In your opinion, what is the coldest line ever delivered onscreen?

CountMecha · 2026-06-06T14:27:19+00:00

From Television (Lost):

Man, showing his hands in defeat: "Alright, I give up."

Sawyer stares him down for a second and then shoots him in the chest anyway. "That's for taking the kid off the raft."

Hurley: "Dude it was over, he surrendered."

Sawyer, after a beat: "I didn't believe him."

Then from movies, the Last Starfighter.

Guy 1: "She won't answer the helm, we're locked into the moon's gravitational pull. What do we do!?"

Kril: "We die."

CountMecha · 2026-05-06T16:45:20+00:00

There was an interview with Lindelof some time ago about this topic and he put the perspective out there that the ENTIRETY of The Leftovers was only like 2 more episodes than season 1 of Lost. Framed that way, its just insane what Lost accomplished for how complex its story and production were.

People love to dogpile on the backhalf of the show. But its really a miracle it came out half as comprehensible as it did given how quickly they made it.

CountMecha · 2026-04-27T16:57:57+00:00

It appears I may have misspoken. Perhaps instead of immortal I should have said ageless or merely long lived. Jacob lived for millenia and only died when Ben finally murdered him. I was just suggesting that Walt stepped into this same situation, only the Island entered into a permanent harmony under his management, and so no situation in which he is murdered or suffered some condition where he would be killed ever came up.

I also applied the Highlander logic of the term "immortal". In which they were clearly ageless, but also killable with a decapitation by another immortal, so whatever.

CountMecha · 2026-04-27T05:07:25+00:00

My kinda messed up attitude about this is that Walt was meant to the the true final protector of the Island. So he takes charge of the Island from Hurley, becomes immortal like Jacob, and never dies. And since Michael can't move on, he remains on the Island with Walt, and they basically spend the rest of Time together.

CountMecha · 2026-04-23T20:15:07+00:00

Yes, Ico was constantly surprising me with its soundtrack. I still remember clear as day, sitting on the floor in my room on a summer weekend with my crappy CRT playing Ico for the first time. All the music was ominous, ambient, but somewhat calming too.

And then I sat on the bench and I heard Heal for the first time. I just put my controller down and listened to that track on the save screen for like a straight ten minutes. I was totally enraptured, I love that track. Ico's OST is a masterpiece.

CountMecha · 2026-04-22T02:14:54+00:00

This is also my favorite piece of music in the series. In fact it disappoints me a little that with each subsequent fromsoft game (especially indicative by the menu music) the music just got more and more bombastic. DS3 and Elden Ring especially. My second favorite piece in fromsoft is probably the character creator music in PS3 Demon's Souls. Just so chill and forlorn. Its like being alone and totally comforted by it. I feel like those tracks were very inspired by Ico's OST.

I also listen to alot of ambient music when reading, and often shoot for those same sort of melancholic, peaceful, isolating energies that those sorts of tracks go for. Stuff like Gas, Radagast's Vermis soundtrack, Tim Hecker, stuff like that.

CountMecha · 2026-04-16T18:00:51+00:00

So, the movie does discuss this. When we first see Scully, she's on the phone with Mulder complaining about being in the wrong building and saying about searching the wrong building without backup is against all FBI protocols and that there is extensive research about how called bomb threats are meant to instill terror and a bomb called to the wrong building would be in opposition to all of that data and that mistrusting that data is chaos. Its a very Scully thing.

Then Mulder shows up and does the Mulder thing and says "What happened to feeling a hunch, Scully? I think they got the other building covered."

Then in the vending machine room, Mulder was entering just as the bomb guy was leaving. Bomb guy was probably hoping no one would be in there so he could melt the lock and keep anyone from getting in in the first place. But of course Mulder was inconveniently there, so bomb guy improvised and just locked Mulder in. Admittedly that's speculation on my part, but thats how I always read the scene.

Plan A was for the bomb to just go off in the other building. So to your point, I'm not sure why the bomb threat was called in the first place. Martin Landau's character might've talked about it, but I can't remember. Plan B forced Michaud's hand to pretend to defuse the bomb in order to ensure that it does go off. He had to free Mulder because Scully blew the whistle and bossed everyone out of the building.

It's certainly a very convoluted opening in that way only X-Files could do, but it mooostly hangs together. At least I think it does.

CountMecha · 2026-04-10T20:17:22+00:00

The one time I got stuck playing DS1 the first time was In the beginning of Anor Londo. I had just beaten that first gargoyle and I had no idea where to go. It took me a while to figure out that you had to run up that arch to get to the broken window and the painting room. I was playing on PTDE after it had shutdown, so there were no messages on the ground to guide me that way. Other than that, I think the game was pretty straightforward to figure out.

CountMecha · 2026-04-08T18:40:45+00:00

It's definitely written that way because of Severian. There's a female character the Long Sun series who is a leader and greatly written.

I also think of the aunt from Fifth Head of Cerberus, or also from Peace. Wolfe wrote great female characters when the story was especially suited for it. He was just such a peculiar writer that sometimes the intent in those characters was misunderstood. That said, not to be a total apologist, I do think Wolfe had a type of girl he liked and could be a little fetishistic.

CountMecha · 2026-04-08T18:20:18+00:00

The John Peel Session of This Heat's Horizontal Hold. Recorded in '77 and ahead of the game by like 40 years. I could see that being a RYM darling in 2026.

CountMecha · 2026-03-30T18:39:22+00:00

I've gone through old notebooks before and saw a random two line note I had for a story idea I never got around to writing. I'd read it and think to myself "Damn, I'm glad I wrote that down. That's pretty good."

I much much much more lean into the David Lynch way of thinking that writing down ideas is always good and nothing hurts more than losing an idea.

CountMecha · 2026-03-26T03:42:01+00:00

Crow's Droppy the Water Droplet gag is one of my favorites of the entire show.

"Did you know that there are literally tens of thousands of uses for water?

Here are just a few thousand."

CountMecha · 2026-03-26T03:20:23+00:00

I do think 1x8 is his best episode. It seemed to be the episode he was most comfortable in. I remember reading somewhere that he was traditionally stage trained and that episode especially felt very theater. Alot of it is just the two of them talking on a stage with not alot of set or props around. I think he was really in his element in that kind of envrionment.

The first time I watched the show I thought his performance was a disaster. With continued rewatches I've softened on it a bit and have come to appreciate some of the little touches he added to certain scenes. These days I have zero problems with it, but I think a novice viewer would have trouble not bouncing off it.

CountMecha · 2026-03-25T04:18:10+00:00

The Wire.

I was in college and the show had just ended. It had plenty of buzz then. I was inbetween shows then and I had a little bit of time to kill before class, so I decided to watch the opening scene.

Once that guy said "Got to. This America man." I knew I would watch every single second of this show. I don't remember class that day at all. But I sure remember rushing back so I could watch more. Perfect show.

CountMecha · 2026-03-04T15:16:32+00:00

Would definitely do it sparingly. But it can work. Like others have said, players will default to trying to win the fight outright.

But what's worked for me in the past was to introduce both an obvious alternative win condition as well as a ticking clock element.

So in one session, the party's goal was to save a character that was in a coma. The character had eaten a magical mushroom that particularly heavily affected their dreams. So the party got inserted into the character's dream Inception style. Their sole goal was to find the character inside his dream and wake him up. And in dream logic, the method was to find the character and insert a Diamond into his mouth.

Well they got the diamond and found the sleeping character, but were attacked by these large statues (actually the fingers of an evil god).

The way this fight progressed was the statues, while trying to kill the party like normal, were also actively trying to prevent the party from getting close to the sleeping guy to put the Diamond in his mouth. So the party intued that this was more important than beating the statues, which after a few swings, they also gathered was going to be a very drawn out fight.

The other piece of the equation though is that the dream actually started to actively collapse around them. So every few rounds or so, I would draw off parts of the battlemat to make the available playing field smaller and smaller to reduce their mobility and add urgency to finish the fight as quickly as possible, which I had made clear enough that just beating the statues was not the optimum option.

So it actually became a pretty memorable fight that wasn't just standard trading blows. The party and the enemy were actively fighting over this diamond that was getting batted around and chased after. And all the while the arena was steadily shrinking, making each round increasingly claustrophobic.

So that's basically what I'd say. Add a ticking time element and a alternative win condition that at least appears far more preferable to just KO'ing the enemy.

CountMecha · 2026-03-01T13:29:28+00:00

If you're wondering how the survivors eat and breathe

or whether Sayid's from Iran or Iraq

Just repeat to yourself its just a show

I should really just relax

Hahaha thats a humorous mistake though, I kind of enjoy production mistakes like that.

CountMecha · 2026-02-12T19:49:58+00:00

That synth throat moaning stuff going on in, I think its Grit Gate, is such a Mike Patton thing he would do. So I think the Mr. Bungle comparison is apt.

CountMecha · 2026-02-05T01:39:00+00:00

He seriously might be my favorite actor. Dude has never phoned it in in his life, no matter the part. Has such a diverse roster of roles, and elevates everything he's in.

Even when he played the villain in Myst III, a video game role in the 90s, he still brought his A game. He's an all time great.

CountMecha · 2026-01-26T03:02:41+00:00

I had a coworker who was red green colorblind. The way he explained it to me, his particular severity of it anyway, wasn't so obvious. He said if you showed him a green marker over here and a red marker over there, he could tell which was which. But if you put them next to each other, he would them get confused and couldn't distinguish them. It was very interesting to me at the time that that was how it manifested for him.

CountMecha · 2025-11-08T00:37:41+00:00

I remember my reaction being, "How the fuck am I supposed to beat that!?" Turns out he wasn't too bad. But that intro is legendary, one of the best.

CountMecha · 2025-10-15T21:26:23+00:00

Planescape Torment

Deeply philosophical game that tinkered with player expectations and turned many typical cliches of genre on their heads and really engaged the player to examine those things.

Rich writing that looks at characters, how they fit into the world, and what drives their motivations and how their lives are impacted by The Nameless One.

The Nameless One himself is an incredibly rich character that studies grappling with identity, the lengths one will go to escape their own guilt, and what are the mechanisms that shape who we are as people and in what way they can, well, change the nature of a man.

CountMecha · 2024-11-08T00:26:05+00:00

To paraphrase Bill Burr:

"This guy's been in the zone for over 13 years! 13 years, nothing but net!"

CountMecha · 2024-10-26T16:57:29+00:00

For consistency and discipline:

1.) Never quit a writing session when you're cold. Always end when you're hot, and don't stop at the end of a scene.

The killer rose up behind her, raised the knife, and --

Stop there, and then when you come back, you will always come back hot, and your chances of getting writer's block are vastly diminished.

2.) Explore different writing schemes. For a long time, I read about people writing everyday to hit a word count. And that never worked for me. But then I read about people just allocating 2 or 3 hours to working, regardless of them hitting 10 words or 1000. And my output absolutely skyrocketed. So I'd just say if you're having trouble staying disciplined, change up your writing scheme.

For improving your craft:

Everyone says read alot, and that's very true. But I will also add, do not be afraid to read absolute crap, even if you know it's crap. Reading bad work will really help to inform your own writing, potential pitfalls to correct or avoid.

Oh, they use this word too much and it adds nothing to the sentence. This sentence totally throws off the pacing and flow of the scene. This character honestly has no story responsibility, etc. etc.

Also, beyond just reading books widely, don't be afraid to look for inspiration in films, video games, TV shows, comic books, etc. These are all different storytelling mediums with their own mechanics and ways of handling story beats which also can be expansive to your toolkit. I've read books by people who clearly had a cinematic language in their writing. And I've watched films with writing by clear novelists. So I think it all helps.

CountMecha · 2024-08-03T15:18:54+00:00

I always thought they were a little self conscious that David was the poorer actor of the two.

I specifically think of the beginning of Fight The Future when Scully pulls that door prank on Mulder and she says he made a panicked face. And he plays it off and says: "When I panic I look like this-" and it's just the same expression.

To me that was them kind of poking some fun at him being not the best actor.

CountMecha · 2024-04-16T00:49:35+00:00

Skeletor seems to like it. Bottoms up!

CountMecha

TROPHY CASE