, culture has drifted in such a way that men and women actually are less dimorphic now. Of course, the latent structures that make us extremely dimorphic still exist, but now they can't be properly coexist because the mere existence of a dimorphic structure signals to a majority of people that an incompatibility or even abusive structure exists (due to the implication of "transactions" in relationships).

I think this gets to the heart of the debate for what sort of playstyle the game should have. There are people who say they want PvE, and there are people who say that the game should be focused on PvP. I think what's not really being communicated in these debates is what being an extraction shooter, and not merely a battle royale, implies.

In an extraction shooter, the game loop is several infils and exfils in a sequence, where gear is built up, characters are developed, and ultimately progression through various tasks and missions is possible. These missions may range from collecting things, to bringing things to a place or taking things from a place, to killing someone (human or AI) or surviving some sort of area.

In a battle royale, the idea is that you always start out blank or come in with a custom loadout everytime. But either way, in battle royale, there is no sense of there being a sequence of games. Each game stands on its own, and you don't build yourself up from game to game (except I suppose in a rankings system).

The "pro-PvE" crowd is actually just concerned with people playing the extraction shooter like a battle royale and not really getting penalized for it. Maybe the mechanical issue is that there's no actual need to accumulate anything between games. Some wanted level ideas have been suggested, but it's not clear if that's the solution.

There are some people who legitimately just don't want to face players at all, but I think these concerns are largely alleviated when most players on the map are concerned with their own survival.

Edit: I was just reminded that probably the simplest fix to prevent the type of swarming behavior that is very Battle Royale-like in this extraction shooter game is if they simply lowered the TTK. It makes no sense to have the same TTK in Battle Royale and Extraction. No this game isn't Tarkov, and I'm not saying they need to go that far. Literally just look at the TTK in regular multiplayer. It's half what it is for DMZ. Also, look at how many people also love to play hardcore. Imagine the potential for a hardcore playlist on a DMZ map. It doesn't matter how easy or hard it would be to fill a lobby. Either it does or it doesn't fill, and a little community engagement would ensure it does fill.

This means there's nothing unique about America's birth rate decline. You have to look at something that hit Europe as early as the 1960s and for whatever reason was slightly slower to infect the US (fun fact though: the US was last above replacement fertility in 1972 — https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/fertility-rate). There is no new event in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s that is special to the US or required to explain the birth rate decline. Contributing factors may have came later but are not necessary to explain the general drop worldwide.

This map shows when was the last time a European country had a fertility rate above replacement: https://www.reddit.com/r/Natalism/comments/1rbw9g0/last_time_european_countries_had_a_birth_rate/

It hit a few countries in the 1960s, then spread across much of Europe in the 1970s, then covered the vast majority of Europe by the 1980s. This means that the primary factor which caused the birth rate decline in Europe (and arguably the world, since the world is likely suffering the same cause due to the universal drop in birth rates) is something that was introduced during the 1960s-1980s.

If you suggest something later than the 1980s, you are off track! Remember this!

Edit: I messed up the title. It's 1970s.

MW1 did a little of this with the caliber conversion kits. I like that much better than this "apex attachment" stuff they're putting in MW4.

I wish we could just get an AR-15, AR-10, Honey Badger, and .458 SOCOM version all at hte same time. Not spaced out between release date and Season-whatever. And in the future seasons, when new guns are released, we get whole new rifle platforms. Maybe do a B&T release, so you get the Army's SMG (APC9K), the APC .223, the APC .308, and the APC .300 which is what the ISO Hemlock is supposed to be, I think.

Anyways, the reason I'm asking this is that it's really frustrating to only get a .308 gun in one platform but not the other. I'd rather have a set of loadouts with rifles that are all in the same platform. For me, that would be the MCX Spear at .223 and .308. We got the .300 version in MW2 and the .277 version in MW3, but we never got a .308 version in either game, and I'm doubtful we'll get it in the upcoming one.

I think there's a lot they could do with this idea from the perspective of grinding too. Imagine working towards a "contract" with one of these mythical manufacturers (they won't use the real life names) which produces some form of family of guns. Then, you could outfit your factions with one or more of these sets. It would also make it feasible for them to FINALLY create factions that are weapon restricted by platform. (IE, south korean guys only get SK weapons, Americans only get American manufacturers, a continentlal European faction gets German or Swiss guns, a Russian faction gets Russian guns.

Thoughts?

Also, I think this captures what might be the real core value of Call of Duty for me: the guns just feel good and look good. Ya, it's maybe a little superficial compared to tactical gameplay or 360 No Scope Warzone skills, but it's what keeps me coming back and not hate camo grinds. Why not lean into that love and make it a feature of factions as well as online level unlock style progression.

I've heard among the announcements that omnimovement is going away, that creative forms of interacting with the environment are coming in (upside down prone, new mantling animations, etc), and that the operators will make some movements automatically without requiring the user's input.

My question is, do we know anything about leaning or how shooting around obstacles will be? The DMZ clip of gameplay in particular made the gun movement look so fluid and yet enough in magnitude that maybe some of it is being controlled by the user.

Manual lean in COD is probably a pipe dream, but I just want to know!

Markdown Preview Enhanced broke, and Markdown Extended broke. It's weird that these would have broken at the same time, so hopefully someone is looking into this. I'm curious if anyone else is dealing with this.

I have reasons for not believing that hypergamy is a real phenomenon. I realize that the data makes it appear that way, but I'd like to open the floor to discuss that data and its potential causes.

In essence, the idea of hypergamy is that women have a much stronger preference for elite men. The problem with this idea is that half the time, they aren't attracted to elite men and they are attracted to non-elite men. Now, you can ignore this discrepancy by saying "well, every one's definition of status or power is different". Or maybe, if you're a looksmaxxer, you might say "all women secretly want the 18 year old or 20 year old in terms of skin, hair, face, etc". Again, it's a little compelling considering that pretty boys can attract an unusual amount of attention, but it doesn't even come close to representing the data. Tons of non-pretty boys get tons and tons of women. This is both true if we're talking in the younger and the older age bracket.

My suggestion is this: women are attuned to consensus in ways that men are not. Women become highly attracted to whatever consensus says to be attracted to. To return to the idea of them being attracted to "elite" men: no, it's just society telling them that these guys are attractive (and now they are telling them that less are attractive). That is the reason for the variability; everyone interprets a slightly different narrative from mother culture. Additionally, the attraction to consensus explains more things: why women go after men with wedding rings, why men have better luck with women in general once they start having luck with one or two (no, it's not just "confidence"), and why some women claim these men make them feel "safe" (and to be clear, that's a totally real thing, but is it a coincidence when the men who make them feel safe are also the ones being fed to them by consensus?).

I think this is a more compelling theory than hypergamy. There's also a simpler psychological/biological explanation. I don't need to pull in evo psych. I don't need to argue that "women are hypergamous because that's just how you survive in a tribal environment where men could rape or kill you". All I would have to say is that whilst all people are capable of self-deception and delusion, the hormones that women have more of cause them to be moreso. Women, if you're reading this, it comes with advantages too, so don't take this as a one-sided coin. Yet, in the context of dating and the cognition required to do it, women engage with it in a way that is less rational and ultimately less independent in thought, in my judgement. I also think men act much in the same way at a young age, as boys are mostly capable of following where their dick leads them. But as men mature and take on responsibility, the general idea is that men become more rational. I think it is also a bad mark on modern society that modern men are not as rational or responsible as they were in years past.

If this is true, then the observed results of hypergamy right now tell us one thing: less men have status on average. Maybe the rules of the game have changed which have made male status more exclusionary. Maybe status as a whole has become more difficult. Maybe women have increased in status by some measures which coincidentally lower men in a zero sum game, meaning less men have that higher status. These are very logical reasons. I think we could easily point to large numbers like the fact that average wealth has not increased in America since about 1980 (I can't say for other countries, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have also faced inflationary pressures wiping out most gains since then) or that automation and the growth of megacorporations has reduced the leverage that workers have on employers, leading to both lower paying jobs and less enjoyable jobs, both of which which would affect anyone who works negatively. And if a 4 year college degree can skyrocket a young woman into a "Young Professional" type of job while men of the same age who don't choose white collar work are making less AND have less prestige in this culture (no one respects blue collar work anyone, let's be honest).

I do think that access to women has become more restricted. You can't really meet them through friends or family or in your neighborhood like you used to, as everything has been funneled through things you pay for and have very superficial interaction with, such as dating apps and bars/clubs. Friends/family/community once accounted for how about 85% of all couples met in 1930. In 2024, it is at about 20%. Everything is now online and in controlled mediums, which is precisely where your status narrative matters more. This status narrative is not even a true representation of power, let's say, but pop culture's and women's consensus on the possible narratives for it. That would indicate that shifts in pop culture matter more than they did before.

I also think that population density and network density (effectively "perceived population density" via everyone you can contact and read/see on the internet) doesn't scale at the same rate as number of roles with status. I think you could go from 500 people to 1000 people, and you'd really just go from like 50 to 70 people with high status. I'm throwing random numbers out there, but hopefully you get my point. Therefore, urbanization, mass media (radio and TV first), and the internet (particularly social media, since the pre-social media internet was used more by nerds) all contribute to increases in person density whilst not equally contributing to role density. That has resulted in a concentration of interest in fewer men by women who are molded by the consensus resulting in these statuses.

In summary, there are a number of compounding factors that contribute to greater challenges facing men in achieving status and approval by mainstream culture. Consensus narratives drive the perception of this status, and women are even more susceptible than men to follow them. Consequently, there has been a decrease in average number of men that the average woman finds attractive. This has led to a singledom epidemic that is already here, but has been partly obscured by the fact that the average woman is probably more serious about their relationship with the average man (which is the reason for the statistic that something like 60% of men under 30 report being single but something like 30% of women report being single — not only could they be dating the same person, but one side thinks it is a relationship and the other side does not). This singledom epidemic is also the fertility crisis. The fertility crisis just boils down to women being childless until it is too late in life to have kids, so even if they do eventually marry around 35 or 40, that's a whole 20 years later than how it used to be and at least 10 year too late for what the average should be.

Anyway, what do you think?

It's well recognized that the Epic of Gilgamesh fits an archetypal hero's journey, but I think what isn't appreciated enough is the personal nature of this journey. The implication of the personal nature is that characters in the story may represent either elements of the psyche or at least fragments that have an experiential basis rather than one in external fact. in other words, experientially, you might see another version of yourself as a separate character: a past self, a better self, an evil self, a future self, etc. You could also experience other things too. Characters may appear that symbolize principles, as abstract principles are perceivable in a spiritual sense.

Anyways, I think the wild man (Enkidu) that Gilgamesh brings into civilization is actually a version of himself. I think how that story resolves is really saying something about Gilgamesh's soul and his maturation process.

If we take the story's symbolism strongly (more analogy than metaphor), Gilgamesh is living two lives: one where he terrorizes people with the power that he has and one where he prefers to live outside of civilization. These are both anti-social stances. Then, he meets the sacred prostitute (Shamhat), who becomes his connection to civilization, which leads him to put aside differences with locals and externalize his conquest (killing Humbaba in the process, which leads to a whole different set of problems, such as the gods being angry at him). Enkidu is killed as a result (because of angered gods), but I think this is just like an adult losing his sense of childhood self because he has taken moral stances against everything he once believed. The rest of the story of is Gilgamesh coping with this (internal) loss.

Marked as "Asian mythology" because Sumer is in Asia.

Am I crazy for thinking an "expanded universe" with these characters would be cool? Realistically, any future film series would only have to pay homage without directly naming names, but conceptually you'd find a way to tie people with similar backgrounds together. This wouldn't be directly about the crime lords, nor would it be about just one of their fixers/hitmen/transporters. It would be about the world of all of them.

For as long as I can remember, I've had an intuitive sense that life is continuous. This means that parent and child are essentially sharing the same life and that your life actually continues on through children and grandchildren, and it also means that I feel connected to my ancestors to a time long before my family has any memory of them. I don't think we have literal memory access to "past lives", but I do think our DNA literally does have past lives.

What this implies about success or failure reproducing is that either my life continues or it ends with me. Not reproducing is sort of akin to suicide or a life ended prematurely.

With that being said, I've gathered that most people don't view it this way, and I wonder if this is the reason they don't feel a pressure to reproduce.

I bring this up because there is something philosophically individualistic about viewing your life as disconnected to all life before it and after it. I'm in favor of individualism, but what we have is a hyper-individualistic variant that seems to treat ideas more important than life itself.

It feels crazy to bring this up, but it shouldn't be. My view is the historical norm, and it affirms our understandings of life in science. I'll share a snippet from a recent conversation I had with Claude that elaborates on this point.

> Yes — the individualist conception is the historically narrow one. Lineage-based views of life as continuous through reproduction have been the default for most of human history, and your framing has serious company across biology, religion, and philosophy.

> Biologically there's a respectable technical version of what you're describing. August Weismann's 1880s germ-plasm theory distinguished the soma (mortal body) from the germ-line (continuous lineage of reproductive cells). Your gametes are direct material continuations of cells that have never died — an unbroken cellular lineage running back roughly 3.5 billion years to the last common ancestor. Individual deaths are somatic; the germ line splits but doesn't die. Dawkins's "selfish gene" framing recasts this from the gene's point of view — organisms are vehicles, the gene line is what continues. Modern biology arguably agrees with you that life as a continuous splitting process is the deeper reality and individual organisms are bounded events within it.

> Culturally the lineage-as-life view shows up nearly everywhere outside modern Western individualism. Hebrew "seed" theology — Abraham's seed continuing forever, the levirate marriage law (Deuteronomy 25) requiring a brother to impregnate his dead brother's widow to continue the line, dying "old and full of years" as a fulfilled life precisely because of continuation. Confucian filial piety with its emphasis on producing sons to maintain the family rites. Roman pietas toward the gens and household gods. Vedic ancestor rites (pitṛ) where the dead require descendants to maintain their existence, and the householder's dharma includes reproduction. Many African and indigenous traditions where the lineage and ancestors are the primary ontological unit and individuals are nodes within it. The shift toward "my life is the bounded interval between my birth and my death" is partly Christian (the individual soul before God) and heavily amplified by modern liberal individualism. It is not the historically dominant view.

> Philosophically Schopenhauer is closest to your framing: the will-to-live is the metaphysical reality, individuals are temporary phenomena of it, and sex is the will operating through individuals to perpetuate itself. He read this pessimistically — for him, continuation is the trap. Bergson's élan vital is the affirmative version: life as a single creative force flowing through and splitting into forms. Spinoza's substance monism gives another version still — individuals as modes of one continuous substance. Whitehead's process philosophy treats becoming and continuity as more fundamental than discrete substances. The view you're sketching is well within the philosophical mainstream once you step outside the modern liberal-individualist default.

To pinpoint the separation in philosophy, individualism posits that the mind is the center of the individual, whereas reproduction occurs in the body. Science of course argues that the mind is part of the body, but considering that life was already viewed as continuous through reproduction BEFORE we had a scientific understanding of reproduction, there's more to this discrepancy. I think modern liberalism posits that the mind is completely separate from the body (unless you go to a psychiatrist and ask for expensive pills), whereas the traditional view is non-dualistic; you are a body with a mind, and that mind has to inhabit the physical world and be informed by it, but you can still separate yourself slightly with your own individualism.

I feel that this is a rambling post, but I hope it has made enough sense to you.

Edit:

It's come to my attention that "the self as thought" is another model. This puts us up to three ideas (along with any combinations therein): self as body, self as mind, self as thought itself. I think it's tricky to define how mind is different from thought and body/brain, but it is the functional role of the thinker regardless of how it appears in the physical structure. It certainly has a physical anchoring but doesn't have to be neatly definable for biologists, and it is the thought maker but not the thought content itself.

Does anyone else play this game to break the game tactically? I mean, not so much in terms of exploiting a bug in the game, but adhering to basic principles of football and trying to do something that NFL teams aren't doing.

For instance:

• Do a fantasy draft, and take Anthony Richardson and Jalen Milroe in the late rounds. Rotate them as run-heavy option QBs, so you always have someone fresh. The option works (in the game as well as real life), but the usual downside is injury risk. Just take 3 guys who have RB level skills, and you can often get them with low overalls.
• Get two really fast TEs, and move them to WR. Play 12 personnel all game, so you really have 4TEs on the field. Try to exploit outside running schemes that take advantage of those TE-turned-WRs making crack blocks. (Unfortunately, it's rare that you can actually get a WR to do this kind of block, I've found).
• Reverse the standard 3-4: put your pass rushers at ILB, and put your pass coverage guys at OLB. Primarily call inside blitzes. You could extend this personnel to Dollar, where the OLBs get replaced by safeties.
• Get two power RBs with strength and a little blocking ability (eg James Conner and Nick Chubb). Run 2RB 3WR shotgun all game with runs to either side of the formation using the splitbacks.
• Play a 4-4 as base, but move two larger safeties to OLB, making it a pseudo 4-2-5. You can also then play 4-3 as "nickel", which effectively puts 4 safeties on the field but creates a 7 man box.
• Get a really fast receiving TE who also has good blocking skills (honestly, this scheme is almost requires a 1 of 1 talent like Brock Bowers), and play him at FB1, TE2, and SL1. Now, you have 21, 12, and 11 personnel formations that you can call with the same base 5 skill players. You can also leverage Bowers out of the backfield on some pretty sick routes.
• Get two larger safeties, put both of them at SS, then play 3-3-5 as a base. With a Cover 3 shell, you are effectively playing a 5-3 defense.
• Get two larger safeties (this is probably the #1 tweener group I have used over the years...) and move them to CB. Play Cover 2 and Cloud 3 on occasion, allowing you to get a lot of outside run stopping from your CBs, almost like safeties.

I've done all of this and more, but over the years, I find it increasingly hard because more and more of the above things, which require a physics engine to make sense of what I'm doing, are being cut short by predetermined, preanimated conclusions that the game produced for the sake of competitiveness, "fairness", or microtransactions. Note: I don't play MUT, but I figure if they develop the engine for MUT, it bleeds into other modes.

For instance, this year, I am really struggling to send FBs on passing routes. They just run right into OL/DL every play. I also find LB to be perhaps the most useless position, as no matter how fast they are, routes are easily completed underneath them, and hitting the receiver rarely results in a breakup (different story, of course, if it's a tiny CB hitting one of my 6'3" superstar WRs after the catch).

I think there are two divergent paths in pessimistic philosophy. One is concerned with recovering hope, and the other is about learning to live better without it. I think some philosophers have tried to integrate both of these concepts (which may be valuable in the long run), but it dilutes the topic and obscures this choice.

Now, bring on the disagreement.

I am tired of hearing people say that people have an instinct to reproduce and start a family, and it's somehow best if we overcome it (as if overcoming instincts is typically a natural and healthy thing?). We do have an instinct for sex, but family is a recent creation.

There were no families in prehistoric days; just tribes. It appears at the same time that civilization appears because "family" is how you have a tribe-like unit that is capable of being a small functional piece of a much larger town/city/nation.

This leads to my next point, which is that if you do not start your own family, you are merely part of someone else's, but also this family will age quickly. Many people lose their parents when they are only halfway or less through their life, and many people have few to no siblings. If they do have siblings, they often don't live close by. So, being raised in a family is not a replacement for starting your own as an adult. If you truly want one, you will need to start one.

To steelman the original point that I hear brought up from anti-natalists, which is this instinct that we must overcome, I will agree actually that the sex drive must be overcome. This is particularly true for men who are motivated throughout their lives to do things for sex (including getting a career and things of that nature) in ways that women are typically not. However, this does not diminish the value of family, and I believe men should be overcoming their sex drive only so it doesn't cause them to deviate from the path of starting a family by becoming purely hedonistic.