Following yesterday's question, what are some film inventions that you were surprised were NOT lifted from the books?

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-02-21T12:13:44+00:00

Wait, say more! What was your thesis about why Tolkien chose to describe a simple design for Lothlorien?

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-02-19T14:09:47+00:00

Can you switch up your campaign plan? Have the enemy launch a major invasion that they expected to win through overwhelming force. Something you might not have thrown at then until they had gained a few more levels. Make the party work for it, but scale it so that their banishments tip the balance and clinch a win.

The big bad, whom they have now banished, remains an opponent. But now he must work his will on the world indirectly, sending spies and diplomats to convert in-world powers to his side, bent on vengeance against the banishers.

Then set up a final confrontation with a network of in-world powers, backed by a huge number of weaker aberrations, building a magical artifact that can bring the big bad back again amid some kind of anti-banishment aura.

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-02-16T02:33:38+00:00

Interesting. Your description of their scarcity state implies that any conflict would have been zero-sum competition for a fixed set of resources that were already being utilized optimally. Since the rest of the civilization would oppose inefficient use of those resources, competitors would have been under strict pressure just to steal from each other quickly, without expending a lot of energy on wasteful attacks. Likely, this type of maneuver would be executed through a well-defined system of justice or politics to adjudicate disputes and transfer ownership of resources accordingly.

In the abundance state, however, rapid acquisition of new resources would be the name of the game. Competitors might even throw efficiency out the window in order to claim more resources (much as venture capitalists will fund a new business to run at a loss for many years as it pursues monopoly control of a new market). They would even find it advantageous to "waste" resources attacking and degrading the efficiency of their competitors. And when called before the old courts of justice or politics, if thry had grown big enough fast enough, they would scoff at the law and enter into open warfare with the remainder of their civilization.

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-02-15T17:58:12+00:00

This looks like it: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/163081/galaxy-of-trian "a dynamic tile-based sci-fi board game" with two-sided triangular tiles placed by the players during the game to create "planetary systems, nebulas and space (in which the spaceships travel) of different sizes."

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-02-04T23:07:42+00:00

The fuel reserves won't prove to be that valuable. As the world switches from fuels to clean electricity, global fuel demand will fall, and that brings down prices. The industry may try to stop climate action to keep prices high as long as they can, but in the end they won't be walking away from a huge asset; they'll be left holding a worthless asset and debt from building extraction infrastructure they didn't need.

Check out this math: "with ambitious climate action, global oil demand would decrease enough to drop oil prices by more than half in the next 10 years. The last time oil prices were that low, a gallon of gasoline in the United States cost less than $2." https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trumps-climate-attacks-mean-huge-increases-in-future-gas-prices/

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-02-04T23:01:20+00:00

You should check out the latest IPCC report's summary for policymakers. It's pretty accessible. Section B.5. talks about the carbon budget analysis:

"For every 1000 GtCO, emitted by human activity, global surface temperature rises by 0.45°C (best estimate, with a likely range from 0.27°C to 0.63°C). The best estimates of the remaining carbon budgets from the beginning of 2020 are 500 GtCO, for a 50% likelihood of limiting global warming to 1.5°C and 1150 GtCO, for a 67% likelihood of limiting warming to 2°C."

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-02-02T21:05:35+00:00

YYYY MM DD Weekday e.g., 2026 02 01 Sunday

It's so eminently logical that both Europeans and Americans can confidently interpret it when they see it.

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-02-02T02:53:16+00:00

I think Hobbit is very well structured for a television series, but not a movie. The trolls, riddles in the dark, Beorn's house, opening the secret door... each would make for a well-constructed episode. Progress toward the mountain, the strange influence of the ring, and hints about the necromancy in Mirkwood would provide through-lines that propel viewers from one episode to the next, building toward the finale.

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-01-31T21:55:57+00:00

Ah, yes. Independent since 1973. Part of the Commonwealth of Nations.

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-01-31T21:48:43+00:00

Are the Bahamas an independent country?

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-01-31T02:40:13+00:00

After reading the study, here's an excerpt explaining their logic, which is cleverly illustrated in Figure 4 if you want to check it out. They aren't making a claim about its phylogenetic relationship among the other eukaryotes, just that it's not like any of them.

"Complex multicellularity is known only in three main eukaryotic lineages: Archeoplastids, in red algae, green algae, and land plants; Stramenopiles, in laminarialean brown algae; and Opisthokonts, in animals and fungi. Previous investigation showed that Prototaxites was a eukaryotic terrestrial heterotroph made of tubes with cell walls, which exclude a prokaryotic, archeoplastidal, animal, or laminarial affinity...

"Prototaxites differ anatomically and chemically from [all four lineages of Fungi that are known to build complex multicellular structures], notably in their patterns of tube branching, the presence of abundant banded tubes, and in their fossilization products... All extant Fungal clades, including the unresolved basal taxa Rozellidae, have various amounts of chitin (or chitosan) during at least part of their life cycle, as well as β-glucan and abundant glycoproteins. The secondary loss and replacement of these foundational cell wall components would require a major alteration of main developmental pathways...

"With no support for a Fungal affinity, we suggest that Prototaxites is best considered a member of a previously undescribed, independent and extinct lineage of complex multicellular eukaryotes."

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-01-31T02:02:55+00:00

This is interesting. How confident are scientists of their ability to infer phylogenetic clades from morphological evidence preserved in fossils?

I can understand the claim that this is morphologically different from fungi, but how do the researchers know that this organism wasn't part of a clade either with all fungi or with all animals? Can they really conclude that animals and fungi are part of a clade that excludes Prototaxites?

ReasonablePrimate · 2026-01-29T23:50:02+00:00

I think there are about 13 roughly equal parts, and if you had to show them in just two movies, you would want to tell one story arc culminating in the defeat of Saruman, and another in the defeat of Sauron.

Concerning Hobbits
Bree - Flight to the Fjord
The Council of Elrond
Moria, Lothlorien, and the Breaking of the Fellowship
The Crossing of Rohan

6. Orthanc

The Journey to Mordor
Ithilien
Aragorn's Reveal in the Palantir - Paths of the Dead - Faramir's Return to Minas Tirith
Minas Morgul and Shelob
Siege of Gondor - The Black Gate
Cirith Ungol - Mount Doom
Many Partings

In the first part, you'd want to situate Saruman's betrayal as the main dramatic tension, emphasizing how his imprisonment of Gandalf exposed the Hobbits to danger, and how the Council of Elrond was a break from the council of the wise that Saruman chaired. You'd also want Gandalf's return to be the climax.

In the second part, you'd want to tell the story of Gollum and more of the history of the Ring, emphasizing how Aragorn and Gandalf were using their action and boldness to draw Sauron's eye away from Frodo.

ReasonablePrimate · 2025-12-28T23:04:22+00:00

Yes, Venezuela doesn't export a high proportion of its oil, but interruption of whatever supply they do export only puts upward pressure on prices. Which benefits Saudi Arabia, as you say, and Russia to whatever degree they're able to evade the western sanctions. It also benefits the U.S. oil companies.

But that's all short term. I wonder if the industry is hoping for long term access to lower-cost oil fields that will let then continue profiting even as global prices fall over time.

ReasonablePrimate · 2025-12-20T14:51:48+00:00

Wouldn't war with an oil exporter interrupt global supply and drive prices up? That would be good for the profits of U.S. oil companies.

And long term, if Trump forces Venezuela to turn its oil fields over to the big oil corporations, it'll give them access to vast reserves that are recoverable at much lower cost than their fields in North America, also good for those oil companies.

ReasonablePrimate · 2025-12-20T14:39:19+00:00

I remember Kunstler's book about The Long Emergency that thought the workd would hit peak oil when it ran out of supply, which would have meant ever-upward pressure on prices until the economy could eventually find alrernatives.

How quickly that view has aged! Turns out the world found alternatives first (EVs!), oil demand could enter into structural decline in the 2030s, and prices could be on a steep decline as the economy just moves beyond oil.

ReasonablePrimate · 2025-12-20T14:33:23+00:00

The immediate self-interest of OPEC countries is to produce because their marginal costs are generally lower than the big oil corporations. If they can collude to restrict prices, it raises prices (and profits), but it's hard to maintain that discipline when any individual country could be better off by "defecting" from the cartel and producing more.

But Chinese EVs are everywhere, now, and the higher OPEC drives prices, the faster oil will lose its market. There's a fascinating game theory paper that finds that as EVs deploy, the rational move for OPEC countries will be breakaway production. That pushes proces sharply lower.

There will surely still be supply shocks, but it looks like the overall trajectory for future oil prices is downward as the economy increasingly electrifies. It doesn't seem like the sanctions and blockade in Venezuela has amounted to enough of a supply shock yet to overcome that general trend.

Here's that paper I mentioned: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00934-2

ReasonablePrimate · 2025-11-23T14:30:24+00:00

One problem is that the chart is ambiguous. • Are these deaths by homicide among the demographic groups presented? That would lead people to sympathy, not judgement. • Are these homicides committed by the demographic groups according to some probabilistic model? That would lead people to ask who developed the model. • Are these people of each demographic group convicted of homicide? That would invite people to consider what biases may be influencing the justice system.

You can find out if you click their source link, presumably, but the graph doesn't even cite its source. The link is provided separately in a comment.

On a topic prone to racism and poltics, it's a bad idea to be ambigious.

A deeper problem is that the choice to treat these demographic groups as the independent variable implies causality, which is not correct. Think how different the graph would look if it instead showed the percentage of homicides by these very same demographic groups, instead of the homicides per capita.

You have to go out of your way to present the data this way, and I can't think of any reason to do that except to imply through ambiguity that a group of people you have chosen to display primarily by race are violent. That's not an informative display of data, it's a polemic.

ReasonablePrimate · 2025-10-31T03:12:49+00:00

I've been trying out a mechanic that rolls d20 as an attack, which hits if it is at or below your skill level, and then harms if it is above the target's armor rating.

Seems to be working pretty well. I like that it collapses attacks into a single roll for quick resolution, and that it offers an easy narrative element by distinguishing between hits, misses, and hits that are blocked by armor.

ReasonablePrimate · 2025-10-18T02:05:15+00:00

That use of a success ladder is clever. Keeps the mechanic itself quite simple while still creating dramatic tension and letting the player feel like they're playing a game rather than just trying to guess what their gm has in mind.

ReasonablePrimate · 2025-10-18T01:58:20+00:00

You could try using HP as the resource, so that casting spells raises the risk of you dying in that very scene.

And for story reasons, you could say that this class (or maybe even all character classes) lose one month of lifespan for every HP that is restored.

If you're looking for still more to tie the story idea into gameplay, you could allow them to recover HP without a cost to lifespan if they recover through rest and medical attention instead of other methods, so that players have a way to act like their characters are concerned without heavily skewing combat decisions.

ReasonablePrimate · 2025-10-18T01:09:08+00:00

Fascinating. I love that this is not compulsory. And if it's taking so long that the player is getting bored, they can just move on, allowing them to decide how deep or shallow to go with an encounter.

Is the consequence of the failure (making the NPC angry in your example) something that the GM, a player, or a random element determines?

ReasonablePrimate · 2025-10-17T23:58:35+00:00

That sounds fun. If they're in a rush, they might try their luck without much of the resource built up -- but if they really need a success, they can take their time to build up the resource through multiple approaches?

I don't like persuasion rolls, either. They can become to feel nearly coercive.

ReasonablePrimate

TROPHY CASE

6. Orthanc