Kalbear

It is definitely remarkable to me to see the people who view Ramsey as Ellie as somehow bad and how that correlates to other views. It's a good litmus test. I'm personally super happy with her and the small and big things she does. Her interactions with Sam, her interactions and quick looks with Riley, her desperation and anger about Joel getting hurt, her body language while wearing the wolf costume - it's all charming and real and bittersweet. I wasn't a super big fan of this ep but it was at least a bit better than I expected being a flashback, and did a good job tying to the 'current' events. I hope we get to see what actually happened with Ellie and Riley post-bite. I also like how they keep showing the wonder of things we take for granted in our modern world; this is something that is really not done very much in most apocalyptic stories. The escalator scene made me smile.

Exactly. He had to betray a person horribly. He had to sell his soul to get Sam the drugs he needed. And it was all for nothing. Kids die. He couldn't live with not just having to end Sam, but all the things he had to do to get there.

I didn't. I think he (and a lot of others) appreciated that as much as they loved her brother he didn't get shit done. He wasn't willing to do the hard things and allow the hard things to happen. But she was. I think others might have tired of her eventually, especially as things continued to suck for her. But her second in command? He was a true believer.

He did really well and the chemistry he had with Bella was awesome. I loved the detail of Sam the next morning just staring at the morning sun until ellie touched him. He had been infected but was still deaf, so it didn't notice her until she touched him. Great little detail.

Yeah, so far the parts that have deviated most from the game and deviated most from the standard zombie horde stuff are the most interesting. The prologue explainers of the fungus were just riveting and Frank and Bill were wonderful. It's weird how an anthology show might be actually better than the serialized show, though I think that makes some sense; part of the issue that this will have in adaptation is that you had real stakes in the game. Getting through clickers and the raiders and the traps made you feel the payoff of the cutscenes and feel the pain of losing people, but here we get none of that automatically.

My fanwank is that I90 is fucked between Boston and Chicago due to major bombings or a nuclear strike. (I think they could mention this in the show and that'd be cool)

Some of it is, some of it isn't. The Cordyceps vector and the stages of infection are really cool. The incredibly rapid speed of infection is kind of bullshit. The actual apocalyptic vector of infected flour in INCREDIBLY unrealistic; in no reasonable way would people all around the world on the same day or two be eating flour-based things from that one specific factory. Flour and mixes are things people buy and then use weeks, months later, and the shipments take weeks and months to arrive at their destinations. I like how they set up the first ep and the avoidance of gluten - finally we understand what a threat gluten is to us - but the actual collapse is really, really dumb.

It was great on many levels, and nick Offerman gave such a nuanced performance of a survivalist in a role I normally despise. One small complaint I had with it is that it did not feel like it was part of the TLOU world. It didn't build on the background very much or really require anything specific of the storyline. Bill's backstory was about as generic prepper as they come, and Frank got even less. We could have taken that story and put it in TWD or many last man on earth style things. I'm not sure what they could have done differently - maybe give us more of the story, more of frank and bills backstory to show us how important the paradise they made together was - but it felt a bit adrift to me.

Yep. As the mycologist mentioned at the start the flour was considered to be a 'perfect' substrate. From a fungal perspective the spores can live in the flour and then become activated once ingested, and then quickly activate. This is actually very close to the way Ophiocordycepts works in ant colonies, where the spores can remain dormant for a long while until the ants either ingest them or they get put into moist areas between the chitin plates. If they are external the attack can take a while as the fungus produces enzymes to digest the chitin and get inside, but if it's in the digestive system it can go very fast. Apparently the standard ant strategy is to have the infected ant get as close to the queen as possible and then explode with spores. The counter strategy is that ants can tell when an ant is infected and will carry out that ant as far away from the hive as they can, even sacrificing their lives to do so.

This thread is only for the show. While we can talk about similarities in the game we can only do so after the episode which has them aired. so we can talk about Tessa dying because it happened in the show but not really anything after.

I'm now really hoping that after a super dramatic moment they then have Joel randomly searching the ground for crap to make molotovs with and hiding behind the wrong sides of walls from things.

Here's a clip from the game on Tess, and it's very close to a reshoot. The primary difference is that they changed the vector and behavior of the fungus and incorporated that into this sequence instead of being pursued by FEDRA.

I really love the prologues, which is good because the main show is decidedly a shot for shot rehash of the game. It's less like watching an adaptation and more like watching a 'HBO plays' stream.

I mean the standard arasaka one.

My son just finished CP2077 for the first time and went for the fastest ending he could, and he was SUPER sad. It was funny to think about as far as viewpoints - if the only ending you know of and experience is that one, it's a super down feeling to end the game.

At the time they did, because it was in a video game and doing cool homages to awesome other media is great. The actual sequence is very, VERY close to what is in the video game. Which makes it an amusing problem - previously the goal was to make comparisons to CoM as a tribute, and now it looks like a ripoff.

For me the reason you don't hand over Ellie to FEDRA is kind of obvious - because you don't give an authoritarian repressive government power over you even more than what they already have. Not only do you not trust them to just kill ellie on the spot (which almost happened!) but you don't trust them to make a cure or give the cure out to everyone.

Yep. That's the case for all 4 romantic interests, still. And while silverhand might swing both ways I'd argue he definitely does not present that way whatsoever in his behavior or commentary. His sexual comments are entirely female-centered.

Yeah, NVidia may never be going to that low-cost version given how complicated their work is and how low their yields are. One can hope AMD does at some point, but that ship may have sailed. That said we also appear to be hitting something of a lull in ridiculously high-requiring performance systems right now so perhaps it won't be quite as bad. The Unreal 5 engine games are still gonna be a couple of years out.

If you can wait a few months the prices should drop significantly - demand for cards is on the floor with the lack of mining that is being done right now, and that will affect the market in 2-3 months. You can also try your luck on a used one but the ones from mines are notoriously overworked and sketchy, so buyer beware.

If you're looking to play CP2077 don't go with AMD. It's not nearly as good as it is on NVidia. And run all the way away from Intel.

I thought this was an excellent, funny indepth analysis of what ftx did and why it was so incredibly shaky. It reminded me a lot of the Big Short and how that walked through how sketchy it all is. And yeah, it is super sus. Come for the approachable explanation, stay for the Visage of a bloody clippy warning you of the eldritch horrors you committed on the balance sheet. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-14/ftx-s-balance-sheet-was-bad?leadSource=uverify wall

That's weird. While it wasn't super easy and took a few tries, I don't remember having two guys one-shot me or anything like that. To be fair I was playing pre-balance mode so hacking was absurdly powerful but even then it didn't seem, like, impossible.

It's not going to be a strong buy because it's going private. I believe right now it's delisted.

That is, imo, one of the weaker parts of the game - pretty much every gang is just complete trash and horrible, and most are not very interesting. There is very little nuance or attempt at any kind of empathy with any of them. It does mean I do very similar things to @karaddin - all scavs die, maelstrom gets the violent ways out, etc - and I guess that is good on some level so you don't feel too bad about them and have a constant stream of enemies. Still, doesn't make me feel like I have many good choices.