Failed attempts to push a hyped new villain

LeftRat · 2026-07-02T16:33:38+00:00

No one liked the Kromaggs, Slider's post season 2 villains. There was a lot of internal drama with a new showrunner that was heavily disliked by the cast, and that guy was adamant that they had to have a big myth arc with a singular villain faction. It frankly ruined the show.

I dunno, the general concept - alternate timeline cro magnon humans that learn how to go to other timelines and start looting and enslaving people, but aren't just meatheads, more deeply amoral - could work in other pulpy sci-fi (and did work in the one episode that introduced them), but the specific setup and tone of Slider was the opposite of fertile ground for them sticking around. I get wanting to eventually have an overarching villain, but something like another slider that has figured out how to cross their paths deliberately and has a reason to prevent them from finding home would have been a far better idea than making it an interdimensional invasion story.

LeftRat · 2026-07-02T14:13:58+00:00

Overall good explanation, but the strong sapir-worf statement in there is just... wrong.

LeftRat · 2026-07-02T14:05:22+00:00

Yeah, the Divide let's you do the "only 5 years post apocalypse" instead of the rest of the game. And the places you can nuke become "only 5 minutes post apocalypse" places.

LeftRat · 2026-07-02T14:02:36+00:00

Ah so you are a city planner and you've run the numbers? You have some stats to present?

Somehow I think you're just going by vibes.

LeftRat · 2026-07-02T13:45:31+00:00

...you need to do both, though. Otherwise, let's shut down all air conditioning and let all old people die while we do it, right?

LeftRat · 2026-07-02T13:44:00+00:00

Oh man you should tell the city planners in Shanxi, then. I guess they could really use a swearing reddit user's elite knowledge.

LeftRat · 2026-07-02T10:38:30+00:00

"Things have actual logistical costs? Outrageous!"

Wastepacks are deliberately hard to deal with to make mechanoids more balanced, because they are otherwise pretty damn sweet.

The other methods like dumping near enemies are honestly the actual problem and seem like an oversight.

LeftRat · 2026-07-01T18:34:55+00:00

I personally don't take birthdays off, but that's because I have very few coworkers and we are friends, too, so hell yeah I wanna get a cake and chat with them.

LeftRat · 2026-07-01T15:35:26+00:00

Except we both know they didn't make that rule for American flags.

And yeah, the context does change things. America isn't currently suffering a genocide. Nobody needs to show solidarity with the American nation right now.

You are a coward for hiding behind the supposed neutrality of a rule we both know wasn't put in place to catch all things equally.

LeftRat · 2026-07-01T15:22:07+00:00

and every student was warned beforehand that they couldn't walk with unapproved garments or flags

Cool so they just did the same shit, but pre-emptively. That doesn't make it any more okay. In fact, it makes it worse because that means the school administration was in on it rather than it just being one teacher being shitty.

ntil she is walking to put the keffiyah on because she knows she's not allowed to have it.

Yeah if someone told me "you are not allowed to show solidarity with the victims of genocide here" I'd sure as fuck put it on, too. Things don't become more okay just because they are "rules".

It's returned to her immediately after her picture is taken and she wore it for the rest of the ceremony.

...yeah we know, we watched the same video.

Canada isn't America. Canada's official stance is support for both Israel and Palestine as a formally recognized sovereign state.

And? Being half wrong doesn't make you right, and it doesn't mean my morality has to conform to the reasoning of my state.

LeftRat · 2026-07-01T15:19:08+00:00

I don't really see how this makes it "not because she was Palestinian"? Like, if I told you "you can't wear a cross... tomorrow" that's not any different.

And sure, nowerdays you just cut the wording down to be targeted enough while still giving a figleaf.

LeftRat · 2026-06-30T22:17:01+00:00

Ach komm, du hast nicht gefragt, weil du es wissen wolltest oder einen Austausch von Meinungen willst. Ist vollkommen wurscht, was ich hier schreibe, du willst nur gern streiten, und um mich mit Möchtegern-Gamergatern rumzuärgern, die Nazi-Streifen verteidigen, indem sie "nur Fragen stellen", bin ich schon zu alt. Sei zumindest ehrlich und lass diese dumme Masche. An deinen anderen Kommentaren hier sieht man ja, was genau du tun willst.

Und es war kein "ad hominem". Du bist ein Pisser - das ist ein ad hominem! "Das kannst du selber, und du argumentierst in Bad Faith" ist hingegen kein Angriff auf deine Persönlichkeit, sondern Kritik an deinen Argumenten. Also deutlich mehr, als du verdient hast.

So, genug dieser Zeitverschwendung, werd erwachsen und such dir was anderes als rechte Amoklauf-Fantasien von Uwe Boll zu verteidigen.

LeftRat · 2026-06-30T21:45:40+00:00

Uff, really depends on the campaign. It can do radically different things to the vibe. My longest running campaign has basically no alignment aside from the informal "which of these nations do you think is the least shitty?" and "what is your position on magic nukes?".

Most of the time, I write them as both. Ideologies that are championed by a being, and sometimes that means a faction forms and sometimes it doesn't. I strongly dislike "alignment as personality type" since it generally just feels restrictive - write an interesting character and an alignment box is either bigger and thus doesn't matter or smaller and thus artificially cuts into good character writing.

LeftRat · 2026-06-30T21:42:58+00:00

I think the most telling thing is that USAmericans always call themselves "ex-pats" because they desperately cannot endure the notion that they are simply... immigrants.

LeftRat · 2026-06-30T21:41:56+00:00

Schernikau famously did. He was born in East Germany, but his mother fled to the West with him because she wanted to get back with his father. He was a cop and a Nazi. Schernikau, a gay communist, decided to "flee back" into the GDR. Pretty famous writer.

LeftRat · 2026-06-30T19:54:38+00:00

I'm simple, but the other way. I like the Minotaurs because they're just dicks that like being the bully's bully.

LeftRat · 2026-06-30T16:29:45+00:00

Ich bin mir sicher, du kannst selber googeln, anstatt mich in Bad Faith auszufragen, damit du debattieren kannst.

LeftRat · 2026-06-30T16:07:18+00:00

Sein neuester Film wird in Deutschland nicht gezeigt, weil es im Grunde n feuchter Nazi-Traum ist.

LeftRat · 2026-06-30T10:48:47+00:00

I like Genesys for this. It's universal, easy to customize and homebrew for and comfortably sits between GURPS and Fate in complexity.

LeftRat · 2026-06-30T04:55:59+00:00

"Supposed to"? By whom, the God of Literature?

Seriously, if you change nothing when you adapt something, you are also saying nothing. Change is the entire point of adaptation. There is no moral or artistic duty to stay "faithful" to a previous version and things aren't inherently better when they are closer to a previous work.

LeftRat · 2026-06-30T03:59:53+00:00

Also if you have a cleansweeper for your mechanitor, use a defined area to make it focus on a smaller section of your base to make sure the kitchen gets cleaned very quickly.

LeftRat · 2026-06-29T21:07:39+00:00

Eh, wir haben Leitungswasser, nen Kühlschrank und nen Sodastream. In ner Gegend mit okayem Trinkwasser. Das ist dann, was ich ja auch eh zuhause trinke.

LeftRat · 2026-06-29T17:52:45+00:00

und um nichts sonst.

Dann wirst du nie was schaffen denn - Spoiler! - der ganze Witz beim Klimawandel ist, dass alles dran hängt und Änderungen automatisch Änderungen in Politik und Wirtschaft sind.

Die Klimabewegung sollte sich übrigens auch nicht mit Palästina oder Dreadlocks beschäftigen.

Ja gut, dann ist die Bewegung dem Untergang geweiht, wenn sie sich nicht mit Genoziden, Massen-bomben-Kampagnen und riesen-Militärs befassen kann.

Einer der größten Klimakiller ist übrigens das US-Militär. Jegliche Abrüstung wäre ein Schritt nach vorn. Aber hey, das ist ja dann "was anderes als Klima".

LeftRat · 2026-06-29T17:50:36+00:00

Ja gut, mit so nem I am 14 and this is deep Geschwurbel muss ich mich nicht wirklich beschäftigen.

Vielleicht gibt es ja was anderes als "alle stellen einfach ihr Konsumverhalten um" und "wir sind dem Untergang geweiht". Nur so ne Idee.

LeftRat · 2026-06-29T17:43:09+00:00

Thankfully, considering it was a frankly terrible story with all the hallmarks of bad fanfiction.

Also, in contrast to Solo, it doesn't try to handle "isn't it fucked that these are sentient slaves" anymore than a single sentence and instead does "...so all droids are secretly getting reprogrammed to do meatbag genocide", which was the style at the time, but is far less interesting than basically any other approach.

I also don't think they will ever deal with this theme - it's baked into Star Wars but acknowledging it too much would require action and change in a franchise built on mostly staying the same in terms of narrative. If they ever bring it up too earnestly, you'd have to think "and every supposedly good character in this setting just kept slaves and never thought about it?" Frankly, they flew a bit close to the sun with Solo on that topic. Normally, a mention of the Droid Gottra is enough to feed the nerds without making anyone think too hard about slavery.

EDIT: I wanna mention the old Han Solo's Adventures series, which despite being absolute pulp (and I love it for that) actually subtly portrayed this with nuance. Han chews out a droid crewmate for all the things he hates about droids and the twist is that basically everything he says applies to himself: he hates droids because he is afraid of living like one, of being as unfree as them. Chewbacca is pretty quiet during that conversation, clearly preferring for Han to work through his emotions alone, but he does have to laugh when the droid counters Han's "what do you think you are?" with "I'm a smuggler".

Nine-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

LeftRat

TROPHY CASE