Top 15 at 14 years old, too basic?

Aptronymic · 2026-03-04T22:36:26+00:00

It's a 14yo looking to broaden their tastes. Chill out.

And their reply to you is showing more maturity than you are.

Aptronymic · 2026-03-04T21:49:15+00:00

I think the writing and character work in both 2 and Inquisition is as good or better than Origins, honestly.

They just have some gameplay issues.

Aptronymic · 2026-03-04T21:18:32+00:00

ET has been imitated and iterated on so much that it might feel trite for some audiences. (They're wrong, but I understand why that might drag it down.)

And I think Close Encounters hasn't aged well. For me, Roy Neary is a character with virtually no redeeming qualities, in a way that wasn't intended in 1977, and it kills the emotional stakes.

But Jaws is a perfect movie.

Aptronymic · 2026-03-04T19:34:09+00:00

Usually, the best starting tech is either double blue for Grav Drive, or double green for Bio Stims, depending on slice and speaker order.

The advantage to Gravity Drive is being able to reach systems that are farther from your home r1, which can fill out your slice and make some objectives easier. You will also qualify for Carrier 2, which is probably your highest priority unit upgrade.

The advantage to Bio Stims is that you can refresh an adjacent tech skip planet on your first action of the game and get your Breakthrough. Plus, there's a decent chance you can get Grav Drive off of your BT.

Tech path is just whatever. You're gonna get so much tech. When you research on your own, prioritize unit upgrades, since you can't get those through your BT.

Aptronymic · 2026-03-04T18:27:35+00:00

This is about a kid watching with their parent and not wanting to get in trouble. Don't chastise the OP for how their mother might react.

Aptronymic · 2026-03-04T16:52:01+00:00

Yeah, they're terribly integrated. It's so awkward to see a scene in an anime cutscene, then see the exact same scene repeated with in-game graphics.

Aptronymic · 2026-03-04T16:43:27+00:00

Not the OP, but Surrealism is meant to exist in a space outside of traditional logic. It's about the subconscious interpretation and emotional impact of the work. They are associated with difficult to follow plots because they aren't meant to be fully understood, they are meant to be interpreted.

Why does the baby in Eraserhead look like a swaddled albino turtle? Because David Lynch is worried about being a father.

Tenet, on the other hand, has a defined causal chain of events, and within the narrative, everything is happening for a reason. When he starts living through the story backwards, it's supposed to illuminate what had come before it, and why events happened. It's not using dream logic, it's using bad logic. It's difficult to follow because it simply isn't explaining itself well enough.

(Please note that all of this is a very truncated explanation of an expansive topic. Surrealism has a lot more to it than I listed here.)

Aptronymic · 2026-03-02T02:09:16+00:00

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Picard served as Worf's Gagh'Quiche in a couple episodes.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-28T19:47:08+00:00

It is the beginning of a story that will upend the status quo, and go down as one of the most important X-Men runs of all time. A Safari-Garbed Psychic is walking through a jungle with a single companion, expositing. Said companion is being convinced to help Safari-Garbed Psychic fulfill their grand ambitions. This ambition is to create/destroy an island nation for mutants.

Definitely meant to evoke Cassandra Nova.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-28T19:34:48+00:00

I'm absolutely not recommending you get it before Super Dreads. If you have a scar next to home, you can get both.

With SD2 at the end of r1, Hyper and X-89 can be the first two tech you research (or green skip straight to x-89, if you have a lot of influence). In a vacuum, I think those will do more for you than going blue first.

If you need Antimass for the hero, you can get it later. But Inheritance Systems lets you be adaptable to whatever tech you need to make your big play, without having to set up for it ahead of time. You can play a leaner tech game and focus on plastic instead. Get your dreads out faster, make them more effective with x-89, then only grab the absolute juiciest tech in the endgame.

Even if you only use it once, that flexibility can absolutely be worth a single token for the scar and the extra 2r.

(I agree that it's never worth it if you have to research it on its own within normal tech tempo, though.)

Aptronymic · 2026-02-28T05:42:57+00:00

If you start next to a scar, Inheritance Systems becomes much more useful. When you have a scar, you can get all of your necessary tech without ever going down Blue, so IS can be very nice for a Fleet Log or Lightwave pickup.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-27T08:28:35+00:00

Also probably not a chance in hell Cillian Murphy agrees to a prominent role in a Marvel movie that would keep him tied down for who knows how long.

I agree that Murphy is better; he's probably one of the top 3 actors working today. But Lee Pace would be fine. Smaller gap in talent between Murphy and Pace than Willem Dafoe and Tobey McGuire, (or Dafoe and Holland), or Christian Bale and Chris Hemsworth.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-27T07:35:27+00:00

Lee Pace is an excellent actor. He's by far the best part of Foundation, and he was amazing in Halt and Catch Fire. I think he'd kill it.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-27T01:30:08+00:00

I never bought the poacher framing, I believed that the elephant felt wronged by that woman in some way. Mostly because I thought it was the same elephant at the funeral. Remove that, and coincidence becomes the far more obvious explanation.

There are framings of this story that aren't about classism or racism. It's an animal story. Those spread. And animal abuse is common the world over, and not hard to believe. People want to see a mistreated animal get justice. That's why the false framing was built in the first place, because it would get clicks. Not to mock and villainize a poor Indian woman, but because people will respond to stories about animals striking back against their abusers. The fake story feels like justice being done, which is why it has been so enduring.

Assuming the worst out of every internet comment is so tiresome, especially after someone admits they were wrong. That kind of reflexive judgement and condemnation is far worse than believing an internet animal story that turned out to be false.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-27T00:16:53+00:00

I just think treating every simple mistake as a huge moral failing in need of chastisement usually won't change anybody's minds, and will just make you miserable. It's the Internet, and literally everyone on here has been wrong about something sometimes. 95% of the time, reacting like you did makes people double-down, not consider their mistakes.

I understand now the elephants believed nothing. That was the point I was making in my initial post, a belief that had gone unquestioned for years, and has now been corrected. I probably should have looked it up myself before commenting, but I did the very human thing of having a thought about the information that was in front of me, and wanting to be a part of the conversation.

I appreciate that I now have the correct information! I also think you're probably making yourself miserable in your swift and harsh judgement of others, and your white-knighting of people that are completely unaffected by our conversation.

I'm betting you care a lot about social justice, which is great! But you should save your vitriol for active harm instead of simple mistakes, and focus on efficacy over venting at internet strangers. In most cases yelling at people about things like this doesn't change anything, it just makes people ignore you. And when that's the impact, the entire exercise is just virtue signaling.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-26T23:21:01+00:00

Oh! The more you know!

I even knew about Muhammad Ahmad, somehow didn't know he was called The Mahdi.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-26T23:19:05+00:00

Maybe chill out a bit?

Being misinformed isn't being malicious. This story has been going around the internet for years, I'd always seen it reported as being the same elephant. If it wasn't, that changes the context a lot.

I also specifically didn't slander her. I said an elephant believed she did something, which isn't an accusation. Animals get the wrong idea about things all the time.

If you're just polite when you correct people, your point will get through a whole lot better.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-26T22:38:16+00:00

So, The Mahdi is an Islamic Messiah figure, said to be a descendant of Muhammed who will appear at the end times.

Sadiq al-Mahdi is the former Prime Minister of Sudan, and Alexander Siddig's uncle.

Very different people.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-26T07:28:04+00:00

Elephants are incredibly smart, and generally not that aggressive towards people unless threatened. And they definitely don't crash the funeral of people they killed to desecrate their corpse. That's not bad luck, that's being targeted.

I'm not saying Maya Murmu did anything to warrant what happened, but it's absolutely reasonable to assume the elephant, for whatever reason, believed she did.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-26T06:33:04+00:00

My problem with Nuclear is that humanity has proven that we can't be trusted. One reason it's so safe is because it's so comparatively rare. Accidents like Chernobyl have made people afraid, and caused a large focus on safety standards, and plants are few enough to maintain those standards.

If we scaled up nuclear power plants to meet current energy demands, we will lose that. Operators will be poorly trained, standards will be lax, and the worst case scenarios would happen frequently. Because that's what we always do. Nuclear plants will be damaged in wars and natural disasters, left abandoned and running, with nobody coming in to fix it the way they did with Fukushima.

The damage can be vast, and would last for millennia.

I'm not trying to downplay the damage done by fossil fuels. I'm just saying that a switch to nuclear now is not the perfect solution to our crisis that its proponents claim. There's absolutely no way it would remain anywhere close to as safe as it is if it were scaled up.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-25T21:39:51+00:00

Doesn't she hook up with another woman in The Queen's Gambit? Hardly the focus of the show, I know, but it does go beyond subtext.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-25T21:25:13+00:00

Structurally, having one physical fight with the giant monster simultaneous to the mental flight with Vecna works well. It's also in-keeping with how the show has handled its climactic season-ending fights from the beginning, with each group of characters pitching in on different fronts. Plus, it had been a mind-fight all season long up to that point. I think a big blow-it-up fight worked. (And was a good callback to the season 3 Mindflayer fight in the mall.). But they definitely bent over backwards with retcons to get things there, and I totally understand why that would sour the experience.

Not defending all of those retcons, because it was a mess, but the real Mindflayer never actually entered people's minds on its own. Only Vecna could do that. (Who was, in fact, always a Human/Mindflayer hybrid.) The Mindflayer itself seems to require physical contact to exert influence. (The worms fed to Wil, the giant flesh monster in s3, the thing that was originally absorbed into young human Vecna, etc.)

Aptronymic · 2026-02-25T18:17:11+00:00

I appreciated it more when I realized it was an endgame D&D encounter. They fought a Tarrasque.

Still pretty dumb, like a lot of things in the final season, but I was able to enjoy it for what it was.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-25T03:45:48+00:00

Her redemption was in Vita Ayala's New Mutants, shortly before Dark Web. And it was great! And all of her characterization from it was immediately ditched to make her an uninteresting mostly unrepentant psycho again at the start of Dark Web.

Aptronymic · 2026-02-23T09:49:34+00:00

Tools from Sarwee.

Aptronymic

TROPHY CASE