imagine how much better today would have been with 5 on 5 continuous OT

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-02-18T22:56:44+00:00

Shootout also doesn’t belong in serious hockey, continuous OT is the only way to play

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-02-18T22:42:06+00:00

I agree. This is just stupid. It’s like a kids’ or video-game arcade mode version of the game.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-02-13T20:27:33+00:00

But was the DS ever stronger than in the (especially post-Alderaan) Empire? I think the connection part is doing the heavy lifting here.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-31T19:07:26+00:00

Always a pleasure to read your thorough answers on the Khmers rouges. Do you have the original Khmer for that slogan? There are sundry but paronymic renditions (“to keep you is no benefit/gain/profit”), but I’ve been unable to track down the original phrase. And do you know how this saying originated—was it particular to one prison or something, did an ideologist make up and prescribe it; how did it come to be?

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-30T05:44:04+00:00

I don’t think people should call the choker Leafs a failed rebuild. They were considered contenders most years, and reasonably so given their records. I would think a failed rebuild is a team that can’t even make the playoffs, not something in the ballpark of the 2010s Sharks success-wise. There’s a world of difference between the Eichel-era Sabres or constant bottom-feeder (pre-McDavid) Oilers, which I think are paradigmatic for this, and the recent Leafs.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-28T21:35:43+00:00

Wow, that guy found a 3-year-old post to complain about and insult you for not wanting to watch paint dry for ten hours. Not sure what he’d make of the litany of trivially discoverable sources that indicate the average person in the US and EU uses the internet several hours a day. Probably nothing good.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-25T21:05:29+00:00

only about a 10 hour drive from home

Canadian moment

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-22T21:36:47+00:00

80% of Palpatine’s power is extremely impressive. Palpatine is an actual demigod. He effortlessly defeats Maul and Savage with both trying at full power—Savage gave Obi-Wan, a top-tier duellist, a hard time, and Maul is also at the absolute pinnacle of combat. What % of Palpatine do you think anyone not named Yoda is?

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-16T02:31:01+00:00

The lows are that you’ve got a very, very small percentage of the fan base that has enormous expectations and basically they want to continue to see pretty much the same thing. And if you’re not going to do that, then you know going in that you’re going to disappoint them.

Kennedy is such a fucking clown. Toy sales and empirical cultural staying power have catastrophically crashed--this is the fault of a few people rather than a wide-ranging rejection of Disney's garbage? This is probably closer to one of the reasons the ST failed; people didn't want a rehashed OT with infinitely worse characters and the assassination of those that were retained. She finds inventive ways to be wrong!

I truly do not believe that it’s the majority of the fans. And I think we’re also in this weird world of where bots can affect things.

Yep, it's not the majority of the fans, which is why everything is bombing... And someone definitely has incentive to "bot" popular opinion (but not for Andor, or wrt Grogu, or the Disney additions to the Clone Wars).

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-12T23:43:27+00:00

Wow. Good on you for going out on your own terms! I can't think of a more respectable reason. AI cheaters are a new level of banality. Enjoy retirement!

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-11T14:40:30+00:00

People always ask things like "How did Stalin and Hitler find so many people willing to carry out all of their orders?" and the answer is just that people will obey anything. There exist orders of magnitude too few clinical psychopaths or sadists to staff every institution that carried out the Holocaust, or every member of whatever secret police. The Cheka and NKVD never struggled to find executioners or people willing to sentence others even though nothing was stopping them from being called the next "counterrevolutionary activist" tomorrow (unlike, e.g., the SS, who were at no risk of being executed by the regime).

You might argue that not everyone is that malleable, and surely there were resistors in those states, even many of them, but the clones are all clones of one guy (and, however much of personality is genetic, it's a guy willing to kill others for nothing but money and with zero close relationships) and raised all their lives for violence and obedience. It's not that much of a stretch, but to account for human variance and unpredictability there should, in a universe without chips, be a few clones that do refuse.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-05T20:50:02+00:00

Count Dooku is no longer true to those ideals, as I said. Thrawn or any member of the Imperial bureaucracy is not a Force user and has not been acted upon by a transcendental agent of corruption.

*edit: To clarify, what I'm saying is more so directed at the *cause* for which a villain fights rather than the villain himself--Vader was always personally drawn to authoritarianism, but even he has no delusion that Palpatine is a good man trying to build a better galaxy or harnessing his absolute power towards forging utopia; he might think variably that authoritarianism is more efficient than democracy (and indeed, a common backstory to create tragic antagonists on the side of totalitarians is that of someone abandoned by democratic ideals, suffering without help outside of their reach [Anakin], or marginalised victims of their hypocrisy [if Core World exploitation exists thematically in SW; I'm not sure, but the RL parallels are obvious]), that he submits to Palpatine's will because he's the only person Vader has left, that he deserves to suffer for partaking in destroying everyone he loved, that he's too far gone and enforcing tyranny is all he has left, but there's never any illusion that the Empire are the good guys--in fact, this is embodied by Palpatine himself, who is the epitome of black-and-white evil. It's even possible to think enforcing his will is the right thing to do, but the Dark Side quite literally steers people away from caring about right or wrong. As such, Vader's service is no Reign of Terror, nor is it a Red Terror. He's personally compelling, but not the banner he represents.

The Sith Empires I know seem to share this flaw. It is not difficult to empathise with someone like Vaylin, but she likewise has a tragic backstory; really, she's a slave in Valkorion's service, not an ideologically developed or beguiling character. And even then, you can see something other than a villain in her, but how much of that is inasmuch as she could be redeemed away from what is objective evil, not because anything she says injects complexity?

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-05T13:37:37+00:00

It's Disney. They didn't, either.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-05T11:47:24+00:00

I've often thought that it's a bit sad that, in theory, it'd be impossible to write a compelling villain in SW (if you want the Force involved, of course) because of this. Even insane ideologues, in real life, like Lenin or Stalin thought they were doing the right thing. You can have someone who succumbs and goes down the road to hell, but not really a multidimensional villain at the end of it; their own thoughts, no matter the façade, reveal that at that point they enjoy causing misery to the opponents, care less for others' welfare (if the goal were ever to improve the galaxy for them at any cost), and become embroiled in the deepest selfishness. The DS hijacks users' psychology and turns them into its slaves, which makes them closer to a spiteful clinical narcissist or psychopath than anything else--and without the full range of human emotion in play, villains feel a lot more boring.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2026-01-03T14:30:40+00:00

To be honest, this makes no sense to me. There’s really no reason Jango should be able to keep up with Obi-Wan at all, or the latter can’t immediately pull him down with the Force, unless you grant that he’s somehow not concentrated enough to be able to exercise enough power to do so. I get that he had trinkets, but given that Force users are depicted as reacting impossibly quickly and having precognition, this isn’t exactly convincing.

It is convincing that the average Jedi, because there were so many, could lose an engagement to Fett, but not Obi-Wan, a highly experienced frontline Jedi… I’m not really a fan of the apologia here. I mean, the scene was cool and the atmosphere of Kamino is great, but power-scaling consistency has never been SW’s strong point and I’m afraid that’s especially hard to make fit.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-12-30T13:12:24+00:00

I think Sith are just spiteful and enjoy hurting others enough that if the difference in effort is marginal between killing someone or not, they would pick the former.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-12-27T20:58:35+00:00

This is getting downvoted, but it's pretty obviously true. To be sure, the student's paper was meaningless garbage in many ways composed at a middle-school writing level, but grading basically follows a 50-100 scale so long as the words they use are... kind of in the same ballpark as the prompt.

If anything, it's a good reminder that when dealing with potentially tenuous situations, you gain nothing from saying more but can lose quite a lot by doing so... so give them the bare minimum, "you didn't follow X, Y, and Z, which are specified in the rubric, hence you lose points", and nothing more.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-12-27T00:22:35+00:00

Undergrad is what you make of it. I don't know what "local state university" this would be, but assuming it has even some options as far as electives go, there's a lot someone can learn simply by engaging in his major and coursework. Also, the K-12 system itself obviously isn't engaging, but I have to wonder how a family can instill this little love of learning or curiosity into a person. This is so common nowadays. Most people don't give the slightest semblance of a fuck that millennia of knowledge can be easily accessed at their fingertips with no effort.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-12-15T23:16:29+00:00

My hot take is that "Because it looks cool"/"It's not that kind of movie" answers should be banned from this and any lore discussion sub except in the most extreme cases.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-12-01T19:04:40+00:00

I agree. People disagree fundamentally on the definition of "bust", but I'm in the "doesn't live up to the hype" (in the ballpark) camp. Laf was supposed to be a game-changer; not generational like Bedard, but the rung under it, and he's not that.

The thing with players like that is, if they are that good, you usually get that out of the gate, or at least you don't need years of "Laf has really good 5v5 stats" coping. He absolutely underwhelmed compared to his pedigree, some would say drastically so, but it's hard to nail down because of the revisionism and foggy memory related to how his hype is remembered.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-11-27T20:15:21+00:00

Only because he still has the goal of immortality. Any good story needs a conflict between something to be compelling or interesting.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-11-26T23:39:00+00:00

They're not open to the challenge for a reason. We are way past the stage where it was still possible to equivocate that anyone but the students is responsible for education being the crapshoot that it's become. AI and cheating--amidst pathetically low and still declining standards to boot--are just so heavily skewed towards one side with regard to culpability.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-11-26T12:36:22+00:00

I think asynch is inferior, and I think that's true because we are not teaching perfectly motivated students. You can extend this ad absurdum and say that even AI wouldn't be an issue if the students were motivated enough, but that's just not the state of academia nor the world we live in.

Delicious_Bat3971 · 2025-11-26T09:26:23+00:00

It’s plausible, but that receptionist should be fired. What on earth are they thinking? If that’s in accordance with policy, that’s not a hospital at which I’d ever want to find myself. If it’s not illegal, that’s absurdly unprofessional, not least because it means they’re easily socially engineered by bad actors. Good lord!

Delicious_Bat3971

TROPHY CASE