Ran

20 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

I'm more in the traditionalist camp there (even if I admittedly have no horse in this race).

Notre Dame is a historical landmark, so it should remain as original as possible.

I find that strange. I think the major elements that make it identifiable now, like its spire and stained glass, should stay as they are... but I don't really see any reason why plain glass windows that are unremarkable and that no one remembers (except in that they don't compare to the stained glass elsewhere) can't be replaced. Hell, they probably have been replaced, as glass cracked or broke, and are more Theseus's Ship than anything.

3 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Yeaaaaaaaahhhh…

No.

Even to upgrading the north tower windows? Remember, the spire and stained glass are from the mid-19th century. Nothing says that the Cathedral needs to be entirely stuck in the mid-1800s. Something that's a clear upgrade seems reasonable.

8 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Huh?  I thought Notre Dame was being rebuilt as it was.

It is, but there were debates about it, and Macron has been a big proponent for adding modern touches. He wanted a modern spire, that was vetoed, then he proposed replacing the (perfectly intact) stained glass from 1859 with modern stained glass, I think that's also been vetoed or at least people aren't keen. I saw a nice proposal of replacing the north tower's plain glass windows with contemporary stained glass as a way to update.

Heartening to see members of the public joining efforts to save the artworks in Børsen, though. I think I read that they were able to save quite a lot, between the efforts to contain the fire and the efforts to get things in danger to safety.

Shame about the spire, though. Such an awesome design.

Decided to Google and Reddit surfaced this idea of MIRVs coming in, both by night (very clear) and by day (less clear, but still, you'd probably be able to see it with the naked eye as they streaked down out of the sky):

Speaking of Conan, he featured in probably the greatest episode of Hot Ones of all time: 

23 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Well, not if vault tec was planting them.

Right. But even if they didn't, would we really see an atomic warhead coming in before it exploded at the distance we see the city at? I don't know. Maybe not.

The one thing I wonder at when we saw the explosions was... would we actually see the bombs falling before they hit? Probably not. I guess they'd just be MIRV style warheads, right, on ballistic trajectories? I tried to rewatch the scene to see if they CGed a blip of dark something plummeting to the ground prior to each explosion, but no.

Finished Ripley, a new adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, written and directed entirely by Steven Zaillian (writer/co-writer of Schindler's List, Searching for Bobby Fisher, Clear and Present Danger, Gangs of New York, Moneyball (with Sorkin), The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, and The Irishman). It's an absolutely gorgeous show to watch, shot in sumptuous black-and-white by cinematographer Robet Elswit (There Will be Blood, Good Night, and Good Luck, Bologie Nights, Mangolia, Punch-Drunk Love, etc.), with really great production design capturing 1961 Italy. Zaillian uses some very formal camera work and tropes -- I particularly love all the shots of people going up and down stair cases, sometimes brightly-lit Italian village cliffside climbs, other times dark interiors of old palazzos. 

I do think at eight episodes it meanders a bit -- it feels very "European" -- and the biggest flaw, in my mind, is the casting -- everyone is too old for this story. Andrew Scott's Ripley is reptilian, a cold sociopath who hides behind vague amiability, but he's at least 20 years too old for the part. Johnny Flynn (younger half-brother of GoT's own Jerome Flynn, aka Bronn) is also about 15-20 years too old, and his performance is that of a very mediocre, kind of whiny trust fund baby, nothing like Jude Law's lively, 1000-watt presence in Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley, but the TV show follows the line of the books closer in this regard. While it raises one question for me -- why would this nebbish Dickie Greenleaf let Tom hang around for months if neither he nor Marge likes him; this is a question Minghella's version fixes by making Dickie wilder and Tom capable of easy latching on to his obsession for jazz to appeal to him.

Also featuring is Dakota Fanning as Marge, a quieter and more studied performance compared to Gwyneth Paltrow's, but it works well. Alas, the show does not have a Philip Seymour Hoffman to inhabit Freddy Miles, his loud, smarmy cruel frat boy who makes a big entrance and steals every scene he's in. They go a very different direction with Freddy (perhaps closer to the novel), where he's a sophisticated Brit, a "playwright" allegedly, but a wealthy dilettante mostly. He's played by Eliot Sumner, the non-binary child of Sting (the singer, not the pro wrestler), but there's no toying with the idea that Freddy is anything but a male on the show (we get a glimpse of his passport at one point). He's much quieter in his sneering, more sophisticated than Hoffman's character, but in the end Sumner's is among the least of the main performances.

Anyways, it's very sumptuous, and fun. I prefer Minghella's film because it's more direct and I think the changes made to the story really work, but if you want to see something much closer to the novel (except I gather it veers strongly at the end to do its own thing), this is it. Though I have seen people say the 1960 French film Purple Noon, with a young and beautiful Alain Delon as Ripley, is worth watching.

(Oh, also, John Malkovich has a cameo in a cute nod to the fact that he played an older Ripley in Ripley's Game.)

It tells a relatively complete story within its 8 episodes, with a couple of hooks leading to a next season. There's no reason someone shouldn't see it just because the 2nd season is an unknown.

Howard and the game's design director both say it's canon and imply people are jumping to conclusions about some things. Maybe there's a mistake or something, but the canonicity of the general story of the show does not seem to be in question.

@Corvinus85

Probably a joke reference like that. I also liked how they basically look like oversized golf bags in terms of their shape, which is poking fun a the concept of Brotherhood of Steel squires caddying for their knights.

Pretty sure any uses of 'Wyl' without an article are just like Ned being called 'Stark'. I don't think we know his first name.

Re: Moldaver,

It's retrofuturistic, basically a representation of how people in the 50s thought the future would look -- kind of recognizably like their era, but with their aesthetics applied to the "futuristic" bits.

George went through and made corrections, additions, etc. to that section, so I think he felt it was an acceptable usage, at least in the context of a maester in Oldtown.

Done binging it. Linda and I both quite liked it (she could have done with less gore). It's not the greatest TV show ever, but it's very, very solidly entertaining, the pacing never flags and make you feel a scene is going on to long, and it's well-performed. It's an excellent genre show, an excellent adaptation of a video game, and (if I may say so) I probably prefer it to The Last of Us because the setting, if nothing else, is much more inventive.  She preferred the back half to the first half, as it dove more and more into the lore and the grand design of the seasons started coming together, and I think there's something to that for me as well as we spent more and more time

The way it's left with some major questions hanging and a foreshadowing of the future season also was a great way to go. Very surprised but pleased that at least one character I expected to die will be making it to the next season. 

There are some dangling questions that I'm not sure we'll get answered,

Another one I think I can ask openly: are the Brotherhood of Steel people supposed to be extremely tolerant of pain through training, drugs, genetic manipulation, or what? Both Maximus and *other character* take significant injuries and either barely react or fail to crumple into screaming agony as would happen with most normal people. Or maybe this is a game nod, and the way characters can take massive wounds and then recover with barely a squeak?

Finally, the finale does touch on the idea of

@Rhom Verify the integrity of the files.on Steam.

Linda recognized an actor and was trying to figure out where she knew him from. Turns out it's Chris Parnell, who (among many other things) does the voice of Jerry on Rick and Morty, which she doesn't even watch, but has heard me watching enough that she somehow picked up the similarity.

I was totally thrown because I'd assumed it was an actor who performed in some live action show and didn't get it and assumed I couldn't place him because of 

4 minutes ago, Nictarion said:

Rewatching the old HBO series Tales from the Crypt for the first time since I was a kid. It’s crazy how many fairly big stars they had on this. 

The one featuring Joe Pesci is the only one that's really stuck with me. I suspect that has to do more with his co-stars than him and his fate, though; I was 14 when it aired. Heh.

Fan estimates of the population of North America in 2277 range from 10 million to 25 million, with the NCR apparently canonically set at 700k people.. Boston has like 10k-11k people. Estimates of the entire population of North America range from 10 million to 25 mllion The EU Fallout map is explicit that it's speculative and includes fan-fic-created locales, apparently, to try and fill out the half-empty map. This is apparently a semi-canon map with only canon tribal and nation-state territory guesses... whole lot of nothing listed, though.

If this is not a post-apocalyptic world, I don't know what it is. It still seems like a mostly lawless continent filled with undeveloped wastelands with pockets (yes, pockets) of tribes, cults, and glorified city-states. I can't answer as to force projection, but then Imperator Joe sends his forces hundreds of miles chasing after Furiosa, so... does having technology that let you travel large distances mean you're no longer post-apocalyptic?

No doubt I'd have a different impression if I actually played the games. 

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.

15 minutes ago, Werthead said:

 for why the post-apocalyptic vibe has somewhat endured

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.

13 minutes ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

Well the Fallout games were never about the personal story of the protagonist and their relationships unlike Cyberpunk 2077. It was always more about the world

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.

5 hours ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

Yes. Because a setting should not stay stagnant if there is supposed to be a point to it

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.

5 hours ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

and the point of Fallout was to explore how a society/humanity would move on from the apocalypse.

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.

5 hours ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

And if that means that you cannot tell "Fallout" stories anymore, than so be it. A time-limited setting isn't something bad. Tolkien recognized that 4th Age stories would have to be very different from what came previously and Middle-earth is undiminished as a setting. It's also not like that they have no room for more Fallout stories. Probably most of the US is still untouched.

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.

5 hours ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

Additionally, if there is no chance of advancing beyond the post-nuclear hellhole stage, why should I get invested in any of the factions and characters who want to improve the wasteland?

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.