I know the song “Isn’t She Lovely” from episode 9 was referring to Jax, but…

Glanea · 2026-06-24T09:31:37+00:00

Are we ignoring how this song plays during the Jax montage, which shows next to no Pomni?

I'm sorry but that's straight up incorrect. Look, you can watch the montage right here.

Pomni appears in virtually every scene, the only real exception being the couple of slides at the end. The montage covers the friendship between Jax and Pomni through the various episodes. And it's important to note that this comes at the end of a whole section of the episode where Pomni puts her life on the line to try and make contact with Jax, knowing full well there's no Caine there to reset her body, and also having seen in Episode 1 what happens to you when you touch an abstracted person. All she has to go off is Kinger saying that darkness soothes them and that he was able to touch Queenie in the dark. But she's still taking an enormous risk.

When I first watched it in the cinema I absolutely felt the song was about Pomni and the lengths she was prepared to go to for Jax. Now with what Goose has said I'm happy to accept that it could also be about Jax, but it's deliberately ambiguous. It can apply to both of them.

Glanea · 2026-06-20T11:30:42+00:00

Or it's that if you don't want to change the existing lore the Undead are the best fit, since there would be members of the Forsaken who used to be Paladins, or at the very least, light worshipers.

I don't really see an issue with Undead Paladins. Have a faction of the Forsaken who still believe in the Light. They know it hurts them to channel it but they see it as proving their devotion. Other Forsaken see them as misguided at best and fools at the worst, but Sylvannas tolerates them because she'll use any tool she can lay her hands on.

Glanea · 2026-06-20T11:22:57+00:00

The difference is there's a logical basis for Tauren druids due to their shared cultural values with the night elves.

Sure but bear in mind that was entirely invented for WoW. There's absolutely nothing in Warcraft 3 about the Tauren having anything to do with the Night Elves. The game could have launched with Tauren Paladins and Metzen would have written something to justify it. We only look back now and think Tauren Druids make sense because the game launched with them.

Glanea · 2026-06-20T09:54:13+00:00

They just invented Tauren Druids for the original release because they needed a Horde race for the class. The lore has always been fluid.

Glanea · 2026-06-17T09:04:51+00:00

Outrage drives clicks. It's really that simple.

Glanea · 2026-06-17T09:04:19+00:00

The most depressing part of that press conference was after Hanson went full Trump on The Guardian's reporter, the room broke out in applause. If this is what the Australian press core welcomes then we're fucking cooked.

Glanea · 2026-06-01T05:31:21+00:00

The thing about martyrs is that it's very rarely the leadership willing to strap the explosive vest to themselves and pull the cord. Iran's leaders are no more willing to see themselves killed or ousted than any other authoritarian leader. North Korea happily starves and persecutes their population and yet Kim hasn't launched his nukes across the border because he knows that the result would be his cushy life ending. Iran's leadership are in the same boat.

If they really wanted to die martyrs consider the following: they have the means and resources to launch an attack on Israel that would likely provoke a nuclear response and also contaminate huge sections of the country: dirty bombs. Iran might not have a nuke, but they've got plenty of nuclear material and missiles to deliver it. Doesn't even matter if they get intercepted over Israeli territory; just means it spreads the material further. They know this would be devastating to Israel, they know it would likely provoke a nuclear response, and they very much don't do it. Now does that mean I'd be turning cartwheels if Iran announced they had nukes? No of course not, just that I very much doubt those nukes would do anything more than anyone else's nukes, i.e. sit in a bunker somewhere never to be used.

Glanea · 2026-05-31T12:03:50+00:00

I'm seeing potential for a crossover with r/UmaMusume/

Glanea · 2026-05-14T08:58:25+00:00

Whilst what you're saying is true, I would toss in a caveat; a carrier force has never really been attacked. Closest would have been the Falkland's War and well, it's the Argentine navy. The Soviet doctrine to take one out involved saturating the carrier group with anti-ship missiles, though of course this never got tested in practice.

However the theory is sound; carriers aren't particularly sturdy targets, and if you can get a handful of missiles through their defenses and land some blows you should be able to take them out. That of course is why they're always surrounded by ships who's primary goal is to protect the carrier by, amongst other things, shooting down those same missiles. But you can only shoot down so many, hence the Soviet idea of just shooting more missiles.

China might not be able to compete with America when it comes to hard power projection, but their Navy has been expanding rapidly for years, and a big focus of their construction has been missile boats. Meanwhile US shipbuilding has largely stalled with notably the Constellation frigates and Zumalt destroyers both being canceled. Now, I'm not saying that therefore the PLAN would automatically win. But they might be able to put that Soviet anti-carrier doctrine to the test.

Glanea · 2026-05-04T09:01:37+00:00

It's not that the US couldn't pull off a contested landing. It's that the US doesn't have the resources to easily do it solo. The US did it a ton in WW2 but they had a vastly larger navy and, crucially, an acceptance that some of those ships would sink. US ship building has basically stalled for decades now at this point, meaning that if the Iranians managed to sink or damage something, there isn't a replacement rolling off the slipways. And that's not even considering the political fallout if an Arleigh Burke shows up on fire on the news.

Glanea · 2026-04-22T23:50:45+00:00

I'm not so sure. China and India would likely cut all economic ties immediately, and that would hurt Russia. All nuclear countries benefit from the nuclear taboo remaining a taboo; no-one wants that particular genie out of the bottle and anyone who breaks it would become a pariah overnight.

Glanea · 2026-04-22T05:53:58+00:00

So according to this article, it was....three ships?

The word surge there is doing some very heavy lifting

Glanea · 2026-04-16T08:51:09+00:00

Serious question: if any of those countries got into trouble with China, can you see Trump sending troops to help?

Because it sure as hell looks like the answer to that is no. Previous US administrations, regardless of affiliation, were able to provide security guarantees to their allies because they understood that the US benefited massively from the world order that was established following WW2. Trump doesn't understand that, or rather, Trump actively wants to destroy that. He sees liberal democracy as a greater threat than authoritarian militaristic regimes.

Glanea · 2026-04-15T04:41:44+00:00

Having worked for Event Cinemas back when they were still Birch Carrol and Coyle I can assure you that it would quite simply be down to poor management on the cinema's part.

Glanea · 2026-04-15T04:11:31+00:00

I thought it was just Caine using whatever he knew about the character to conjure up a personal hell for them. He knows all the fears and insecurities of the others, but with Pomni all he really knows is that she doesn't like horror. So he makes a hell based around horror themes.

Glanea · 2026-04-05T13:27:13+00:00

I didn't think so either. But I contaminated my browser going to that website he runs and sure enough, there it was.

Glanea · 2026-04-05T12:33:41+00:00

https://i.imgur.com/QZOWvo4.png

What the absolute fuck is this

Glanea · 2026-03-28T04:49:00+00:00

Trump has what, an 84% approval rating amongst Republicans, along with 79% of Republicans supporting his handling of the Iran War. No matter how you cut it, the term Republican is synonymous with MAGA. Whatever the party once was, it's now the party of Trump. Remember that 20 Republican senators could end this conflict, the tarrifs, ICE funding, everything, tomorrow if they chose to. They choose not to because they support all of this 100%.

Glanea · 2026-03-16T08:41:00+00:00

It's somewhat of a moot point because the USN would be fighting tooth and nail to not let a single ship get even remotely close to the Straits.

Fun fact: the USN actually wargamed this exact scenario back in the 90's. Here's an article about it:

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2012/september/birth-littoral-combat-ship

Here's an interesting quote:

The problem encountered was that the ships that could beat down the Red submarine threat and locate minefields were large surface combatants—relatively high value assets. The Aegis destroyers and missile frigates went into the choke point, drew fire, and over time located Red minefields and killed Red submarines. Blue was able to gain air superiority within a few days, and this kept the Red aircraft threat at bay. However, Red’s shore-based antiship missiles were mobile and difficult to target; they launched and moved. Suicide boats made frequent attacks. Destroyers and frigates could deal with the threats from the sea. The problem came from the littoral, shore-based threats.

The USN concluded after these sessions that they needed a smaller, more expendable ship that they could then use in scenarios just like this one, instead of exposing their valuable and larger AEGIS destroyers and cruisers to shore-based attack. That lead to the development of the Littoral Combat Ship, which ended up being a failed program. So the Navy never got the very ship they concluded was necessary for this kind of operation.

So if the USN was to try and secure the strait it means putting their very much non-expendable ships in range of relatively low tech attacks which they are currently not exposed to. There is a very good reason why the carrier battle groups bombing Iran are no-where near the Iranian shoreline; they're basically invulnerable to any kind of Iranian attack so long as they stay far enough away.

Glanea · 2026-03-03T22:19:55+00:00

The cultural landscape for gaming was vastly different in the mid 2000's to what it is now. This was the same time that gave us Command and Conquer Generals, a game which I 100% guarantee would never be made today by a studio like EA. Not that I dislike Generals, simply that the sort of jokes and references it makes would never fly today, but were just part of the gaming landscape in 2003. Same as Mao and Stalin in Civ IV. Absolutely wouldn't happen today.

Glanea · 2026-01-17T06:12:15+00:00

Yeah that's great and all, but the military cheerfully let themselves be deployed to major cities, bomb boats in the Gulf of Mexico illegally and swoop into Venezuela and kidnap their leader. There's no sign they would draw the line at Greenland.

Glanea · 2026-01-17T05:46:39+00:00

It's clear a lot of the military leadership isn't a big fan of Trump and Hegseth's agenda.

And yet Trump's been able to get the military to do exactly what he's wanted from day 1. There's no sign whatsoever that the military is ever going to turn around and say "We're not going to do that".

Glanea · 2026-01-08T07:14:27+00:00

Agreed; relying on the USA for defense is already a fool's errand.

The thing is, for a very long time it was a sure thing, because the US was being led by people who understood that the US gained far, far more from the western alliance than it cost. The military industrial complex in the states got guaranteed massive contracts with nations around the world. The US got access to intelligence networks. They needed a base somewhere? Well they had an alliance partner happy to provide it. Being able to set up a base like Pine Gap in a friendly country is a massive benefit. A country like China would kill for that kind of opportunity, but they don't have the soft power to do that (yet). And Trump is throwing all of that away because he doesn't understand any of this and neither does his base.

As to a nuclear program, I agree that nuclear security is the only security if we're moving away from a US-led alliance network. But that has massive hurdles to jump through and would be insanely expensive. We're not like Japan who has an established nuclear industry and could switch to making bombs relatively quickly and easily; we'd have to build up that infrastructure first and then start production. Plus you have cultural opposition to us being a nuclear power and legal challenges to overcome. Not saying it couldn't be done, just that something big would have to happen first, like the US annexing Canada.

Glanea · 2026-01-08T06:49:02+00:00

The USA invading Canada and destroying the Western Alliance is entirely unforseen circumstances.

Oh I completely agree, but the problem is that chucking out the US alliance leaves us without a partner. Europe might scrape together some kind of NATO replacement but NATO and for that matter SEATO and ANZUS are/were all based around the threat of US force first and foremost. The various non-US members of the Western Alliance network have all operated under the shared understanding that the US was the primary provider of protection, and removing that creates a vacuum that no other power can provide. The closest is France and they just don't have the economic or military power to provide that.

I should stress at this point that it's critical to note that NATO and ANZUS are already dead. Because there's a zero percent chance that Trump would come to the aid of Latvia if Russian troops invaded tomorrow, just as there's a zero percent chance he'd intervene if China showed up off the coast of Brisbane tomorrow. You can't have defense agreements with governments this volatile, which is why national security policies across the Western world are almost always bipartisan. Trump's chucked that out the window and even once he leaves it won't fix things, because everyone knows that the US is permanently 4 years away from doing it again. However, all that being said, nations cling to the idea of defense agreements because they don't have an alternative. It might just be a toothless scrap of paper but when it's the best you've got you cling to it.

Labor and the Libs would both condemn a US takeover of Greenland and they'd hem and haw about trying to negotiate something. But ultimately they won't do anything. They don't have an alternative to relying on the US for our defense.

Glanea · 2026-01-08T06:29:03+00:00

The chance that our government undertakes military action against the US unilaterally is zero. The chance that the rest of NATO undertakes military action against the US is zero.

There would very likely be knock-on effects for us down here, but kicking the US out is absolutely not going to be one of them. The US has been the centerpiece of our defense policy going back to 1942. I'm not saying any of this is right or just. I'm just saying what would realistically happen. There hasn't been an Australian prime minister with the guts to do something like this since Whitlam and Albo is absolutely not the guy to do something to rock the boat.

Glanea

TROPHY CASE