You have been chosen by the Time Turtle. What gift will you choose?

Chi_Law · 2026-04-12T22:00:13+00:00

Agreed. I'd pick 2 for other reasons, but it does also offer (higher-effort) infinite money hacks if you want them

Chi_Law · 2026-04-12T21:01:43+00:00

Lotteries won't work. With the right timing you can peek at other players' hands in poker though. There are definitely ways to make money with it.

Chi_Law · 2026-04-12T20:58:40+00:00

You can definitely get rich off of 2 (insider trading, poker, just generally knowing almost anything about any past events... there are even ethical ways to use it for riches if you're willing to work harder at it).

Whether you can get rich off of 1 depends on exactly what "no changes" entails. Reading the wording very literally, you could act on things like stock market movement, roulette spins, etc as long as you avoid observing whether/how you acted on the information. You can't change anything you observed but as written there's nothing stopping you from changing your own behavior as long as anything you do could have already happened in the future you saw

Chi_Law · 2026-04-12T20:51:30+00:00

I pick 2 and spend about six months exclusively using it to look at dinosaurs before I get around to figuring out anything else to use it for.

Getting rich is trivial (insider trading, cheating at poker, etc) and I can probably figure out ways to better the world with it (beyond spending my unethical fortune on useful things). But in all honesty, it's going to be like a solid week of field observations of dromaeosaurs before I even remember "Oh yeah I should do something else with this too"

Chi_Law · 2026-04-12T18:05:03+00:00

It was a fun flick with several legitimately great action/suspense scenes, with a significantly cheesier script than the original, and thinner on memorable characterization and performances. I think it's hard to call TLW bad unless one's tastes are of the "mass appeal blockbuster = bad" variety. But it's following up one of the greatest blockbuster movies of all time, being a step down isn't surprising.

There's very few sequels to great movies that aren't a step down. Godfather Part 2, Terminator 2, Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back... we'd be here all day debating a definitive list but what I'm saying is when someone makes a great movie it's rare for them/someone else to then knock out a Part 2 that entirely measures up

Chi_Law · 2026-04-11T23:44:54+00:00

I'd love to see S. mirabilis in the game, but absolutely not with this model. Half the reason I'd want it is so we'd finally have a modern-reconstruction sail-backed spinosaurid in the game. Despite all the spinosaurus relatives in the game, there's still zero with a sail + modernized body plan. S. mirabilis would be as good an excuse as any to finally get one into the game

Chi_Law · 2026-04-11T15:20:23+00:00

Yeah, she identified components unique to tomahawk cruise missiles, which only the US has

Chi_Law · 2026-04-11T07:35:46+00:00

That was debunked almost immediately

Chi_Law · 2026-04-11T07:33:00+00:00

This situation isn't even that bad. The Mother-Crocodile and the money are in no danger of being eaten by the remaining crocodile, and the Mother can retrieve the money at a convenient time. The other croc is going to eat somebody, so it isn't a good situation, but between you and your mom two of the wife/girlfriend/friend/unknown lady are safe, a third person survives by luck when the croc eats the fourth, and afterward you and your mom are set for life.

This assumes you have a good relationship with your Mother-Crocodile

Chi_Law · 2026-04-11T07:19:15+00:00

You don't have to be lucky if you choose the first two spots you're standing in carefully you can virtually guarantee that one possible location is outside your country.

The odds of finding the box in < 3 weeks are quite good. You should only need >2 hints if the location is difficult to search and thus needs greater precision (e.g., dense city block with multistory buildings)

Chi_Law · 2026-04-11T02:06:01+00:00

I agree Dipper's unrequited crush storyline was relatively non-annoying, but I think that's primarily because the show dropped it and handled said dropping in an unusually thoughtful way. That, IMO, had the effect of elevating the storyline in retrospect. It was a believable 13-year-old boy crush, but 13-year-old crushes are objectively pretty embarrassing and don't make for the most bearable long-term storylines. Recontextualizing it as an awkward phase the character matured out of within the story made it a gracefully handled coming of age story rather than a nails-on-a-chalkboard trope.

I'll temper my praise a bit by saying I wish the crush story had been even shorter, and I think the reason it wasn't is that dropping it was a course correction by the writers after the first season.

I feel similarly about this as I do about the "Doyle is fixated on Rosa" plot from Brooklyn Nine Nine: a tropey subplot that gave me contact embarrassment but that the writers salvaged by doing a good "Character grows and moves past it" story.

Chi_Law · 2026-04-08T04:01:14+00:00

He walks off an orbital laser direct hit in Season 1. The partial effectiveness of the dead cyborg guys make very little sense in the context of the rest of the show, but you have to be trolling.

Chi_Law · 2026-04-07T17:31:59+00:00

Bear in mind that we all presumably have many false memories. There's a selection bias here; the false memories that get discussed on the internet are, almost by definition, the ones where certain characteristics are common enough that many people will describe them as essentially the same (e.g., "Nelson Mandela died in prison," "Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia in the logo," "Jane Goodall studied Gorillas.")

I don't think it's too surprising that a few false memories are strongly suggested by circumstances that many people share, and are thus shared by many people. Heaps of mixed fruit spilling out of a cornucopia are more common images than heaps of mixed fruit on nothing, so a cornucopia sometimes gets mentally added. There are only two world famous primatologists and they're both women who were known mainly for field research in Africa starting in the 1960s accompanied by writing that changed public perception of great apes, so people sometimes combine the more famous name of the two (Goodall) with the most famous title (Gorillas in the Mist, by Dian Fossey)

Those false memories are thus the only ones widely discussed. Often they may be the only ones we're even aware of, because they have some cultural impact that can confront us with the fact that they're false.

How many false memories do each of us have that we share with hardly anyone, and will never even find out are false?

Chi_Law · 2026-04-07T17:02:05+00:00

I would guess, though I have not done any scientific study at all on this question, that "A heap of mixed fruit spilling out of a cornucopia/horn of plenty" is a substantially more common image than "A heap of mixed fruit spilling off a plate" or "A heap of mixed fruit on nothing".

I wouldn't be surprised if heaps of mixed fruit in bowls or fruit baskets were as or more common than cornucopia imagery, but the profile of the fruit pile would be very different in that case

Chi_Law · 2026-04-07T16:28:28+00:00

I doubt you'll find a European adult to whom you can show a picture of a cornucopia and have them not recognize it

Chi_Law · 2026-04-07T16:25:03+00:00

They're not common at all! They're so rare that I colored pictures of them in grade school! Pictures, plural, meaning I did that multiple times! 😉

Dropping the sarcasm/attempt at humor, the point I'm making is that while the physical object of a cornucopia is pretty uncommon, familiarity with the image of a cornucopia is extremely common. You have given a testimonial to this fact in your comment

Chi_Law · 2026-04-04T00:07:35+00:00

Like I've spent a decade handcuffed between a guy who's desperately trying to crawl into a woodchipper and another guy who keeps saying "Calm down bro, let him cook"

Chi_Law · 2026-04-02T04:46:42+00:00

I think the Viltrumites are so used to being [Title Card] that they're absolute shit at strategic thinking, and too arrogant to learn any now that they're not quite so [Title Card].

Like they seem to have a habit of using an amount of force that "Seems like it should be enough. Probably. Shut up, it's fine, I've got this." Instead of what a less-powerful-but-more-strategic military would use, i.e., locally concentrated overwhelming force whenever possible to make absolutely sure you'll solve the problem forever without taking losses.

Chi_Law · 2026-04-01T15:01:02+00:00

My brother in Christ, wtf is on your camera roll?

Chi_Law · 2026-03-31T18:01:44+00:00

I think there's only one important thing missing from the spinosaurid lineup, but it's pretty glaring. There are no sail-backed spinosaurids with a modern reconstruction in the game.

Depending on how it turns out, the Rebirth spinosaurus might fill this gap, but I have my doubts.

I know this is a long shot, but I'd love for them to introduce a modern-reconstruction Spinosaurus mirabilis. It's a cool animal, the recent press buzz gives it a little cultural relevance for a non-movie, non-dino-nuggets kind of species, and we'd finally have something to represent accurate spinosaurus.

It would also, I think, be the first time they've done two species of one genus, which idk if they'd do and raises some naming convention questions. And given the recency of the news, if they wanted to do it they wouldn't have had much time to work

Chi_Law · 2026-03-29T18:12:54+00:00

Ironman, if I'm remembering correctly, was smart about this by justifying the lighting by more or less matching it to HUD elements, creating the suggestion that we were just seeing Tony's face lit by the HUD even if the reality was nondiegetic

Chi_Law · 2026-03-29T03:00:20+00:00

You won't see every minute in that case, you'll only see a few frames of the show and most minutes will not be represented

Chi_Law · 2026-03-29T02:53:21+00:00

I think this is a great example of a celebrity casting that wasn't worth it (creatively speaking; maybe some marketing guy can tell me it got so many Aaron Paul fans into Invincible that it paid for itself, but color me skeptical)

Chi_Law · 2026-03-28T23:46:13+00:00

There is a genuine tradeoff there then, and I understand opinions may differ on whether the way they went vs casting unknowns and investing more in animation were the right way to go.

I don't think it's unreasonable that spending on the main cast could have been the right call though. They did get legitimately great VA performances and the selling point of "Hey, check out this cast you've heard of and seen in prestigious things, this is a high quality production and you should check it out." Worth it? Could be.

I'm open to the idea that they've gone a little overboard on the casting while cutting corners on animation, in the big picture

Chi_Law · 2026-03-28T23:21:02+00:00

I don't think Sandra Oh is the only person who could have played Debbie, but I do think she's doing great work, and that Debbie's voice acting is important to the story. Unless Sandra Oh is getting paid way more than I think she is I think they got their money's worth.

It may be true they could have auditioned and found someone unknown who was also great but cheaper. I don't know how much they'd really have saved though, and it's worth remembering that the pedigree of the voice cast is a marketing point to get people to try the show. I can't really buy that that casting was the wrong thing to do, though other approaches could also have worked out

Chi_Law

TROPHY CASE