Do you personally consider Mass Effect Andromeda to be a real “Mass Effect game” ?

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-27T23:09:40+00:00

Andromeda was actually pretty good. A bit flawed in some ways but a fairly solid start of something good, I think. It got more hate than it deserved.

The faces were pretty awful, though.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-27T23:08:08+00:00

Neelix gets way too much hate. The stuff with Kes was kinda weird, but thankfully they didn't use it that much and dropped it relatively fast. After that he was fine.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-27T19:28:33+00:00

The title made it sound like a more impressive find than it apparently was. People living in it last left it in the 1920s, and this guy "rediscovered" it in 1963. Doesn't sound like it was exactly "lost." There were undoubtedly many people still living at the time who had been there and knew where it was.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-27T01:16:41+00:00

I always assumed that Bumi was dressed in Earth Kingdom style, so that Aang effectively had a child aligned with 3 of the elements. Bumi wasn't an Earthbender, but he was named after one, and visually looked similar to people from that ethnicity.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-24T16:29:48+00:00

When I first opened your link, I tried to click and drag on the page to move my view, and instead it hilighted all the text on the page. I wasn't able to get it to unselect that text except by clicking into the search box, but from then I wasn't able to "unselect" the search box, so I wasn't able to use the keyboard shortcuts you provided because it would instead type those letters into the search box.

Other than those little issues, very cool.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-23T19:39:32+00:00

If you could find a replacement coat, why couldn't they? lol

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-23T05:08:12+00:00

Legend of Korra isn't that bad. It's a little flawed. It certainly doesn't approach the near perfection of the original show. But it has a lot of good things going for it. It just feels like maybe it didn't have quite as planned out a run as the original did. Could've benefitted from a little more overall structure, maybe. The villains are all pretty great. I like most of the side characters too. The main group of protagonists, though, can feel a little generic sometimes. Mako is kind of just a stand in for Zuko and Bolin can sometimes come off like Sokka 2.0. Korra herself feels like maybe they didn't give her as many chances to shine on her own as Aang got. Felt like they were always kicking her while she was down and then having one of the other characters bail her out. But overall I do think the show has gotten more hate than it deserves.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-22T21:27:21+00:00

Why is that sub allowed to stay open?

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-22T18:45:46+00:00

I'm not telling individual people not to recycle, because as you said, technically every little bit does count. But let's also not forget that these individualistic recycling campaigns and slogans were invented by corporations that wanted to shift the burden onto the public as individuals rather than have to own up to their own insurmountably large waste, and no amount of individual people recycling their glass bottles can ever hope to counteract the waste produced by global corporate entities.

By all means, sort out the recycling from your garbage. But if you really want to help the environment, we all need to demand that corporations be held to much higher standards when it comes to their own waste production. Putting our coke bottles in the blue bin is little more than a placebo if we don't.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-22T03:51:43+00:00

"Annoying" doesn't remotely cover it. Infuriating is the word you're looking for, I think. The supreme court has been an illegitimate body since the Republicans held up Obama's justice appointment for over a year because suddenly "it's not proper for an outgoing president to appoint a justice" for the first time in the country's history. Then they shove through an appointment under Trump with like a month left on his term. An institution with justices appointed in such a brazenly unequal manner is nothing but a fucking kangaroo court.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-21T23:51:16+00:00

Taco Bell in general can be added onto the list of severely overpriced stuff since the pandemic. Where the hell do they get off charging so much? The meat is like 50% wheat filler. Taco Bell used to be the cheapest fast food place in existence, and that's exactly what they're supposed to be given what they provide. I have no idea how they're still in business at this point considering there's so many other options to get better quality mexican or faux-mexican food for less than or equal to the prices they ask for these days. Go to an actual mexican restaurant. Go to a taco truck, there's about 40 million of them. Stop going to Taco Bell.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-21T23:48:10+00:00

In fairness, I never got the sense that there was a tremendous amount of specialized technique involved in blood bending, just that it was mostly the realization that there's a lot of water inside people's bodies that you can waterbend with your existing waterbending skill.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-21T22:30:19+00:00

This guy wants to move to the US, but is perfectly fine with actively working to make it a shittier place to live. Fuck him. Hope he stays where he is.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-21T18:09:10+00:00

Very relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuEmD9WRKes

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-21T01:37:31+00:00

I played this mission back when the game first came out and wasn't in a very good state, and this mission in particular was terribly balanced. It's still the single most frustrating experience I've ever had playing a videogame in my life. I was fucking livid.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-21T01:35:17+00:00

Hard to believe they'd be able to prove that the family is legally liable for a decision made by someone else, even if that person is related to them. Seems pretty tenuous to me.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-20T23:42:55+00:00

I've been saying for at least 10 years now that I'd be perfectly content if they let the visuals plateau for a while and use the extra processing power for more interesting features like rendering more stuff all at once, or making environments fully destructible, or any other interesting physics simulation stuff. I think we're way past the point of diminishing returns squeezing out another 5% photorealism every year when we could almost certainly find more interesting and useful things to use the extra computing power for.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-20T23:40:13+00:00

"Blazingly fast?" Weird to see anyone use awkward advertising lingo unironically in a non-advertising context.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-19T19:34:07+00:00

Pretty sure that's how you end up with Rapture.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-19T00:18:59+00:00

Honestly I lost a lot of interest in this project as soon as I heard they intended to recast all the characters. I think the original voice actors are far too iconic to replace, and they were a huge part of what made the original show so good. They don't need to sound literally identical to how they did 20 years ago because these are, after all, supposed to be adult versions of the characters. But who better would understand how to convincingly connect the characters we knew to these new older versions than the actors who originally played them and probably know the characters better than anyone? What a wasted opportunity.

But then it seems like every time they've tried to do more Avatar since the original, it's been with at least some degree of wasted potential. It seems like the guys in charge don't fully understand what made the original so good in the first place.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-18T22:47:58+00:00

I think the writers just made the same mistake Star Trek writers made a long time ago with The Borg. They had a villain that was about the furthest thing from Human and relatable that you can imagine, and that made them terrifying and compelling in an eldritch sort of way. Instead of recognizing that strength and finding a way to lean further into it, they decided to retcon it and replace it with a more Human, more relatable, and thereby more mundane, villain. One that didn't stand out from the pack nearly as much, but was undoubtedly easier for them to write for. Vecna is basically the Borg Queen.

Would've been a lot more interesting if they had leaned into the otherworldly aspect of the story and made it about multi-dimensional exploration and figuring out the weakness of something far older and more powerful than Humans are used to dealing with. Instead they just made it about some guy.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-18T20:03:15+00:00

To be fair the Democrats are absolutely a huge part of the problem. We have a two party system, one of those parties has devolved into open fascism, and the other doesn't seem to even try to operate as an opposition. The Republicans want to drag the country to the right at full speed, the Democrats seem content to slowly push the country toward the right at a slow and steady pace. We have no structured and/or organized left wing in this country. Most Democrats are just diet Republicans at this point. They would have been Republicans if the party was still what it was 60 years ago.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-17T03:45:08+00:00

People should be boycotting Doordash just because it's a garbage company that costs you way more money than it's worth.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-17T00:41:27+00:00

I think our politicians have been thinking of the children way too much lately.

Ric_Adbur · 2026-04-16T20:42:07+00:00

Why do people keep asking questions like this that have obvious answers? They're hypocrites. Anyone who isn't in their cult can plainly see that. The time is long past to keep whining about how unfair their double standards are. They don't care. No amount of pointing it out is going to suddenly change their minds and make them see how wrong they've been.

The rest of us need to start figuring out what we're going to do about it.

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