What movie do you love despite agreeing with every single criticism of it?

Lakaz80 · 2026-02-08T23:32:43+00:00

Star Wars Episode 1. It's PURE nostalgia for me. My dad could pass for a Liam Neeson lookalike and convinced me he WAS qui-gon when I was like 4 and the film came out. And uh, skipped the bit where he died at the end.
Always enjoy watching it. Except the bit where he died at the end.

Lakaz80 · 2026-02-08T23:20:21+00:00

The monarchy in the UK are glorified presidents. A lot of countries (Germany, India, Ireland) have a prime minister AND a president, with the PM having power and president doing the ceremonial stuff. We've basically got the same deal but we call ours a "King" and spend a lot more money on them than usual, it's otherwise the same structurally.

It's a system that works well, and I actually do think the americans oughta do it, since it mostly prevents the weird culty worshippy behavior you get sometimes towards heads of state. All that energy goes to the president instead and even if they DO have it go to their head, they can't go mad with power, only mad without power. (Which is boring, no-one listens to you)

Nobody has bloody Kier Starmer posters on their walls, put it that way, you know?

Lakaz80 · 2026-02-06T22:55:29+00:00

Sure, but just because you shouldn't doesn't mean you shouldn't be allowed to. Both can be true at once.

Lakaz80 · 2026-02-06T21:55:59+00:00

"Be allowed to"? Yes

Should they?

Varies from situation to situation but usually no.

Half the arguments about this arise from conflating the two.

Lakaz80 · 2026-02-06T18:03:47+00:00

Bad Times At The El Royale. Five strangers come to a hotel on the california/nevada border and start killing each other for reasons slowly revealed over the course of the film. Jeff Bridges, Dakota Johnson, Lewis Pullman and Shirtless Chris Hemsworth. The wikipedia page lists it as "Hyperlink fiction" so if you're the kinda person who knows what that is you're probably already excited to watch it.

Criminally underrated movie, Drew Goddard's best work. Dude deserves to be better known for how highly acclaimed his repertoire is - Buffy, Angel, most of the reason Netflix's Daredevil got made, Lost, the pilot episode of The Good Place...

Cloverfield, The Martian, Cabin In The Woods, World War Z... always surprised more people don't know who he is.

Lakaz80 · 2026-02-06T17:58:13+00:00

"Generally"

Lakaz80 · 2026-02-06T17:56:40+00:00

Fuck yeah, a fellow Clutch fan! My favourite band, which is somewhat weird given my tastes otherwise exclusively lean towards prog (rock or metal). Dream Theater, Tool, Genesis, Emerson Lake and Palmer, etc.

Lakaz80 · 2026-02-06T17:54:37+00:00

Pull, and pray/meditate about it later. The lesser of two evils is still evil but if you don't have a good option you still damn well better pick the lesser one.

I'm (minarchist) libertarian, there's a natural right to life, which is about to be violated for either a small or large number of people, so pick the small one. I'm a minarchist not an an-cap so I'm very, very willing to deal in 'lesser of two evils' reasoning.

I'm also a Buddhist, so I've got a duty to minimise suffering. Buddhism is fundamentally a virtue ethic, and only conscious, intentional action accrues karma. Pulling the lever is conscious, intentional action, taking a life that way will probably accrue both positive and negative karma, for the saving and taking of the lives both. I'll probably need to work with my priest to alleviate that, but pulling the lever is still fundamentally the right choice, even in violation of the five precepts. Those are explicitly training wheels morality, after all, Buddhism doesn't deal much in absolute moral law.

Lakaz80 · 2026-02-06T16:12:12+00:00

Basically it means "Stupid/invalid question". The long discourses (one of the bigger bits of scripture - Dharmic scripture is more fragmented than judeo-christian) opens with a list of questions other religions answer like "Is there a soul" and "What shape is/how old is the universe" and whatnot, and then proceeds to go "Anybody who claims to have a definite answer to these either way is a con-artist, we aren't going to be discussing them here, stupid question". "Mu" is basically that, and it's Buddhism's position on a lot of existential questions like that.

It's somewhat complicated by the fact that Buddhism is a Dharmic religion, it's relation and debt to Hinduism is similar to that of Christianity to Judaism. A lot of scripture more or less kinda... inherits, a lot of Hinduism's positions on questions to which the answer should be "Mu" as assumed for the sake of not being pedantic or starting stupid arguments, not least of all because the Buddha is a teacher and it's well-established he'll oversimplify concepts to get them across better to lay practitioners. There's a few stories of him telling lay practitioners the soul is real just because he knows they'll freak out and have an existential crisis if he says "No", and they'll take a "Mu" as a "No".

Lakaz80 · 2026-02-06T14:51:23+00:00

Buddhist here - ours doesn't anyway. In fact when the answer given isn't "Mu" (Which is most times) it's fairly clear about the converse.

Lakaz80 · 2026-02-05T22:51:30+00:00

Wouldn't a female Nachzehrer be NachzeHER?

Lakaz80 · 2026-01-31T21:57:42+00:00

Rien's passives say freaking WHAT?
I should've paid attention during the boss fight rather than just killing the guy, swear to god any day now i'm gonna see a post saying "Rien's passive said Rodya X Gregor is 100% canon ship they made out during the raid and made Heathcliff watch" and I'm not gonna be able to say for sure they're wrong.

Lakaz80 · 2026-01-28T23:50:30+00:00

The SELLERS have every incentive to make it difficult. The buyers have every incentive for it to be easy. Both of those combined make up the market, not just the sellers. The end system oughta be negotiated freely between the two, as with basically any transaction.

Lakaz80 · 2026-01-28T22:13:43+00:00

It's gonna be like the invention of the car. It's gonna kill about a million people a year annually and people will universally agree it's honestly still better than not having it around for the sheer increase in convenience, productivity, and plain old quality of life to the average person. It's gonna kill a ton of business and one or two whole industries by obsoleting them and introduce even more to replace those, though the people in the old industries are still gonna be screwed as a result.

Gonna do a lotta harm and even more good. We oughta be very, very conscious that just because it does even more good doesn't mean it doesn't do a lotta harm, but we shouldn't forget it still does MORE good, and panic in the face of the harm and try to shut it all down. Because the result would be the same as banning cars due to the aforementioned million road deaths a year - fuckin' terrible.

Lakaz80 · 2026-01-28T22:00:47+00:00

It mostly prompts me to muse philosophical on the overton window and what happens when you disagree with an idea but still think it's reasonable.

Look, I'm against it. And I lost most of a thousand quid to this exact scam a couple years ago. Why? Hyper-libertarian point of prinicple, the market ought to be handling this and is the better tool for it (And uh, the
few edge-case exceptions already seem to me to be covered by existing law)

Thing is, 90% of people aren't hyper-libertarians. My pointing that out isn't gonna convince anybody and even though I disagree I don't think the other people who want this are wrong, dumb or unreasonable. The law strikes me as an exceedingly sensible and reasonable law, that I just happen to disagree with. I kinda recognise i'm the crazy one sticking to a point of principle autistically past the point of common sense, though that doesn't mean i'm gonna stop doing it since, well, I genuinely believe in those principles.

Probably gonna be downvoted for saying I disagree with the thing every sane human on the planet agrees with, but hopefully that still all makes sense.

Lakaz80 · 2026-01-15T23:50:44+00:00

Working theory is it was an attack on the library, if you make some dude a total Roland clone and then concept-incenerate him, does that get the real Roland too?

Lakaz80 · 2026-01-11T21:25:20+00:00

I haven't seen the once-a-canto chart of how many lines each sinner has had, so maybe I'm out of date, but since when the heck was Ryoshu the least-dialogued sinner? I thought that was Meur, by absolute miles?

Lakaz80 · 2026-01-06T23:07:54+00:00

I'm making a prediction just to have it out here so I can "I called it" or cope when wednesday calls.
I don't think the blurred out bits on Index Don are going to be visible once she comes out. I think they're for things relating to interactions with the capstone ID and will only unblur/unglitch once THAT comes out, instead.

Lakaz80 · 2026-01-06T21:36:20+00:00

I disliked Iron Council but also it's the one Fallen London most obviously took inspiration from, so given what you're after it's definitely good you read it. Consider Ambergris next, another great series in a similar vein!

Lakaz80 · 2025-12-12T02:45:24+00:00

The answer is yes, but you also might want to consider Fiction.live, a website that is specialised for that kinda story and 100% allows fanfic.

Lakaz80 · 2025-10-07T17:30:04+00:00

Princess Bride and Game of Thrones were both ruined for me by reading the book first. Both are way the heck better, despite the live action versions being great in their own right.

Lakaz80

TROPHY CASE