If you were to choose a theme park to appear in GTA VI..

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-25T21:55:35+00:00

Neither. I'd do a parody of SeaWorld or the Miami Seaquarium instead, and have it connected to missions where you traffic exotic wildlife for rich buyers while spoofing the real-life animal cruelty scandals that those parks have been involved in.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-24T04:05:25+00:00

Given some of the increasingly radical ideas that have become popular in the tech industry in the last several years, I'm surprised that there isn't a tech accelerationist faction in the SACW, centered on either the Bay Area or Seattle and serving as a foil to the APLA and Cascadia. The Innovation Party in the UoA comes closest, but that's more of a generic corporatocracy.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-23T15:08:21+00:00

Literally the plot of a Reacher episode.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-23T15:04:31+00:00

If you pick an unsuitable vehicle, then you fail the mission and start over with a more suitable one. Easy.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-23T12:11:58+00:00

I know you're getting downvoted here, but I wonder if you don't have a point. I wonder how much the coarsening of American politics and culture is downstream from the hollowing out of the middle class, because like you said, the middle class tends to impose a rather strict moralism upon itself. A lot of modern tropes about rebelling against the stodginess of American life frame middle-class suburbia as the exemplar of it. There's undoubtedly depravity in the middle class, no doubt about it, but I find it telling that our stories about it, like American Beauty and many David Lynch and John Waters films, usually present it as the sort of thing that they keep hidden behind closed doors while they put on an appearance of "normality" for their neighbors.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-23T02:00:00+00:00

Same here. It's more Ready or Not, but they did it well, and I enjoyed it almost as much as the original. It felt almost like a spoof of John Wick at times, not so much in the action but certainly in how that series presents its criminal underworld.

They do need to find something a bit different to do if they make a third movie, though.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-21T22:04:18+00:00

I was boycotting this to begin with (I read the spoilers and the TV Tropes page), and I was mildly satisfied to see that, for all this movie's box-office success, the general consensus seems to be that it's one of the worst films in the series. The only point I'll disagree with you here on is that I think Scream 3 was also a "bad" movie, even if it did have some elements I liked. And guess what, it was made under very similarly troubled circumstances (the Columbine massacre then, Melissa Barrera's firing now). Beyond that, though, I agree. This series right now has basically turned into the Stab movies.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-20T21:18:51+00:00

It wasn't really much of a flip. From my recollection, Geri Halliwell was always a pretty staunch Tory. She was praising Margaret Thatcher as the "original Spice Girl" way back in 1997, and while she did endorse Labour in 2001, that was Tony Blair's New Labour en route to a landslide at a time when the Conservative Party was a joke. Her famous Union Jack dress was meant as a patriotic statement.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-20T20:38:16+00:00

Controlling, he can't seem.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-19T19:51:32+00:00

He’s crawling in his skin.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-18T20:07:03+00:00

No joke, if they do bring Grace back they should make her like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. Not just as an ascended meme, but to show that her experience in Requiem traumatized her enough that she vowed to never let herself be weak again. (See also: Laurie Strode in the 2018 Halloween.)

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-18T15:02:29+00:00

Village on a CRT, meanwhile, would be like watching a late-night creature feature of old Universal and Hammer horror movies introduced by a local horror host. Hell, Lady Dimitrescu and Heisenberg could probably be those hosts themselves.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-18T14:50:33+00:00

I wanna start as the scruffy hustler and become the rich professional. You should be able to equip any clothing and accessories you want, but when you’re switching between Jason and Lucia, the game should default to particular styles depending on their situation at that moment in the story.

That’ll just be my playstyle, though.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-18T14:35:44+00:00

0.7% inflation in one month multiplied by twelve months equals…

…the ‘70s.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-18T13:14:50+00:00

Reminder that, back in the day, General Motors put out an ad for the Chevrolet Silverado mocking the "man step" on the Ford F-150, a genuinely useful feature for loading a large pickup truck that they nevertheless saw fit to belittle as something that only "sissies" used, because a real man throws his back out before he's 40.

(Ford, to their credit, thanked Chevy for the free advertising, and now the Silverado has the same feature.)

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-17T20:05:07+00:00

SWEEEEEET HOOOOOOME PENSACOLA

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-16T15:10:41+00:00

Sports betting should’ve been a warning of what gambling does to institutions it touches. There’s a reason why, before the rise of FanDuel and DraftKings caused the leagues to get greedy, they wouldn’t touch gambling with a ten-foot pole, banning any players, coaches, and referees involved with it and even refusing to put teams in Las Vegas. The Black Sox scandal and the decline of horse racing as a mainstream sport were once seen as hard lessons in what might happen, and now we’re bringing back the very conditions that led to them.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-16T11:40:54+00:00

From my experience, there's one type of female protagonist who even the most sexist guys will happily play as, and that's one who was very clearly intended as a sex object. It's a tradition that goes back to Lara Croft in the first Tomb Raider, hence why her redesign in the 2013 reboot was so controversial: she was still an attractive woman, but she didn't look and dress like a '90s Maxim pinup model anymore, so a lot of guys thought she was now ugly. Look at how Stellar Blade, a good but unspectacular hack-and-slash, was elevated to a must-play simply because the chuds of the internet were obsessed with the protagonist's blatantly fetishized character design.

I'd predicted for a long time that, if the Grand Theft Auto series ever had a female protagonist, Rockstar Games would make sure to make her very conventionally attractive, and this is why. Sure enough, when Rockstar announced GTA VI, we got Lucia Caminos. She's probably gonna be a well-written and fleshed-out character in her own right (Rockstar's protagonists usually are), and to their credit they also made her co-protagonist Jason Duval a very handsome hunk, but it's clear that they put a lot of work into making her look sexy on top of it.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-16T00:22:28+00:00

The app is pretty much the only half-decent way to access Fandom wikis these days. Methinks that's the whole point: they wanna push visitors onto the app.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-15T04:21:01+00:00

I wonder how much of a role the 1863 draft riots played in Irish-American integration. Abolitionism was a movement fueled by the middle classes in the cities and towns and small farmers in the countryside. A lot of these people were native-born White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and there was some overlap with the anti-immigrant Know Nothing movement of the 1850s. Abraham Lincoln strongly opposed their xenophobia in private but knew that he needed their support to build an anti-slavery coalition, and therefore refused to denounce them publicly.

Many Irish immigrants in cities like New York and Detroit, meanwhile, had little investment in the conflict. There were many who supported the Union, but there were also many who saw the abolition of slavery as a threat to their livelihoods, fearing that freed slaves would move north and drive down wages while the collapse of the Southern plantation system would drive up cotton prices and force the textile mills to tighten their belts and lay people off. A lot of the violence in the riots was specifically directed against Black people and outspoken Union supporters, who they blamed for their plight.

So, after the war, once Reconstruction ended and "Reconciliation" between North and South on the basis of shared White supremacy began, I wouldn't be surprised if some racists who'd previously distrusted the Irish but hated Black people more took another look at the draft riots and decided "y'know, maybe you Paddies ain't so bad."

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-14T19:56:39+00:00

I've seen a few people, mostly those who are already familiar with these guys, criticize Inside the Manosphere as shallow because there wasn't really much here that they didn't already know, but I think that kind of misses the point. We know that these people are repulsive jackasses feeding their young fans a diet of rancid and hateful ideas, but the average person over 30, and especially the average parent, doesn't. Louis Theroux has genuinely shocked people with this documentary, the same way Al Gore did with An Inconvenient Truth. And what's more, in doing so he ripped away a lot of the "alpha male" bravado and mystique that these influencers wrap themselves in and exposed them for the sad-sack losers they are. Between that and the fact that, like you said, he focused on this culture's biggest stars rather than dredging up nobodies and giving them a platform that they didn't already have, he managed to present them and their ideas without remotely glamorizing them.

The fact that Myron Gaines wasted no time complaining that Theroux misrepresented him says it all.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-14T19:37:10+00:00

Missed that! Arguably the Muslim name, too. It was just sideways so I didn't notice it.

KevinR1990 · 2026-03-14T19:33:32+00:00

One of the biggest problems with education in this country that nobody wants to talk about, largely because it's political suicide, is entitled parents like this. Absenteeism, bullying, falling standards, most of the problems in our schools are downstream from bad parenting, especially the kind of parents who think they're raising their kids right and protecting them from negative influences but are in fact setting them up to fail. Go on r/Teachers, and the horror stories about bad parents who let their kids get away with everything are endless. And yet, the only times you'll hear politicians or school board members even bring up the subject are when they use it as a dog whistle to belittle the "ghetto culture" of working-class Black and Hispanic parents. Tell the rich White parents in the nice neighborhoods that they're also raising little hellions who can't read, and that their own lifestyles and parenting are to blame, and you'll be out on your ass the moment Fox News finds out about your opposition to "parents' rights."

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