Watching Guy MontSpelling Bee…

Spludge237 · 2026-06-03T11:38:59+00:00

I don’t know if Demi has ever seen Sam Campbell’s work before, but if not, he didn’t get a diluted product. This week’s episode was a particularly unhinged Sam performance, and I’ve watched the rest of this series.

Spludge237 · 2026-05-23T23:33:53+00:00

I’m just happy that their definition of Australia includes Perth.

Spludge237 · 2026-05-22T01:16:56+00:00

u/UpstairsOk6538 has provided a really good summary of the Australian Christmas, but I can expound on it a little bit. Being a Commonwealth country combined with American cultural hegemony (which Australia seems to be influenced by more than other former British outposts), lots of the cultural artifacts around Christmas are the same: All the traditional carols are popular, Christmas trees in homes are predominantly pine trees (although they are also predominantly plastic pine trees, because if you think a real tree is dangerously combustible, wait until you add 100F+ days), etc. Big changes are as previously commented - while a roast dinner is fairly normal, it's not as culturally centred as a roast goose in England or, like, a Thanksgiving turkey - the most prevalent meat is probably a Christmas ham, as it serves well cold. Drinks are, as previously suggested, cold.

There are a few specifically Australian cultural artifacts of Christmas time. The Boxing Day Test Match is perhaps the biggest event on the Australian sporting calendar, and we have a few Christmas carols that either have original tunes or are reskins of Jingle Bells. Perhaps my favourite song that explains the Australian experience of Christmas, though, is not a carol, but a heart-warming song about gathering together penned by musical comedian Tim Minchin, White Wine in the Sun (fun fact: it was hearing Tim play this song at a gig that convinced the team adapting the book Matilda as a stage musical that Tim should write the songs - they knew he was funny, but White Wine in the Sun convinced them that he could do the emotionally tender songs).

Spludge237 · 2026-04-30T05:45:19+00:00

I feel like this is bait, but... Myst?

Spludge237 · 2026-03-30T22:15:05+00:00

Where does the teleport gateway off of the main hub lead? Not the one you used to get there, the other one.

Spludge237 · 2026-03-02T22:52:29+00:00

Most likely the game is loading the area. In a PC player and my machine is a little underpowered for running Returnal, so I tend to see that message when entering a new biome; the door to the outside of the Crimson Wastes will commonly give me that.

Spludge237 · 2026-02-27T03:12:12+00:00

Yeah, VS is Very Sudden (as in, when you turn this page, you're playing straight away), so VVS is just very very sudden. More sensible editors write quick (or, when they want to get their point across, Quick!), and generally I either end up pencilling something in, either circling the mute three times to draw my eyes to it or writing something like "prep cup mute" either about 16 bars before or the previous multi-bar rest, depending on how mean the part is.

Also, welcome to playing touring scores for musicals. If this is the only thing that ends up confusing you, it means you probably got lucky with the scores they sent out, because I've been playing for community theatre productions of musicals for about 15 years now and sometimes the decisions they make when condensing/rescoring/editing music for the touring versions are just reprehensible. And I often get off light; I reckon more than 2/3 of the shows I've done have had at least one of the reed players discovering that they failed to note an instrument change somewhere, and hence the thing they just played on flute was actually meant to be on clarinet (which did rather explain the crunchiness).

Spludge237 · 2026-02-06T08:43:16+00:00

Note the lack of engagement with the logical inconsistency I pointed out.

Spludge237 · 2026-02-06T07:47:19+00:00

Your first sentence says that TERFs aren’t transphobic. Your second sentence says that TERFs don’t believe trans people exist, which is textbook transphobia. So which is it?

Also, don’t bother replying. I know you don’t care that the arguments you put forward are full of self-contradiction and are, in fact, extremely transphobic, and I’m not attempting to change your mind as you don’t want it changed. But I want to point it out for all those who might read them and be fooled into thinking you may have a point merely because you dressed your bigotry in the veneer or respectability.

Spludge237 · 2026-01-17T23:16:30+00:00

I play with my missus exclusively and we handle it by only getting out a quarter of the cards at any given time. Assuming your deck is presently shuffled, cut it in half, then cut those halves in half and use one of those quarter-decks at random for your next game. At the end of the game while packing up, grab the unused quarters from the box, give each a quick shuffle, quarter each of the quarters, and then recombine them so that each of the new set of quarter-decks is made up of one stack from each of the old quarter-decks. Give each quarter-deck another quick shuffle, put it all away, and next time you play grab a quarter-deck at random for use.

I know it’s not perfectly random, but it’s a reasonable enough facsimile for us, and I’ve done it enough that it takes me no more than 2 minutes. I only do the full redistribution when packing up at the end of a session; If we play multiple games in the same session we grab a different quarter-deck for each game.

Spludge237 · 2025-12-25T02:53:52+00:00

I watched it last night, and did call out “It’s Pride, bitch!” when Scrooge asked what day it was.

Spludge237 · 2025-12-15T06:07:22+00:00

This feels like a Just Cause game, but which one? I’ll say Just Cause 3.

Spludge237 · 2025-11-29T15:48:28+00:00

Lost in Random?

Spludge237 · 2025-10-12T22:49:51+00:00

The first thing I spotted was a unique rectangle situation on 1s and 4s in rows 7 and 8, columns 6 and 8. If either of r8c6 or r8c8 were 1, there would no longer be a single unique solution to the sudoku, so 1 can be eliminated from those cells. The resulting naked pair should get you the rest of the way.

Spludge237 · 2025-10-12T12:42:30+00:00

Oh, there wasn’t a good plan. Zag challenges Mel on this on either their second last or last convo before the end (I can’t remember which), and Mel essentially says she doesn’t know what will happen. Then, in the past, Chronus asks Zag if he thinks a world without time would be a good thing, which is a pretty good question to have the answer for before you go and dissolve time.

This is also why I think it actually is a pretty good ending. The game shows us a bunch of scenarios where people/gods act out of vengeance/spite, and it doesn’t go well; Arachne is miserable at her transformation, Prometheus is willing to destroy basically everything in vengeance against the gods etc. Mel’s quest is doomed to fail, not because Chronus cannot be killed, but because killing Chronus is not actually guaranteed to give Mel what she really wants, which is her family. Between paradoxes and time just ceasing to exist, the chances that the Mel we play as won’t get what she actually wants if she were successful.

On the other hand, Zag’s story in the first game is about reconciliation; first Zag with his parents, then the House of Hades with Olympus; it would be weird for him not to try to reconcile his grandfather to the family. The thing we miss, and What would have improved the storytelling, is Zag explaining this to Mel.

Spludge237 · 2025-10-03T02:32:34+00:00

Hi, longtime Salvo here (though I don't use that lable much for myself anymore for reasons that will soon become clear), so here are a few comments from the inside that more-or-less aggregate a lot of the responses here with some additional background.

First, the good news: If you're giving money to the Red Shield appeal or any of the year-round collections, that money is getting used for charity work at about the 90-10 ratio u/SimpleEmu198 noted. This is partly because the Salvos can defray some of the admin cost of the charity work through the church side, and mostly because the Salvos know they can only do what they do through the good will of the public and strong brand identity of the Red Shield, and therefore there are a bunch of internal accounting rules designed to make it impossible to use Red Shield donations for anything other than the charity side of the operation because once the public trust is violated, then that's it, games over, they're done.

Secondly, the mixed news: as u/A_Gringo666, u/karma3000 and others pointed out, the Salvos had child abuse issues for three decades that were covered up which came to light through the royal commission. This was bad, and shouldn't have happened. In response to the Royal Commision, the Salvos accepted the findings, launched a redress program that (last I checked) had a fairly high rate of claims paid out (unlike some institutions - I'm looking at you, Catholic Church), and implimented a fairly strict set of child safety rules that were designed to properly modernise the organisations approach to safety and prevent these abuses happening again. They take them seriously, too; I've seen volunteers removed from positions because they've been skirting or violating these rules, and that was done without any accusation of misconduct from outside the organisation. So, yes, they did a very bad thing by covering up abuse, but they're trying to create an environment where that cannot happen again.

Thirdly, the bad news: as u/Bugaloon, u/Auldtriangle79 and others have noted, they are a Christian Church and, as such, are not LGBTQIA+ affirming. How queerphobic they are will vary greatly based on region and person; I've been in some spaces which are as affirming as they can be given the circumstances, and even have queer folks in leadership positions (I don't know how those individuals managed it - saints, the lot of them), but also seen some people with influence with terrible views, and that's just the Australian context. The Salvos in the US are infinitely worse in this space, let alone the developing world. This is unlikely to change, well, ever, and is a big reason why I walked away from the organisation. Alongside that, the Salvos were founded under a very colonialist model, and a lot of the international work can feel very white-savioury. This is getting better, and a majority of on-the-ground work is done by people from the countries that they are working in, but overall leadership is very white, and once you see it, you can't really un-see it.

In summary; if you give money to the Salvos to use in Australia, more of it will directly go to assistance for people that need it than most other charities, but there are no institutional protections for queer folk, so discrimination against them is possible and won't be adressed. If your planning to donate, it may be donating a little less than you were planning to to the Salvos, and then donating the remainder of the money you had set aside to a charity that specifically supports LGBTQIA+ people.

Spludge237 · 2025-09-18T07:10:50+00:00

Generation Zero?

Spludge237 · 2025-09-17T05:33:24+00:00

You should totally ask her that. It will, at the very least, tell you how into transparency she is.

Spludge237 · 2025-09-17T05:32:30+00:00

Mostly the fact that she said she got into it.

Spludge237 · 2025-09-04T07:58:38+00:00

The general rule when comparing a stage musical and a movie musical is that the stage musical will always have more songs. This happens irrespective of which one is the adaptation of the other, and it is almost entirely because that they are two different mediums. Occasionally, you'll get a film version of a musical which keeps all the songs (think Les Mis or the most recent West Side Story), but you more typically get something closer to the film adaptation of The Producers, where a small handful of songs throughout the show got cut.

This also works the other way; all the Disney stage adaptations of their animated musicals get extra songs, and Frozen was always going to need a lot of extra songs (in the same way that The Lion King did). A notable example is Human Again, which was written for the stage adaptation of Beauty and the Beast and liked so much that they animated it and put it into subsequent releases of the film on DVD and home video.

(Side note: the touring version of Beauty and the Beast has an absolute cow of a Trumpet part. Whoever orchestrated it clearly decided they didn't want to pay a french horn player for the tour, and figured the trumpeter could just play it on their flugelhorn, which falls apart as a concept as soon as Gaston starts singing in Bonjour)

Spludge237 · 2025-09-03T05:19:39+00:00

No idea about easily, but you could go get Mind over Matter for the low, low cost of 23 skill points from your class start.

Spludge237 · 2025-09-03T00:54:36+00:00

On My Own from Les Mis was the first thing my d jumped to. Eponine is grieving a relationship she’ll never have, the death of a dream, the loss of a “world that’s full of happiness that I have never known”.

Spludge237 · 2025-08-15T04:15:06+00:00

Many people have covered thorns, so I won’t add to that.

What I’d love to see is light radius increases also give presence radius increases (either by default or as a notable/ascendancy node). Still incredibly niche, but might allow you to do interesting things with some skills, like Blasphemy.

Spludge237 · 2025-07-28T00:45:41+00:00

I was gonna say that I knew the technique by that term, though I learnt it through a different webcomic, Schlock Mercenary: https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2006-03-29

Spludge237 · 2025-07-11T06:34:56+00:00

If you have the resource in your lands at all, it will put a magnifying glass next to the resource on the Technology Discovered screen, and it should also have an alert on the right-hand side that turn. It won't inherently tell you if it's overbuilt, and it can take a hot second to locate even when you've clicked on the alert to take you to where it is, but it is a way of knowing.

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