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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • With the renewed interest from the show, it would make sense for Microsoft to get someone else working on a Fallout game since Bethesda isn’t going to do it any time soon. However, I would think that Obsidian would be the more natural choice. I would guess that MS would prefer to utilize one of the studios they own rather than license it out, but I could be wrong about that.

    And even if they did license out development on a Fallout game, I would assume that they would be in a hurry to get something out there, which would make Larian far less appealing to them. I agree that they would probably make an amazing Fallout game, but another studio would probably make a decent enough game that costs less to develop and pays off sooner.


  • The problem is that we have so little media that is both trusted and trustworthy. That so many people don’t actively seek out reliable information and think critically about it. Many just find a source that confirms their bias and feeds their emotional state, while others just passively absorb from those around them and on social media. And once you’ve bought the lies and misinformation, anyone that tries to tell you the truth becomes suspicious, because you know they are wrong.

    And because the never ending stream of bullshit is both a lucrative industry and a source of immense political power, there is a vested interest in keeping it highly polarized and partisan. They have to tie it to your identity and tell you that this is what your country stands for, so that you know that everyone who disagrees is an enemy.

    Anti-vaxxers are nothing new, but they were never so openly embraced by a political party (to say nothing of those who have claimed that vaccines are suddenly against their religion, discovering a prohibition that no religion has ever had prior to 2020). They don’t care how many people will suffer or die because of their actions, as long as they can benefit from it politically. Sadly, this is a fairly consistent theme on the right.




  • You know, maybe if you prioritized getting a really good script before shooting the movie, you wouldn’t have to keep reworking the thing. Scripts are cheap, it costs practically nothing to just keep working on them until you have something really smart and creative.

    Or you could slap something together based on the studio roadmap and notes from marketing, because it’s all just a placeholder and half of it will be replaced in post production when they decide what they want the movie to actually be. Why pay a good writer or two when you can work an entire vfx studio half to death trying to crunch their way through to the release date?



  • “A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I’d talked about it, I’d hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me, we put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.”

    So, no they didn’t know the “deepest secrets” of the lore 20 years ago. One guy had vague notions in his head, and they only actually fleshed it out when they were working on Inquisition.


  • One of the things that sets the original apart from a lot of other open world survival craft games is that it was designed to be a single-player experience. Hopefully they can make it work well for both solo and co-op, but that’s a tricky balance.

    One thing I’d really like to see is for creatures to be able to damage structures, and to balance that by having defenses to protect those structures. Being able to throw together an invincible fortress in seconds made some of the dangerous areas a lot less threatening.





  • This video is dumb. It’s making contradictory criticisms while having no alternative of its own to suggest.

    The heroes don’t use their powers to radically alter the world because, first and foremost, then it wouldn’t be our world, it would be a very different one. Once you actually apply all the innovations that should be possible, the setting starts looking more like Star Trek, and it becomes a very different story. This is the same reason that Batman will never keep his villains off the street, whether he captures them or kills them. It’s the same reason the Doctor always makes his way back to current year earth somewhere in the UK. The status quo they are maintaining is the one that let’s us continue telling this kind of story.


    Second, things like time travel and reality altering magic, things which can fundamentally change our world in an instant have to be kept limited, or we have no more stories. This goes beyond just the status quo of the setting and gets into the basics of storytelling and having tension. Make your heroes too powerful with no limitations, and you can’t maintain a conflict without gigantic plotholes.

    Second and a half, fundamentally altering the world with time travel or super science or magic is a concept that should be terrifying in its implications. Maybe time travel could alter the timeline for the better, but who gets to decide what is better, and what trade offs are worth it? Who gets to decide that it’s worth unmaking millions of lives to alter history into something you think might be better? And how many ways can it go wrong? The world is a complicated place, you can’t make sudden drastic changes without inflicting a lot of harm, even if you think the good it does will outweigh the harm. And doing so with forces that we may not fully understand or control is reckless. I mean, fuck, Ultron is the example they give of something to change the world, and would you trust the people making AI today to put that in a self-aware army of iron man robots?


    Third, what kind of message would it send if the heroes used some bullshit super science or magic solution that quickly and easily solved environmental issues or social problems? Is that really addressing the issues in a way that’s helpful for us in the real world? Is it setting an example for us to follow when they aren’t faced with any of the real difficulties that come with solving those problems? it seems like that would just be dismissing the problem and implicitly endorsing the kind of vaporware solutions that polluting industries often try to hype up to avoid real change.


    Fourth, do you really think the world would end up better if a small group of super powered individuals tried to overthrow governments, destabilize economies, and transform civilization by force? We’re not just talking about intervening in a specific conflict like Ukraine or Palestine here, the video makes that clear. If at the end of the day, they aren’t radically altering society, they are just defending the status quo. But, how do you think that would actually play out, especially in a world where there are other super powered individuals who will oppose them? World domination by benevolent dictators imposing their will on society while tearing the current order down by force is not going to be pretty, it’s going to be a fucking nightmare. And let’s be honest, none of our heroes have shown the capacity for building back the world they would be destroying, which is the much harder part.

    Well, actually, no, despite criticizing the heroes for not using their powers to single-handedly institute radical change the video goes on to argue that change would actually require larger movements lead by the public, and condemns the idea of an elite few hogging power (should iron man be flooding the streets with military hardware? And how the fuck is the hulk suppose to share his power?). So, what then is the right thing for them to do? I guess they should engage in peaceful activism and support the people when they aren’t called away to stop some murdering asshole from killing a bunch of innocent people. So, basically what we have now, but with a few more scenes of them making political statements and doing volunteer work that doesn’t actually contribute to the plot.


    Fifth, the villains are sometimes given sympathetic motivations because we want some nuance and complexity. The world is complicated and most conflicts are not just black and white. The lesson isn’t that change is bad and evil, it’s that you can’t just view the world in such simplified terms. The alternative of making the villains all bad and the heroes all good is actually far more dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that we can just see the world in simple us vs them terms, with no need to understand other points of view or to question our own.


    Sixth, they do fight the status quo, just not the parts that the video wants to address. Daredevil can’t solve all the world’s problems but he can and does fight both organized crime and corruption. Captain America isn’t going to overthrow the government, but he will fight SHIELD when it crosses the line. Iron Man changed his own company to address its role in the world, and uses it to innovate to make the world a better place, that’s just not the focus of the story.






  • Just what we need, more walled gardens and exclusivity deals. And of course, another way of monetizing your data, because we don’t have enough of that already.

    Search results are already fucked enough as it is. We don’t need to start carving up the internet and and dividing it among different search engines.




  • On the one hand, yes, these movies are products being churned out for profit by a corporate machine that cares more about marketability than creativity or quality. Anyone signing up for a big studio blockbuster production (superhero movie or not) should know exactly what they are getting into.

    On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with actors in flopped movies pointing out that they flopped in no small part because they are the product of a system that seems focused on everything but the quality of movie being made.

    And it absolutely can be life changing when it works. Just look at the early MCU movies and tell me that they didn’t have a huge impact on careers. Of course younger actors who take these roles are hoping they will be life-changing. You don’t become a superstar by doing nothing but small independent arthouse films that kill at festivals and award shows and are never seen by the general public.

    And finally, I gotta call bullshit on the assumption that you can’t have artistry or depth in movies based on “some fucking universe for cartoon characters.” There’s no reason why a superhero movie (or any other genre film) can’t be more than just a two hour trailer for itself, or a soulless vehicle for merchandise. It’s not the medium that the IP came from that determines the artistic value of the movie adaptation, it’s the people making the movie (and the suits controlling them) that determine whether it will be a cinematic masterpiece or further proof that AI generated movies are inevitable.