So I just fucking did it.
I bought and downloaded Marvel’s Midnight Suns.
Finally got sick of my own hand-wringing about the whole thing and just fucking got the damned thing already.
Was that the “right” decision? I don’t know and I don’t care.
Fuck it. Life’s too short to waste time looking back. You make the decision the best you can and you keep going,
Seems like my kind of game, good reviews, my fave superheroes, and so on.
Worst case scenario, I end up hating it and returning it. Big fucking deal.
Somewhere in my head, there is a thick-headed Neanderthal of a man who lives in a perpetual state of simmering rage and who has little patience for nuance and abstractions, preferring to strong-arm his way through life.
I could learn a lot from that guy.
Anyhow, I have tried the game now and I have good news and bad news.
The good news is that it seems like a pretty damned good game so far. Excellent voice acting, fun dialogue, very interesting and fun combat system (I got to take out three Hydra goons by having Captain Marvel kick a couch at them!), and so on.
The bad news is that it runs really crappily. In fact it ran so bad the first time I ran it that it took it ten minutes to get halfway through displaying the Firaxis logo.
I gave it the ol three finger CTRL-ALT-DELETE treatment, shut it down in Task Manager, then shut down Chrome and Thunderbird before trying it again.
Then, it just barely managed to load over ten painful minutes of disk thrashing and strangulated audio quality, and I was able to play.
But the audio gets out of sync during the cinematics and this game has a LOT of cinematics, so that’s a serious thing.
And the chunkiness of the performance makes the turn based battle scenes a bit trying.
So overall, it’s about as stressful to play as No Man’s Sky has become since the latest god damned update.
Hope they fix THAT shit soon.
So anyhow, because of the performance issues, I am not entirely sold on Marvel’s Midnight Suns yet.
But I have hope because before I quit, I lowered the graphics quality settings and hopefully that will perk up the performance some.
I’m not looking for smooth as glass performance at high resolutions, just synced up audio and a lot less lurching about.
I’ve been pricing RAM on Amazon.ca and it looks like I could get another 32 gig of RAM for around a hundred bucks.
That should help a ton. And I might be able to afford it this month if I am careful.
Of course, then I would need dear Spuug to come install it for me.
Plus I would want to make sure it’s the RIGHT kind of ram for my motherboard and whatever. I still remember the bad old days when if you bought the wrong kind of RAM, it wouldn’t even plug in let alone work.
Things are probably way saner now but the paranoia lingers on.
Why people don’t like utilitarianism
Because to them, ethics is warm and numbers are cold and therefore the two cannot be the same ever.
To them, numbers are the opposite of ethics. They despise quantitative thinking in general and anything that looks like a spreadsheet in particular.
They hate utilitarianism because they hate math and therefore any suggestion that you might need to know and use math to be ethical offends them to their core.
Because utilitarianism suggests that morality is, at least in theory, a solvable problem. They prefer to think of ethics as a mysterious, unknowable thing where there is always room for debate and interpretation and nuance and therefore the idea that it could, in in way and in any situation, be definitely solved with a calculator shocks them.
But the biggest reason people hate utilitarianism, I think, is because it leads to conclusions that don’t feel right. Conclusions that fly in the face of our built in ethical programming that comes from our evolution as a social species. Conclusions that say that the right course of action might leave you feeling horrible.
Looked at like that, I can totally understand some people’s reaction to utilitarianism. If you have spent your whole life doing what feels right, and let that feeling be the very foundation of your sense of right and wrong, the idea that said feeling can be wrong according to some cold blooded calculations is an outright obscenity.
And I am saying this as a lifelong utilitarian.
Because none of this actually proves that utilitarianism IS wrong, just that it FEELS wrong, and while that is understandable, it isn’t rational.
In fact, by definition, utilitarianism can’t be wrong. It is just the seeking of the greater (or greatest) good. Therefore, to oppose it is to argue for the lesser good or greater evil.
This is exactly how ethic works even in people who have never even heard of utilitarianism. The only difference is in how we determine the greater good.
For some, the greater good is determined by what feels like the best choice. They weigh things in their minds, contemplating one option than the other, to see which one feels like the right one.
But for someone like me, numbers are preferable. I don’t trust emotions. I can’t verify their truth. Anyone can tell which number is bigger and that conclusion cannot be argued with in the same way as some nebulous emotion.
That said, most real world ethical situations do not come with numbers attached. So while I am comforted by utilitarianism’s logical rigor, I am far too pragmatic to imagine that numerical utilitarianism is applicable to every situation.
And in the absence of numerical information, I imagine my moral reasoning is not that different than anyone else’s. I try to figure out what is the morally superior option.
My conclusions might seem coldhearted to some in some circumstances and there is no guarantee they will feel right, but I am just trying to find the truth in the best way I know how and that makes sense to me.
You might just have to shoot the hostage.
But only if you are sure there is literally no better option.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.