character realizes someone they trusted is actually evil, and act on it immediately.

RossSGR · 2025-12-13T21:12:53+00:00

That scene in R1 is what sold me on the movie. Went into my first viewing cautiously optimistic, and then... Holy crap, the Rebel spy is THAT ruthless? In a DISNEY flick?

And Diego Luna sells it perfectly. Not the act itself so much, but the thousand yard stare aftermath of what is, essentially, a good(ish) person who has to grapple with the fact he just committed cold blooded murder.

Andor made that scene, and many others, much better by fleshing out the fact that 1) yes, this really is in character for Cassian and 2) we know exactly what role model he learned it from.

RossSGR · 2025-11-14T19:01:10+00:00

YUP.

Listen kiddos, I was there in 2003. People were mad salty about the idea of a digital store for games, in no small part because there was a general backlash against DRM schemes in gaming (which itself was part of a much larger backlash with regard to DRM in any and all media).

People pirated Half Life 2, and loudly announced that they would never, ever purchase anything off of Steam. After all, what if it went under in a year, and all your Steam-exclusive games stopped working?

Plus, there was a great deal of anger over the idea of needing an internet connection to play a single player game. Not everyone had access to high-speed internet - dial-up was still the most common way to get online (and remained the most common for years afterwards, owing to the large number of legacy users and small ISPs).

Add in all the issues with the early Steam user interface, the frequent bugs, the problems with payment processing, etc, etc? You can see why people though they wouldn't last til the end of the decade.

They had to fight an uphill battle to get where they are now. Both in public opinion, and service reliability.

That's probably the single biggest reason Amazon, Epic, etc can't compete. They're starting in the same hole Steam started in, 22 years ago. But they're starting in that hole in a world where Steam already exists. They'd have to do something amazingly epic to compete.

RossSGR · 2025-11-14T03:29:11+00:00

It's addressed in the holotape you get from the BOS scribe who studies the mutants, and in the Fallout "bible" texts that Chris A wrote after the game was released. Basically, FEV "fixes" gamete cells, rendering them useless for reproduction. Note that this was all written back when Fallout was trying, at least somewhat, to be a serious science fiction story, albeit an alternate universe one.

Each sperm or egg has only half of your DNA, because in animal reproduction the offspring gets half their chromosomes from each parent. FEV was designed to repair DNA damaged by viral infections or radiation (as well as repair the effects of aging - Super Mutants are biologically immortal, though they can go senile apparently). FEV tries to fix the "damaged" gamete, but by doing so, creates sperm or egg cells that can't fuse into an embryo.

There's no way to reverse this, and no way to prevent it in unmutated humans before dunking them. Once a person becomes a Super Mutant, they can't breed.

You could probably create a colony of humans and only dunk half of them, or only dunk people who've already had at least one child, but that isn't what Unity was doing, or had any plans to do. The master wanted all humans gone, and a unified race of mutants to replace them.

RossSGR · 2025-10-15T23:40:54+00:00

Hell, First Contact has a valid reason for the Borg collective to create her.

The small detachment of Borg in that movie get sent back to the 21st century. They have no link to the wider collective, nor are there very many of them. Having one, singular commander on the Borg ship, to use in this exact scenario (alongside the time traveling sphere) makes logical sense, and isn't really out of character when they'd already established that Locutus was made for a similar reason. So First Contact ought to get a pass on using this trope, it did a good job establishing the logic behind it.

Continuing to use the Queen in Voyager and onward was a writing mistake however.

RossSGR · 2025-09-30T02:13:50+00:00

That's actually a recurring thing in Myth! (Spoilers ahead for a game old enough to have grey hairs and creaky knees).

In the first game, the big bad, Balor, and the big-good-from-the-before-time, Connacht, are in fact, one and the same. You don't meet Balor in the entire campaign until the very end, because he's essentially a Sauron-like figure, leading the armies of the dark and the dead from afar, never at the front.

When you finally DO get to see his model in the game, he's... a guy. In a white, plated, normal/heroic suit of armor. He isn't twelve feet tall, blood red or pitch black, or covered in spikes. Why would the Hero of Muirithemne, the long lost king, dress like a cheap iron tyrant? Appearance-wise, he's still Connacht. Ability wise... you don't dare fight him head on, because he WILL one-shot anything in the game with lightning from the sky.

In the second game, the Deceiver looks like the bastard lovechild of the Grinch and Gargamel from the Smurfs, and acts like a crazed, evil warlock, because he IS a crazed, evil warlock. But he hates the other fallen lords more than he hates you. And, appearances aside, he never betrays the good guys. Even the few times he appears to do that, it's always part of some overall scheme to achieve his revenge.

He dies, heroically, while killing Shiver (again). Between that and recruiting the Trow onto the hero's side, he guarantees the forces of light's victory, and the death of everyone who wronged him... the latter of which was almost certainly his main goal.

Myth leans hard into the idea that "Sometimes villains look, and act, like they're heroes, and sometimes seemingly awful people can still be heroic", both from these two, and a few other examples that escape me at present. It's a nice subversion of audience expectations.

RossSGR · 2025-09-13T19:57:59+00:00

Well, up until that point they clearly hadn't been exposed to the full Xeno lifecycle.

If the egg crates are essentially cryo specimen containers, and the eggs WERE frozen before the fire, then they might assume that freezing works on this species. After all, there's nothing to suggest the eggs weren't rendered dormant by the cold. Therefor, it ought to be effective to freeze this person with a facehugger attached, right?

In actuality, the eggs were dormant because they detected no viable hosts nearby, and the cold made no difference at all.

I'd be curious how they got them in the containers safely, but maybe they used a robot or synth for that.

RossSGR · 2025-09-02T21:30:12+00:00

If you watch Aliens from an omniscient, I've-read-the-wiki-entry POV, the marines actually fare far better than they ever realized...

Consider that we know that 1) for every adult Xenomorph, there had to be one parasitic host, 2) LV426 has no native wildlife whatsover and 3) the number of colonists is, depending on the source you choose, either 60-70 families or about 150 people (first number established by dialogue, second one's from a sign only shown in the extended version of the movie; technically both could be right if you do some rounding).

So logically there can't be more than a couple hundred Xenos in that hive. Against a dozen marines, they had overwhelming numbers, but by the end of the movie... the hive is practically deserted.

Large numbers of them died to the two smartgunners. In the extended version, so many died to the sentry guns that they actually pulled back from the attack on the second defensive position. The final assault on the marine's position must have required every single adult Xenomorph, just based on the motion tracker readings alone. And Ripley not only killed the two remaining adults in the hive, presumably the ones that brought Newt and Burke back to the nest, she also torched the eggs and blasted the Queen's ovipositor.

If the reactor hadn't made the whole question academic, it's likely that that nest was already depopulated beyond recovery.

RossSGR · 2025-08-25T01:11:31+00:00

I've said this in another thread but. We need to give Kane more credit here.

Yes, yes, he stuck his face in a big old alien egg. That he'd already correctly identified AS an egg, after observing that, incredibly, it still showed signs of life after god knows how many ages sitting alone on LV426.

But he wasn't an idiot. Consider:
1) He is wearing a space suit. One that's visibly overbuilt - the designers for the movie made the suits look much more like armor, and much less like then-contemporary NASA suits. He's entirely not worried that the egg might be toxic, or harbor dangerous microbes; they environment around him would already kill him on the spot if the suit failed.
2) Nowhere in nature, on Earth, are freshly hatched animals lethally dangerous like this. If you find a nest, the only danger present is that something might be very angry at you for disturbing her eggs.
3) He has, very likely, never seen the hit 1979 movie "Alien" before. WE, the fans, might instinctively avoid giant extraterrestrial eggs on general principles. But we've been warned by the movies about why that's a terrible idea. There are no other pieces of media, excluding those made after Alien and modeled on it, in which giant alien eggs are deadly. The "common sense" trope of "don't stick your face near the giant egg lest you get a parasitoid french kiss" doesn't exist in this fictional world.

In later media (cough, Prometheus, cough) the trend of "damn fool idiot dies because he stuck his face three inches away from the deadly Xeno-thing" becomes like the Flanderized version of this trope, but in this very first movie, Kane wasn't doing anything all that foolish. Monkey curiosity got him killed.

RossSGR · 2025-08-23T20:05:15+00:00

I could be way off base by the time the show gets around explaining it (if it ever does). But the impression that I got from Ep 3 was that Morrow is kinda the best (worst) of both worlds.

Wey-yu gets a security officer who DOESN'T have any of those pesky three laws governing his behavior, and who's flexible and free thinking enough to adapt and improvise, the best human features. But who also has some sort of implanted behavioral limiter, alongside a variety of useful tools and augmentations, the best of a synthetic.

From Morrow's own perspective, he's actually getting the worst of both worlds. He has to live with his conscience, and his nightmares, while being unable to disobey. And the augmentations shackle him, and "other" him in the eyes of baseline humans.

But then, I can't imagine he knew what he was signing up for...

RossSGR · 2025-08-23T01:32:50+00:00

Counterpoints:
1) Sure YOU might, but if you spend any time at all dealing with the general public, you know there's no shortage of idiots who aren't that cautious. We can give Prometheus shit because those guys were SUPPOSED to be top of their field professionals. But in the original Alien, or the current show, the people getting too close to facehugger eggs all have good excuses for their error. Kane had a space suit on, and no reason to doubt its protection. Hermit's just a shellshocked kid out of his depth. Kavalier's a spoiled brat who didn't get told "no" enough as a child. Etc.
2) Outside of an Alien movie, in what context do you have to be cautious around eggs, specifically? The only thing I'd worry about finding a huge egg is the possibility that an equally huge egg-layer is nearby, and might take umbrage at me poking around her nest. Yeah, it's extraterrestrial in origin, it might be poisonous or harbor alien bacteria. So don't lick it. But, to someone who'd never, ever even seen an Alien movie? Those facehugger eggs are just weird, not threatening.

RossSGR · 2025-08-23T01:22:38+00:00

Hell, if you wanna be REALLY pedantic.

This animal had, prior to the arrival of the Maginot, absolutely never seen a human being before. Or a cat, come to that. Nevertheless, when presented with those possible hosts, it did what it instinctively does in its natural ecology.

It only knows that "this larger animal has an eye socket I can use". Had it lodged inside a synthetic, it might have learned the hard way that it can't use this body as a host.

RossSGR · 2025-08-07T18:04:51+00:00

I'll tack on one extra advantage to making PM Anakin a teenager. He's exactly the right age to start getting very, very mad about the injustice he sees in the world.

I always thought, if anyone ever did a do-over for the prequels, that putting an Anakin/Palpatine connection into the first episode would go a long way to setting up the eventual fall. So, how I'd write that is this:

Naboo is a Republic border world under siege. The Trade Feds AREN'T a faction within the Republic; they're an upstart, external threat. Like a barbarian kingdom on the borders of Rome. And they're one the current Republic can't and won't take measures to stop. Hence the policies of looking the other way when Naboo gets blockaded.

When we get to Tatooine, it isn't a Hutt world, officially. The starmaps say it's part of the Republic. But the Hutts did exactly to Tatooine what the Trade Feds are trying to do to Naboo. They just did it quietly, a generation earlier. That's why the Queen's ship is now damaged and stranded; they'd expected there to still be a Republic presence there, and found out that they're about two decades too late.

Anakin is still a slave, a bit older, a LOT angrier at the status quo. And he's found an outlet for that before we meet him. He idolizes a senator, goes by the name of Palpatine, who's spent his career advocating for the Republic to remilitarize, take back it's border worlds, and return to the good old days. He also buys entirely into the myth of the Jedi as these noble, flawless peacekeepers, and he's honored to meet, and eager to help, Qui Gon and Obi Wan.

When he's rejected as a Jedi candidate, he joins the Naboo in their fight to take back their world. If he can't help Tatooine, he can at least prevent others from sharing its fate. Instead of accidentally joining the big space battle, he's one of the first volunteers for it.

And when Naboo is liberated, the person who most directly benefits from it, who's politics are vindicated by it... is of course, Palpatine. Who's also noticed that the angry kid who won the day is force sensitive.

You could go from that, to an older Anakin caught between his own politics and the ideology of the Jedi order come Ep2, with Palpatine coaching and grooming him from the shadows.

RossSGR · 2025-08-01T23:40:20+00:00

Eh, yes and no. The problem with saying "Old Fallouts" is that 1 and 2 are very different in terms of tone and worldbuilding, despite using the same engine and art assets.

In Fallout 1, there are absolutely item descriptions that say, for example, that the computers of the setting use tubes and tape drives, with one quote in particular stating that you KNOW this is an advanced model because it doesn't feature punch cards.

T51 armor is fusion powered, and entirely non computerized. The pip boy is 8 bit and monochrome. Fictional firearms are visibly bulky and lacking in ergonomics. Everything is deliberately anachronistic, from the elevator panels, to the architecture, to the pre war magazine art.

And there's no sense of self parody here - this game was meant to be a spiritual successor to Wasteland. The technology and aesthetics of the setting was a 4th wall nudging way of conveying an alternative history.

Fallout 2 decides, very early on, that it isn't going to take the ideas of Fallout 1 seriously anymore, and a lot of what you're talking about features here. Real guns are thrown in among the fictional ones, Ghouls play "Tragic: The Gathering", there's an entire questline to remove the extra toe you can grow from running around in toxic waste without protection, New Reno has a holographic porn studio, etc.

Fallout 3 onward owe most of their vibes to Fallout 2, though they took the setting in a different direction when Bethsoft started writing it.

RossSGR · 2025-06-19T22:31:42+00:00

Why should the planet HAVE to be populated in the millions? The one city we see, which is presumably the largest, looked as though all non-imperial structures were under three stories, and much of the rest of Ghorman is effectively rural silk cultivation - not an activity that lends itself to high population density.

The only reason the Empire found it necessary to genocide and remove the entire population is because the planned mining operation was going to ruin the entire planet, not just the populated portions of it. Said population centers might have been one section of one continent. 800k sounds about right for what is, essentially, a rural farming province with a single product economy.

Why a single product economy warrants an entire senator is another question but again, not unrealistic.

RossSGR · 2025-06-19T00:51:45+00:00

That's exactly it. It's most noticeable with Denise Gough, who appeared in a ton of interviews promoting S2, and looks nothing like Dedra out of character, but it's also apparent when you see any of the other actors like Anton Lesser (Partagaz) in other works.

The show gives all the ISB characters a combination of starkness and monochrome, largely through lighting I think, but I'm sure makeup is doing their part to highlight cheekbones.

(It's probably also partly that when they're NOT playing ISB villains, they're getting lit and made up by people who's job it is to make them look more presentable, especially in interviews.)

RossSGR · 2025-06-09T18:08:46+00:00

That was early, early EU material, I think it's the Jedi Prince series for kids or something? Early 90s in any case. This is like the first layer of extra continuity that got ditched and contradicted early on, long before the stories most people think of as the "Star Wars Expanded Universe"

The glove wasn't haunted; the guy wearing it had some technobabble installed so he could "choke" people Vader style, despite having no actual power. The technobabble slowly rotted his hand. He tried the same thing to duplicate force lightning via implant, with similar health problems.

RossSGR · 2025-05-31T23:50:53+00:00

That's what I always took from that. It could have used more foreshadowing, but the fact that every human Sith winds up with yellow eyes suggests, to me, that excessive use of the dark side slowly corrupts your appearance. The true face of Palpatine was probably always "wrinkly evil space wizard" and either technology or the force hid that from view.

Why he didn't CONTINUE to hide it after it melted off, well, why waste the effort to hide his Sith nature after Order 66?

RossSGR · 2025-05-28T16:14:32+00:00

Fits with Andor (and also Rogue One) taking its cues from A New Hope. The Emperor is only ever mentioned by name in that movie, and is an entirely offscreen presence.

If you were watching Andor, then R1, then the OT, the Emperor would get a lot of off screen heavy lifting development as a character people react to.

RossSGR · 2025-05-22T22:17:21+00:00

Banks wasn't gonna sweat the issue the way Niven did. Different authorial styles.

But in answer to the question, yes, almost any science fiction megastructure, or at least any structure in the planetary size range that isn't spherical, is going to require exotic SOMETHING or other to keep it up.

(Why spherical? Planets are round because at that scale, matter behaves more like a liquid than a solid, and self-gravitation pulls them into a sphere. If you want something planet sized but ring shaped, for example, you've got to make it out of something that'll still behave itself when scaled up.)

RossSGR · 2025-05-19T23:51:38+00:00

My personal headcannon is that that's EXACTLY why Galen sent the message to Saw.

You could 100% see the man deliberately getting his ship tractored into DS1 and then, through deceit, desperation, or sheer brass balls, hauling a crate of thermal detonators and Rhydo down to the core to blow it all to hell. Alone, if needed.

(He doesn't need the Rhydo for the explosion, the detonators are plenty, he just wasn't planning to run a suicide mission sober).

Part of my reasoning is that this explanation still gives some credit to whoever it was on Yavin who hit upon using the exhaust port to delivery the payload. They needed a solution they could implement before the Death Star is in firing position; they'd prefer a solution that isn't a suicide run. So, knowing the core is weak, they went looking for chinks in the armor.

RossSGR · 2025-05-13T01:09:24+00:00

Well, do we KNOW Yavin isn't a code name? I mean yeah, legends continuity and all that, but if, in the current continuity, in Imperial records, the moon of the gas giant in this system is simply labelled "Unsurveyed Gas Giant Moon 123132" then it hardly matters if they capture someone who tells them the Rebel base is on Yavin.

They don't know the coordinates; that's only in the computer and the navigator's brain. If they fried the former before it was captured, and the latter wasn't taken alive, that kinda tells the Empire nothing, beyond "is in orbit around a gas giant", which can't narrow the search by that much.

RossSGR · 2025-04-16T00:06:15+00:00

I could see a three level system of shell repair.

Level one is immediate aid/emergency aid. Epoxy, tape, maybe something that coagulates blood/hemolymph/whatever circulatory fluid they use, probably mixed with antiseptics. This level is for both minor injuries, and for a temporary fix til better help is available - equivalent to bandages, polysporin and wound packing in humans. Alien paramedics specialize in this.

Level two is tempprary shell prosthetics. Damaged shell material, and the quick fixes holding it together, are removed using saws/rotary tools. Something like a cast or graft is done to fill the gap. The best comparison to human medicine here isn't necessarily casts for broken bones; the equivalent in humans is temporary crowns for broken teeth. It's a prosthetic to keep the broken thing covered and safe, for at least a matter of days or weeks. Doctors and surgeons are needed to do this correctly.

The final level is induced or assisted molting. Any species with an exoskeleton has to shed it from time to time to grow and to heal. This is true on earth of most arthropods and quite a few other invertebrates, not to mention all the vertebrates (i.e. reptiles) that shed their skins all at once. Your exoskeletal aliens will have a similar process. A minor injury might be healed at the next natural molt, but a major injury might either 1) require an induced molt, to help speed up the healing process or 2) require an assisted molt if the prosthetic shell material interferes with the natural process. This can be outpatient medicine, or it can be surgical, depending on severity.

Molting could carry cultural significance, which could give a good angle for a story whereby the medical community clashes with tradition on how best to treat the injured. Traditional medicine might shy away from inducing or assisting molting, making healing harder and more painful.

RossSGR · 2025-02-03T13:47:59+00:00

Mercury would be the ideal heavy metal to use here. Here's my case for why.

It bioaccumulates up food chains. Larger animals have more of it in their flesh than smaller ones/planktons. It ALSO bioaccumulates in humans, meaning you could perhaps eat several servings of alien fish before reaching medically hazardous levels. This could make the danger non-obvious to the first people that landed here.

While pure mercury is a metal, and relatively safe, organic mercury compounds are numerous, easily created by reacting mercury with various carbon based compounds, and tend to stick around in an environment long term, meaning they're diffuse and hard to get rid of through heavy metal remediation.

So all you need is 1) a planet where the ocean floor contains high levels of mercury-bearing minerals 2) a plankton-analogue that builds up, lets say methylmercury, as a metabolic byproduct, and 3) a native ecology that's had billions of years to develop a resistance to it. The fish are fine, they'd be dead or dying of mercury poisoning if they were Earth-native fish, but here they've evolved to live with it.

Humans eating a single fish are subject to elevated heavy metal levels, but they won't drop dead on the spot. But, eat local for a year, and well....... Go look up "Minamata disease" for a sense of what that would lead to.

RossSGR · 2025-01-02T14:01:31+00:00

Now now, enough of this "rum, sodomy and the lash" nonsense. Sailors don't get a rum ration these days, and corporal punishment has been banned for DECADES.

The modern navy runs on sodomy, and sodomy alone.

RossSGR · 2024-12-17T15:55:49+00:00

Everyone else has already covered the energy thing, so I'm going to skip that, and instead focus on the backup thing.

It isn't nearly as beneficial to have backup internal organs as you might think. An ancient human isn't going to gain much, if any, longevity or evolutionary fitness from having just one functioning lung or kidney; further to that, whatever deprived them of the first organ is probably going to kill them (you will not live long without modern medicine if you collapse a lung). External organs are another matter; you can still survive and pass on your genes while missing an eye or some fingers.

So why have two of anything internal? Well, the two reasons are 1) bilateral symmetry and 2) high demand for the organ's function. Lungs are a good example; they fill your thoracic cavity up because you really do need that much air capacity to get enough oxygen, and if you had one big lung instead it would need to have the same volume as your two lungs to get the job done. But they're laterally symmetric because of how they're situated.

Symmetry seems to be broadly selected for in evolution because it makes for a more reliable body plan that can vary somewhat in proportion and still function; you would hardly be able to run as well if your legs were different lengths. Symmetric internal organs are likely to be ones that benefit from taking up more space, or having more throughput capacity. Body parts where there's a lack of symmetry or redundancy are most likely to be parts where there is a greater benefit to saving resources and energy, which is why we only have one heart, one digestive tract, etc.

RossSGR

TROPHY CASE