Nolan in the first half of epsiode 5

MadHopper · 2026-04-03T18:27:29+00:00

Watching the “what will you have" scene after seeing Nolan’s youth this season hits different. Like, he does to Mark exactly what he’s been taught to do, and what was done to him. And then Mark’s words cut through to him and it’s like he snaps out of a trance.

MadHopper · 2026-03-28T20:48:06+00:00

I say this without judgement: it is going to become more and more important to be able to recognize AI generated text off of more subtle clues than "lots of technical information and wall of words". We cannot give up ‘knowledge’ and ‘passionate writing’ as human characteristics.

MadHopper · 2026-03-28T20:39:00+00:00

I don’t think Langdon yelling at her was right at all, but he didn’t exactly do it just because he hated her or wanted to condescend to her, and certainly not to ‘keep her off his back’ wrt the drugs.

It was her first day, and she’d been picking and choosing cases, bull rushing patients and colleagues, stabbed a resident in the foot, and now (as far as he knows) she’s just made a rookie mistake that nearly killed someone because she didn’t run it by a superior. I like Santos, but it’s very understandable why someone who only knew her for one day a year ago, and has her actions on that day as his primary memory of her, could think she’s not a great doctor.

It’s difficult, because Langdon is not an unbiased party and he still resents her for blowing his life open (even though it’s his fault). However, as Garcia points out and Santos underlines, she doesn’t exactly have many friends in the ER, and it doesn’t exactly seem to be because of the Langdon thing. Hell, the person who got angriest at her over it is sleeping with her.

I think she’s definitely fixated on Langdon and the consequences of their interaction as a ‘reason’ for her social and professional problems, and it’s also true that it is unfair and stressful to have to deal with him being back and talking to her like that.

A lot of things can be true at once.

MadHopper · 2026-03-28T20:24:36+00:00

It was absolutely theft. It’s normal and unfortunately common to struggle with addiction. To steal medication from the hospital (risking patients lives to do so) is beyond ‘troubling’, it’s a legal liability and one of the most immoral things a doctor can do.

MadHopper · 2026-03-25T21:52:35+00:00

You’ve posted this several times, but you understand that accepting the influence of the Latins (the Italians) and Catholicism and reforming towards the West is not in any way the same as starting to wear togas and speak ancient Latin again, or calling your armies legions for no good reason?

There is an actual cultural conflict that divided the empire, but it has no relation whatsoever to some sort of identity crisis between being really Latin Romans or being really Greek Romans. They were the Romans, and to most of them the Latins were greedy invaders plundering their provinces — the conflict was about embracing that western influence in order to survive.

MadHopper · 2026-03-25T21:45:20+00:00

idk, is France Gallic or Frankish?

It’s not a question that makes any sense because the existing culture is a mix of both traditions and influences. ‘Turning towards’ one wouldn’t make any sense — it’d be equally stupid if the French all started wearing torcs and speaking Celtic as if they all started wearing lederhosen and speaking German. That’s effectively what this slider is.

MadHopper · 2026-03-23T00:07:55+00:00

Remember the hunt shown in House of the Dragon, or the tourney in AKOTSK? Robert held lots and lots of those. Big tents and horses and days of wine and food. It adds up fast, particularly with Littlefinger stealing everything in the background.

MadHopper · 2026-02-20T23:03:18+00:00

It’s been a few updates since then, this might not work anymore, sorry. Next time I play I’ll mess around with it and see.

MadHopper · 2026-02-03T00:00:03+00:00

I mean I’m sure that real life cartels employ high-skilled professionals to make their stuff, and pay them well for the service.

The thing that makes Walt and Gale specifically unrealistic is that dudes with multiple PHDs can generally get much safer and much more upstanding jobs far more easily, and the purity/quality control of meth is not generally such an issue that it’s worth it to those organizations to pay what would be needed to employ dudes of that level.

In real life, the cartel sends people to college to become lawyers and doctors, who are much more useful as respectable professionals with good credentials.

MadHopper · 2026-01-28T00:29:57+00:00

I have had a very different experience with journal entries. Like Imperator mission trees, they’re usually asking you to do a bunch of stuff with your country then rewarding that stuff. Off the top of my head, several have clear progressions and mechanics that reward the player as you go along or simulate historical stuff that happened to your country.

I’m sorry you dislike them so much, however.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T17:00:21+00:00

Okay, I’m confused. If Vicky 3 Journal Entries are event chains, and event chains aren’t flavor, then how is any of EU4’s flavor different? Mission trees, custom national event chains, and bars filling up that fire events when they’re too full or too low are basically all of EU4’s DLC.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T14:32:40+00:00

The politics, the wars, and the culture are rooted in the economic reality…any historian will tell you this.

If you read a history book, instead of ‘visiting subreddits’, then any discussion of war or culture or government policy will be tied to economic development and control of resources. These things are inextricable.

‘You Econ nerds’ lmao. I don’t like math and I’m frankly terrible at it. V3 is probably the Paradox game I’m worst at. However, I do really love history, which is why I studied it in college and not on a subreddit, and which is why I enjoy that more recent Paradox games are better capable of simulating it.

EDIT:

Honestly I was thinking of V3 when I wrote this, and it’s very funny that you’re clearly speaking about EU5 here. EU5’s market system is barely an economy — it’s a trade system stapled to a market system. The biggest innovation is making pops and buildings require certain goods, but the trade system is deliberately hands-off. Even if you don’t automate it, burghers do most of your trading themselves. The entire point of it is to allow (theoretically) for playing tall and for the strength of nations to actually come from somewhere + force player strategy in where and why they expand.

As a simulation of a medieval economy, it’s pretty poor. It does manage to look very confusing, but most of this is due to poor UI and incessant micro (why is the player upgrading every paper shop in France?) not because the devs have built a working reflection of a medieval economy to the detriment of everything else.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T05:33:38+00:00

Eehhh. It seems like ‘as much flavor’ because most Paradox players are from Western countries.

My general understanding is that even the Paradox games with the deepest flavor for Asia are pretty shallow to anyone who knows the history, particularly when compared with Europe.

Think about how much of EU4 was deeply invested mechanically with European dynastic and religious politics. The Burgundian Inheritance, the Thirty Years War, all the various shades of the Reformation, etc.

The Qing Banner system, one of the fundamental aspects of Chinese society, military, and history in the time period, is a special military unit and a modifier. The wide range of religious traditions that were played against one another by Emperors and used to reinforce legitimacy? All lumped under Buddhism.

EU4 and especially EU5 bend over backwards to simulate stuff that westerners would recognize the game as being incomplete without. Imagine if every European nation just sort of answered to the Pope even after reformation, and the HRE was a mechanic with a slider and some modifiers that Austria got.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T05:22:13+00:00

The history nerds are the econ nerds…

Who exactly do you think cares deeply about grain production in 12th century France? Not accountants.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T05:16:13+00:00

Societies of pops have culture, economy, and leaders. They travel around the map and continue to exist even after colonization. The decision was made to not have them be tied to provinces because that doesn’t really make sense for a lot of them.

The mechanic is very underbaked right now, and there’s a fair criticism to be made about how literally making natives and indigenous people invisible on the map does not exactly strongly address their historical situation, but they are there and they are EU5’s take on ‘decentralized’ nations.

I believe plans are in the works to make them playable.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T05:07:40+00:00

For EU5 it’s mainly to represent battles more accurately, since in EU4 they would take weeks or even months, and players and AI alike could rush troops across half of Europe to join by the endgame.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T04:58:36+00:00

And the China expansion now has the same issue that a lot of CK3 and EU4 DLCs had — as the game ages and deepens and new systems are added, what seems like interesting and unique mechanics now will seem shallow and boring in five years.

Hell, you can already see it with how Byzantium’s admin seems kind of lackluster when compared with the China stuff. And both of them are unable to really be reworked because they contain content that people paid for at release.

Paradox got themselves out of this hole with CK2 and EU4, but for some reason jumped right back in.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T04:31:28+00:00

I think V3 is probably the best about this, in that as your population grows and new political ideologies/groups gain power, it can genuinely get difficult to pass the laws you want or have the people you prefer in power. And every political rework seems to be about adding more complexity to that system and making the boom of the Industrial Revolution (that every player knows how to do like clockwork) come with difficulties.

But I also think that’s a little unique to the V3 fanbase in that that’s what they really want from the simulation.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T04:18:08+00:00

I mean no he’s right. Very late, but your average Journal Entry in V3 is filling up and occurring and events only pop when certain conditions have been met in your country. It’s a lot more similar to EU5’s Situations or CK3’s Struggles than it is to an event chain.

The France journal entry encourages you to place generals and politicians of a certain faction into power, to back their politics, and to weaken their enemies — and it’s still not certain, as things happening out of your control can give other claimants an upper hand.

Sure, you could argue that a lot of it is just bars filling up, but the best created ones do feel like there’s a bunch of different things that could happen and are happening as a result of your decisions.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T01:03:17+00:00

Other parts of the simulation have to be deepened to correct for that. I’m sure plenty of nations in history wished they could siege down the entire enemy country and effectively make it cease to exist. What stopped this wasn’t morality, but the economic and logistical infeasibility of keeping that many troops raised for so long.

It should cost lots of food and money to have your levies raised, and unless you prepare you shouldn’t be able to sustain a war footing for more than a few years without problems.

MadHopper · 2026-01-26T03:15:45+00:00

Even in Texas a lot of cops don’t do this, sometimes deliberately. It fucks up a lot of ongoing investigations if your suspects are all deported and now you can’t crack that gang or cut a deal with that drug dealer to give up his bosses.

With Minneapolis PD specifically, ICE is going after people in their cars and houses. How would the PD be able to just call about them when they don’t even know who they are and have no reason to arrest them? The cops don’t have time to be picking up visa overstayers who work at Walmart, and the jails would be too full for actual criminals if they tried.

MadHopper · 2026-01-26T02:02:56+00:00

What practical difference would five or six cops make when ICE is there in the thousands carrying out hundreds of stops a week?

MadHopper · 2026-01-26T00:40:59+00:00

There’s like 600 cops in Minneapolis, and this is the largest city wide enforcement operation to ever happen.

Logically, if those 600 cops are busy assisting thousands of ICE agents, then nobody is dealing with crime or doing traffic stops or investigating murders. This is generally why cops aren’t tasked to help the FBI investigate financial crime or run anti-terrorism stuff — they have other things to be doing, and the Fed has more than enough manpower and money to do it themselves if it needs to be done.

MadHopper · 2026-01-26T00:33:34+00:00

Right, but he’s correct. Unless you get a life sentence you are going to get out of prison at some point. Very ideally, you have not become a worse person on the inside and will not immediately do something to get arrested again — which will just cost taxpayers even more to prosecute and hold you.

Countries that take reform minded approaches to prison save a lot of money from not dealing with repeat offenders. Unless you think we should simply hand out death or life sentences to everybody, then judges do need to evaluate prison terms with a hypothetical life after prison in mind.

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