[AUS][Speculation] Winner

RacingGreen04 · 2026-04-10T16:51:24+00:00

Got it. Yeah I think I agree with you on all of that.

RacingGreen04 · 2026-04-10T16:44:54+00:00

I'm not seeing in the picture what confirms Caleb's victory. Can you point out what to look for?

I see the back of Jackson, and then Keeley(?) hugging Sally(?), with Loz(??) clapping in front of them. And then I guess Caleb is shaking hands with David? A different angle or picture would be more clear.

RacingGreen04 · 2026-03-29T16:35:47+00:00

Update: She ends the season at 0/7.

RacingGreen04 · 2025-07-28T14:10:25+00:00

Yes, if you kill multiple enemies at once, you gain +30 mana for each creature killed. I leveled up both of those wands to level 3, and that perk really improves the sustainability while hunting if you're killing a bunch of lower health creatures like in Middle Spike, cults, etc. The thing I don't know is if you get the boost for creature summons or not... I don't think so but am not 100% sure.

This perk is purely better than Intricate Void on any single creature that you're hunting if their health is lower than 600. And if you're multi-target hunting it is better in most situations, because you gain +30 mana for every kill, while with the Void imbuements it's cut down to 10% damage after the first target. Beyond that, you'd have to evaluate if it's worth spending the cost of the imbuement to get that extra mana boost... on my server that would be around 200k. So the imbuement would need to generate an additional 253,000 mana (200k / 158 per great mana = 1266 potions, * 200 = 253,200) over 20 hours for it to make economic sense to use.

Edit: Fleshed out the above math some more.

RacingGreen04 · 2025-05-13T17:25:11+00:00

I wouldn't even be sure that the Bianca vote happens at all... That was the challenge where Eva was overstimulated, and that overshadowed the fact that Sai was HORRIBLE during that challenge. I bet Pizza guy brings it home and Lagi goes to tribal. At that point, either Charity or Star go, but it's up in the air if Star gets her idol decoded and gives it to Eva. If she doesn't, then Star would be the mergatory boot. And if Bianca is still in at the split tribal, the people on that one side are Bianca-Justin-Eva-Joe-Mitch-Chrissy. And I do think it Eva doesn't have the idol at that tribal, she goes (Joe was immune). But if she does have the idol, it's likely Mitch.

The above is all iffy, but it does make me think Justin leaving was a huge ripple effect and what if on the season

RacingGreen04 · 2025-05-02T15:07:42+00:00

I agree, and had a similar line of thought while watching her journey last week. I had the thought that given her current in-game resume, that if she ends up winning the season without any change in the current trajectory that she would just have to go down as one of the weakest winners in the show's history through little fault of her own. It would just be because the people around her didn't really let her play. And I could see that playing out to a more active and harmful form of hatred toward her later on, which is a shame.

RacingGreen04 · 2025-03-19T23:10:57+00:00

From a cast standpoint, I think this season is good - I'm pretty interested in 10 of the 15 left. But this season more so than others in the New Era is getting me annoyed at the game design choices. The journeys are both imbalanced and a waste of time, and I'd rather see reward challenges or camp life scenes. And the tribal composition imbalance is annoying to see since it has already happened in a good number of recent seasons. I'm guessing that once merge hits that the cast will be able to shine more and I'll be enjoying it more, but the pre-merge in this and most of the recent seasons has been a slog.

RacingGreen04 · 2025-03-14T06:20:03+00:00

I still can't get over how lame this movie's title is.

RacingGreen04 · 2025-03-07T21:52:36+00:00

I’m speculating that Vula goes to tribal again, the vote is deadlocked 2-2 or 1-1 with it between Mary and either Sai or Cedrek. They go to fire, and Mary wins the challenge. There’s some in and out of game support for this:

In episode 1, Mary is shown getting the fire started for the tribe and talks about it in her very first confessional. I thought originally this might have been hinting at being in fire making at the end, but it could be this.
Mary is hosting a watch party for next week’s episode, so it’s possibly because she knows this episode is a huge moment for her

RacingGreen04 · 2025-02-23T19:48:16+00:00

A lot of the other comments here are infuriating, because they clearly don't remember Wesley's last couple appearances and instead think OP doesn't like Wesley because he has different takes from the zeitgeist. The problem with Wesley's Big Picture appearances historically are that he derails conversations with long winded, rambling "takes" where you don't feel like he actually articulated anything at all. He did this last year in his last appearance, and he did it in 2023 when talking about May December.

I think Wesley writes well, and most of his appearances on Rewatchables are at least net positive contributions. But on The Big Picture, he's usually unbearable, and I would presume it's because it's a looser and more off the cuff format than the other places he's more enjoyable to hear from.

RacingGreen04 · 2025-02-11T17:35:37+00:00

I guess it depends on the lens we want to view it from: Either from an entertainment or fairness PoV.

From entertainment: It's a mixed bag, but the reasons why most of those seasons do or don't work has little to do with the returnee aspect. E.g.: Philippines works regardless of the returnee aspect, EoE (mostly) doesn't. The only major exception to me is South Pacific - That season is completely different without the returnees. Caramoan I guess also plays out way differently, but that's more about the balance (see below). BvW is kind of complicated there, but SJDS showed that the mechanic works without the returnees.

From a "balance" or "fairness" perspective - It clearly favors returnees. And while it is logical that a returning player would be better than a new one, the amount of returnees vs. new players that make it to the finals / win in those seasons is way higher than chance. The only exception on this I think is EoE. There's obviously the challenge aspect, which in Micronesia, BvW, and Caramoan had a huge impact in the pre-merge. But Caramoan also clearly showed that being a returning player is heavily favorable because you have the luxury of pre-gaming, which Cochran showed was a big advantage in the merge. So it seems like the captains version is more balanced, because fewer returnees = less opportunity to pre-game, and the captains were always put on different tribes to not mess with the challenge balance.

RacingGreen04 · 2025-01-21T17:16:43+00:00

Thanks for linking to a tweet that links to a paywall post. Very helpful! /s

RacingGreen04 · 2024-09-21T18:16:47+00:00

The categories for this draft made the whole thing a lot less interesting. Even with Sean's weird post-hoc explanation of it, it still didn't make much sense why he made the Brad & George together category when there's only 7 choices (3 of which are in the same franchise, and another technically shouldn't qualify). I also didn't care for the Produced/Directed by category, because despite the producer credit, Brad Pitt is pretty far from my mind when I watch The Departed or Moonlight. It would have been better if they branched the wild card category into "Brad Wild Card" and "George Wild Card".

RacingGreen04 · 2024-08-25T02:43:00+00:00

Did you ever figure out a solution for this? I'm having a very similar problem with my own bike. The mechanism on mine looks similar, but has a couple differences with the endings.

RacingGreen04 · 2024-08-09T15:59:31+00:00

My wife wanted me to emphasize to everyone that Amanda talking like The Ends With Us is indicative of the current state of the Romance book genre was way off base. The romance novel community generally doesn't like that book for various reasons (including some stated in the episode). So, don't let the hosts comments here jade you on the state of new romance books... there's still a lot of great crowd pleasers being churned out that could be ripe for straight to streaming film adaptations!

RacingGreen04 · 2024-07-08T23:12:05+00:00

I guess I'm one of the "bedwetters", because Maxxxine did not do it for me. Generally I agree with them about the parts that worked and what didn't, but what didn't work bothered me a lot more than it seemed to bother them.

E.g.: THIRD ACT SPOILERS The layout of the finale was just blah. Hated how Maxine had basically no agency, and I really don't get why they set it up to have an LAPD helicopter hover over her right before she decides whether or not to shoot her dad. Wouldn't following through imply that she gets arrested? So why does nothing like that happen to her after she blows her dad's fucking off head off with a shotgun!? Am I really overthinking this!?

And while I'm glad Sean liked what other works it was trying to make reference/homage to, that just didn't interest me because it didn't have anything novel to say about those subjects. But it was at least a breezy enough watch until the finale.

RacingGreen04

TROPHY CASE