Ran

Take "pockets" as just... what you describe: places where things are going along and things where they definitely aren't. If the world is still scarred by the apocalypse, it's post-apocalyptic. Once it's all recovered, it's basically post-post-apocalyptic. On this show, the giant roaches, the gulpers, the rad meters, etc., all of it says "post-apocalyptic". The power armor and the healing tech are advancements (at least compared to our world, I don't know how they compare to pre-war 2077), but it's still post-apocalyptic.

Ahem. Civility, folks.

John Carter had a lot of bad luck. It looked great, story was fine, it's a fun setting, but yeah, the marketing certainly dropped the ball, and I feel critics were really unkind to it given it was trying to do something new.

A Fallout game without the "post-apocalyptic vibe" isn't really a Fallout game, I'd think, so I can understand why someone like Avellone would think that has to be an enduring element of the games. And presumably why it is, in fact, an enduring element of the series. Right. But if the creator and lead of the series says, "You all know this world is a dead end, right? At the end of it all, it's the cockaroaches that'll be running thing, humanity will be gone," I'm sure a lot of people may say "Well, what's the point?" but it's all illusory. It's fiction. It's not real. Disregard what they say. Or embrace it, and enjoy the hopeless struggle for the sake of the struggle. Take whatever I say with a grain of salt. My total knowledge of Fallout comes through cultural osmosis and four episodes of the TV show. I've never played the games. I just know that when someone says Fallout to me, it's a game set in a post-apocalyptic world along the lines of Mad Max or Wastelands. There's nomads, there's factions, there's pockets of recovery and pockets of chaos, etc. I've never heard of a Fallout game that doesn't have something along these lines, presumably because they wouldn't really be Fallout.

I think Avellone's point is that people who want to play Fallout want to be in something recognizably post-apocalyptic rather than in some stage of having put the apocalypse behind you and steaming ahead through recovery. I suspect one reason to set games in different locations and times and featuring different protagonists is in part to maintain that vibe rather than being left to wonder, "Gosh, we've played games improving this same place over x years, but it's all the same." Well, what you did is a drop in the bucket against something that swept the globe. Shady Sands, whatever that is, may prosper now, but that's a small place in a big ol' wasteland. Is that "the point"? I'm sure it's one notion the creators had, but I suspect they mostly wanted to give people a post-apocalyptic setting to enjoy gaming in with mutants and monsters and crazy societies. I think that's more Avellone's idea. I took the statement to mean that the games (since he's a game writer and creator, that must be what he cares about foremost) are always going to have the crazy post-apocalypse. If some game ends with law and order and justice and civil society being restored, the next game either needs to knock it down or alternatively go somewhere else where the post-apocalypse wasteland is still a thing. I'm sure the number of people who want to play a Fallout game set 1,000 years into the future where the world has recovered is relatively small, and I suspect they would wonder why you're calling it "Fallout" anyways if the disastrous apocalypse is no longer front and center in the game. You can imagine whatever you want happens, regardless of what Avellone or Howard or anyone tells you. Personally, I think the reason to invest in factions or characters is because they and their journey appeal to you in the moment when you're playing and not because you believe the destination is anything other than a mirage. I've played Cyberpunk 2077 in full 3.5 times, knowing after the first one that my character's future is not great in every ending possible, and yet I was invested because the journey of the game was fantastic.

I've got no issue with the idea that it's in the conversation. I think anyone who has decided that it is in fact the greatest RPG of all time, especially when they lack much knowledge of RPGs from before they were a gamer, is suffering recency bias, and I stand by that.

Is that really a crazy position, that a series about living in the apocalyptic wasteland should stay apocalyptic?

I should add that I meant not that Chrono Trigger appears on multiple lists, but rather that it's #1 on multiple relatively recent lists. On top of that, a poll of JRPG fans from 3 years ago on Reddit listed it as the 7th most played game (!!!!) despite it being 26 years old at that point, and it was also the #1 RPG in a separate poll there 4 years ago. There seems to be a zillion articles and blogs and forum posts touting it as the all-timer. Sadly, not a JRPG fan, but I'll check out the video to learn more about how such an old game has kept people enthralled.

I know it's a JRPG. I know nothing else about it, other than the fact that it's a game from 1995 that appears on multiple and relatively recent "greatest RPGs of all time" lists, which is pretty remarkable.

Seen the first two episodes. The second episode narrowly avoided Linda's "nope, not watching any more" list, It's very gory and also very off-kilter with its humor, which I guess is probably in line with the Fallout franchise (which I have never played before). Interested in seeing how it develops. And even without a nose, Walter Goggins is always watchable. I can sort of feel where it might start to wear thin, tonally, if they take a more languid pace. Rapaport in particular made me LOL when I realized who he was. Good casting.

No.

The recency bias is strong.

The UK too, at this rate. Olly Alexander has been particularly targeted by protesters for nonsensical reasons. The EBU has put out a statement decrying the attacks on artists.

Generally positive reviews, especially about the look of the show, though THR says that the pacing is a bit languorous in a way that can be frustrating. (It's also fairly explicit about a spoiler I think everyone guessed, but just saying.), and Brian Lowry at CNN echoes it saying it gets a bit messy narratively.

Yes, that makes more sense. I need to rewatch the scene.

Some very interesting departures from the book, I have to say, especially I do wonder at the consistency of Mariko's character, though. Up to this latest episode, we understood her desire for death as being due to the infamy of her father and the shame it brought on her. But to Buntaro, she says it's being married to him that makes her want to die, and she'd be willing to live a thousand years rather than die together with hmim. It seemed pretty honest and legitimate, not just something calculated, but if so it's a complete change regarding her feelings as recently as the previous episode.

You have to go to Source after the embed, and edit out the strange character they use for the country code abbreviations. Our board doesn't support them presently. I've gone ahead and done it for your post. As to accuracy of predictions, in the last years 4 of 6 winners were #1 in the odds a month out, and in all six of the last six years, the winners were at least in the top 4 of odds. So right now the likely winner is Switzerland, with a chance that Croatia, Italy, or Ukraine surprises. Right now "The Code" isn't so far ahead of 2nd and 3rd that it's a runaway, and we'll see how things shift as we get more live performances. ETA: I'm with you, I prefer the runner-up to Tali's "Fighter".

Finished The Regime from HBO, starring Kate Winslet. It was kind of bonkers and off-kilter, but I can't say it was superlative television. I feel like Will Tracy was trying to do something Armando Iannucci-like, and didn't quite have the chops to really get something scathing. Also, as to the finale, Also re-watched Shot Caller, starring Nikolaj Koster-Waldau in what may be his single best performance. A prison thriller, he plays a stockbroker who ends up on a DUI manslaughter charge, and ends up being forced by circumstances to join up with a skinhead gang to protect himself. What goes on from there is often ugly and brutal, and as "Money" (as he comes to be known) we end up moving back and forth in time as we learn the costs of his survival. The script is actually quite well done. Jon Berenthal also features, and he's always worth watching.

Jeez, how could I forget Hades? It's the other game I played heavily in 2020, although technically its release date for early access makes it 2018.

Indeed, after a 20 year break. I think the song is solid, but unfortunately the bookies have it as among the very bottom. Once we're closer to the final, it'll be interesting consider who'll make it through each of the semis. Here's Tali's "Fighter", for Luxembourg, for those wondering: Not much movement in the odds the last days, but the London pre-Eurovision party took place without too much to note except that Austria's Kaleen gamely performed through a "wardrobe malfunction" that started almost immediately from the first dance break. I see among the hardcore fans that people have liked her "We Will Rave" but felt that she came off as too impersonal and media polished, and the humor and good-nature with which she dealt with her wardrobe issue made a few people warm up to her more:

Jeesh, favorite releases over my lifetime... 1978: Air-Sea War - Battle (played on the Atari 2600 at least 6 or 7 years after the fact; 1984 to 1986, thereabouts) 1979: Space Invaders (ditto) 1980: Star Raiders (ditto) 1981: Jupiter Lander (Played some years after release on a Commodore VIC-20) 1982: Tough year, with Dig Dug, Pitfall!, and Q*bert all in the same year. And Zaxxon, too. I'm thinking most of these were in the arcade when I played them (years after their releases, of course) so I'll go with Pitfall! which we had on the Atari a few years later. 1983: The old Star Wars arcade game with its vector graphics for the assault of the Death Star. 1984: 1942. (Didn't play until we got an NES in 1988-1989. 1985: Super Mario Bros.. (Ditto) 1986: Metroid (Ditto) 1987: Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! (Ditto) 1988: Super Mario Bros. 3 with an honorable mention to Tetris which properly released on the NES the next year. 1989: Strider 1990: Wing Commander with a bullet, honorable mention to Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire. Oh, and Super Mario World, though I wouldn't have an SNES at the time -- think we got in in 1992. 1991: Wing Commander II and Street Fighter II. WC2 was sort of the pinnacle of space sims for me for a long time, but as SFII went from arcade to SNES, I probably ended up playing it a lot more. 1992: Wolfenstein 3D and King's Quest VI with its fully-voiced CD-ROM. Bonus nod to Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant. 1993: Doom, Star Wars: X-Wing, Frontier: Elite II, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Merchant Prince, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, Star Fox, Master of Orion, Sim City 2000... yeesh, what a year. I've fond memories of all of them, but I'm going to go with Master of Orion. 1994: Star Wars: TIE Fighter or X-COM... yeesh. TIE Fighter I suppose, I went through so many cheap joysticks thanks to space and flight sims. I also played Hammer of the Gods a lot. 1995: Interesting year, not a lot leaping out at me that I really played with any great intensity. Maybe Heroes of Might and Magic? 1996: Civilization II and Quake, but more the former than the latter. That was my first Civ game. It ate way too many of my study hours when I started university. After this year, I never played a console again, and 99% of gaming was on PC (the other 1% being arcade games like Virtua Fighter). A more obscure game I'll add is Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, a sadly rather forgotten voxel-based game from the late, great LookingGlass Technologies. It's a first person tactical shooter where you play a power-armored soldier in a squad sent on missions. Some really memorable times playing that game. 1997: SubSpace, my first foray into competitive multiplayer games. It's kind of like a multi-player Asteroids, but you attack one another or try to capture the flag, etc. Lots of different modes. This was the point in time where I start to play video games a lot less often, so there may be some year-skipping going on soon. 1998: Soulcalibur at the university's student union arcade. 1999: The Longest Journey, one of the great point-and-click adventures, and kind of a last gasp for the genre in a lot of ways. Honorable mention to FreeSpace 2 and The King of Dragon Pass, a narrative strategy game set on Glorantha in the Runequest tabletop RPG universe. 2000: I missed a lot of the games that year, but I did play Ground Control. 2002: Freedom Force, absolutely fantastic super hero RPG that captured the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby silver age. Also, Medieval: Total War. 2003: Freelancer 2004: Rome: Total War and Sid Meier's Pirates!... I'd go with the latter over the former, played it I don't know how many times. 2006: Medieval II: Total War and the sequel to The Longest Journey, Dreamfall. 2007: Team Fortress 2 is one of the games I've spent the most time playing in a long while. I still pop in on occasion, despite the hackers, just for the sake of nostalgia and some easy fun. 2008: Mirror's Edge, classic parkour first person. 2009: Braid, Machinarium, and the renaissance for indie games about to begin. 2011: Bastion from Supergiant games, who'd go on to make a number of great games, including the awesome Hades. 2012: Crusader Kings II was my first introduction to Paradox's grand strategy games, and I made my first foray into Far Cry with the 3rd entry in the game. Also, the terrific Sleeping Dogs: But the true winner is the MMO The Secret World from Funcom, led by Ragnar Tornquist of The Longest Journey. We didn't play it that first year or two, but it was the first MMO Linda and I ever played, and we went deeeeep into it, hooking up with a cabal of mostly-Scandinavian players (plus the odd Brit and German). It ate up waaaay too much time until the game started to collapse on itself, and the revamp to Secret World Legends in 2017 kind of took the luster off of it and we stopped, alas. We miss it sometimes. After that it gets very tough to find anything. TSW kept me going until 2017, with the occasional foray into TF2 when I felt like it, but otherwise... ETA: 2018: Hades, although that was the early access release whereas I started playing it in 2020. It was a nice lead-up to the next game on the list.. 2020: Cyberpunk 2077, followed by the 2023 release of its expansion Phantom Liberty, possibly the best game and certainly the best expansion to a game I've ever played. I could easily do another run of that game. Outside of TSW and maybe TF2 (and Street Fighter 2 and its variants back in the day), it may be my single most-played game.

Watched In The Land of Saints and Sinners, a Liam Neeson film from last year set in Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s. It's in some ways a typical late-era Neeson film, where he's playing a man with a past who has a certain set of skills, but it's enlivened by the period setting, especially footage of the west coast in Co. Donegal, as well as the cast which includes Colm Meaney as a fixer, Neeson's long-time friend Ciarán Hinds as a garda, and especially Kerry Condon in a fiery performance as an IRA terrorist. (Oh, also Jack Gleeson -- aka Joffrey -- back out of retirement from acting, doing a good turn as a cheerful sociopath) I've enjoyed Condon's performances ever since I first saw her, years ago, in Rome as Octavia, and this particular performance shows a very different kind of character, flinty and hard and uncompromising. The film's let down a little bit by its rather formulaic back quarter, everything pretty much ends up as you expect it to, but it's a fun enough ride as that goes, and apparently most critics feel it's a sight better than a number of Neesons' recent paycheck films.

Loved all the call backs, and the Seinfeld-finale meta. Only thing I regret? No Jon Hamm. He killed it every time he was on the show, would have been fun to have a cameo from him.

Griffith is a pretty awesome character, though, just looked at as a whole. But if they like Griffith specifically for (spoilery horrible stuff), then yeah, I get your point.

It's really charmingly well-done, I have to say. Damon's charismatic, the casting is spot on for everyone, great humor, great pacing. Honestly, it's one of Scott's best films.