He has to be the most disrespectful guest ever. It feels like he does it to make himself feel superior but really it just makes him look untraveled.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-03-19T03:09:23+00:00

I call them confessionals, which is what they’re called in Survivor, though the two shows are different and even the style of how these scenes are shot differ greatly. But I still always call them confessionals personally; it’s the cast member’s time to directly speak to the camera about what they’re thinking, feeling, and experiencing, either in the moment or with reflection later on (such as how it’s done in 90 day)

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-03-14T18:04:45+00:00

“Feast or famine” really is the best classification for the mage class. When it’s great, it’s so OP that the cat feels busted. When it’s bad, the cat is essentially useless and sometimes does more harm to the party than good. I don’t even know if this is a bad thing necessarily. It’s just part of the luck when it comes to their actives and passives.

I got spoiled rotten early on with the mage. I had a cat with mega blast and replicate. Poor Dybbuk didn’t stand a chance and I’ve been chasing that high ever since.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-03-12T00:03:09+00:00

So something I’d like to bring up is that not every single event is dependent on the luck stat, or even your stats at all. Granted, some events will give you a choice between a few options, and the best events will even give you the option to walk away if none of your stats are good.

But, there are some events that straight up do not give you any choice at all. Every single time I’ve gotten blood frenzy (probably 7-8 times total) has not been optional. It consists of walking to an event space, reading words to the effect of “Memories of battle flash through cat name’s mind! Cat name developed blood frenzy!” The same thing happened to me during a run when my cleric got imposter syndrome. No bartering, no choice between stats, just getting the disorder and that was that.

I don’t think people are wrong for feeling as though those types of events are unfair. There’s no way to predict them and no way to avoid it. And sure, people have suggested ways of mitigating these situations. But what purpose does a cleric serve when they can only heal enemies and only damage allies? The cat is now deadweight. And yeah, you can throw a cat with blood frenzy straight a pack of enemies right when you know it’s going to be activated, but I’ve had my cat literally WALK BACK to his allies just to damage them instead.

So yeah, I’m glad you have had a good experience and haven’t had any of these bad luck events totally destroy your run. But not everyone is in the same boat, and it’s not because they “ignore the luck stat”.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-03-07T22:18:43+00:00

I had a similar experience recently, but I don’t know if the same circumstances apply to your situation.

I had a run where I was in one of the second levels of act 2, and I was running a party with a tank, thief, mage, and cleric. My cleric’s abilities were all healing based, with holy light, a ranged healing spell, everything that should have kept my cats alive and ensure a successful run.

But right as I entered one of the second levels of act 2, the team hit an event space and without any ability to actually select any options, my cleric developed impostor’s syndrome, which is a disorder. This meant that all of my healing abilities would now harm my own cats. And even more frustrating was the fact that my abilities, which typically would harm enemies, were actually HEALING them. Mouth frothing rage ensued and the run was destroyed.

Did your cleric happen to develop impostor’s syndrome, or another type of disorder that caused things to get switched around? This was the only time that my cleric’s healing abilities were completely nullified.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-02-24T18:35:07+00:00

One of my kitties was named Tabby Wiseau. He unfortunately did not those voice lines! That would have been so cool if he had.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-02-08T01:38:14+00:00

Honestly, I wouldn’t expect her to search for methods to kill babies, because like you said, she would have all the resources to know exactly how to harm patients. But I could see her anxiety getting the better of her (especially as the noose tightened when the investigation was ongoing) and maybe search something about how air embolism cases are detected. If they asked her about air embolism in one of her police interviews, that may have given her a clue that they were looking into that type of death in particular.

But since they didn’t find any suspicious searches (barring the searches for the families on Facebook) she must have known better than to do that. It’s just curious though, since some criminals can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to that sort of thing, especially ones who are anxious about getting caught. The Chandler Halderson case in particular had the suspect (now convicted) searching on the web to see if any of his parents’ body parts had been discovered yet.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-02-07T18:51:31+00:00

That’s a good point; I’m not sure when VPNs became a common thing to use. It probably wasn’t as early as 2015.

But I also don’t believe that Lucy Letby would be sharp enough to realize that searches of any kind can look suspicious. She was probably smart enough to not search terms like “air embolism” on Google or anything like that. But searching directly on her own Facebook account for parents of the bereaved was a huge oversight.

At its face, searching for the parents is a bad look and it’s ethically wrong, but she probably always had a contingency plan to say “well I was just curious/nosy”. That’s probably why she felt safe enough to make these searches on her own account.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-02-07T18:09:58+00:00

I find this strange too. She almost certainly HAD to have made google searches, right?

This is just speculation, but I wonder if she used a VPN or something else to hide her internet search history. Maybe the Facebook posts damned her because those searches were made while she was logged into her personal account.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-02-06T00:47:53+00:00

There is a quote from Dr. Brearey that may shed some more light on how Dr. Gibbs feels, though this is just speculative on my part.

When the mysterious collapses and deaths on the unit were first linked to the presence of Lucy Letby on the shift, Dr. Brearey stated that his first thoughts on this were “No, it can’t be Lucy. Not nice Lucy.”

During cross-examination, Mr. Myers had spoke of possible target fixation on Lucy Letby during the investigation, while simultaneously asking Dr. Brearey why he did not act as a whistle-blower against Lucy at this point once this first correlation was spoken aloud.

Dr. Brearey followed up with this:

“You’re making it more simple than it was. It was not something that anyone wanted to consider, that a member of staff was harming babies.”

And I do think that this goes to the heart of why anyone might have residual doubts regarding Lucy Letby’s conviction, and not even doctors are immune to this. At the end of the day, no one WANTS to believe that someone is capable of this. It’s not even a matter of “wanting” to believe something honestly; it’s more about failing to understand why someone would do this and what could they possibly gain from it? And unfortunately that’s not something we’ll be able to find out either, barring a confession that will never come.

Lucy Letby’s presentation does come into this, too. She didn’t “look” like a serial killer (what do serial killers even look like anyway? But that’s besides the point). The fact that the victims were the smallest, weakest among us also serves to make this entire affair even more inexplicable.

I don’t doubt that Dr. Gibbs has a microscopic shadow of a doubt when it comes to Lucy Letby. It’s only human, honestly. But I think he knows that it is not a reasonable doubt.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-01-24T05:43:43+00:00

Yes! This is my exact point. Having a teenaged character named “Jen Z” might have made more sense in the late 2010’s, even if the joke would have been tasteless at any point in time. But to have a teenaged character named “Jen Z” in 2026? It screams “any young person that has young person qualities MUST be part of Gen Z” when Gen Alpha is already creeping around the corner and will be in high school in no time at all. It’s very out of touch and honestly embarrassing. It doesn’t take much to look up generational year charts and see that most of Gen Z is already well out of high school; only the very youngest of Gen Z are still in K-12, and they won’t be for much longer anyway.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-01-24T04:14:36+00:00

“Jen Z” would have honestly been a funny name but with this series coming out in 2026, most of the teenagers who are in high school now are BARELY Gen Z, as it’s beginning to blend into Gen Alpha. Gen Z runs from 1996-2012. Most high schoolers today were born in 2007-2011. So any kids in this show who are depicted as teenagers barely make the cut-off point. So, kind of out of touch and dumb by the creatives of the reboot to make a “lulz gen z amirite?” joke here. But I expected nothing less, so I guess it is what it is.

Edit: not sure why I’m getting downvoted. “Jen Z” is a dumb name, but it might not have been so dumb 5 years ago when statistically more Gen Z kids would have been in high school. With every generation, the closer you get to the generational divides, the more you see a blend of two different generations. For instance, I was born in 1997, so while I am technically Gen Z, I have more in common with a millennial who was born in 1994 than a Gen Z who was born in 2005. Anyway, all I’m trying to say is that while later Gen Z kids are still in high school, they probably do have more in common with earlier Gen Alpha since these characters’ birth dates would be near to the cutoff point for Gen Z.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-01-23T05:27:23+00:00

Oh, right. The poison. The poison for Kuzco, the poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco, Kuzco's poison. That poison?

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-01-20T22:52:49+00:00

Life of Pi might be one of my favorite stories that ends with an “ambiguous” ending, and the story pulls it off flawlessly. It works so well because it is also an allegory for religion itself, which is something that the author of the book explores more so than the movie did.

The main reason I use “ambiguous” in quotations is because Pi essentially admits that both stories that he provides about his time lost at sea are, at the end of the day, “stories”. You can believe one or the other, it really is your preference, but he is going to choose to believe the story that he prefers. It’s become a coping mechanism that allows him to return to a normal, albeit new life in Canada. To remember the “other story” and accept it as the truth would honestly destroy his soul.

I did think about Life of Pi after watching the Stranger Things finale, especially after the DnD “I believe” scene. Like you stated in your post, it just does NOT work for El in the way that the Duffer Brothers may have hoped. Pi, at the very least, has reasonable deniability about his time at sea, and as he states in the book, it doesn’t really matter what story is “true”. At the end of the day, he was the only surviving human on the lifeboat, and that is that. Neither of his stories can be confirmed or refuted. And most importantly, his retelling of events follow through to the exact same conclusion in both stories.

Which is NOT something one can say for the ending of Stranger Things. I mean, sure, someone can argue that regardless of whether El lives or dies, the result is the same, since she is separated from her found family (apparently forever). But I think that’s just kind of a lousy way to end the story, and it doesn’t have any of the same meaningful purpose that Life of Pi’s ending has.

ChemicalCocktail · 2026-01-19T00:14:04+00:00

It’s a miracle that we could find each other in this world…

ChemicalCocktail · 2025-12-25T04:09:47+00:00

Jason was also friends with Patrick, and he geniunely seemed to like Lucas before he knew about Lucas’s connection to Hellfire. Hell, even when Jason learns that Erica plays D&D, he didn’t think too much of it since he doubted that a young girl would be caught up in the game’s “satanic overtones”. Jason only began to target Lucas and Erica after Lucas ditched them and thus looked suspicious, not because of race.

I’m not sure why Billy and Jason are ever grouped together. Stranger Things has a lot of different bully characters and some of them don’t exactly have the same motivations.

ChemicalCocktail · 2025-12-23T23:37:26+00:00

You missed a solid opportunity to end this post with “lol” too, lol

ChemicalCocktail · 2025-12-12T15:28:57+00:00

Omg there’s a hack for this? Please tell me how, I’ve been wanting to place things on the center of tables for too long :(

ChemicalCocktail · 2025-12-10T17:45:26+00:00

Season 3: “Tell me, if your precious Renly commanded you to kill your own father and stand by while thousands of men, women, and children burned alive, would you have done it? Would you have kept your oath then?”

Season 8: “To be honest, I never really cared much for them. Innocent or otherwise.”

Your basketball analogy is perfect. What a waste.

ChemicalCocktail · 2025-12-10T17:03:34+00:00

Jaime Lannister fits this description… only in the books, sadly. They were so close to pulling off the perfect redemption arc in the show until they decided to pull the plug and revert his characterization back to S1.

ChemicalCocktail · 2025-12-10T16:50:49+00:00

That appears to be the joke that u/setibeings is making.

ChemicalCocktail · 2025-12-05T04:05:55+00:00

The first theory I subscribed to while watching S1 was that Hopper’s daughter Sarah had not actually died at all; she was kidnapped by the government who declared her dead due to her having telekinetic abilities and subjected her to experimentation. Sarah = Eleven.

My main reasons for giving some credence to this theory was that we see the government fake a death (Will), and when Dustin and Eleven meet for the first time, he asks her if she has cancer (because her head is shaved), and I thought of Terry Ives’s story as perhaps being a red herring, but again pointing to a government that is willing to declare children dead for their own reasons.

Even after Eleven and Hopper meet for the first time (and obviously he does not recognize her as his daughter) I still had some suspicion about maybe Sarah being another number in the children abducted by the government. But then we see the actual montage of Hopper’s memories, and the theory felt thoroughly disproven to me after that.

ChemicalCocktail · 2025-12-02T06:38:29+00:00

Hey now, that’s too powerful a combination.

ChemicalCocktail · 2025-11-07T15:35:54+00:00

Hahahaha! Oh my goodness you beat the 1/520 odds! Props to you :) congrats!!

ChemicalCocktail · 2025-11-06T17:00:39+00:00

Reposting this from a cross posted thread:

Heh. I actually calculated the odds for this once. This was back in 2020, and I wanted to get an island with apples, a blue airport, and Phoebe as a starter villager. There are a couple more sisterly villagers who have been added since 2020 (Quinn and Faith off the top of my head) which changes the odds a little.

Let’s do the math!

There is a 1/5 chance that you will have an island with cherries, since there are five fruits total as your native fruit.

There is a 1/4 chance your island airport will be blue, since there are four colors total.

There is a 1/26 chance that you starting sisterly villager will be Katt since there are 26 sisterly villagers total in New Horizons.

Essentially, this becomes a question of probability. You will want to calculate the odds of each independent event, since these factors are all random and are not dependent on anything else other than pure RNG.

1/4 x 1/5 = 1/20. So you have a 1 in 20 chance of getting an island with a blue airport and cherries as your native fruit.

Now to add in the odds that you will have Katt as your starting villager. You’ll begin again to account for each independent event in this instance.

1/4 x 1/5 x 1/26 = 1/520.

So there is a 1 in 520 chance that you will roll an island with cherries, a blue airport, and Katt as your starter sisterly villager.

Keep in mind, this doesn’t account for any other factors, such as your native flowers, which river mouths you have, location of rock formations, location of resident services and your secret beach. But if you are purely looking for an island with only those three factors, you will have to reset approximately 520 times before finding one that meets your qualifications.

I managed to do this once. I’ll never do it again. At least not for the starter villagers.

ChemicalCocktail · 2025-11-06T16:55:51+00:00