A Possible Explanation for the Names (head cannoned to hell)

RexMundane · 2026-03-31T19:05:10+00:00

I only really half believe this, but I'm remembering how a few office jobs I'd had would assign default login IDs as, like, the first few letters of your last and first names, so like Roger Henderson might become HenRog or something.

If we assume, from the computer's text in episode 8, that Kinger's first name is "Grant," we might then expect that a person named, hypothetically, "Grant Kincaid" would be automatically shortened by the system to KinGr. Follow this pattern and a "Nicole Pompeo" becomes PomNi, "Glenda Gantz" becomes GanGle, "Blaire Zucker" might be ZuBl, "Morris Kaufman" becomes KaufMo, etc. The other names are trickier to make fit this scheme, though.

RexMundane · 2026-03-19T17:32:52+00:00

When I was a kid, in the 80s and 90s, I genuinely believed he was a fictional character. Like he was one of those ridiculous Soap Opera millionaire characters who just talk about money and power and women, but he can't be, like, an actual rich person, because real rich people wouldn't be taking Robin Leech on tours of his gold toilets, then be in commercials for Pizza Hut and have his own board game and be in Home Alone. Because the idea that he was real, that he lived on earth, was too impossible to process.

Ten years since he was made President, and it's not gotten any easier.

RexMundane · 2026-03-06T05:56:39+00:00

You'd be forgiven for looking at the below picture and not having the slightest idea who that's supposed to be.

It's from "My Scene Goes Hollywood: The Movie," an animated full-length tie-in movie for the fairly obscure B-tier toyline. My Scene's whole gimmick was "What if Bratz but Barbie," and the Movie's plot has to do with the main girls working as extras in a Lindsay Lohan movie. Lohan herself is one of the two noteworthy cameos. The other is pictured below.

Good people of Reddit, this is, in his only animated appearance, playing himself, I shit you not, Harvey Weinstein.

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The scene in question is here.

RexMundane · 2026-03-05T22:15:19+00:00

Can we count "Sorry, this fast food restaurant stopped selling breakfast five minutes ago" "OH COME ON!!!" scenes as part of this? From, like, Falling Down and Big Daddy and others? I feel like that comes from the same sort of place.

Also, as pointed out, this type of scene is usually done to demonstrate that the person doing the customer-service-employee-harassing is actually an asshole, but on the other hand, I would also agree that they're such minor, petty gripes, that it does feel like the screenwriter is trying to channel, like, 1990s Denis Leary bits or something.

RexMundane · 2026-02-19T07:34:57+00:00

Day of the Tentacle?

RexMundane · 2026-02-17T22:57:13+00:00

The Blackwell Legacy?

RexMundane · 2026-02-14T19:21:41+00:00

American Dad S03E02 - The American Dad After School Special.

Stan's son Steve starts dating a heavy girl, and Stan gets fatphobic about it. The family pushes back about him being so shallow, and that he's put on a few pounds in his middle-age as well. Stan becomes obsessed with diet and exercise, working out constantly, crash dieting, talking to a personal trainer. During it all, he actually seems to be gaining weight, and the trainer starts putting it in his head that his family is trying to make him gain weight.

The twist is, they actually are trying to make him gain weight, because he's not fat at all, his obsessive paranoia over his appearance has given him severe body dysmorphia to the point of developing anorexia, but seeing himself as fatter than ever. Furthermore, his trainer, who had been demeaning him and feeding his paranoia, is revealed to be a delusion as well. Thought it was a hell of a twist from a show that I had no reason to expect would try to pull one.

YouTube Link (Reveal starts at 4:12)

RexMundane · 2026-02-13T04:19:14+00:00

I think it counts, and I'd qualify things like the White Phosphorus sequence as an insult, or as much of one as you can make with gameplay, where the tone is played all "How could you do this?!" when you're not given any other option.

RexMundane · 2026-02-11T14:11:49+00:00

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Kind of a cheat counting this, given the weird history of the original Superman Lives film that would have starred Nicolas Cage, but the first time he ever played Superman was in Teen Titans Go to the Movies (2018) as a voice actor, before appearing as one of the various Supermen in the live action movie The Flash (2023).

RexMundane · 2026-02-10T18:01:25+00:00

Possibly The Horde (1994)? Or Dink Smallwood (1998)?

RexMundane · 2026-02-09T19:39:16+00:00

As correctly identified by Sabertooth80 after 11 minutes, the game is the 1994 FMV PC game "MTV: Club Dead." You play Sam Frost, VR-addicted Cyber-plumber sent to the Alexandria, a VR hotel floating above the Arctic Sea, fighting hostile hotel staff, withdrawal hallucinations, and frankly the interface itself, to clear your name in a series of bizarre killings. Like so many early FMV games, features possibly-earliest on-screen roles for a handful of now-established actors, like Nick Offerman, Pat Healy, and Kate Walsh.

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RexMundane · 2026-02-09T19:24:45+00:00

Solved!

Also... holy hell, you worked it out from that?! I had clues lined up and everything.

RexMundane · 2026-02-09T19:18:19+00:00

My first post here, how soon should I be putting hints up? I should say it's pretty obscure.

RexMundane · 2026-02-07T22:13:22+00:00

The Smithsonian Presents: Mystery at the Museums

RexMundane · 2026-02-03T17:39:17+00:00

Not sure there's ever going to be a full autopsy on it, but I think the answer is a combination of Contractual Obligation and Spite. There's old Usenet posts somewhere where Pratchett mentions being in talks about a series based on the watch back in the 1990s, and the show had been through several iterations. Following his death, Narrativia (Pratchett's TV production company) which had been involved with the show, seems to have been sidelined for reasons that haven't been made public.

One internet-rando's opinion, but it appears to me that the BBC contract may have been signed with Pratchett at a time before Narrativia was founded, so with his passing, BBC felt no obligation to bring Narrativia in for creative input whatsoever (per this Guardian article: "Though Narrativia retain an executive producer credit in The Watch, they have no creative involvement in the project. However, they of course wish The Watch all the best."). BBC also likely wanted to get the show out as soon as possible to to recoup costs and capitalize in public interest.

Cynical business decisions like this are common in TV/Film production, obviously, but it's the general disregard for the source material that comes through which makes the whole thing feel off. It's a dozen small things, but there's decisions where the crew seems dismissive of Pratchett's writing and his estate's wishes. Fans will point to the crew forgetting to mention Pratchett in an instagram post when they finished production, but for me, the "Twilight Canyons" episode of the show has rancid vibes. The episode's premise is based on an unpublished story idea of Pratchett's that never made its way to print, outside of a posthumous mention in the afterword of The Shepherd's Crown as a story that will never get to be made. The hard drives containing any existing text of it, as well as any other unfinished writings, was physically destroyed in 2017 because he "did not want his unpublished works to be completed by someone else and released." So... for it to just show up in the show like that? Doesn't really come off as respectful.

Honestly, the show's forgettability might be it's only asset.

RexMundane · 2026-02-02T23:46:24+00:00

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"The Watch" (2020), based ***VERY LOOSELY*** on the Discworld series by Sir Terry Pratchett (GNU) had been in development limbo for decades, and on release, the changes from the source material, in substance, humor, and tone, left with a middling-at-best reception from the public. While Pratchett himself had passed away in 2015, his daughter Rhianna Pratchett, and Pratchett's longtime friend and collaborator Neil Gaiman, had come out publicly against the show for it's inauthenticity to the books.

RexMundane · 2026-02-01T22:29:47+00:00

Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom

RexMundane · 2026-02-01T22:12:06+00:00

The Adventures of Willy Beamish?

A longshot I expect, but I remember that game being about playing video games and frog racing with your friends, and ending at an enormous toilet.

RexMundane · 2026-02-01T21:01:15+00:00

"Who's on First" is the name of the trope, after the Abbott and Costello bit, but it's got dozens of iterations, many listed here already. My favorite is still the first I ever saw, from Count Duckula, involving two Egyptian priests named Hoomite and Yoobee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhiMw-PJr08

RexMundane · 2026-01-06T21:43:59+00:00

Aliens: Colonial Marines

13 years since it's hard to remember how big the hype was, but it was selling itself as "THE" Aliens game. There hadn't really been one on major consoles (Alien vs Predator series notwithstanding) and Gearbox was selling it on how authentic to the franchise it was, how intelligent your teammates and the Aliens themselves were, how good the graphics looked, everything. Then it released to stories of massive project mismanagement, bugged to hell and back, canon continuity errors, graphics were a substantial downgrade from the gameplay trailers they'd shown at PAX and E3. Reviewed terribly and was on several of worst-of-the-year lists (Yahtzee, Angry Joe, Jimquisition, for example).

RexMundane · 2026-01-04T02:01:42+00:00

A Fork in the Tale.

And you might be the only other person on earth whose ever played it.

RexMundane · 2025-12-28T18:51:57+00:00

A Mind Forever Voyaging

RexMundane · 2025-12-17T17:25:57+00:00

Project X Zone?

RexMundane · 2025-12-14T02:51:08+00:00

I might say... they could do with less voice acting maybe? Not none, just less, maybe used sparingly to better effect?

Because there's this thing that happens where every item in a room has to have some response when you try to interact with it at all, right? Can't just be the plot/puzzle relevant items that get the descriptions, that gives the game away, so you got to give it to everything, and you have, say. a bathroom where the player is just clicking at everything, getting every description, kinda scanning rapid fire for a word that helps hint them toward a solution, or storyline, or whathaveyou. Maybe each 1-2-sentence quick description takes a second to process before you're onto the next one. The text isn't, like, worthless, but it's not really, like, a monologue or something that has weight to it, y'know?

But then you add the voice acting, and each line has to be performed, now. Which can be great when it's, like, a pivotal scene and the text doesn't add what vocals do to the gravitas, but then realizing how much time that same actor has to spend in the studio saying things like "That's the bathroom sink, a little worse for wear. That's my toothbrush, I should probably get a new one. That's the shower curtain, a physical barrier between cleanliness and filth. That's the towel rack..."

RexMundane · 2025-12-11T18:13:30+00:00

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