karaddin

Welcome back! How long are you around for? We need to set up another meet up while you're here

I thought it was pretty heavily implied Ellie is aware, or at least thinks it's very likely, and accepts it. That was at least the interpretation I based my above comment on. If she doesn't/isn't then I'd shift to where you are.

His actions in the hospital are wrong from an objective point of view, but the subjective angle is much more nuanced. Lying to her about it later after he's already overridden her agency is pretty cut and dried for me, there's no excuse or justification for it and I really hope (and expect) that will remain.

On a sad note continuing the discussion of the voice/mocap actors from the game and their alternate or lack of roles in the show - just saw that Annie Wersching who played Tess in the game has just died of cancer at 45.

I think most of that is enjoyable gameplay that may not make for the most compelling TV. In particular I think its a good choice to have at least 1 or 2 episodes with no actual danger for Joel and Ellie, to avoid it becoming too predictable that there's going to be a "and now the zombie fight of the episode!" formulaic. I was also skeptical I was going to find it as emotional as the couple of snippets I'd seen talked up, but it landed despite that.

Haha makes sense. I was probably going to go back and watch the rest, but was leaving the rest for later as he'd worried it would be a bit repetitive and said to go 2 then the finale, then go back if you wanted.

I followed his viewing suggestion and only watched 2 then the conclusion, I went with 3 and 6 - I think the open world discussion was 5? Don't think I heard that point, so guessing its from one of them I missed but sounds about right.

I clearly enjoyed the mechanics of the game a lot more than he did, some of that is just going to come down to much of my play time coming after patches that were released after he was done but I think the basics of the gun play etc appeal to me more at a basic level. He's certainly putting the work in to give it a fair shake though, a lot more work than I would ever do. I did disagree with his reading on certain thematic beats but that was like 2+ hours of video time back so I've already forgotten what it was. I remain a lot less bothered by the lack of explicitly grappling with any trans elements in the game. Its true that it might be a tad cynical to use the chromanticore ad without any actual exploration of the issue, but it just doesn't bug me in the game - it being used for IRL advertising absolutely did though and was a significant contributor to my initial lack of interest. I lay that one at the feet of the marketing department though, not the developers. I definitely agree that the way the narrative is structured makes the integration of side quests into the game cause much less dissonance against the urgency of the mission - you are chasing down leads as you can, but you also have bills to pay and a reputation to spread. You're clearly in a far better place to take on Arasaka as one of the top mercs in NC than you are just crawled out of Vik's clinic. I do think the open world filler content is where you get the most ludonarrative dissonance from the superficial game mechanics butting up against the themes of Cyberpunk generally and the main story lines of the actual game. Also very much agree with him that the story itself and the character you're playing justify not putting much weight on the whole cop chase mechanic that so many people are still so hung up on, although he's not wrong that being essentially a hired murderer for the cops in the NCPD scanner missions was a choice. I did also find it amusing that when he was commenting on the original teaser showing mechanics that weren't in the end game, he talked about ricochet guns when those mechanics were definitely in there by 1.3 which is when at least some of his play time was - he just forgot and didn't even think to try.

I haven't played the games but I did watch a let's play if TLOU1 and have been pretty thoroughly spoiled on part 2. It was really impressive the level of palpable tension in the first half of this episode even knowing what was coming. I love Pedro so much I wasn't sure how he'd go at bringing the menace of Joel or if his charisma would detract from it but I think he's going to have it. The brutality of Joel in the game was something that really struck me, it managed to feel much more violent than games typically manage due to the physicality if it.

That's also not the part I'm talking. You can be mindful of the source of information even while acting on it if needed but I haven't been seeing much consideration of that at all. Digging up offensive shit someone did as a young adult 20 years later is also an issue with the way we're doing things on the internet, and I don't think it should be treated as relevant if it's not consistent with the way the person acts now and they respond in an appropriate manner. If it's not clear it isn't consistent with who they are now then that's of course an issue but already should be raising red flags. In his case I honestly don't know if it is or isn't consistent with how he behaves now, it doesn't have overlap with the parts of him I do take issue with so I'm not really across it. If I was ever to consider voting for him I'd be interested in his statements in response to school kids wearing nazi uniforms in the last few years and would probably draw conclusions from those but I'm never voting for him anyway. I'd expect conservative Jewish voters to be the demographic most likely to reassess support for him based on this and that's probably true for the people responsible for digging it up as well. Lobby groups hoarding kompromat and using it to attempt to bring down premiers that challenge their power base is bad for democracy though, even when the content of that is in the public interest. And you might not grasp how fucked this country (and especially NSW) has become with respect to gambling, it got worse when I was living in the US and it's so jarring on the rare occasion I'm watching sport.

Yeah, "defending the bastion of the only true faithful" is a hell of a tool for rationalisation to build on top of. Any evil can be justified if you're (in your own delusion) carrying it out to protect God. On Perrottet the part that worries me is how clearly it's a warning from the gambling industry to other politicians not to go up against them or they'll play gloves off dirty. Perrottet was already likely to only have a couple of months left as premier, this isn't about him and it also concerns me how many on the left are on board just because it hurts a guy they were about to beat anyway. Remember what happened when it was a Labor government ending up in a fight with a different powerful industry lobby group? It brought down Rudd, poisoned Gillards term as PM and took over a decade for Labor to come back from. This shit isn't good for democracy regardless of which party it's aimed at. On that note, Brook was in Qld a couple of weeks ago and the mining industry is already doing tv ads on SBS to preempt any new mining taxes.

Yeah I think Kerry only being into male V is defensible within the narrative without viewing it as bisexual erasure, he's not in a healthy place and his relationship with V is so thoroughly overlaying his relationship with Johnny for whom he clearly never stopped holding a candle. It's actually a little amusing to see that lobbed at the game when other parts feel like they're erasing my lesbian mindset with V by having River utterly unable to take a hint and V having a porn mag with men in her bed. And to be clear I don't think the game is actually intending that, although I can't decide if the River issue is intentionally written to give guys playing fem V a sense of what that actually feels like or it's just obliviousness accidentally doing it. I quite like the romance options having set preferences the way it does, it makes them feel more like actual people rather than being playersexual, so I think the solution to the problem is having more options that represent more of the spectrum rather than altering the characters as they exist. @IlyaP it's sometimes a bit hard to parse how much of the subtext in the narrative that I see is actual subtext rather than just explicit text that everyone is aware of lol. The experience of living in Night City is extremely shaped by gender which is one of the things that makes the two different Vs such starkly different experiences for me, so that criticism just doesn't mesh with how the game was for me. Those elements were there for me, I don't think I've ever felt so uncomfortable with a sex scene as the Johnny and Alt flash back and it's because it's so starkly not lesbian V's perspective or gaze. I do think that "straight-coded brain dude" is a reasonable way to describe how Johnny feels though even if he dabbles with men occasionally, I think it comes down to the disposability he views women with. Every time he tries to push that view point onto V I push back on it and him to eat a dick. Its there when you let him take your body for a spin in Chippin In as well, he's explicitly using your body in ways you didn't consent to, acting like himself and you're pissed off at him for it. But maybe that's where it's subtext that is so obvious to me. Honestly the times when you're jammed into Johnny are outright dysphoric for me, that doesn't happen just by playing male V - it's emergent from playing as fem V and then having that happen. As for Crichton - there's an absolute fuck load of queer subtext with both Scorpius and Harvey lol. And with D'Argo for that matter. It's mixed on how much it's actually saying with it though and how much is just humour, it's constrained by the time it was made. As for Baltar I can't remember BSG well enough.

I've worked with some people for more like 10 years and would believe it if someone told me I had wires crossed like this when I already didn't like them lol

There's also a possibility that there's simply crossed wires - that they do like/love the books but do so with eyes open to it's flaws and find some of those flaws funny. I could easily see a situation where I was laughing at some of the issues in WoT and someone took that as me disliking them. Especially if De Mayo doesn't vibe well with the person and may completely misread tone/not like their sense of humour. It doesn't require bad faith on anyone's part. Or it could be writers that are no longer with the show because it's true as stated for a couple of writers.

I thought that people zoomed in on the photo and found it was actually the Mass Effect wiki printed out? Lol. That's what I was thinking of though, if nothing else it shows he'd be interested

Maybe a series set in Mass Effect's setting will get off the ground and get him on board. I still want FemShep if they're doing the main story but there's plenty of room to fit him in somewhere even if that was what they did.

I'm pretty sure that's where the first part of the Star ending takes place? It's up north near the Aldecado camp but I'm not 100% if it's NW or SW from there. I know the trailer showed Militech operating in the Pacifica stadium so I'd assumed it's finally giving a name to the combat zone in Pacifica. I'm kinda hoping for an extended assault through multiple massive towers - I've been intrigued by what that helicopter is shooting at in the intro to Pacifica with Placide since my first play through and it's the only opportunity for something like that. I had also wanted a megatower siege style mission as a tribute to the more recent Dredd but it doesn't look like we'll get that, so a mission like what I'm describing would still give opportunities for something in a similar vein. I'm also curious how much agency we'll get to have in what we do and who we side with.

Forgot my actual concluding point. My feeling is if you can't get that excellent value option and have to spend a lot regardless, it's worth coughing up a bit more to get the better card. Going from $300 to $500 is almost double the price, but if the difference is the same while the price of the cheaper one has tripled then that skews the value equation much more to the higher end card.

I got my 3070TI back in March, it was expensive but I thought if I kept waiting for prices to fall I'd never upgrade but was worried they'd drop straight after I got it. I did see plenty of articles claiming they did, but if that was true it didn't happen here - I looked in the black friday sales last week and the price for my card was $100AUD lower than what I paid so I made the right call. I don't think the old sweet spot prices for graphics cards is coming back any time soon - that was always the *60TI card of the current gen at around $300AUD here.

I realised I've had the 2k monitor for almost 6 months now and never changed it from 60Hz. I bumped it up to 144Hz today and I'm surprised at it being quite noticeable, to the point of feeling weird for now. I'm sure I'll adjust and then the old will suddenly feel unacceptable lol.

I thought that was the best approach anyway, Edgerunners was self contained and fantastic and most importantly finished. Plenty of other stories to tell in Night City though, and plenty of room for distinctive visual style under the umbrella of the aesthetic.

And some of it just comes down to the compulsory voting thing - they already have all the voters that would buy into it so it hasn't helped them come election time. Funny you said this though I was just saying to brook I think the most effective framing for the coalition is when they position themselves as the adult in the room. Unlike things like the culture war, this doesn't need people to actually think ill of Labor - they can be well intentioned but simply misguided about the hard realities of governance. The culture war is the opposite of that, they're a big evil that's trying to corrupt your children etc etc. For the people that buy into it, it's a very strong motivator but it's hard to convince more than half the population to actually think that way. It absolutely did not position them as the adults for the north shore Sydney electorates last election.

Can we please not act like this shit has been broadly successful here. They have faced major backlash from their own voters when they've tried to make transphobia the main issue in actual elections, and that shit has also hurt the Greens in Victoria when they've put up TERF/SWERF types. Yeah the scare mongering over safe schools worked a few years ago but that part of the culture war has not been effective for them other than that.

Yeah, losing those heartland seats feels like a new problem they haven't had to tackle before. When they get wiped out like this it leaves the party more heavily skewed to the hard right types who take that power and drag the party even further right, which just makes it even harder to try get some talent back into the parliamentary party. They said a few times on the ABCs coverage that you would never expect to win the next election after a wipe out like the last one, but that they hadn't even recovered any ground. It's actually even worse when you consider the liberals rather than the coalition, the numbers last night were the nats gaining 3 seats but losing 5 from the libs, they lost basically 20% of their seats. They were supposed to recover some of the seats that produce somewhat talented performers so they can truly recover next election but instead they lost more. If Matthew Guy was already the best they had after getting mauled in 2018, how are things going to be looking in another 4 years. Hell, he didn't even resign on election night after these two atrocious election results...

If the Libs keep this up the teals will become a genuine chance to party up and displace them