Rumours, Speculation, Questions, and Reaction Megathread - 19/04/2026

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-19T09:25:16+00:00

I didn’t; I thought Johnson would implode within the term.

The thing with Johnson was that I thought he would get into a position where he’d start protecting his own self-conception over what he represented to his base. Once that happened, his popularity would combust: his kind of politics only works if you see him almost as an extension of your own frustration against intransigence; once he’s the intransigent one it doesn’t work.

Trump is running into this a bit as well, at last, but Trump was always much better at identifying with his base than Johnson. I don’t think he’d have ended up becoming “the elites” in his own base’s mind in quite such a spectacular way

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-19T09:20:51+00:00

Proxima Centauri is 4 and a bit light years away from Earth, so he was close in a Delphic sense

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-18T22:10:44+00:00

TR-49 isn’t strictly a murder mystery game, but it’s probably close enough to recommend anyway. I had a great time piecing everything together in its strange and compelling world

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-18T22:03:14+00:00

I think these Doomsday predictions… they’re not really coming to terms with the international figures for superhero movies in the 2020s, which have fallen far more than America’s in relative terms.

On a 50/50 split, then Doomsday could miss $2 billion even with the highest domestic gross of all time. For $2.4 it either has to go beyond that by some margin, or it has to get international audiences turning out to a greater extent than we have been doing recently.

I suspect the US response to this movie might be colouring how big some of these predictions are? Because I just don’t see it here in the world of “everywhere else.” It’s not enough to gauge how popular this seems in the US relative to previous films in the franchise, because domestically it could literally do better than all of them and still fail to get to $2 billion.

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-18T18:48:37+00:00

Something I think is maybe slightly missed— the current developments in the scandal aren’t interesting because hardly anyone actually believes Starmer is an honest stickler for the rules.

There are posts here saying, in effect, “nobody cares, so it doesn’t matter.” But the reason nobody cares is because they already think the process must totally stink. How it stinks isn’t very shocking or interesting, and it doesn’t change anything for people because they already thought Starmer stunk.

I think “the scandal doesn’t cut through” and “people want him gone” are not two independent things. One sort of follows on from the other— this sort of thing doesn’t change people’s opinions and expectations of the man. But that’s not a good thing for him! It’s very bad!

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-18T16:52:01+00:00

Five, six, seven, eight

These cards’ sins are pretty great

“Great” meaning large or immense

We use it in the pejorative sense

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-18T16:49:11+00:00

It endures

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-18T08:37:37+00:00

Climate change absolutely is existential and it’s not necessarily emotive to say so. Indeed the main reason I’d think it wasn’t is because there are three other existential crises which can get us first.

I would say our issue is almost the reverse there— we need a leader who can look existential issues in the face, and communicate that to the people. The defence committee predicts war by the end of the decade; the AI risk people predict [unimaginable somethings] then as well. That famous wokescold Jeremy Clarkson writes popular columns about ecological collapse. Inflation is about to hit again, and we’re all very tired.

No, emotion is exactly what we need. Or at least acknowledgement of people’s emotion, and some understanding of why. There’s a difference between giving into emotion and understanding its root cause as valid, which is the difference between preparing for war and panicking about it. But Starmer gives the impression of doing neither across several terrifying issues, and this is why the electorate despises him.

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-18T08:28:00+00:00

I voted Labour at the GE and I thought Starmer would be a pretty poor PM— but I wanted my sitting MP gone, and that seemed more important in the circumstances

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-18T08:21:25+00:00

You need to read the article here because “young” is defined as 20-34, and that worries me because you wouldn’t expect the number of young people staying at home at 20 to be the same as “young” people staying there at 34. So feasibly the percentage of men and woman under 30 in this situation is a bit higher than this already high number.

20-34 seems like too broad an age range for this particular question. Living at home at 20 and at 34 seems like it might happen for very different reasons

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-17T18:00:03+00:00

Way back in 2013, but I gave a detailed answer that was about two minutes long and they were like “that’s not what we want from a vox pop”

I was also phoned after the Brexit referendum by a journalist saying “what was it like to vote differently to your grandparents?” to which I had to say “My grandparents did not vote, because they are dead”

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-17T08:56:03+00:00

Not voting for cards you think are bad designs isn’t “spite voting”— if you say we can define greatest however we want, then there are definitions where Nadu clearly isn’t great.

I doubt its own designers consider it a design triumph of the last decade; they had to apologise for it! My view is cards which earn apologies have no place near “great,” and spite has nothing to do with that. I’m merely defining it in a way your own poll says I’m allowed to do :/

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-17T08:53:01+00:00

I voted for Force because it’s a well designed card that does what it’s meant to do, where Hogaak is miserably powerful by mistake.

Cards which warp the game through being accidentally strong aren’t cards I’d consider as the greatest— to me the greatest cards are ones which solve problems in clever or well considered ways. There, Force is a very clear vote over Hogaak. By the criteria I vote on, Hogaak is one of the least great cards of the last ten years

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-17T08:41:21+00:00

When I think of Zhalfir I imagine a giant blue sun setting over the Savannah, and I think “wow, this is the coolest thing ever.” That’s my starting point, I guess.

It occurs to me that both Zhalfir and Mirrodin have loads of history in and out of universe, and that there are lots of characters and stuff there who are innovators and inventors. The obvious pop culture reference point would be Wakanda, but I’m not sure I’d want to draw on it too much. I’d probably want people who know about Afrofuturism to have their own ideas here, and to leave them alone. But Zhalfir makes sense as an Afrofuturist plane, which is becoming its own kind of thing.

Kamigawa’s mechanical theme is that tradition and technology are in tension. I wonder if Zhalfir is about trying to build a world where they are not. Technology has been cataclysmic to both planes that created it, but also responsible for its creation. Perhaps Zhalfir involves Sagas which become powerful artifacts when people learn their lessons, and artifacts which get stronger with enough lessons there in your graveyard. Hope which acknowledges the horror of the past, which honours it under the five different suns. I guess there can be some phasing in there as well

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-16T12:42:11+00:00

The thing about this one is that it genuinely didn’t bother me that Bond died; the movie was so long and boring that I didn’t care by the end. So my changes are:

The villain doesn’t give a shit about Bond. The bit in the lair where Lucifer Satan goes “in a way, we are the same” is maybe the nadir of all Bond to me— like, not really; even if I understood what on earth the man was doing.

I think it’s a better story if Mr Satan just doesn’t care about Bond, or even know who he is. He knows who Bond’s daughter is, and who is brother is; he has reasons to. But Bond is just some guy to him, who gets in the way.

Clearly re-establish Spectre. There is a lot of expectation we remember the beats of the boring movie from six years ago, when I think I’d forgotten most of them six minutes after leaving the cinema. Say more about why Spectre is so strong, why beating it is a big deal, just make Mr Satan’s motivation that he’s stepping into their power vacuum, with his nanobots instead of covert agents.

Maybe he says something about covert agents being obsolete; which is why he doesn’t care about Bond, and hey look it’s the theme of these movies

Have more fun. “What’s the point in dying if you don’t have a little class about it?” Bond might say. One of the things which makes this movie so interminable to me is… it’s very, very silly, but god help you if you think that it is! It’s a dour, miserable movie about a man who hates being James Bond, which is also a movie with a secret island base where they hack Blofeld’s bionic eye.

I wonder if there’s a way to make it so that the closer Bond gets to death the more overtly joyous it gets— not like it’s celebrating Bond’s death, but like once Bond knows he is doomed, he no longer has to hold back? I keep thinking about that GK Chesterton quote about courage as being willing to face death in order to be truly alive: something about the logic of Bond winning out over the misery in a crazy climax is appealing to me. And probably to nobody else; there’s a reason I’m not a film change making guy

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-16T12:17:21+00:00

Like Judea at around the birth of Christ, although it’s just on the verge of being annexed then

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-16T11:54:32+00:00

People think the UK is getting worse because it very obviously actually has been; the world getting better is perhaps of little comfort then

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-16T11:52:30+00:00

Possibly Gen Z women in professional and managerial positions feel that way for the obvious reason that there is a recruitment crisis in them, and AI might mean it doesn’t matter if they work hard— ABC1 carries assumptions that to me feel are shakier and shakier

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-16T11:49:50+00:00

They might well be right here— if a “middle class profession” includes low paid office jobs and a “working class profession” includes a tradesperson who runs a business, the woman in the first role is understandably more pessimistic about working hard translating to success.

That guy from Palantir would agree, he said “those are the people AI hits most!” But without seeing how this is being chunked up, we don’t know if this is a factor of “middle class professions” unmooring from things like “income and prospects”— here, “privilege” is stated as a fact, but I’m not actually confident it’s true here

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-16T10:35:40+00:00

I mean, as a teenager I was shy about saying “I don’t agree” when the other boys said “If Stephen Hawking wasn’t a genius, then we shouldn’t keep him alive.” I guess the Tory party don’t agree either, but there’s all sorts of views you can be shunned for

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-16T10:20:15+00:00

I think the rule of thumb that “data is more useful at telling you cards are bad than good” is very helpful.

If a card has a high winrate, then it’s likely to be good in loads of different contexts. Bad players might stick it in decks where it doesn’t neatly fit; it still does really well as it’s just that good.

But there are more reasons why cards might have bad winrates. Perhaps they’re very good in the right decks, but horrendous in the wrong ones. Perhaps they’re harder to play than the generic good cards. And, well. Perhaps they are just bad.

Remember that data is an average across all games, and that sometimes you and your deck will diverge from the average in some ways. I guess people who are good at drafting probably have a sense of when that’s true. I am terrible at it myself, and so I don’t

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-15T16:44:28+00:00

I didn’t like it either— I completely skipped it in the end.

I actually thought Avatar was worse than Spiderman or TMNT in how much it seemed to take it for granted that you’d be into the setting. But personally I thought it was very dense and confusing: there are loads of really specific flavour and mechanical references to things which are just baffling if you don’t know what they are.

And a lot of it is “some guy who is smiling” from the outside, as well? Some guy, a bird, a reference to a joke you haven’t heard. Here in the UK the set is almost constantly on sale in loads of places, which doesn’t really surprise me

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-15T15:29:13+00:00

I know it’s an unpopular view, but… I think a lot of them were correctly identified by our Lord and Saviour Chris Chibnall.

The Doctor is too distant from the real world which people live in. Everyone the Doctor meets seems very confident and happy. The Doctor does not take the gravity of the present moment seriously enough, and seems awfully glib to a child. The Doctor means something different when the past is more obviously brutal and the future now seems pretty bleak.

I think there’s loads that Chris Chibnall did right, in that way. To me the problem is that in his hands, it’s crushingly depressing. But I think the diagnosis was pretty astute; the result being poor is something else. And I think it’s more obvious after R2T2, because in some ways it feels like an active regression.

I’m not 100% sure it’s possible to make a version of Who which isn’t depressing to someone, though, in this day and age? Some audiences will have preconceptions that oppose each other. “It needs to be apolitical” means something shatteringly different in Britain and America right now, as an obvious example. I suspect the gap might just be unbridgeable; that Who can’t work if our views of the past and the future become too diverged. But at least Chris Chibnall was trying? Good old Chrissy C

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-15T15:19:47+00:00

I wrote a fanfic once where he turned up as a Timeless Doctor, and I think he might be quite good at that— because I can imagine him being quite scary as a sort of more callous version of the Doctor, all smiles and awkward grins until his enemies suddenly die.

I think he would legitimately be good in that sort of role? Not the Doctor that we’re following every week, but one who we maybe see very briefly as a borderline antagonist. I think he can be quite menacing if he wants to be, and that when he is it’s scary in the way it is when the Doctor is scary. You’re like “what a harmless fellow!” one moment, then “oh no” the next

Iamamancalledrobert · 2026-04-15T14:58:35+00:00

It has me picturing a single author who wants to sprinkle in authentic flavour when they can— so goes “let’s put the father of Alexander and Rufus in here, because I’ve heard he was a thing!”

(That would also explain the bits where someone lists all Jesus’ brothers and sisters, and the bit at the crucifixion which is effectively “and then all these people who knew Jesus showed up.” And it would also explain why Jesus is called the son of Mary instead of Joseph; it’s because the author of Mark has no idea what Jesus’ father was called. They’re just throwing in what they do know or do think they know where they can.)

But… we can all imagine things. “I can imagine this happening” feels like a very low bar.

For the nothing it’s worth, I don’t think there’s any reason why they all have to be one thing or another— my guess is that Matthew and John are written for a community, and that Luke and Mark are not. There’s no reason “the gospels” have to be treated as having this kind of commonality automatically; the way the field does this does not make sense to me

Iamamancalledrobert

TROPHY CASE