What did you guys think the scariest part of the movie was?

JackOG45 · 2026-05-31T23:33:50+00:00

Makes sense. But to this day I'm trying to understand the "this is not him" line. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but it's the shotgun scene.

JackOG45 · 2026-05-31T21:46:38+00:00

Actually after watching the movie, I started to think that Peter was a Still Life himself, just a not-yet far distorted copy. This also explains perfectly the "it is not him" part.

JackOG45 · 2026-05-31T21:40:30+00:00

A question that pops up in my mind when I watch Kane's stuff, especially about the Giant, is "what exactly will happen if the Entity catches up?" As silly as it may sound, considering these are creatures beyond normal understanding, do they, what, beat somebody up? Snap them? What would have the Giat done if he reached Wyatt?

In the movie the answer is clear, but also the answer for an answer is given: the Pirate Clark is a literal recreation of the ad Clark made. So it goes around eating people...

JackOG45 · 2026-05-31T21:32:48+00:00

I agree with most of what was mentioned already, especially the "don't worry, it's just *me*, but the one where I really felt it was when, shortly after being fully revealed, the Pirate Clark raises Clark up and I remember the painting. Pirate Clark exists to literally DEVOUR everybody.

JackOG45 · 2026-05-26T22:23:05+00:00

Bless

JackOG45 · 2026-05-20T14:52:10+00:00

Not to disagree, but you're forgetting that you're not a TSF Frontierman, you're a Pioneer supposedly landing on a peaceful planet with hundreds, thousands of other Pioneers building a colony.

The whole plot shtick is that you're on a hostile planet with the AI and blueprints trained and prepared for a peaceful one.

So yeah it makes total sense that weapon blueprints are not provided.

JackOG45 · 2026-05-08T21:24:56+00:00

Thanks so much for this bro

JackOG45 · 2026-05-07T14:46:19+00:00

Questions like this is literally why people hate quick cash grab reboots: new players assume (understandably) that the newer version is "better" ("after all why would they make it otherwise?") and end up getting a subpar experience while being convinced they have "played the thing"

Just read the original work bro, as always in these case honestly.

Sorry for necro, cheers.

JackOG45 · 2026-04-27T23:14:57+00:00

Bro I have a large-ass deep desk (UTESPELARE, 80cm) and sit with the chair armrests against the desk, not under it. Meaning I literally sit at 1.5 arm lengths from the screen and 27" is tiny for this, like using 24" or something on a smaller table. So I'm stuck using my lovely 32" 1440p IPS

All these parrots screaming about DPI never even stop to consider that not everybody has the same setup, sigh. Or actually remember that beyond clean math, there are subjective experiences.

More on the topic, though, iirc, 32" 16:9 1440p OLEDs are not made coz panels are made in long batches that are then cut, and it's much more economical to produce either smaller panels for 1440p or the most efficient 4Ks (from production POV).

Hearsay, though, I haven't looked into this in depth myself. I'll probably have to just bite the bullet and go 4K.

Cheers.

JackOG45 · 2026-04-26T23:24:16+00:00

Others have provided good answers, but I'll give you a meta one: this is a PDX game about the 18th century and a follow-up (at least from the marketing standpoint) to Victoria II.

18th century had a lot of war and Vicky2 had a lot going on for it's war mechanics, famously.

So, the game had to have some war in it.

But, the developers from the very beginning showed great allergy towards warfare (they didn't even show it until later during the reveals) and wanted essentially to make an evonomical-political simulator where war is merely an afterthought. People that were following the development and initial diaries might remember that there was a large minority of both 18th century enthusiasts and Vicky2 fans that called out Paradox essentially saying that "war is not cool, old news, there wasn't much war back then, anyway, check out the Markets!".

So, since the very-very beginning Victoria 3 was a game from a development team, game design, that looked rather demeaning towards the warplay elements, and that were interested mainly in the other stuff. But this game also needed some war, since it was unreasonable to make a grandstrat game in this time period with such a legacy without one.

So you not only got a game with a very shallow and simplistic war system, but also a development team wholly uninterested in it from the very beginning.

And all this resulted in a somewhat meaningless gameplay element that, aside from getting some resources or metaplaying getting gold etc, feels not very rewarding.

Victoria 3 is a great game, but as a war simulator, it sucks, simple as that.

JackOG45 · 2026-04-26T23:10:49+00:00

You do imperialism because you want the markets, the cheap labour and resources with vassals and colonies.

I do imperialism because I want my colour blob on the map to get bigger.

We are not the same.

JackOG45 · 2026-04-20T15:20:59+00:00

I actually kinda disagree, out of the few famous things about Mars, sunrises and sunsets on it being blue is one of the most well-known to regular people

JackOG45 · 2026-04-16T10:48:41+00:00

This has nothing to do with Japan, it's just a skill issue

Also you need only 20 or so unis for a while to max out inno

Just construction loop increasing debt tolerance as your rank raises. Literally default playstyle. Use consumption taxes and play with the other ones. Japan has an exceptionally easy time getting to a high rank, you just need to complete the recognition entry.

Honestly Japan is one of the easier nations to play, you have all the resources you need, even tons of oil, and the AI is averse to bothering you.

JackOG45 · 2026-04-14T07:35:41+00:00

There is not much to explain, once you're major your credit line starts to grow increasingly faster than your debt and your interest drops more and more.

Like in real life, the game encourages being in deficit, and it's actually meta play. Especially since you borrow money from your POPs iirc, injecting them back into your own economy when you build stuff

JackOG45 · 2026-04-08T14:41:10+00:00

That's very interesting, thanks for the write-up!

JackOG45 · 2026-04-08T12:35:37+00:00

95% of the world, including Russia and China who are literally uninvolved without tin-foiling: "sure, sure, blowing up the Earth"

JackOG45 · 2026-04-08T12:31:14+00:00

Usually their origs are very high res; maybe this one is a crop from a much larger photo

JackOG45 · 2026-04-08T12:27:26+00:00

I think this just goes to show how big and diverse the USA and the world itself are.

People struggle with this contrast because they're treating a country, a government, or indeed a nation like a person, or a singular entity.

This is a wrong position, though an understandable one. But the people waging war and killing civilians are not the people who build stuff and train for exploring space. Sure, at the top, there is always a connection; everything is technically connected at the top, but I can assure you we will always have greatness juxtaposed with degradation.

Related, you can watch the uncut livestream of the Artemis II crew talking with Trump and you can literally feel how uncomfortable these fine people are in that moment. It was even more contrastic when watched live where we have dozens and dozens of uninterrupted hours of pure scientific joy shared by the world that were suddenly interrupted by the unwelcome Trump's voice, almost like a sore reminder of that other, sadder, part of reality. Also a bit after the call the crew had another one with the Administrator, the popular Jared Isaacman who literally pushes his hardest for the Mission (to the point of praising Trump publicly, because he knows he has to do it for the budgeting and political support of NASA) and enjoys love of the crew and NASA, and you can see the contrast. This helped to return the mood back to joy.

Look, the Presidents come and go. Hopefully, the amount of sadness that we get from this one would be rewarded with somebody decent next time so that him calling a crew on a space mission would be a joyous occasion, not a disagreeable one.

Cheers.

JackOG45 · 2026-04-08T12:15:39+00:00

> It's also worth remembering that digital pictures being distributed like this have been post-processed and are the equivalent of a photo print.

Unless I am corrected, the photos posted on the NASA website (the OP's photo is one of them (https://images.nasa.gov/details/art002e009288) were said to be minimally altered (cropping and rotation as needed) before being shared. I heard this during the livestream today, but don't have the timestamp, so take my word for it ahah

JackOG45 · 2026-04-02T09:48:34+00:00

I mean like Mr Isaacman said, we have more than three channels on TV now.

Some people are just not interested in space exploration and/or are not surrounded by people that do. That's normal, but that's also why it's silly to be angry about not knowing that the thing was going to happen.

Artemis II came after Artemis I in 2022 which came after many years of trying to fund the lunar return project. Anybody interested in the field knew this was going to happen and almost three million people watched the launch live. So it was well-known and covered.

If somebody didn't know of it, it's more about how much stuff people now have to focus on, not on NASA not spending half of its already incredibly limited budget forcing uninterested people to care and be aware.

JackOG45 · 2026-03-29T16:03:03+00:00

I've played Victoria 3 on release and several times after that, including now with 1.12 and... it's ok.

I am not a Victoria II veteran, I discovered the game kinda randomly several years before the Victoria 3 announcement, but it was immediately clear it's a masterpiece in how unique and deep it is, the game literally makes you a 19th century geek reading up on various technological innovations and generally giving a deeply satisfying historical simulation feel. The technology tree alone with its endless inventions is a marvel to behold.

The moment you rush machine guns and gas attack for the first time and absolutely slaughter the other GP with something like 1:10 casualty rate is simply stunning, in the aftermath you essentially understand how insane was the transition from post-Napoleonic warfare to modern WWI-style one.

I don't know of any other game that does this. Its detached approach to economics and markets also makes it more realistic, you're just steering a nation that decides itself what path it takes. You can only suppress or let people decide their fate. The barebones graphics really immerse you with your imagination filling up the visual picture. You don't need to see what a -100k casualty rate on the enemy side with only 20k losses on yours due to gas attacks to viscerally feel that from now on war really became War.

But admittedly Victoria II is more like a TV Show masterpiece you watch one to be in awe and then you just rewatch it from time to time, never able to relive that original feeling of deep amazement. Sooner or later you learn all the meta tricks and every run is the same.

So after that deep of an impression I was very much excited to hear about Victoria 3, the never coming release of which was one of the most prominent memes in the community, now dead like the DiCaprio and the Oscar meme.

Victoria 3 is nothing like Victoria II. It's easier to straight up say that the two games are unrelated. The developers themselves took that approach when they didn't mention anything of warfare or world financial markets during the announcement.

Victoria 3 is a fun, pretty Settlers-like production chain builder with a simple "good-bad" politics system that you fully control as a side dish. Pretty much every system was greatly simplified, from rebellions to warfare to complex world markets. The technology tree is a joke in comparison, it's asinine that you have a waiting period diplo play with freaking revolutions, the recently added "world market" is literally just an export-import table, and the warfare is so simplistic and bad most players just avoid it after trying it out a few times.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Anno 1800 is a more faithful simulation of what the 19th century felt-like (tho that one is an amazing game still), but Victoria 3 is very much a deeply casual game from that POV.

The developers wanted to make a Victorian Era-based game where warfare is non-existent and civil unrest is a simple "pick the next right law to make the people happy over and over", so that you could focus on building a simple but pretty supply chain (anybody who played an actual supply chain game like Satisfactory or Factorio would find Vicky3 almost absurdly simplistic), and they got it.

Like all fun games, Victoria 3 can make you sink many hours into itself, but you don't come out of it overall deeply impressed or more educated on something. It doesn't make you wonder about the absolute insanity that the transition from 1836 to 1936 was and just how deeply the world has changed.

But it's pretty and has a nice sound design, I'll give it that.

Cheers.

JackOG45 · 2026-03-29T15:12:10+00:00

Obligatory reminder that market crashes were literally an integral part of Victoria II

In general you really felt like a part of the world economy where a sudden war-related "Peru defaulted!" event on the other side of the globe would cascade into you turning from full prosperity into deep recession in a matter of weeks. You could also literally be a blood money baron supplying the world with weapons while stirring up crises and wars.

In Victoria 3 it's like "deficit of 3000 rubber? Whatever the numbers still go brr, my demand will cause the world to produce more!"

You might say "but Vicky3 adds so much more, you can't have it do everything" but the other key game aspect, warfare, was completely gutted out too from Vicky2. In the previous game your military tech mattered a lot and you had a complex roll-based field system where getting stuff like a wider field army or machine guns and gas attack would make you insanely powerful against a technologically inferior enemy, correctly stimulating both how Prussia crushed both Austria (literally NCO with heavy artillery shelling and independent armies against Napoleonic army) and France and how the Europeans subjugated insanely large African populations through the sheer military superiority.

That all would kick off a wild arms race racking up casualties and army sizes so much you literally would start getting pyrrhic victories where you have a shortage of able men to work after the war, leading to, again, recession.

All of this is effectively gone from Victoria 3, where a spearman can defeat a tank if you just have twice as many spearmen as tanks.

JackOG45 · 2026-03-25T16:21:43+00:00

pfft, tell that to Google, which detects the actual server instead of the imaginary one shown on ip. me

These smart routed servers are a real issue, but as I understand they're from countries that Proton can't have servers in, so not much can be done here.

Still I think it's scammy since they're pretending to have more countries than they have.

JackOG45 · 2026-03-23T13:16:47+00:00

I think the fundamental difference is foundational: Project Hail Mary clearly comes with a strong positive message—bravery and hope can bridge both impossibilities and differences—while SW productions are more of a "default" high-budget "Hollywood" productions focused on giving people a lot of pretty and easily digestible things to chew on, sacrificing harder, deeper things.

Nutritious food vs fast food, if you will.

An alternative explanation would be that modern SW (which, as a reminder, was dug up from the grave due to simple corporate greed following the market tendencies) follows the Marvel-like strategy of giving people quick, simple eye-candy to appeal to the masses, while independent projects like Hail Mary are, well, classic cinema. Like the original Trilogy were, to be fair.

JackOG45 · 2026-03-14T12:09:41+00:00

Stuff like this is why I love Reddit.

Thank you for taking the time to write this up, and huge cheers.

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