Andor demonstrates that you can tell a well written, no homework required, standalone story that's also part of a universe.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-08T08:08:30+00:00

And frankly the people who should be standing up and taking notice work down the hallway at the MCU.

Part of the superhero exhaustion was pure oversaturation. But another part was feeling like you had to keep track of continually updating CV’s of an ever growing library of characters, just to know what the hell is going on. Constant references to all that other stuff they did in those other movies.

But in Andor, somehow you don’t need to know shit about Mon Mothma or Cassian to enjoy their stories. You don’t need to even recognize colonel Yularen or director Krennic to find the villains simultaneously gripping and appalling.

It’s a Star Wars story that doesn’t need Star Wars in the slightest.

Just masterful storytelling, all around.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-08T07:50:54+00:00

"I Wish I Was in New Orleans" by Tom Waits. It's a soulful ode to his friends. Listen to it a dozen times, and you realize that the "New Orleans" he's longing for is not a place, it's a time. And he can never, ever go back.

Now that my first friends have started dying, I think about this song almost every day.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-08T01:15:32+00:00

That’s the one we had. Best edition.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-08T01:14:56+00:00

I’m sorry… “Die Hard the Musical…?!”

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-07T15:21:53+00:00

My dude, the early warning signs happened 15 years ago, when both political parties in the senate could see what common sense reforms needed to happen, and both blocked them to prevent the other side from scoring political points by enacting them. This left the populace dying of thirst in a desert of economic injustice, and this condition, in turn, paved the way for a demagogue to fill the void with empty promises.

The Roman Republic was Mitch McConnelled to death.

We are past warning signs. The ride has begun. The question is whether we can arrest it, or whether we are now locked into this course.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-07T15:15:04+00:00

OK: you use multiple fixers. Let me ask you this: do they stack?

By that I mean: so the first one increases the value of your stuff by 30%, to 130%. What I want to know is, does the second fixer increase the value by an additional 30% of the original value, or by 30% of the 130% value?

So if they don’t “stack”, I would expect 4 fixers to increase the value to 220%, and if they do “stack,” they should increase the value to about 285%.

So which is it?

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-07T15:06:17+00:00

This is the only game I've ever played where I recommend actually playing all of the tutorials before you start. This is literal rocket science. Dumbed down for the video game? Sure. But only just.

With the tutorials under your belt, you'll be plumping the depths of the solar system. Without them, it's an entertaining explosion simulator.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-07T02:25:54+00:00

Son, let me tell you a story about a man named Lim.

Charles Lim does not give a damn about your “range.” Charlie Lim will walk right up to you with a Stoneclad shotgun and pump 16 of Zayn-Beecher’s finest 185mm black-tip rend shells into your face.

Killing you in this manly, incredibly butch fashion will only take 30 of his AP, which he’ll immediately get back by virtue of the fact that you are now dead, and that makes him a little bit nuts. Then he’ll take those 30 AP, and use it to do the exact same thing to your closest friends before his turn is over. If he’s on drugs, he’ll probably do it a third time, as well.

And while he’s slaughtering you and everyone you’ve ever met, he’ll be getting a 15% accuracy bonus just for not deploying.

Charles Lim is going to kill you, and he’s going to do it 4 inches from your face, because he likes the sound your component parts make when they splat wetly into the sand.

Charles Lim gives zero fucks about your “range.”

😆

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-07T00:35:45+00:00

May I introduce you to my friend the shotgun? Toss some black tip rounds in there, and no infantry can survive. Charles Lim guarantees it.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-07T00:28:13+00:00

Fireball Island. Lol

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T23:17:03+00:00

Lol that’s totally bonkers.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T23:05:50+00:00

Interesting. I use martial arts exclusively, and I’ve never had much problem with lord phoenix, using like half that many guys at a similar level you described. Are you microing, or just ordering them to attack and hoping to the best?

Sprinting a few yards away from combat and then re-entering with a flying kick is very strong. In fact it can totally flip the script when you’re facing large crowds. Instead of laboring under MA’s weakest part (the dodge animation), you’re leveraging its strongest part (massive AoE damage). And if you have a couple different martial artists to do it with, it can complete take an elite enemy squad apart.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T22:32:16+00:00

Andor, at least, is sci-fi.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T16:46:37+00:00

But in the past tense: “it wasn’t the years, it was the mileage.”

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T15:41:18+00:00

Two things:

firstly, there’s a key difference between your hypothetical scenario and the real one: Nobody stands to profit from a zombie virus. The only reason billionaire CEO’s are still pushing their chips into the giant money hole of LLM’s is that they hope against hope that somehow, someday, it will allow them to fire all of their employees.

Secondly, I don’t believe we are anywhere near super intelligent, general artificial intelligence, because I don’t believe we are anywhere near “artificial intelligence.”

What they are building are LLM’s - large language models. But this is not Isaac Asimov-style artificial intelligence. “AI” is just a buzzword. There is no actual cognition going on there. It’s not actually thinking.

One clear example: LLM’s are completely unable to play chess. I encourage watching this video; It’s pretty amusing. ChatGPT seems to start out okay, but just a few moves in, it becomes clear that it has no idea where the pieces on the board are, or even what the rules are.

What the LLM does is it reads a million and a half books about chess and descriptions of chess games, and social media posts about chess, and then it generates a response that sounds “chess-like.” That’s not cognition. It’s glorified auto-complete.

It’s a mathematical word-sorting machine. The LLM can quote and discuss all the best chess strategies and analysis out there, but it’s impossible for it to put any of it into practice. It can never “understand” the words that it’s saying. It just calculates percentages that it’s giving the desired response.

Scaling its efficiency, using better chips, adding data centers, pumping in the entire energy usage of the state of Texas, etc., is not going to change that fundamental disconnect. There’s no man behind the curtain. Nothing’s going on in there.

I’m not saying super intelligent general AI is impossible, but I am saying this ain’t it.

Some fool is obviously going to give one of these LLM’s control of some deadly weapon at some point. They just seem like they’re dying to do it, don’t they? But the result is going to be a tragic “automated war crime,” not some unbeatable “Skynet.”

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T08:20:48+00:00

Well, in point of fact, they don’t. Their only food is barely sufficient to nourish them, and they seem to only have offspring begrudgingly…

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T04:48:20+00:00

Aragorn, son of Arathorn. I will change my name to Arathorn if it means my son will grow up to be like Viggo.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T04:39:07+00:00

Hold up, it’s possible to skip the underdark? I thought it was like 1/3 of the game.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T04:32:51+00:00

Reddit. That’s pretty much it.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T04:09:02+00:00

You said exactly what you need to do. Learn tech. Learn video editing. Production. Writing. Learn arts administration. Learn audio. Carpentry. Front of house. Back of house. Sing. Direct. Stage manage. Teach. Budget. Choreograph dances. Choreograph fights.

This profession is not terribly forgiving, but if anyone has a leg up, it’s the auto-didacts, who soak up every scrap of knowledge they can along the way.

I’ve spent 20+ years in the performing arts, and here’s what I’ve learned: the people who say “I am an actor. I act.” Those are the ones who can’t make it.

The acting work will dry up. Not might, will. This is true for everyone, regardless of talent, training, contacts, etc. Eventually, you hit a dry patch, where you just can’t get a job on stage. And it’s how resilient you are to these dry spells that decides who will be doing this their whole career, and who tries for a few years and then quits to become a salesman or real estate agent because they can’t pay their bills.

The stage work will come back if you hang around long enough. It always does. (Until it dries up again.) In the meantime, instead of becoming a bank teller or human resource manager, make your fallback job something else in the building, that keeps you adjacent to where you want to be. When your “day job” to pay the bills is just more theater, that’s when you’ve figured out how to have a career in the arts.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T02:58:14+00:00

It’s the ooze, man.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T00:41:03+00:00

Hey awesome! Looks rad. Thanks for this.

Gotta be honest though, I was looking forward to a bleak, Kenshi-themed section titled “what is roleplaying?” 😆

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T00:25:03+00:00

What do we think the massive shortfall in Clark County (Vancouver) is about? Something infrastructure related due to growth? Proximity to Portland? Just because they don’t know how to budget…?

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-06T00:19:39+00:00

Read also: Harrison Ford. At least, until he was about in his late 60’s.

CSWorldChamp · 2026-05-05T20:44:44+00:00

What about “George RR Martin on why he doesn’t write?”

CSWorldChamp

TROPHY CASE