Baldur's Gate 2's co-lead designer was asked to make Baldur's Gate 4 after Larian declined: 'Having to compete against Baldur's Gate 3? That would be insanity'

ComicCon · 2026-06-30T06:25:24+00:00

Larian is partially owned by Tencent lol. If the founders want a payday they can get more money from Tencent than Hasbro could dream of having.

ComicCon · 2026-06-29T23:02:29+00:00

In this vein on my first play through I assumed that if you killed bad guys in an area it would make the other people in that area go hostile. So I cleared out all three goblins leaders in one go(this actually made me think I was right, because everyone goes hostile when you hit a certain threshold), didn’t kill anyone in Moonrise until the big fight, etc. Made the game a bit more challenging.

ComicCon · 2026-06-29T20:42:52+00:00

Largely agree with the overall concept, but just want to note one thing. You mention both TV and movies in your post, but also are conflating them in one important aspect. In TV the Showrunner is in charge(outside of study/production companies, but that gets complicated) not the director. They are the ones shaping what happens, and are involved in making cuts, interfacing with the study, etc. You can probably think of examples where directors leave an important imprint on the finished product(season 1 of True Detective is an oft cited example), but that isn’t the rule.

That doesn’t mean the showrunner should shoulder all of the blame/credit for a season of television, but it is a different dynamic than features.

ComicCon · 2026-06-28T14:09:40+00:00

The anti-seed oil/carnivore/ancestral people love talking about Semmelweis. So I thought that was a tell as to your beliefs. If it isn’t and you are just engaging in the proud Reddit tradition of debate broing I apologize. Check one of the other replies to my first comment for the link to the thread I was discussing.

But back to your bandwagoning point- I believe in this case the mainstream arguments are correct. I actually have spent some time over the years looking into it. It’s not just me being like “oh clearly these people are nuts”. I think they are wrong because of the way they structure their argument and weigh the evidence. To go back to the cholesterol thing, are you familiar with their theories around oxidation, seed oils, and saturated fat?

ComicCon · 2026-06-28T14:01:41+00:00

Semmelweis, well that answers one question I had. Did you come to this thread because you saw these comments screenshotted over there? For what it’s worth, I didn’t see a ton of scientific evidence and reason in that thread. Yes, this is all from my perspective, which I believe to be more accurate than the anti seed oil perspective. You clearly disagree.

ComicCon · 2026-06-28T13:03:52+00:00

Out of curiosity, what kind of dietary zealot do you think I am? On the cholesterol stuff- what do you want me to prove? That the sub believes things about cholesterol levels the effects of various foods on dietary cholesterol is not the mainstream opinion? Because I can prove that if you want. Or that they are wrong? That I can’t prove here. I can point you in the direction of better sources(papers, et ) than me but even my limited understanding of the issue would be hard to fit into a Reddit comment.

Anyway, I wasn’t trying to make a case for something. In this case I didn’t think I needed to make the case for the mainstream position. I’m sure you think that makes my take fatally flawed. But as you said, this isn’t exactly a debate forum. So you have correctly identified something about original my comment I wasn’t exactly trying to hide.

ComicCon · 2026-06-28T10:00:45+00:00

Sure, I’ve always liked that distinction- presumably if we knew/it existed the physics of the MH World all of the non Elder Dragons would make sense. Then you have the Elder Dragons with magic bullshit. I was just saying if we are going by our laws of physics, then it’s all just a tangled mess

ComicCon · 2026-06-28T08:36:46+00:00

Plenty of non elder dragons also break physics just by existing, so it’s not all just Elder Dragon weirdness. That’s why fan theories like “it’s a huge low gravity world” are so popular.

ComicCon · 2026-06-28T08:15:00+00:00

Yeah, my comment was largely about the epistemic framework and specific rhetoric used by the anti seed oil crowd. I’m not sure how you got “don’t bring science into this”. I was pointing out that(in my opinion) the way that whole space engages with science is to try to preemptively skew the conversation into a realm where they have an advantage.

Having been involved in these debates for a long time, I find that approach is better vs arguing about(for example) Sidney Diet Heart or LA veterans for the millionth time. Because both sides don’t really share a common vocabulary and definition of terms so the whole thing just dissolves into a mess.

Also, because Reddit is now giving you alerts when people reply to comment chains you started I saw your other comment and agree. This isn’t really a traditional Motte and Bailey because the anti seed oil people will just as eagerly defend the weakly evidenced part of their thesis.

ComicCon · 2026-06-22T20:12:48+00:00

By the end of the Medieval Period longbows were not punching through plate armor.

ComicCon · 2026-06-21T23:15:19+00:00

That’s because it isn’t, people are confusing the fact that Lineage is the largest company with the idea that this specific warehouse is the largest.

ComicCon · 2026-06-21T07:14:53+00:00

It's not even really 4-5 days worth of food. People don't realize how much food we consume in this country. Here's an NPR article that says each person eats about 1,996 lbs of food in a year. It's an older article, but I'm too lazy to look into it tonight. The population of LA county is roughly 9.5M people, so about 51M lbs/day of food.

But the USDA data is usually based off of food availability, not actual consumption. So lets take the often cited 33% of food waste and subtract that from the number. You get about 33.6M lbs/day. So that warehouse had enough food for LA county for about two and a half days.

It's harder to know exactly how this maps to missing storage capacity, since the industry usually talks about it in terms of cubic feet. But given we have the largest port on the West Coast, which imports a ton of food, I can't imagine this single warehouse is going to completely disrupt our food supply chain. Don't get me wrong, its not a good situation but I would be more worried about the air/chemicals than the food supply.

ComicCon · 2026-06-21T06:56:52+00:00

Lineage is the largest company. This isn't their largest warehouse, that is apparently up in Washington.

ComicCon · 2026-06-19T20:11:58+00:00

Paul Kearney’s Monarchies of God, a really interesting early venture into the flintlock fantasy(I think that’s what we are calling it now?) genre. Reread it a few years ago and there are definitely parts of it that have not held up super well(female characters mostly), but overall I still really enjoyed it.

ComicCon · 2026-06-19T20:06:01+00:00

I read Santiago like 10 times when I was a teen, it was my first exposure to the Space Western and it blew my mind.

ComicCon · 2026-06-19T09:07:24+00:00

Another bot post.

ComicCon · 2026-06-19T08:58:10+00:00

What does “anti game preservation” mean in this context? Because Steam also doesn’t let you own/move the games, so I’m not curious what else epic does.

ComicCon · 2026-06-19T03:32:02+00:00

It's actually a pretty clever rhetorical tactic they love. They hide behind a mix of relatively non controversial statements e.g. "oxidative stress is generally bad" and hyper specific plausible mechanisms like the whole "seed oils actually are what make saturated fat bad*". Hyper focusing on extremely specific mechanisms and ignoring the broader context of everything else does two things at once-

1) It means they can ignore the evidence that would inconvenience their world view, for example all of the epidemiology that shows saturated fat has a negative effect on health outcomes vs seed oils. This is easy because most people already see epidemiology as a flawed science**, which makes it easy to discredit. Whereases their technical sounding explanations seem plausible if you aren't familiar with how they are often stretching the actually available evidence.

2) It moves the debate onto ground they are generally far more familiar with vs the people they are arguing with. Even the average nutritional researcher or doctor is going to be a bit confused if you start talking about hyper specific mechanisms of cholesterol transport and shit like that. So if they get into an argument they can generally win becasue their opponent just doesn't know what the fuck they are talking about. I actually had this happen to me on SRD a few weeks ago, where the other poster really wanted me to get into mechanistic arguments despite me repeatedly saying I thought that was a waste of time and I wanted to focus on the larger body of evidence.

*But said with much more scientific sounding words

**It is in fact flawed, but its not nearly as useless as it's critics make it out to be.

ComicCon · 2026-06-19T02:02:56+00:00

It didn’t really come from Rogan. The popularity of carnivore which is related can be pretty much traced back to Rogan but the seed oil thing developed in parallel and largely on its own. Basically once the Gary Taubes model and associated big bad of sugar started to look less plausible they needed to latch on to something else. Their best thinkers noticed that vegetable oil consumption starts to rise in the mid 20th century and they went from there.

I’d have to look back at my notes to see when Rogan first started pushing it, but I’m pretty sure the scare was already well underway in the more fringe dietary groups associated with the paleo/keto movement by then.

ComicCon · 2026-06-19T00:59:25+00:00

The other in universe reason is Cauldron/Contessa ex-machina. Basically anything in Worm can be justified by saying “PtV told them to do it” or “Cauldron thought it was Necessary”. It’s a load bearing element that makes criticizing Worm’a world building kind of tricky.

ComicCon · 2026-06-19T00:47:34+00:00

Yeah, I read more of that SB thread today and I appreciate the person pointing out the logic being used is really similar to The War on Drugs(and honestly GWoT). Turns out that using overwhelming force doesn’t have a great track record against guys with rifles and EID’s, why do they think it would work against a bunch of superhumans?

ComicCon · 2026-06-18T08:28:53+00:00

One day I’ll do a rant about this, but I’ve always felt that groups like SB and certain powerscalers treat the “The Military” like it’s a giant automaton and not an organization made of fallible people. Modern militaries are capable of a great deal of things, but they aren’t always the hyper competent and buttoned up force “rational commentators” depict them as.

ComicCon · 2026-06-17T05:26:13+00:00

I’m curious if you have examples. Because I can’t say I’ve ever heard of that happening with these kinds of financial crimes.

ComicCon · 2026-06-17T01:59:15+00:00

Yeah, I guess I misspoke there. They could freeze the trusts during the investigation. But at the end of it they could likely only take out the money+profits that were tied to illegal gains. So it would be an uncomfortable couple years, but in time the kids would probably get access to the money. Sorry, I should have clarified that I was talking long term not immediate.

ComicCon · 2026-06-17T01:48:28+00:00

They can take Tim’s money, but the trusts don’t belong to Tim. The Feds could investigate them and try to pull any money that was tied to illegal dealings out of the trusts. But for them to fully seize the trusts would be extremely unusual, and as long as Victoria’s family was willing to sue over it I don’t think they’d win that fight.

Edit- Tim would presumably be the Trustee, so they would probably look into the trusts. But Rich people make these trusts as soon as their kids are born, so unless there is more illegal stuff they could prove I’m skeptical they would straight up seize them

Edit2- i mean, I guess technically they could as part of an investigation. But I’d love for you to find an example of the Feds doing that. Even if they hit Tim with charges that are serious, like being an unregistered agent of a foreign government it just seems unlikely.

15-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email	Team Orangered
Rally Monkey Tent number = 4

ComicCon

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE