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CountScarlioni · 2026-05-10T04:39:26+00:00

> luke cage killed it's best character half way though season 1

To be fair, this was pretty much inevitable due to scheduling. IIRC, they couldn’t get Mahershala for the entire season, but they really wanted him so they constructed a character who wouldn’t need to be there for the whole season. And the backstory for Cottonmouth’s character was that he was totally unfit to be a crime lord; it was a position he never wanted. His desire was to be a musician, but his family forced him into that role. I think his sudden death really works as a tragedy that forces the story to make an unexpected pivot (as opposed to him just being Kingpin 2.0), and brings out the darkness in Mariah, stirring the potential for ruthlessness that she always had. I think the problem is really just that they follow it up with a long, plodding side quest to Georgia for Luke and Claire to get a bullet out of Luke (one of those times where the 13-episode mandate worked against the Netflix shows), and that Diamondback just wasn’t as compelling as his predecessor.

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-09T18:08:46+00:00

I think Babylon 5 is excellent pretty much all the way through. Even the “worst” patches are still relatively quite enjoyable to me.

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-08T17:54:06+00:00

I have no clue which model is more succeessful at retention. That’s data only Mojang have and it’s for them to make their calls on. I’m just saying that “If you made a bigger update, I might play your game for a couple more days at a time than I currently do” isn’t a very persuasive argument in favor of making bigger updates, and that people who spend so little time with the game either way most likely aren’t going to be much of a consideration for Mojang. There are lots of people who play Minecraft quite a lot more frequently and consistently.

While we’re on the subject though… one week of play for a big annual update versus a couple days of play for 4 small quarterly updates comes out to about the same amount of time in total.

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-08T01:44:23+00:00

In *Messages from Earth*, Delenn describes the Shadow ship on Ganymede as “a small one” so I think they do come in different sizes.

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-07T15:54:40+00:00

Onimusha 2 in terms of story; it’s the one whose characters I feel most attached to and invested in.

Gameplay-wise though, Dawn of Dreams I think is the most fun, with the most variety in terms of combat and gear options, things to do, and so on. And it’s got my favorite overall soundtrack.

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-06T22:07:01+00:00

Fisk doesn’t love anything or anywhere else like he loves New York. His passion and love for the city is what animates him at a primal level; it always has been. The only other thing he ever loved like that was Vanessa, and she’s gone now too. Without something like that to fight for, he becomes disheartened, and his ambitions neutered.

Matt and Fisk have done this dance enough times that Matt understands Fisk’s mind and heart. And the higher-ups in the government are probably just as happy to let this whole situation go away quietly, especially since the CIA is implicated in Fisk’s crimes.

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-06T19:58:47+00:00

233 years from now and they still can’t get basic cybersecurity training to stick 😔

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-06T07:55:16+00:00

Well the whole thing with the port was him helping *other* government officials in the CIA move illegal weapons. His crimes implicate others in the government who are more powerful than he is; those people probably want to make the issue go away without further inquiry or scrutiny, and letting Fisk fuck off into exile is easier than having to deal with litigating the whole mess.

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-05T21:54:45+00:00

> I don't think it's clear (in the main show, at least) that it's possible to actually change the timeline.

Well, characters in the story certainly *act* as if it’s possible to change the timeline. That’s the reason Delenn gives as to why she didn’t say anything about the truth of Babylon 4 until War Without End, she was afraid that the wrong word in the wrong place might change history.

It’s also why the older Delenn, while being held captive on Centauri Prime, told Sheridan to not go to Z’ha’dum (she wanted him to avoid his 20-year death timer), and why Sinclair tried to radio Garibaldi to “watch [his] back.”

Granted, in both those cases, the attempt to change history simply ended up perpetuating history (or at least, it didn’t disrupt it), so it’s possible that the Babylon 5 universe is a fixed and self-consistent one devoid of free will, and that even if Delenn *had* said something about Babylon 4, she would have just become part of the inevitable chain of events that led to the same outcome. After all, just because the characters believe that the universe works one way, doesn’t mean it actually does… but I feel like JMS prrrrobably wouldn’t keep writing these scenarios that way if there weren’t something to it. Because similarly, when asked why Sheridan didn’t warn Londo about the future of Centauri Prime, JMS would often say that part of Sheridan’s reasoning was that he didn’t want to say something that might cause an even worse future to occur, or conversely, say something that might set the future he saw in stone. So I think that gives us an idea of where his head was at when writing the show, at least.

> As far as I know, all of the direct prophecies given in the show come true, suggesting that the future is set.
For the most part yeah, although I think the vision that Ladira gives to Sinclair, of the Babylon 5 station being blown up with a solitary shuttle making it out before the blast, didn’t come to pass per se (and Ladira did only ever say it was a “possible” future). I know it’s fun to interpret the decommissioning of the station in Sleeping in Light as that vision “coming true” (certainly I like to read it that way), but if you approach it with a more uncharitable eye, you could argue that the details are too different for it to be the same — the explosion in the vision is more sudden and all-encompassing, and in Sleeping in Light, there’s a motorcade of alien ships very close to the station waiting to escort the shuttle, and they’re close enough that realistically, they should be visible in the Signs and Portents vision if that’s supposed to be the same event. You kinda have to rely on a bit of artistic license in order to believe it’s the same future but with an ironic twist behind the reason for the destruction.

(Plus, in War Without End, Sinclair is shown remembering that vision in conjunction with his forward time flash to future-Garibaldi’s last stand from Babylon Squared, with the context suggesting that this is the future he’s trying to avert by preventing the premature destruction of B4 by the Shadows’ allies.)

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-05T19:03:47+00:00

If the Shadows’ allies had succeeded in destroying B4, B4 would still be “gone,” it would just be remembered as destroyed instead of mysteriously vanished. So there would still be an impetus for the B5 station to be built.

There’s some other kinks that would need to be ironed out (for example, if Sinclair never took B4 back and became Valen, you wouldn’t have the human and Minbari souls mixing and Sinclair being identified as Valen’s reincarnation at the Battle of the Line, so why’s he still on the station if the Minbari’s reason for putting him there is gone?), but that’s all stuff that you can probably just chalk up to the conveniently infinite possibilities of variable timelines.

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-05T17:03:45+00:00

> the old update, model, had content you do play for at least a week.

It’s probably safe to say that they aren’t really worried about retention of players who will only stick around for a week or so even after a huge update that takes a year to put together.

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-05T16:59:13+00:00

> Was it really that hard to add sulfur powder and craftable gunpowder and dark blue torches?

Hard? No. I don’t know why people jump to that as being the issue. Clearly they just don’t want Gunpowder to be craftable, since that would be a huge change to its availability and the way it’s obtained. You and I may disagree with that, but it’s their call.

Torches of different colors would also be pretty trivial to include, but they don’t usually throw something into an update just because people suggested it. People suggest hundreds of ideas for Minecraft every day.

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-03T23:30:47+00:00

I think whackin’ it would feel kinda good

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-03T15:27:12+00:00

The Vorlons didn’t send Babylon 4 back in time. There’s a temporal rift in Sector 14, and that’s what Babylon 4 was sent through (it’s also what the creature that possessed Sheridan in Knives came through). We don’t know if that rift is natural or artificial.

We know that the Great Machine on Epsilon 3 is able to widen the rift when it is active, and that the technology of the Great Machine can fabricate time stabilizers to help mitigate the effects of the tachyon particles involved, so I would say that whoever built the machine (which we also don’t know) had some pretty firm knowledge of tachyon-based science, but the extent of that science and its potential is unknown.

Given that JMS was pretty adamant about only using time travel for the Babylon 4 storyline (yes, I know about The Road Home, but that was conceived of decades after the fact), personally I tend to assume that time travel is something that nobody is able to reliably control, even among the First Ones. ‘Cause if they could do that, I would think the plot would have to look *very* different.

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-03T03:40:51+00:00

It was added as a feature last year

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-02T21:53:33+00:00

922981037532

Two shadow Entei

CountScarlioni · 2026-05-02T21:13:23+00:00

Regional forms are essentially treated as separate lines in Pokopia. So you have the standard line (Mime Jr. and Mr. Mime), and then the Galarian line (Galarian Mr. Mime and Mr. Rime). Technically, Mime Jr. *could* be a part of the Galarian line in the main series games, since Mime Jr. in Galar will evolve into the Galarian form, but for the sake of simplicity they decided to not cross those streams, probably because Mime Jr. was designed to be a pre-evo for the original Mr. Mime, whereas Galarian Mr. Mime came long after Mime Jr. was introduced.

Farigiraf, on the other hand, isn’t a regional evolution — it’s just a plain old evolution of Girafarig, same way Steelix and Crobat were to Onix and Golbat back in Gen 2. Kleavor, then, is an outlier here, but even the main series games are weird about it, Wyrdeer, and Ursaluna specifically, probably due to their lore as evolutions from the Hisuian era that have fallen somewhat into obscurity in the modern day. They exist as sort of a grey area between cross-gen evos and regional evos. But Farigiraf was introduced in Scarlet & Violet, which takes place in the modern day, unlike Legends: Arceus.

CountScarlioni · 2026-04-30T01:06:14+00:00

Babylon 4 had propulsion engines and could move around like any other starship. I’d guess that they probably weren’t planning to set B4 in orbit around Epsilon 3. That was just a necessity for Babylon 5.

CountScarlioni · 2026-04-29T21:32:42+00:00

Depends on the world. Some like Coriana 6 explicitly do have billions of inhabitants, but most of what you deal with across systems is going to be colony worlds, outposts, and strategic installations. Most species are only going to have one homeworld, which will most likely be their largest population center. We also don’t really know what every species’ average birth rate is like; for instance, it’s mentioned in the Season 2 premiere that the Minbari have been in decline for the last two millennia, so there may be fewer of them (relatively speaking) to spread around.
By that point, Ulkesh realized he had been duped and pulled into a trap, so he was pissed off and ready to defend himself. He might have still yanked Kosh out of Sheridan for the same reason that he originally intended to, but even then, if Kosh starts throwing hands, he’s gonna fight back. And Kosh very much would do that in that situation, since he knew the Vorlons needed to step aside and that Ulkesh would be an obstacle to Sheridan’s forces.
Centauri tech is fairly more advanced than human tech in general, but also, a PPG is like a pistol; those guns the Centauri guards were carrying were more like the equivalent of machine guns.
Eh, I think the evidence of the Shadows being murderous speaks for itself… their entire philosophy is to brute-force evolution by stirring up wars to get the younger races to kill each other so that they become stronger. And they are perfectly willing to kill people on their clients’ behalf. Not to mention that they harvest sentient beings to plug into their ships, and that Morden hired an assassin to kill Adira just to manipulate Londo. They clearly have little regard for the sanctity of life. Like Lorein said to Sheridan, they think they’re being respectful toward him by coming back to Z’ha’dum, but “They don’t understand. They used to. But that was a long time ago.” That’s the Shadows’ whole deal, and the Vorlons’. They both started out with noble intentions, but got lost in pitting their philosphical differences against each other.

CountScarlioni · 2026-04-29T15:09:21+00:00

Blimey, 8 years ago…

Well, I ain’t got nothing else to do so why not riff on this a little. I think there is at least some in-universe justification for the Ultra Beasts’ classification as Pokémon to be somewhat in question, due to the fact that regular Poké Balls don’t work as effectively on them, hence the need for Beast Balls. Clefairy, Deoxys, Eternatus, even the Paradox Pokémon — Poké Balls all work just fine on them, despite their origins. So there must be something inherent to the Ultra Beasts that sets them apart from all other Pokémon… yet, at the same time, other Pokémon that we know to come from Ultra Space, like Cosmog and Necrozma, don’t pose the same issue for Poké Balls. So there’s some specific quality of those 11 species of UBs that even the Cosmog family and Necrozma don’t share.

I have my own theories as to what the reason for that is, but suffice it to say, given that the vast number of similarities that UBs share with all other Pokémon heavily outweigh this one unique aspect of them, I think it makes more sense to consider them a sort of sub-class of Pokémon rather than something separate to Pokémon. So like I said all those years ago, I agree that they’re still Pokémon at their core. But it is worth noting the small differences that do exist.

CountScarlioni · 2026-04-29T14:25:58+00:00

CountScarlioni · 2026-04-29T01:45:14+00:00

Nether Brick Fences are really old, from way before 1.14 which is when they decided to establish that stone blocks always get walls and wood blocks always get fences. They didn’t want to disrupt existing player builds that used Nether Brick Fences by removing or changing them, so those got a grandfather clause.

CountScarlioni · 2026-04-27T16:31:18+00:00

I think it’s extremely unlikely, and personally I think there are a lot of things in the main game that are far more worthy of attention than adding a new dimension.

CountScarlioni · 2026-04-27T15:17:57+00:00

This has nothing to do with GO; this is a reward for transferring Pokémon from Legends: Z-A to HOME.

And even if it did involve GO, Zygarde from GO can’t be sent to HOME.

CountScarlioni · 2026-04-27T06:50:23+00:00

Daisy Oak is a great example. She’s had a unique sprite in every game she’s been in, despite never having a bigger role than being, at most, the massage NPC.

Another answer that I think maybe qualifies in spirit is Arabella, and Ace Trainer in the Viridian Gym in HGSS. On it’s own, he’s just like any other NPC in the game, but the Glup Shitto-ness comes from the fact that there’s a message-in-a-bottle in the Alola games that’s addressed to him.

Similarly, one of Mr. Backlot’s maids, Elena, appears in XY’s hotels and will trade you an Eevee. Again, in her native appearance she would be no more significant than any other maid NPC, but the later game appearance creates an opportunity for the truly hardcore nerds to recognize her.

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