karaddin

Yeah taking kids you've just invested almost 6 years into training up and feeding them into the infantry meat grinder is some real "Saturn devouring his son" energy. Even if it worked at this point, it would make a pyrrhic victory seem aspirational.

Sorry I'm still half asleep so this is going to be a terrible explanation but... Watsonian = looking at the writing choices etc from inside the story, things like "the character could never have done anything else given who they have been established as". This perspective works for looking at Joel's decision to kill them all and save Ellie Doylist = looking at the writing choices from the meta story perspective, so in this case knowing the author wanted to create maximum conflict for the player then the cure would have worked even if the science looks a little flimsy from inside the story In an ideal world the author manages to align these perspectives perfectly, the pursuit of this is one of the things that's really bogged Martin down over the last few books, but judging things from one perspective can really hamper enjoyment when the author makes a decision that skews heavily to the other one.

I actually did mean to concede that whether the show did an effective job of communicating the situation is certainly a fair argument, I'm just talking about what I think was meant to be the question at the end - stand-in daughter or humanity. Like many, I'm also viewing it with the context of already knowing the story from the game which is going to colour my interpretation of that scene in the show and Joel's subsequent lie about it. My view is that murdering the Fireflies is subjectively correct, but objectively wrong whereas the lie is wrong from both perspectives

I believe it was intended to be 10 episodes before the first two were merged, which I think was the right call. But I do think it could have used another episode or two in the back half. I honestly don't understand coming at this from the perspective of trying to analyze the science of the "cure". It just doesn't strike me as a conflict point that makes sense to look at with a watsonian lens, if the Fireflies are obviously wrong and chasing a pipe dream then it takes any tension and moral conflict out of it, Joel is clearly in the right to fight and protect Ellie from this deranged group. But if the hope for the cure is real, suddenly you've got that juicy conflict of picking family over the world - a conflict you have Druckmann explicitly talking about in the quotes provided by Ripp, and that they wanted to force players into the non heroic (ie selfish) choice. So from the Doylist perspective it just seems black and white to me. The cure would have worked, Joel might rationalize it away as it wouldn't have but deep down he knows it would have and it doesn't actually matter for his decision, he made the only choice he ever could have made. Arguing over the efficacy of the cure just seems like engaging in exactly the same rationalizing Joel would be doing.

Yeah this one definitely hurts. On top of the other projects mentioned he's also Zeus in the new Percy Jackson series which had also finished filming

I'm not really sure either, but my guess was that corporate America thought it could use the MAGA political movement to get the representatives it wanted in Congress without having to give them anything, but it turned out they didn't want to be controlled... And then really not sure on the second half of the post. If MAGA wins that fight then the US goes full fash, if corporate America wins then you'll have the likes of nestle owning all essential resources. Not sure how that's connected to current SVB stuff though. It would be more relevant to the crypto side of the discussion as that shit is pure toxic capitalism, delivering nothing of value to anyone, merely existing as a scam to siphon money from others.

I think the speed at which they jump to harvesting the fungus from Ellie's brain is just one of those relics of gameplay that you just accept. Yeah it doesn't make much real world sense but it does fit causing the emotional response it does in the game, so I roll with it. I understand why others can't. I think there's a similar thing with the cure - this isn't the real world, they don't have to actually figure out the hard details. The entire point of it is to present Joel with the choice of "Ellie" or "humanity" and see that he doesn't even hesitate for a beat in picking Ellie. The cure not working takes away the impact of this, so for meta story reasons the cure would have worked. They definitely don't make it explicit, but I thought between "I reckon you know why I'm telling you this" "yeah I guess I do" and "this has to have been for something" it's pretty heavily implied what choice she'd make and also that Joel knows it. I thought they also made it quite clear Ellie knows he's lying and Bella did a great job playing the emotions across her face in response.

Yeah I did have a brief moment of "there's a lot more sparsely populated coast line in Australia" while doing that post lol. I don't think it matters, if they effectively scare people with the threat of prison time and the media is complicit they can still do a pretty good job of it.

"Haha, this venison we're eating from the deer David brought back yesterday tastes so different from the venison we had yesterday. What's up with that?" Cue frantic shush motions from the others

I don't know him at all but he did get mentioned in the article

You're making an assumption here that should be reasonable, but I think is a mistake. The UK and the US have been using shitty policies beta tested by Australia for over a decade now, but "Stop the boats" isn't just loosely copying policy, it's verbatim the primary slogan used by Tony Abbot to get into government a decade ago, and they trotted out the sentiment constantly while in government to the point that wanker in chief Scott Morrison gave himself a trophy shaped like a boat saying "I stopped these" - this guardian piece is actually talking about the Aus connection here https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/08/stop-the-boats-sunaks-anti-asylum-slogan-echoes-australia-harsh-policy. Now the part where I think you're making a mistake is assuming that they need to actually succeed. If they follow the play book that was used here then they'll classify everything relating to boat arrivals and then use this silence to claim it was successful. We had basically no reporting on it for years so they could claim this, then Morrison leaked news of a boat arrival literally on the day of our election to try scare people once he realized he was going to lose, which I'm still fucking angry about. And I think it's a safe assumption that they're going to follow more of the play book since they're already copying more than just "stop the boats", the "if you come here illegally you won't get x,y,z" is also straight out of our advertising although we only apply it to boat arrivals. And yeah, advertising - we were fucking buying ad spots in countries like Sri Lanka to try scare people off seeking asylum. Showing the rest of the Western world that you can pull this shit without consequences is one of the shames of my county and it just doesn't stop.

I know that the military angle is going to be people's primary consideration, but when talking objectives that might be motivating Ukraine I don't think that should be the only angle. If the fighting can be kept in Bakhmut then that spares the next town(s) from getting utterly destroyed and almost certainly saves civilian lives as well. That's not going to decide the fate of the war, but it certainly seems something that could be weighing on Zelensky's mind. So if there are other reasons to keep fighting, such as bleeding the Russian army as much as possible and especially trying to kill off Wagner, then saving another town could be the deciding factor in a 50/50 call.

My wife heard me listening to that and her first comment was "my 'there was nothing' improper t-shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my 'there was nothing improper t-shirt" despite having no idea what it was about. Very much convinced without context that there was indeed something improper while accepting that he had been looking for a chief of staff. So yeah I'm agreeing that wasn't particularly well handled.

They also act like slightly increasing the tax rate on super above that level would cap their retirement savings. You're still able to put more in, and you still have millions in other assets if you're making enough money to have that much super. You're going to be fine. They all like to see it as a nest egg for their kids when the entire point of it is to fund their own retirement and be used up, kids inherit whatever other estate you've got left.

I saw Bolt was screeching about Albo being more "dangerous" than Whitlam. This is why there's not much point in running from the left wing, it doesn't matter how little you do the hysterical right wing media will still act like you're building communism again (for real this time).

Given Riley was leaving the next day but the explosives were there I assumed Marlene would have been coming there to pick her and the gear up rather than expecting her to show up elsewhere.

The intro to Fallout 4 did give some background, but if that particular detail was mentioned I missed it so that does give a little at least. But yeah, that doesn't address the aesthetic preference, just makes the development make a bit more sense.

Its exactly this, that time period is an outright turn off to me - not just something I don't really enjoy. If the gunplay or skill tree had grabbed me more it might have got past that, but so far it just felt like I was going to be starved for ammo or using weapons I wasn't enjoying so that didnt do it either.

Yeah we discussed this a bit after I tried it out, it was sufficiently bad for me it triggered a full blown migraine not just the usual nausea in a pretty short amount of play. I just refunded it immediately instead of trying to make it work when it was that bad. It always baffles me how arbitrary the issue is though, Half Life 2 was terrible for it but CS:Source and DoD:Source in the same engine were both perfectly fine. A more recent non shooter one - Tacoma was also really bad, almost as bad as MW5. I tried playing it recently as well and bounced off completely. I think for me part of the problem is the aesthetic of the technology just does not appeal to me at all. I looked at the TV during the opening and thought "this civilization has hovering robots but their TVs are still 14 inch fishbowl CRTs even decades in the future from 2022?" and it bothered me lol. I thought the tension leading into the nukes going off was pretty good, but wasn't feeling much at all after leaving the vault. I forget the names already, I cleared out the nearby town of raiders and got that power suit then followed some quest down to an armed area to the south/south east and didn't feel any desire to continue the next day.

It was in Australia until recently though, Gillard did it because it was the expectation but then people acted like she hadn't anyway and the whole thing destroyed her despite scraping in the win. The coalition took away the message "don't call an election" and in each case it was long enough the voters got over it and now it's not the expectation anymore.

Setting aside all the glaring and obvious issues, I've got some bad news for Tim regarding the reliability of eye witness testimony, especially after any reasonable period of time has elapsed.

Yeah regardless of her views being espoused she clearly does not have the necessary skills for this leadership position. I remember people saying that Jezza's job included dealing with a hostile media and that's no less true here.

Bolded - Yeah I think that's the key for where they're at right now. If you know the subject matter already you can tell if it goes off the deep end instead of accepting whatever it tells you. I was thinking exactly the same thing about getting them to write scripts - if you can write the appropriate prompts in 10 minutes or so and then skim through the code it produces to catch any issues that's going to wind up faster than manually writing it yourself, but if you don't have the understanding to read the code yourself then it's going to do things you didn't want and there's a risk of functionally inserting malware. A useful tool for those with expertise, but not a replacement for having that expertise.

Really hit my groove once I got used to the large sword of moonlight and levelled up a bit. Cleared 2,3 and 4 now so just the rest of 5 and then back to 1. I originally gave the first version a shot back on a PS3 and barely got past the first trash before deciding controllers were too hard so it's nice to come back to it and be up to it now. Will probably pick up the dark souls trilogy next time they're on a good steam sale.

Found that one out last night haha. Need to make the world full black tendency to get them to appear as well. I got the one I could get from giving the talisman of God to Sparkly but that's it for now. Did get Dragon God out of the way and was surprised to realize that's the end of the 2nd world. ER messed is so huge I was expecting more, but that's fine